The oriental poppies have broken the green, rearing above the rush of June foliage. They are the first true colour in the garden, save the Tulipa sprengeri that teetered neatly on the last week of spring and preceeded them. Red is a jolt this early in our verdant landscape, but we are ready for it now, the first slash of summer.
I have planted the poppies in homage to several memories. The first, a plant I remember from being about the same height, gazing into their interiors in our childhood garden. It grew with ferns and sprawled beyond the borders to offer up bristly buds, the casing breaking into two under the pressure of soon to be uncrumpled flower. I am red-green colour blind, but not completely and those poppies are an early memory of being able to see red fully, for they present it without compromise. Luminous and as red as anything can be, heightened by black-blotched bases and turquoise stamens.
The second memory, and one that I have planted into this garden, refers not to poppies at all but to meeting scarlet Amenone pavonina flaring amongst euphorbia and the march of giant fennel on the Golan Heights in Israel. I was there for a year working in the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens and the brilliant Michael Avishai, then Director of the gardens, would take me on weekend excursions to look at the flora of Israel. A fearless and terrifying driver, we would leave at 4am, to arrive at a site, spot on time for a happening in the landscape. This one came with his advice to not stray too far from the road. If you stepped over the wire marked “Land mines. Do not enter !”… The red of anemone I can see too and I shall never forget its shimmer amongst its opposite acid greens and the sun rising over an army of fennel stretching into a dangerous distance.
So, this particular memory comes with a charge and the oriental poppies that step through the giant fennels in the garden here take the place of the anemone. We have two varieties by default, not design. The requested ‘Beauty of Livermere’ (Goliath Group) are pillar box red, while there are three plants of a tangerine orange one that were substituted and planted without knowledge of their difference. I do not have the heart nor the desire to take out one or the other. The reds are good together and if I were to try and remove the plants to only have one, they would still likely regrow from root cuttings. This is the way to propagate oriental poppies for they do not come true from seed.
The rush into life in the spring, first with a mound of hairy, lime-green foliage and then the reach to flower is made possible by energy stored in thick, deeply searching roots. Hailing from Central Asia, their habit of disappearing once they have flowered and set seed is a survival mechanism against the drought of summer. The gap they leave will need to be negotiated by cutting the plants back to the base as soon as they begin to wane and in combining them with later-to-come perennials that will cover for the gap they leave behind. Asters and late flowering grasses make good couplings.
The reserve in the root can also be used to advantage in the fringe of the garden in rough grass and amongst cow parsley for the early growth will also outcompete grass in spring. The secret is to introduce them as established plants and keep them clear of competition in the first year whilst they are building their root system. Their dwindling summer growth will be disguised by the meadow and the autumn regrowth can be mowed around once it returns with summer rains.
Though I do not grow more varieties here, for the oriental poppies set an opulent tone and demand your attention whilst they are in flower, I have grown several in the past. At Home Farm I set ‘Perry’s White’, with its contrasting dark blotch, amongst gallica roses and inky bearded iris. I used the wood aster, Eurybia diviricata to cover for them later. For a while I also grew ‘Patty’s Plum’ for its thunderous bruised grey-mauve flower though it was never a keeper and dwindled for me. Then there was Saffron’, with wide open flowers of pale tangerine.
Burned into the June green, I will be there as I was aged five this coming weekend to witness their awakening. Never dimmed, always welcome.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 12 June 2021
Bright as sunlight and illuminating these wet, windswept days, the Welsh poppies are dancing down the steps. This is their way, seeding into cracks and crevices and taking advantage of any window of opportunity. This is usually in bare ground but, being adaptable, it could also be in the centre of a later-to-emerge perennial. The seedlings, which are happy in cool shade, take the initiative, sending down a sturdy taproot and then bolting up unexpectedly the following year without you so much as noticing.
This is how they arrived here, as stowaways in the ark of plants that I brought with me from the Peckham garden. Probably wedged in the roots of the Molly-the-witch peonies or amongst the hellebores which, in turn, hitched a ride in the plants that I brought with me from Home Farm years before. Now that I cast my mind back, hopping and skipping from one garden to the other, I can trace them back to a trip I made to the Picos de Europa in northern Spain when I was in my early twenties. They were a highlight on the way there, growing with wild goat’s beard and Mourning Widow geranium on the cool, shaded side of the Pyrenees. Their bright, gold flowers were the reason we stopped and climbed amongst the rocks to see where they grew and with what companions. Beguiled, the seedpod I slipped into my pocket marked the beginning of their journey here.
