Transatlantic Gardener

Brits develop new plants too

2012-01-19T09:33:57-05:00

Last I week I was enthusing about Simply Perennials bringing lots of great new American perennials to the UK for the first time and I was also reminded of an article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper a few weeks ago saying, basically, that American plant breeders had taken over the world.

But British plant breeders not only have a great history of new introductions going back hundreds of years but in Britain there’s still a huge number of nurseries and plant specialists developing new plants. Although in North America it’s often not clear that these plants are actually British. So perhaps an American company should specialise in bringing new British plants to North America?

Many of Britain’s best are already have their plants doing well in North America. Raymond Evison’s clematis are much admired. Blooms of Bressingham continue the great tradition begun by Alan Bloom eighty years ago. There are Tumbelina double petunias, and singles too, from David Kerley; begonias from Fred Yates are everywhere; David Austin trials his new roses in the US, as well as the UK, and recommends varieties specifically for North America; many of the plants created by Charles Valins, at Thompson & Morgan from echinaceas to the first blue verbascum (as well as buddleias and hollyhocks), are popular in the US.

There are also companies like Whetman Pinks who develop new varieties of garden pinks of all kinds; Peter Moore works on shrubs, Joe Kennedy works with primroses. David Tristram is a leader in hellebores with his fine hybrid of H. niger and H. x hybridus, and has other valuable introductions. Patrick Fitzgerald in Ireland has some good things on the way.

In vegetables companies like Tozer and Elsoms are world leaders and smaller companies led by people like John Burrows and Simon Crawford are leaders in patio tomatoes. Britain is also a leader in strawberries, raspberries, and other fruits while in Floranova and Vegetalis Britain has one of the most innovative creators of new annuals and patio flowers and vegetables.

I apologise to the many many other accomplished creators of other new varieties for not mentioning them; that’s the thing, there are just so many – delphiniums, sweet peas, peppers, irises, caryopteris, the list goes on. Perhaps an American nursery needs to start a Best of British brand.

In the picture (click to enlarge): Begonia Million Kisses Elegance (‘Yagance’), Clematis ‘Josephine’, Geranium Rozanne (‘Gerwat’), Rosa Molineux (‘Ausmol’) and Verbascum ‘Blue Lagoon’

Book Bullet: The Art of Creative Pruning by Jake Hobson

2012-01-15T14:44:22-05:00

Even coming from England, where topiary of one sort or another is everywhere - ranging from wobbly yew pillars and neat box balls to leaping racehorses and steam trains (yes, really) – this book is an eye opener. The range of pruning artistry developed around the world is amazing.

But this is not just a book about topiary – which I suppose is usually thought of as clipping trees and shrubs into shapes. It’s also about thoughtful pruning to enhance the grace of plants without pushing them into forms which some say are simply unnatural. The elegance of conifers or wall trained fruit, for example, can be enriched by the styles of thoughtful pruning this book explains.

I have to say, I hate clipping hedges. It’s my least favorite job in the garden. But I love pruning, in fact my very first book was on pruning. And this intriguing and book is full of great ideas for both approaches.

The Art of Creative Pruning by Jake Hobson is published by Timber Press.

The creative side of pruning and training thoughtfully explained and beautifully illustrated.
A refreshingly international view.

Transatlantic Perennials

2012-01-09T07:00:00-05:00

“New” is the salesman’s favourite word. It’s the word that gets us to look even if it doesn’t always get us to buy. Doesn’t matter if it’s a TV show or a plant, if it’s new we usually pay attention.

Perennials have become amazingly popular in recent decades and new perennials are now being developed all over the world. Laboratory techniques enable them to propagated in large numbers very quickly. Terra Nova Nurseries in Portland, Oregon (who are not retailers) produce over six million young plants a year and have become famous for the huge number of new varieties of perennials they’ve created in the last twenty two years. And from their early days they sent plants to nurseries in Britain.

Heucheras have always been a focus and their varieties have been carried in particular by two British specialist nurseries with the splendid names of Plantago and Heucheraholics. Other species have been carried by a range of mail order nurseries but now a new venture, Simply Perennials, is developing a mail order range focusing on varieties from Terra Nova.

Simply Perennials is a part of Simply Seeds and Plants which began with sweet peas, added fuchsias, chrysanthemums, patio plants, bulbs, and vegetable plants and has now added perennials. At the last count about half the perennials in their range are varieties not available from anywhere else in Britain. I was especially pleased to see new kniphofias, an amazing new corydalis, a lovely new rudbeckia for cutting and borders, and what looks to be a dramatic red-stemmed variegated hosta. Simply Perennials will be adding new varieties from other sources as they enhance their range.

