A taste of the Caribbean: The Tower

One of the last gardens we went to see was also one of the most beautiful. The Tower is an extraordinary relic of the past: an old Victorian house built by an Englishman purely so that his wife would feel at home when she came out to the West Indies.

He perched it as high up on a hill as he could, 250m above sea level, to keep her cool, and filled it with every comfort of the day, from stained glass windows to great airy dining rooms so that she would have nothing to complain of. You can only guess how much he must have missed her while he waited for her to arrive.

Unfortunately she didn't feel at home at all and hightailed it home in disgust after a few months. He was probably well shot of her - anyone who's not capable of falling in love with Grenada is a few sandwiches short of a picnic if you ask me. But you try telling him that. Obviously addled by the wonky logic that is love, he was so broken hearted he couldn't bear to live in the house and moved back into the town at the foot of the hill. A few decades later, in the 1940s, he sold it to the father of the current owner, Paul Slinger, for a mere £4,000. It's now home to Paul and his wife Victoria, plus three more generations of their family: at last it's being lived in as it should be.
The house is preserved almost exactly as it was built, even down to the stained glass, made of individual grains of coloured sand held in place between sheets of glass. But even more spectacular is the garden: eight acres of beautifully landscaped tropical paradise.

Don't you just want to sit in those chairs? This was such an informal, homely garden: artless, in fact. A sure sign that a great deal of care has gone into every last detail.

See those philodendrons just behind the chairs?

At least, I think they were philodendrons. They might just be alocasias - I got a bit fuzzy about the distinctions. But they looked very nice there.

Now I was going on about John Criswick's ability to weave coloured foliage through the greenery in the rainforest at the St Rose Nursery the other day: well Victoria has done something similar here. A little more deliberate, perhaps, but nonetheless effective: she's a painter by trade, which explains the very colour-led approach. She's threaded coloured crotons through different types of Graptophyllum pictum - yet another plant new to me but the ones I liked best were deepest green with subtle white splashes on the leaves.

Another example of Victoria's fine planting sense: bougainvillea, crotons, and that's a juvenile fishtail palm in front there.

Now these are definitely alocasias. Or maybe colocasias. They're all over the place in Grenada - they eat the leaves of colocasia (a bigger-leaved variety than this one, if it is colocasia, which I doubt) like spinach, and call it callaloo.

This confused me no end. I'd always thought that callaloo referred to amaranth, and in fact I'm positive I've heard people on allotments on the telly here referring to amaranth as callaloo - but everyone was adamant here, it refers to colocasia.

Anyway, these were growing in a copper - the same as the one the pond was made of at Sunnyside (and countless other gardens too). Lovely, aren't they? The kind of thing your average architectural salvage merchant would eat his own arm for.

I loved this group - a huge torch ginger, around 30ft or so high, with those bright bromeliads flowing across the ground in front. There were blooms like fat orange tulips coming up, rather wierdly, straight from the ground among those huge great stems, too.

This was a beautifully flowery garden all round, in fact - just the right balance between foliage and blooms. Here it's the heliconia - a flower so ubiquitous here as to be common. Nothing common about this: Victoria tells me it's the variety 'She', and I was very taken with those oh-so-subtle green-tipped flowers. The bright orange bits are bracts - it's the sticky-up bits which are the flowers (usually much smaller than in this variety). They're pollinated by hummingbirds. Obviously.

Another nice vista (despite the hosepipe: we were coming into the dry season so they have to water things endlessly if they're not to look out on a brown and crispy desert of sleeping plants). Bougainvillea to the left, palms to the right: and they had some nifty crotons along here which had half the leaf missing in the middle:

Wierd, huh? Another very beautiful flower along the same stretch:

My note-taking powers failed me on this one and I have no idea what it is but I liked it (and the photo didn't come out too bad either).

One last one to finish: this might look like a greenhouse, but it's actually a chicken shed. Some chicken shed. The disastrous hurricane, known as Ivan, which struck the islands in 2004 and flattened much of the vegetation (as well as countless houses, several churches and a lot of people's livelihoods) did for most of it and it hasn't been repaired since. I quite liked it as it was, in fact: spookily atmospheric, somehow.

