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| Extracts From The Current Issue |
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from
the editor’s introduction to HORTUS 158, Summer 2026
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The decision was taken quickly, though painfully. I will cease publication of Hortus at the end of this year, with issue number 160. It completes forty years of uninterrupted production, despite several moves of house and garden and a string of potentially life-threatening diseases over the past eighteen years. HORTUS has occupied me for half my life. I ‘celebrated’ my eightieth birthday last October with a visit to Picton Garden at Colwall, at the foot of the Malvern Hills, to see the deservedly famous collection of Michaelmas daisies. No great triumphant slap-up lunch – merely takeaway cheese panini from Greggs in nearby Ledbury, before Simon and I disappeared into the equally famous Herefordshire countryside to explore yet another remote and architecturally interesting rural church. We are no longer accepting new or renewal subscriptions. Instead, readers without a full 2026 subscription should order the journal’s final issues via our website (hortus.co.uk) as they become available. Anyone with a subscription running into next year will be refunded for any over-payment. There will be an anticipated demand for the final number – as collectable as issue No. 1, which has been changing hands among aficionados at prices in excess of several hundred pounds.
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from
‘Tradescant’s Diary’
by
Hugh Johnson
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17 March 2026: Who do we have to thank for the splendid variety of trees that adorn our local streets and parks? Not everyone looks at, or even notices, the trees they walk under every day. Perhaps in April when they light up with blossom and scatter confetti on every car. Perhaps in September when they begin to cover the pavement with potentially treacherous leaves. We rarely thank them, though, for the grace of their branches against the sky and the welcome shade they offer on a hot sunny day. Our part of Kensington is blessed with more trees, and more different kinds of trees: from the stately planes that give Pembroke Square its special dignity, to flowering cherries that for a few weeks in spring completely change the mood of otherwise unexceptional streets. Planes and cherries are commonplace, the bread and butter of street planting. The council’s tree officers, though, are doing a more imaginative job.
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from
‘Our Garden Birds: No. 26: The Grey Heron’
by
Adam Ford
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One might say that herons are the sharks of the avian world. They have an ancient ancestry that predates, by many millions of years, all our garden song birds. Like the shark, the heron is such a brilliant design for survival (in its case, hunting mostly by rivers and in wetland) that evolutionary pressures have had no need to alter the bird’s sleek killing form. This is why you will find herons listed near the beginning of many modern bird books – crows, buntings and finches, the most recent to evolve, coming last.
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from
‘Managed with a Light Touch:
A Nurseryman’s Selection of Choice Perennials’
by Malcolm Allison
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As the days lengthen and there is more warmth in the sun, the number of plants coming into flower increases rapidly. By late March the ipheions have already been in flower for more than a month and they continue into May. Ipheion uniflorum, a small-growing summer-dormant bulb, that is native of Argentina and neighbouring countries, has been grown in UK gardens for a long time for its star-shaped flowers held singly on each stem. The colour is a pale bluish-white, like skimmed milk. More recently, other species have been introduced into cultivation: the plant ‘Rolf Fiedler’ is in fact an unidentified species with wonderful blue flowers, but it is sadly not hardy. Newer hybrids, presumably derived in part from ‘Rolf Fiedler’, are proving hardier and more robust as garden plants.
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from
‘The Hybrid London Plane’
by Stephen Barber
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Samuel Johnson said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. I maintain that if you are tired of London, you have not studied the life of its London planes. Smokey Wood is a bosky enclave tucked between playing fields off Queen Elizabeth Centre in Barnes and the River Thames at Fulham, reached through a pair of small wooden gates inside Barn Elms Sports Trust. I have sought the entrance several times over the years in search of ‘Barney’, the capital’s oldest London plane. One time I glimpsed his towering crown across a fish pond but never found my way to him. Eventually, I discovered a narrow path that leads into the dense thicket of trees over which Barney presides. I had seen photographs, but I was wholly unprepared for the dramatic, soaring bulk of his central trunk.
