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19 Aug ' 07:15
From the new (No 94 - Summer 2010) issue: 
I haven’t seen a mature jacaranda tree in Britain and if one exists I doubt it has reached the majesty attained by those commonly seen around the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands or Madeira. Jacaranda mimosifolia, native to sub-tropical regions of South America, is an outstanding beauty that we came across repeatedly on the HORTUS trip to Sicily at the end of May – the blue haze of its full flowering creating a unique and unforgettable sight. I brought home some seeds and will try to raise one or two plants, although I cannot even begin to hope they’ll survive out of doors in this far corner of Herefordshire. If my efforts fail I can turn to Burncoose Nurseries in Cornwall, who offer young specimens in 2.5 or 3 litre pots for £14 – with the following advice:Frost tender. This plant may be damaged by temperatures below 5° C (41° F). Will grow outside in milder locations. This could include plants which would survive happily in a greenhouse or conservatory if not in a mild location. If you have a sheltered spot in your garden then it may do well there – if growing in greenhouse use loam based compost, full light and plenty of air . . . Height up to 15m; spread up to 10m. Preferred location: full sun . . . These plants need to be grown in a conservatory or cool greenhouse or at least brought inside for the winter in this country. Soil conditions: fertile, moist, well-drained . . . Thompson & Morgan currently list a packet of twelve Jacaranda mimosifolia seeds for a trifling £1.34 saying, most importantly as far as I’m concerned, that this ‘bush/tree . . . can be pruned and restricted’. Watch this space. Of course, it’s not the first time I’ve returned from foreign parts with exotic seeds. I recall bringing back oleander seed from Spain when I was a teenager and the resulting couple of plants did in fact survive for a few years until I ‘flew the nest’, leaving my poor mother with rather too much of a horticultural burden. There’s something about trips with fellow gardeners that generates a lust for plants we realistically can’t expect to endure. If, as was the case in Sicily, we visit a well-maintained botanic garden (and the orto botanico in Palermo, founded in 1779, ranks highly) then the rush of blood to the head increases. However, I was a tad more circumspect on this occasion, resisting the temptation to pocket the many curious and unfamiliar pods and capsules scattering the dry and shady paths. (Incidentally, the woody seedpods of Jacaranda mimosifolia somewhat resemble the carapaces of baby terrapins, which we saw at the botanic garden, having climbed from the large circular lily pool to enjoy the morning sun.) On the return flight from Sicily I did a mental rewind of gardens seen and tried to compile a list of plants coveted. As with the insomniac’s counting of sheep, I dozed off somewhere over the Alps and never made a full tally – there were just too many. From the Editor's introduction to the summer issue9 January 2010: The garden has been hidden under snow and the ground frozen for a week now. The conservatory is the only place to see plants (and to realise how much it means to see leaves and flowers). The days have been reasonably sunny but the nights regularly down to 27 degrees Fahrenheit or so. We rely on two little electric fan heaters to keep the frost out – with a Calor gas stove for emergencies. At breakfast time we are down to 400; on one morning 360, yet a surprisingly long list of plants are in flower – some only residually, but some making steady headway. Pelargoniums are still providing most of the colour; ivy-leaved, pink, white and red, ‘Apple Blossom’ now seven feet high, leaning against the wall, P. echinatum, a girly pink called ‘Lavender’ and a single white. Salvias are coming to an end, but S. guaranitica and the yellow S. madrensis are still in business, the spikes of the latter tangling with the white tassels of Buddleja asiatica, and the buddleja’s honey scent just beginning. A purple hardenbergia is quietly doing its business up under the lights, and more surprisingly Solanum ‘Crech ar Pape’ has decided to flower again. Correya pulchella has its dusky red bells, Camellia ‘Narumigata’ has a few white flowers, cyclamen are flowering (when are they not?) and twining white dipladenia likewise. Blue cape primroses are getting on with it, a good colour beside orange calamondins and Meyer’s inestimable lemon, bowing with fruit. There are still flowers on Fuchsia thalia, a purple plectranthus and the frothy little Euphorbia ‘Diamond Frost’. Cymbidiums keep relentlessly on and a deep red auricula, while not exactly perky, must detect spring on the horizon.
Nightshade is, strictly, the correct common name of the Solanaceae genera, but because of the popularity of one of its best-known members the temptation to refer to it as the Potato family is irresistible. It has members to match that of any family – beautiful, toxic, tasty, destructive – and mysterious characters abound. They range from short annuals to very large shrubs and vigorous climbers spread across about one hundred genera with around two and a half thousand species. If I were to list them all I’d end up with a lengthy catalogue of some well-known names mixed in with a far greater number of the obscure, but each and every one would be worthy of investigation either for the history of its discovery, its ethno-botanical importance, its beauty or – alarmingly – its potential to kill. I will select just a few to show the diversity of this genera, taking the more colourful and beautiful first. These include common bedding plants like petunias, callibrachoa and tobacco plants (Nicotiana glauca, a woody shrub that can rise to twenty feet or so high, might be a surprise to some), and the now less-common schizanthus (poor man’s orchid) and Salpiglossis (painted tongue). There are handsome shrubs: brugmansia (angels’ trumpets), streptosolen (the marmalade bush) and brunfelsia (the yesterday, today and tomorrow plant), whose flowers open purple, fading over a few days to pure white. For all their beauty there is a mysterious element to many plants which seems to be lying in wait behind their loveliness, with inviting flowers tempting you to take an intoxicating sniff, or shiny fruits borne to lure you into darker places if you will just take a bite. This underlying darkness is recognised in their association with shamanism and by many of their common names including those of British hedgerow natives: deadly nightshade, black nightshade, henbane, bittersweet and thorn apple. And who would dare pull a mandrake root from the ground, lest its shrieks of pain cause you instant death? Thus with the beautiful come the toxic and the tasty, and many plants lie in all three categories. Most of the Solanaceae are toxic to some degree and the psychoactive alkaloids they contain have been made use of by shamans in South America, where concoctions of brugmansia, datura and brunfelsia are used to put themselves into a state of mind whereby they can better move between this and the spirit world. Less obviously toxic plants are the tomato, potato and aubergine, which will give at least an upset stomach if eaten at the wrong stage of ripeness, or cause more serious problems if parts other than the trusted edible bits are consumed. This paradox of beauty, nourishment and destructive capacity occurs right across the family with nicotiana being a good example – the delight given by many of the ornamental species contrasts with the utterly destructive properties of Nicotiana tabacum when it is processed into commercial tobacco.
From ‘Climbing and Twining’ by Paul Williams
How splendid they are, those long days of high summer when the sun goes so far north that, from my garden at Greencombe in north Somerset, it appears to set in the sea. I relish them all the more because they pass so soon. Inevitably, these days are bound up with the scent of philadelphus, that wonderful sweetness that comes and goes – now you get it, now you don’t, and where is it coming from anyway? I remember years ago, after searching, I discovered that the richest perfume came from the rather scruffy old Philadelphus coronarius: scruffy indeed, but unequalled for fragrance. Mock orange – to use an old name for the philadelphus – comes when the first great flush of roses is over. I have one rose however that waits for these mid-summer days. A climber, bred by a Belgian, it was given the French name ‘Dentelle de Malines’, which I have translated as ‘Froth of the High Tides’. It is truly a froth of small pink many-petalled flowers, liberal and gracious in its bearing. I began by growing it as ground cover on an awkward corner, but no one can keep a good rose down. It found an evergreen Lawson cypress, about thirty feet high, growing a few yards away and sent out long branches in that direction. After a few years or so it had climbed right through the Lawson and emerged at the top. I noted this in my record book and added: ‘in ’02 it acquired scent’. As it grew opposite the front door, on the way to the garden, I passed it several times a day and could not fail to notice something so dramatic as the coming of scent. With hindsight I think that once the rose was free to climb away it became fragrant. This rose is glorious for three weeks. Then either rain comes, or wind, and the glory ends in a shower of confetti. As it continues to bloom it becomes two- and three-toned, the more recently opened flowers being the deeper in colour. ‘Froth of the High Tides’ literally marks the transition between days getting longer and days getting shorter.
From ‘Pick of the Bunch: Summer’ by Joan Loraine
There's no sign: you could easily miss the entrance. Titley Mill, and the house beside it, lie up an unmade drive overhung by trees in one of the quietest corners of Herefordshire. Just off the slender road behind you is the little old railway station; ahead, a gentle bridge rises over the River Arrow, broad and tranquil beneath the alders. Kingfishers flash, trout now and then break the surface. Only the sounds of sheep and birds disturb the quietude: the songbirds, the mew of a buzzard wheeling overhead, the croak of a glossy pheasant, picking his way over farmland. Occasionally, you also hear a steam train: the station and track have been restored, and the whistle and puff of an engine running through the nearby woods add to the atmosphere of an unworldly place. But the river was the reason the corn mill and the house were built here; their foundations are fourteenth-century, and by the eighteenth this was a substantial property, set against hills and pasture on an alluvial plain where rich, well-drained soil will grow almost anything. It's been a long hard winter – 'terrible,' says the farmer at the top of our lane, and he has seen a few. But on the morning in early April when I arrive here the sky is blue and three of the four cats, Emily, Anne and Branwell Brontë are taking the first of the spring sunshine. Charlotte is somewhere about: in the three-acre garden there are plenty of places to hunt, explore and sleep, even if its structure, planting and effects are very different now from how it was in the summer of 2001, when the actor Christopher Good first came to look at it.
From ‘A Truly Magical Place: Titley Mill, Herefordshire’ by Sue Gee
‘We have a date for you!’ Thus Caroline, Alan Titchmarsh’s personal assistant and defender of his diary, alerted me to the fact that her boss would be doing a photo-shoot for Gardeners’ World magazine at Chawton House Library in Hampshire on such-and-such a day, and that he would keep an hour free for me between noon and one o’clock. Since the alternative on offer was a telephone interview, I felt it would probably be chancing my luck to plead for more time or, better still, for that hour to be spent on Titchmarsh turf. That said, why should he invite me into his home (which I happen to know is just down the road from the Library)? Then again, why should anyone? Yet they do. This setback to my plans should serve as a timely reminder of the fact that I am dependent on the kindness of strangers, but also that – to plagiarise another American writer – the celebrity is different from you and me. Not that I wish to imply that Alan Titchmarsh isn’t kind. On the contrary: from what my researches on the Internet have revealed, kindness is arguably his greatest, albeit most baffling, attribute. Take this extract from a blog entitled ‘I’m Not the Only One Who Loves Alan Titchmarsh’: ‘If you strike him down he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Criticism of the Titchmarsh oeuvre is useless. He is imperturbable. He never gets angry . . . Do you love Alan too? Or does the mere mention of his name see you cursing the very soil from which he was hewn? Over to you . . .’
From Diana Ross’s interview with Alan Titchmarsh
It was very early on a lovely summer morning in 1796 and the Duke of Everyshire looked out from the window of his Grand Salon in the house designed by who else, but William Kent? His lordship's gaze wandered over the Horne Park, across the lake to the Temple of Aeolus and the ha-ha and came to rest on the distant obelisk. It was all that an English Whig gentleman's estate should be, but it did have its price. The duke had been roused 'dashed early' that morning, while dew still bespangled the grass, by the sound, every few minutes in fact, of stone rasping on the metal of scythe blades. What with the noise and the labour costs involved in regular mowing, his lordship wondered if the extortionate fee which Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown had charged his late father for landscaping the estate had really been money well spent. However, he supposed that you had to keep up with the times and the neighbours, so acres of well-kept lawn there had to be. True, Mr Repton had recently installed a terrace with flower beds and poets and philosophers were now talking Arcady rather than Elysium – or was it the opposite way round? 'Confounded obscure these chaps, can't make head na' tail of Walpole. Which ever, there was still an awful lot of grass to be cut, and labour was short and expensive with the farm hands away fighting Napoleon. To make matters worse, fashion dictated that those 'fleeced foragers and unkempt ruminants' which, in the good old days, had kept the grass short for nothing, were now banished beyond the ha-ha. However, the good duke supposed that, provided corn prices held up, he could just about manage. ‘Fellow by the name of Coke, or some such, in Norfolk, seems to be doing wonders in that department.’
From ‘Our Debt to the Basal Meristem’ by Peter James
If you have hiked the Appalachian Trail, marvelled at the Golden Gate Bridge, or changed planes at New York’s La Guardia Airport, then you have experienced the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘new deal for the American people’ that helped put food on the table for millions of men and women during the Great Depression. FDR and his band of pragmatic idealists launched their first public jobs programme within three weeks of his inauguration in March 1933. In the span of nine years, the Civilian Conservation Corps, popularly known as Roosevelt’s Tree Army, marshalled the muscle of more than three million unmarried men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, who were paid $35 a month (with the stipulation that $25 be sent home to their families) to live in outdoor work camps and restore and improve America’s natural resources. Their accomplishments were astounding by any measure – the ‘CCC boys’ planted more than three billion trees, erected 3,470 fire towers, and developed erosion control programmes across eighty-four million acres, including the infamous Dust Bowl memorialised by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. They cut trails and built visitor shelters and campsites we still enjoy in our great national parks, from magnificent Mt Ranier in the north-west to the Great Smoky Mountains in the south-east, and they provided critical emergency disaster relief, even hauling feed on sleds for thirty-five miles in temperatures forty degrees below zero to save a million sheep trapped in a Utah blizzard – imagine what this ‘peace-time army’ might have done during Hurricane Katrina! But as quickly as it mobilised and as much as it accomplished, the CCC only provided a drop in the bucket of unemployment that had reached beyond ten million in 1935. Over the next eight years and over the vicious objections of FDR’s opponents, who dubbed him ‘a traitor to his class’, the ambitious Works Progress Administration (WPA) created jobs for more than eight million people who built and improved 651,000 miles of roads, 124,000 bridges, 125,000 public buildings, and 853 airport landing fields. And the WPA’s legacy is not limited to infrastructure – ‘starving artist’ was more than a catch-phrase in the 1930s. The WPA Theatre Project enlisted the young talent of Arthur Miller and Orson Welles; the WPA Artists Project employed five thousand visual artists, including twentieth-century masters such as Diego Rivera, Mark Rothko, Willem deKooning and Jackson Pollock, to create tourism posters and murals for public buildings; and the WPA Writers Project helped launch the careers of authors as varied as Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Jim Thompson, and Zora Neale Hurston, as they collected oral histories and created unsurpassed travel guides.
From ‘The Gift: The Norfolk Botanical Gardens, Virginia’ by Sukie Amory
I’ve never had a particularly happy relationship with wild animals. Few gardeners have. The basic reason, of course, is that animals eat things we would sooner they didn’t, and tend to make a mess in other ways when they are not hungry. Consider, for example, the natural habits of moles, which when they are not tunnelling shallowly in long runs just below the surface (into which one can easily slip and break an ankle), they are plummeting to the depths in search of earthworms and heaving up equally lethal hillocks of spoil all over the lawn. For many years I have fought a running war with them, first with ‘mole smokes’ (alas no longer available), then with mothballs, paraffin, exhaust fumes from a mower, and lately with traps. Very little success, and no hint of intimidation on the part of the moles. Even beyond the confines of the garden, I’ve had problems with animals. I find it difficult to feel friendly toward beavers, which in New England are capable of riparian ruin greater than you would expect from their amiably lumpish buck-toothed appearance (ruin that the wildlife lobby in the UK now seems determined to inflict upon the British wilderness; reintroduction has already begun after centuries of beaverless peace and quiet). Trout fishing in bear country in the Rocky Mountains calls for armed defence – pepper spray and constantly singing or whistling is the order of the day. (So far the bears have kept their distance from me, I’m glad to say, and rattlesnakes likewise.)
