Green Grow the Modular Walling System, Oh.

On my travels around the country and in particular at various shows I have met a lot of green walls.

They have varied from magnificent multi-storey affairs planted by Patrick Blanc (in particular the side of the Athenaeum Hotel in Piccadilly) to a collection of plastic pots nailed to a fence. I have even made a film on the subject with Joe and Cleve.

At Grand Designs Live last week there was a very good, densely planted wall of ferns and one set out in boxes so it looked like a series of framed pictures. They have been, and doubtless will be again, at Chelsea Flower Show and all points in between.

The question really is, are they a good idea? The answer, and this is the case for many of life’s larger questions, maybe. Or sometimes. They are brilliant if they work but they, like this blog and many other things, are almost entirely dependent on technology. Without the help of irrigation systems, timers and pumps they are completely useless as they will expire in double quick time. They may be fashionable and they may be a marvellous way of “greening our urban environment”* but they are not at all sustainable.

In any sense of the word at it is a word that has a lot of senses, not all of them totally sensible. If you get my drift.

A green roof, on the other hand, is a much more self supporting entity when built well and can carry on undisturbed and unmolested by human involvement. It will get a bit weedy but it will survive on rainwater and will hum with sound of buzzing insects on a warm day.

So, my point is, having roundly dissed the idea of green walls, that I have just installed one for a client. This is okay because we are both under no illusions at all and we realise that it will need maintenance. It looks marvellous occupying, as it does, a high empty wall in deep shade beneath an overhang of thick thatch. Beneath it are some raised beds and a low square pond both of which have been clad in lead – which looks darn sexy. It was installed as a sort of modular pocket arrangement by a company called Treebox. The plants are tough and resilient (Bergenias, Vinca, Polystichum, Lirope etc) and are trickled with water for about two minutes every twelve hours.

I like it.

* That phrase is in inverted commas because I would hate you to think that I would ever write anything so dreadful without either a gun to my head or my tongue shoved firmly into my cheek.

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Yellow peril

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Nature is quite remarkable sometimes.

The weather warms up a bit and suddenly every road verge and scrap of spare ground turns from grubby green to a livid yellow. This is the triumphant march of the dandelions, make the most of it for very soon the council mowers will be out in force and all that yellow will be shorn.

They are a very opportunistic weed, popping up really fast and swiftly going to seed before anybody has really realised quite how many of the darned things there are. In gardens they are a pest but on roadside verges they are quite jolly.

Quite interesting facts about dandelions include:
The common name comes from Dent de Lion, French for lions tooth.Other countries have other names: in Bulgaria it is called ’deaf’ because the seeds are rumoured to cause hearing loss.
Portuguese children also call them “o teu pai é careca” (your dad is bald) due to a game which consisted on blowing on a dandelion. If it was left with no seeds, that would mean the other kid’s dad was bald. I must remember to play this game with Joe Swifts children.

It can be used in salads although tastes pretty nasty unless blanched which involves covering a plant with a bucket so it sends out pale and etiolated leaves. Even then it is not really a massive asset to a sandwich.

Other culinary uses include roasting and grinding the roots to make an ersatz coffee.

In the language of flowers the dandelion symbolises happiness and is a promise of total faithfulness. NB Gentlemen, This does not necessarily mean that a bouquet of dandelions will guarantee a good evening.

It is apparently good for treating urinary tract infections.

That may be more than you ever wanted to know about dandelions but, here at Crocus, our mission is to keep you, the browsing public, informed and on the ball.

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On the Beech

I know, I know: this blog post is late. Again. Sorry

In my defence I have been rushing around like a blue-arsed fly* but I also realise that that is no excuse for such neglect of duty.

Anyway.

On my travels around the place I have been heartened – as I am sure you are too – by the leaves springing onto trees all over the country. On Thursday I was near High Wycombe and was stopped dead in my tracks by a beech tree in a field **. It was just coming into leaf and had that haze of lettuce green against a fabulous blue sky. The tree itself leans close to the ground on one side and is an almost perfect specimen.