Meconopsis cambrica is wide-spread in upland areas of Western Europe and appears here in south west England, parts of Ireland and Wales, hence our common name the Welsh Poppy. Though in the wild you will find it, as I did, in the cool crevices of rocky places, a garden setting can emulate these conditions readily. So readily sometimes that you have to be careful where you let it seed. One plant that I couldn’t bring myself to remove that had found its way into a crack in the concrete in my growing area behind the barns has seeded repeatedly into the trays of seedlings and pots nearby. This is how many of our plants have found their way into the garden.
Being thoroughly perennial and happy to find a niche, their spring to early summer flower is welcome now before the garden gets into full swing. From bright green, ferny foliage the fine yet sturdy stems rise and stand free in their own space. The hairy cases are cast aside as the buds tilt upright to reveal the crinkle of bright petals. Each flower lasts just a day or two, but there is a relay of buds that will throw colour for quite some time. The secret to keeping them within bounds is to cut them back, leaves and all before they seed. A second refreshed crop of foliage and sometimes flower will return and these are usually the plants that catch you out to throw their seed when your eye is then firmly set on the summer.
We have a naturally occurring soft orange form that I’ve let run on the other side of the barns, but I do not want it to pollute the pure chrome yellow of those that enliven the garden. Away from both, by the trough in the milking barn yard, I am building up a colony of the variety ‘Frances Perry’. Though more diminutive in stature, the dark tangerine flowers are quite my favourite thing of the moment. Flowering for a month to six weeks they coincide with the acid green of Euphorbia cyparissias ‘Fens Ruby’. Opposites on the colour wheel which vibrate one against the other.
Apparently, this form is less profligate as a self-seeder, but my pot of seedlings that were sown when ripe last summer and overwintered so they got the frost are looking like they are far from difficult. Difficult is not a word I would apply to the Welsh Poppy which, if it decides it likes you, will probably be with you for the long haul. Here and there and, if you are not a little careful, everywhere there is a cool corner and opportunity.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 22 May 2021
This week has seen a quantum shift happen all around us. The crab apples in full sail like cumulo nimbus and the meadows flashing chrome-yellow as the buttercups push above the sward. The lane has suddenly narrowed with the cow parsley rising up and racing to flower. It is that moment we have been waiting for, the ground wet again from rain, warmth finally in the sun and growth with no excuse but to burgeon.
The lanes here are miraculous for a fortnight. Walk them in the morning and the verges reach out to touch you, dripping from the night before and spangled with starry speedwell, stitchwort and the first pinpricks of campion. All suspended in an extraordinary moment of aptly named ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’. Fresh and reaching and smelling of newness this interlude between spring and summer is dashed by the local farmer who brings out the flail to raze the cow parsley as it comes into full bloom. It taints the milk he says, but since he no longer droves the cows along the lane I think it is more about order and control. The carnage makes me smart. He doesn’t touch the verge on our side – rules are rules – which we leave long and unkempt and brushing the windscreens.
I have invited the cow parsley into the garden in its cultivated form Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Raven’s Wing’. Darker for the contrast of pale flower as they begin to expand and lace, I watch the new growth closely from the moment it begins to muster. This is usually just as the snowdrops fade and you become ready for something new. The filigree newness of ‘Raven’s Wing’ shows its true colours early and the best of the seedlings are dark from the moment they produce the first true leaves. Our lane-side population have their influence though and many seedlings begin their reversion back to type, turning first chocolatey instead of the deep plum purple and then green. The early vigil to winkle out the plants that revert is important so that I am marking the difference between the hedgerows and the garden proper. An echo of our surroundings, a segue and a gentle transition between the wild and the cultivated.
Derry Watkins has a darker version named Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Dial Park’, which I will try here too because cow parsley goes with almost anything. Go to Great Dixter at this particular zenith in a fortnight and you will see how extraordinary it is where Fergus has invited the wild form into the borders. I have to exercise control here, leaving just a single plant, the best of the dark-leaved forms to seed where I want the lace amongst slower-to-rise perennials. The majority are cut as soon as I see the seed ripening, since they are profligate seeders. Being hedgerow plants anthriscus are as happy in sun as they are in shade and use their tolerance of the latter to take their time under the cover of summer growth to send down taproots into the crowns of plants you’d rather they didn’t. Their early growth can be the undoing of a later-to-rise aster or sun-loving iris or nerine.