From ‘Wild Animals’ by Charles Elliot
At last. At last. The dawn chorus is fading and a whiff of honeysuckle is creeping in at the window, mixed with a certain amount of sun. Outside, the dew hangs on the hedge, each drop a crystal ball. The future glimpsed within is that they will evaporate, and it will be another day that if not hot, will at least not require more than three jerseys. Summer, in short, is in our midst. Naturally this has meant a frenzy of activity. The flowers for the wedding in September have got their heads well up, but no signs of budding yet, thank goodness. As soon as they do it will be time for the form of Chelsea Chop known as the Herefordshire Hack: a rose takes six weeks from zero to hero, so grit teeth, cling to holy relic and strike fearlessly with billhook. About the only part of the pleasaunces and messuages not down to late-flowering wedding gaudinesses is the pond. This is its usual dark and glassy self, if not a bit more so. We spent a cheerful few days in a canoe snipping away at dogwoods, which have now resprouted with commendable enthusiasm and are producing the usual bright variegations. We also removed several gargantuan water-lily roots, using a boat’s anchor attached by a long rope to the tow hitch of the Land Rover. The upside of this is that the water is beautifully clear and of a true obsidian darkness, in which the fish hang red-gold by the fringe of gunnera and water soldiers. The downside is that the shelter is much reduced, so various herons have decided that this is the avian equivalent of the baby food shelf in Boots.
From ‘Being and Nothingness’ by Sam Llewellyn
A Garden in My Life and Garden Tales by Cynthia RamsdenHistoric Gardens of Somerset by Timothy Mowl and Marion MakoGardens of Dorset by Roger LaneThe Gardens of Charleston: A Bloomsbury Garden Through the Seasons by Sue SnellBloom’s Best: Perennials and Grasses by Adrian BloomMeadows by Design by John GreenleeTall Perennials by Roger TurnerGreen Flowers by Alison HoblynThe Pruning of Trees, Shrubs and Conifers by George Brown, revised by Tony KirkhamPlanting and Maintaining a Tree Collection by Simon ToomerJekka’s Herb Book by Jekka McVicarThe Realm of Fig and Quince by Ria Loohuisen
HORTUS 95 (Autumn 2010) will be published in October -
06 Aug ' 04:00
HORTUS 94 (Summer 2010) will be published mid August 2010 -
06 Jul ' 04:38
HORTUS 94 (Summer 2010) will be published at the end of July 2010 -
20 Apr ' 10:57
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13 Apr ' 05:43
From the new (No 93 - Spring 2010) issue: 
It has been an agonisingly slow start to the gardening year, with January falls of snow piling one upon another and penetrating frosts rendering the ground as hard as steel. Hellebores, winter aconites and snowdrops that in recent years have been in full fig by mid month were barely showing in mid February. Conversely, the witch hazels were not that much delayed, although a succession of cold days did inhibit the disbursal of their scent.
At the time of writing (mid February, snowing again and more forecast) the several thousands of daffodils, muscari, scillas and crocuses that I planted in Cricket Wood last autumn have yet to appear – perhaps we’ll have a good show of them by Easter when we open the garden. [The garden is open on Saturday, Sunday and Monday afternoons until 12 July.]
While waiting for the show to begin I re-read Anna Pavord’s The Tulip, a book well-deserving of its many plaudits. It’s also an excellent piece of publishing: good paper, a clear typeface, free of whimsical design with a generous and beautifully reproduced galaxy of fine illustrations – many in colour from specialist tulip books dating back to the sixteenth century. It rekindled my interest in the genus, despite our local badgers’ fondness for the bulbs – we lost more than, newly-planted tulip bulbs to badgers one year, and the wretched critters came back for the survivors as they poked their stubby shoots above ground.
From the Editor's introduction to HORTUS 9328 October 2009: I wonder how many great gardens of the future are taking shape, unknown to most of us, in this age of plantsmanship and planting. More, I suspect, than at any time for a hundred years, the era of the Himalayan-inspired woodland gardens of the early twentieth century that I call, collectively, Rhodoland.
Woodland gardens are, of course, the slowest. The full achievement of some of today’s gardeners won’t be known until after their time. I have been visiting the most notable of those nearby since its inception some ten years ago and the sense of ambition gradually being fulfilled is thrilling. Few people know it yet, but Marks Hall, near Coggeshall in north Essex, already has an aura. Its splendid three-walled garden (the fourth side being a lake) is excitingly planned and cunningly planted; ready for photographers, indeed. But another hundred acres or more are only just emerging as a landscape with a unique sense of place. It is an arboretum in a wood, in glades and rides surrounded by mature oak, pine and chestnut. But an arboretum of communities: not one Himalayan birch or dogwood or liquidambar or koelreuteria, but scores of them, the same species repeated again and again, merging with others at the edges of the group to give the impression of a natural population. The most memorable section, at least for the moment, is ‘Gondwanaland’, where plants from the southern hemisphere, sundered by continental drift over millions of years, are reunited. Scores of eucalyptus, but not a collection, just E. dalrympleana and E. debeuzevillei, cluster their pale trunks among New Zealand grasses against a dark wood of Andean nothofagus. If you want to see not a specimen but a wood of the Wollemi pine, the new celebrity survival from desert Australia, there are sixty or seventy here, dotted like forest seedlings. The colours and shapes, the smells and sounds, already make this the Essex bush, a garden like no other with, I’m sure, a famous future. From ‘Tradescant’s Diary’ by Hugh Johnson
Spring is without doubt an exciting time in the garden, not just because plants are bouncing into life again, but because the whole of (northern hemisphere) nature is gearing up in response to more light and warmer days. Many plants are already in flower; some have already come and gone. Some of these early plants are ‘alpines’, keen to make the most of what would be a short season in their native mountain home; others are woodlanders that have taken advantage of the fact that there is moisture and light under the deciduous trees in winter and so give all their energy to early flowers and foliage, then sit out the rest of the season not doing very much and becoming scruffier as they do it: pulmonarias have always been good at this in my garden. Therein lies the problem I have with spring-flowering plants, not in general, but in the small garden. By ‘small’ I mean the garden of the average backyard, where you can generally see everything in one sweep and where, if divided into compartments, the subdivisions would be too small. If you have a large garden you can give over a part of it to spring effect, where all the early-flowering plants and coloured winter stems are arranged together to create a comprehensive and many-hued picture. Floods of primroses and scillas under hazel trees, hellebores, salix and cornus twigs, early euphorbias, pulmonarias, hamamellis, narcissus, bergenias, symphytum, lysichitum, and even forsythia can all be placed to enhance one another. That’s how I would like my spring plants to be – not ranged disparately, dotted all over the place. Once the show is over attention moves on to other parts of the garden and the pulmonarias can then become as scruffy as they like. As individuals these spring plants are undoubtedly showy or interesting, yet I am uneasy about having them as part of a cohesive design. It is here that I take a careful look at myself: I worry that I have become somewhat obsessed by wanting every plant to be ‘positioned’ in relation to its neighbour because it offers something in combination that it does not have on its own. I appreciate the beauty each individual has and in fact revel in the wonderful detail offered by plants in close-up – details of floral structure, tendrils, leaf spines, et cetera – components always worth looking. On a bigger scale, however, I like the interaction of plants. From late spring until early winter it is challenging – but do-able – to place plants where each acts as a foil for its neighbour, giving greater impact over a long period. In a small garden this summer/autumn period of plant association is easy, but when early-flowering plants are introduced I can’t see how to avoid the need to forego some of effects of a particular combination and just rely on the pleasure to be had from the spring plants as individuals. Do I hear faint howlings of ‘Nonsense’, and stout assertions that with careful selection it can be made to work? Perhaps I expect too much, or perhaps it can be achieved with a careful selection of plants that flower or leaf-up early but do not then degenerate into scruffiness or inconsequence. Bear in mind all the time that we are dealing here with a small garden, where every square foot of ground has to work very hard. from ‘Iberis sempervirens’ by Paul WilliamsI was blessed with a mother who grew the Munstead strain of primroses and polyanthus. Some of these were multi-headed, but many – which to me were lovelier – were single-stemmed flowers. The strain is named after Gertrude Jekyll's garden Munstead Wood in Surrey, and came into being because she collected only white and yellow primroses. This deliberate limitation gave rise to blooms of the most elegant and touching beauty: whites with orange centres, soft yellows with bright orange stars in the middle, wavy-edged semi-double whites, to describe just a few. Miss Jekyll obtained her originals from cottage gardens, where many good things used to be found. They grew, as often as not, in the narrow flower beds that bordered a path from the gate to the front door. They had doubtless been acquired by a sharp-eyed farm worker who went round the fields on foot and knew even the remote corners of the farm, and he took his findings home as treasure and kept them going. They would have benefited indirectly from the liberal load of manure given to the potato crop on the other side of the border. Those were the days when primroses were so abundant that church window-sills were covered with them at Easter. It is, alas, the application of chemical fertilisers that has made them rare. Should anyone doubt this assertion I can show them a north-Devon field (tipped to the north, which primroses love, and on a steep slope with narrow ledges, which promote successful seeding) with an old cottage and enclosed garden within it. This cottage has been unoccupied for several years but someone keeps the garden scythed down. Come spring it is bright yellow with primroses, completely carpeted, while in the surrounding field there is not a flower to be seen. Nitrogen promotes the growth of grass, and primroses cannot compete. To return to Gertrude Jekyll and the care that created the Munstead strain: 'All day for two days I sit on a stool dividing the plants,’ she wrote in Wood and Garden (1899). 'When the bloom wanes and s nearly over-topped by the leaves, the time has come that I find best for dividing and replanting.' She had already marked with a stick those to be kept for seed, and removed any not worth keeping, and she went on: 'They vary in detail so much: in form, colour, habit, arrangement and size of eye and shape of edge, that one year, thinking it might be useful to try to classify them, I tried to do so, but gave up after writing out the characters of sixty classes. Their possible variation seems endless.' It is this variation that makes the strain so exciting and irresistible. You look from flower to flower and each is different. from ‘Pick of the Bunch’ by Joan Loraine
One of my favourite wild flowers is the miniature pink snapdragon, weasel’s snout (Misopetes orontium). Last summer it rewarded my years of admiration by turning up to infest my allotment, decorating rows of onions, shallots and perpetual spinach with neat sprays of flowers. It is indeed a weed but looks wonderful and is barely aggressive, and really rather rare and special. It’s a plant that fills me with joy whenever I find it – although I’ve only ever seen it in three places in Britain and one in Ireland. However, it’s common enough and widespread in the Mediterranean region, for example on Corsica and Crete. So, not for the first time, last summer – the third wet one in a row – I was thinking about weeds, which did well then, and how gardeners perceive and treat them. Weeds almost define a garden as much as the flowers and vegetables. Especially in the English cottage garden, they’ve always persisted and often flourished alongside the hollyhocks, sweet Williams, annuals, herbs, fruits and vegetables. Many garden plants behave as weeds in the garden, while many weeds are also garden plants – marigolds, forget-me-nots and sweet alyssum – effectively. On a larger scale, most vegetable and cereal crops have been weeds at some time or another, and most too have evolved pestilential weedy races. Some weeds were once valued crops or food-plants, for example the ubiquitous fat hen (Chenopodium album). The small starch-rich grains have been found in the stomachs of Iron Age bog corpses, and in the late eighteenth century William Curtis reported how the leaves were still being gathered as ‘spinach’ greens from the dung heaps of London. Many weeds are also aliens, travelling the world wherever people move seeds, agricultural produce or other goods. Some, such as the pretty but pernicious procumbent yellow sorrel Oxalis corymbosa, apparently have no native home, although that particular species may well originate from upland Central Asia. When I say I’m interested in weeds, the stock response is 'Oh, of course, a weed is merely a plant in the wrong place.' Yes . . . but a better definition might be Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that a weed is 'a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered'. The master of aphorism was more correct than he perhaps realised – for most weeds are related to crop plants and many more feature as food somewhere in the world. For example, shepherd’s purse is an esteemed edible green in the mountains of Kashmir, while Greek and Italian ladies scour the spring countryside for rocket and wild cabbages. Looking at weeds from another angle, I’m not sure the head gardener at Tresco Abbey wholly shares my delight at how clustered clover (Trifolium glomeratum) infests his rock garden, nor would his counterpart at Garinish Island in Ireland's Bantry Bay be entirely thrilled to know that another English botanist recorded a rare and obscure wild corn-salad in one of his beds! It would be a hard person who rigorously removed fumitories or scarlet pimpernel, although one can’t expect even the most ecologically liberal-minded, wild-flower-loving gardener to tolerate the goosefoots, much as we love their cousins spinach and spinach beet, good King Henry and love-lies-bleeding. Or the tall, purple-leaved Atriplex hortensis that has established itself as a weed with the weasel’s snout among my vegetables (and is a superb spinach substitute). from ‘Give Weeds a Chance’ by John Akeroyd
‘I’m retired! I’m retired!’ These were the first words I heard Penelope Hobhouse, acclaimed garden writer, designer, historian, and doyenne of the international lecture circuit, utter as I walked through her front door one dank and gloomy evening last July, though not to me: she was on the telephone. As my subject was eighty in 2009, her protestations sounded reasonable enough, yet I did wonder what she was announcing her retirement from, exactly. For one thing, I could see that only a small corner of the large dining table in her World of Interiors-chic kitchen-living room had been cleared for supper, and that the rest of the space, separated by two enormous jugs of sweet peas and a bowl of pomegranates, was covered with reference books and scholarly-looking journals. For another, when we arranged our meeting Penny warned me she was planning a return trip to London that day in order to attend a Trustees meeting at the Garden Museum, and if she missed her train would be late back home. ‘Back home’, incidentally, meant back both to her new home in a converted stable block on the Hadspen Estate, and back to her old one as well: Penny first came to live at Hadspen, which now belongs to her son Niall Hobhouse, in 1952 when she married her fellow Cambridge graduate and tennis partner Paul Hobhouse (Penny was a tennis Blue, and gained an Honours degree in Economics). And here she remained for the next twenty-eight years of her life, raising three children and turning herself into an accomplished hands-on amateur gardener along the way, until she left husband and home in 1980 in order to embark on a professional career. In the event, however, Penny wasn’t late back that evening, for the simple reason that she’d never left in the first place. Put baldly, she’d spent her day, or a portion of it, locked inside a freight container parked in the middle of a sheep field. In the circumstances, her assessment of her ordeal sounded beyond stoic: ‘It was really very funny,’ she announced cheerfully as she set about assembling supper, ‘because I couldn’t get out and I was stuck there possibly for the rest of the day.’ Hard to imagine the shock of finding oneself locked inside a windowless iron box (for all this particular iron box has been painted matt black and converted by an architect into a library to house Penny’s valuable collection of gardening books) that is not plumbed, has no means of communicating with the outside world – a Tardis without the technology – and you’ve forgotten your mobile; worse, no one is likely to hear you if you yell for help. And even harder to imagine having the nerve to cope in the way Penny did: she went on sorting her books until, after ‘only’ a couple of hours, an ancient Hadspen retainer happened to go for a stroll in the field, heard her forlorn calls for help, and managed to yank open the door with the help of a length of frayed blue plastic rope he fashioned into makeshift handles. What her son had to say about the aesthetic effect of the life-saving handles on his design remained to be seen or, rather, heard: ‘Of course’, she adds doubtfully, ‘he may laugh and decide to keep them as a memorial to my white knight.’ from ‘Diana Ross meets Penelope Hobhouse’
