A walk on the wild side: Primrose

'Do not, as some ungracious pastors do

Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,

while, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,

Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads

and reaks not his own rede.'

- Ophelia, Act I Scene III, Hamlet

In Shakespeare's time a path strewn with primroses was a common metaphor: it signified the easy option, the choice that was alluring, the least challenging and most self-indulgent.

There's a note of rebuke in Ophelia's words – as also in Macbeth, where a porter speaks about 'treading the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire'. The implication is that following the beckoning of the pretty little primrose is to disregard the right and proper, but more difficult course: primroses, in other words, mean temptation.

It's an interesting dark note to what's generally seen as a symbol of youth, happiness, spring and innocence: a reminder that youth can be impetuous, happiness a shallow goal and innocence corrupted.

I find primroses a temptation that's very hard to resist at this time of year. We're lucky enough to have banks of them here: tumbling down the grass in cheeky froths of palest yellow, shrugging off the coarsest of grasses, peeping out from among hedgerow plants and at the feet of roses: if you plant them on purpose they often fail to thrive, yet they'll seed themselves into the oddest of corners and seemingly love it.

Primroses were among the first flowers ever to be grown. They were brought in from the fields by mediaeval peasants at the time of the Domesday Book alongside cowslips, verbascums and mallows to be planted among the cabbages and onions, and cared for with as much love as any modern gardener.

Of course these days that's illegal: primroses are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act and you can't pick them, let alone dig them up wholesale. Luckily they're not too difficult to raise from seed, as long as you sow them on the surface of the compost – don't cover – and leave them outdoors and exposed for the frost to get to them.

And quite apart from their sheer prettiness – and the joy they bring as the 'first rose' of spring – they are extraordinarily useful (one of the reasons they earned their place in those mediaeval cottage gardens).

Every part is useful: you can infuse the plant and its leaves to make a tea (one part primrose to 10 parts hot water) which will calm and soothe the nerves. It's also said to ease coughs and rheumatism.

Culpeper wrote in the 17th century about making an ointment out of the leaves to heal wounds, and also recommends an extract the juice of the roots (packed with essential oils and also good in pot pourri) taken 'snuffed up the nose' for nervous disorders. He warns that it 'occasions violent sneezing' and should only be taken in small doses. I wouldn't try it at home.

The fresh flowers are edible and can be used in salads or to add a pleasantly fragrant flavour to desserts: I like the sound of 'primrose pottage', or perhaps rice pudding with almonds, honey, saffron and ground primrose flowers. You can also crystallise them like violets. The leaves, too, can be eaten in salads (pick them young) and also boiled to eat as a vegetable. I haven't tried this myself – must have a go - but if anyone has I'd be very interested to know what they taste like.

Primroses are no longer as common as they once were; the dryness of the east of the country has all but driven them out, as they thrive only in damp conditions (one of the reasons why they do so well in the West Country: they are the county flower of Devon).

But they remain woven through the history of the country quite as closely as any quintessentially English flower.  Primrose Day, held each year on April 19, is the anniversary of the death of former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Apparently primroses were his favourite flower, and Queen Victoria regularly sent him posies from Osborne House (or he sent them to her: accounts vary). To this day a posy of primroses is laid at Disraeli's statue by Westminster Abbey each year.

Incidentally – next time you look into a clump of primroses, see if you can tell whether they're pin-eyed or thrum-eyed. This genetic diversification helps promote cross-pollination: pin-eyed flowers hold the female stigma well above the male anthers, like a green pinhead, while in thrum-eyed flowers the male anthers are to the fore and appear as an orange ring, with no central knob.

PS: I am here entirely ignoring the benighted race of hybrids about which Mr Colborn has ranted with much aptness and fluency here. Wildings only in this garden. 'Nuff said.

When is a meadow not a meadow?

Not a meadow

Does it matter what we call things?

This was the question posed by Miles King, well-respected Conservation Director of the Grasslands Trust – an increasingly vociferous and effective pressure group, campaigning to reverse the destruction of the nation's grasslands and meadows.

