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| Extracts From The Current Issue |
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from
the editor’s introduction to HORTUS 159, Autumn 2026
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Throughout its existence Hortus has carried just two different logos at the head of its Contents page (page 3). Both represent tulips, reflecting my own personal fondness for the genus. The first was generated anonymously; the second was engraved by our dear friend Yvonne Skargon (1931-2010). Not unexpectedly, then, I’m alert to any tulip news that strays in this direction. It was good, therefore, to read in The Plant Review (September 2026) that the thought-to-be-extinct-in-the-wild scarlet-flowered Tulipa sprengerii, unrecorded in its native terrain for the past hundred and thirty years, ‘has been found alive and well in Turkey’s Amasya province’, close to the Black Sea.
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from
‘Tradescant’s Diary’
by
Hugh Johnson
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21 April 2026: The road home to London from Snowdonia and our Welsh woods is long and winding. There was a blizzard of sleet as we threaded our way along the lovely green valley of the River Elan. We arrived with deep pleasure at our overnight stop, precisely on the English border and my favourite garden for half a century. Yes, Hergest Croft, Herefordshire. I see I first wrote in this diary about Hergest Croft in the 1970s, when the third of the five generations of the Banks family was in charge. The fourth, my friend Lawrence, my contemporary at Rugby and Treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society, is suc- ceeded by his widow Elizabeth and their son Edward. They are quite a family. Elizabeth was the first professional landscape architect (her briefs included the Royal Parks) to become President of the RHS.
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from
‘Our Garden Birds: No. 27: The Pied Flycatcher’
by
Adam Ford
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Not all British garden birds will find their way to where we live: species are distributed unevenly across the country, each in their own specific habitat. So, much as I would love to welcome a pied flycatcher to my garden in East Sussex, it is a very unlikely event. There is just a faint possibility of one spending a few hours here on its migratory journey north from sub-Saharan Africa in March or April – but I am not holding my breath. Or I might catch sight of one in the autumn when on its return journey to hotter climes. I was a young schoolboy when I was first struck by the beauty of this distinctive and stocky flycatcher; a black and white male had become trapped in my father’s Cumbrian church. It flew anxiously from beam to beam. We opened all the windows and doors until it found its way out. It was almost half a century before I saw another.
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from
‘Roses and More:
A Nurseryman Makes’s His Personal Selection '
by Malcolm Allison
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Writing this at the beginning of June, I find myself looking out on a garden in which a warm dry spring has been followed by rainless, repeated summer heatwaves. This weather favoured the roses which have been spectacular, unblemished by wind or rain. Over the past forty years there have been extraordinary develop- ments in garden roses. Perhaps the most important one has been the increase in disease resistance. I remember in the 1970s, every month during the summer, my father would shoulder a knapsack sprayer and treat the rose beds with fungicide to keep blackspot and rust at bay. Thank goodness few people now spray their roses. In another welcome sign of progress, roses are seldom grown as monocultures, with their extended dreary down times between flushes of flowers and issues of rose replant disease. For both aesthetic and plant health reasons, roses are much better grown among other plants.
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from
‘An Admirable and Distinguished Thing ’
by Jane Steward
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When I embarked on my medlar life a decade ago, Mespilus germanica may have already reached its nadir. Around the same time, a British survey of endangered foods reported that fewer than 10 per cent of respondents were aware of, or had tasted medlars. More than 50 per cent were curious to sample this largely forgotten member of the Rosaceae family. I wanted to build on this potential interest, and revive the medlar’s fortunes by telling its story and encouraging people to bring it back to their gardens and tables. The medlar was probably brought here by the Romans as a luxury food. Later, the Anglo-Saxons used them medicinally. The first written evidence of cultivation in Britain dates to the thir- teenth century. Widespread presence of the medlar in what is now Germany may have led Linnaeus to believe it was a native species, hence ‘germanica’. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that Soviet bo- tanists first suspected that the medlar’s original homeland was almost certainly in the Caucasus, somewhere between the Black and Caspian Seas. It was fashionable in English royal orchards and gardens, and on the table, from the sixteenth century onwards.
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from
' Rooted in this Ground ’
by Tamsin Westhorpe
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Gardens can be created in an instant, but a garden that unfolds over the years without intricate planning always has more stories to tell. This is the story of Stockton Bury Garden in Hereford- shire, a four-acre garden at the heart of a working family farm. It has been created over the last fifty-plus years by its owner Raymond Treasure and his partner Gordon Fenn. I write this as Raymond’s niece and the person who works beside them every day to keep the pages of their garden story turning into the next generation. We open the garden to the public from April until the end of September, and their enthusiasm to share their garden has never faltered. I joined them ten years ago after deciding to give up my comfy swivel chair and job as editor of The English Garden magazine. At the time it seemed a little crazy but now makes perfect sense. Returning to hands-on horticulture was something I had always intended to do and where better to do it than home?