Cow parsley, also known as wild chervil, opens the season of umbellifers here and the laciness of the umbels is something I love and include for their loftiness and suspension. Chaerophyllum hirsutum ‘Roseum’ is already in flower too, a pink form of Hairy Chervil with a flowering season of about a month. The flowers start low and on a level with brunnera, but rise up to hip height to accompany the first of the Iris sibirica. Another related umbellifer which flowers at the same time is Myrrhis odorata. Before sugar was freely available the leaf and seed of Sweet Cicely were used to sweeten cakes. We have it here in the herb garden, where it is happy in the shadows of the Afghan fig and giant fennels. Its filigree of aromatic early growth is good beneath plants that take over later, but if you are not to have a thousand seedlings it is best to remove the seed heads once you have enjoyed them green and before they start to drop and conquer all they survey.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 15 May 2021
The spring this year has been slow. A wet winter finally giving way at the end of February to a long and testing period without rain. This came with a relenting fortnight of frosts that saw us fleecing the wall-trained fruit nightly and praying for the plum orchard, which at the time was in full and vulnerable flower. It has been too cold to direct sow in the kitchen garden and the self-sowers, which I like here to make the garden feel lived-in, are looking sparse, the seedlings dwindling without the water in the top layer of soil in this critical period.
We knew the garden would find the water with well-established roots searching it out, but new growth needs rain and it began to show it in tardiness and a reluctance to get out of the blocks. This spring we have pined for the burgeoning that is so much part of an April landscape.
Cue the tulips which, although slower to appear than usual, have sailed through unscathed and oblivious. Miraculous for their ability to cover for the pause between the narcissus waning and the cow parsley filling the hedgerows, we would not be without their impeccable timing.
Despite the hiatus in the garden and their ability to plug the gap, I have deferred from including tulips there due to their immediately ornamental nature. Preferring the slow unravelling of greens against our rural backdrop, we have, instead, grown the tulips in the kitchen garden for picking where, in this productive setting, their flamboyance can sing and not shout.
It was on a trip to see the Dutch bulb fields while a student at Kew that I first saw tulips jumbled together en masse. They were in an old orchard at the back of a bulb farm where the spares had been thrown and provided (for me at least, desperate for naturalism) a relief from the rigour of the regimented rows in the fields. It was an unforgettable sight. Free and liberated and multi-layered with colour and juxtaposition of forms. We grow them together here in homage to that memory and to ease the tulips’ innate formality.
Each year we put together a collection that explores a particular colourway using early, mid-season and late varieties so that we have a month to six weeks of flower. Thirty of each and usually ten varieties planted randomly about 6” apart in November. We move the tulips from bed to bed so that they appear in a different place in the kitchen garden to avoid Tulip Fire, which builds up if you replant the tulips in the same ground repeatedly. A five to seven-year cycle means that the fungal disease goes without its host and, by the time they return to their original position, the ground should be ‘clean’ and ready to receive them again.
The annual selection sees us experimenting with new varieties, and returning to old ones that we favour. Inevitably, because one tulip bulb looks roughly like another, we curse the bulb suppliers who substitute one or two without letting us know so that there are some wild surprises. This would matter if you were planting them into a scheme, but it rarely matters in the mix and sometimes throws up an oddly welcome guest.
After ten years of enjoying growing the tulips in the knowledge that they provide us with a guaranteed respite after winter and a kickstart in spring, we are beginning to feel less easy about their disposability. We are particular here about reusing what we can and not more than we need and it goes against the grain to discard the bulbs, because we don’t have the room to keep them. So, a new place, which will be our equivalent of the Dutch orchard, will be found by the polytunnel for the bulbs to have another life and show us which ones have the potential to be recurring in our heavy, winter-wet ground. This may take some time, but it feels the right time to apply this rigour.
