Although asparagus only became prized as a culinary vegetable in Britain in the 17th century it was grown, and indeed prized, by the ancients as a medicinal herb and vegetable. The Romans even froze it in the High Alps, with the Emperor Augustus creating the Asparagus Fleet to take the freshly pulled spears to be buried in the snow for later.
The tips, which are the sweetest part and known as the love tips or ‘points d’amour’, are always best when eaten fresh and, though we think nothing of seeing it on the supermarket shelves as an import, there is nothing like eating it in season, right there and then, when the energy of the new season is captured in young spears.
So it is a good feeling to have planted an asparagus bed, as they represent longevity and permanence. Plant one and it will take two to three years to yield, but established crowns can easily crop for a couple of decades if you give them the care they need; namely good drainage, plenty of sunshine and little competition at the root. The roots, which radiate out from a crown in spidery fashion, are shallow, and hoeing is not advisable, so an asparagus bed is also a commitment to hand weeding. You will have to work for your reward.
“…established crowns can easily crop for a couple of decades if you give them the care they need…”
Being a coastal plant, Asparagus officinalis is tolerant of salt, indeed tradition has it that the beds be salted to keep weeds at bay. However, I do not. In truth my bed is far from text book perfect. I have not raised it above the surrounding ground like the carefully drawn diagrams in the books, and the Californian poppies and Shirley poppies have seeded into the open, weed-free ground to become the, admittedly attractive, weeds in the patch.
I winkle the Eschscholzia out where they seed too close to the crowns, but leave a handful, as they like the same conditions and sit brightly beneath the fronds once the asparagus is allowed to grow out after cropping. The few plants that are female pepper themselves with scarlet, pea-sized fruits, which hang in suspension like beads caught in a net as the fronds fade to butter-yellow later in the season. It is a fine but unadvisable association, if playing things by the book is your thing.
Californian poppies provide interest beneath the asparagus ferns later in the season
Our first asparagus bed was planted four years ago in the original mixed vegetable and trial garden. The crowns, which are best planted bare-root in the spring, arrived by post and were carefully planted in late April. The soil was manured the previous summer and the crowns laid out on an 18” grid. The books advise two feet between rows, but our slopes are sunny and the ground hearty, so I took the risk with a closer planting.
I opened a trench and fashioned a little mound of soil for each plant to allow the roots to radiate out, down and away from the crown. The trench was then backfilled with the crown just below ground level and marked with a cane to protect the position of the first emerging spears. Over the first year the crowns gather in strength, each frond outreaching the next so that, by the end of the first summer, they are already showing their potential. It is essential to wait before cropping to allow the plants to build up their reserves. I cropped them for the first time last year, but took only a few spears to avoid weakening them. This year, there will be no need to hold back.
Asparagus officinalis ‘Connover’s Colossal’
I bought two varieties initially, both male, so I am not sure how I have females in the mix, but no matter. Male plants are more productive and so, according to the rules, the berrying females should be weeded out. ‘Connover’s Colossal’, an old 19th century variety, is a reliably strong cultivar, but ‘Stewart’s Purple’ has been disappointing. It is supposed to be higher yielding than many of the green varieties, but you only really know and understand what a plant’s habits are when you grow it for yourself and, for me, ‘Stewart’s Purple’ doesn’t cut the mustard.
A third of the plants have failed and, although the spears are a beautiful inky purple colour and deliciously sweet, even the plants that have survived have cropped very erratically. They require far too much space to waste on such a meagre harvest. Anthocyanins, which give vegetables and fruit their purple colouring, are valued as antioxidants, but I wouldn’t grow this variety again other than to possibly work it into the herb garden as an ornamental. Here, with moody fronds rising up prettily above chives and purple sage, occasional spears could be harvested and thinly sliced raw into salads.
Asparagus officinalis ‘Stewart’s Purple’
There is an associated guilt attached to my original asparagus bed, which comes from the knowledge that the bed could never have been long-term. I always knew the test garden would give way to a new ornamental garden and, over the last couple of years, I have been relocating the vegetable garden to the other side of the house. The diggers are coming in shortly to shape the land for the new garden, but the asparagus bed will remain for one more year, like a boat anchored off shore.