Tall, dashing, commanding, handsome and just a little world weary. Everything I have often wished to be but have only managed the last .

Beech are lovely things – and adaptable. Plant one in the forest or a field and it will grow into a magnificent deciduous tree. Plant it in the garden as a hedge or topiary and it will keep its leaves for most of the winter: brown leaves admittedly, but still fine. The young leaves can be added to salads and are quite sweet and cabbagey or you can make a liqueur called Beech Leaf Noyau by steeping the leaves in vodka (or gin or white rum) for a few weeks, straining it, adding a bit of sugar syrup and  there you go….

Other good things about beech: good firewood, excellent for nesting, great climbing trees and before paper was invented most Northern European societies used beech wood for writing. The word “book” apparently is a derivation of the ancient words for beech.

 

 

* This is an expression which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was invented by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1970. I would like to invent an expression that ends up in the OED, it would be interesting.

** You know that you are middleaged when you are struck dumb by trees.

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Que Lonicera, Lonicera. Whatever Will Be, Will Be

I am not usually an intolerant fellow.

I like to think that I am pretty laid back about most things. I do not get terribly agitated by politics (apart from the usual sweary despair that most politicians excite amongst reasonable people) and can usually overlook even the most heinous sartorial hiccup in others. I shrug off bad poems about cats and am left largely unrumpled by travel chaos.

However, there are certain plants that drive me to the edge, mostly because there are so many better alternatives. I could rant my way into a padded cell over the Forsythia and Ribes combo but will restrain myself on this occasion and confine my ramblings to the shrubby Lonicera.

Lonicera ntida or Lonicera pileata are about as far away from the usual Lonicera (or honeysuckle) as a slice of Camembert is from an open cast bauxite mine. Whereas most honeysuckles are the stuff of poetry and longing. To me they conjure up images of quaintly thatched cottages with doors framed by climbers or scrambling Shakespearean woodbines beside forest paths. Equally, the winter honeysuckle (Lonicera fagrantissima) is another heavenly being, not climbing but shrubby and tinged with the scent of saturnine debauch.

But let us return to the black sheep of the family. These are small leaved evergreen shrubs which you will find populating almost every supermarket or industrial estate car park in almost every town in the country. You may well not have noticed them because they are remarkably unremarkable. They are much appreciated by the less imaginative town planners because they do an admirable job catching litter as it blows across the car parks. They are also green. All year.

So in that position and under those circumstances they serve an admirable purpose. They are like benign bacteria: working away quite happily in the background. However, in the same way that you are unlikely to invite bacteria to share a light luncheon you should not give these Loniceras room in your garden. They are ridiculously dull and make a very unstable hedge.

And in particular you should avoid a variety called Lonicera ntida Baggessens Gold. It is not gold, it is the colour of urine in a pudding basin.

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National Gardening Week

Today is Day Four of National Gardening Week. I should really have written about it earlier in the week but I have two excuses (a) I have stuffed my back by carelessly lifting a sack of seed compost (b) I have spent most of the week driving from one side of the country to another. I have been from Northamptonshire to Sussex, Somerset, Devon and Sutton Coldfield.

Therefore I have singularly failed to conform to the criteria of this week by actually doing any gardening. I have stood in clients gardens and waved feebly at things while fumbling for ibuprofen but I have not muddied my fingers at all. Do not let this put you off: do as I say not as I do*

This is the second year of National Gardening Week – last year the weather was sadly vile – instituted by the fine folk at the Royal Horticultural Society to encourage the nation to get out there and get on with it. All this week there have been things going on in the RHS gardens as well as much kerfuffle over planting flowers for pollinating insects, horticultural careers as well as garden openings, workshops, vegetable planting and composting. In short all things gardeny.

There are details here.

Today I am on the road again but at the end of the road lies the delicious prospect of the year’s first RHS Show – in Cardiff. I have never been before which is pretty disgraceful: I have been to Cardiff once but I have absolutely no recollection of why or when. I think it involved lunch. The show runs all weekend and is the beginning of a great avalanche of gardening that continues on to Malvern, Chelsea, Birmingham, Hampton Court and Tatton Park.