Now, that's ancient, traditional meadows, I should clarify – what Miles King capitalises as Wildflower Meadows.

What with 2012's RHS Britain in Bloom going 'wild about wildflowers' (that's arable cornfield flowers, not meadows), and the Olympics planting Fields of Gold (that's annual seed mixes, not meadows) and the advent of MeadowMats (that's wildflowers used as shed roofing: does that count?) and the people who manage Hyde Park letting the grass grow long to encourage wildflowers (ah - now we're getting there, surely?): there has never been a time when meadows have been more in the public eye, yet more annoyingly woolly in definition to the purist.

This isn't one either: the Fields of Gold
at the Olympic Park

In his blog, Miles takes particular issue with the highly successful Pictorial Meadows: annual seed mixes invented by Professor Nigel Dunnett, urban horticulture specialist, RHS Chelsea Flower Show regular and urban renewal pioneer, of the University of Sheffield's Department of Landscape.

Pictorial meadows are transforming urban spaces cheaply and effectively: they are introducing many people who have never had much to do with nature, or the countryside, to the joys of getting up close with beauty, and teeming insect life, and the pleasures of feeling things growing under your feet.

I've planted them in my own garden: they are breathtakingly beautiful, full of wildlife, and one of the best things I've ever done. I should add – just for balance – that I'm currently also taking care of 1/3 acre of rare traditional chalk downland meadow, the top third of my garden, and that's beautiful, full of wildlife and one of the best things I've ever done, too.

Read the post for Miles's full argument, but it basically boils down to the fact that by calling themselves meadows at all, Pictorial Meadows are distracting people's attention from ancient traditional meadows – of which there are precious few left - confusing the issue, and therefore undermining Miles's attempts to save our traditional grasslands. To quote: 'pictorial meadows are not contributing to the conservation of Wildflower Meadows or their wildlife (and other values). And for that reason it does matter what we call things.'

I happen to know, from regular conversations with him over the past few years, that Nigel is someone who thinks particularly deeply about our wider environment and the role plants have to play.

So when a Twitter discussion erupted last week – mainly in support of Miles's position – I couldn't help thinking Nigel's voice was missing from the debate. I was curious to know his take on the subject, so I got in touch and asked him. I felt his answer deserves quoting at length.

So what about this? MeadowMat growing at the nursery

He told me a story from the very early days, when he was just beginning to work with annual seed mixtures. Gloucester Council asked him to vegetate a central reservation on a dual carriageway: roadworks and tree planting had ripped up existing grass and shrubs, and all that was left was 'mown grass and tired landscape shrubs'.

Nigel made them an annual mix which flowered from June to November, a blaze of yellow and orange through into the autumn.

“I was contacted by a representative from English Nature,” he says. “She said this should never have been done.

“Her issue was that by making it look so easy to make these 'wildflower landscapes', we were giving the go-ahead to farmers to destroy meadows in the countryside because they would think that they could be made again in cities. And because these weren't proper wildflower meadows, that was a very bad thing.”

Nigel asked her whether she would have preferred the central reservation to remain mown grass and variegated shrubs: to which her answer was 'yes'.

'I was staggered by this,' says Nigel,' because this was a nature conservationist saying that she would rather have areas offering very little wildlife value, and extremely monotonous in a visual sense, instead of these flower, nectar and pollen-rich landscapes.

'By implication, her purist approach would both deny people a beautiful experience, and also eliminate a potential wildlife haven. People like this are dangerous in my opinion.'

This is: wildflowers in the south west
(courtesy of the RSPB via www.oursouthwest.com)

He points out that research has shown that far from non-natives having little wildlife value, the opposite is true. He says the general consensus now is that diverse flowering meadows and gardens are highly valuable to invertebrates, regardless of where the plants come from.

'What I am doing is working, and it is highly successful,' he says. 'It is bringing flower-rich landscapes into the heart of the city, into the everyday landscape. This isn't the nature reserve approach, where people are kept away from valuable sites and only those in the know can visit them, or make the choice to travel to them.

'What we are doing is making meadows in places where people have no choice but to walk through them, live with them, look out on to them. And therefore they do have to have a different character.'