But here's the thing: while it’s great to see new American perennials available for the first time in Britain – what about the other way round? There’s a huge wealth of new perennials, and shrubs and climbers, being developed in Britain – perhaps an American specialist should make them the focus of a new mail order business.

In the picture (click to enlarge): Kniphofia 'Papaya Popsicle', Hosta 'Raspberry Sundae', Corydalis 'Blue Heron', Rudbeckia 'Little Henry'.

Book Bullet: Visitor’s Guide to American Gardens

2012-01-06T14:31:10-05:00

Producing a guide to America’s (and Canada’s) gardens comes with both the advantages and disadvantages of a broad North American sweep. It ensures that wherever you travel the book has an interesting visit to suggest, but some states have so few entries that they may all be hundreds of miles from where you happen to be.

Entries are crisp and to the point, with symbols to highlight many features, and there’s enough to tempt you to look for more information on those that are especially appealing. But: “Smart-phone scannable QR codes that link to every garden’s website,” says the back cover and the publisher’s website. No. Of nine entries for South Carolina, a state picked at random, only three gardens have QR codes.

I can’t help but feel that the information should come not only as this useful book but as an app and a website where you can just put in a zip code (postcode) and see what’s nearby.

A useful throw-in the-suitcase book for American and overseas travellers.
Needs an app and website which includes far more gardens

The Visitor’s Guide to American Gardens by Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp is published by Cool Springs Press.

If you could pick just one plant...

2012-01-02T09:11:00-05:00

The great British plantsman E A Bowles once posed this question: “Suppose a wicked uncle,” he wondered, “who wished to check your gardening zeal left you pots of money on condition that you grew only one species of plant: what would you choose?”

Then the great man answered his own question: “I should settle on Iris unguicularis,” he answers. And, considering the extraordinary range of plants he grew at his garden at Myddelton House in north London, we should respect his choice.

It’s a zone 7 plant so not hardy here in Pennsylvania - well, it grows wild in North Africa - so one of the treats of going back to zone 8 England in winter is the chance to see them, and smell them too for their fragrance is wonderful. Bowles chose this plant, long ago known as Iris stylosa, as the first flower of spring and from October onwards in Britain in zone 8 the flowers appear: purplish or true blue, lavender or white, building up to a crescendo in February or March when you can gather enough flowers from a single clump to enjoy indoors and the leave the plant in the garden apparently unplundered.

There is an art to cutting these flowers for what appears to be the stem of the flower is actually an unexpectedly elongated part of the flower stem itself and only at ground level is there 3/4in/2m of true stem. Each stem usually carries not one, but three flowers. So, if you simply slice off the flower as low down as you can possibly go – and that is certainly the temptation – you will cut off those extra flower buds. But if you slide your fingers down the stem you’ll feel those other buds; cut just above them.

‘Mary Barnard’ is dark blue, ‘Walter Butt’ is a soothing, cool, pale pearly lavender while ‘Alba’, the white form can be shy. They’re all lovely.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a suitably warm border, perhaps just a narrow 2ft/60cm strip in front of a sunny wall, then Iris unguicularis will repay your planting it there with plenty of flowers. Add pink Nerine bowdenii and the white crocus-like Zephyranthes candida and the bold trumpets of Amaryllis belladonna (not those indoor monsters, the hardier one) and Agapanthus for the summer and you’ve created a border for almost al the year. Scatter a few seeds of the dainty little creamy California poppy, Platystemon californicus, and you’ll have to open the garden specially for visitors to come and admire just this one border.

But Iris unguicularis, the first choice of a long gone master plantsman, E. A. Bowles, is worth growing even without them.

In Britain, Avon Bulbs list six varieties. In North America, Plant Delights list two tempting varieties (scroll down), while Mount Pleasnt Iris also list two (scroll down).

Book Bullets: Two Important Re-Issues by Christopher Lloyd

2011-12-30T09:00:11-05:00

No one in recent times - and not so recent times, come to that – has known plants so well, had such decided opinions about them, and written about them so persuasively as Christopher Lloyd. So what a treat to have two of his best books back in print.

“He challenged fashion, flouted conventions and poked fun at correctness,” says Fergus Garrett, who was Christo’s, and now Great Dixter’s, Head Gardener in his introduction to the re-issue of The Adventurous Gardener. And that’s what this book is about. Bursting with bold opinion, rich in planting ideas and written in his always entertaining style.