See you there. Unless you are gardening in which case you are excused.

 

* The origin of this phrase may be Anglo-Saxon. “Ac theah ic wyrs do thonne ic the lære ne do thu na swa swa ic do, ac do swa ic the lære gyf ic the wel lære” which, of course, translates into:   “Although I do worse than I teach you,do not do as I do, but do as I teach you if I teach you well.” I am sure that the utterance of this ultimatum by pompous, smugly self satisfied Saxons provoked as much irritation as it does today.

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Kitchen Gardens (and Boudoir Borders)

I have a confession to make to you.

The care and nurture of indoor plants is, to me, a complete mystery. I have planted conservatories before with moderate success – odds of the survival of the plants are increased if their care is swiftly removed from my field of responsibility – and for a brief moment in my life I had the contract to supply and maintain healthy, oxygenating plants for an office of solicitors in London. Plants promote a good of working environment and a convenient tipping place for coffee dregs and (in those days) fag ends. After a short period of time I was dismissed and they sensibly decided to go down the artificial plants route.

Show me a Ficus benjamina and, within hours, it will have lost its leaves. Put me anywhere near a Sanseveria and I will almost definitely do it some damage.

In other words, do not look to me to keep the Aspidistra flying.

The sort of houseplant I like are the ones which can be used, abused and disposed of in relatively short order. My father-in-law produces a couple of boxes of large cyclamen around Christmas which serve two purposes (a) they brighten the place up (b) they don’t mind the icy draught that whips through the hall. Next up are forced bulbs: Hyacinths* and Paperwhite Narcissii which smell almost too sweetly in a confined space but a waft of winter scent as you walk into the house is pretty special. When they are finished with, they too go on the compost heap.

We have been given various Cymbidiums and moth orchids over the years which are almost always marvellous but never knowingly flower again. Call me a pagan but I cannot really be doing with indoor gardening – I had an orange gerbera on my desk at one point but chucked it when I realised that my keyboard was sticky with aphids.

I would rather have a bunch of something in a jam jar: at the moment it is two hellebore flowers floating in some water **.

Terribly sophisticated and easier to deal with than a Justicia brandegeeana.
* Hyacinths should never be allowed into gardens. They are really only suitable for pots as the flowers are just too waxy and unnatural looking for borders. I am sure they look marvellous on hillsides in Turkmenistan or Israel but that does not work in Telford or Ipswich.

** Mostly because that is the only flower in the whole garden.

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Where the Girls are so pretty….

I have just returned from Ireland where I did a whistle stop lecture tour – three gigs in three days between Dublin and Cork. I had rather hoped that I might get the chance to go and visit a couple of gardens but it was very cold and the Spring still seems to be on hold.

Which has rather scuppered my cunning plan to entertain you with tales and photographs of blossoming Magnolias and seas of golden daffodils amongst the gambolling lambs and emerald fields. We did go for a bit of a walk through Dublin that was supposed to end up in Phoenix Park but were defeated by driving snow. Therefore we had no choice but to go into a very warm cafe to eat cakes and drink coffee. Which is, I suppose, one of the keen gardener’s secondary preoccupations.

The Phoenix Park is rather a fine place – I once spent an hour sitting under a tree there waiting for somebody to pick me up* – consisting of about 1700 acres of trees, grasslands and the houses of the very important (the President of Ireland and the US Ambassador for a start). The park is smack bang in the middle of Dublin and provides habitat for assorted wildlife (there is a conservation area called The Furry Glen**) while a herd of fallow deer have been here since the seventeenth century. There are monuments, sports pitches a zoo and a Victorian flower garden..

To avoid confusion I should also explain that there is another Phoenix Park which is the location for the filming of Endless Love, a South Korean teen romance series.

This is a particularly flannel laden post as I did not even get there, suffice to say it is well worth a trip, maybe you could go in June for Bloom2013 – the Irish equivalent of the Chelsea Flower Show. It runs from 30th May-3rd June.

