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| Extracts From The Current Issue |
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from
‘From the Editor’s Desk’
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I seldom buy cut flowers. Why would I? Even in winter’s depths the garden proffers twiggy sprays of hamamelis, sarcococca, mahonia, edgeworthia (sometimes), Prunus autumnalis and bountiful leafage of various shades and shapes. And, anyway, ledges and window-sills all around the house are littered aplenty with pots of early-flowering bulbs and tubers – Iris reticulata, crocus, muscari, small daffs, cyclamen. However . . . at a supermarket on one of February’s coldest, greyest, wettest, cheerless days, I succumbed. There, among the all-too-tropical-looking, flamboyant bunches of flown-in exotica, was a lone wrap of barely-opened primrose-yellow tulips – a single-coloured handful calling to me like a mythical siren beckoning doomed mariners onto the rocks. I jumped.
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from
‘Tradescant’s Diary’
by
Hugh Johnson
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10 October 2024: The magic of Rousham never fails. For decades now I’ve called it my favourite English garden. It has slumbered beside the river Cherwell since the seventeenth century, no doubt much greener and with bigger trees now than when General James Dormer created it, not long after he had fought at the battle of Blenheim. The house is still owned by the Dormer family, seemingly altered only by time.
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from
‘Our Garden Birds: No. 21: The Starling’
by
Adam Ford
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It was the starling’s gorgeously blue eggs, unmarked and perfect, that impressed me most when I was young. The eggs need no camouflage of blotches or streaks, since the nest is hidden away in the dark in a hole in the brickwork of an old building or, as in my first discovery, beneath the eaves of the school cricket pavilion. On hatching, the broken half-shells are ejected from the nest and briefly rest on the ground until trampled or blown away by the wind.
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from
‘Spring’s Cloth of Gold: Celebrating Cowslips’
by John Akeroyd
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Writing in HORTUS 141, I reflected on ‘The Glory of Bluebells’. These violet-blue wild hyacinths are both a springtime spectacle and a British and Irish botanical speciality, one that is endemic to the Atlantic fringes of north-western Europe. But another charismatic spring-flowering plant – of far wider European distribution – also demarks the season and honours Easter, happily crosses the boundary between gardens and the wild and has the power to enhance and transform whole landscapes. Coming into bloom a little earlier than bluebells, and mostly in grassland rather than woods, cowslips are deservedly popular and familiar even to a non-gardener or anyone who rarely gives a wildflower a second glance. Cowslips’ loose clusters of bright yellow flowers have broad instant appeal. Yellow can be the dominant springtime colour, sometimes almost too much of a good thing, in gardens and the countryside: daffodils, forsythia, dandelions, celandines, the first buttercups and assorted brassicas wild and cultivated. Yet cowslips stand out from these others: in favourable sites they occur in great crowds and the flowers, like those of bluebells, rather than being individually showy, are numerous in prominent nodding clusters . . .
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from
‘London’s (Secret) Islamic Gardens’
by Katie Campbell
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With its distinctive combination of poignant beauty, sensory delight and spiritual consolation, the Persian Garden has long been an inspiration to Western designers. Though its origins lie in Persia – modern-day Iran – where ingenious water management enabled local rulers to wrest delightful gardens from the arid steppe, it is the Islamic conquerors of the seventh century who adopted the Persian prototype, and carried it with them east to India, south to the Maghreb and west to Andalucia. Over time the style evolved, adapting to the vastly different cultures and climatic conditions of the expanding Muslim empire. But through it all a few key elements persisted: enclosure, geometry, shade and water. And it is these adaptations which are so brilliantly explored in the Islamic Gardens of London’s Aga Khan Centre.
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from
‘The Hickory: Our American Arboreal Cousins’
by Charles Hulbert-Powell
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In his bestseller, The International Book of the Tree, Hugh Johnson says that if the walnut inherited the dignity in the family, it was the hickories (Carya species) and the wingnuts (Pterocarya), which inherited the looks. Hickories are monoecious (self-fertilising) but despite pollination some varieties, such as the mockernut (Carya tomentosa), take many years to produce fruits. Before the last Ice Age hickories grew in Europe. The climate was warmer than it is now, but as the cold and ice moved south the tree didn’t survive. In America, the southward-moving ice forced hickories down to the Gulf of Mexico. When the ice retreated, the trees moved north again. The time from sapling to nut production, particularly in the case of the mockernut, seems long, but the Ice Age was itself a long event, and the hickory can live for two to three hundred years. They become tall forest trees in their American homeland, perpendicular in stature.
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from
‘A Walk with Fruit:
Foraging (and Scrumping) on Foot from Norwich to Rome’
Part II.
by Tony Hufton
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I was lost in the fields south of Vercelli when a farmer took pity on me and gave me a lift on the back of his tractor to the place where I had missed the turning a quarter of an hour before. His daughter jumped down from the cab to point out the way and we talked for a while about my walk and what lay ahead. ‘Here in Piedmont it’s all rice,’ she said, ‘In Lombardy you’ll see maize; near Piacenza tomatoes; in Tuscany lots of grapes and olives.’
