Saturday, November 10, 2018

Portugal Centro Region - the front line of climate change?

You want to know what impact climate change will have on landscapes? Come to the Centro Region of Portugal and take a look.
Having spent some months in the region, I really feel on the front line of climate change. I have blogged before about the devastating fires the area has suffered from..... to read on see here.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

Louisiana, Denmark - a perfect synthesis of sculpture, archictecture and landscape

Louisiana, a contemporary art gallery north of Copenhagen just has to be one of my most favourite places. Not for the contents so much (I am no great fan of contemporary art) but for the extraordinary and quite unique synthesis of art, landscape and architecture it offers. It also has an atmosphere of immense calm, almost a healing atmosphere. I think I have been there six or seven times now and every time I walk away quite mesmerised by it..... continue here

Thursday, October 11, 2018

End of an era at Hummelo

So, you have until October 27th to see Piet and Anja’s private garden at Hummelo. After that, sorry, but its no more visiting..... continue on
where I will now be moving my blog posts from now on. This felt like a good opportunity to make the move, as the old blogger site just did not do justice to the images.

Sunday, August 19, 2018

Ecological Planting - The revolution will never be bought at the garden centre.

A Larry Weaner garden in New England. To be featured in the October issue of Gardens Illustrated. Photo credit: Claire Takacs

Who remembers that wonderful Gil Scott-Heron rap song “The Revolution Will Not BeTelevised”
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
Thinner, because The revolution will not be televised.

I feel like coming up with something similar for 'ecological planting'.

There is much talk of ecological planting? Is anyone actually doing any? Or is it all talk?

What is ecological planting anyway?

And does it matter?

Well, it is always nice when words convey meaning we can all agree on, and in this case we are not just talking about something with the equivalence of an artistic movement but also something that a direct impact on biodiversity. There is always the ever-present danger of 'greenwash', something sounding green and good for the environment but in fact just a trendy feel-good facade.

Years ago (late 1990s) Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough had made the distinction between 'naturalistic' planting and ecological functioning, i.e. you can have 1) something that looks natural but is either completely static or dependent on quite intense management or 2) a planting that is to some extent dynamic, i.e. its components are going through active processes of seeding, spreading, dying. An ecologically functioning planting should have some level of stability, so it can continue to exist without too much human intervention. One example might be a meadow, which is dependent for its long-term survival on annual mowing but otherwise is relatively stable from year to year.

Now, it should be pretty obvious that there is a lot of good planting design that falls into the former category, natural looking to most observers but in fact not in the remotest sense a dynamic self-sustaining plant community. Anyone with any knowledge of basic plant ecology would not be fooled, and more importantly neither would most invertebrates seeking a habitat.

Compare such a planting to a natural or semi-natural habitat like a meadow and it is immediately obvious that any horticultural planting is almost absurdly low density. In a wild habitat, gaps between plants are often difficult to see, whereas in a human-created planting they are usually pretty obvious. It is possible to get tens of species in one square metre in the wild, whereas most artificial plantings have 4 or 5 plants (never mind species) to the square metre, or 9 at the most (this figure is significant, as we shall see).
Six species in shot, but could do better, BUT much greater species density than most gardeners aim at: close-up of one of my old trial plots in Herefordshire

Think about this disparity in density in habitat terms – the artificial planting will be almost inevitably far poorer. So, before doing too much slapping ourselves on the back about what a good turn we are doing for nature, let's just consider the absurdity of thinking that just because we've got something that looks rather natural, and/or is composed of locally-native species we've created something that is any way equivalent to a natural habitat. If it's got gaps between plants its ecological functioning will be below par, and it will be unstable (space for weeds). Ecological planting it is not.

To go back to Gil Scott-Heron:
The revolution is not because you got the right plants for the habitat conditions,
The revolution hasn't happened because you've gone all native
The revolution isn't ticking all the species on the list of bee-friendly plants from Home Depot
The revolution is not just about looking all wild and woolly,
The revolution will never be bought at the garden centre.

Above all, because the whole 'perennial revolution' has happened alongside the interest in naturalistic planting there tends to develop the thought in too many heads that “it's all perennials therefore it must be ecological”.


At the same time however, let's remember the much-quoted Owen research  which showed just how many insect species an average (i.e. not in the remotest sense ecological) British garden contains. This shows us the exciting possibilities! Imagine how much biodiversity a garden could contain if it had something approaching the density of real habitat AND the range of diversity that most gardens include anyway (trees and shrubs and perennials and climbers).

