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?

Perfect partners #2

Cornus alba 'Sibirica' and Hamamelis x intermedia 'Pallida' lighting up a corner on a gloomy February day at Capel Manor's gardens in Enfield, London, underplanted with Erica x darleyensis 'Silberschmelze'.

Identity parade #4

Right, that's enough holidaying. Back to school.

(and I'll try to post about something else in between times otherwise this is going to become the plant ident blog....)

A word of warning - there's no theme this time and the examples we were given were utter pants, especially since most were bulbs and had mostly turned into sad little droops of slime long before we got to look at them. So one or two I've had to re-photograph from my own garden :D

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Have fun!

Identity parade #3: the answers!

There were only two you didn't get in the end, so congrats to VP, Alice and Anna for your stalwart efforts. Here are the ones that foxed you to the last:

No. 1 was the diminutive Cornus sericea 'Kelseyi' - it often seems to be named as 'Kelsey Dwarf' (as it was at this nursery), wrongly I believe. Anyway, it's a twiggy shrub about 60cm high and though not as colourful as its cousins in the dogwood family, it has an almost grass-like effect planted en masse and is quite lovely.





No. 5 many of you realised was a Phormium - but I needed the cultivar. It is in fact Phormium 'Sundowner' - a heady mix of purple, pink and slate-green but one of the nicer of the pinkish phormiums and not quite as garish as many of them seem to be.






That's it for now, and you get a holiday this week as it's half-term! Back next week with some more fiendish foliage for you to ponder over :D

Tagging along with VP

Couldn't resist this one - VP has invited everyone to join in with a great meme where you get to fish about in your photo folders and post whatever photo is the fourth photo in the fourth folder that comes up.

So here it is. Funnily enough, it's a garden....

To be more precise, it's The Old Croft, a rather lovely garden on Holmwood Common near Dorking which opens under the National Gardens Scheme. We go there every year because they have a fabby swing hanging on very long ropes from their very large and venerable oak (I think) tree which if you get it going fast enough soars thrillingly over the lake. So the girls have a great time and so do I (not on the swing, I hasten to add - far too vertiginous for me). This is the planting in a boggy bit by the lake - they do a lot of this pink-and-orange colour scheme in that bit of the garden, which sounds horrific but is actually stunning in the sunshine. There's a bamboo maze and a hosta garden and... oh... all sorts of things.

I took the photo as part of an attempt to get a magazine to publish an article on it when I first started writing, back in 2006 (my photo folders really need clearing out). Encouraging noises to begin with but then the ed said no in the end. Not sure if it was me or my photos that put her off!