Thanks to Paul and Victoria and their family for giving us such a very memorable day, and to Paul's father who makes a mean rum punch. They do occasional tours, though you have to go through an agent to organise it: Suzanne's web page has the details, just scroll down to the bottom.

A taste of the Caribbean: St Rose Nursery

Sometimes when gardens have a powerful resonance with natural landscapes - I'm talking about wildlife gardens, very "naturalistic" planting and a lot of woodland gardens - there's a fine line between it being a garden or countryside that's been tweaked a bit. This garden teeters delicately right on that line, and on occasions falls off - in places, it's more rainforest than garden. But then that recognition and respect for the natural beauty of the forest is why St Rose is so special.

The owner, John Criswick, is a consummate plantsman, but one with such sensitivity to his unique surroundings that you can often barely tell where his hand has been. St Rose is perched on a mountainside, in the foothills of the dense rainforest reserve that covers Grenada like a green blanket. Here, foliage is king.

The word 'jungle' could have been invented for this garden. The density of the planting is mind-boggling: not only is there no bare earth (the very idea is laughable here) there isn't enough room for hard landscaping either. We clambered down this steep hillside on a narrow path that would have been a sheep track if we'd been in Yorkshire (though of course quite a lot would have been different if we'd been in Yorkshire.)

It's practically impossible to get an idea of the scale in photos - probably best to assume that the smallest leaves you're looking at in these pictures are about half the length of your arm. The biggest are the kind of leaves you can comfortably stand underneath and still not be able to touch the end. Anyway - this gives you something of an idea:

The chap by the pond is slashing down kudzu vine with a machete - kudzu vine is like bindweed on steroids, and entire houses disappear beneath it within a few weeks if it's left unchecked. They say Grenadian guys are all lovely once you get over the fact that they're all carrying machetes: this is pretty accurate though it's hard to concentrate on pleasant small talk while ignoring the murderously sharp knife.

As I said before, this is a garden that's all about foliage. John uses coloured foliage to spectacular effect, weaving it in to the predominantly green rainforest with aplomb. Here it's a river of purple cordylines trickling through the green. (By the way - yes those are cordylines. I'd always thought they were sharp, pointy sort of things. Not so: Grenadan cordylines are soft and the leaves are rounded, and most delightful of all, they come in a myriad of colours from green to yellow to purple to stripy. Altogether much, much nicer).

And in case you don't like purple: how about yellow. This is golden crinum (that clump is waist-high - told you it was hard to capture the scale). This garden more than any other has taught me that you don't need flowers for things to be colourful.

This is the nursery adjoining the garden. As you can see, there's a tad more hard landscaping but otherwise it's still a bit tricky to tell the difference. Look closely, though, and you'll see this rainforest is in pots.

And there are flowers! All sorts, orchids and gingers and tons of things I hadn't a hope of recognising - this garden stretches your plant ID skills to the limit and well beyond. These were my absolute favourites: elegant racemes about a foot long, growing across a pergola-like grid so they hung down gracefully. Here's that flower close up:

We were told it was a Thunbergia, at which I thought, "nah - they've got that wrong". The only Thunbergia I'd ever come across before was Black-eyed Susan, an annual climber with small, single orange flowers - no racemes and not a great deal of elegance, though it's quite sweet if you like that kind of thing. Then I got back and googled it - well I should have known. The one lesson I learned in Grenada is that everything I think I know is as a grain of sand compared with the beach of stuff I don't. Thunbergia mysorensis, or Red Glory Vine, is from India, and you can even get plants here - though you need a greenhouse or conservatory to grow them well.

Just before we left, Derek, the head gardener, brought this out. Have you ever seen a flower like it? It's an aroid of some kind, but nobody knew its Latin name. They did, however, know its common name. Men of a certain age - look away now.
It's called 'Old Man's Balls'. I expect you can see why.

Thanks go to John Criswick for sharing his fabulous garden and nursery with us - it was an unforgettable experience. The garden is open to the public, and the nursery sells rare and unusual plants, trees and palms - it's stocked half the gardens in Grenada. If you're ever over that way - don't, on any account, miss it.

A taste of the Caribbean: Sunnyside Gardens

One of the lovely things about blogging is you can write about what your editor hasn't asked you to write about (whether for space reasons or just cos they wanted something else), yet which you're just bursting to tell someone about.