How do we measure garden biodiversity? Not easy. Never is. Owen simply counted species not their frequency of occurrence in comparison to 'nature', and if you look through the academic literature it rapidly becomes apparent that there is no easy, or for that matter difficult, way to measure overall health of ecological functioning. What sometimes is done by researchers is to take one particular aspect, usually a category of insect, and use that as an indicator. Trouble is, it will be different for different types of habitat. Currently there is much focus on pollinators. And much trendy nonsense spoken; trouble is - where there are marketing opportunities, pseudoscientific gibberish soon follows. Pollinators could a relatively easy group to use as an indicator for ecosystem health. The trouble is though that I could imagine a garden planted with pollinator-friendly plants buzzing with bees etc, but which actually supported very little else such as ground-level invertebrate biodiversity.

How much do we want to create gardens that are genuine biodiversity reserves? If we really want to create plantings with an ecological functionality that approaches equivalent natural environments, then we must be honest in making clear the distinctions between these and plantings that merely look a bit wild.

Anyone who sows a meadow or prairie and got it to a point of reasonable stability will have created a functioning ecosystem. BUT,  this won't be a garden but only a habitat restoration. In the US however, practitioners such as Larry Weaner have started to tweak seed mixes to create what are essentially ornamental versions of natural ecosystems. The much richer flora of North America (compared to much of Europe) allows this. But it still is not what most people would regard as a garden. BTW there's a great example of his work coming up in Gardens Illustrated soon.

So, any other, more garden-like, examples?

The best can be seen in lightly shaded habitats where light levels knock back grass growth, the main enemy of plant diversity (dense north European grassland could possibly be worse in ecosystem functioning than your average garden). Or indeed other, slightly stressed habitats. Established gardens sometimes have amazingly dense and varied combinations of woodland species in such places. One of my favourite such areas is the woodland garden at Wisley (the one near the new glasshouse): a whole range of rather competitive woodland edge species, native and introduced fight for supremacy, and with the possible exception of one patch of comfrey, nobody seems to be winning. Maintenance seems to be limited to the odd clear-out and re-plant, which I suspect has the effect of 're-setting the clock'.
A spectacular example I saw recently was as Innisfree in NY State, where a shaded rocky slope is home to a bewildering variety of naturalised garden plants, mostly non-native species, but mixed with natives. According to Kate Kerin, the Landscape Curator there, this would have been planted up between the 1930s and the early 2000s and gets only limited maintenance – mostly pulling of grass and tree seedlings. One of the sights in this fascinating, but also rather precipitous, place is a big patch of Coreopsis verticillata and Convallaria majalis growing completely intertwined, two species of very different habitats (sun, dry and shade) no gardener would have put together.

Nigel Dunnett's planting at the Barbican in London may be only a few years old but shows enough self-seeding to suggest to me that it could stabilise as a genuinely ecologically functioning planting. It's essentially a green roof planting, so seasonal drought will limit grass and weed growth.
James Hitchmough's various plantings, all created from seed, should theoretically, lead to semi-stable ecosystems, but I have personally not seen one that convinces me, yet, although some of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park ones may yet do so, and I have heard good reports of others.
The Barbican, a Nigel Dunnett planting, effectively a green roof, lots of regeneration

In two gardens in Herefordshire, I feel I have got pretty close to achieving small areas of genuine ecological planting, with really dense species intermingling. In my last garden I ran a trial for seven years which went someway to convincing me that, in the most challenging situation of all: fertile moist soil, full sun, this might be possible. These conditions favour the growth of strongly competitive plants which could possibly swamp everything else and most dangerously, favour weedy grass growth. This never happened (success!), but somewhat disappointingly, an analysis of every 10cms square after seven years, revealed that there were still a lot of gaps. In reality these could probably be filled with ground-level creeping species and more seeding short-lived species. More species need to be packed in to really create a dense multi-layer habitat. I, like everyone, have a lot to learn here.

What about Oudolf-style perennials or German Mixed Planting systems, which use long-lived perennials at around 8-9 plants per square metre? They are designed to be relatively stable, but also allowing for a certain amount of self-seeding. They seem like a very good starting point for a genuinely ecological planting. Not TOO stable though, as that can preclude any ecological functioning (think prostrate cotoneaster ground cover).

And, on the subject of Piet Oudolf, he has created one of the most interesting and successful combinations of an ecological planting (native grasses and wildflowers) and non-native perennials. See here:  This approach is certainly one which deserves much more research: but very dependent on having low fertility soils.
Piet Oudolf perennial meadow at Hummelo, not typical of his work but possibly one of the most interesting things he's ever done; combining genuine ecological functioning and good looks

The fact is that we have hardly begun to explore the possibilities of what ecologists are now calling Novel Ecosystems: “a system of abiotic, biotic, and social components (and their interactions) that, by virtue of human influence, differs from those that prevailed historically, having a tendency to self-organize and manifest novel qualities without intensive human management.” quoted here.
From now on I'm going to talk about: NOEs: Novel Ornamental Ecosystems.