In the search for varieties that do well year after year, we are going to try a few in the garden, but only close to the buildings and used very sparingly so that they do not compete for attention. They will be worked in amongst the volume of the Paeonia delavayi at the garden’s entrance, so that the early flower coincides with the unfurling plum foliage of the tree peonies. We are referring back to our 2019 selection that focused on dark reds and plums. The moodiness of the almost brown ‘Continental’ and the glowing cardinal red of ‘National Velvet’ will sit well here. We will let you know next year how the association fairs amongst the peonies.
In order of flowering our selection was as follows:
First to flower in early April and with a long season of over a month. Tall, straight stems. Uncommon shade of lemon sorbet yellow. Widely listed as growing to 40cm, we found it to be one of the tallest at 55-60cm.
Difficult in a garden setting as the flower is so out of scale with the stem length, for cutting this wine-dark tulip is rich and lustrous. Almost as good as the peonies it precedes. Long flowering season. The shortest for us at 30cm, although listed at 45cm.
Opening primrose yellow with dramatic green flaming this lily-flowered tulip fades to cream and twists extravagantly as it ages. 40cm.
Another diminutive tulip better suited to a pot. A boxy shape we were not so keen on and a rather violent shade of scarlet in the garden. This mellows when cut and brought indoors though, where the exaggerated fringing and black eye can also be seen to best advantage. 30cm.
Delightfully elegant Viridiflora tulip with green flaming on gently waved petals of off-white, broadly streaked with raspberry red. 45cm.
Similar in colour to ‘Orange Sun’ which we have grown before, this Darwin tulip is taller and more elegant. The pure, citrus orange flowers have a satin sheen and a clear yellow centre, which is shown when the flower opens in sunshine. 50cm.
A more sombre shade of burnt orange which is accentuated by the matt petals, which age to faded apricot-gold at the margins. Deliciously sherbet-scented. For us this was the shortest lived at just two weeks. 45cm.
The court jester of parrot tulips. The flaming of primary red and yellow is utterly joyful. The yellow fades to a more subdued clotted cream as they age. 50cm.
Late and tall this tulip has huge flowers the size of a goose egg in a rich shade of deep crimson. With sturdy, ramrod straight stems it is ideal for a windy site such as ours or for picking. 55-60cm
The scarlet lily-flowered tulip in the main image is ‘Red Shine’, which we grew last year and would seem to be a good contender for perennial flowering.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs & captions: Huw Morgan
Published 8 May 2021
This is the fifth spring since Dan oversowed the newly landscaped banks at the front of the house with native meadow seed and now the cowslips (Primula veris) are really starting to show themselves. This year we have counted over fifty individuals on the bank immediately in front of the house.
Their luminous, pale green calcyes, like tiny inflated bladders, announced their presence long before the golden flowers unfurled from within them. The sturdy, felted stems rise up from a basal rosette of heavily textured foliage and can hold up to thirty scalloped flowers, each marked with five orange spots, on wire-thin stalks in a loose umbel. Their resemblance to a bunch of keys gives them another common name of Key Flower. They have a notably long season of three to four weeks, as the flowers open in succession in each cluster and with a relay of flowering stems as newer ones rise up to replace those that fade. They come on stream just as their cousins, the primroses, start to dim and so continue to provide early nectar for long-tongued bees, butterflies and moths. I picked some last weekend and they have been unexpectedly long-lasting in a vase and with the most delicious spiced apricot scent. I imagine this perfume is one of the notable attractions of cowslip wine, the romance of which haunts the hedgerows of Thomas Hardy and Laurie Lee.
The farmer who lived here before us grazed the fields with cattle, but after we relaxed the grazing regime we were delighted to find that a large colony of cowslips was still intact in the Tynings, the fields that our neighbours call the Hospital Fields. Although the colony has not proliferated quickly we have seen definite evidence of an increase in numbers and the start of an expansion of the main colony. Fine-tuning the mowing and grazing regime to increase the presence of flowering plants such as these is one of our constant challenges.
Due to bad agricultural practice in the 1970’s and ‘80’s the cowslip almost became an endangered species, but its inclusion in commercial meadow mixes over the last twenty years and more has seen it make a resurgence on motorway embankments and in new meadow creation schemes.