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from
‘ By Donkey to Dyffryn’
by Catherine Beale
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Mawson, a native of Lancashire, set up practice in 1889 at Windemere in the Lake District. His first real break was provided by Ruskin’s niece and carer at Brantwood, Joan Severn, who recom- mended Mawson to Joseph Bridson, then building Bryerswood at Sawrey on Windermere. Mawson was introduced by Bridson to (among others) Col. Thomas Sandys of neighbouring Graythwaite Hall. His work at Graythwaite really brought Mawson to notice. ‘I devoted much thought to the successful linking of the gardens with the house on the one hand, and the house and garden with the landscape on the other.’ The architect of both houses was Knill Freeman who lodged his assistant Daniel Gibson on site. It was to Gibson (1865 - 1907) who designed many architectural details for Mawson’s gardens - metalwork gates and screens, pillars, steps, sundials - that Mawson owed his epiphany.
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‘This is the Moment I’ve Waited For’
by Martin Leigh
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The gardens at East Ruston Old Vicarage, those singularly brilliant and glorious adornments of Norfolk’s north-east coast, might never have been. The moment of their origin is customarily said to be in 1973, at an auction in the Royal Hotel in Norwich, when Graham Robeson paid £20,250 to the Church Commissioners for the Old Vicarage and for its two bleak acres of surrounding land (consisting in ‘unkempt grass . . . one ‘Albertine’ rose and some yellow-flowered tree lupins’). But the story of East Ruston is far more than one of architectural and horticultural brilliance, far more than the gardens’ ambition and beauty, their vision and excitement; it’s the story of how two men ‘come together for the good of the garden’. The two first came together sometime in 1971, at a road junc- tion, a red light stopping traYc on the Prince of Wales Road in Norwich. They drew up to the lights, two cars next to each other: Alan Gray driving a borrowed car, Graham Robeson in his own.
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from
'All Intrinsically Interwoven'
by Caspar Giorgio Williams
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As one stands at the gates of Villa Lante in Bagnaia, one witnesses order made visible: fountains and parterres, and water coursing down terraces, in one of Italy’s greatest Renaissance gardens. Across the road lies another garden. This is small, private, and alive with flowers that spill riotously over its railings. It is the garden belonging to the artist Domitilla Harding. While the villa, the historic residence of the Lante delle Rovere family and Domitilla’s ancestral home, is now preserved as an Italian national (state) monument, her own garden is a highly personal and ever-changing place: a hundred square yards cultivated across from the villa’s gates.
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from
‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’
by Sukie Amory
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Robert Frost laments ‘Nature’s first green is gold/Her hardest hue to hold’.’ In his brief stint studying philosophy at Harvard, did the poet of verdant New England ever visit the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Blaschka Plants? The collection opened to acclaim in the university’s new Botanical Museum in 1890, a decade before Frost decamped to his New Hampshire farm. Like many writers and gardeners since, he would have marvelled at the golds and greens held in what Jamaica Kinkaid calls ‘a state of perfection stilled’. In ‘Splendor in the Glass: Flowers More Real than Real’, the writer and gardener singles out ‘a branch of Aster novae-angliae’ that ‘a student of botany could see as clearly as if it had been picked from the American roadside’.
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from
' From The Home Patch'
by Tom Petherick
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There have been mixed reports from growers and gardeners up and down the country in the face of the sustained heat that has defined the growing year. After a consistently wet winter, during which here in southwest England there was plenty of rain but no per- sistently long spells, it was surprising how quickly things began to dry up. Early May was cold. Easy to forget, but I rely on my aged tortoise Shelly as a guide (the only livestock under my care). She refused to get up from her winter quarters until the first heat hit in the second half of May. My other benchmarks are cricket squares. Normally we are playing Saturday League cricket on puddings in May. This year the wickets were like iron by the middle of the month. Most odd. Where did that rain go? Or was there not that much?
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from
‘Digging With The Duchess:
Sahel in a Bucket'
By Sam Llewellyn
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One of the joys of the Hope is the waft of the church bells across the woods, soothing the ear of the outdoor sitter as he contemplates the swallows volplaning over the Sunk Garden. One arid evening in late summer, though, the Plain Bob Majors and whatnot were joined by other tintinnabulations, infinitely less joyous if more essential. There I was, late sun striking through a glass of rosé d’Anjou, thinking, this is hot and this is dry and this is all a bit much, when an unpleasant clanking joined the bells and the Duchess appeared over the horizon. Closer inspection revealed that she was carrying a bucket in each hand and was staggering somewhat. ‘What,’ I said, ‘are you doing?’ She put down the buckets with a crash. ‘I am irrigating,’ she said. ‘A better word,’ I said, ‘would be "infuriating".’
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from
' In Our Rear-View Mirror
A Brief Selection From The HORTUS Archive'
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I recall a few days spent in Devon during an April week fanned by bitterly cold east winds. Staying in Topsham (almost due south of our home in Wales but beside what appeared to be permanently sun-washed beaches) we were well placed to visit gardens long on a list of places to see. The late Lionel Fortescue’s garden (The Garden House, Bucklanmd Monochorum), despite the previous night’s late and damaging frost, was no disappointment. Because you can virtually smell the sea from the bowery terraces (the garden lies some ten miles inland behind Plymouth), people are surprised to find that it is situated five hundred feet up on Dartmoor, which explains its susceptibility to late cold snaps . . . From ‘On the Road’, the editor’s introduction to HORTUS 18, Summer 1991.
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HORTUS 160, Winter 2026
will be published in early December
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