I am almost certain it will not still be snowing.

*By ‘Pick me up” I mean that I was waiting for a friend to collect me in his car, rather than waiting to be ‘picked up’ in any other sense of the phrase. If that was the case I would possibly still be waiting there.

** Hmmmm…….

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Funkadelic

Is it right that my feet should be quite this cold in March? It seems unfair that this month not only came in like a lion but is exiting without changing its costume. I was going to write about my rapidly emerging daffodils and how they are always out for my daughter’s birthday but, alas, I cannot as they have disappeared under another blasted snowdrift and are showing a marked reluctance in the area of flowering.

Pity as I was going to go on about picking them when she was a chubby fingered toddler which would have melted your heart and thoroughly embarrassed her – if ever she chose to read her father’s drivellings. Which is unlikely.

So instead I have been thinking about literary gardeners, in particular the fearsome Angus McAllister who was Lord Emsworth’s gardener in the Blandings Castle novels of the great P.G.Wodehouse. I suppose that there must be some people in the English speaking world who have not read Wodehouse. I pity them and urge them to mend their ways at their earliest convenience.

McAllister was very protective of his domain and held strong views on a number of subjects – not least the picking of flowers, a habit upon which he frowned. Wodehouse’s description of the gardens goes as follows “They were bright with Achillea, Bignonia radicans, Campanula, Digitalis, Euphorbia, Funkia*, Gypsophila, Helianthus, Iris, Liatris, Monarda, Phlox drummondii, Salvia, Thalictrum, Vinca and Yucca. But the devil of it was that Angus McAllister would have a fit if they were picked. Across the threshold of this Eden the ginger whiskers of Angus McAllister lay like a flaming sword.

As a general rule, the procedure for getting flowers out of Angus McAllister was as follows. You waited till he was in one of his rare moods of complaisance, then you led the conversation gently round to the subject of interior decoration, and then choosing your moment, you asked if he could possibly spare a few to put in vases.”

He was, as the name suggests, Scots.

Other fictional gardeners include Samwise Gamgee (the hobbit who went off with Frodo in Lord of the Rings), Chance the gardener played by Peter sellers in ‘Being There’ and Pat, the White Rabbit’s gardener in Alice in Wonderland (who may well have been a guinea pig).  There are two in Shakespeare’s Richard II who spent some time pruning ‘apricocks’ which sounds alarming.

There are others but I will save them for another snowy miserable day when I am again starved of blog material.

* The picture above is of an emerging Hosta, previously known as a Funkia.

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Gardening with an iPhone

This is a slightly biased post but the sticklers amongst you will be pleased to know that it does have something to do with gardens.

Do you have an iPhone?

Well, if you are one of the many millions and are also interested in gardens then I have hot news: there is a new app called, for simplicity, Gardens which should amuse you.

It does two things. Allow me to create a scenario…you are walking around a garden somewhere and are suddenly captivated by a particular plant. What is it?

“Ah*” you cry “I must remember this. You reach for camera and notebook and after some jiggling take a picture and transcribe the plants name from label to page. Or you might take a photograph of the smeary label. When you return home you are distracted and when you eventually download the picture you are unable to match it up with the note, or the rain has fallen and smudged the ink or, while rewarding yourself with tea and Victoria sponge a dollop of jam has dropped onto the page and your note is obscured by bits of raspberry. Ring a bell? It does with me.

Fear not the Gardens App is there to rescue you from such embarrassments. It allows you to take the picture on your iPhone** and then to add a caption and stash it in a clever little scrapbook under whatever headings you wish – Flowers, Vegetables, Garden Visits, Plants that Look Like The Pope etc etc. Whatever you wish.

In addition to this little bit of public service there are add on Magic Parcels (also known as Golden Nuggets). These consist of neat little packages of information, pictures and video to help you with practical gardening. They only cost a pound or so each (we have to charge something as all this loveliness costs money to make) and I promise that you will be dead impressed. At the moment we have Ian Le Gros from Hyde Hall showing you how to prune Roses, Mark Diacono and Chris Smith training fruit trees (Mark also juggles rotten apples), Ben Dark propagating, Kate Bradbury chatting up birds, and the unutterably gorgeous Laetitia Maklouf walking you through winter window boxes.