Plantlife, the British charity that supports native wild plant conservation, is currently running a Cowslip Survey. Cowslips come in two forms, ‘S-Morph’ and ‘L-Morph’. In the former the plural stamens (male) are presented foremost in the corolla, while in the latter form it is the singular stigma (female) that is seen. In healthy cowslip populations there should be around a 50/50 mix of forms, however this gets out of balance if there is a change in agricultural practice, land or habitat management. The survey has been launched to gain a broader understanding of how healthy British cowslip populations are and, consequently, the wider health of our native grasslands. On a cursory visual check today it would appear that our colonies, both new and long-established, are pretty well balanced, but I will definitely be taking a more detailed look for the survey to get a better understanding of how we can maximise the species diversity in our meadows.
Words and photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 17 April 2021
The Tenby daffodils are flaring on the banks that fall steeply into the ditch. Backlit by morning sun they are the purest of yellows, brilliant and bright and so very full of life. The tilted buds are already visible breaking their sheaths as the snowdrops dim and the primroses take over and begin their moment. The narcissus join them then, not to overshadow as you might think, but in a partnership of yellows, the colour of spring and new life.
Now considered a subspecies of our native daffodil, N. pseudonarcissus subsp. obvallaris is found locally near Tenby in Dyfed, South Wales, where they have a small range of natural distribution. Their cousin, N. pseudonarcissus, is variable, with a soft yellow trumpet and palest yellow petals, so a group registers quite differently and they have a softness that sits easily. Not so the Tenby daffodil which is brazen and to the point, being bright chrome yellow throughout. Though this might not be easy in a larger daffodil, the Tenby is no more than a foot tall and everything is perfectly proportioned and neat. Thus they weather the March storms and stand like a person with innate confidence that is happy in their own skin.
The crease in the land that we call the Ditch is far more than that. It is the divide between the ground that we garden and the rounded rise of the Tump that we look out upon and forms our backdrop to the east. The spring-fed rivulet that runs quickly down it is constant and gurgling, even in summer. The silvery slip of water was revealed when we cleared the brambles 10 years ago and fenced it on both sides so that this distinct habitat could become an environment of its own. We have been building upon the nature of this place ever since. Splitting the primroses that sit happy in the heavy, wet ground and stepping plants through it that are either closely related to the wild plants that thrive there or feel right and can cope with the competition.
The Ditch is a place that we garden lightly and the plan is to one day have it naturalised with bulbs that like the conditions here. Snowdrops and aconites to start the year and snakeshead fritillaries and camassia to follow. The Narcissus obvallaris are grouped loosely around a staggering of Cornus mas, which start to bloom when you can feel the winter easing.
So far the Tenbys have not started to seed, but I hope that our man-made imprint can be softened with seedlings that find where they want to be. This has begun already with the straight Narcissus pseudonarcissus, which I’ve been planting lower down the slopes and, in an echo of the ones we found higher up the valley, growing on little tumps that run alongside the stream where the hazel grows. They sit there with the young Dog’s Mercury as a marker of this ancient woodland and looking down on all they survey. The way they grow in the wild is a good measure for where they want to be when you find them their home. Cool, but not in the wet hollows and with a little shadow later to ease up the competition of the more thuggish grasses.
Having been stung a couple of times with narcissus orders that were incorrectly supplied, I started three years ago by potting up a hundred bulbs, two to a pot, as I needed to know that we were putting the real thing into this wild place. It was the year that Huw’s mother passed away and, as his family are from Swansea, it felt fitting to be planting them out just a fortnight after she died. The Tenbys start to bloom around St. David’s Day and, when the first yellow shows, we add another round of plants potted up the previous autumn. Midori and Shintaro from Tokachi Millennium Forest took part one year when they were here to stay on a ‘gardening holiday’ from snowbound Hokkaido, and it has now become something of a tradition to plant a number round about now to find the places in the ditch where we feel the light needs capturing.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 13 March 2021
Against the odds, the delicate Crocus tommasinianus ‘Albus’ spear the turf on the bank in front of the house. When you first become aware of their presence earlier in the month it is easy to mistake their pale tapers for the light reflecting off blades of grass, but suddenly and all at once they are free. Standing tall enough above the sward to shiver in the slightest of breezes and opening wide in a sunny interlude to reveal orange stamens, yellowed throats and nectar for the early bees.