David Austin is adamant that he will not answer any questions about himself. 'All you journalists always ask me exactly the same stuff,' he says, 'and I get tired of repeating the same thing over and over.' The trouble is, of course, we all want to know the same thing. Which is, why? Why does a man suddenly take it into his head to reinvent the rose, the most revered, most fabulous, most puissant of flowers? Why does he consider it important enough to devote a whole lifetime to this endeavour? And what makes him so sure he knows best? Mr Austin is eighty-three, and has been battling for the last two years against cancer. He has spent half a century in pursuit of ‘the essence of the rose’, studying its lore and deconstructing its beauty. It was his sister Barbara who set David Austin on his life’s path, when she gave him for his birthday a copy of Edward Bunyard’s Old Garden Roses. Bunyard (1878–1939) was a pomologist as well as a rosarian, an apologist for old fruit varieties as well as one of the first collectors of old roses, and one of the most influential horticultural figures of his day. The teenage David sent off for his catalogue. 'There were these quite simple pictures, and he’d only got about twenty old roses – that was all they knew about then.' Altogether different was the lavish production of the celebrated Harry Wheatcroft (introducer of the ubiquitous ‘Peace’). 'After the war there were no catalogues about. Harry Wheatcroft was the great figure in roses then, and his was the first glossy catalogue I ever saw.' So he bought some plants from each, and compared. 'But there was no comparison. Those Wheatcroft roses were awful looking things. The problem was that Bunyard’s lovely old roses didn’t repeat flower: you got about three weeks if you were lucky. But if you got a modern Hybrid Tea or Floribunda it flowered all summer long.’ from ‘David Austin and the Romance of the Rose’ by Ambra Edwards
Many Victorian self-made men were larger-than-life figures who had the energy and self-belief to create houses and gardens that defied conventional good taste. The results, if not always beautiful, were at least markedly individual: in food terms, strongly spiced rather than blandly insipid – something you either liked or loathed but couldn’t just ignore. More recently, the late Gerald Hitman was a similarly larger-than-life figure, and one with a similar taste for the strongly spiced (‘literally and metaphorically', in both categories – size whether physical or psychological, spice whether culinary, horticultural or intellectual). One of his most frequently repeated provocations was his insistence that he and his house and garden stood apart from what he saw as the insipidity of contemporary versions of ‘ghastly good taste’ – were rather, in fact, the contemporary inheritors of that Victorian tradition of ignoring such namby-pamby notions entirely. ‘Men like that invented a new bit of technology or found a niche in the market, with the result that suddenly loads of money dropped on them. That’s more or less what happened to me.’ Like many before him, having had wealth suddenly dropped on him he immediately splashed out much of it on the rapid creation of a large and striking house surrounded by an equally large and striking garden. (Both were achieved, from scratch, in less than a decade.) In his characteristically odd combination of boastfulness and modesty, employed to make a characteristically provocative point, he pooh-poohed the idea that there was any ‘vision’ involved. ‘I was just flush with money and success and felt I could do what I wanted.’ In words that might well have been used by his Victorian predecessors, he summed up his garden-making motivation by saying simply, ‘This garden is me. I made it to make my friends drop dead with jealousy, to make a mark, to do something different and interesting – but above all simply to give me pleasure. If other people like it, of course I’m pleased, but that isn’t why I made it.’ And his reason for making a garden, he insisted, should be the reason for making all gardens: that is, ‘To do something you want, not to worry about the other buggers and what they want.’ from ‘The Old Zoo, Lancashire’ by Tim Longville
I enjoy a job and pastime that usually meets with enthusiastic endorsement. ‘How wonderful!’ And I agree, ‘Yes, I’m a very lucky man,’ and a bridge is built. The chat extends to ‘It must be lovely working outside’ (and it often is) and ‘Do you get your own hands dirty?’ (either mud or ink, I do). I’m also often asked what my ‘look’ is, to which I never reply – frightened, because the truth sounds pretentious: ‘Actually it is not so much how things look that’s important, but the development and maintenance of an artistic conscience.’ The fine arts, literature and music certainly oxygenise garden design, but if not administered with care can result in light-headedness. One of my first clients cut to the chase: ‘That is all lovely . . . but what will it look like?’ – too much concept had obscured the real garden. Show gardens can also be at times an interesting testament to this. In any case, surely a simple garden with a few pretty flowers hardly demands a theory of art? Indeed, garden design can run on applied common sense, taste, plantsmanship, sensitivity to architecture, cultural and historical awareness, ecological responsibility, ergonomics and vision, but without art it pegs along with a stitch in its side. from ‘Beauty, Truth’ by Sean Swallow
'Many', wrote William Robinson with his customary asperity, 'not satisfied with the good word "Landscape Gardener" . . . call themselves "Landscape Architects", a stupid term of French origin implying the union of two absolutely distinct studies.' The great spokesman for natural gardening made no secret of his disdain for architects, landscape or otherwise, especially those who fancied themselves omnicompetent. An architect could help the gardener by building a beautiful house – 'that is his work' – but ought to go no further. A garden was a gardener’s business. While there is no reason to think that Robinson did not mean what he said, it has to be admitted that he spoke in the heat of battle. The Great Debate – or, if you prefer, the frustrating argument – between his followers and their opponents, represented principally by the architect Reginald Blomfield, author of The Formal Garden in England, was raging in the 1890s, at a time when the Victorian tradition of spot planting and bedding out was coming to a little-lamented end. The Edwardian era was at hand, and Robinson was convinced that his approach – relatively unconstrained, with natural forms, plenty of flowers (preferably native), richly unpredictable climbers and ramblers, the whole glorious panoply of nature itself focused and enhanced – represented the future for British gardening. Blomfield, in equally polemical mode, argued for what he called 'formality', which was really a sort of throwback version of the early seventeenth-century English style, integrating house and 'old-fashioned' garden with hedges, topiary, walls and turf. from ‘H. Avray Tipping and a Debate Reconciled’ by Charles Elliott
To be able to continue opening a book at random and at any page and to be instantly entertained or intrigued is distinctly unusual. However, this does happen with one dated 1953: Truffle Hunt with Sacheverell Sitwell. It is what he intended, for the foreword declares his aim as 'none other than to amuse and please'. This he certainly does. It is an extraordinary and heterogeneous collection of mostly miniature essays that first appeared in the Sunday Times throughout 1951 and 1952 when they were brought together in book form a few lengthier ones were added, equally diverse in content and manner. It proved popular at the time, unlike some of his more esoteric works. Today, it might be a collector’s item. Of course there can be a slightly similar effect in the occasional anthology or collection of letters or diaries, and here James Lees-Milne should be remembered, a friend and contemporary of Sitwell. On 15 August 1948 he wrote: 'Sachie is a voluble talker. His mind flits from houses, paintings, music, poetry, birds, nuns, flowers to jewellery and strawberries within one breath.' This certainly sums up Truffle Hunt – as all these subjects and far more stream onto its pages. Colour and exuberant pattern were the supreme joys of his life and part of all he wrote about. A great love for plants was matched only by one for music and art and architecture. The rapture is tempered by twists of the unexpected, and as Sitwell had been a wildly enthusiastic traveller over many years there was much to report. from ‘Multum in Parvo: Plants and Sacheverell Sitwell’s Art of the Essay’ by Irene Feesey
Grottoes with their accompanying skulls, the memento mori of the eighteenth century, are enjoying a small revival, or perhaps this eccentric form of garden decoration has always appealed to people of a certain bent. One recently completed grotto I know is lined with sheep’s skulls, but it was at the Royal Horticultural show at Tatton Park this year that I saw a grotto complete not only with a human skull but with that other strange phenomenom – the ‘ornamental hermit'. Unlike genuine hermits whose desire for solitude can be traced back to early Christian traditions, ‘ornamental hermits’ were born out of the Age of Romanticism. Peers and poets, writers and great landowners of a melancholic disposition looked to the grandeur of mountains and back to a fabled past, enjoying with a frisson of horror novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Men of substance were able to translate this new Romantic Movement with its love of all things Gothic into stone or, in the case of the grotto at Painshill in Surrey, into brick lined with limestone and stalactites built up on laths faced with plaster and quartz. Grottoes and their second cousins, hermitages, were at their best when inhabited by a hermit, for as the poet Edith Sitwell reasoned, ‘Nothing, it was felt, could give such delight to the eye as the spectacle of an aged person with a long grey beard, and a goatish rough robe, doddering about amongst the discomforts and pleasures of Nature.’ from ‘The Ornamental Hermit: A Strange History’ by Carolle Doyle pic It was a shaky beginning to the year. Elderly relations kept ringing to say that because of the abominable things this ghastly government was doing the Gulf Stream was moving out to sea. Thank goodness (they said) there would be an election soon, if of course the thaw set in in time. And it was easy to believe this doomsaying. For months, all you could hear was the clatter of agriculturalists getting sugar beet out of the ground with road drills. There were many days when we looked out of the window at the snow-iced yews of the frozen Hope, and thought of the Azores, planted firmly in the Stream. The whole of the Azores is a garden. A farmer will plant a field of tea next to a field of potatoes. To separate the two, he will plant a row of hydrangeas. Then, recollecting that your hydrangea en masse can be a bit overwhelming, he will plant canna and madonna lilies on either side of the hydrangeas. Having stepped back to admire the effect against a background of blue sea and Ireland-green headland, he will then nip off and cook his lunch in a volcano. But this is mere dreaming. We are in the Welsh Marches, not the Azores. We were beginning to panic when suddenly a warm blast swept in from the southwest, and the daffodils bowed their heads and blew their fanfares, and the birds started roaring away and building nests out of the straw with which we had been trying to protect the big-leafed hebes and the flowering sages. Under normal circumstances, we would at this point have trudged around the garden admiring this and titivating that, and doing our best to effect last-minute pollination of the peach trees with the special dedicated hare’s tail, and all the rest of it. But as the red tulips embarked on their annual race with the Rheum atropurpureum for the attention of the golden bamboo, our minds were on other things. from ‘Wedding Fever’ by Sam Llewellyn
Plus reviews of the following books:On Chinese Gardens by Chen CongzhouOrchard: A Year in the Life of a Herefordshire Cider Orchard by Gareth Rees-RobertsA Walk in the Woods: Exploring Britain’s Greatest Woodlands by Archie MilesA Year in the Life of Westonbirt by Sarah Howard
Japanese Maples: The Complete Guide to Selection and Cultivation (Revised 4th edition) by J. D. Vertrees and Peter Gregory
Trees for All Seasons: Broadleaved Evergreens for Temperate Climates
by Sean Hogan
Conifers of the World: The Complete Reference by James E. Eckenwalder
A Clearing in the Woods: Creating Contemporary Gardens by Roger Foley
The Ivington Diaries by Monty DonIndex to HORTUS Volume Twenty-three, Numbers 89–92 (2009)
HORTUS 94 (Summer 2010) will be published on 31 May -
23 Dec ' 18:57
From the new (No 92 - Winter 2009) issue: 
Helena Attlee writes in this issue about Il Biviere, a 'post-diluvian' garden in Sicily, where Pricipessa Borghese has created a 'robust community' of exotic plants on land drained in the 1930s as part of the government's plan to rid Italy of the malarial mosquito – the plain south-east of Rome, around Ninfa, was similarly targeted. Il Biviere is among the intriguing gardens we will be visiting on our tour of Sicilian gardens at the end of May next year. We begin near Palermo with drinks at Villa Tasca, where the garden supposedly inspired Wagner to complete Parsifal, and where the two swans on the lake are called – yes, you've guessed it – Tristan and Isolde. The following morning we visit Palermo's orto botanico, where Sicily's native flora intermingles with an abundance of tropical and sub-tropical exotica. Lunch that day will be at Villa Spedalotto, overlooking the sea, before we motor on to experience the 'eccentricities of the crumbling Villa Palagonia' in nearby Bagheria – and if that is not enough for one day, we take aperitifs that evening at the invitation of Princess Licata di Baucina at Palazzo Alliata di Pietratagliata. Thus fortified, we drive across the island the following morning to see the garden at Il Biviere, where we will also have lunch, and in the afternoon visit the orange-growing estate of San Giulian, where the private garden contains many rare and exotic trees. Our fourth day begins with a leisurely walk through Taormina, taking in the Anglo-Italian Trevelyan gardens, followed by a visit to Ruggero Moncarda's Palazzo Biscari before driving into the foothills of Mount Etna to see the garden made by Sicily's most important twentieth-century landscape architect, Ettore Paterno. We leave on the fifth day, but not before taking time to shop at Catania's celebrated food market and to enjoy a thoroughly traditional – yet modern – Sicilian lunch in the thoroughly modern plantsman's garden belonging to Rossella Pezzino. The tour runs from 28 May to 1 June and our hotels are the Villa Igiea with its opulent Art Nouveau interior and terraced gardens overlooking the Bay of Palermo and, at Catania, the San Domenico, a luxuriously converted fifteenth-century monastery with views towards Mount Etna. And if that were not enough, we have the expert guidance and delightful companionship throughout of Helena Attlee herself. I do hope you'll join us. As ever, full details may be obtained from Boxwood Tours: telephone 44 (0)1341 241717 or email mail@boxwoodtours.co.uk
From the Editor's introduction to HORTUS 92‘I wasn’t sure that we had really made a garden’, Princess Maria Carla Borghese says, ‘until I received a call from Clarence House in London to ask if the Queen Mother could visit Il Biviere with some friends.' These illustrious visitors arrived in 1988 and responded to the garden with such delight that the princess was finally convinced she and her husband had achieved their aim. It had been a long journey. When they moved to Casa del Biviere, a thirty-minute drive south of Catania in Sicily, the house was derelict and rat-infested. ‘It was an awful place,' the princess admits. ‘There was no water, no trees or bushes. In fact, there was absolutely nothing here at all.’ Casa del Biviere had originally been a hunting lodge on the eastern shore of an enormous expanse of water called Lake of Hercules. In 1931 the lake had been drained as part of the government’s campaign to rid Italy of the malarial mosquito. It took twenty years for the water to seep away, and when the Borghesi and their four children arrived in 1968, they found a desolate, post-diluvian landscape. The children were delighted to find themselves living in the countryside and the prince began working hard to transform the fertile soil into a successful agricultural estate that soon began to produce organic citrus fruit, vegetables and grain. ‘I wasn’t too happy at first,’ the princess recalls, ‘but I soon realised that we had to stay, and then I decided to make a garden.' When the Borghesi started to plan the garden they had ‘no idea’ what they were doing. They began by buying two books in California, one on exotics and the other on succulents. ‘This gave us an idea of all the plants that would grow in a climate more or less like ours,’, the princess says, ‘and from then on we experimented.' The result of this thirty-year experiment is a wonderful collection of native and exotic trees, shrubs and plants that grow in natural groups around the house, mooring it in the vast, open landscape. From 'Il Biviere: a Post-diluvian garden in Sicily' by Helena Attlee You don’t just build a Japanese garden. Everyone knows that few styles of horticultural creation are so lapped about with formalities, precedents, rules, principles and prohibitions. After all, experts have been refining the appropriate concepts for something like a millennium or so, to the point where whole shelves of treatises offer guidance (or further confusion) to the perplexed landscaper worried about where to place that rock or plant that azalea. Consider the absolute elegance of such chefs-d’oeuvres as Kyoto’s magnificent Ry?anji garden, consisting of nothing but raked sand and a few rocks, or the moss and pruned trees of the Katsura Riky? Detached Palace, or the miniature world of the tightly-enclosed Daiseinin, a few hundred square feet that brilliantly succeed in suggesting infinity. The complexity is obvious, the details more than precise, the strangeness palpable, but at the same time gardens like these carry an extraordinary emotional charge. No wonder they made such an impact when reports about them first reached the West, and no wonder the first attempts to create Japanese gardens here went so awry. Later attempts too, for that matter. From 'Japanaiserie' by Charles Elliott
