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 issue
9 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.
From ‘Tradescant’s Diary’ by Hugh Johnson
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
Plus reviews of the following books:
A Garden in My Life and Garden Tales by Cynthia Ramsden
Historic Gardens of Somerset by Timothy Mowl and Marion Mako
Gardens of Dorset by Roger Lane
The Gardens of Charleston: A Bloomsbury Garden Through the Seasons by Sue Snell
Bloom’s Best: Perennials and Grasses by Adrian Bloom
Meadows by Design by John Greenlee
Tall Perennials by Roger Turner
Green Flowers by Alison Hoblyn
The Pruning of Trees, Shrubs and Conifers by George Brown, revised by Tony Kirkham
Planting and Maintaining a Tree Collection by Simon Toomer
Jekka’s Herb Book by Jekka McVicar
The Realm of Fig and Quince by Ria Loohuisen
