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| Extracts From The Current Issue |
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from
the editor’s introduction to HORTUS 157, Spring 2026
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Can HORTUS really be forty years old? Ten years older than The English Garden magazine; six years older than Gardens Illustrated; older by far than all online gardening blogs. Original subscriber records were kept on index cards, payment was by cheque (sometimes cash). An annual subscription was £22. In forty years, the price has only slightly more than doubled – what other products and services can boast as much?
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from
‘Tradescant’s Diary’
by
Hugh Johnson
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25 October 2025: . . . that is forever England. I nominate Le Bois des Moutiers, a hundred and fifty miles south of Portsmouth, perched on a white clifftop sloping steeply north, a jewel box of precious plants designed by Gertrude Jekyll in ideal conditions round the first (and perhaps best) country house of one of our best twentieth-century architects, Edwin Lutyens. The house was built for the Mallet family of bankers in the last years of the nineteenth century, while the pre-Raphaelites were a recent memory, and Arts and Crafts were germinating. Something tells me Lutyens had seen Gaudi’s work in Barcelona. His is more spare, less Gothic, a strong stone block austere on the inland side, facing the formal gardens, and a wall of many windows looking north to the sea.
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from
‘Our Garden Birds: No. 25: The Robin’
by
Adam Ford
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I would hazard a guess that, in some future century when human beings have travelled far through space to explore other planets circling other stars, a strange dinosaur-like flying creature with a splash of orange-red down its front will be called a robin – the ‘Proxima Centauri Robin’ perhaps. The label ‘Robin’ has a particularly adhesive power for attaching itself to other species. Our own original European robin, a member of the chat family, has become an emblem of winter festive greetings on billions of Christmas cards; he is the cheery and friendly fellow who joins us in the garden as we dig.
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from
‘Stalwarts v. Upstarts:
A Nurseryman’s Glance at Some New Plant Introductions’
by Malcolm Allison
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Humans have always been interested in novelty and difference. We now grow a wider range of plants than ever, after millennia of new introductions, selection and breeding, resulting in opportunities for cross-pollination and the creation of characteristics previously unknown. In addition, the techniques available to plant breeders are much more powerful. Scientists are able to identify individual genes and screen new plants for desirable traits at a very early stage in their development. Also, the techniques for enabling cross-fertilisation between hitherto incompatible plants and procedures such as embryo rescue mean that we are still able to raise plants from crosses that have failed to generate viable seeds.
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from
‘Pure Magic! Mona’s Garden’
by Matthew Pottage
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You could be forgiven for double-checking if you heard correctly that the National Collection of Corokia, a wonderfully versatile New Zealand native shrub, was nestled in the back garden of a private home in North London. Surely it is at Kew? Or Tresco Abbey Garden? No, you heard it right the first time, it is indeed tucked away in Highgate, in a garden that feels like something out of a fairytale. The more you look, the more you see, and the more you explore it, the further it extends. It is the year-round paradise that is known to keen gardeners, simply, as Mona’s Garden. I first met Mona Abboud some ten years ago, when I was Curator of RHS Garden Wisley, in Surrey, and our shared affection for corokias allowed us to start geeking out about cultivars we’d grown and experimented with, immediately. It feels quite an honour to be writing this article, not long since she celebrated the tenth anniversary of her collection of some sixty-nine species and cultivars officially holding the National Collection status, as certified by Plant Heritage.
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from
‘No Failures, Only Opportunities:
Knepp Walled Garden, Sussex’
by Ambra Edwards
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How wild should a garden be? It’s a question that rears its head every time a carefully curated nettle patch wins a gold at Chelsea. Can a ‘rewilded’ plot even properly be called a garden? Gardens, after all, are man-made things, and some of us mourn quietly for the days when garden-making was considered an important art form, on a par with poetry and painting. It is a question that is particularly germane at the Walled Garden at Knepp, currently enjoying much fanfare as a ‘new’ approach to gardening, with a stated aim of ‘changing the conventional gardening mindset’. Twenty-five years ago Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell famously turned their backs on conventional farming at their loss-making 3,500-acre Sussex estate, and embarked on a process we have come to call ‘rewilding’. As herds of longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies and rootling Tamworth pigs steadily reshaped the landscape, imitating the disturbance once caused by aurochs and wild boar, multiple new habitats were created, and plant and animal numbers soared. Storks were introduced in 2016, beavers in 2022.
