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| Extracts From The Current Issue |
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from
The Editor’s introduction to
HORTUS 155, Autumn 2025
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Sad to say, it’s been more than fifty years since I last set foot on the magical Ionian island of Corfu. I learned to water-ski in Ipsos Bay where, then, just two small family-run tavernas had the entire panoramic view, I dived for terracotta shards in the bluest of clear waters off Palaiokastritsa, ate frugal picnics on the then deserted beach at Nissaki, partly scaled Mt Pantokrator, and acquainted myself with the island’s rich fauna and flora (including its many aromatic wild herbs) in the precipitous hinterland . . . Time now, surely, for HORTUS to investigate – hence our five-day tour scheduled for 13–17 April next year…Details from Boxwood Tours, 1 West Street, Buckingham MK18 1Hl. Telephone: 01280 430175; Email: mail@boxwoodtours.co.uk
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from
‘Tradescant’s Diary’
by
Hugh Johnson
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Someone asks, ‘How do you keep thinking up things to write about?’ Another asks, ‘Why?’ When you’ve done something for fifty years, the real question is: ‘Why stop?’ So I won’t. Not yet. Lately, I’ve been remembering the times when Trad has strayed beyond his usual remit and ventured into some actual gardening – even garden designing. Sadly, I have no portfolio of blueprints. Just memories, a few regrets, and a feeling of satisfaction.
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from
‘Our Garden Birds: No. 23: The Jay’
by
Adam Ford
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There is something funereal about crows and their relatives. Black is the colour we naturally associate with them, whether from seeing a Hitchcock film or watching a lone character strutting across the lawn. Apart from the orange of a chough’s curved bill, the black and white of a magpie, or the hint of a purple sheen on a raven, the birds of this family all seem to be dressed like judges.
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from
‘Nerines in the Garden and in the Greenhouse’
by Malcolm Allison
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Nerine bowdenii was a feature of my grandmother’s Surrey garden in the 1970s. A committed member of the local church flower rota, she made extensive use of the flowers and foliage from her garden, and she loved to use the nerines in October. I too loved the plants, with their strong, straight stems emerging from the bare soil to provide a burst of intense pink as all the vegetation around was taking on the yellows and browns of autumn senescence. It was in the 1980s, I was not like other teenagers and persuaded my mother to take me across Worcestershire, where we lived, to one of the October open days of the Nerine Nurseries in Welland near Malvern. It was here that Tony Norris had assembled an outstanding collection of nerines, some from gardens across the British Isles, others raised through his own breeding efforts, and yet others from wild collections he had made on a number of expeditions to South Africa.
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from
‘Agapanthus: Stately, Desirable, Strong and Sophisticated’
by Lorraine Harrison
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The stately agapanthus is one of those especially desirable plants that looks good and gives something at all stages of its development. Importantly for me, it is also firmly in the category of plants that die beautifully. From the first appearance of the dagger-edged tips of its leaves in spring, until the time comes for it to be cut to the ground in midwinter, it has something pleasing to offer the eye – something of interest and note.
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from
‘Wood-pasture, Pollards and the Prodigious Oaks of England’
by Stephen Barber
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Early in May, my aptly named friend Benedict Pollard, who raises oaklings from the acorns of ancient oaks, made me an offer I could not refuse. ‘I’ve spied what looks like a massive unmapped oak, visible from the road. Would you like to visit it together?’ We took off for the Oxford/Warwick county border and there, some fifty yards off a nondescript stretch of the A3400, standing in a cultivated field, stood a solitary English oak, branching low with a wide, thickset base. From a distance, the girth of a veteran or ancient oak is deceptive. But as we approach it is obvious this is a large tree, its trunk distended by outgrowths of swollen burrs – the result of centuries of epicormic growth. Such burrs are often found on open-grown oaks because of periodic pollarding, or the persistent attentions of livestock, either of which would stimulate the growth of adventitious buds on the trunk.
