I've just got back from a 10-day geology fieldtrip, where I was one of the staff members driving the little buggers undergrads around the various outcrops. As I wasn't actively involved in the education of them, I was able to enjoy some of the non-geological aspects of the area as well as the geological.
And pretty much the first plant I noticed was this Euphorbia characias "Black Pearl":
You'd pay a lot of money for one of these in a garden centre - in fact, I can only find that variety available for mail order (and of course the relatively cheap £5 per plant is doubled in price by shipping at least). Yet they were growing wild as easily as dandelions do in the UK:
There was also Myrtis communis:
And I found the teeniest tiniest little daffodil I have ever seen, with flowers the size of my thumbnail:
Here's a planting scheme that wouldn't look out of place in a Chelsea show garden:
And I bet it isn't a cultivated one (although the marigolds are very popular potted plants in Huesca).
The most prevalent plants seemed to be the rosemary though, and they had the audacity to cover the outcrops the students needed to see:
They're some pretty big plants there, and I reckon that, while you can pick up a rosemary plant for £5 in Homebase, they'd cost a lot of money at that size and would take ages to get that big over here. I was waxing lyrical about the rosemary, when one of the undergrads in my car said "They're weeds in Italy". Which made me wonder why we prize so many different plants that are as common as muck overseas.
Then again, isn't everyone's prize plant specimen just another person's weed?
And pretty much the first plant I noticed was this Euphorbia characias "Black Pearl":
You'd pay a lot of money for one of these in a garden centre - in fact, I can only find that variety available for mail order (and of course the relatively cheap £5 per plant is doubled in price by shipping at least). Yet they were growing wild as easily as dandelions do in the UK:
There was also Myrtis communis:
And I found the teeniest tiniest little daffodil I have ever seen, with flowers the size of my thumbnail:
Here's a planting scheme that wouldn't look out of place in a Chelsea show garden:
And I bet it isn't a cultivated one (although the marigolds are very popular potted plants in Huesca).
The most prevalent plants seemed to be the rosemary though, and they had the audacity to cover the outcrops the students needed to see:
They're some pretty big plants there, and I reckon that, while you can pick up a rosemary plant for £5 in Homebase, they'd cost a lot of money at that size and would take ages to get that big over here. I was waxing lyrical about the rosemary, when one of the undergrads in my car said "They're weeds in Italy". Which made me wonder why we prize so many different plants that are as common as muck overseas.
Then again, isn't everyone's prize plant specimen just another person's weed?
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