So - at the risk of making everyone look at my holiday snaps with accompanying stifled yawns and glances at watches - there follows, over the next few posts, just a soupçon from the 250-odd photos I took at the amazing gardens I went to see while I was in Grenada recently. I can't include all the gardens - there were about ten of them and I wouldn't inflict that on you - but I'll pick out a few favourites.

The first is typical of some more formal gardens we went to. A lot were designed by a Venezuelan garden designer called Chris Baasch who seems to have a monopoly on the island's gardens. Sunnyside, near the capital, St George's, is a fine example of his work, as well as a tribute to the gardening skills of owner Jean Renwick and her son Randy.

Aloe, scarlet spikes of the red ginger, Alpinia purpurata and mango trees - this is a densely-planted garden of island beds separated by that tropical grass you get that's a bit coarser than an English lawn. It's on a hill, like nearly everything in Grenada, so there are views everywhere:

That little pond to the bottom left houses a tropical waterlily, just coming into bloom when we were there.

The copper basin it's in is about 5ft across - they're used everywhere on the island for all sorts of things, mainly ponds though. They were used to 'tread' cocoa beans to help fermentation, a bit similar to treading grapes - three to a copper and bare feet. Since cocoa beans are slimy and squishy it must have been akin to dancing in the flats of Portsmouth Harbour at low tide. Only warmer.

Allotmenteers - eat your heart out. This is a calabash tree, and those fruits are about the size of a baby's head. They're not very tasty, but when dried, cut in half and hollowed out they make handy soup bowls.

This was one you'll probably recognise: the jade vine, Strongylodon macrobotrys. Here it was quietly strangling a cashew nut tree. They're heavy and rampant climbers which quickly overcome less thuggish plants but with flowers like that, you can understand Jean's reluctance to do anything about it.

This is a wierd and wonderful climber, too: it's the vanilla vine, of vanilla pod fame. Trouble is, it's not native to Grenada (it comes from a neighbouring Caribbean island - Trinidad, I think) and neither is the single species of bee that pollinates it. So if you want it to produce pods here, you have to get up before 8am and do it yourself with a paintbrush. It's testament to the obsession with gardening in Grenada that a lot of people do actually do this.

Cute little wendy house, but if you're wondering how they mow that humpy ol' lawn, they don't. That's because it's not a lawn: it's a Japanese hummock grass called Zoysia matrella. The amusing thing - for Jean, anyway - is that those hummocks are entirely hollow, so any visitors happening to think it might be a lawn fall in.

Another Chris Baasch composition: those palms are Travellers' palms, which I entirely fell in love with while I was on the island. Just look at those architectural stems.

Bromeliads cascading down (up?) a mahogany tree. The bromeliads have little cups of water in their hearts, colonised by insects: the Grenadan government decided they might be breeding places for malarial mosquitos so tried to get Jean to remove them all. You can imagine how well that went down. In the end, they decided the line of least resistance would be the dazzlingly impractical solution of anti-mosquito tablets to place in the centre of each plant. That's a philodendron scrambling its way up the mahogany tree.

The national tree of Grenada: the Flamboyant tree (Delonix regia). The flowers are bright orange, and you see them dotted all over the hillsides when they're out. We were there just afterwards, when they were loaded with pods: the kids here use them as musical instruments because the beans inside rattle. They call them "shack-shack" trees for the same reason.

Flamboyant wood is very weak, and if you look at the tree above you'll see it has a typically hollow stem. Luckily this is an ideal habitat for things like airplants, bromeliads and orchids - and this particularly fine staghorn fern:

I have one of these in my greenhouse at the moment but... well, suffice it to say it doesn't look much like this!

Thank you to Jean and her irrepressible son Randy (and his alarmingly active koi carp) for their generous and warm hospitality. I can't hope to do proper justice to their garden here, so either go visit it if you're ever over Grenada way - it's open to visitors by appointment - or read on at their own website here.

Back from my travels

Well - that's what you call a lengthy spell out of the country.

I've been spending a lot of time on aeroplanes in the last few weeks - some of it planned, some unplanned (or at least, planned at the last minute). The result was, I just disappeared over the horizon for the whole of April. Sorry about that, but I'm afraid not only am I back - I'm back with holiday snaps...!!