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from
‘Seeds of Sarajevo:
A Week-long Journey Through Central Bosnia’s Living Landscape’
by Patrick Bogue
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. . . We threw down our sleeping bags and our host brought us cold Niksic’ko beer and a very hearty meal. No signal. No one else around. We were so tired from the adrenaline of the journey we couldn’t talk much. By morning, the whole place came into view. The surrounding forest was dense and layered, with long slopes stretching down into deep scars of valleys. Pines dominated the higher ground, the lower canopy was mixed – beech, hornbeam, sorbus, birch, field maple. We set off walking, taking one of the old paths that carved along a ridge. The air was dry, the light was flat and clear. We stopped often to check plants – patches of wild thyme, dried orchids, alpine thrift, an understory of young hazel. The forest was active but not dramatic. A scops owl was suddenly disturbed by us as we snapped deadwood underfoot. Signs of human use were everywhere: cut stumps, wild goat tracks, occasional plastic sheeting weighed down with cement bags and stones. People were still in this landscape, just not visibly
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from
‘Postcard from Jutland’
by Rosemary Lindsay
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Skagen . . . in the district of Vendsyssel is the northernmost town on Jutland, mainland Denmark, and is its second largest fishing port. This is where the two seas meet at Grenen – the Skagerrak and the Kattegat – and the turbulent collision of the two is dramatic. On a recent visit to Jutland, we walked to Grenen through the dunes. The beaches on either side are wide and sandy and one can walk from them towards the foredunes, which are dune ridges formed when wind-blown sand is trapped by vegetation, primarily grasses and tough shrubs like gorse and broom, adapted to the harsh, sandy environment, and the constant wind which keeps the sand on the move.
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from
‘The Paris Garden of Robert Martinson’
by Caspar Giorgio Williams
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In a shaded Parisian courtyard, Robert Martinson has assembled a potted garden made from fragments of the places he has lived in, visited and cared for, and so every plant has a history. I first saw Robert Martinson’s garden, in the courtyard of an apartment building in Saint Germain-des-Pre?s, three years ago. Everything is planted in pots of various sizes, arranged in clusters or staggered, depending on the season and what is growing. The light is shaded. Some pots are pushed into corners, others line the perimeter. They are frequently moved.
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from
‘A Miraculous Restoration:
The Gardens of Camden Park, New South Wales’
by Howard Tanner
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Imagine the fledgling colony of New South Wales in the 1820s, with the Blue Mountains traversed into the hinterland for the first time in the previous decade, and with food production and economic prosperity as essential concerns. At that time, some fifty miles from the ‘town’ of Sydney (it gained city status in 1842), the Macarthur family were creating a country estate that they named Camden Park. Their experiments with imported merino sheep and vine cuttings led to the successful production of wool and wine in Australia, which greatly assisted general rural prosperity. At Camden an imposing classical house was proposed and finally completed in 1835. Its grounds were improved by the introduction of three feet or so of topsoil brought up from the banks of the Nepean River half a mile away to ensure a successful garden setting.
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from
‘Don’t Fence Me In:
Walls, Hedges, Fences and Gates’
by Peter Dale
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Not quite a defining feature of English gardens, but certainly a frequently visible one, is how they are physically demarcated by walls, fences, hedges, gates. We give this element barely a moment’s thought . . . unless as English men and English women we visit the US. Or vice versa, Americans come here, garden visiting, and report on what they see. In Alabama, Oregon, Connecticut or Ohio, a front garden (‘yard’) – a clearly demarcated, set-apart space before a private dwelling – is not necessarily the norm. In some streets indeed it will be a rarity. There, to enclose was – and may still be – to violate the unwritten but powerful mantra of openness, of space privately owned but visually shared, of commonality, almost of commonwealth. It’s a true badge of the spirit of a Brave New World’s republican (small r) credentials. In the British Isles, quite the contrary is the norm. The British garden still lives up to, still goes with the misty spirit of the word garden’s very origins (in yard, gird – the place enclosed). It’s true that in the new post-war towns of the 1950s and ’60s – Basildon, Milton Keynes, Hemel Hempstead, Harlow, and so on – open frontages were vigorously introduced, indeed enforced, but not without precipitating a revolution (albeit a failed one eventually) in what property-owning was supposed to mean to ordinary householders.