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from
‘An Eastertime Update from the Teign Valley’
by Adam Heppinstall
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The authorities (a nice young ecologist under contract to the Rural Payments Agency) have declared our meadow a priority habitat and species-rich grassland, which we knew, but it is nice to have the badge. All sorts of delights are to be certifiably found, including early purple orchid (Orchis mascula). The mascula (virile?) is said to refer to the testicular shapes of the tubers (one is small, and one is large). Dioscorides, the Greek physician, thought if a man ate the full tuber, a boy would be born, whereas if a woman ate the smaller one, their child would be a girl. The Scottish Highlanders called it Love & Hate or Gra?dh is Fuadh, because eating the larger makes someone fall in love with you, whereas eating the smaller means that they will hate you.
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from
‘Cottage Fever:
Bidding Farewell to a Second Home & Garden’
by Rosemary Lindsay
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Our first home in London was a small flat in Trinity Church Square, behind Borough High Street in SE1. It’s an unspoilt early-Victorian square which, in those days, was owned by a charity and the rent was atypically low for such an attractive place. The church was locked and neglected and surrounded by railings. It is now restored, renamed the Henry Wood Hall, and is used by orchestras and choirs as a premier rehearsal and recording venue. The garden behind our flat was divided into four small and largely unkempt plots, shady except in summer. We tried to tidy ours up a bit and enjoyed the hollyhocks which appeared at random. It was somewhere to sit in the sun and dream about being in the country, which we called cottage fever. Trips in our ancient VW Beetle to estate agents in Sussex and Kent meant we eventually managed to turn this idea into reality. We would still live mainly in London.
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from
‘Bringing Calm, Hope and Beauty:
Horatio’s Gardens at UK’s Spinal Injury Centres’
by Olivia Chapple
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Spinal cord injury strikes randomly. It shatters bodies and souls, hopes and dreams. Everything and everyone has to readjust to this catastrophic event, while patients live in austere, clinical, hospital environments for months and months. My son Horatio, an aspiring doctor, was a volunteer in the spinal injury centre in Salisbury. There he saw patients who had nowhere to go from the ward when friends came to visit, nowhere to be immersed in nature, to feel the weather or watch the clouds. Horatio loved being outside, whether walking, reading a book or playing sport. He instinctively knew the benefits it brought him and this made him question the way patients had to spend so much time indoors. As a young person who saw possibilities rather than barriers, he gathered the evidence needed to persuade the hospital to allow the disused land around the spinal centre to be made into an accessible garden.
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from
‘A Pigment of the Imagination:
The Quest for a Blue Rose’
by Martin Scott
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Roses are red, violets are blue. But what if roses could be blue as well? A couple of months ago, a Facebook message from Japanese breeder Takunori Kimura proclaimed, ‘It’s pretty safe to say that light blue roses are born.’ Underneath was a photograph of four tea-rose blooms taken in his glasshouse. They were undeniably blue. Thrilled messages began to spread through online rose groups around the world. Had Kimura really cracked the code that has eluded generations before? I set off for Japan, hoping to find out. The quest for the blue rose goes back centuries. Since the twelfth century gardeners have been feeding dye through the stems of white roses to turn them blue – the same way blue roses sold at garages are coloured today.
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from
‘An Endless Process of Creative Renewal:
Hélène Lindgens at Son Muda, Mallorca’
by Kirsty Fergusson
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A diminutive woman in a panama hat accompanied by an enormous Irish wolfhound are framed by the ochre walls of a Mallorcan farmhouse, from which three or four more dogs (of far less distinguished parentage) leap enthusiastically the moment the kitchen door is opened. He?le?ne loves dogs as much as she loves the gardens she creates, although she insists with immoderate modesty that she is not a landscape architect, ‘just a housewife who likes making gardens . . .’ It’s true she has no formal training in garden design. He?le?ne and her (third) husband, Christian, are Swiss and until 2008 when their ambition to leave behind their complicated city lives and former professions (she was a head-hunter, he a banker) in order to restore a ruined farmhouse and create a garden from the surrounding bare soil began to take shape, she had no previous experience of gardening in a dry Mediterranean climate. ‘I knew olives and lavender and that was about all.’