His final point struck a particular chord for me: I dislike the entirely unnecessary polarisation of gardener and nature conservationist almost as much as I do the whole gardener vs designer dichotomy. Though it may be in a different key, we're all, surely, marching to the same tune.

'People like to see things in such simple black and white terms – things are either one thing or the other: it's either a meadow or it isn't.

'To me, life isn't so simple. Things are in shades of grey. So there is a whole continuum of meadow types, ranging from flower-rich and annual, through to grassy, perennial and with little flower.

'The key thing to me is that the pictorial meadow type approach, whether annual or perennial, opens the doors, or the floodgates to the much wider use of the native wildflower meadow because it makes meadow landscapes far more acceptable and part of the norm, and enables them to be used in high profile, high intensity places that would formerly be preserved for intensive horticulture.

“The use of the word meadow is deliberate. People can identify with it, and it makes sense. Of course it isn't a meadow in the purest sense, but then the same applies for countless other things that I can think of that are popular and well-liked.

'I would suggest the argument in [Miles King's] blog is entirely misplaced and focussed on the wrong thing. Rather than attacking a concept that is really entirely positive and is bringing huge benefits for urban biodiversity compared with what was there before, I suggest that the real fire should be on the rural landscape and the covering of thousands and thousands of hectares with monocultural crops with minimal habitat value.

“Compared to this, the concern over the naming of a few tens of hectares of flower-rich landscapes is rather trivial.”

**stop press** Miles King's response to this post is included among the comments below

A walk on the wild side: Gorse

Ulex europaeus catching my eye in the morning sunlight

'It's just the sort of place,' he explained, 'for an Ambush.'

'What sort of bush?' whispered Pooh to Piglet. 'A gorse-bush?'

'My Dear Pooh,' said Owl in his superior way. 'Don't you know what an Ambush is?'

'Owl,' said Piglet, looking round at him severely. 'Pooh's whisper was a perfectly private whisper and there was no need - '

'An Ambush,' said Owl,' is a sort of Surprise.'

'So is a gorse-bush sometimes,' said Pooh.

Gorse is not a much-loved plant.

It is unremittingly prickly. In fact it has become a byword for all that is prickly in life. Winnie the Pooh's wariness on the subject of gorse-bushes came from a close encounter with one after his experiment with the bees failed spectacularly. And whenever the Famous Five needed a really good hiding place, there was always a handy gorse bush around (mysteriously and perhaps a little conveniently always hollow on the inside).

But for the last month my eye has been irresistibly caught every day as I walk the dogs by a vivid flash of yellow in the hedgerow. It stops you in your tracks: the only bright colour in a winter landscape of sepia brown and green.

I think it must have blown in from Exmoor, 40 miles to the west, as we're on a relatively gentle hillside of hazel hedgerows and sleepy sheep and it's the only gorse bush for miles.

West Country names belie a relationship between man and gorse bush as old as the hills it grows on. Another common name for the plant is furze, and place names like Furzey Island off the Dorset coast, Furzey Gardens in the New Forest, and the names of numerous farms, roads and houses reveal the plant's long history here (Furzey is also a common local surname in Somerset).

It was once almost indispensable. The fierce burning properties of gorse made it perfect fuel for fires hot enough to bake bricks: you're well advised not to grow gorse close to a house as it's prone to spontaneous combustion in a prolonged drought.

People made it into fearsome besom brooms to sweep chimneys and hung their clothes out to dry on it as it held them in place better than any clothes peg. It is a good strong dye, the flowers turning cloth yellow or green and the bark a smokey darker green, it's a medicine for jaundice, kidney stones and scarlet fever, and the flower buds make good caper substitutes. The flowers are edible and can be used in salads, steeped in boiling water for a tea, or turned into wine (recipe here: the Vikings are rumoured to have brewed a gorse beer, which may explain their generally atrocious behaviour).

It was also much used to keep witches away: the common confusion between gorse and broom comes from its ancient use as a broom to sweep curses and hexes away from the door of the house.