It wasn't all holiday - the first bit was what has to be said was really quite a swanky press trip. I had all of a week's notice and then found myself rather unexpectedly on a plane to Grenada, in the Caribbean. As well as some other journalists and a PR lady, all of whom turned out to be quite delightfully good company, we had the equally lovely Suzanne Gaywood with us - she's the lady who creates that vividly colourful exhibit of tropical flowers for Grenada every year at Chelsea, and the reason for my being there. About which - more later (a lot more).

Then I came back and spent a few days unpacking, washing and packing again in between trying to do some sensible work, then went to a different airport, this time with my family, and jetted off to Florida for a couple of weeks. Not so many gardens this time - there are some fabulous gardens in Florida but most of them were over the other side - but lots of wierd and wonderful plants in their native habitats, as I went to the Everglades. About which... you get the gist.

So I've turned all tropical just lately and my plant vocabulary has expanded by several dozen palms, a few exotic flower species and a swamp plant or three. I came back thinking two things: a) why do we bother with tropical plants - whatever we can persuade to grow is a shadow of what they're really like, and
b) why have we concreted over our little island? This after returning from Grenada, which is a properly green and pleasant land. Ours is mostly grey these days, and all the leaves are small.

Don't worry, I'll get over it. I already have to some extent as I returned to a garden full of tulips and forget-me-nots, and who couldn't fall in love all over again with such prettiness.

So that's my carbon emissions sorted for the next six decades. Lucky for the future of the planet that these chances don't come along very often - in fact these two flights have been the first time I've been on a plane at all in nearly 10 years. Last time, too - it's holidays in Bognor all the way...

Perfect partners #4

Juniperus squamata 'Chinese Silver' and Erica carnea 'Springwood White' spotted at Wakehurst Place, Sussex, earlier this month. Who said the old conifer-and-heather combo was boring?

The bamboo boogie

You may already know that I'm no fan of bamboo.

The trouble with urging people to dig up all their bamboo and throw it on the nearest bonfire is that if you happen to be the gardener, you're the one who gets to dig it up. And if you've ever tried to dig up even the smallest hawser-like root of a bamboo you'll know this is The Job From Hell.

Since I have a number of clients who have bamboo in their gardens - and therefore require me to do something about it - it quickly became time for some rapid backtracking.

So while I still won't have the stuff anywhere near my own garden and am seriously tempted to pour petrol - or at least a little well-aimed glyphosate - on pots of bamboo waiting for sale to unsuspecting customers at various garden centres across the land, if it's already in your garden there's only one way to go: Proper Maintenance.

The trouble is, bamboo is generally touted as a low-maintenance or even no-maintenance plant. Even if you're going to be wilfully blind to its thuggish habits, if you don't spend at least a little time each year sprucing them up a bit they end up looking like this:

This is a Phyllostachys nigra in the back garden of one of my clients which has never been touched, like most of the ones I come across. As you can see, it doesn't just behave like a thug - it looks like one too.

So - you take out the thinnest of the canes, right down to the ground, leaving just the nice thick well-coloured ones. Then you remove the suckers migrating out from the main clump, as ruthlessly as possible, followed by those annoying canes that flop out to the side too much. After that, trim down the tops to the height you want - in this case there was only one stem that needed shortening as for some reason known only to itself it had headed skywards and left all the others behind. After all that, you end up with something like this:

Actually I think I overdid it a bit on removing the arching branches - this is a little upright for my liking, though I'm not sure I had much of a choice really. But anyway, it'll start leaning outwards again soon (the overriding principle of bamboo is to revert to the most troublesome way of growing at the earliest possible opportunity). The client and I also agreed that this is a bamboo in desperate need of some company (there used to be a swimming pool on that circle).

But what we both loved - and the whole point of the exercise - is this:

Aren't they lovely? Strong, slim, elegant canes of near-black, and you can actually see them now. Not only did I remove the messy ones in between, I also stripped away the leaves up to about a third of the way up. Now, that's a bamboo I can see the point of growing.

Perfect partners #3

Betula utilis, Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Nigrescens', and Galanthus nivalis. A little island at Wakehurst Place earlier this month: perhaps the black-and-white snowdrops-and-lilyturf thing is becoming a tad clichéd nowadays but I don't care. This looked fabulous.