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from
E. A. Bowles and the Restoration of Myddleton House Gardens’
by Jacqueline Eykelbosch
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Myddelton House and Gardens are situated in Enfield, North Lon- don, and are the headquarters of Lee Valley Regional Park Authority (LVRPA). They were the home of Edward Augustus Bowles (1865–1954), who began work on the garden in the late 1800s. Bowles was a botanist, plant hunter, artist and garden writer. In 1912 the editor of the Gardener’s Chronicle, E. Hooper Pearson, suggested to him that he write three or four books describing his garden season by season. The idea was the origin of the famous trilogy: My Garden in Spring (1914; reprinted 1997), My Garden in Summer (1914; reprinted 1997) and My Garden in Autumn and Winter (1915; reprinted 1998). In them Bowles takes the reader around the garden commenting on the different plants and features, and giving attention to early-flowering species such as snowdrops, crocus, narcissus, tulips and anemones. In A Handbook of Crocus and Colchicum for Gardeners (published in 1924, second edition, 1952) he discusses growing, observing and painting these bulbs. It was followed in 1934 by A Handbook of Narcissus. His book on anemones, co-authored with W. T. Stearn, remained unfinished at the time of his death.
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from
‘The Artist-Plantsman and Writers at Bottengoms’
by Barbara Segall
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The names of prolific centenarian writer, editor, Church of England lay reader and, yes, gardener Ronald Blythe and his friends the artists John and Christine Nash have swirled around my life in East Anglia these past forty years. My first visit to Bottengoms – Blythe’s Tudor longhouse in the Stour Valley on the Essex/Suffolk border – was to see the garden surrounding the house, the titular building of his book, At the Yeoman’s House (2011). Only on my second visit did I venture indoors. Bequeathed to the Essex Wildlife Trust on Blythe’s death in 2023, the property is ‘waking up’ again, although it still felt to me as if both house and garden were held in time and that all its former inhabitants remained nearby.
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‘The Spirit of Allotments’
by Peter Dale
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Look out of the train window and sooner or later you will spot an allotment site. It will be – it always is – close to a settlement, an urban or a suburban event. Allotments are to the living what cemeteries are to the dead: always close to dense habitation, never quite integrated. They’re slow oases of space, fresh air, places out- side the slip-streams of noise, speed, spending and getting. They’re pedestrian: places where cars – in motion or just parked up – are disqualified. They’re never vast, never tiny: largish spaces but very visibly divided into smaller units, all of the same size. (Still they’re often measured in perches: 160 perches to the acre.) From the train they make you think of the months of a calendar broken up into days. And they’re studded with sheds, though even that humble word seems to stretch credence for some of these erections – shabby, gimcrack, improvised but somehow honest, if only because they subvert all the norms of buildings elsewhere. There’s character here but no USP, no pretence at permanence, no effort of translation into the slippery word ‘property’. Ownership here means some- thing quite different from the housing market: not possession but partnership.
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from
‘Gardening on Granite: Parc de Saleccia, Corsica
by Katie Campbell
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Anybody driving up the barren northwest coast of Corsica might be surprised to see a sign for a botanic garden, the Parc De Saleccia. Carved out of the rugged maquis, this unlikely project was begun fifty years ago by landscape architect Bruno Demoustier. The park was conceived, in part, to protect the landscape from urbanisation, but its main aim has always been to demonstrate horticultural skills, and to reveal the range of plants that can be cultivated in Corsica’s unpromising climate of scorching heat, fierce wind and little rain. Though the park lies on the edge of Europe’s only desert, the Desert des Agriates, the region has, in fact, been cultivated since neolithic times, when humans evolved from nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers. The name, Agriates, derives from the Latin ager, meaning a cultivated field, attesting to the fact that the region was once a rich and fertile valley. Here, however, and throughout the island, human settlement has had an unfortunate effect on the landscape.
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from
‘Daybreak in the Dominica Garden’
by Paul Crask
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I like to get on with gardening jobs at dawn, before the sun has risen above the treetops. By ten o’clock, it’s simply too hot to do anything not in the shade. Our home sits at an elevation of two thousand feet on the western slopes of Morne Anglais (the name of the mountain – actually a dormant volcano). It can feel a little chilly early on and, in winter, the mountain dew can be so heavy it resembles frost. Perish the thought. Yet it is the perfect time for heavier work: chopping back encroaching bush and vines with my machete (the default Caribbean gardening tool), digging new beds, pruning trees, or harvesting those hard-to-reach coconuts.