Last spring I planted an F1 variety called ‘Gijnlim’ in the new vegetable garden to pave the way for the hand over from the old bed to the new. Having been selected for its hybrid vigour ‘Gijnlim’ is said to crop within a year, but I am still leaving it this year to build up reserves, mulching the bed with home-made compost before the spears emerge. It won’t be easy to cut my old bed adrift when I have to later in the autumn, but for now we are enjoying the luxury of eating the spears absolutely in season, when the garden is beginning to rush with energy.
“It won’t be easy to cut my old bed adrift when I have to later in the autumn….”
When a bed is up and moving in the spring, you can visit it daily for three weeks or so of harvesting. A sharp knife inserted carefully at the base of a spear and just below ground level is the best way to pick what you need, but be careful not to damage the crown. See it as a surgical exercise and, for best and sweetest results, pick just before you eat. Steam and serve al dente and every mouthful will be worth the commitment.
If you read up about asparagus yields to try and arrive at an ideal number of plants for a bed that suits your needs you get wildly differing advice. An American website says that 24 plants produce enough for a family of four. Big portions I’m guessing, but advice closer to home advises ten to twenty plants for the same number of people. We have sixteen crowns in the new bed and hope that this will be plentiful enough to pick what we need without providing a guilt-inducing glut. I’d have liked for there to be two varieties, so that we have an early cropper and a late, but we have had to draw the line somewhere. There is only so much ground that can be committed to perennial vegetables, even one as delectable as sparrow-grass.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Before we arrived here the land had been grazed up tight to the hedges and to the farmyard, which held the cattle back from the house. That autumn, in a tiny strip of garden sandwiched between the front of the house and the concrete path to the door, blazed a clump of bright pink nerine and, the following spring, a slash of blue muscari marked what we later found to be the dog cemetery. Above the milking barn to the east a vegetable plot measuring four paces wide and double that down the slope was still in evidence. Raymond’s brother, Norman, had kept it cleared with a wonky-wheeled rotavator that coughed and spluttered black smoke and sported an arm held in place with baler twine. He tried to sell it to me with the advice that, to turn it off, it needed a thump with a broken-handled lump hammer. Needless to say I didn’t take him up on the offer.
Raymond’s vegetable garden when we first arrived
When you arrive somewhere new, it is important to take the time to look. So the three loads of plants that I brought from the garden in Peckham were shoe-horned into my ration of cultivated ground. The ground, only tickled over by the rotavator, revealed a hard pan a couple of inches down and soil that had clearly not been improved for some time. But I was grateful, as it was free of weeds and provided me with the time to think.
“When you arrive somewhere new, it is important to take the time to look.”
Although it was clearly going to take time to decide how to make a garden here, I made a move in the first winter so as not to miss the planting season. It felt important to repair and reclaim boundaries so, over the Christmas holidays, we replanted a broken hedge on the west boundary, that was missing more teeth than it retained and removed the rickety barbed wire fences that stopped our eyes from seeing the stream below us sparkling in the low winter sunshine.
I walked the land daily, looking for the best location to plant a new orchard and took the lead from a dead stump in the field beyond the barns where our neighbour Glad said there had once been plums. We planted over thirty fruit trees here – apples, pears and plums – a hazel coppice at the base of the slope below them and, in the top corner of the field above, a blossom wood of natives to provide cover, shelter and food for birds. I also started the process of introducing more oaks, both as hedge trees and gate markers. The land felt in need of a new generation of trees and these were good moves to make straight away. After five years here we already have trees we can stand under, a complete and continuous hedge and the beginnings of a fruit and nut harvest.
Laying out the expanded garden in 2011
The following spring I expanded the little vegetable plot, with a local farmer helping to turn in part of the field and partition the ground with a stock proof fence. I will write more on the balance between farming and gardening another time as it is a huge subject but, suffice to say, in our time here we have learned a great deal about sheep, their appetites and the importance of fences and tree-guards.