Close encounters of the horticultural kind #2

At Wakehurst Place, Kew's garden in Sussex, I came across another truly unforgettable tree.

I first noticed it for its heady perfume that filled the air. I couldn't work out where it was coming from - there were witch hazels around, but it was sweeter than that. Then the ranger who was showing me around put me out of my misery:

"Oh, that's the Osmanthus," he said, grinning a little mischievously. Right, well that was fine, but I couldn't see an osmanthus anywhere. You know them - nice neat medium-sized evergreen shrub, right?

Wrong.

I was actually standing underneath it at the time. This was Osmanthus yunnanensis in full flower - about 30ft tall and scenting the air all around with these lovely little powder-puff white flowers.

There are apparently only 11 left in the wild, and this particular one was brought back by Ernest "Chinese" Wilson in the early 20th century. It's not that difficult to get hold of these days - about ten nurseries around the country stock it. Another one for the 'must-grow-before-I-die' list...

Seeding the world #2

What surprised me on my behind-the-scenes tour of the Millennium Seedbank at Wakehurst Place was just how many plants there are in there.

There are a lot of sidelines to the Seedbank's work, all of which seem to have just grown (excuse the pun) from their original premise of saving seed from every plant in the world.

Now they not only collect rare seed: they germinate it (sometimes in very complicated ways) and grow it on to re-patriate it. These are seriously rare plants - six are entirely extinct in the wild - and it's not long before you're looking at a lot of seedlings of plants you've never even heard of before.

Nearly all these plants have a story to tell. Here's a cracker: this is a Leucospermum from South Africa, but not just any leucospermum.

You might remember reading about it in 2006 when it was found, tucked into a notebook owned by Dutch merchant Jan Teerlink and left, forgotten, in the National Archives at Kew. They'd been there for over 100 years. Yet despite their hair-raising journey - the ship they were on was captured by the British Navy - some of the seeds were still viable, and this, two years on, is the result.

Here's another one: this is a Banksia brownii....

...also known as a feather-leaved banksia (you can see how it got its name). This is critically endangered in its native Australia, with only two or three populations left in the wild. The Seedbank is growing on dozens of them in its cool greenhouse ready to go back home. One batch was returned last year: without this work the plant would be extinct within a decade.

I did recognise one plant there - this protea, just about to flower, is from wild populations on the Cape. The Seedbank works almost exclusively with wild populations - if I understood right, it's because the lineage is purer, and seed from cultivars rarely comes true in any case.

Looking at these plants standing in rows on benches in the greenhouse, they look entirely normal and unremarkable. But these individuals at the forefront of survival for many species: without them their kind would simply die out.

You may be tempted to think that while that might be regrettable, it doesn't really amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things. But bear in mind that not one of these plants has been tested to find out what illnesses it can cure, or what useful purpose it can serve. Not that every plant has to have a purpose - but as was pointed out to me, a few years ago we didn't know that daffodils contain galanthine which they now use to treat Alzheimers. So if we let any one of these plants die out, we could be throwing away chances we wouldn't even know we might have had. That's as good an argument as any, if you ask me.

Identity parade #5 - the answers

Nigel rose admirably to the challenge and guessed correctly no's 1, 2, and most amazingly 4 - and gets half-marks for nearly guessing no. 5, too. Well done that man. Here for those who are curious is the low-down on last week's idents:

1.
Ruscus aculeatus - Butcher's broom. Very useful plant to know as it grows in the deepest of deep shade and has some rather pretty red berries in autumn. Most interesting for me though was those flowers - the 'leaves' aren't actually leaves at all, but modified flattened stems, and the flowers are borne right in the middle. Fascinating, and a little wierd.







2.
Chaenomeles speciosa 'Nivalis' - I used to grow this in my previous garden and the flowers are for me the most beautiful of all the Japanese quinces.






3.
Scilla mischtschenkoana - Pretty little thing, isn't it? If you want to know the difference between this and the earlier-flowering Chionodoxa, or 'Glory of the Snow', look at the petals - scillas have a blue stripe down the middle, whereas the Chionodoxa don't. At least, I think that's the way round...







4.
Sequoiadendron giganteum - or more commonly, Californian redwood. Instantly recognisable as a tree - but this is the very lovely foliage. Slightly flattened and down-turned, and I think a bit of a revelation for those like me who haven't got much further than looking with mouth agape at the trunk.