Foliage Plants, its companion re-issue, was the book that made me realize that garden writing could be funny. [What on earth was I thinking before?] In a time, almost 40 years ago, when foliage was not at all fashionable, the great man is way ahead of the rest of us with his appreciation of the value of leaves.

Have to mention, btw, that these reissues are very basic paperbacks: no color pictures, no fancy design, with the focus on the text. But of course it's the writing that counts. And, thank goodness, the botanical names are updated.

The Adventurous Gardener and Foliage Plants, by Christopher Lloyd, are published by Frances Lincoln.

Two invaluable texts, available again with updated plant names
Simple, elegant, but fairly basic format

Declaration of interest: I wrote a book with Christopher Lloyd back in 1997. It does not seem to be part of this re-issue program!

Christmas Day flower counts

2011-12-27T12:10:17-05:00

Well, having discussed the tradition of listing plants in bloom on Christmas day in my last post, I asked a few friends on both sides of the Atlantic to make lists this year. I myself dutifully went out on a chilly Christmas morning to count the plants in bloom in our Pennsylvania garden and was delighted to find far more than I expected – a grand total of… two!

These were two of the recent Gold Collection hellebores bred in Germany by Josef Heuger: Helleborus niger ‘HGC Jacob’ and ‘HGC Josef Lemper’. The mild weather two or three weeks ago had hurried them along, then it was down to 19F/-7C so they bent their heads and froze to the ground! I blogged about these impressive hellebores back in 2006, and also in 2008 when we had them in flower in mid November.

Back in England my friend Tracey Mathieson, who runs the lovely barn shop and garden called Foxtail Lilly, just a few hundred yards from our Northamptonshire home, took a quick look at her garden at Christmas and, surprisingly, came up with only three plants in flower: Helleborus argutifolius, Penstmon ‘Port Wine’ and Prunus x subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’.

The record from Russ Graham’s garden in Salem, Oregon, was also surprising: “My list is short this year,” he emailed: “Cyclamen hederifolium.” This is especially unexpected as Russ has been collecting early flowering forms of the Christmas rose, Helleborus niger, for some years.

“I do have Rhodie 'Christmas Cheer' and Viburnum 'Pink Dawn' blooms from a nearby neighbor open in the house,” he continued. “And a garden in Salem had H. niger in full bloom last Tuesday (they had a low of 23F/-5C already as did we...) I still only see tight buds. I do have H. foetidus with a couple of flowers essentially open but it is a bit of a stretch to think of it as "in bloom"”.

Much farther south on the west coast, another British ex-pat Ian Cooke, author most recently of Designing Small Gardens, published in Britain in October and published in the North America in April 2012, reported: “I think maybe I got the easy one – Palm Springs, in Southern California…”

Ian explained that his own yard is tiny so he added what’s in bloom in his neighbor’s gardens and came up with a total of forty – but that counts the many cultivars of Bougainvillea, Hibiscus, Lantana, Nerium oleander and roses he spotted as just one of each.

Back in Britain Julia Boulton, the Editor of The Cottage Gardener, the quarterly magazine of the Cottage Garden Society, reported fourteen plants in bloom in her suburban garden on the south western edge of London, including a pyracantha with both flowers and berries, and three different roses but no hellebores.

And finally Clive Lane, who when writing in The Cottage Gardener back in 1988 revived this old Victorian tradition. This year Clive counted nineteen plants in bloom in his cottage garden in Cheshire, in the north west of England including three hellebores and, surprisingly, Genista monspessulana which has seeded everywhere in his garden.

You can check the full lists from Ian Cooke, Julia Boulton and Clive Lane.

Plants in flower on Christmas Day

2011-12-24T02:00:00-05:00

Nearly twenty five years ago Clive Lane, for so long the guiding light of Britain’s Cottage Garden Society, revived an old Victorian custom. Writing in the Society’s Newsletter in December 1988 he said: “I believe there was a delightful custom in Victorian times for gardeners to list and publish the number of plants which were flowering in the garden on Christmas Day, and I have seen references to some quite remarkable lists.

“The length of the list, I feel sure, will depend very much more on where in the Kingdom the gardener lives (and of course to some extent on how much port was drunk after lunch on Christmas Day!) rather than on the gardeners’ green fingers. However, this quaint custom should be revived, and I propose asking all members of The Cottage Garden Society to forget that little snooze in the armchair before the Queen’s Speech and to take a look at what is flowering in your garden on Christmas Day.”

[For US readers: The Queen’s Speech – officially The Royal Christmas Message – is an annual broadcast by the Queen to her subjects. In the 1980s, if I remember rightly, it was broadcast on all British TV and radio channels at precisely 3pm on Christmas Day!]