There are three native gorses: U. europaeus, U. gallii (found, as the name suggests, on Welsh mountainsides, and smaller than the common gorse); and U. minor, almost prostrate, flowering in autumn and found mainly in the New Forest. Gorse flowering alongside heather in great swathes across the moorlands is probably one of the most breathtaking of Britain's natural spectacles.

But - bright yellow splashes in hedgerows aside – it's not something you'd have in your garden, surely.

Well I'd just like to make a little plea for this old friend. If you have a coastal garden, or one where the soil is really, really poor, there are few plants which will thrive better. It makes a dense and thorough windbreak: and it'll keep any amount of burglars out.

And it is just wonderful for wildlife, particularly bees. As well as the main flourish in winter and early spring, it produces a few flowers sporadically all year round ('When gorse is out of blossom, kissing's out of fashion', the old saying goes), which bumblebees find irresistible. The flowers, incidentally, are as explosive as the seedpods: they go off like a cannon the moment the bee clambers on, pasting the poor insect with pollen.

There are cultivated forms: U. gallii 'Mizen' is prostrate and tiny, growing to just 30cm x 30cm, and there was once a useful-sounding U. europaeus 'Strictus' (sometimes 'Fastigiatus') which makes for a good low hedge, though it's no longer listed, sadly.

More commonly-found is Ulex europaeus 'Plenus' or sometimes 'Flore Pleno', compact and double and recommended by Christopher Lloyd who calls it 'a fine sight in spring' and says it has coconut-scented blooms (he's less keen on gorse when it comes to propagating the stuff: 'a painful operation best left to the nurseryman', he says).

October flowers

Well I seem to be late for everything this month. And so it is with the unmissable Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens, which for some time now I have been using as a way of stepping back and looking, properly at the garden and where it is in the year (instead of just seeing the usual tick-list of jobs that became urgent last week).

I blame a certain lethargy brought on by the impending frosts. And the recent demise of Slide.com, which was my way of indulging in loads of photos without the guilt of having to inflict them on anyone unless they wanted to sit through them all.

So I'm afraid this month you'll have to look at all my photos, one by one: either that, or log off right now and go do something more improving instead.

Since it's undeniably autumn now - the swishing sound as I walk becoming less and less easy to ignore, or indeed wilfully deny - I'll start not with flowers but with berries, filling my garden gradually from the yellow buttons of Sorbus 'Joseph Rock' to hips and cotoneaster berries and the little jewel-like Tomato 'Hundreds and Thousands' tumbling over the tubs on my patio.





I'm not too keen on the cotoneaster, as it self-seeds everywhere, but at this time of year you can't help but like it.

There are always lots of wildlings in my garden - and several are having a second flush at the moment.



Some aren't strictly wildings but sort of naturalised garden plants: the Anemone x japonica 'Honorine Jobert' is going mad in the front garden and will have to be sorted out at some point. Not now though.

The hardy fuchsia is another one in its prime right now: hard to think I'm going to have to get rid of it this year (too big, too old, too shady).

In fact the fuchsias generally are looking pretty good right now.



Also in this part of the garden are - or rather were - the scented-leaf pelargoniums; though I spent part of today digging them up and tucking them away in the greenhouse ahead of the Big Freeze.

It's been a good year for the annuals: and a good thing too, as I'm still in my first season so stuck to seed-raised flowers to see me through while I waited to see what came up in my new garden.





The cosmos in particular have been fabulous: flowering madly since about the end of June and still going strong.



But there have been two annual stars which have really stolen the show. The first is my bronze fennel: a lovely foil for other plants while they have their summer spell in the spotlight, but now a fireworks display of golden yellow.

And equally tall and airy, the Nicotiana mutabilis are dancing through the border on their wiry stems of pink and white, charming, dainty and adorable.

So adorable have they been, in fact, that I'm going to follow some advice Chris Ireland-Jones gave me on my recent visit to Avon Bulbs and try to overwinter them in the greenhouse. He says if you can cut them back hard, pot them up and bring them in, they have a head start on the season next year. Twice this display will be quite, quite ravishing. Can't wait.