Where do we go from here?

How do we assemble plantings that look good, with species from multiple origins that are so dense that they can offer wildlife as many opportunities as natural/semi-natural plantings, and which are stable enough to make maintenance easy?

This is now the challenge. Let's raise the bar.
Wrong time of year for the flowers but a shaded bank at Innisfree which includes a bewildering range of Novel Ornamental Ecosystem biodiversity

Thursday, August 2, 2018

We have the new perennials but where is the new perennial garden?

A recent blog post by Marc 'le jardinier' is tries to provoke a discussion about whether the so-called 'New Perennial' movement has had much of an impact on British gardens. His conclusion is 'not much'. The implication is that this should be a surprise. In many ways I agree with him but I don't think it is a surprise. So, here I'd like to do one of those roundups where I look around and survey the scene and ask, “what has really changed?”. Apart from the interest in this as gardeners and landscape designers, it's an opportunity to think more widely about why we garden and about the way that cultural change happens.

The 'New Perennial' moniker is an annoying one anyway. Anything with 'new' in the title inevitably comes with a date stamp in the near future. It actually dates to 1996, when Frances Lincoln decided, in one of those moments of genius that made everyone else in publishing think “why didn't I think of that?”, to use it as a title for a book project I had with her company.

A Nadia Malarky designed garden in Columbus Ohio
What the 'new' and the 'perennial' flag up though is that there have been enormous changes in British, and American gardening over the last thirty years, and one of the biggest has been the revival of interest in herbaceous perennials. Looking back to the 1980s, it is actually hard to imagine how people gardened with so few perennials. Anyone who is too young to remember this time would be astonished now at how garden centres and nurseries almost entirely sold shrubs and bedding, with perennials a distinct minority interest. On a recent trip to the US (primarily Ohio) I was amazed by how many gardens featured perennials, mostly echinaceas and rudbeckias of course. In the past there would have been lawn and a square metre of pink phlox if you were lucky. A great sense of satisfaction, and pride, at having been part of the movement that has enabled this.

What people have done with the perennials is another thing. As with the grasses, which have been an even bigger shift since the 1980s (back then NOBODY in Britain grew grasses apart from eccentric prophets in the wilderness like Roger Grounds). On the whole they have slotted their geraniums, monardas and Carex testacea into the garden format they had before. Which generally means the borders around the lawn; the ingredients have changed but the recipe hasn't.

For those of us, like the people reading this blog post, who are (and trying not to sound too superior here) part of the gardening 'elite', acting as opinion-formers etc., the mismatch between what we think people should do with 'our' plants and what they actually do with them, may be considerable. But take an analogy – think of the amateur art shows we have all been too, usually held in village halls. How many of the artists have done what the art elite seem to describe as art: smear mud on the walls, pile up bricks, carry in their unmade bed and leave it in the middle of the room? None. Elite thinking about art has not penetrated very far into popular culture (do I hear sounds of relief?). No-one in the real world seems to want to practice 'conceptual art'. 'Art' for most people does mean: painting, beauty, colour, form, memory, landscape, portraiture, while Tracy Emin's unmade bed at the Tate is little more than a provocation to chattering class dinner parties.

Am I making an analogy between conceptual art and 'new perennial' gardening? Only in as much as they are both elite concerns which have not penetrated popular culture. Personally, I think most conceptual art is crap and new perennial planting isn't. But then I'm not a conceptual artist whose just had a fat grant for hanging tampons on a washing line or whatever.

Most people garden to relax, unwind and feel close to the sanitised version of nature that the garden presents us with. They are not interested in trends, concepts and 'movements'. They want something that looks nice and makes them feel good. This means that gardening is one of the more conservative of the arts. And who are we to criticise what people do in their spare time? And another thing – naturalistic planting is systems or community thinking. Its about creating plant mixes and most gardeners do not think like that. They think only in terms of individual plants and how they like them, and maybe find good neighbours for them. They are driven by what looks nice down at the garden centre or the nursery. Fair enough. I don't think we could expect otherwise.

And another thing! Much of the naturalistic planting featured in garden magazines is large-scale. It's Piet O doing parks or those designers who specialise in large country gardens; some medium-scale and more 'average' gardeners certainly get featured, but there are surprisingly few who really carry it off. One who has tried is featured in the September issue of Country Living; Jo Ward-Ellison in Gloucestershire. Size puts people off. Unnecessarily I think. On of the virtues of naturalistic planting is that it is about building plant communities, which are scaleable and work over a range of sizes. Take a Piet O planting and in many cases you could chop a bit off and stick in your suburban garden to replace the oh-so-boring lawn and with a bit of fiddling it would still look good. The main difference would be that you would be forced to be closer to a lot of the plants so you would appreciate them in a different way to the 'big picture' view. Perhaps no bad thing.

