I'm In Love...

...With my garden! On Sunday I could stand it no longer. For three years, Hubster has trudged, tripped and cursed his way around Jurassic Park hanging out the washing on a line suspended 6'6" above the plants. It was clear the washing line needed to go.


I replaced it with an extendable line, screwed in to the apple tree at one end and a miserable ash tree that not a single resident will miss if it "accidentally" falls down at the other end. This now means Jurassic Park never has to cope with having knickers unceremoniously dangling over it, and more crucially, we don't have to worry about our upstairs neighbour soaking the laundry when he waters his plants!


So I've interspersed in this post some photos of Jurassic Park, approaching its absolute peak. Enjoy. I'm going to go outside and embrace my unemployment with a margarita and a good book.

Inherited Plants

I mentioned that my mum visited me a couple of months ago, and brought three massive clumps of plants - two Geranium (pink and blue) and a Convallaria.

Mum had taken them from Grannie and Grandpa's garden when they had to clear the house, and grown them on in her own garden, and now that her garden is being completely redesigned, she lifted them for me to have, on the condition that she can have a clump of each later.


On Thursday, I saw the first flower on the Geranium open. And coincidentally, Thursday would have been Grannie's 90th birthday. I'm not very good on my flowers though. Is it "Johnson's Blue"?

I love the fact that these plants are the same ones that have been in three generations of gardeners' gardens, and that I get to go on enjoying them. And if I keep on dividing them, there'll be enough for my little brother to have some when he's able to have a garden.

And now I'm wondering if the pink variety will flower for what would have been Grandpa's 93rd birthday this coming Tuesday.

The Plant That Pulls A Sickie

I spotted this in my feeds yesterday:

The plant that pretends to be ill

Makes me wonder if all my ferns are secreting silvery slime all over their fronds to deter slugs from eating them. Except that bits of my ferns are missing, so clearly it isn't working.

Friday Fern #27

Here's a delicious one for you on this lovely Friday morning. So delicious that the slugs ate an entire frond. Grrr.

Anyway, this is Asplenium bulbiferum "Maori Princess". And it's one of the odder ferns I've seen. I bought it from <Fibrex Nurseries at the end of April (and if you're out in the Cotswolds and happen to like ferns, or indeed like ferns and happen to be out in the Cotswolds, I highly recommend a visit).


"Maori Princess" is unusual - its fronds actually look a bit Adiantum-like, perhaps crossed with a Polystichum. But what marks it out as so different is the little nubbins on a lot of the fronds. It's called the Hen and Chicken fern, as those nubbins, or bulbils as they are actually called, will eventually sprout a couple of fronds before falling off and forming new plants - so much easier than propagating by spores.

So I'm quite keen to try growing more of these. It's going to be fiddly of course - isn't all propagation? But it will be much sought-after at tropical plant meets when the swaps come out!

According to Wikipedia its fronds are edible, so in case I do end up with a surplus, do I have any Kiwi readers who can suggest some recipes?

Babies!!

Much excitement at Jurassic Towers yesterday. I had moved a few pots around, having removed my pretty much dead Hamemelis from its pot and planted it in the ground so the Wollemia could have a bigger pot. Pushing the Agave tequilana up against the Halocarpus that's now on that side of the garden, I noticed a little spike at the edge of the pot:


And even better - it's twins!! You might be able to see the second one just under the finger of my glove. I don't normally wear gloves for gardening, but I always make an exception for José Cuervo the Agave.

I shall watch them closely over the next few weeks, and see if any more appear. I bought him with six pups on him, so I'm thrilled to have another two nearly good to go!

Botanical Tattoos

Some of you may know that I have a fossil tattooed on my foot. Well, a month ago I decided to add to the collection with something more botanically themed. I'd thought about a fern (since I do like my ferns), but I didn't want the first reaction to be "But you're not from New Zealand", and I had the devil of a job finding ideas that wouldn't look like a ponga. I considered a Wollemia nobilis, but knew I didn't want anything big (and it would have to be pretty big to be recognisable as a Wollemia).

And then I found this teeny tiny little thumbnail of a Metasequoia glyptostroboides on the Kew website:


It wasn't available any bigger, so I had to try my best to smooth the image and print it off, before taking it to my rather bewildered tattooist at Ouch! in Brentford. He cursed under his breath, he had to pause while I felt faint with the pain (the wrist is PAINFUL), but somehow he managed to put in detail that hadn't even been in the original:


I adore it. I need to purchase several large snug-fitting bracelets to wear given the nature of my work from September onwards, but I figure if the students see it, it's an opportunity to talk about plant evolution and "living fossils" - Metasequoia was thought to have become extinct in the Miocene period (23-5Ma).