Over the past few years Peter Dale's articles in HORTUS have offered convincing evidence that Ireland contains many gardens which are both intensely atmospheric and unjustly little-known. Few if any, though, can be more atmospheric or less known than Heywood, tucked away off what is now a by-road in the rural heart of untouristified County Laois (formerly Queen's County). And few if any can have a more unlikely and unencouraging approach. Distinguished gardens whose long history involves substantial work by a world-famous architect aren't often, after all, approached through the grounds of a 1960s school, one whose flat-roofed profile somehow manages – like so many schools of that period – the unlikely feat of combining brutality with blandness. Heywood's unique atmosphere is partly the result of its complicated history over more than two centuries, and partly the result of its more recent neglect. Its unknown-ness is also of course at least partly a result of that neglect: you have to be able to see beyond its current imperfections to appreciate its (impaired but still surviving) fascination, beauty and charm. It is also – and equally of course – partly the result of its current strangely uninviting 'introduction'. First you bounce through dense woodland along a speed-humped recent drive (designed to avoid collisions between school buses and parents' cars), with only the occasional glimpse of a ruin lost in the trees to preserve your belief that this is indeed where you are meant to be. Then you park in the usual tarmac-ed school parking area under the bored eyes of pupils staring down from the school's upper floor. You get out of the car, look around and find: absolutely nothing. Not only is there no house and no obvious sign of where a house can have been. At first there is no obvious sign of a garden. Which was in fact not far from the situation when the Trench family, Heywood's original creators, arrived here in the early eighteenth century. The Trenches weren't Irish but Northumbrians of Huguenot ancestry who had been 'planted' in Ireland in the seventeenth century – at first in Galway, then spreading elsewhere and rising socially as they went, so that the heads of the family's most successful branches were Baron Ashdown and the Earl of Clancarty. The branch which acquired Heywood, however, was well-heeled but not titled. Most of its male members were at least nominally clergymen, soldiers or lawyers but were often more enthusiastic as amateur engineers or architects or simply as 'connoisseurs', 'men of taste'. They arrived first in the nearby small town or large village of Ballinakill, where William Trench and after him his son the Revd Frederick (a clergyman of the Protestant Church of Ireland, of course) had 'a sweet habitation' adjacent to the church. Even at that early stage they were clearly much concerned with landscape gardening since that 'sweet habitation' consisted, apart from the house, of '24 acres walled round 10 feet high, the ground naturally in fine slopes and risings, large trees properly dispersed, a river of very clear water running through flowing cascades. These rising grounds command very extensive views'. They didn't own that land, however. They leased it from the area's great absentee landlord, Earl Stanhope. The soil around Ballinakill was described at the time as being 'very fertile, and deep clay yielding both dairy and tillage'. (It still is: it still does.) But when they acquired more land outside the town they did so in pursuit of their interest in ornamental landscaping rather than in pursuit of an interest in commercial farming. (They did run sheep on some of their land but as picturesque objects and mobile lawnmowers as much as as a serious commercial venture.) What's more, they acquired that new land on the same leasehold terms as their land in the town. So, despite the vast amount of time and energy, money and taste, which over four generations they expended on improving their newly acquired estate, they never owned it. They tried, repeatedly, to own it: but could never persuade the current Lord Stanhope to sell. There was from the beginning a house of some kind on this land but (though no evidence of its nature survives) it was probably no more than a simple farmhouse. Certainly the Trenches were interested in neither the original house, or the farming land. What they were interested in was 'the prospect': because the highest point of their land commanded extensive views down an already wooded and stream-filled valley towards Ballinakill in the distance. From 'It is Good to be the King: Heywood, County Laois, Ireland - Its Past, Present and (Uncertain) Future' by Tim Longville.By and large I am not enthusiastic about flowers in the house. It is on feast days and holidays that they become essential; and how pleasing it is when the garden supplies what is needed for Christmas. But pleasing is too mild a description for the first plant of my choice, a small, chalice-shaped tree that brightens the dark days of the year's end. Here at Greencombe overlooking the north Somerset coast it grows in the vegetable garden and I usually take a look a few days before Christmas to see if it is ready to bring in. On 23 December its main decor is likely to be sea-green lichen, which looks miserable in cold dry weather and wonderful in rain. On 24 December I look again and it may well be coming into yellow bloom. The flowers are like stars, with narrow twisted petals, and it has a delightful elfin quality. Its great wonder is its fragrance, the epitome of good spicy things and contentment. It takes me a long time to choose branches whose removal will not spoil the shape of the tree. Strictly speaking it is a shrub, but mine is ten feet (3m) high and wide. I do not nibble, taking a little from everywhere, but select perhaps a side branch that lies across another, or one that is on the way to occupying a space already well served. Finally I cut the branches and put them in the room where our main celebrations will take place – the fragrance on Christmas Day is wonderful. From 'Christmas Flowers from My Garden' by Joan Loraine
If there is any of the schoolboy or -girl left in you then plant names can be a bit of fun, and Parrotia persica must surely raise a smile. There is nothing inherently funny about the name, but it does have a built-in quirkiness – it could just as easily be the name of a Persian member of the Psittadiceae and of the Hamamelidaceae, a parrot rather than a tree. Back in class, stomata was another word that made us smile, because it was similar to tomato – not really funny, but still you'd look across at your classmate with a knowing twist to the lips during a tedious biology lesson. Stomata was fairly tame – there were words with saucy connotations that would raise a bigger titter in the classroom. School-boy humour reached its peak in science lessons, which were the last three periods of a Friday afternoon when the weekend was too close for serious thinking. Puerile without a doubt, but a fairly innocent bit of fun by modern standards. There are other plant names that, as long as you are happy not to take yourself or nomenclature too seriously, have something about them to make you smile inside. Salviauliginosa always becomes 'Sylvia uglinosa', cladrastis becomes gladrags, both cistus and cytisis become cystitus; alnus makes me think forearms, achillea suggests to me a demented Mexican with a gun aimed at his wife’s lover; hippocastanum does not bring horse chestnuts to mind. Robinia is surely an elegant lady mugger, and in my mind hydrangea has always been the taller brother of the Lone Ranger. Okay, okay, enough. Let’s be more serious about our subject, and if Dr J. J. F. W. von Parrot – for it is he whose name is enshrined in Parrotia – is up there looking down on this, then no offence meant, sir. Parrotia is a genus with, until recently, only one known species, and you have to think that anyone whose name is honoured by being given to such a singular genus has to be someone special, and so he is. Johann Jacob Freidrich Wilhelm von Parrot was a German naturalist, traveller and scientist. He studied at the University of Dorpat, now in Estonia, but then in Russia; he travelled to the Crimea and the Caucasus, became a surgeon in the Russian army, and was at various times engaged in experiments in barometry and with the earth’s magnetism. He travelled to Finland to carry out some of his experiments. His most quoted achievement is that in 1829 he was the first person to climb Mount Ararat in the far east of Turkey. There is no record of him finding Noah’s Ark, which is believed by many to have come to rest on the top of this extinct volcano. It was two years after that feat, in 1831, that his name was given to the plant genus that bears it by Carl Anton von Meyer, who had made a great study of the Hamamelidaceae. From 'Parrotia persica' by Paul Williams
Long ago John Masefield wrote that 'It ought to be made a penal offence for any man to write anything until he has knocked about a bit',2 and William Earl Johns (1893–1968) had certainly done that. In the First World War, after army service in the yeomanry and the machine-gun corps he joined the Royal Flying Corps, in 1917, and was wounded, shot down, and captured in 1918; he stayed in the Royal Air Force until 1927. Less well-known is that he was also a keen, well-informed gardener who between May 1936 and February 1947 contributed 106 articles, most under the generic title 'The Passing Show' (henceforth 'TPS'), to My Garden (henceforth MG), a monthly founded and edited by Theo(dore) A. Stephens (1897–1972).3 In his Foreword to Johns's The Passing Show: A Garden Diary, 'by an Amateur Gardener' (MG, 1937), consisting mainly of articles which had appeared in MG, Stephens relates how Johns, whom he describes as 'a born writer' and 'a born gardener', came to be a garden writer: it was simply coincidence that the offices of MG were adjacent to those of Popular Flying, and Stephens suggested that he write about his gardening experiences. Johns indeed believed that 'alpines and ailerons have a connecting link', and said: 'A crash from 20,000 feet and months in an enemy punishment camp left me a sorry wreck. It was then I started gardening, and it was the joy and surprise of seeing my first simple annuals in flower that did what doctors might have failed to do.' ('High Adventure', MG, February 1937). He became a real plantsman, collecting plants and seeds from all over Europe and buying them from all over the world, was extremely well-read in all kinds of literature, and wrote with authority and humour.4 As we would expect, his descriptions can be wonderfully vivid and exact: 'There is only one colour for a wallflower, and that is its original colour, rich, deep, coppery red-brown, flecked with brazen fire, so that a gathering of them looks like the wall of an old French kitchen when the setting sun pours through the west window.' (TPS, originally in MG July 1937). However, my concern here is with the dangerous and adventurous aspects of plants (especially orchids) and plant-hunting which, in both fact and fiction, naturally appealed to Johns. In one of his articles (TPS, MG, July 1942) he reports the story of a man-eating tree in Madagascar as described by Carl Liche and printed in The Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, (edited by Revd R. Baron, Christmas 1881, a periodical which Johns fairly states 'is hard to find': how did Johns come by it?) Liche, with a companion, said that among the Mkodo pigmies a sacrificial victim, a woman, was made to drink the nectar in the cone at the apex of a tree sacred to the great tree devil; then the tree's palpi or tendrils 'like great green serpents' crushed her . . . 'It was the barbarity of the Laocoon without its beauty' – and finally the tree's leaves enveloped and crushed the woman. Ten days later all that remained was 'but a white skull'. Though the Annual declared the incident to be 'non est' (non-existent), Johns suggested that we should be cautious about dismissing the story as fabrication: 'Let us remember that native rumour has often materialised out of the jungle to confound scientists.' From 'Vandas Will Never Cease: Capt. W. E. Johns and Dangerous Orchids' by Edward Wilson
‘A Forsaken Garden’ had first been published two months earlier, in the Athenaeum, in its issue for 22 July. There is no surviving archive of Hibberd’s papers; neither Cecil Lang’s great edition of The Swinburne Letters, nor the recent three-volume supplement compiled by Terry Meyers, contains any correspondence with Hibberd or any references to him. Hibberd may have obtained permission to reprint the poem directly from the publishers of the Athenaeum; the acknowledgment of that magazine as the source at least suggests that the reprinting was not simply an act of piracy. The poem was not issued in book form until 1878, when it appeared in Poems and Ballads: Second Series. Its appearance in the Gardeners’ Magazine seems so far to have eluded Swinburne bibliographers. What would the horticultural readers, confronted with Swinburne’s poem in September 1876, have made of it? Let’s start by being literal. What do we learn of the garden? First, it is a seaside garden, though exactly how close to the sea is left vague; it is at the ‘sea-down’s edge’, but there are also fields or meadows at a lower elevation that advance to the sea – whether between the garden and the sea, or simply positioned so that both fields and sea are visible from the garden. Depending on your interpretation of the fields, the garden is either south- or east-facing. We do not learn its size. It corresponds to no well-known English estate. The documented garden that matches the ambience most closely is Bawdsey Manor, Suffolk, where there is indeed a garden ringed with stone and fronting the sea, but that garden was not begun until after the publication of the poem. From 'Swinburne's Forsaken Garden' by Brent Elliott
So here we are again. The nights are like wet black curtains, parting briefly to let some grey seep in. There is moaning in the kitchen garden, moaning in the borders, moaning at the bar. It is time to sort the apples, separating the sheep from the goats, for there are far too many of them; then beat a retreat to the studio. There are big windows there, and it is warmish, and in front of the big window a profusion of cuttings is clinging grimly to life. There is no heated glass at The Hope, and the cold frames are very cold indeed, and propagation gets done not when it ought to be done but when someone gets round to it. So these cuttings were mostly taken in late summer, and desire to be launched into the world for hardening-off any time now. The way the world is at the moment, though, they will be less hardened off than frozen solid, like the Acer griseum seeds sulking in the bed the far side of the window. So there they sit, squadrons of whitefly droning through their upper fronds, waiting without much hope for spring. Among the cuttings are single chrysanthemums and outcrops of pelargonium, to remind me of Cornwall and bring a faint whiff of the sub-tropics to the chilly Marches. None of your 'Lady Plymouth' here, with a thin niff of toothpaste. These are the deep-red rose-scented festoons that avalanche down the Neptune Steps at Tresco, whose warm winters keep them growing from year to year under the Atlantic sky. A sky which at this time of year sometimes cruises north as far as Herefordshire; at which point it is an idea to abandon the verminous hortus siccus developing under the office window, and head for the outdoors. The winter patrol is a somewhat straitened affair. It is always good to check the gunnera, sprawled on the side of the pond with its leaves folded over its crown like the beast from the Mappa Mundi that sleeps wrapped in its gigantic ears. The dogwood is admiring its gory reflection in the big pond. The Duchess is flitting among the long shadows of the molehills, counting the number of flowers out. She cannot rid herself of this habit, acquired when she lived with her wicked mother just inland from Monte Carlo. But continuing it is a disaster for the gin, as it does not cheer her up at all. Quite the opposite, for the midwinter list is depressingly short. There is the carpet of polyanthus from which the dark fangs of yew rise beside the yard. There is the Viburnum bodnantense, the Lonicera purpusii, the winter jasmine and the clematis armandii. There are some croci and snowdrops and Siberian squills and self-sown grape hyacinths, which she thinks look so constipated that she scarcely classifies them as flowers. It is in vain that we point out the delicate traceries of frost on the sedums in the vertical rockery. She scowls, and curses all snowdrops, and heads indoors. From 'Time for Another Bonfire' by Sam Llewellyn
You don’t just build a Japanese garden. Everyone knows that few styles of horticultural creation are so lapped about with formalities, precedents, rules, principles and prohibitions. After all, experts have been refining the appropriate concepts for something like a millennium or so, to the point where whole shelves of treatises offer guidance (or further confusion) to the perplexed landscaper worried about where to place that rock or plant that azalea. Consider the absolute elegance of such chefs-d’oeuvres as Kyoto’s magnificent Ry?anji garden, consisting of nothing but raked sand and a few rocks, or the moss and pruned trees of the Katsura Riky? Detached Palace, or the miniature world of the tightly-enclosed Daiseinin, a few hundred square feet that brilliantly succeed in suggesting infinity. The complexity is obvious, the details more than precise, the strangeness palpable, but at the same time gardens like these carry an extraordinary emotional charge. No wonder they made such an impact when reports about them first reached the West, and no wonder the first attempts to create Japanese gardens here went so awry. Later attempts too, for that matter. From 'Japanaiserie' by Charles Elliott
Anthony du Gard Pasley (1929-2009) remembered by John Brookes MBEBook Reviews:Spirit: Garden Inspiration by Dan PearsonBulb by Anna PavordThe Explorer's Garden: Shrubs and Vines from the Four Corners of the World by Daniel HinkleyRemarkable Trees of Virginia by Nancy Ross Hugo and Jeff Jirwin
The Editor's Quarterly Book Bag includes reviews of Jelena and Rober De Belder:Generous as Nature Itself by Diane Andriaessen, Oxford Trees by Sophie Huxley, Extraordinary Gardens of the World by Monty Don, Gardens of the Loire Valley by Marie-Françoise Valéry, Great Gardens of America by Tim Richardson, The Gardens of the Vatican by Kildare Dobbs, Encyclopedia of Exotic Plants for Temperate Climates by Will Giles, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants by John Vaughan and Catherine Geissler, Bob Flowerdew's Complete Fruit Book, An Irishman's Cuttings by Charles E. Nelson, Flowers of the Louvre by Michel Lis and Béatrice Vingtrinier, Picturing Plants by Gill Saunders, Hugh Johnson in the Garden by Hugh Johnson and Back to the Garden by Ursula Buchan.
and . . . an Overview of the year's 'best' books by John Akeroyd, Angelica Gray, Charles Elliott, Guy Jones, Rosemary Lindsay, Judith Tankard, Anne de Verteuil, Gregory Long, Charles Quest-Ritson, Marta McDowell and Elspeth Thompson.
