Art Design 4 Garden

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Pottage Full Good

Now leeks are in season, for pottage full good,
That spareth the milch cow, and purgeth the blood.
Tusser in his Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie

Leek Soup; Take a sheeps head, prepared by having had the hair and wool scalded off and the head split in two, take out the brains, and put the head in three quarts of boiling water, add twelve large leeks, cut up into pieces about two inches long, simmer the whole gently for four hours. Mix smoothly as much flour or ground rice as will make the soup tolerably thick, mix it with the soup, and continue stirring until the whole is well done. Season to taste and serve hot.
Our War-Time Kitchen Garden Tom Jerrold (1917)

February afternoon light

The afternoon light streams into the living room, when the suns angle is low. It creates a perfect basking spot in late afternoon, when the view out the windows brings the garden in.

Appy Happle Day

Striped Beefing, Cornish Gilliflower, Bloody Ploughman, Greasy Butcher, Worcester Pearmain, Devonshire Quarrendon, Peasgood Nonsuch, Oaken Pin, Ashmeads Kernel, Hoary Morning, Blenheim Orange, Thorpes Peach, Winter Banana, Pitmaston Pineapple, Ducks Bill, Pigs Snout, Hens Turd, Cats Head, Broxwood Foxwhelp, Eynsham Dumpling, Darcy Spice, Leathercoat Russet, Tom Putt, William Crump, Transparent Codlin, Lodgemore Nonpareil, Phelps Favourite, Barnetts Beauty, Dredges Fame, Farmers Glory, Hanwell Souring, Sweet Cleave, Jackets & Waistcoats, Dumelows Seedling, Burr Knot, Ringwood Red, Hockings Green, Polly Whitehair, Crimson Victoria, Golden Knob, Black Dabinette, Mainds Costard, Howgate Wonder... Apple Day, October 21st.

A gothic hunt for heirloom daffodils

What am I doing wandering around a graveyard at dusk? In the little town of Ullapool in the north-west of Scotland. "I wonder if hell put this in the book, that the Donalds are mad, spend their evenings in cemeteries" muses my companion. We had been out for supper, a surprisingly good meal in a most unpromising place (reek of stale beer, plastic wood paneled walls, a bizarre painting of bare-breasted women in ancient Egyptian headresses holding a submarine). Passing a graveyard I jokingly suggested we go and look for old daffodils. "This is what we do all the time" said Duncan and Kate Donald, who collect heritage daffodil varieties and are always stopping by the side of the road, old gardens, and churchyards. So in we go. It is a spectacular location, overlooking the loch and the mountains. Kate bends over a clump, cautiously names it, bends over another one - she runs the stem through her fingers - the smoothness or otherwise of a stem can itself be a key to identification. Ornatus she suggests. Duncan says something about always keeping a spade in the back of the car. For one awful moment I wonder whether he is going to go and get it. I can already feel the eyes of the notoriously god-fearing folk of Ullapool upon us, suspecting us of digging up the Presbyterian dead.

Duncan and Kate Donald live and grow their plants in the incredible natural beauty of Loch Ewe on the north-west coast of Scotland. Rows of daffodil clumps are lined up around their cottage and an impressive wind turbine – a reminder that although the climate here is very mild, the wind is a constant. Kate had a childhood love of daffodils, which was rekindled by a scholarship year at Tresco Abbey Gardens on the Scilly Isles in the late 1970s. In 1983 she became RHS Daffodil Registrar, and because of this was asked by the National Trust for Scotland to create a National Collection of daffodils at Brodie Castle. Duncan adds “we got interested in making a collection of old daffodils in the 1980s... I was curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London... we had some bad storms then... a large tree blew over on top of a heritage daffodil collection... it really focussed our minds”.

Kate worked as RHS Daffodil Registrar between 1983 and 1986. “I was always more interested in the older varieties” she says, “old varieties which still come up in gardens decades after they have been planted shows they are survivors and therefore proven, unlike modern show varieties which are an unknown quantity”. “We made 1930-1935 our cut off point” explains Duncan, “why?... this was when Fortune derived varieties began to become important... we dont like orange cups, they all look like each other, we dont care for the Fortune look”. That leaves around 7,000 named varieties of which the Duncans now have 400 plus. He went on to explain how “we began to spend a lot of time looking at derelict cottage gardens, and then to ask garden owners for bulbs, and started to build up a reference collection.... we targeted garden owners through our various contacts, for example, people were so often very generous”.