5.
Prunus 'Okame' - as Nigel said, there are so many flowering cherries and this could have been pretty much any one of them, so not really fair, but then who said this had to be fair?







There isn't an ident for this week - we're in the middle of a huge project at the moment (which is doing my head in and using up nearly every spare evening - my family is forgetting what I look like). So I thought, since we're having a pause, that I'd hand out a few virtual bouquets to you virtuoso plantsmen and women out there:

Big bunch of blowsy roses to VP with 14 points
Consolation chrysanths (but nice ones that weren't bought at the garage) to Nigel with 10
A handful of scented daffodils to Niels - 6
and a little posy of snowdrops to Anna - 5

back with some more wickedly annoying teasers soon....

March flowers

It must be spring... I'm joining in with Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day again!

Last month there were one or two but as I remember it we'd barely recovered from the snow... but give it four weeks and a little sunshine, and just look what we've got. Time to get planting!

PS Sorry, that's not Narcissus 'Jack Snipe' at all - it's 'February Gold'. There are some 'Jack Snipe' somewhere but haven't found them yet. I need a map of my garden...

Seeding the world #1

Sometimes I feel so privileged in my job. The other day I got to poke around in the back rooms of the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place in Sussex - home to the seeds of 25,000 of the world's plant species, some of which are the rarest plants in the world. Six of them are entirely extinct.

The place is like a nuclear bunker inside - in fact if World War Three ever does break out, head on down there as the walls are built of reinforced concrete so thick they're entirely radiation proof and would survive a direct hit by a crashing aeroplane. Don't ask me how they worked that out.

The seeds themselves are kept in huge walk-in freezers about the size of my kitchen, but the really amazing thing is that for now - they want to add to their number over time - there are just two of them. For 25,000 plant species. The concentrated biodiversity in those two freezers is just mind-boggling.

If you want a look at the kind of thing they have there, here's a selection:

Aren't seeds beautiful? And yes, that is a coco de mer - largest seed on earth. When you compare it to the dust-like antirrhinum seeds I put in last week, you realise just how much variety there is in the world.

The seeds come into the seedbank in big breatheable sacks from every continent - Kew has teams of botanists working with local experts in the field finding and collecting more and more plant samples to add to the bank. This is a sample of huge sycamore-like seeds from Madagascar. I think they're called Gyrocarpus, at least that's what it sounded like - in an environment like this even if you think you know quite a lot about plants, it's not long before you're out of your depth.

They test all the seeds for viability before they store them, using digital x-ray machines and all sorts of things. Then there's the problem of working out exactly how to germinate them. Here's one way of finding out - a mat with varying temperatures in bands across it. You put the seeds in little packets in rows along the heat bands, and wait. Then those that germinate on a certain heat band reveal the temperature the seed must be at in order to sprout. If that doesn't work, there's always cold stratification, chipping, bashing, soaking in various chemicals and even setting on fire (mainly reserved for the flora of the South African Cape, I believe).

It makes my little experiments in my greenhouse look like child's play...

Identity parade #5

A bit late this week but blame the spring lunacy that is my workload in the run-up to Chelsea... not quite as bad as those actually building gardens for the flower show but crazy nonetheless.

Anyway, just because I'm busy doesn't mean I haven't got time to set a few more plant-related teasers for you, courtesy of Capel Manor who supply the sometimes more than a little battered twigs, leaves and flowers from their garden in Enfield - no wonder they're tatty by the time they get to us, the other side of London in Gunnersbury. Anyway, I thought last week's were far too easy so I'm bowling you a few googlies this time.

1. (if you look very closely you'll see the flowers - these are a giveaway clue)

2.

3.

4. (a bit unfair, really, as this is merely the foliage of a tree, but can you guess which one?)

5.
Enjoy!

Spring has sprung

This is what's been cheering me up over the weekend.


Yep - the sun is out, the birds are singing, the ground has finally dried and I'm gardening again!


As you can see I haven't quite got round to the mulching yet but who cares?

I'm just happy to be outside again.

Anyone else noticed how particularly wonderful the snowdrops and crocuses (croci?) have been this spring? Is it something to do with the weather, or is it just me being so punch-drunk with seeing sunshine again that everything looks more sparkly than it ever has done before?