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from
‘To Understand and Learn and be Interested in Everything:
John Grimshaw’s World’
by Martin Leigh
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It started early with John Grimshaw: with a mother who, at the time of writing, has been a member of the Wild Flower Society for something like sixty years, and with the enlightened accessions of a librarian in Caterham. In 1983, or at least thereabouts, the school- boy John found in that library the great trilogy by E. A. Bowles, describing his gardens at Myddelton House in spring, summer, and autumn and winter. John was spellbound by Bowles’s writing, by its vivid literary flourishes, as much by its occasional rudeness; spellbound, too, by a richness of plants, a depth of knowledge, by a world of possibilities far from the confines of a Surrey boarding school.
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from
‘Garden Dreams and Creation Myths’
By Rod Madocks
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Maybe all gardeners are trying to recreate a lost paradise from which they’ve been evicted. Perhaps that’s why I keep having this dream or reverie where I’m back as a kid again in Africa, at our old government house in Serenje, Northern Rhodesia, walking again along the gravel drive where the cape doves chirr in the msasa trees, then up the bricked terrace past the raised beds where Mum grows Barberton daisies and pelargoniums, mounting the four steps to that familiar threshold and I’m pushing open our wire gauze front door. A silvered salver gleams in the hallway. It’s waiting for callers to leave their visiting cards and letters. The tray is empty. There’ve been no visitors for sixty years and nothing is stirring within the house – not even our bull terrier, Buster, his claws not skittering across the wooden parquet to greet me.
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from
The Language of Plants: or Plantsman v. Gardener’
by Max Calligola
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I cannot remember how I first came to know Maria Gabriella Buccioli. Perhaps it was through my mother, who had visited the Casoncello gardens and suggested I get in touch, because of my connections with Kew Gardens. Be that as it may, I did go – and we hit it off right away. It was immediately clear that Maria and I spoke the same language when it came to plants and ways of approaching nature. Her garden is in the hills of Loiano, in the Apennines, south of Bologna. To reach it, you leave the main road and climb a narrow track between old farm buildings, and then – quite suddenly – there it is: a place that seems to have grown of its own accord, as if the garden had decided its own form and Maria Gabriella had simply listened.
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from
‘From the Home Patch’
by Tom Petherick
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As a part-time agency care worker, I was doing a one-on-one shift in a care home somewhere in mid-Devon recently when the subject of rare breeds of stone fruit came up. Hard to believe, I know, but it is a big world out there.
The local ladies’ choir had just given a concert in this old folks’ home – old favourites from Chicago, Mamma Mia and the like – after which we were all sitting around having tea. The gentleman who I was looking after suffers from dementia and could wander off and get lost in the building, therefore needing a full-time carer. Thankfully, he had chosen a teatime moment to nod off, because it was as we were all sitting down in a kind of exhausted, late-Sunday-afternoon, going-back-to-school silence that the fruit conversation began.
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from
‘Digging with the Duchess: Blood will Tell’
by Sam Llewellyn
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They have been at it again. I went out this morning, promise of warmth but still cool, lawn covered in little jewels of dew, to inter- view the trees. There they were, new leaves hardening off with the coming of summer . . . No they weren’t. Not all of them, anyway. The amelanchier was okay, and the Acer griseum was its beautiful self, low sun shining through the auburn flakes of its bark. But the Cornus kousa’s leaves had gone miniature. Down in the Glade, I scrutinised a couple of the maple seedlings we grew from the little helicopters produced by a palmatum on the edge of the policies. Four or five years ago, I had sown a handful and left them outside for a winter to get a bit of a frosting, and up they had come, about a dozen of them. Most of them had turned out to be poor, weedy, misbegotten objects. These two had shown promise, though, growing strong and hefty, one deep red, the other a zingy and inspiring green.
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THE EDITOR’S OCCASIONAL BOOK BAG
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Madoo: The Making of an American Garden
by Alejandro Saralegui
*
Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape our World
by Christin Geall
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HORTUS 158, Summer 2026
will be published on July 27th
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