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from
‘Doubts & Droughts: Maintaining a Spanish Garden in High Summer’
by Alex Fenollar
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It is seven in the evening in July, in an inland mountain range in Alicante, south-east of the Iberian Peninsula. The thermometer reads 37°C in the shade. To say that the sun shines bright in the sky would be courting cliche?. But it is fair to say that it overwhelms every pore through which I, the house, and the world stretching out for miles around me breathe. There is barely any breeze. And if the wind picks up slightly, it only serves to highlight the driest of leaves. The cool nights of early June and the dew-dotted mornings of late September, the happy domain of the Mediterranean gardener, are far away . . . so far as to seem impossible. Braving the outdoors will not only invite a waiting horde of mosquitoes, invisible and vicious in their attacks, but above all the admonishing looks of my family and, in all honesty, of the garden itself: ‘What the hell are you doing? Given these conditions, do you actually intend to garden?’
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from
‘The Doctors of Dejima:
Plants and Plant-Collecting in Long-Ago Japan’
by Patricia Cleveland-Peck
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In the seventeenth century Japan was a closed country: it banned the entry of foreigners and the exit of Japanese. This was in order to prevent the spread of Christianity, but in 1636 a tiny fan-shaped, man-made island called Dejima was constructed in order to permit a certain amount of foreign trading. It was connected to Nagasaki by a closely guarded stone-arch bridge. At first this trade was with the Portuguese but they were soon expelled as they were spreading Christianity too enthusiastically. Soon after they left, the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) moved onto Dejima and their employees, who were all deemed to be Dutch, together with a limited number of Chinese, were the only foreigners permitted to reside there. They were effectively isolated from the rest of Japan and had little contact with its people, except for translators and a number of prostitutes (who left at night, the gates firmly locked behind them).
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from
‘Rooting Out Ancient Trees in Japan’
by Stephen Barber
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Japan has more ancient trees than anywhere in Europe, or even Asia. Here, the indigenous religion, Shinto, attaches divine status to giant, old trees, often indicated by woven straw rope draped around the trunk. They survive protected in the precincts of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, or in remote locations of this most mountainous country. In England we are proud of our ancient oaks, but Japan’s veteran trees can easily be twice the size, twice the age and twice the height. Their prodigious appearance takes your breath away.
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from
‘Meeting the Rose Rescuer Rescued by Roses:
Murray Radka in New Zealand’
by Martin Stott
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Importing plants to New Zealand is expensive and the regulations convoluted. So, replacing historic roses as they die and as nurseries stop growing them has become almost impossible. History teacher Murray Radka could see this rich heritage disappearing and decided to act. Over the course of a lifetime, he has created a sanctuary for two thousand old roses in his ten-acre garden at Brandy Hill in Alexandra, Otago. He has criss-crossed the country, haunting cemeteries and digging around the sites of old gold miners’ homes. Once he was helicoptered into an abandoned logging settlement to snatch cuttings. To many in New Zealand he is known as the ‘rose rescuer’, but after the tragic death of his son Craig in 2000, it was the roses that rescued him.
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from
‘Volunteers and Visitors:
Weeding Before a Wedding at La Macchina Fissa’
by Clark Lawrence
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Before hosting a September wedding party, two volunteers – the future bride and groom, Valentina and Matteo – helped me clear up the patio and garden. In August, we hid the plastic pots and removed all of the plants that looked dead, dying, or were just not meant to be seen at that time of year. That’s the beauty of pots – you can move them around and make temporary compositions that suit the season or mood. Visitors are often shocked by just how many pots I have collected over the years, and ask a series of questions that I find, as an ornery, compulsive collector, annoyingly irrelevant: ‘My God! How many plants do you have?’
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from
‘From the Home Patch’
by Tom Petherick
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It is worrying on the one hand to see that most of the systems that we have set up for ourselves as human beings are no longer fit for purpose (mainly because we were the ones that set them up), but comforting on the other to know that the bedrock of successful organic vegetable gardening, in existence for more than ten thousand years, still works a treat. The rotation of crops, first figured out by the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), somewhere in between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, is as effective now as it was then and remains widely practised today, even by conventional farmers.
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from
‘Digging with the Duchess: Subterranea’
by Sam Llewellyn
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Here at the Hope we have been giving much thought to rewilding. This is partly because we are slaves to fashion and partly because mowing lawns is a grisly business, resulting in the fumes of mower engines and large bills for blade repairs. Mostly, though, it is because after a long, hard winter the habit of laziness has become so deeply entrenched that getting out of bed in the morning is almost impossible; and thinking about rewilding, fish farming, the inner life of Van Gogh and anything else that crosses the mind is a fine substitute for action.
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The Garden Arts
Book and Music Reviews
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Gravetye Manor:
Twenty Years’ Work Round an Old Manor House
by William Robinson
reviewed by Judith Tankard
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Hedgelands:
A Wild Wander Around Britain’s Greatest Habitat
by Christopher Hart
reviewed by Rosemary Lindsay
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Lost Gardens of London
by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
reviewed by Peter Dale
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A Gardener’s World:
Flowers in Song
Alessandro Fisher (tenor) and Anna Tilbrook (piano)
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American Book Notes
by Judith Tankard
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Index to HORTUS
Volume Thirty-eight, Numbers 149–152 (2024)
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HORTUS 154 (Summer 2025)
will be published in June
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