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| Extracts From The Current Issue |
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from
The Editor’s Introduction to HORTUS 152 Winter 2024
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This year’s autumn colours came late but lasted long. Writing on Remembrance Day when most deciduous woody plants would normally have lost their leaves I can stroll round the garden savouring the fiery hues of many Japanese maples, cotinus and, supremely, Parrotia persica ‘Persian Spire’, upon which upright branches there lingers in multitudinous shades of yellow, amber, pink, red and purple a fabulously pleasing amount of remaining foliage. I’m glad I planted several. Tall and elegant P. persica ‘Vanessa’ coloured up beautifully too but shed her fancy dress well ahead of the Spires.
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Diana loved to talk about herself. She willingly shared her hypochondria. It mattered nought, as it was mostly interesting and always well told. She came to Venice and the Veneto with Simon and me and two dozen HORTUS readers on our first overseas garden tour in 2004. I’m not sure how unwell she really was but by the time we reached Padua she rang my hotel room very early one morning asking me to procure some over-the-counter medication. The list she gave me contained eight or more items. With difficulty I found one pharmacy open for just a few hours that Sunday. When I handed over the list the pharmacist said, with a playful wink, ‘Your friend must be very sick to want all this’. I relayed his comment to Diana later that day and it pleased her enormously. ‘There,’ she said, ‘I told you I was seriously ill.’ She wasn’t, of course, and notwithstanding a few hiccoughs over the next few days, all went swimmingly. And she lived to be eighty- six.
from
‘Remembering Diana Ross (1938–2024)’
Tributes from David Wheeler, Tom Stuart-Smith, Rosemary Lindsay,
her gardener Stephen Barney, and Christopher Woodward
Note: We apologise to Christian Lamb (one of Diana Ross’s eminent interviewees mentioned in these tributes) for reporting that she ‘died in May this year aged 104’. We were pleased to learn – sadly, after publication – that while Christian did indeed celebrate her 104th birthday this year she is still very much alive.
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from
‘Tradescant’s Diary’
by
Hugh Johnson
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9 August 2024: There’s a moment at the beginning of August when our big bush or little tree of Solanum rantonnetii scatters its crown with purple potato flowers – only little ones – and I’m never sure whether to say purple or blue. It’s a matter of judgement – or maybe eyesight. But a fifteen-foot dome of this colour in the middle of the garden pretty much takes over the view for six weeks or so. No such luck with it in Hampshire; it can be too cold even a mere two miles from the sea. But for a London garden with some wall shelter and a fair amount of space I can’t think of a more satisfactory little tree. I tucked it into the south-facing corner by the greenhouse door. Now we have to cut off five-foot shoots to stop them casting the greenhouse into shade.
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from
‘Our Garden Birds: The Dunnock’
by
Adam Ford
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An alternative, older, name for the dunnock is the hedge sparrow, and many still prefer to call it that. It is mostly brown and small and fusses about in the hedge, so the name seems logical. But it is not in fact a sparrow at all but a member of a totally different family of small birds, the accentors. Look more closely and its colours are seen to be slate grey streaked with brown, and it does not have the thick-based bill of a sparrow, which has evolved to cope with large seeds, but has the delicate bill of an insect eater more like that of a warbler.
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from
‘Prickly Heat or Wet Feet?:
Planting Sicilian Opuntia on the Isle of Wight’
by Claire Margetts
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Torrents of torpedoing rain muffle both the rumble of the surf working on the reef beyond the grass-tussock dunes and, closer-at-hand, the consoling sound of a whistling kettle after a sodden but productive day ‘on the boards’ in the garden. I read on: ‘The richness of plant and animal life, the extremely high productivity of our farmlands, the fleeting beauties of our landscape which have inspired so many writers – all are closely linked with Britain’s climate.’ A loud crackle over the radio rings out, ‘Rain pummels Catania, Sicily, roads like rivers.’ A shock but not a surprise to my climate-crisis-weary ears, having been out in Sicily’s baking sun followed by flash floods only a few weeks previously. A row of the cultivated species of prickly pear Opuntia ficus-indica.