HORTUS 93, (Spring 2010) issue will be published on 31st March 2010 -
17 Sep ' 04:53
From the new (No 91 - Autumn 2009) issue: 
Are ferns due for a revival? Perhaps they’ve already made a comeback – they certainly featured prominently in gardens I saw this summer in Norfolk, Ireland and the north-eastern USA. In Ireland, at Hunting Brook, Jimi Blake’s beautiful woodland garden near Blessington in Co. Wicklow, I marvelled at a curving ‘avenue’ of tree ferns (Dicksonia antarctica) in the shade of native oak and beech and was astonished when Jimi turned the fronds of Lophosoria quadripinnata (a terrestrial tree fern found in cloud forests in Central and South America) to reveal their surprisingly blue reverse sides. My own few ferns extend little further than a handful of maidenhairs (Adiantum), the fashionable Japanese painted fern (Athyrium niponicum), our native asplenium in several varieties, and a flourishing containerised woodwardia that’s never seen direct sunshine. Growing them is easier, I’d say, than trying to remember some of their names. June and July’s succession of wet days was just what they liked, as, of course, is some shade during the hottest part of the day. On the other side of the coin, so to speak, I was equally dazzled in Norfolk by a plethora of succulents, cacti, bananas and other non-temperate things at both East Ruston Old Vicarage and Will Giles’s Exotic Garden in Norwich. A ‘signature’ plant at both places was the dark maroon, almost black Aeonium arboreum and the darker still cultivar I take to be ‘Zwartkop’, demanding of a garden’s sunniest and warmest spot. At East Ruston there’s a colony of them in the walled Entrance Court, and if I paid attention to Alan Gray’s droll yet fabulously informed commentary when I took a group of Oldie magazine readers there in June, I understand them to be placed in situ in their pots for ease of lifting, drying and saving from frost during the winter months. Some reached five feet high and more, associating well with agaves, yuccas, euphorbias and some electric-blue salvias. (East Ruston, by the way, is not without its woodland treats too, arisaemas, foxgloves, hostas, cardiocrinums, dicentras and, yes, ferns, succeeding a spring riot of snowdrops and winter aconites.) From the editor’s introduction to the Autumn 2009 issue
23 April 2009: Which is for you: the deep, deep peace of autumn or the hurly-burly of spring? Both, of course. If only spring didn’t whiz by so remorselessly, winding me up in a frenzy of anxiety not to miss any of its tricks. This year the chilly period in March had the effect of slowing the early performers, so that when it warmed up in April, with just enough rain in the ground, early and late grew frantically together. Now everything from daffs to magnolia and tulips to maples and azaleas is in flower together. If only one could call a truce for a few days. I’ve tried to be careful with colour, to keep the oranges and pinks apart. It never works completely, but just now it is not working at all. There is one group in the garden where harmony is total, and gets better every year. Staphylea holocarpa ‘Rosea’, Viburnum carlesii and Clematis armandii all sing the same rather soppy pink tune. The clematis (there are two: one white, one apple-blossom pink) have made a leap for the not-very-low bough of a walnut tree near by. Unauthorised pink flowers in a walnut tree violate my sense of what is proper, but wouldn’t I be a control freak to interfere? Control? Fat chance. Mowing produces a deceptive sense of order. Weeding calms the spirits, as any activity does. At this rate of growth, though, there is simply not time to give every plant its due. Yesterday in London the plane trees in the parks spangled the sky with their new leaves emerging in that unnameable colour between yellow and green. I walked under them for an hour in a sort of excited calm that has no name I know either. It is almost impossible to maintain this state in your own garden. I try to keep my hands in my pockets, to use only my eyes. Next moment I am making fiddly adjustments; out come the secateurs, up comes a weed. It’s spring.
. . . While all these plant passions have been coming and going my interest in cupheas has been ticking over quietly in the background. My first was Cuphea ignea, the cigar plant – with a bit of imagination you can indeed see the small, tubular red flowers as little cigars with white and black ash at the tip. It is easy to keep as a house-plant, and cuttings are easy to root for use in summer container displays or as a plant to bed out discreetly among tougher things. It is a tender perennial shrub producing masses of flowers in a sunny spot, but never looks too exotic to sit comfortably with a wide range of hardy perennials. It will grow to some three feet in height in its native Mexico, but for me a foot-high plant in a pot was a good specimen. It has a variegated form, and while I am no great fan of this aberration, it makes a bright and cheery subject for a container planting. Don’t be put off by young, early-season plants which often look rather sickly – the variegation improves as it grows and the weather warms up. There are some two hundred and sixty cuphea species spread around Central and South America. Many are annuals, others are short-lived perennials, and none can be considered hardy. Some are reputed to be root-hardy to minus five or six degrees Celsius, losing their tops to frost but shooting from the roots in early summer, although this has never happened for me in Central England. All cupheas have simple leaves and many of them have tubular flowers with two petals flaring at the tip of the tube. These are sometimes barely noticeable, as in Cuphea ignea, or can be very large and showy, as in C. llavea. Many have sticky hairs on either the flowers or the stems. They are all bright, but perhaps the most startling of all is Cuphea cyanea: a flower with Barbara-Cartland-pink tubes that grade to yellow at their tip, with two burgundy ‘ears’ and blue anthers borne on red filaments. It is a combination of colours that is not easy to love and almost impossible to combine with anything else, so take it for what it is, one of nature’s little stand-alone colour spectaculars. There is a warm orange-flowered variant called ‘Copper Cricket’, not so much fun but a far more ‘useable’ colour. From ‘Cupheas Anyone?’ by Paul Williams
Alas! The riches I brought back from Siberia (see ‘Hunting the Dog’s Tooth’ Part Three in HORTUS 90) did not take to life in Somerset. They were potted up without delay, but the leaves were dead so the bulbs had nothing to maintain them. They all had coded labels, with a number that corresponded to their site, and a letter that indicated their pollen colour and inner markings – important, but it did not promote survival. The first winter I left them outside to take what came in the way of weather, as do all the other erythroniums I grow. I tried keeping them dry over winter and then watering heavily in April. I tried giving a pinch of lime, as the Altai are old limestone mountains. None of this led the Siberians to appear and flower like the Americans did (see Parts One and Two in HORTUS 88 and 89). Nor did careful reference to sites provide an explanation. These plants are adapted to winter snow and spring thaw, and I can only hope that a handful will survive, having adapted to the uncatergorised English winter. Perhaps my biggest mistake was not planting them out. But before going to Russia I had bought Siberian erythroniums and planted them in the wood, never to see them again. Also, I had over the years grown so many erythroniums that turned out to have been wrongly named that I determined to keep them in pots till they had revealed themselves as true to name, so that I could plant them in the wood and not need to dig them up later. Readers may remember that after my first trip to the USA I knew that my plot of Erythronium hendersonii in the National Collection contained many hybrids, and these I removed so that the plot was ‘true’. This ‘true’ bed was just above the path that goes through the collection, so I decided to let the species be above the path and the hybrids below, and as far as possible let the hybrids be below their seed parents. So we made the first bed below the path, opposite the ‘true’ E. hendersonii, and planted the hybrids where the seed parents would have sown them. Since then we have made many hybrid beds. They have added considerably to the attraction (when they are in flower) and contribute to the interpretive aspect of the layout. From the fourth and concluding part of ‘Hunting the Dog’s Tooth’ by Joan Loraine
One of the defining pleasures of reading HORTUS is that of being led gently down the road less travelled, and thus Michael Cunningham’s delightful articles on Lob’s Wood in issues numbered 76 and 77 were my introduction to Carl Krippendorf. I am sure I was not alone in wishing to learn yet more about the man and his garden. I had previously discovered’ Elizabeth Lawrence but, as it happened, neither The Little Bulbs nor the eponymous and, in Europe at least, hard-to-obtain Lob’s Wood, the books in which Krippendorf made his appearance. So to the Internet. I ran a search (I am aware that even the Oxford English Dictionary now allows me to Google, but to my unfashionable ear, googling will always sound instead like one of those unpleasant habits, unnoticed or ignored by doting parents, in which small children regrettably persist), and from those untiring Amazons these titles duly arrived. But, having read each from cover to cover, the real Krippendorf still remained elusive – like a horticultural Cheshire Cat, little but a disembodied smile, kindly but distinctly mocking, lingered mistily. Again to the Internet, where this time I was saddened to find that Lob’s Wood, (the name, with its sturdy and steadfast medieval ring, somewhat unexpected in the American Midwest), has long been incorporated into the larger and much less enchantingly-named entity of Rowe Woods, owned by the Cincinnati Nature Center (CNC). In the darker and more private recesses of a Lob’s Wood, one would, I am certain, feel no great surprise in encountering a Wood Spirit or a Dryad, or even, with luck, a Bacchanalian romp; clearly no such expectation could exist in modern Rowe Woods. So much have we lost. (For the record, Stanley Rowe was a prime mover in the band of nature lovers who arranged for the purchase of the wood on behalf of the CNC from Carl’s daughter, after his death. He was a tireless raiser of funds in the cause of conservation, and no doubt admirable in every way, but nevertheless the renaming of the wood seems to rattle down an abrupt and impervious barrier on the long and happy days of Carl and Mary Krippendorf). From ‘Lob’s Wood . . . à la francaise’ by Shaun Haddock
‘If it’s boring, old-fashioned, or overgrown rip it out and start again, because that’s what gardening is about. It’s about starting again. It’s about change, and it’s about embracing change: it’s not about making a static shrine.’ Challenging stuff, and more than simply an example of Sir Roy Strong’s well-developed gift for rousing rhetoric: it is the actual mandate he has given Chris Young, deputy editor of the Royal Horticultural Society’s magazine The Garden, and the man he has appointed to take over artistic control of his own garden to ensure that when he’s no longer around himself The Laskett doesn’t end up ‘a static shrine’ to the partnership that created it. Nor is it a challenge he hasn’t faced personally: three years after his wife, theatre designer Julia Trevelyan Oman CBE, died very suddenly in 2003 he wielded the first blow of the axe – what he describes as ‘having to be a bit of a Robespierre’ – to half the iconic hedges he’d spent thirty years clipping into shape, along with a fair proportion of the garden’s fruit trees that had been his wife’s particular obsession, and the majority of its shelterbelt conifers they’d planted together, as much to exclude the world at large from their private space (see H0RTUS 23) as to baffle the wind which blows straight off the nearby Black Mountains. Unfortunately, thirty years on the trees themselves had become a looming threat to the garden’s tranquillity. At the same time, and to satisfy his scholarly penchant for documentary evidence, Sir Roy commissioned photographer Clive Bournsell to record every stage of the operation, from before that first brutal chop, through the entire demolition process to the actual moment when a hundred feet of conifer, or hundred yards of leylandii hedge, is lying strewn about the now light-filled foreground and the surrounding landscape has become a part of the garden scene for the first time in decades. From ‘Diana Ross meets . . . Sir Roy Strong’
Marrakesh is undergoing something of a garden-making renaissance. Sited against the spectacular backdrop of the Atlas Mountains, and blessed with a plentiful water supply, this confection of pink-earth architecture and luxurious groves has long been known in Morocco as 'The Garden City'. Like any city, it has its iconic gardens: the Majorelle with its distinctive use of blue paint and exotica, the historic Menara, a vast water tank surrounded by olive groves, and the French-style Mamounia Hotel Gardens where, for the price of a champagne cocktail, one can imagine oneself back in the opulent 1920s. However, the huge economic boom of the past few years has resulted in a new confidence which while respecting the past looks firmly towards the future. Gardens have been widely recognised as a way of expressing new affluence and civic pride, but in a country where the garden tradition is dominated by that of the hortus conclusus there is a need to develop new idioms such as the public green space. The project to build the Arsat Moulay Abdeslam Cyber Park posed a particular challenge which in many ways reflects the wider political climate of modern Morocco: how to reconcile the past, present and future. Its name may well conjure a vision of a light industrial zone on the edge of a New Town, but what the visitor finds is in fact a splendid restoration of two juxtapositioned historic gardens, with sensitively integrated twenty-first century elements. The easy grace of this oasis of calm belies the painstaking work that underpinned the genesis of the park. From ‘A Walk in the Park: The Arsat Moulay Abdeslam Cyber Park, Marrakesh’ by Angelica Gray
Birr is one of those places that makes the expression ‘small-town' a term of affection and esteem rather than of contempt. It is small, but it is also a place to be reckoned with: dignified, orderly without being bossy, occasionally grand, never po-faced, a place of character. It stands on the banks of the Camcor River and its tributary the Little Brosna; indeed, the name Birr means 'watery place'. Geographically, but perhaps not quite culturally, it is almost in the very centre of the island of Ireland. The castle demesne – more than one hundred and twenty acres, and the largest private garden in Ireland – embraces parcels of the three counties Tipperary, Offaly and Roscommon. The little town – largely spared the ravages of progress – is a mixture of the modestly Georgian with occasional caprices of early nineteenth-century Gothic. Becky Sharp might live here, enjoying the society and excitement of the garrison, running up debts in the milliner's, and lamenting the infrequency of offical balls and assemblies. At one end of the town is a stern, conspicuous, very Classical obelisk of 1746 commemorating the Battle of Culloden (which, being interpreted into an Anglo-Irish context means Yah! Boo! to all Stuarts / Catholics / and Nationalists) and at the other end stands an Hibernian Gothick memorial to the Manchester Martyrs (1867), the Birmingham Six of their time, as it were. Schematised like this, you might think the place was an ideological battle-ground, and in a sense so it is (and Ireland, and Irish history in general), but there's no militancy about it now, or indeed for the last eighty years (though Ulster has joined this tendency to peace only recently): Ireland is unequalled for peacefulness while still yielding rich seams of contested meaning to the alert visitor. From: ‘In an Irish Garden: Birr Castle and Desmene’ by Peter Dale
In the summer of 2008, I was commissioned by the University of Syracuse to come up with a planting scheme to complement the restoration of the Gigliucci family tombs in the English Cemetery in Florence. The Gigliucci were the university's benefactors and left their Florentine town house to this American university for visiting students – as had happened ‘up the road’ at Harold Acton's La Pietra (for New York University) and Bernard Berenson's I Tatti (for Harvard). In spite of being the final resting place for such luminaries as the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor and Arthur Hugh Clough, Fanny Hunt (widow of artist Holman Hunt) and Frances Trollope-Milton (mother and so creator of the creator of Vanity Fair), the English Cemetery is in a sorry state. Today this ancient earthwork is in the eye of the storm, on a busy roundabout and is ignored by most passing traffic. It was originally a charnel house, outside the old city walls. It was built as a raised mound and in subsequent years, when the ghosts had given up, it became an ideal spot to carve out an ice-house; the digging – don't think about it – having already been done. There are more of these now-defunct ice-houses around the old city walls. By 1827 the ice had melted and the Protestant cemetery was founded on the same site, bringing its use full circle. Today it is owned by the Swiss Reformed Evangelical Church and many of its 1,700 ‘inhabitants’ are Swiss, although the English presence is far larger, hence its Florentine name il Cimitero degli Inglesi. The cemetery is effectively full, there being only enough space left for ashes to be interred. Consequently, when English expatriates such as the late Harold Acton die, they are buried in the ‘active’ cemetery south of the Arno. From a restoration and gardening point of view, this presents major obstacles. The cemetery is only really of interest to devotees of the poets and the surviving relatives of other occupants. This must be true of burial grounds the world over, and as time passes there are fewer people to whom they remain significant. Sadly, as usual, it all comes down to money. The bases of the marble tombstones made from pietra serena, the local friable stone, quickly crumble, and Italy, with her embarrassment of cultural riches, has other priorities. So when it comes to gardening in such a harsh, literal and financial climate, a careful scheme has to be devised. From: ‘The English Cemetery in Florence’ by Tiggy Salt
The old story, most likely apocryphal, has it that a group of boys once decided to play a trick on the great Charles Darwin. They collected several sorts of beetles and other insects, carefully dismembered them, and glued the bits back together to create a new creature. Then they asked Darwin if he would identify their discovery. He contemplated it for a while and asked if it had made a humming noise when it was alive. Indeed it had, sir, they replied. No question about it, then, Darwin said solemnly. It is a humbug. I have a soft spot for this story; I’ve always been fond of hoaxes and frauds. Not because I’m any good at perpetrating them, of course (although I embarrassedly remember suffering one myself, when a photographer at the university daily paper I was editing managed to convince me that he’d found a way to develop film using Coca-Cola. I wrote an article about his achievement and was about to publish it when he revealed all, in the nick of time). It’s more a matter of enjoying – and perhaps admiring – the ingenuity of the hoaxers. Fakery may be a slightly dubious art form, but it certainly demonstrates creativity, if of a slightly skewed variety. Particularly in the field of botany, it is probably best to make a distinction between what’s meant as a good-humoured jest, and something more sinister. A few years ago, for example, a case of botanical hoaxing came to light that might well have done some serious damage in the world of scientific scholarship if it had gone unrevealed. (Ultimately it did do damage to the reputation of the perpetrator, although by the time he was conclusively found out he was dead.) It involved the purported discovery of certain otherwise uninteresting plants in a place where they simply didn’t belong, but whose existence served to support a large if debateable theory about Ice Age survivals. From ‘Frauds and Figments’ by Charles Elliott