In 1990 the couple moved to Scotland 1990, and as Duncan explains, “the children got used to the Easter holidays being daffodil time and endless garden visits”. Scottish gardens have often preserved the past better than English ones, and with the climate being a good one for daffodils, they have proved a fruitful territory for tracking down long-forgotten varieties. As time has moved on, and the daffodils have grown they are able to offer a number for sale – wide distribution is always aguarantee of survival. “We want to do for narcissus what Graham Stuart Thomas did for roses” says Duncan.

One particular property, Threave in Dumfries and Galloway, “has been a Rosetta Stone for us” says Duncan. The property had been owned by the Gordons, a family of Liverpool industrialists, who had used the castle as a summer residence. They had regularly bought bulbs over a long period and crucially kept good records. Additionally, in the 1960s an extensive set of notes were made of the old head gardeners knowledge. The Donalds were then in an excellent position to identify daffodils growing in the garden, so far they have named about ninety.

Over the years, the Donalds have worked out an effective methodology for identifying varieties in old gardens. They have systematically gone through old nursery catalogs, held by the RHSs Lindley Library in London, and assembled a database mapping the availability of varieties over time. “The collections for sale in the catalogs are particularly valuable” explains Duncan, “as these would have been bought in bulk and therefore most likely to still be around in gardens... if a garden is known to have been planted up at a particular date or between two dates, then it is possible to go to the catalogue database, and see what was available, narrowing down the possibilities... magazine articles (e.g. The Gardeners Chronicle) can be a useful source of information about when a particular garden was planted up if the garden itself has no record”. Gardens which do keep archives may sometimes contain invoices from nurseries or bulb dealers, listing varieties, or there may be old catalogues with names marked up.

There is no doubting the rigour of the Donalds approach. The changes in names resulting from the way daffodil classification systems have worked over the years and duplications in naming have resulted in much confusion. “We are very careful” says Duncan, “every clump is mapped, and has two aluminium labels with the name and accession number impressed onto them, one of which is buried with the bulbs”. He goes on to explain that flowers are systematically photographed, at different angles, and at different times – as flowers can change in appearance considerably over the period in which they are in flower. The eventual aim, apart from making as many varieties available for sale as possible, is a field guide to old daffodils, which will enable anyone with a garden which may have been planted up before the 1930s to identify their bulbs.


Sweetness - a 1939 Jonquil

The Donalds daffodils are sold through Croft 16.
more to read on my Amazon Kindle page, including essays, interviews and Dig, Plant and Bitch, the world’s first Soap Opera for gardeners.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Technical problems

Last week blogger deleted post from May 10th on. Did anyone else have this problem? Then when they reinstated the post all the comments were gone. I apologize if your comment was deleted, there was about 8 lost.

Tech problem number two was when my laptop got a pretty bad virus. I ended up having to do a clean install of windows 7. Thankfully I was able to backup most of my photos, except what I was going to post earlier this week. Everything was going well until the laptop just shut off today and would not turn on... I am really regretting that I did not just replace the laptop when it did almost the same thing last spring. Since then I learned to use an external hard drive but not to ditch windows :)

Look for a post on whats happening inside the polytunnel in a day or two. Bare with me as I am working on a dinosaur PC I dug out of the basement!

Ill end with a photo I took of a pair of Blue-winged Teal Ducks:

Growing basil easily

Last summer, I first tried growing basil in flats. It was a smashing success. Harvested often, I had lots of tender leaves to use in pesto and for flavoring. In contrast, the plants in the ground had their usual tough leaves, etc., although bees and other visitors enjoyed the flowers.

So this year, I duplicated the method. Fabulous, again. These flats are the multi-harvested one on the right, and the newly sown one on the left.