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from
‘With Much to Teach Us:
Some Plants in the Royal College of Physician’s Garden’
by Richard Claxton
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The beautiful Regency terraces that surround Regent’s Park in London are punctured in the south-east corner by the Royal College of Physicians’ Grade I listed home. Designed by Sir Denys Lasdun and finished in 1964, this striking, angular modern building of white concrete and sloping black bricks sits like an iceberg floating in a bowl of Jersey cream. But surrounding it are beautiful gardens which tell the story of medicinal horticulture through the ages.
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from
‘A Brief Curatorship:
A Fond Farewell to Marchants Hardy Plants’
by Lorraine Harrison
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At the end of October this year the wooden gate finally closed on the much-loved and hugely respected independent nursery and garden, Marchants Hardy Plants in Sussex. The announcement of the sad news on Instagram has elicited comments from so many gardeners who have ‘offspring’ from Marchants thriving in their own gardens. Indeed, as I write, the most perfect cerise flowers of Hesperantha ‘Marchants Seedling’ are blooming just a few feet from my window. As one commentator notes, this diaspora of precious plants forms ‘a little bit of heaven sprinkled around the country’.
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from
‘William Dean and the Hortus Croomensis Bi-Centenary’
by Tom Oliver
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It is two hundred years since the publication of a guidebook and garden catalogue for Croome Park in Worcestershire, which provides a vivid and detailed description of what was at the time one of the most ambitious and admired designed landscapes and plant collections in Britain. Croome Park rests in a shallow valley between the much greater topographies of the Severn and Avon vales, to the west and the east. At the centre of the designed landscape, the house, Croome Court, stands on the site of much older predecessors. But such was the transformation of the whole by ‘Capability’ Brown, working with Robert Adam (with later work by James Wyatt), that there was – and miraculously still is – a staggeringly pure Georgian realm stretching in every direction.
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from
‘Devon and Dordogne:
The Horticultural Adventures Continue’
by Adam Heppinstall
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We have finally departed the relative metropolitan greenery of the South London Manor of Dulwich for the deep and mysterious valley of the River Teign (pronounced Teen – the Romans called it Teng, derived from the Welsh Taen – or ‘stream’) . . . There seems to have been a lot of flower cultivation going on here. The previous owner supplied wedding bouquets and consequently we have inherited sufficient floral bounty for a thousand budding bridesmaids. We are knee-deep in gladioli of every hue and shape. We do not have enough vases to fill. Lilies are currently giving way to pink nerines, erupting out of the earth in their slightly alien way, without the warning of any attendant verdancy. There seems to be some quite exciting butterflies which come with this floral action. We abut a nature reserve where the large skipper (Ochlodes sylvanus) seems to excite attention.
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from
‘A Walk with Fruit:
Foraging (and Scrumping) on Foot from Norwich to Rome’
by Tony Hufton
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When I first planned this walk from Norwich to Rome, fruit had not entered my thoughts. My idea was to follow in the footsteps of others who had made similar journeys over the centuries – writers, merchants, soldiers, pilgrims – and get a better understanding of how the places along the way are culturally connected. But in the seven weeks I’ve been on the road, fruit has been an unexpected and delightful leitmotif. Leaving in late August it was no surprise that I found fat blackberries in hedgerows to snack on. But I wasn’t expecting the plums. After I’d tramped over vast upland corn prairies in Suffolk, it was a treat coming into the villages to find ripe damsons along the paths, identical to the damson Merryweather we have at home.
