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| Extracts From The Current Issue |
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from
the editor’s introduction to HORTUS 156
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Our rear garden, generous in its proportions for a town location, is graced by damson, plum, apple, mulberry and medlar trees. There’s a princely white-stemmed Himalayan birch of the jacquemontii clan. Cyclamen and autumn crocuses soon appeared at its foot. Flower borders are richly endowed with peonies which, in June, when we first saw the property, caused much excitement. They’re unnamed, but my photographs on Instagram excited several RHS bods to whom I later sent seeds. Some forty yards north of the house stand our gates to the river which hereabouts defines the border between us on the Welsh side, and England on the other. It runs with trout and grayling.
Also with paragraphs about
Bulbs, Tony Ridler (1950–2025)
and the Shamrock Association’s Online Hydrangea Index
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from
‘Tradescant’s Diary’
by
Hugh Johnson
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October 22 2025: Late summer sees the Snowdonia Forest at its lushest. ‘Tulgey’ is Lewis Carroll’s word for it, though it’s the neighbours’ sheep, not the Jabberwock, that emerge from the leafy depths of the wood. You can tell which neighbour by the colour of the splotches of blue or red on their wool. We are watching the gradual filling of the new pond. We only discovered a little stream coursing down a fold in the hillside when we felled the tall spruce, its timber destined to be used as rafters and purlins. The stream crosses the forest road at the bottom in a culvert; block that and its water naturally fills a depression, maybe thirty yards long and wide, around what instantly became a birch-crowned island.
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from
‘Our Garden Birds: No. 24: The MistleThrush’
by
Adam Ford
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The mistle thrush, sometimes called the storm cock, is similar but slightly larger than its garden cousin, the song thrush. It is a powerful songster, regaling park or garden, woodland or orchard, from the top of a tree throughout winter, when other members of the Turdus family tend to be silent.
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from
‘In an English Winter Garden’
by Malcolm Allison
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. . . My overwhelming interest has always been in flowers, and here I discuss some that bring me joy in the months from November to February. I realise that November is not necessarily considered part of winter, but the days are short and plants are largely retreating into dormancy, so those that flower at this time are rare and precious. I have a great love for roses, and while one would largely think of appreciating them for their hips at that time of year, there are some varieties that consistently have a few flowers as winter sets in. The single red China ‘Bengal Crimson’ is one, but it is the tea rose ‘General Schablikine’ that I like best, with its slightly reddish pink outer petals paling to coppery, creamy pink in the centre. The flowers are exquisite, if sadly scentless. Once the frosts have destroyed its last flowers, the following spring it is always the first rose to bloom in my garden; in recent years this has been at the end of April.
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from
‘Reiteration and Transcendence:
Ornamental Grasses for the Winter Garden’
by Rod Madocks
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Here we have two differential perspectives on grasses. One, a practical formal appreciation from a great English plantsman and the other, a dreamy transcendental view from an American mystic poet. Both grasp the appeal of grasses, both are true in their own way. These two phrases are like the opposing strophes of a lyric song. I think it’s up to me to provide the third synthetic movement that unites their seeming opposition and which will help give a sense of what grasses can bring to your winter garden. Maybe starting with a paradox like this is a repetition of the drama that grasses can actually give to your garden. Grasses seem to be both wild and tamed at the same time. They form persisting masses, yet speak to us of the mystery of the passingness of life. I suppose contradictions are the true ground of the real and that’s why grasses can be such an eloquent garden presence. You might think that winter would swiftly see off the grassy family, yet they are the most enduring of plants.
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from
‘Plants to Brighten an Irish Winter’
by Jane Powers
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A couple of times a week, I wander down to my town’s coast to pay homage to some favourite trees. The three Arbutus unedo were planted a dozen or so years ago as part of a seafront regeneration scheme. They start to bloom in autumn, with down-turned panicles of pearly blossom. Each flower is a masterpiece of nature: a tiny, hand-blown, frosted-glass lampshade. I know that sounds fanciful, but if you find an arbutus, you’ll see for yourself. This shrubby tree blooms right into winter here, and if that weren’t enough to cheer you, it also bears absurd-looking fruits at the same time. When ripe, the large, perfectly spherical berries – which have a rough, prickly-but-not-sharp texture – turn bright crimson. The burry, goosebump-y surface is underlaid with orange, so the fruits appear to glow from within.