I first grew Crocus tommasinianus in the Peckham garden and learned to love it there for being the superior cousin to the ‘Dutch’ Crocus vernus which stud front lawns in spring like spilled tins of Quality Street. I did not know it then, but I had been supplied with the true species, which has the palest silvery-lilac reverse to the petals with the colour held within. I have since repeated my orders, again and again and from different places, only to find I have planted a thousand ‘Ruby Giant’ here or two thousand ‘Whitewell Purple’ there. These darker selections are often mis-supplied and sit less lightly for their weight of saturated colour.
Just up the lane and making the point that they are happy there, the true form has taken over our neighbours’ garden. The sisters that live there are natural gardeners and have been tending theirs now for decades. Without competition the crocus have seeded freely, to the point of flooding the open ground of their borders, seeding into the crowns of all the plants and seizing every niche between paving stones. The garden is free and joyous and Josie and Rachel never see their occupancy as a problem.
We have struck up a friendship and Rachel has generously allowed me to dig them in-the-green immediately after flowering so that I do not have to depend upon the vagaries of the bulb suppliers. I am going to keep them out of the beds here, however, as I want to work in the garden just as they come into leaf when I’m preparing the garden for spring. The sunny banks at the back of the house are where I am hoping they will naturalise. The free-draining slope there is ideal, because they like dry ground when they are dormant and the sunshine ensures that their flowers, which are light sensitive, open to reveal their interiors. When they do, you feel your heart lift and the long dark winter retreat.
I can already see from their behaviour in the grass under the young crab apples that they will not seed as freely as they have in the open ground of Josie and Rachel’s garden. Though happy in grass, the lushness of our meadows is probably too much for the young seedlings to take a hold. I hope in time, and once the grass thins as the crab apples assert themselves, that they will take to a lighter sward and begin to make the place their own. This is worth waiting for and every year I am adding a few more with Narcissus jonquilla and Anemone blanda to follow after their early blaze is over.
Shipton Bulbs stock a number of special selections that are subtler than the named varieties above. The rosy Crocus tommasinianus ‘Roseus’ (main image) and C. t. ‘Pictus’ which looks as though the tips of the petals have been dipped in ink. The white form, Crocus tommasinianus ‘Albus’, is very choice and, as they do not come as cheap, I ordered a couple of handfuls and gave them their own place on on the bank at the front of the house in the hope that they will not cross with the others at the back. The position here is exposed to our winds that whip across the open ground, but they stand bravely and mark the shift in the season with the snowdrops and the promise of what lies just around the corner.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 20 February 2021
I first grew the stinking hellebore as a child on thin acidic sand in the shadowy stillness of woodland. We were surrounded on all sides and the woods were always on the advance to the point that, when we moved there in the mid 1970s, the vegetation was pressing against the windows. Our acre was a long-forgotten garden and we made clearings and pushed back against the brambles and the saplings as we unpicked what had once been there before.
The Helleborus foetidus was one of the plants that thrived for me there as a young gardener. My first plant was ordered from Beth Chatto and I watched its every move. The first year’s reach to establish its long-fingered greenery and the wait for the second for it to throw its mass of pale jade flower. The bladdery seedpods that followed in early summer and, the following spring, the rain of seedlings and the places that they preferred to be. Being easy in our setting, they taught me that, if you find the right place for a plant, it will sing for you. I can see those plants in my mind’s eye now. Quietly architectural, poised yet slightly melancholy, but holding so much promise when the leaves on the trees were down.
With my eyes newly opened and hungry for life in the winter I began to see it everywhere both in the wild and sitting happily in a garden setting. On the thin chalky soil of the South Downs I found it running through ancient woodland with lustrous hart’s tongue ferns, dog’s mercury and, later, bluebells. This was its territory according to the books, but one that couldn’t be more different from the rhododendron country we lived in just a short cycle ride away. I saw it then pushing onto a verge from a hedge and happy in sunshine where it was escaping a garden. Just a stone’s throw away the parent plant sat contentedly against the base of a bright flinty wall to challenge my feeling that I already knew this plant. Of course, I didn’t know from just growing it once that it is a plant that is happy to compromise if it likes you.