So I want to see your plant- or gardening-related tattoos. I saw Gayla's on You Grow Girl and thought it was freakin' awesome. Botanical illustrations lend themselves so well to being inked on (I have a friend with "Stargazer" lilies all over her back), and there aren't nearly enough of them on Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium in and amongst all the formulae!

Friday Fern #26

To what, I hear you cry, do we owe this honour? Nothing but an absolute glut of delightful ferns! So here's one from Fibrex Nurseries, which is really taking off, and which would make an excellent ground cover fern if it wasn't currently stuffed into a £2 Homebase pot...


This is Gymnocarpium dryopteris, the oak fern. I guess it looks a bit oaky?! I just have to remember that it's a deciduous fern, so I don't panic and wring my hands until the first frond appears in spring.

Wollemia Woes

This time last year I was very excited, as the polar caps had melted, allowing new growth to form on my Wollemia nobilis.


Over the winter of 2007-2008 Matildus came inside, suffering the indignity of having Christmas baubles strung on him, grew polar caps perfectly happily, and was then put outside in the spring of 2008, where by June he was shoving out new growth as fast as he could.

Over winter 2008-2009 I left him outside fleeced up. After all, the trees at Kew have been outside unprotected, and as said on "Save Lullingstone Castle", it's been through 18 ice ages. This is the only (blurry) photo I could find from the past two months of the Wollemia:


This doesn't matter though, because it's looked precisely like that since October 2008. The 2008 growth has hardly darkened (and certainly not as much as the 2007 growth did), and most worryingly of all, there doesn't seem to have been any polar cap. It just looks as though it's finished growing and isn't planning on doing anything else ever.

I'm a bit puzzled. It's been fed, watered as normal, rotated throughout the winter and moved only very gingerly when I bought the potting bench for the site of the old Isleworth Pinetum. The one thing I haven't tried is a bigger pot (*groan*). It shouldn't really need repotting, as it's a) very slow-growing and b) has a comparatively small rootball for the size of the tree.

Anyone else's Wollemia nobilis not growing at the moment? Its closest relatives, Araucaria araucana and A. heterophylla are growing quite nicely, but that probably doesn't mean anything.

Recycling And Not Making It Look Rubbish

Continuing from yesterday's post on Future Gardens, I found when I got home that I had a lot of photos of some great uses of recycled or unwanted items in the gardens. So I'm just going to post a few of these for your viewing pleasure:

Corrugated card reeds in Nature's Artistry - Autumn's Edge:


And in the same garden, dried leaves used as mulch:


Walnut shell mulch in Narratives Of Nature:


And cutlery in the bottom of the ponds, complete with little metal letters!


Anthracite rubble in Anthroscape 3 (anthracite is a more metamorphosed coal which tends not to be used that commonly):


Rubble, old building bricks and tiles and broken plaster drawing a boundary around Theatre Of Insects:


And recycled glass in the British Butterfly Garden:


And a toilet bowl nestling in the middle of the very much pun-intended Bog Garden (this may be lost on the American readers):


I have to say, I'd not considered planting flowers in an old toilet, but it'd be an excellent container! Who needs a Belfast sink when you can have a good old Armitage Shanks avocado-coloured throne?!

A Glimpse Of The Future

On Thursday I joined some of those fortunate souls who get to write about gardening and get paid for it, with an invitation to the launch of Future Gardens. This attraction is the first phase of the Butterfly World Project, just outside St Albans. It is set to be an astoundingly big conservation area, absolutely full to bursting with wildflowers.

It's the 12-year dream of the founder Clive Farrell; a 27 acre site that will reestablish native habitats, bringing in nectar sources for bees and butterflies, and at the same time showcasing imaginative sustainable gardens.


Sitting listening to Clive, patrons Emilia Fox and Professor David Bellamy, and garden designer (and fellow blogger) James Alexander-Sinclair, I couldn't help but be caught up in the enthusiasm of everyone involved. Emilia Fox mentioned being "kissed" by butterflies, and when I got an opportunity to nip into the butterfly house I understood what she meant (even if this particular butterfly wasn't so much kissing me as tasting me):


James The Hat told us that we are not supposed to be madly in love with all of the gardens, and sure enough, there are some "Marmite" gardens. I could not love Roger Phillips' Chalk Garden. The brilliant white of the chalk was too clinical for me. And those Echium in the foreground have an awful lot of growing to do if they're going to catch up their Cornish counterparts:


In contrast, I adored Anthroscape 3 by Tony Heywood, with its bejewelled dragon and crazy planting:


I hated Andy Sturgeon's Urban Greening garden on sight, and more than one of us compared it to gravestones when we saw it, but you know, now that I'm home and looking at my photos I'm rather warming to it...