In gardening circles the distinguished artist Sir Cedric Morris Bt. (1889–1982) is remembered for the superb border irises he bred in his paradisical garden at Benton End on the outskirts of Hadleigh in Suffolk. In previous articles (HORTUS numbers 78 and 82) I described his greatest triumphs as an iris breeder and unmasked some of the friends and benefactors whose forenames he co-opted when naming his new iris cultivars. But nowadays many people, even among the most knowledgeable of the gardening cognoscenti, tend to forget or are wholly unaware that Cedric bred or discovered and introduced an extraordinarily eclectic range of plants other than irises. In 1952 after Beth Chatto had made her first, astonished visit to Cedric's garden at Benton End she observed that apart from the irises, old -fashioned roses and surprisingly few trees and shrubs, ‘the rest was a bewildering, mind-stretching canvas of colour, textures and shapes created primarily with bulbous plants and herbaceous perennials’.1 It is these bulbous plants which Cedric bred or introduced into cultivation from the wild that I have brought together here, conscious that there must have been others about which I am regretfully ignorant. Hardy bulbs blooming in December deserve our highest regard and I remember a luncheon party hosted by Cedric's gardening friend Jenny Robinson in celebration of his ninetieth birthday on 11 December 1979 to which Beth Chatto brought a sizeable clay pan well-filled with the stunningly beautiful, perfectly proportioned, miniature, golden-yellow trumpets of Narcissus minor ‘Cedric Morris’, each flower elegantly poised on its seven-to-nine-inch high stem and admired by all present. Of all the bulbs associated with Cedric, this is the best known, although it was not strictly one of his own discoveries. In about 1956 – Cedric could not be certain of the year when I asked him – another gardening friend of his called Basil Leng (pronounced Long) had come across this tiny daffodil growing by the roadside while driving along the Costa Verde in the neighbourhood of Ribalden in northern Spain. Some of the plants bore nearly ripe seed pods while others were still in flower, and he dug up a few bulbs and took them into Portugal where he had a prearranged rendezvous with Cedric. There, Leng gave Cedric the bulbs, saying they would fare better at Benton End than in his own garden in Antibes. At one time Leng had helped in Compton Mackenzie's garden and later he worked with Lawrence Johnston (of Hidcote fame) at the latter’s La Serre de la Madonne in the Val du Gorbio near Menton on the French Riviera. Cedric described Leng to me as a considerable plantsman well known among the gardening elite, and I treasure a copy of The Epicure's Companion by Edward and Lorna Bunyard (Dent, 1937), once the property of Basil Leng and inscribed on its flyleaf ‘To Basil, Best of Hosts and Co-travellers from E.A.B.’ (E. Augustus Bowles). From ‘Bulbs at Benton End’ by Tony Venison
This year the Edinburgh-based Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society is celebrating its bicentenary. Darwin was also born in 1809 and there have been many events commemorating this, but it is interesting to reflect on what else was going on in that year. In 1809 Napoleon held sway in Europe but in the Peninsula Wellington, newly raised to the peerage, was making inroads into French dominance with victories at Oporto and Talavera. Joseph Haydn died. Canning and Castlereagh fought a duel but, luckily, neither aimed to kill. Edinburgh was in the throes of the building of the New Town, but only two of the gardens, St Andrew Square and Charlotte Square, were laid out. Yet gardening must have been a subject of fairly wide interest, because in December of that year a group of Edinburgh worthies met at the Royal College of Physicians, then in George Street, and from this meeting a Society for the ‘encouragement and improvement of the best fruit, the most choice flowers and most useful culinary vegetables’ was set up. This was the Caledonian Horticultural Society, later to become Royal, and still very much a feature of the Edinburgh landscape. The inspiration for this Society came from the Horticultural Society founded in London five years earlier, and there were many links between the two. Sir Joseph Banks and Richard Salisbury, founders of the London Society, and Thomas Andrew Knight, President from 1811 until 1838, were honorary members from the outset. At the first meeting, and many subsequent ones, the Chair was taken by Dr Andrew Duncan, a professor of medicine at Edinburgh University and President of the Royal College of Physicians. This genial bon-viveur was created a life Vice-President became known as the father of the Society. The Society clearly had social pretensions, for at this first meeting the Earl of Dalkeith was elected President; Patrick Neill became joint secretary, remaining in the post for 41 years, until shortly before his death in 1851. The long partnership between Neill and Duncan was very productive. From: ‘The Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society: The First Two Hundred Years’ by Anna Buxton
That smell is in the air again. It is thick and wet, with a faint hint of mould. The dew is not so much a dampness, as an inundation, and the pheasants leave dark trails as they wade through the grass. In the outer reaches of the garden, where it merges into the woods, the deer prowl and prowl around, ready to pounce on the half-ripe leaders of the five-year trees. Autumn is coming, and as usual we re in a hurry . . .
From ‘North and South’ by Sam Llewellyn
Reviews of Paradise of Exiles by Katie Campbell, Thomas Mawson: Life, Gardens and Landscapes by Janet Waymark and Mary McMurtrie’s Country Garden Flowers by Timothy Clark.
HORTUS 92, the Winter 2009 issue will be published on 30 November -
21 Jun ' 08:39
The camassia bulbs planted in the arboretum last September began to flower in the first week of May. They are Camassia quamash, giving a good gentian-blue stubby spike on an eight- to ten-inch stem. They are supposed to naturalise well in grass, as long as the ground remains moist – as they say, much depends on summer. I planted them in clumps of three and five about eighteen inches or so from the trunks of small trees, avoiding shrubs beneath which the flowers could easily be damaged by low branches. They looked ravishing in long grass among buttercups, lady’s smock (Cardamine pratensis), sweet Cecily, campion, pignut (a low-growing cow-parlsey look-alike), clover, dandelions, bluebells, cowslips, speedwell, daisies and the season’s last few celandines. It’s a rich turf, with more ‘sewn-in’ grasses and motley ‘weeds’ than I can identify, and in May and June it sparkles with all the splendour of a medieval mille-fleurs tapestry.
Delight in this was sadly marred by the sudden death of several young Acer palmatum cultivars, planted a year ago. In April they came into leaf, but then withered after a few days. It wasn’t frost or drought, and I can’t see any signs of mouse- or rabbit-nibbling; each has a tree guard round its young stem. The casualties appear random among the twenty or so different kinds I planted. Why one should perish while its neighbour – perhaps only ten feet away – should prosper, is a mystery.
From the edior’s introduction to HORTUS 90‘What is your favourite plant?’ is a question I am often asked by non- gardening friends. Gardeners know that it is almost impossible to answer. Each season has its gems, as does each different habitat, and to choose between them means making unreasonable comparisons. But what if it came down to it: you had to choose; you were going to be banished to a desert island, and apart from a few old gramophone records, the Bible and some clean underwear, you were allowed to take just one plant. What would it be?
We have to presume that some sort of food would be available on the island, so no need to take a fruit or veg plant. Even though it is a desert island I cannot imagine it is completely devoid of some sort of greenery to offer shade: there has to be at least one lonely cartoon palm to give some shelter, so no need to take a tree.
As part of keeping up morale we might also feel the need to keep up appearances – we just might have to greet would-be rescuers. So how about a flax plant from which we could raise enough seedlings to make ourselves a linen suit, eventually. Imagine it, sitting on the veranda of the bungalow we have built from whittled pieces of driftwood (assuming a poor frisking job at my port of departure had failed to detect my concealed Swiss Army knife), rocking gently in the chair we have made from bamboo canes crudely lashed together with lianas, sipping some gently intoxicating syrup that we have brewed from the bark of a tree, wondering what to do with all those discs since we weren’t given a record player, and gazing longingly at that set of fresh underwear, wondering whether to save it for Christmas Day, and all this in our homemade crumpled linen suit – how good can life get? Drat, if only we had thought to slip in some indigofera seeds we could have had a blue suit for Sundays.From ‘Melianthus major: A Desert Island Plant?’’ by Paul Williams
‘A fearsome maze of eerie crags’ is how one guidebook describes La Gomera. That phrase alone would have tempted me.
I kept hearing different accounts of the Canary Islands: their heaving airports, their lava landscapes, the smell of Ambre Solaire on black sand beaches . . . Nobody had said that Spain’s highest mountain (admittedly no Mont Blanc) is on Tenerife, and only one friend, years ago, that La Gomera, twenty miles across the water, manages to include a rain forest in its astonishingly varied flora.
The mid Atlantic tropics, when I thought about it, should have pretty special conditions. Trade Winds refreshing sun-baked soil – fertile, too, with ancient lava – it’s a promising recipe. For someone who avoids hot climates the idea of a misty mountain refuge from the coast was pretty attractive too. Breakfast in the garden, botanising in the clouds (or, if no clouds, with distant views to other islands and the snow-capped Mount Teide), tea by the swimming pool and a late Spanish dinner sounded perfect. It was.
La Gomera has the islands’ biggest remaining area of the peculiar indigenous forest known as laurisilva: 10,000 jungly acres. To call it a rain forest is not quite accurate; strictly speaking it is cloud forest, meaning that the trees collect the moisture from the overladen air; the perpetual drip from their mossy branches, rather than conventional precipitation, doubles the measurable 'rainfall'.
‘Laurel’, Laurus azorica, closely related to bay, is the main theme, supported by half a dozen superficially similar evergreens (the most recognisable being Viburnum rigidum) and the very different tree heather, Erica arborea. In certain exposures at a certain altitude in the hills you are in heather as dense as on a grouse moor – the difference being that it is thirty feet high. One should be there in March to smell it flowering.
From ‘Tradescant’s Diary’ by Hugh JohnsonThis year everybody’s talking about Darwin, widely regarded as both a hero of biology and one of history’s greatest thinkers. Not only does 2009 mark two centuries since his birth, but also it’s a hundred and fifty years since the sensational publication of The Origin of Species in November 1859. Even as we celebrate a remarkable individual, the evolution debate continues as fiercely as ever. Yet this seminal work, far and away his most famous and influential book, has overshadowed the other considerable scientific achievements of a man who is the father of modern biology and ecology, and godfather to evolutionary genetics. Darwin’s genius impinges directly upon HORTUS readers, as his great body of published work reveals so much of the life history, structure, physiology, reproduction and inheritance of garden plants and wildlife. We think of him at his desk, but Darwin spent much of his time outside in the spacious, well-appointed and much-loved grounds of Down House, which provided botanic garden, laboratory, thinking space and essential element of the contented domestic and intellectual environments that nurtured his genius. There he worked quietly and patiently on the simple but perceptive observations and experiments that would change science and the way we all see the world.
From ‘At Home in Charles Darwin’s Garden’ by John AkeroydThe Lewes Seedy Saturday is one of several seed exchange events that take place throughout the country. The very first UK seed swap, Seedy Sunday, took place only a few miles away in Brighton in 2002, and this event continues to thrive. There are also numerous internet sites devoted to the cause – but what exactly is ‘the cause’? Well, over recent years anxiety has grown concerning the control of the supply of seed by the major seed companies, most especially seed of foodstuffs. Commercially available seeds are F1 hybrids, meaning that once a plant has flowered and set seed the seeds cannot be collected, stored and sown, as they are not viable (being either sterile or degenerate), unlike traditional open-pollinated varieties; thus new seeds have to be purchased each growing season. While this may be an expensive irritation for gardeners in the west, it is a real privation for subsistence farmers in developing regions of the world.
From ‘Seedy Saturday’ by Lorraine HarrisonI have a big box of open, partly-emptied seed packets, and I suspect I’m not alone in this. It seems like a terrible waste to throw unused seeds away – seeds aren’t cheap, for one thing, and who wants to be wasteful these straitened days? Besides, I’ve frequently planted seeds left over from the year before that germinated perfectly well once they were in the ground. But the seed packets pile up, a few dated as much as three years back. Something will have to be done.
It would be nice to know for certain whether old seed is still good, without having to plant it to find out. Given the extreme heaviness of the soil in my garden and its reluctance to dry out to tillable condition, I can’t afford to spend a few weeks of growing time experimenting with viability (there have been times when I was still waiting impatiently for the earth to crumble as late as the middle of May). As a result, I’ll probably go out and buy yet another batch of fresh seeds –beans, lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini – just to be on the safe side. And end up with still more leftovers that may or may not be any good.
Theoretically, it should be possible to establish with reasonable certainty the likelihood of seed survival. While some touchy species bite the dust (perhaps not the best metaphor) almost as soon as they ripen, others are prepared to hang on for years, decades, even centuries. The other day I ran into a table listing in some detail the life expectancy of a large variety of vegetable and flower seeds ranging from salsify to physostegia, which I would dearly like to trust. Most vegetable seeds, it says, are supposed to be good for three to six years, with only parsnips and okra fading inside one to three. (Cantaloupe seeds, exceptionally, may still sprout after ten years, which recalls the tradition that melon seeds need to age; John Claudius Loudon’s great Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1835) suggested carrying them around in your pocket ‘near the body’ for a couple of months before planting. This was supposed to harden and mature them, though it’s difficult to believe that any living object would be greatly improved by jostling small change and one’s house keys over an extended period of time.) Flower seeds tend to be a good deal shorter-lived; apart from salpiglossis and nasturtiums (would you believe seven years?), they average two to four. Salvia, delphiniums, gerbera and a few others are good for only a year.
From ‘Long Live the Seeds’ by Charles ElliottOn 7 March this year, the Weekend Australian, Rupert Murdoch’s national newspaper, reported that 2009 began with droughts and flooding rains – the writer not even bothering with quotation marks! The newspaper noted that while northern Australia flooded, southern Australia was enduring a heatwave, near-record low rainfall and, in Victoria, unprecedented bushfires. In the first six weeks of the year, twenty-five sites across northern Queensland received more than two metres of rain with a top reading of 2873mm at Bulgun Creek, a small town south of Cairns. Over the same period, most of Victoria had less than 24mm, with Melbourne receiving less than 5mm.
By the end of the first week in January one-third of Queensland was flooded. Record rainfalls broke recordings from 1974; the statewide rainfall for Queensland that month was 229.3mm, almost twice the long-term average of 127.7mm.
At the other end of the country, in South Australia, western and central Victoria and south-western New South Wales, other records were under threat. Many significant towns and cities received no rain; Melbourne got just 0.8mm of rain, its second lowest on record, in January. The city endured a thirty-five-day spell with no rain.
The first weeks of February brought no improvement. But it was the heatwaves of late January and early February that really stressed us southerners and set new records. The heatwave climaxed on what has now become known as Black Saturday, 7 February, when much of the state experienced its hottest day on record. In Melbourne, the temperature reached a record 46.4 degrees Celsius. The previous record was 45.6 on 13 January 1939, a day known as Black Friday.
A decade of drought, coupled with severe water restrictions in capital cities and country towns, a heatwave like no other has tested the determination and dedication of every gardener. We are on severe water rationing with an allowance of four hours of hand-watering per week; in my case, Wednesday and Sunday, from 6 till 8 a.m.
We had been lulled into thinking we might be headed for a mild summer; at Christmas my garden looked green and positively lush after one good fall of rain in early December. But in January Melbourne experienced days in the forties, a day of 45 degrees on 30 January and followed a week later by the 46.4 Celsius.
So what happens to your garden when the average temperature in January is supposed to be 28 degrees and it climbs to 46.4 with 4 per cent humidity?...
From ‘Gardening in the Dragon’s Breath: Australia and its Recent Forest Fires’ by Christine ReidI was plodding along, as gardeners do, when news about Russia came to me from Holland via Lithuania: I was told that in Siberia there were whole square miles of Erythronium sibiricum. This made me ring a friend who was able to give me a Moscow phone number to which I confided my desire to go Siberia, with the result that contact was established between me and Novosibirsk Botanic Garden. My first and most useful contact there was Helen, whose English was excellent and whose knowledge of the way things worked invaluable.