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from
‘Plant Tales:
Voyages from the Himalayas to the English Garden’
by Naman Chaudhary
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The ascent from the vale of Kashmir into the greater ranges of the Himalayas that straddle it from the northeast is soaring. The road rises alarmingly, a vertical tilt behind each hairpin bend. The midday light reflects in the lakes, turns everything to watercolours. Rows of cypress, juniper and poplar, copses of willow along nullahs, and the lone-standing chinar (Platanus orientalis) are left behind and the slopes become the sentinel territory of silver fir (Abies pindrow). One of the first plants I encounter on this climb is a clump of geranium that the Kashmiris call laljhari, their stamens still stuck together, like the wick of a candle not long blown out. The flower has been turned to paste for millennia as an astringent for insect bites, toothache and cattle wounds, its root used for tanning. The scientific name, Geranium wallichianum, however, honours Nathaniel Wallich, a botanist for the East India Company who distributed it, along with other plants, to Europe. re were several plans, several purchases of further fields in which we planted trees, made a pond, and tended what we’d made.
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from
‘A Garden from Flames:
How Fearsome Destruction Breeds Abundance’
by Matt Collins
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The feral plant known to British gardeners as rosebay willowherb bears a different name across the Atlantic. In North America, where its speared, spiralling leaves and candy-pink petals are found in all but a handful of states, it goes by the name ‘fireweed’. And as with the assignation of many common names, there is nothing complicated about the moniker: in the US, fireweed grows often in the wake of flames. Among the very first plants to do so, in fact, Chamaenerion angustifolium (or Epilobium angustifolium, to use the Linnean) colours the soot and singe left behind after a forest fire, springing conspicuously green from seeds which dormancy is broken by heat and which preference of seedbed is one stripped of nutritious topsoil. In mid-century Britain, the plant proliferated over the rubble wreckage of the Blitz; in America, its five-foot blooms are found never brighter nor more abundant than amongst the blackened skeletons of poplar or pine.
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from
‘Hunting for Bumblebees’
by Jane Powers
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One of my high points this year was a ‘bioblitz’ in a fine, big garden (about twenty acres) where I work as a consultant. A bioblitz is something like a trolley dash for nature. But, instead of haring around a supermarket frantically throwing things into the cart, you’re bouncing high and low in search of wild flora, fauna and fungi. Our bioblitz was led by a team of experts from Ireland’s National Biodiversity Data Centre, and the event stretched across two days in late May: moths and bats (and a long-eared owl) on the first night and everything else during the next morning and afternoon. We racked up over two hundred and fifty wild species. This didn’t include mosses and liverworts, of which we have more than fifty species, catalogued during another project. The estate, Danesmoate, is in the foothills of the Dublin mountains: suburbia nudges its southern edge, while the rest of the surrounding terrain is woodland, scrubby hillsides and well-treed golf courses.
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from
‘From the Home Patch’
by Tom Petherick
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Looking back over the gardening year is never much help for the next one to come because no two years are the same – and we have weather. But since the conversation is as ever dominated by the desire to cling to climate change as the great Satan of our time and blame everything on that, it doesn’t hurt to see what happened with that monkey on our backs. So much could be perceived to be new to us in this field, so the trials and tribulations of each year are now more loaded than they ever were before.
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from
‘Digging with the Duchess: Woodland Folk’
by Sam Llewellyn
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‘Nash,’ said the Duchess. This was puzzling. We were standing in the Ash Grove at the Hope. A cold rain was falling and we were up to our knees in brambles, but that was no excuse for drivelling. The only Nash I could think of was the villain in From Russia with Love, a SMERSH assassin who, I do not need to remind you, got his name from the Russian for ‘ours’. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Wake up,’ said the Duchess. ‘The trees.’ And suddenly I got it. The Ash Grove, called after Llwyn on, a charming Welsh song we learned at gunpoint in infancy, was one of the first things we planted when we started at it in earnest thirty-five years ago.
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The English Landscape Garden
by Tim Richardson
(reviewed by Peter Dale)
The Tree Hunters:
How the Cult of the Arboretum Transformed Our Landscape
by Thomas Pakenham
(reviewed by John Akeroyd)
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HORTUS 153, Spring 2025
will be published at Easter
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