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from
‘Roses Beyond the Garden Wall’
by Michael Marriott
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While our first thoughts of roses concern their beauty as garden shrubs and climbers, they also have enormous significance in just about all parts of our culture, and in just about all parts of the world. You will find them in religion, politics, medicine, love and romance, fashion, perfume, the legal system, as a culinary ingredient, and in all the arts. Roses are often thought of as somehow being very European garden plants, but in fact wherever they are found growing wild – north of the Equator from Japan to North America – there is a very long tradition of incorporating them into the local cultures. In Iran the rose is planted everywhere and seen plentifully around cities – especially Shiraz – figuring frequently in art and poetry and in urban culture generally. There is the legend about how roses became red: a nightingale supposedly fell in love with a rose, inspiring it to change its tune from croaking to the chirping of the beautiful song we hear today. The nightingale’s love for the rose was so intense that it pressed itself hard on a thorn, piercing its heart. The blood turned the rose red.
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from
The Education of Russell Page’
by Graeme Moore
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In a career spanning more than fifty years Russell Page became the most celebrated English garden designer of his generation. He worked in Europe, America – North and South – Australia and elsewhere, mostly for private clients who valued their privacy, and few of us will have had the chance to visit any of his gardens in person. Many of us, however, will know something about his gardens and his style from his book, The Education of a Gardener, and indeed his reputation probably owes more to the book than to his gardens. It is both enchanting and informative, combining memoir, with garden history and a wealth of reflections on garden design and planting, illustrated by a small selection of his own photographs in black and white. It was well received when it first appeared in 1962 and successful enough to justify several reprints during his lifetime, but its author eschewed the celebrity that was awaiting him, and continued with his very exclusive professional practice away from the glare of publicity. He became something of an enigmatic recluse like the American novelist J. D. Salinger, who was also an adherent of Sufism which teaches an ascetic and contemplative way of life. er and the manoeuvres of ephemerids rising to meet their doom in the pillar of swallows that whirls into the empyrean.
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from
‘From the Home Patch’
by Tom Petherick
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From a brutal hungry gap, the 2025 season moved quickly into a sublime summer with plenty of sunshine, high temperatures but little in the way of rain. They were challenging times for farmers, growers and gardeners. Hosepipe bans were enforced around the country on account of emptying reservoirs and heat domes. Rain was entirely absent throughout June and only variable in July with isolated, localised downpours. Temperatures remained very good, constantly in the low to mid-twenties, occasionally much higher. The response of certain groups of plants to yet another set of unusual weather conditions was interesting.
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from
Digging with the Duchess: Lwah’
by Sam Llewellyn
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‘Ah me,’ said the Duchess with a sigh like a breeze in an oakwood. ‘How one wishes one was elsewhere.’ This is the kind of thing she is always on about, and the kind of sound effect that accompanies the tirade. But at this precise moment you could see her point. The Hope’s garden had passed the point of high summer some months previously, and was now in practically stratospheric summer. The roses had been magnificent. The salvias had roared out of the ground. The sun had blazed down from a pure sky, nearly obscured at buddleia time by rolling clouds of peacocks and red admirals and commas. Day after day it had blazed, until the salvias began to lose heart, and the roses emitted muzzled cries for water, and the level in the ponds sank until the blanket weed coming up met the surface coming down and the whole works turned into a lukewarm greenish soup. By the time the Duchess started doing her sighing, just about everything had died except for some fine pelargoniums originating in Tresco and therefore used to harsh conditions, and an avocado tree grown from a stone in the compost heap which could scarcely believe its luck.
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The Garden Arts
Book Reviews
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The Green Fuse: Essays in Making Sense of Gardens
by Peter Dale
reviewed by Rod Madocks
*
Renaturing: Small Ways to Wild the World
by James Canton
reviewed by Barbara Segall
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HORTUS 156, Winter 2025
will be published in December
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