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from
‘Backs to the Future:
Harvesting the Wildflower Meadow at King’s College, Cambridge’
by Tony Hufton
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It’s a wonderfully bucolic sight. Almost in the shadow of King’s College Chapel, a magnificent shire horse is patiently trundling an old agricultural machine across a large expanse of new-mown hay. The horse’s coat, a rich chestnut, glows from recent grooming and the polished brass of its harness glints in the sun. The machine it pulls is an intricate, spidery thing, sky blue with two large scarlet metal wheels and rotating arrays of tines that gently toss and turn the hay to help it dry. The whole contraption is so light that the horse, which goes by the name of Bryn, can pull it with little apparent effort. Mounted at the rear and guiding Bryn with only the slightest pull on the reins is the driver, who is dressed for this performance (for performance it is) in a costume that harks back to that of an Edwardian agricultural worker: fawn cotton trousers, braces, collarless shirt, knotted neckerchief and flat cap. Two young assistants – one of whom is now holding the reins of Bryn’s companion Cosmo among a cluster of young Chinese admirers – are dressed in similar fashion. I’m reminded of Joseph Losey’s film The Go-Between.
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from
‘The Game is Afoot:
Hunting and Preserving Maine’s Heritage Fruit Trees’
by Sukie Amory
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‘American as apple pie’, goes the old saying. Yet except for four crab-apple species (Malus angustifolia, M. coronaria, M. fusca, and M. ioensis) what Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed ‘the American fruit’ is not native to North America, but like the people who brought them to our shores, an immigrant who’s made a home in the New World. The apple is the epitome of Diogenes’ ‘Citizen of the World’, thanks to its heterozygosity – a McIntosh apple tree bears only McIntosh apples, but its seeds are diploid, carrying genetic material from both the ‘mother fruit’ and the tree that pollinated it. This means that every McIntosh seed will grow into a new and unique seedling, giving the apple a kind of super genetic diversity and adaptability that has allowed it to travel across the globe, whether planted deliberately or sprouting spontaneously from a tossed core. From the original Malus sieversii forests on Kazakhstan’s Tien Shan Mountains above Almaty, ‘Father of Apples’, it traipsed along the Silk Road. Roman legions brought it to Gaul and Britain, and from there, it was carried across the pond, perhaps by sixteenth-century Basque whalers, and most certainly by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonists. American folk hero and pioneer nurseryman John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed (1774–1845), carried this migration westward. Strapping two canoes together, one laden with thousands of seeds under a blanket of moss and mud to keep them viable, he paddled New World rivers to establish a string of nurseries bearing fruit just as settlers arrived, eager to plant the orchards the government required as a condition for their newly cleared homesteads.
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from
‘Postcard from Brittany’
by Rosemary Lindsay
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If you think of going to France for gardens – Provence, Cote d’Azur, Normandy for gardens – perhaps Brittany wouldn’t immediately come to mind. However, in early September 2025 we joined a HORTUS tour to visit gardens along the Pink Granite Coast . . . The influence of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream is evident in the range of exotic plants thriving here. A huge sixty-foot-high warm granite rock shelters Le Jardin Exotique & Botanique de Roscoff. A public-spirited municipal gardener in the department of Finiste?re and his hotelier friend cleared it of brambles and scrub and added several hundredweights of soil and compost. In the crevices they planted aloes, agaves, ficoids, and giant echiums.
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from
‘Father of the Shade:
Carlos Thays and the Landscaping of Buenos Aires’
by Katie Campbell
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Argentina’s capital, the aptly named Buenos Aires, must be one of the world’s most vibrant, verdant, walkable cities. Its streets are lined with trees, every few blocks there’s a public park and many of the motorway underpasses are lined with live green walls. Much of this is down to Carlos Thays (1849–1934), a French landscapist who first visited South America at the age of forty, when he was commissioned to design a park in a city in the interior. Like many before him, Thays fell in love with the newly independent country and decided to make it his home. In 1891 he was appointed Director of Parks and Promenades for Buenos Aires, and over the next three decades he reshaped the city, planting her streets with a hundred and fifty thousand trees, transforming every usable plot of public land, however small or unpromising, into a public park, and establishing a prestigious botanic garden.