I have not grown Helleborus foetidus for myself again until fairly recently, living vicariously in the interim years through my clients’ gardens and conducting an erratic relationship, like you do with faraway friends. You have to fill in the gaps of influence when you see a plant, or indeed a friend from only time to time, but I have learned through time about its longevity. If the conditions are too good, it will live fast and move on after a handful of years. If you give it too much direct competition and immediate shadow it will dwindle and if you grow it hard, with plenty of light, be it a cool north light or the brightness of an open position, it will provide you with the most handsome growth. Handsome and all-year-round is what Helleborus foetidus does best.
The Lenten roses (Helleborus hybridus) are ultimately longer-lived and better adapted to a long distance relationship or the vagaries of their custodian’s gardening knowledge. So, the steadfast Helleborus hybridus were favoured in the Peckham garden where I didn’t have room for both. The Lenten Roses came from Peckham to here and until recently I hadn’t thought about rekindling my acquaintance with the stinking hellebore, because we are as exposed and open to sun as I was huddled in trees as a teenager. But just down the hill in a farmer’s garden, there is a colony growing contentedly where his intolerance of anything but grass has pushed them into a rugged bank that is too steep to mow. Seeing them happily flowering in the bright open sunshine amongst primroses reminded me it was time to live with them again.
I have put them in two places here, one in more shadow, amongst the rangy limbs of the black-catkinned Salix gracilistyla ‘Melanostachys’ and another group against the potting shed where the ground is dry and free draining and there is plenty of light under a lofty holly. They face east here and receive a blast of morning sunshine, so they have grown stockily amongst Butcher’s Broom (Ruscus aculeatus) and Cyclamen coum. Their leaves are also more metallic and light resistant than those growing in the shade of the shrubby willow. The two groups couldn’t be more different but they are coming into bloom together.
The plants take a year to get up the strength they need to throw their prodigious flowering head. This is held aloft and above the ruff of leafage beneath them. As they mature they branch again and again so that there are tens or even hundred at their zenith in March . The first opened here in the first week of the new year and the unravelling as one joins another is good to mark the passing of wintery time. The flowers are known for being slightly warmer when they are producing pollen and make a good early plant for pollinators. They will produce plentiful amounts of seed if you let them, but I prefer to leave just one limb to seed in a group and cut the rest to the base to save energy once you begin to see the plant has peaked in the middle of March or a little later. You will know when it is time as your focus goes to other spring flowers, which by this time are fresher.
One limb saved will rain all the seed you need for youngsters. All the remaining energy goes into the new growth, which comes from the base to mound architecturally over the summer. Though there is a fine, scented form called ‘Miss Jekyll’, the stink in the stinking hellebore comes from the foliage when crushed. It is when you are cutting this old growth away that you first encounter the beefy smell that you instinctively know will not be good for you. All parts of the plant are toxic if eaten and cause violent vomiting and delirium, sometimes death. Interestingly, in times past they were used, in miniscule quantity, to treat worms. Note, however, that the 18th Century herbalist Gilbert White called this ‘cure’: “a violent remedy … to be administered with caution”.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 15 January 2021
The shift has happened. Last leaves down to reveal the trunks and tracery of branches. Winter outlines and the definition of reading individuals, their structures and differing characters against the sky. Hidden by the cloak of the growing season, but ever present, is the ivy. Where it grows uninterrupted and using the frame of another tree to make its way, a shadowy presence or a life within throws its winter outline. Dark and glossy and a refuge for the birds.
The oldest plants sit just inside the halo of their host, the growth becoming arborescent once it meets its reach. The mature ivy wood is entirely different from the juvenile, branching like antlers and without the need for the suckers that attach the young plant on its ascent. This wood, throws flowers in November, the very last forage for bees, and then goes on to weight itself with darkening, inky green berries. Fruits that at the very end of winter are ripe and ready for hungry birds. If you propagate the arborescent wood, the resulting plant retains this character and makes a fine winter evergreen if you grow it without the temptation of a support nearby. A wall or a trunk will trigger its innate desire to climb and conquer and it will revert to type if it senses an opportunity.
There are mixed feelings about the damage ivy can do. I prefer not to let it loose on buildings for it will forever be in the gutters and having a go at crumbly mortar and window frames, but I am relaxed about it growing into trees. That said, a mature plant can eventually bring a tree down, the weight of foliage providing a sail the host had never allowed for. We have an old hawthorn in the top hedge and at this time of year you can see it is more ivy than tree. Every year after a winter storm I expect it to topple, but I am happy to see the association for now striking a balance and making more of the hawthorn. Walk by it now the foliage is down elsewhere and it is alive with chatter.