After three weeks I received an official invitation to accompany the Novosibirsk Botanic Garden team on a field trip to the East Altai Mountains. The date for starting was 19 May 2000, by which time it was reckoned that snow at lower levels should have melted. I welcomed the opportunity to learn at first hand about an erythronium of which I had no practical knowledge.
I had only to get to Moscow and change from the international to the national airport and find the place to queue. I believe the plane to Novosibirsk went through six time zones in ten hours, but maybe I misunderstood the Russian announcements. The only advice I had been given was to eat the fish, not the chicken. I did, and it was excellent.
It was first light when we landed at Novosibirsk, with pink clouds in the sky and sweet fresh air. Helen and her husband were there to meet me and we drove off through the flat landscape. The memory that remains with me is of the large numbers of abandoned projects and unfinished buildings along the roadside, where work appeared to have abruptly stopped. When I asked about this I was told ‘they ran out of money’. I realised then that they had been through a period of high inflation, which probably explained why there had been such a delay over telling me what I should pay for coming on this trip. In the end it was £400, which I took in traveller’s cheques and gave to Helen.
From ‘Hunting the Dog’s Tooth: Erythroniums in the Garden and in the Wild’ by Joan LoraineMadrid is favoured with more green spaces than any other European city. There are fifty-seven named parks and hundreds of floriferous garden squares and tree-lined avenues. Some of the parks, like Buen Retiro and Campo de Moro, are well known but it is worth also seeking out the exquisite Parque Almeda de Osuna, otherwise known as El Capricho (or The Folly), in the north-east of the city, near Barajas.
It was created in the eighteenth century by Maria Josefa de Pimentel, the Duchess of Osuna, an intelligent and influential woman from a family so wealthy that it was said you could walk all over Spain without stepping off its land. The Duchess acquired one thousand hectares of land piecemeal and constructed a garden which was effectively an extension of her salon. She was a patron of Goya, who painted her, and a friend of poets and theatre people, some of whom had a hand in the making of this, the most romantic of gardens.
Now the city has encroached and only some forty-three acres (17.5 hectares) of garden remain. It was acquired by the city in 1934 and has undergone a very sympathetic and thoroughly documented restoration begun in 1986 which continues to this day.
If you entered by the front gate of the Palacio in the Duchess's day you were probably a spy or a political enemy – all friends entered by the back, as visitors still do today. The first thing you see is a miniature bull ring, used, as was the rest of the garden, for the entertainment of guests. From here an avenue of tall clipped cypresses brings you to a classical exedra surrounded by sphinxes and a semi-circle of classical busts – which are genuine antiquities and were transported here on seventy donkeys from the family's property in Valencia. As you proceed towards the palace, if you look down to your right you can see the lower garden, which was at one time orchards and today still contains shady walks and a large maze of clipped laurel.
From ‘The Duchess’s Folly: El Capricho, Madrid’ by Patricia Cleveland-Peck‘John Brookes: Fifty Years of Garden and Landscape Design in London’ was the title of a lecture given at the Garden Museum in London earlier this year by garden and landscape historian Barbara Simms for which I had signed up because I was hoping to learn something of the life of the man behind the work and because, in truth, I had failed to notice the obvious limitations that title would impose on her. Simms is also an academic and she stuck so unwaveringly to her brief that most of the past thirty years of her subject’s multi-faceted career, never mind its hinterland, had to be summed up in a tantalising sentence or two. For example, my notes – and they are not far off verbatim – read: ‘After an eighteen-month stay in Iran, returns to London in late 1979 without clients or a teaching post’, followed by ‘1980: sets up design school and practice at Denmans, West Sussex’ and, finally, ‘twenty-first century: busy creating gardens around the world, but hardly any in London.’
So I wrote to John Brookes, MBE to ask if he would fill in the gaps in his story for me himself. I had in any case wanted to meet the celebrated designer ever since hearing him some years ago deliver the opening address at an all-day seminar on the subject of garden design, and in the process lead his audience on such a scintillating dash through its various stages of evolution in Britain in the last century that his allotted hour had felt like half, and the next speaker’s like two by comparison. ‘I have’, he emailed in reply, ‘done quite long teaching stints in Australia, South Africa, Chile, US and I now have a school in Buenos Aires – La Pampa Infinita it is called! It’s all to do with trying to establish a cultural identity. I love the research.’ That last observation would explain why a man now in his mid seventies who could afford – according to a well-informed friend - to spend his life on cruise ships, prefers to spend it flying around the world on work projects.
From ‘Diana Ross meets John Brookes at his Home in Sussex’After pausing on the steps of the Flora Pavilion to admire the panorama of the Lower Pond, Dr Kosenko settled us into a capacious boat whose rower manoeuvred expertly among a cheerful throng of gondolas and pedal-boats, past one of the most delightfully bizarre nineteenth-century additions that the Russians made to Sofiyivka. With his deft manipulation of water pressure, Metzel had created a fountain in the centre of the Lower Pond with a plume of water shooting up from a rough-hewn boulder. To this the Russians have added an astonishing bronze sculpture of a massive serpent coiled upon the rock, head thrown back and water shooting up from its open jaws. It is a stunning sight, an apparition worthy of the Nibelungenlied.
The second Stakenschneider Pavilion is also approached by water, across the Upper Pond to the Potockis’ Island of Anti-Circe, given the more conventional name Island of Love by the Russians. Nicholas ordered that an 1843 Gothic building erected under the Military Settlements be removed, and now on the site where Prince Dolgoruky admired the Rousseau monument and Sophie considered entombing either Felix or Trembecki, the Rose Pavilion emerges among the willows, its pure form reflected in the Upper Pond's clear waters as we drifted across on that lovely wooden barge pavilion. Designed on a more intimate scale than the Flora Pavilion, this two-storey octagonal temple presents a graceful portico supported by Ionic columns. Windows in the second-storey lantern light the interior rose stucco walls covered with beautiful white plaster bas-reliefs of acanthus leaves and doves from tiled floor to airy ceiling.
In 1848, a year after Nicholas I’s last visit, officials of the Military Settlements invited Ludwig Metzel to see ‘the final arrangement of the garden’. En route from his home in Warsaw, the aged engineer who had first chose the picturesque site while riding with his uncle Felix more than fifty years before, became fatally ill on the road to Uman, and returned home without seeing his finest creation again. His tomb in Warsaw bears this simple inscription: ‘The creator of Sofiyivka, glorified by Trembecki, lies here.’
From the fourth and concluding part of ‘Eros toi Sofia. Sofiyivka: A Garden of Allusion in Ukraine’ by Sukie AmoryThe solstice has come and gone. The sundial’s shadow is a little black pool in the moss under the gnomon. It is hot and green – sweltering hot, and so green that the mind wanders nostalgically back to Hergest and a red Rhododendron ‘Elizabeth’ in front of a cool white-barked Betula jacqmontii ‘Jermyns’, with behind it the clear pink of a big Magnolia campbelli . . .
Someone is sneezing on the far side of the hedge. They are high, cross sneezes, so the sneezer is the Duchess. Her blood is deepest azure, splendidly reactive, so she is allergic to just about everything. The situation is aggravated by the fact that she has declared a state of economic siege, dismissed all garden help, and taken on her own bony shoulders the Hope’s grimmer chores. The dawn chorus segues seamlessly into the howl of her chainsaw. After a light breakfast of anchovies and gin, she careers wildly to and fro on the lawnmower, cursing all trees. This process naturally stirs her allergies to fever pitch, forcing her to spend the afternoon on a daybed in the Turkish kiosk, smashed comatose on Piriton and smoking Capstan Full Strength against the wasps. At dusk she zigzags forth to reminisce.
The other night she gazed upon our flaming embothrium, flared her nostrils to a whiff of wood smoke, and started talking about Lochinch Castle. A friend of hers visited this pile in the time of the last Lord Stair but two, famous as a man who would shoot his own grandmother if he saw her rising from a root field. Returning to the castle one afternoon, the friend became aware of a delicious, incense-like smell. He asked what it was. ‘Embothrium,’ said Stair, waving at the castle’s forest of chimneys. ‘Never burn anything else.’ This seemed to impress even the Duchess. Your embothrium is generally considered a shrubby object of no great height or bulk, and the fireplaces of Lochinch were apparently on a scale that required the service of a full-time stoker. The Gulf Stream coast of Scotland is evidently pretty useful embothrium country. So why were we hanging around in the Welsh Marches?
During the week that followed, we painted the boat. Then we hauled up some sails and went to sea, heading west into a more or less sneeze-free zone.
From ‘A Voyage to the West’ by Sam LlewellynBetty Kershaw: A Tribute
Book Reviews
Scotland for Gardeners: The Guide to Scottish Gardens, Nurseries and Garden Centres by Kenneth Cox
Citrus: A History by Pierre Laszlo
The Wall by John Cannell
Woody Cut Stems for Growers and Florists by Lane Greer and John Dole
Ornamental Grasses: Wolfgang Oehme and the New American Garden by Stefan Leppert
A Garden in the Hills by Alan Tait
Inspiring Sussex Gardeners by Lorraine Harrison
Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland by Rae Spencer-Jones and Sarah Cuttle
Sufficient: A Modern Guide to Sustainable Living by Tom PetherickHORTUS 91 (Autumn 2009) will be published on 10 September -
13 Jun ' 08:01
From the new (No 90 - Summer 2009) issue: 
HORTUS 90 (Summer, 2009) published on 11th June 2009 -
06 Apr ' 04:44
From the new (No 89 - Spring 2009) issue: It’s good to have some travel plans again. In addition to taking groups to see gardens in Norfolk (in June), Ireland (July), The Netherlands and Sussex (September) I am off to the Nantucket Garden Festival (23 to 25 July), to help raise funds for the Nantucket Lighthouse School, which provides education that ‘engages the whole child – head, heart, and hand’. Co-speakers at the event include Englishwoman Cary Goode and Holly Shimizu, executive director of the US Botanic Garden in Washington D.C. Of course I’ll also be on the lookout for good gardens on the mainland anywhere between Boston and New York as I trundle southwards on a slow train during the week following the event.
Following a return to a ‘traditional’ (that is, a cold and at times snowy) winter I’m delighted to see how well the garden has survived. Some snowdrops were up to six weeks late in making their appearance, although once into early March nature’s ‘clock’ seemed to have reset itself and, for example, the many Anemone blanda that festoon our orchard mid-month were barely inconvenienced. January and February’s several falls of snow prevented any serious work in the garden and it was pleasant on several afternoons to retreat to a log fire and a pile of books once any fresh accumulations of the white stuff had been shaken from the boughs of vulnerable trees and shrubs. Hellebores that occasionally flower as early as Christmas were delightfully delayed, with ‘oriental’ hybrids looking set to maintain a good show well into April. I see from my diary, however, that our young, early-flowering Prunus ‘Okame’ (a Collingwood Ingram hybrid dating from 1947) broke bud no more than two days later than its usual average.
While I have not taken a head-count, I’m pretty sure that each and every one of the thousand Scilla siberica bulbs I planted last autumn in Cricket Wood came through unscathed, speckling the turf with uplifting shots of gentian blue by Mothering Sunday.
From the Editor’s introduction to HORTUS 8929 September 2008: Just home from a weekend in Wigtownshire. That’s the first time I’ve ever written that, and I feel the word ‘wet’ should come into it somewhere. But no, Stranraer was sunny, and so was Ayrshire when we visited Culzean en route from Prestwick.Culzean produced the first surprise: its name. How come I had never heard of the prime treasure of the National Trust for Scotland? Because you pronounce it Cullane. Imagine Powis Castle perched on a cliff top facing, across an untroubled sea, the Isle of Arran and the Gibraltar-like shape of Ailsa Craig, with Robert Adam rooms and a close-to-subtropical garden. The subtropical theme only intensified as we drove south, eventually, to Logan, in the final south-western spear of Scotland, where the Edinburgh Botanic Garden has its most exotic outpost, three-hundred miles north of the Scilly Isles (but you’d never notice). So it was a weekend of envious awe, mighty specimens of our conservatory treasures thriving among other plants I didn’t recognise at all. Every twenty years or so, they told us, it really freezes and they lose precious specimens, but frosts strike the Canary Islands occasionally without depleting their flora. An extremely exotic garden is like a museum; you marvel and learn, but it is hard to engage. The garden that captured my heart was a great domain in just that state of marginal decay that induces romantic sympathy. Castle Kennedy occupies a ridge between two lochs near Stranraer, with an unexpected Hanoverian signature: massive earthworks carved and scythed smooth in clearings in the woods, reputed by legend to represent the battle plans of Marlborough’s war. Apparently the second earl of Stair found his regiment unemployed in barracks and turned them out for a bit of digging. From ‘Tradescant’s Diary’
Not nearly as popular with poets and writers as primroses and violets, the celandine was nevertheless Wordsworth's favourite flower, his ‘prophet of delight and mirth’, despite his more familiar association with wild daffodils. Famously the flower carved on his gravestone is not lesser celandine at all but the unrelated greater celandine (Chelidonium majus), a member of the poppy family. And Richard Jefferies in his notebooks regularly recorded the early leafy growth and flowering of the plant he correctly called lesser celandine. Perhaps the plant's greatest champion was D. H. Lawrence, a writer who intuitively appreciated the life-enhancing qualities of celandines. In his essay ‘Flowery Tuscany’ (1927), a paean to the spring and early summer flowers of the Mediterranean hills where he travelled and made his home towards the end of his life, he talks of how ‘Tuscany is spangled with celandine. But for all that the daisy and the celandine are English flowers . . .’ Perhaps he was looking back to his youth, growing up in the colliery community of Eastwood near Nottingham, a district then still rural enough for his father to walk to and from the pit through green fields. Celandines repeatedly embellish Lawrence's short stories and novels. In the first chapter of Women in Love (1920) they ‘showed out from the hedge-bottoms’, helping set the scene for a chilly early spring wedding. In one passage in his first novel, The White Peacock (1911), a book suffused with vignettes of wild plants and flowers, he doesn't even mention them by name, merely that ‘under the hazels . . . new little suns dawned, and blazed with real light’. In Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) their ‘yellow glitter’ lit up the woodland path on a cold, windy but sunny day to the hut and cottage of the gamekeeper Mellors. In Sons and Lovers (1913) Paul Morel, so much the persona of the sensitive, tortured young Lawrence, talks of them when he visits Miriam Leivers and her family at Willey Farm, as he convalesces after a long illness. Asked about his journey there on the milkman's cart he says: ‘I saw a sloe bush in flower and a lot of celandines. I'm glad it's spring.’ Describing an Easter Monday excursion a year later by Paul, Miriam and their friends, Lawrence echoes the seasonal joy of the young people: ‘Celandines and violets were out. Everybody was tip-top full of happiness.’ Above all, the flower symbolises a shared fondness for nature that kindles the ill-starred love between Paul and Miriam: ‘. . . he noticed the celandines, scalloped splashes of gold, on the side of the ditch. “I like them”, he said, “when their petals go flat with the sunshine. They seem to be pressing themselves at the sun.” And then the celandines ever after drew her with a little spell.’ Lawrence, remembered mostly for his exploration of human relationships, kept as keen an eye on the natural world as Jefferies and the other English nature writers. Lawrence clearly loved celandines . . . From ‘Little Suns at Winter’s End’ by John Akeroyd