Three months later Clive Lane reported that he’d received over a hundred lists and that a member in the west of England had counted the most with sixty three different varieties in flower in her garden on Christmas Day. These included five different roses, four hellebores, four euphorbias, polyanthus in all colours except blue, and the old double wallflower ‘Harpur Crewe’.

And Clive is right about it being an old tradition. Here’s just one example, a letter printed in the issue of The Garden dated 16 January 1909 from a garden near Falmouth, a cosy spot in the south west of England, listing plants in flower there on Christmas Day, 1908. The list includes such unexpected companions as Cobaea scandens, three nicotianas and Helleborus niger.

I’d add a list of my own at this point – but this year I’m in Pennsylvania and my notes are all in England. The rose at the top of this post, Suffolk (‘Kormixal’) was shot in Northamptonshire at Christmas 2010.

If you’re interested in cottage garden plants and cottage gardens, you should join Britain’s Cottage Garden Society. With their quarterly magazine, extensive seedlist and many other benefits membership is great value at just £12 in the UK, or £17 (about $27). It’s easy to join online.

In the family: His Emporium

2011-12-20T02:01:00-05:00

This is the first of an occasional series of posts looking at what the rest of the family is up to online. I just thought you'd be interested to see that gardening is only part of it, and that almost everyone else seems to have bypassed horticulture entirely - but it adds up to an impressive collection of enterprises.

The latest to hit our screens is His Emporium (click to enlarge the front page), an online source of unusual vintage and antique gifts for men. It’s run by my daughter Lizzie and son-in-law Carl, with an equal measure of assistance and impediment from their toddler Monty and the benign tolerance of Piccola the little black cat.

They sell none of those gadgets that marketing people seem to assume are the only things in which men are interested. No, His Emporium features carefully chosen vintage and antique gifts for men including: Andy Warhol’s prints of Marilyn Monroe (right, click to enlarge); some impressive vintage watches; “naughty” playing cards; Christmas issues of the classic British country magazine The Field from the 1970s; hip flasks and antique decanters and glasses; retro cigarette lighters, and even a very rare vintage Manchester United lamp which is probably from the 1970s (below, click to enlarge).

You get the picture? The range is astonishing, and it’s all good quality and at a fair price. What's more, they’re offering free UK delivery on everything during December. Don’t you just love a bargain?

As well as being a great source of unusual gifts in Britain, His Emporium is a great site for family and friends around the world to use to send gifts to British men – without the cost of international shipping.

OK, she’s my daughter – what do you expect me to say?! But trust me, if they didn't have a great selection of really special gifts I wouldn't be posting about the site at all. This is a gardening blog, after all!

So, if you’re looking for an unusual vintage gift for a man in your life start at His Emporium.

Don’t you just love a Christmas Tree bargain?

2011-12-19T06:30:00-05:00

Here in the US some people buy their Christmas trees a month before the holiday, as soon as they’ve recovered from Thanksgiving. Some wait until Christmas Eve. We went out for ours yesterday afternoon – and the timing was perfect.

We passed the local store - “Christmas Trees from $19.95” - and carried on to Lowe's (For Brits: Like a supersized B&Q) because we needed some bungees to tie the tree to the roof of the car. When we got to Lowes we were greeted by a “30% off Christmas Trees” sign. “OK,” we said, “let’s take a look.”

There were plenty of trees left, a range of species, and the quality was pretty good. And the prices… We picked out a 6ft/1.8m Balsam Fir (Abies balsamea) - $5.97 (£3.84). Then we thought: Perhaps we could have a tree by the front door too? 5ft/1.5m Fraser Fir (Abies fraseri) - $3.97 (£2.55). And then we thought: Why not have one on the back porch as well?! 5ft/1.5m Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) - $2.97 (£1.91). Yes, you read right. And these were originally $30-$40 (c£20-25) trees!

The very friendly and helpful woman who netted the trees for us explained that the manager of the store had yesterday decided to slash the prices of the remaining trees.

Then at the checkout, two more happy surprises: Not only were there free plastic sheets and twine to help us get our trees well secured to the car. -- We still got the 30% discount! So, with sales tax, we got three trees, about 16ft/4.8m of tree in all, for $9.58. For Brits that’s £6.17. Don’t you just love a bargain?

But here’s the thing. Not only is this a great deal, but the staff were so friendly and helpful. And we were told that store manager, Evan Yanik, is full of great ideas that help the store by helping the customer. Makes you want to go back, doesn’t it. And you should have seen the poinsettias…

I just hope we have enough lights for three trees. Otherwise it will be back to Lowe's. Lights are 30% off, you know.