Look into the winter hedges and you see that they are also laced throughout with ivy, which in turn provides the hedges with a winter opacity and shelter. The seedlings arrive there from the birds that have gorged upon a mother plant and then paused to poop and this is how they appear in the garden too. Showing you where the perches are and mapping the birds’ movements.
Holly does not do as well here in the hedges as it might on the lighter ground of acidic heathland. I have tried to introduce it, but the plants dwindle and have come to nothing, presumably due to our hearty ground and the advantage it gives to competition. The hollies do better here in isolation and out in the open and we have a pair of old trees by the potting shed that were planted when the land was once a market garden. A neighbour told us that the family who lived and worked here made Christmas wreaths from it for Bath market. Though it is now dwindling, this female tree is a good form, thornless and holding on to her berries for far longer than usual. Not far away in Batheaston a colony of suffragettes who lived in Eagle House planted a collection of hollies each one celebrating a woman who had fought for the cause. An emblem that perhaps also drew upon the ancient appreciation of the constancy provided by this plant and representing, in its winter steadfastness, an image of eternity. We wonder, a little romantically, if our plant might have originally come from the same collection and I have propagated autumn cuttings with the thought that she should have life elsewhere on the land and a new generation.
Unless you specifically buy a named female or a self-fertile tree such as ‘J. C. Van Tol’ it is pot luck whether you have bought a female or a male. Though one male can service many trees and from quite some distance when the bees are active, I have planted tens in groups where the sheep cannot get to them. One day, for they are slow, I hope they will provide our land with some weight and heft of winter evergreen.
Just this year, seven years after planting, the females are beginning to fruit. Bright and clean. Red against ink green, foliage shimmering, the leaves as reflective as mirrors when basking in winter sunshine. It is then, in this stark season that you see the holly in another light altogether. Not a tree of darkness and sobriety, but one of light and joyfulness.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 5 December 2020
The gales have torn at the last of the autumn colour, the rain is with us again with apparently no let-up, but open the door to the polytunnel and you enter a world that is stilled. Immediately calmed and weather-protected. The drum of the storm amplified yet distanced.
This is a place we are getting to know and learning about through growing. Ordered in the first lockdown and erected just before we came out of it at the end of May, the summer’s crop of tomatoes, cucumbers, basil and chillis is now replaced by winter salad. Hunkering down in an environment that takes more than the edge off the winter, we can already see the benefits in the enabled growth. The complement to the hardy winter vegetables in the kitchen garden.
The polytunnel is also providing sanctuary for another crop we are growing to keep us buoyant as the evenings lengthen and the growing season retreats for good. Brought inside at the beginning of October to escape the elements, the spider chrysanthemums are at their very best and, indeed, most vulnerable as the weather turns. Though I grew them successfully for a couple of years in the microclimate of our London garden, last year’s attempt at growing them outside here ended in tears. Months of care and promise were destroyed by November frosts, the very first flowers left in ruins and buds blackened beyond hope.
Not to be daunted, an order was placed with Halls of Heddon last year without a specific plan for their autumn protection. Such is the way with failure in a garden, it often spurs you on to succeed. The rooted cuttings arrived in the spring, this year with the promise of the polytunnel as an autumn retreat, so they were potted on and placed in the lea of the barns up in my growing area. Here, they received morning light – the four to six hours they need to set flower – and then afternoon shade. They were carefully staked and given not much more attention than a regular liquid feed to help flower production.
I confess to preferring plants that one can nurture towards independence to those that are reliant on human intervention, but the chrysanthemum festivals in Japan are enough to subvert my self-imposed rules. Once the leaves are down on the fiercely coloured maples and twiggery presents itself again to grey skies, they take a special place in the descent into winter. Grown often just one flower to a stem, displayed on a plinth and often against a dark backdrop, the blooms are naturally likened to fireworks.
My plants this year have, by contrast, been neglected. They were not pinched out to promote appropriately spaced branching, nor dis-budded to select a number that can put all their energy into flower. They have had the minimum of care. A chrysanthemum grower would say mistreatment. But here they are, in the shelter of the polytunnel, coming into their ethereal own as the rest of the world outside begins its slumber.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 20 November 2020
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