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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
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