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from
‘O, Plant and Animal Kingdoms Come!’
by Nigel Jarrett
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I saw them first. Rats. We’d moved to a house with a garden close to a cutting on the border-country railway line from South Wales to Crewe. At first, from the bedroom window, I didn’t see a rat because something in my mind blanked out the concept of rodent. I saw a grey squirrel and wondered what it was doing. Then I recalled that my gardener-grandfather had classed squirrels as rodents – something to do with a postman who’d been attacked by one and limped on his rounds for ever after – so squirrel segued into rat. The cheeky critter was after windfalls from the dwarf crab-apple tree (Malus ‘Evereste’), which the former owners had planted on the sloping plot behind the house. There was a patio with a brick wall covered in grapevine, then a plateau of decking with a shed to the side, then a vertiginous plot before the wild quarter-acre of brambles leading like coils of barbed wire to the railway. I watched the rat bite on an apple that made its jaws extend like snakes which ‘unlock’ theirs to take on outsized prey. I saw another rat emerge from under the shed. Half-eaten crab apples were everywhere, chewed by slugs, as I thought, but evidently left by rats which had had their fill of a glut.
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from
‘The Botanical Brontës’
by Marta McDowell
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The Bronte sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne – lived lives filled with flora. Cultivated plants grew in a small walled court next to the stone parsonage which was the family’s home. Beyond the neighbouring St Michael and All Angels’ church where their father preached and the small, steep village of Haworth, lie the West Yorkshire moors. Wide rolling uplands, the moors supported pasturing sheep and not much else in an agricultural sense. But this wild landscape of wind and heath underpinned the literary output of the Bronte?s. It lent inspiration, atmosphere and a broad palette of plants to their work. Attention to the natural world was part of the Bronte? milieu. (Consider the diminutive Jane Eyre, hiding from the Reeds in a window seat to peruse Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds.) Botany was in vogue, among women too. Beatrix Potter [see HORTUS 30 and 109] studied mushrooms – a discipline now termed mycology – in England, Scotland and Wales, and submitted a scientific paper to the Linnean Society. Marianne North went further afield; travelling with her widowed father, she painted the flora of the British Empire and beyond. Anna Atkins turned to photography – a new technique called cyanotype – to capture and reproduce her collected plant and algae specimens. Attention to the natural world was part of the Bronte? milieu. (Consider the diminutive Jane Eyre, hiding from the Reeds in a window seat to peruse Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds.) Botany was in vogue, among women too. Beatrix Potter [see Hortus 30 and 109] studied mushrooms – a discipline now termed mycology – in England, Scotland and Wales, and submitted a scientific paper to the Linnean Society. Marianne North went further afield; travelling with her widowed father, she painted the flora of the British Empire and beyond. Anna Atkins turned to photography – a new technique called cyanotype – to capture and reproduce her collected plant and algae specimens.
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from
‘From the Home Patch’
by Tom Petherick
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The most important month of the year for anyone growing fruit is always May. Warm, calm, dry, frost-free weather results in ripe pollen. Given an abundance of insect life to carry out necessary cross-pollination, you have most of what you need for a bumper year. All the stars aligned this year to give extraordinarily bountiful crops of late maturing fruit such as apples and pears. The soft fruit was good enough in the summer but extended spells of hot sunshine in combination with the occasional heavy downpour in September allowed the top fruit to really go to town.
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from
‘Digging with the Duchess: Stone Face’
by Sam Llewellyn
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There we were, standing in the yard, fresh breeze bending the tops of the willows, leaves blowing off the mulberry by the pond like big gold coins running away from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And the Duchess said, ‘What’s that?’ We peered. In the deeps of the mulberry, among crimson stalks of dogwood getting ready for the low-sun winter blaze, something lurked. It was not vegetable. It was not animal, either. Mineral, it was, in fact: a sort of pig, made of iron by someone in China in the distant past. A racking of brains commenced, and a picture emerged. Long, long ago, when the Hope was a tottering wreck and the Duchess was still living somewhere in (she claims) Argentina, we had gone in search of something to divert the eye from the wilderness that surrounded us, and returned bearing the pig
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The Garden Arts
The Garden Arts
Book, Exhibition and Music Reviews
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Putting Myself Together
by Jamaica Kincaid
reviewed by Peter Dale
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Flora Indica at the Royal Botanic Gardens, KewFlora Indica
by Henry Noltie
reviewed by Naman Chaudhary
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Flowers in a Hurry
by Victoria Martin
reviewed by David McArthur
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Three Études for Piano and Flower Pots
by Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade
played by Xiaoyuan Fu and percussionist James Larter
reviewed by the editor
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HORTUS 157, Spring 2026
will be published in March.
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