“The plot has reminded me of working on the trial beds when I was at Wisley…”
I sub-divided the plot with dirt paths into a series of beds that could be reached easily from either side with a hoe. It was a practical decision that freed me up to grow things in rows where they could be observed and easily tended. It was an easy way not to have to worry about aesthetics at this point, and to focus on identifying the best plants for the site. We were also growing vegetables and soft fruit on this same piece of ground, and so I enjoyed the discipline of the orderly rows, the unconscious reference they made to the former market gardens, and the liberation from the expectation that a garden must be a designed composition. The plot has reminded me of working on the trial beds when I was at Wisley and I have been free to observe and experiment in this laboratory.
In the first year the balance of plants favoured vegetables
Compared with Raymond’s old vegetable patch digging over the new ground was like turning cake mix. Where it has been converted from pasture, the soil is deep, dark and hearty and, that first summer, I understood why there had been market gardens here. Tilted at the perfect angle to receive the south facing light and exposed to it for as long as the sun shone, my garden grew like I’d never seen anything grow before. Sunflowers threw themselves at life, towering to over ten feet by the end of the summer. I grew fifty-six dahlias, because there was the space to absorb their flamboyance, and a collection of two-dozen David Austin roses, each lined out neatly, and easy to tend. I was able to devote a whole bed to peonies, one to lavenders and another to irises. All with the intention of watching and waiting to see which were most gardenworthy.
Some of the 56 varieties in the dahlia trial
That first spring I sowed three separate panels of Nigel Dunnett’s Pictorial Meadows annual mixes. I had grown them in clients’ gardens, but had never had the space to experience growing them at close quarters for myself. It was like starting all over again. One world inside the fence, revealing itself through growing, another beyond revealed through a slow and informed process of looking and steering.
Black opium poppies and a Pictorial Meadows mix in year one
We quickly learned that gardening on a slope was hard work. Every move has to be negotiated with the incline, the push and the pull of manual labour considered very carefully. Knowing how much to fill the barrow and how to place it on the slope to avoid losing a load, which way to dig and which direction to hoe, how to place yourself to make weeding less strenuous, all were a whole new way of gardening for me, having always gardened on the flat. It is a windy site too. My daylilies from the sheltered garden in Peckham grew to half their height in the exposure of this sunlit hillside. The hellebores flagged without shelter, but everything that liked it stood solid and healthy as an athlete.
The functional arrangement of plants has produced some unexpected and exciting combinations
The garden grew, but at a price. Gradually, from nurseries, specialists, friends and plant fairs, I accumulated a collection of special martagon lilies, an assortment of asters, salvias and sanguisorbas and countless other treasures. So, rather predictably, my growing collection of herbaceous, flowering plants rapidly started to crowd out the vegetables, and I soon found myself planning a new vegetable garden with level ground and ease of access. We made a start in the third summer, forming a flat terrace to the west, extending the ridge that the buildings sit upon.
“I knew early on that I didn’t want to be able to see an ornamental garden from the house…”
In doing so, the spine of garden activity was taken out from the house, linking the practicality of vegetable and fruit growing to the barns and the newly planted orchard beyond. I knew early on that I didn’t want to be able to see an ornamental garden from the house, that looking into the complexity of a planting was something I wanted to choose to do, rather than have it demand my attention. So, with the vegetable garden positioned to the west, I am now planning to sweep the landscape up to the front door from the south and develop the gardened garden in a complementary span to the east.
The aster trial
As I write, at the end of our fifth winter here, I am surrounded by the aftermath of building works, which have seen us modernise the house and convert the milking barn into a studio where we can work. From here we look onto the ground that was once Raymond’s vegetable patch and, now that the battleground of construction has settled, and with five years of looking behind me, I am ready to make my move. The winter has seen me rationalising the stock beds of plants and we have just turned in a green manure crop of winter rye, so that soon, when the weather is dry enough to get on the land again, I will be able to start forming the garden. The survivors from those carloads of plants that arrived here from Peckham five years ago are finally ready to be found a home.
Dan and Ian turning in the winter rye
Words: Dan Pearson/Photographs: Huw Morgan
ALREADY A PAID SUBSCRIBER? SIGN IN
ALREADY A PAID SUBSCRIBER? SIGN IN