Its autumn so its daisy time

The garden now is daisy-heaven. There is an incredible array of this versatile family for late season flower. Most of them North American - the Asteraceae must have gone on an evolutionary binge during some or all of the interglacials of the last million years. Maybe it was the way plantlife was pushed down by the ice every few 100,000 years and had to reconquer territory that drove the evolution of prairie flora. Heliopsis helianthoides (above) is a classic daisy. Its common as a cottage garden plant in British country villages, one of those plants that gets divided up and given to people or sold in yogurt pots or plastic bags at the church fete, losing its identity in the process. I actually grew this from seed from Prairie Moon in Wisconsin, but I prefer the church fete version, which has darker foliage.

Aster Little Carlow is the gold standard aster - free flowering for a long time, disease free and slowly spreading. This lot are ok, but the row in the pic below have o-deed on this years rain and the general fertility of the soil and flopped horribly, which is most uncharacteristic of them. I got the glass ornament from a factory shop near Passau, Germany.

There are zillions of named cultivars of Aster novae-angliae. In fact you could make your own selection by stopping by the side of many an interstate in the eastern US and digging up a few clumps - the level of natural variation is quite amazing. But of course there arent any varieties called New Jersey Turnpike no.2 because it was enterprising Brit and German nurserymen in the early 20th century who realized their value as garden plants. They stand upright (usually) and flower brilliantly. Shame about the bare legs mind.

I was introduced to Aster pyrenaeus Lutetia by Chris Marchant of Orchard Dene nurseries, where all cool garden designers in southern England buy their perennials. It is one of Europes very few really garden-worthy asters, but a rare plant in nature apparently.

A. turbinellus is a new one for me, a bit disappointed so far, insubstantial and wishy-washy, but maybe i should be patient and see what it does next year.

This is a real favourite. Yes, I know that things you collect yourself are going to be regarded with as much objectivity as looking at ones own children. Aster puniceus though is a damned good plant - and it used to be in cultivation in Europe but died out sometime in the 20th century - heaven knows why as it seeds like crazy (but does not spread vegetatively). It flowers from late August on for up to two months and makes a nice misty blue backdrop for lots of other colours. I got the seed off a few plants by a roadside swamp in the Catskills sometime in the early 2000s.

Kalimeris mongolica is a member of an Asian genus close to Aster. Pretty, free-flowering but grows stems at an awkward angle. Some idiot, in a desperate attempt at making it memorable for the latin-name-phobic has named it the Genghis Khan aster. Which makes you think it spreads like mad and lays waste everything in sight, which it does not.

Not sure about Aster praealtus yet. Very robust, does not appear to spread (yet!) and very tall. Palest mauve flowers. Might be a good back of border or pretend-prairie plant.

There was a fashion for creating dwarf asters in the early 20the century, much of it driven by the need to have flowers on war graves. This is Purple Dome, originally German apparently. But, as you can see, they occasionally throw out normal shoots which grow so much taller.

Aster umbellatus is anything but dwarf, at nearly 2m. This lot have flopped badly but after our horrendously wet summer that is not entirely surprising. Masses of white flowers and an erratically spreading habit.

Helianthus Lemon Queen just has to be one of the best perennials of the last 20 years. Does not spread aggressively but very robust.

Its big sister is H. Sheilas Sunshine which is the very tall (3m +) at the back here, not quite in flower yet, but primrose greeny-yellow when it does. Fantastically strong, but I suspect too tall for most people- who lets face it do not like being shorter than their perennials. Eupatorium Orchard Dene in front - around the onepointsomething metre mark - again useful for those who cant cope with the 3m joe pye weeds.

Rudbeckia laciniata has turned out to be a ruthless thug, overwhelming other prairie perennials in one of my plots. So its going to be banished to a new project Im developing elsewhere.

Rudbeckia triloba is a short-lived species which smothers itself in flowers. Looks great with blue asters, like A. puniceus. So exuberant.This seed is from Prairie Moon too, with much more star-shaped flowers than the usual rather rounded form we see.

Rudbeckia fulgida Goldsturm is simply the best yellow, and a useful not overwhelming height.

Finally, forget not that goldenrods are daisies too. This is the view from my office, with Solidago rugosa as a component in some research plots looking at competition. Its much the best goldenrod, being robust and reliable but spreading only slowly, a graceful and elegant plant. There are many others though, which I am working my way through, and so many of them are quite unlike the thuggish S. canadensis types that have given them all a bad name.

And even more finally, Leucanthemella serotina, a Hungarian species which flowers pretty much last of all.