Wild at heart

I came back from a recent weekend hiking over the chalk downlands of Oxfordshire aching rather more than expected in joint and muscle but also puzzling over the distinctions we make between wild flowers and garden flowers.

A sort of pinkish vetchy sort of thing.... wildflower identification never was my strong point

When is a wild flower not a wild flower? When does it cross the line and become a flower that is somehow more acceptable: somehow not untidy, pretty even?

Common toadflax (Linaria vulgaris)

Is a cornflower a 'wildflower', or a 'garden flower'? When we buy garden wildflower mixes, do the plants that grow become, de facto, garden flowers? Or are they still somehow 'wild'?

Common knapweed (Centaurea nigra)

It was brought home even more forcefully because what I optimistically call my top field (mainly because it is home to my chickens) has been gradually filling up with flowers all season. That's because - to the horror of the local farmers - I haven't been mowing it. First, I just couldn't be bothered; second, I didn't have the time; and third, I just couldn't bring myself to cut down all the wildflowers.

Dog rose (Rosa canina)

In both Oxfordshire, where my poor walking companion had to endure frequent pauses for me to take the photos on this page, and the top field, the flowers are classic chalk downland wildflowers. That's a protected habitat under the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, which is as good an indication as any of the quality and diversity of the plants, insects and animals which live there.

Field poppy (Papaver rhoeas)

This weekend I had small blue butterflies flitting around my head as I made the trek back and forth to the chicken run. The air is buzzing with insects; not just bees, but hoverflies and little funny-looking blue flies and big clumsy may bugs. The field is surging with life (unlike the barley field next door), and in my gardener's book, that's just as it should be.

Fox and cubs (Pilosella aurantiaca)

And never mind the wildlife: the whole thing has been a picture of loveliness. First it was a powder-blue sheen of bluebells and ajuga, later sprinkled liberally with starry speedwells; pink campion and white campion danced with ox-eye daisies, cow parsley and jack-by-the-hedge later on, with clover and sheets of yellow buttercups skipping at their feet.

Meadow cranesbill (Geranium pratense)

Of course some 'wild' flowers are deemed acceptable: few gardens are without their foxgloves or forget-me-nots. But why do we go to the effort of growing Ammi majus - lovely as it is - when cow parsley is every bit as beautiful and rather more statuesque? Not to say easier to grow?

Comfrey (Symphytum officinale)

Don't you lose your heart to red field poppies every bit as much as to oriental poppies? But why are field poppies 'wild'? And why are cornflowers and corncockles relegated to the 'wildflower' bits of the garden? Why aren't they allowed to hold their own with the penstemons and the salvias and the astrantias?

Hesperis matronalis... I think

It strikes me as all rather arbitrary. I suppose I should take heart from the fact that there are wildflower bits of anyone's garden; it wasn't so long ago that Beth Chatto was almost disqualified at an RHS show for daring to bring Helleborus foetidus, deemed 'wild' and therefore undeserving of appreciation. At least these days we're allowed to have 'wild' flowers in our gardens.

But I do feel sad that we are divided and labelled. We are 'wildlife gardeners' - or we are other sorts of gardener. I don't consider myself a 'wildlife gardener', whatever that is; I love having wildlife in my garden, yet I do my own thing and don't garden around them (and am quite horrible to a lot of wildlife, especially if it's furry and tries to eat my lettuces).

White campion (Silene latifolia)

If anything, I'm a kitchen gardener; but I also love to grow flowers. I like having wild things in my garden, too, and even like several of the so-called weeds (wildflowers?), as long as they behave themselves, more or less. I hoick a lot of them out as well: but then I dug up a rose bush last week because I didn't like it and it was in the wrong place. So does that make roses weeds in my garden? No, of course not; and neither are cow parsley or cranesbills, though I treat them much the same in that I grow them where I like them, and pull them out where I don't.

Guelder rose (Viburnum opulus)

Well: these were idle thoughts, and rather rambly ones, and I don't pretend to have any answers. But I do make a plea for everyone to stop all this pigeonholing. Personally, I shall grow campion and cranesbills among my cosmos and crocosmia, and hang the consequences. They're just far too pretty to leave out.