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from
‘Posies for the Devil’
by Clark Lawrence
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There’s an Instagram account that I follow with mixed curiosity and repulsion: I often watch a very sweet, always smiling, softly-spoken, blue-eyed blonde (in the Cotswolds, I think) nonchalantly arrange flowers in antique vases. She’s good at it, and even if the composition is a total flop, her soft words and genteel manners have you thinking – or maybe just feeling – it’s all lovely. She says things like, ‘I hope you’re really well and having a fabulous day today’, but I don’t know if I believe her. I have the strangest feeling that to gain herself ‘likes’ and followers – or to sell some porcelain vases or £100 cups from her webshop for loose and floppy floral fluff – she would probably, if given the chance, put on some fresh lipstick and prance her way down to hell with her metal flower frogs and chicken-wire balls to make posies for the devil. In a word, she seems either duplicitous or oblivious, as if she does not actually know or care about anyone or anything that is not in her white-washed shed or her privileged, pretty world.
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from
‘From the Home Patch’
by Tom Petherick
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On the night of 8 January 2026 Storm Goretti paid a significant visit to Cornwall. Damage was widespread and some of the county’s great gardens such as Trengwainton near Penzance and the Abbey Gardens on Tresco suffered badly. St Michael’s Mount made the national news. It must be hard enough to grow a tree of any sort on The Mount, so to lose around a hundred of them must have been terrible. Heligan also lost a lot of trees, so did Trelissick, which had to close its gates to the public, as did the under-visited and very underrated Godolphin near Helston, one of Cornwall’s ancient and most mysterious houses and landscapes which may have lost as many as three hundred trees. Caerhays, perhaps Cornwall’s most important garden – along with Tregrehan (not badly damaged, thankfully, but took some heavy blows) and Trewithen, which is high above the Fal estuary and therefore exposed and vulnerable, just east of Truro – lost two hundred trees.
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from
‘Digging With the Duchess: Ruination’
by Sam Llewellyn
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I was standing on the edge of a cloud. Above me the sheep-mown turf sloped upwards and disappeared into the mist, and behind me in clearer air the trees of Hergest Croft made confidential remarks to each other as they towered over a migraine of azaleas. Then something happened. The cloud’s vapour condensed into a dark shape, which gradually solidified into a black mass and became the Duchess. ‘Good afternoon,’ I said. ‘You are rather indistinct.’ ‘Indistinctness is in the eye of the beholder,’ she said sharply, and I could see that, as well as sneaking into the overcast for a crafty Capstan Full Strength, she had been thinking. So I offered her a penny for them. ‘Up there,’ she said, ‘above the fog, you can see for miles. It is charming to view the seventeen old counties of England and Wales. Radnorshire, Brecknockshire, Monmouthshire . . .’
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The Garden Arts
The Garden Arts
Book, Exhibition and Music Reviews
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Diary of a Keen Gardener
by Mary Keen
reviewed by Rod Madocks
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Melbourne Hall Garden
by Jodie Jones
reviewed by Peter Dale
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The Hidden Stories of the Linnaean Herbarium
by Sverker Sörlin
reviewed by Rosie Atkins
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Literary Gardens:
The Imaginary Gardens of Writers and Poets
by Sandra Lawrence
reviewed by Peter Parker
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In Our Rear-View Mirror
Brief Selections from the HORTUS Archive
by Stephen Lacey, Beth Chatto, Alvilde-Lees-Milne,
Mirabel Osler, Robert Dash, Deborah Kellaway,
Fergus Garrett and Peter Parker
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Index to HORTUS Volume Thirty-nine,
Numbers 153–156 (2025)
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HORTUS 158, Summer 2026
will be published in June
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