And as if that was not too much to handle you can also easily buy useful stuff from Crocus with just a couple of taps on your screen.

So. There you go. A little bit of what you fancy to liven up a dreary March. You can get it here or read more about it here ***

 

* If reading this in France you might say “Zut, alors” .

** Soon those of you in possession of Android phones will also be able to play.

*** Of course if you have an iPad your cup will run over as we can also steer you towards intoGardens which is even sexier. It lives here.

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A Frond in Need….


I had rather hoped that a lightning visit to Scotland would give me fuel for a whole series of Caledonian blogs laden with lively horticultural instruction combined with a chuckly anecdote about something or other. However,as I spent a large proportion of the weekend dancing rather than gardening I have singularly failed in that particular ambition.I can, however, show the bruises from a particularly vigorous Orcadian reel or I can treat you to a step perfect St Bernard’s Waltz.

But that does not really fit the brief, does it?

Instead I will tell you about a garden: a very wonderful place called the Ascog FerneryI had rather hoped that a lightning visit to Scotland would give me fuel for a whole series of Caledonian blogs laden with lively horticultural instruction combined with a chuckly anecdote about something or other. However,as I spent a large proportion of the weekend dancing rather than gardening I have singularly failed in that particular ambition.I can, however, show the bruises from a particularly vigorous Orcadian reel or I can treat you to a step perfect St Bernard’s Waltz. But that does not really fit the brief, does it? Instead I will tell you about a garden:a very wonderful place called the http://www.ascoghallfernery.co.uk/”>Ascog Fernery on the Isle of Bute (where the dancing occurred).

This is an outwardly rather unobtrusive building lurking in the gardens; half buried walls with a glass roof. There is absolutely no indication of how splendid it is until you step through the thick wooden door. Inside it is one of those very precious places that make you physically stop and gasp with surprise; there are tinkling waterfalls, white pebble mosaic paths and everywhere you look ferns of every possible shape and size.

It was not always so.

In 1986 the house was in a state and the garden was submerged under a ten foot high jumble of self sown trees, knotweed and brambles. One day the new owners, Wallace and Kath Fyfe, found a set of steps leading down into a dark area full of rotting vegetation and broken glass. Like the handsome Prince they had cut their way through a tangle of thorns and stumbled upon a sleeping beauty.

The decision was made to try and restore this jewel to its previous glory. The Fyfes slowly removed the slime of ages to uncover ponds, paths and, lurking under the debris a magnificent specimen of the Australian tree fern -Todea barbara – that is estimated to be at least 1,000 years old. They got a grant from Historic Scotland to restore the roof and help from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh to restock the ferns. They were both keen amateur gardeners but they now had to get to grips with a whole new group of unusual plants. In exchange for academic and conservation access to the collection the Botanic Gardens discovered as much as possible about the original plantings from the slim resources available and also suggested some newer varieties to plug the gaps. Soon Wallace was beetling back and forth from Edinburgh, his car crawling with rare and exotic specimens.

Ferns are prehistoric plants (their petrified corpses form the majority of the seven billion tons of coal in the world) and, as a result, are pretty tough cookies. The building is perfectly suited to satisfy most of their needs – humidity, damp feet and a little shade – so maintenance (though time consuming) is relatively straightforward. The Fernery is laid out as closely as possible to the original layout with particular reference to geography – the plants are laid out in groups from every continent except Antarctica. They also come in the most phenomenal range of shapes from majestic six-foot fronds to what look like small damp splodges adhering to the walls.

Sadly Wallace and Kath are no longer with us but the Fernery is run by their daughter, Susie, along with her husband Graham Alcorn who (fortunately) is the very knowledgeable deputy head gardener at Mount Stuart, just up the road.

It is only an hour and a bit from Glasgow – including the ferry ride so easily accessible.

Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that there will be dancing.

http://www.ascoghallfernery.co.uk/

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