Few flowers look quite as fake as a gold-laced polyanthus. Clustered atop a sturdy stalk, its blossoms (or ‘pips’) facing outward like so many little round plates, each of them comprising a bright gold centre (‘eye’) surrounded by a dozen or so deep red petals outlined by narrow gold ‘wires’, the GLP gives the distinct impression of having been invented by a four-year-old, or possibly a seriously unskilled Sunday painter. It has charm, but of a startling, slightly unreal kind, as if it had turned up growing comfortably in a bed full of H. G. Wells's imaginary Martian plants. The unreality is in fact real enough. The gold-laced polyanthus is a triumph of the plant breeder's art, a wholly artificial creation. Although its parentage has been traced to a cross between a red-flowered primrose brought from Turkey in the seventeenth century (Primula vulgaris rubra) and a hybrid oxlip (itself a cross between an English primrose (P. vulgaris) and a cowslip (P. veris), one thing fairly obvious in this fog of genes is that the marriage probably didn't happen accidentally. The polyanthus – and above all the gold-laced polyanthus that ultimately emerged after generations of pollen-dusted tinkering – was almost certainly the result of the efforts of gardeners. Moreover, it came into existence right here. Peter Coats, in his Flowers in History (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), goes so far as to single out the polyanthus as ‘the only variety of flower which can be claimed as a purely British creation’. I don't suppose I'd have ever paid much attention to the GLP, as it is fondly known, if I had not run across a book published nearly forty years ago by Roy Genders bearing the (to me) irresistible title of Collecting Antique Plants. Collecting flowers! What a wonderful idea – far more plausible than collecting rare books or Chinese paintings (both of which I have tried, not very successfully). All you need to do, according to Genders, is to search through old gardens looking for surviving specimens of plants that were thought to be extinct. ‘In the same way’, he writes, ‘that the cottage home has maintained a constant supply of antique furniture, of china and glass and early English watercolours, so too, in the cottage garden are to be found many of the old fashioned flowers which also have antique value.’ Well, times have, as they say, changed . . . From ‘The GLP’ (the gold lace polyanthus) by Charles Elliott
Most of us have been tempted at some time to bring home a cutting or seed from abroad, sauntering nonchalantly through the ‘Nothing to Declare’ gate while thinking to ourselves ‘would they really want to rummage through my dirty underwear to find the cuttings of that fabulous trumpet-shaped flower with the intoxicating scent that grew in the hotel courtyard?’ Well, in certain circumstances and in certain countries they certainly would if they suspected you of bringing in any type of plant material, and rightly so. Any precaution against plant pests or diseases entering a continent or country, particularly one otherwise well isolated by oceans and seas, is worth enforcing and enforcing stringently. For better or worse it is now possible to bring into and take out of the UK almost any type of plant so long as it is not endangered or that you do so only within the European Union. So you can flaunt your special Chaumont purchases along the back window of your MPV and sail back over the Channel or scuttle under onto the shuttle without a care in the world. What strikes me as a far greater risk comes from the vast lorry loads of plants that travel to the UK from Italy, Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands every day. We know they are regularly inspected but I am not convinced that one or two unwanted bugs have not hidden themselves among the cargo of a forty-ton lorry, or that the odd soil-borne fungal disease has not escaped the eye of the inspectors at some of mainland Europe’s huge nurseries. Perhaps we already have all the bugs and diseases that the rest of Europe has and we don’t need to worry, but that has the ring of some famous last words . . . From ‘Euphorbia Euphoria’ by Paul Williams
It is one thing to give your name to a plant – thus Forsythia (Wm. Forsyth, superintendent of the Royal Gardens at Kensington in the late eighteenth century and then author and purveyor of a famously quack remedy for weeping saw-wounds), Davidia (Père David, missionary and botanist), Buddleja (the Revd Adam Buddle, vicar of North Fambridge in Essex, and friend, as it happened, of Père David, who discovered the original buddleja). These are the names of species of course, but some varietal names have achieved canonic status too: mention Mrs Sinkins and you hardly need the specific Dianthus, ditto Bowles' Mauve (Erysimum), Mrs Hegarty (Schizostylus) – and, turning the coin of eponyms over, it is not, even now, unusual or eccentric to name your daughter after a sweet-smelling, bonny-looking daisy or rose, rosemary or lily (or susan, if you prefer your lily in Hebrew). But calling your offspring after trees is a bit more exotic (unless perhaps you are a footballer and not quite sure how to spell beach but wishing to memorialise a romantic liaison at (say) Copacabana, in which case perhaps: ‘Come 'ere Beech, and eat up your Frosties’). Even so, Willow is still possible. Linden used to be quite common, and I once knew a Mrs Smith – Hilda for most of her life, but once she became a grandmother, she was always known as Apple. To name your daughter Rhoda probably suggests an intention to imbue her with a bit of Welsh flavour, and it would only be a pedant who pointed out that, in principle at least, you would actually be harking back not so much to Cymru and Wales as to roses again (though this time in Greek). However you look at it, it's probably best not to put too much store by what's in a name. But it's still fun. Why not, for example, call her Rhododendron? After all, there's Laura from Laurel; there's Daphne; there's Veronica, so why not RoseTree? That would be its literal translation and it's not such a bad moniker perhaps. One of Ireland's most single-minded rhodo collectors was a man by the name of Fielding LeckeyWatson. His collection ran into thousands but, even among so many, he had a favourite, 'Corona'. It's a medium-sized hybrid with gorgeous coral-pink flowers, pitched somewhere between the boudoir and the ballroom, whose parents have been lost (or mislaid, perhaps, in Left Luggage at Waterloo Station? It is of that prurient, Edwardian vintage) but which is still well worth taking the social risk to plant. It flowers in May Fielding called his daughter after this rhododendron, and she – under her married name, Corona North, (and helped or hindered by her name as the case may have been) became a legend in her own lifetime. She had interests in all sorts of local affairs in and around Carlow but her greatest passion was for the garden she inherited from her father at Altamont, a few miles away which, ‘to save it from the digger and the chain-saw’, was given to the nation when she died in 1999 . . . From: ‘In an Irish Garden: Altamont’ by Peter Dale
For my April flight to Los Angeles in 1998 I prepared a chart with information from Brian Mathew’s writings. It gave me the vital statistics of every erythronium species that grows in north-west America. The purpose of the chart was to help me memorise the pertinent details, such as whether the leaves were patterned or plain, and the colour of the pollen. At Los Angeles I had to wait for the flight to Medford, where my hostess was building up a wild plant nursery. She had a great reputation for the seed she supplied and knew where to find erythroniums. With the help of a Land Rover, and a well-stocked picnic basket, we set out to discover all we could. We began by going to an old quarry – Slate Creek – where two species (Erythronium hendersonii and E. citrinum) have hybridised. We turned off Highway 199 onto a narrow track and passed one of those delightful half-hidden wayside places that give a brief glimpse of treasure and suggest there might well be more. I could not refrain from shouting out in recognition of Polystichum maritum. It was such a magnificent sword fern that I asked if we could stop. We did. Then, next to the fern we found Trillium albidum in flower and, growing on a cliff at the back, Erythronium citrinum with petals fully reflexed and light and dark patterned leaves well displayed. I looked around for a way of recognising the site again. The lonely farmhouse in the cornfields opposite was number 1620 – I do not understand the American system of numbering, but no doubt they do. Slate Creek itself was disappointing. On our way in we passed quite a few (apparently) true Erythronium citrinum, but there was no group, however small of (apparently) true E. hendersonii. Phyllis knew the Creek well and had not seen any. She taught me that hybridisation can be detected by yellow at the centres and that true E. hendersonii had no yellow at all. This yellow did not replace the dark purple guide lines, but lay around it, and varied in shape and intensity. I found no magic in the hybrids. If I think back and visualise in my mind the wonderful true E. hendersonii, those bowls of purple growing in the light shade of Pinus amabilis, to see which we had to slip into California. They grew as individual flowers with no clumping up and one flower to a stem. There was a sad lack of youngsters. Unfortunately, this is a well-known site and an easy place for seed collection. I love Erythronium citrinum. They always look happily at home and glad to be there. They grow in family groups, with about six well-spaced adults and a crèche of one-leafed juveniles of various sizes. My favourite site is along Eight Dollar Mountain Road, where there are springs in the middle of the slope that drops to the highway. These springs make a boggy area where giant sarracenia grow. Surplus water runs downhill, till it comes to one of several groups of red-stemmed pines. The water runs through these pines until something – maybe a rise in the ground, maybe a small fallen branch – brings it to a halt. Then that place becomes saturated. If the flow of water is maintained, and carries seed with it, a group develops. This is written on the ground and clear to read . . . From ‘Hunting the Dog’s Tooth, Part Two’ by Joan Loraine
So the ‘design team’ that gathered in Uman in 1796 brought ideas to the drawing board – Sophie the mythological allusions of Arkadia still fresh in her mind, Felix his experience of garden-making at La Roche, and Ludwig Metzel his hydro-engineering skills enriched by trips to Prussia, Silesia, and Saxony to study the latest machinery for working the granite they planned to harness to their vision; perhaps while in Saxony he had taken a look at the grottoes and subterranean passages in Wörlitz’s faux Vesuvius. And a fourth ‘team member’ cannot be overlooked – the eight hundred serfs who worked for decades to realize that vision. As Priscilla Roosevelt, Peter Hayden, and Ivan Rodichkin and Olga Rodichkina note in their studies of Russian and Ukrainian gardens, none of these great landscapes could have been made without the muscle and considerable talents of these mostly unknown men. The surnames of serfs who worked on Sofiyivka survive in the Central Record Office in Kyiv, conjuring up such men as Ivan and Ilya Vdovichenko and Korniy Kuzmenko who dug the waterways, hauled the stone, and carved the grottoes. As a recent guide to the park exclaims, ‘Let there be eternal glory and honour to them!’ From ‘Eros toi Sofia’ (Sofiyivka: A Garden of Allusion in Ukraine, Part Three) by Sukie Amory
Winter went on a bit too long. Well after it should have ended there we still were, slumped on the sofa, gazing slack-jawed at twenty-six condemned cock pheasants eating a hearty breakfast in the herbaceous border. The ground appeared to be made of tarmac dusted with sea salt. The Gatling seemed jammed, the Colonel dead. Then one morning I woke laughing hysterically from a dream in which I had just made tea for the bank manager by infusing the compost heap in a bucket, and felt a sort of juddering in the cosmos, as if a mighty steam train was thundering towards us over a bumpy track. And there suddenly was the Spring Express, panting and roaring and spewing energy in all directions. When this particular train pulls into the station there is no time for hanging around, because it is not going to wait, and the station-master is drunk and the porters are asleep, so there is no help to be had. All you can do is hurl your bags into the goods van and jump after them, and stagger like James Bond over the wagon roofs to the footplate to see if you can drive this thing before it drives you. First there was a hasty but satisfying phase of bonfiring up the debris of hedge-laying and the brashings of the walnut grove before some thick but delightful bird could decide that this pile of dead stuff was a handy nesting site. Then there were the ponds to weed. Actually there are three ponds. The rectangular tank positioned to reflect light into the kitchen is a tidy, polite object, containing two fish and a pink water-lily. It can safely be ignored. So, for a different reason, can the tangled morass of bullrush and Norfolk reed we planted to attract warblers. The warblers have ignored it in a studied manner, and its vegetation is now totally beyond control. Its only use is as an object of idle speculation. The leaves of the Norfolk reed, for instance, are of a supremely attractive stripiness, and would make a pleasing if ephemeral material for a gent’s suiting. They are also handy for sucking up foul water and wafting heavy metals into the breeze, assuming they can find any heavy metals lying around in their bucolic corner. From ‘The Spring Express’ by Sam Llewellyn
The actual desert the Oxford-educated Stephen Venables feels compelled to wander in for months on end is as hostile an environment as any on the planet: Stephen Venables is a professional mountaineer, best known for having been the first Englishman to climb Everest without oxygen. He was the only man at that date to have spent a night up there in the mountain’s Death Zone alone and without shelter, and live to tell the tale – although he nearly didn't: having managed to get himself back down to where his loyal team-mate was waiting for him, he came to an exhausted halt and was ready to give up, until his friend found the trigger: 'Don't wait long, Stephen,' he goaded. 'If you don't get down alive you won't be able to enjoy being famous.' He made it down, and by some fabulous chance news of his triumph was announced in London on 2 June 1988 – thirty-five years to the day since the world learned that two human beings had stood on top of the world for the first time. I had been alerted by the retired Deputy Curator of Wakehurst Place, Tony Schilling, (see HORTUS 84), himself a keen amateur climber, to the fact that his hero is also a fine writer. Venables’ heart-stopping accounts of his climbing feats include disarmingly self-deprecating insights into his own complex, driven character, interlaced with philosophical musings on human nature in general. They also come well-seasoned with botanical chat about the local flora he notices on the long treks through some of the remotest valleys on earth that musdt be traversed to reach the base of whichever unclimbed peak is on the agenda for that particular expedition.
An interest in botany is unusual in a mountaineer, and Venables gleefully records the merciless teasing his team-mates subject him to: 'Oh, oh, so sorry Stephen, I stepped on a flower!' Or, on the occasion when he spotted a potentilla – actually Potentilla atrosanguinea – simply baffled: 'what's the point of a strawberry plant that doesn't produce strawberries?' As for his other interests, which include opera, architecture and English literature: all are dismissed as 'cultural bull-shit'.
I also heard on the horticultural grapevine that this cultivated creature haunts specialist plant nurseries when he is in England. And so he does – these days. But I also knew from reading his autobiography that for many years after leaving Oxford with a second-class degree in English in the mid 1970s, Stephen Venables was of no fixed abode. He writes vividly about this rootless period of his life, when he and a motley band of fellow addicts spent most of their lives, and every last farthing, on the hitch-hiking road to the next impossible challenge. Nonetheless, the urge to settle was always there, and he records the wistful pang he felt on one occasion when he watched a group of Swiss old-age pensioners setting out on a peaceful amble through the wild-flower meadows on the lower slopes of the alp that his own remorseless ambition was insisting he climb that day – alone, because the rest of his gang had long since packed up and left.
From Diana Ross’s interview with mountaineer and gardener Stephen VenablesIt all started with Bette Davis. One night, watching her steam through Now, Voyager as Charlotte Vale, the number of botanical allusions struck me. Charlotte is an aging, troubled spinster, the last offspring of a Boston matriarch played with imperious aplomb by Dame Gladys Cooper. A psychiatrist (Claude Rains) called in to consult suggests to Mrs Vale that, ‘A child has rights, a person has rights, to discover her own mistakes, to make her own way, to grow and blossom in her own particular soil.’ The mother retorts, ‘Are we getting into botany, doctor? Are we flowers?’ The script is awash in floral references: Charlotte's shipboard flame (Paul Henreid) nicknames her ‘Camille’, and the melodrama unfolds with camellias delivered regularly and anonymously to the Vale mansion.
Voyager set me to thinking about the number of movies that are horticulturally intensive. What would a gardener’s ultimate film festival consist of? My own nominations – and readers will have countless more – might start off with gardeners as characters in movies. In Being There, simple-minded Chance (Peter Sellers) is a gardener who, through chance and misunderstanding, is dubbed Chauncey Gardener, becoming a man of consequence. Brendan Fraser plays the stereotypical role of estate gardener as sexual prey in Gods and Monsters. Andi MacDowell's gardening character in Green Card marries illegal immigrant Gérard Depardieu in order to qualify as a married caretaker of a penthouse flat with greenhouse and terrace.
Top of the list for films featuring gardeners are Saving Grace and Greenfingers. Saving Grace begins with an ending. Grace Trevethyn's husband has died. As one of the ladies of a Cornish village, we imagine her living out her days in comfort, tending the orchids in her greenhouse. Instead Grace (Brenda Blethyn) discovers that the money is gone, her husband having squandered the savings and mortgaged the property to the hilt at Southern Rock Bank. Her Scottish gardener-handyman, played by Craig Ferguson (who also co-wrote the screenplay), asks for her help in reviving some ailing plants. They turn out to be Matthew's nascent crop of marijuana. ‘I'm a gardener and these are sick plants’, Grace says determinedly. Grace and Matthew cook up a scheme to get Grace out of hock by growing a bumper crop of weed.
Illegal activities also figure in Greenfingers . . .
From ‘Hollywood and Vine: A Gardener’s Guide to Film’ by Marta McDowellReviews of :
THE MORVILLE HOURS by Katherine Swift,
EUGENIO’S NEW NEIGHBOURS IN SPANISH GALICIA by Margaret Gimson,
OUTSIDERS by Ronald Blythe,
FIGS, DATES, LAUREL, AND MYRRH by John Musselman,
THE GARDENS AT KEW by Allen Paterson
NATURE OVER AGAIN: THE GARDEN ART OF IAN HAMILTON FINLAY.Index to HORTUS Volume Twenty-two, Numbers 85 to 88 (2008)
HORTUS 90 (Summer, 2009) will be published on 30th June 2009
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