And for sheer beauty of planting, and the fact that I would willingly spend hours sitting in this garden (and had I been 25 years younger I'd probably have crawled into the circles and made a cave for myself), my favourite is Narratives Of Nature by Hugo Bugg and Maren Hallenga:


I saw an awful lot of ferns, Polystichum polyblepharum, Asplenium scolopendrium and Blechnum spicant were immediately obvious to me. Now, Asplenium loves limestone/chalky soils, will grow out of walls and really doesn't care for that much water, but the other two do rather like a lot, and I killed a Blechnum while I was on holiday last autumn through lack of water while we were away. So I had a bit of trouble squaring the use of such thirsty plants with the overall idea of sustainability.

These are not Chelsea Flower Show gardens. They are not intended to all look their absolute best for five days in May and then be dismantled. These are to last all summer long. Wildflowers do not flower on demand, and there are obviously some gardens with late-flowering annuals that look a bit bare at this time. And that is why several visits over the summer are recommended, because every garden will change over a matter of weeks. I'm used to visiting Wisley and Kew several times a year, and although Hubster may disagree, I always find something new and exciting to see when I go.

Emma raised a concern about the price of the admission - I'm very glad I'm still a student, because £12.50 for an adult admission ticket may well put me off. But when you consider that London Zoo and Kew Gardens both charge easily that much for admission, the RHS charge £8 for entry at Wisley (and arguably have more income from membership fees than ZSL and RBG do), it's just one of those things. Expensive though it may be, you really do get your money's worth. There are many ideas, and (again unlike a Chelsea garden) they are all things you at home can do whatever your budget (do not get me started on the "credit crunch gardens" with a budget of £5k each...). The easiest of these is to sow a wildflower meadow - it'll cost less than a fiver to do the bottom of your garden.

With everything that went on at the press conference, and wishing to make more of a point of some of the features I spotted, AND scoring an interview with Professor David Bellamy, I'm going to need more than one post to do this justice. But if there was one photograph within the 120-odd that I took last week, that I felt summed up what Clive Farrell was trying to do, it would be this one:


I can't remember if I have ever told you all this, but when Hubster was very young he was really nervous of bees. When visiting his grandparents his grandfather would say "Oh you don't need to worry about him, he's my pal Jimmy Bee", and that would calm Hubster down. Until they went on holiday, and Jimmy Bee followed them to Blackpool and Weston-Super-Mare. And then they went back to Scotland, and Jimmy was there too. So rather than being reassured that this was a friendly bee who wouldn't hurt his pal's grandson, Hubster got it into his head that Jimmy Bee was psychotically stalking him wherever he went.

Maybe I'm going to have to go back to Future Gardens alone...

On Not Bragging About Blogging

On Thursday, at a Very Important Press Event, I was extolling the virtues of blogging versus print journalism, happily saying "It's great - I don't have to run it by an editor, I'll just go home, write it all up, upload the photos and it'll be there to be read tonight", not considering the following factors: a) that I would consume two large margaritas as soon as I got home, break a glass and be incapable of cooking even pasta for dinner by 8pm, and b) that I would spend the whole of yesterday glued to the television as the death-knell for UK science was sounded.

So with a slightly more humble attitude, I am now preparing my write-up of said Very Important Press Event. Here's a teaser though - I finally found a big enough pot:

A Short-Lived Career

It's been what we refer to at Jurassic Towers as a complete bowel movement of a fortnight. On our last day of holiday we were rear-ended as I did an emergency stop to avoid hitting an old fool who decided the middle of the A39 was the perfect place to suddenly park up. The car, Hubster and I all appeared superficially undamaged, but it turns out the car is a write-off, and we feel about the same. My ace GP signed me off for two weeks because my job involved a fairly large amount of manual labour, and I do have a fair bit of discomfort down to whiplash (having been to the physio yesterday I can happily tell you that it is my trapezius and levator scapulae which are well and truly screwed on my right hand side, so I no longer have any healthy shoulders).

All was going well until I dared to ask for Statutory Sick Pay, and suffice to say I have parted company with the company for such reasons cited as "did not plant poppies fast enough". And on that happy note, I think my career in the horticulture business is over for the time being. I start a teaching job in September.


Every cloud has a silver lining, however, and there is much excitement for tomorrow (all to be revealed shortly), and it means I have plenty of time and inclination to tend my own garden. Especially as my tiny Ginkgo biloba seems intent on setting a record for Bring A Bigger Leaf.

Behind The Scenes At Kew

You probably knew it was the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. But did you know that all summer long you can take part in exclusive behind-the-scenes tours of the bits of the Gardens the general public almost never gets to see?

Have a looksie here and head to the "Kew: Not Just A Pretty Place" section. See, this month you can snoop round the Jodrell Laboratories, where Science!^TM is done. How awesome is that?

And if any of you are in the area, Jurassic Park is not too far away...