More pointedly, I'd like to ask about how much designers and the landscape profession have taken on board 'new perennials' or as I'm going to call it from now on, naturalistic planting? There is no doubt that the range of plants has been massively increased, although there is still a problem about how you sell late-season perennials, as they generally look so awful in pots. The garden centre industry has never really tried although internet sales have come to the rescue to some extent. The huge growth in the garden design profession has gone hand in hand with the perennial explosion although for the most part perennials are used within those designs in a relatively conventional way.
Most garden designers still seem to be at the level of slotting individuals together than creating functioning plant communities.

The landscape profession, largely under pressure from clients anxious about the maintenance costs of what they pay for, have been cautious, understandably. For the most part, they also lack the plant knowledge to know how to use perennials. Many are anxious to learn, as I can see from the folk turning up at my workshops ( and Knowledge about the long-term performance of perennials is also poor; something I am endlessly banging on about, and which I try to address in the workshops.

The big change in British gardening, and one also increasingly being followed elsewhere is the 'wildlife gardening' movement. Supported by a strong grassroots interest in conservation and at what we might call the 'official level', i.e by the RHS, this has made a huge impact, and again it is difficult to imagine how this could have happened without the perennial revolution. It stresses diversity, that varied habitats are the best thing we can do for nature, something that the good old British 'mixed border' addresses rather well. Crucially, the wildlife gardening movement also does something else – it gives gardeners permission to be a bit untidy: weeds, dead leaves, unpruned shrubs. That has probably helped a great deal.

So, changes there have certainly been, for the better, but we still have a long way to go. Changes in garden practice can take a lot longer to take place than in many other spheres of human activity. More crucial than the largely aesthetic concerns of New Perennial gardeners are the impacts that gardening and landscape practice have on sustainability and wildlife. I'll be considering that next and ask the question “is anybody out there actually doing ecological planting?”

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Let's stop talking about 'natural' gardens












Thursday, June 7, 2018

So often it's gardeners make great gardens not owners or designers








Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Australian plants amaze, astonish and confuse

The stunning landscape installation by Kate Cullity at the Cranbourne Botanic Garden, Melbourne, evokes the Australian Outback
Still mulling over my recent but brief trip to Australia. We'd spent most of our time 'down under' in New Zealand, followed by a week in Tasmania before a week in Melbourne at the biennial Australian Landscape Conference. This was a fantastic event, organised by Warwick Forge, a retired publisher and entrepreneur. I am sure the fact that Warwick is not a professional 'landscape person' has been one of the reasons for the success of the conference; an ability to see beyond immediate professional concerns and trends. It also probably helps explain why the conference was a real coming together of professionals, and some amateurs, from the world of horticulture as well as landscape. Gardeners and landscape folk meet together on equal terms all too rarely.

Warwick first approached me about speaking at the conference nearly two years ago. He does his homework well. Being a retired chap of independent means he is able to spend time traveling around meeting people and checking them out to ensure that the resulting two day conference and workshops really delivers passion, stimulation and knowledge. I remember we agreed to meet in Oxford and spent an afternoon wandering about the Botanical Garden, discussing what I did and what I knew of what my colleagues did. I remember Warwick asking me “if I invited you to speak, who else would you like to speak?”. I'm a ferocious networker so I was able to make plenty of suggestions. Cassian Schmidt was my first choice, the director of the Hermannshof Garden in the Rhine valley and increasingly a leading teacher of planting design through a post at Geisenheim University. Thinking of parched Australian landscapes however, I had to admit that what we had to say might be only rather partially relevant.

Shortly before I met Warwick, I had been in Spain and met Miguel Urquijo, whose ground-breaking approach to garden design in Spain and deep thoughtfulness about what he did, had really impressed me. So I told Warwick about him. A few weeks later I learnt that Warwick had more or less straight away flown to Madrid to meet Miguel. I had also insisted to him that if he invite Cassian he ask his wife Bettina Jaugstetter too, as she is emerging as a very interesting planting designer in her own right. She was asked to run two workshops, but of course she worried that “no-one has heard of me, so no-one will come”; apparently though, hers filled up before anyone else's – a strong indication that the reputation of contemporary German planting design has great pulling power. I wonder whether she would have got such a good audience in Britain? I fear perhaps not.

A real feature of the ALCs over the years has been the pre-conference speakers' tours whereby the speakers are crammed into a mini-bus to tour gardens and landscapes in the state of Victoria. The day we went to the stunning new botanical gardens at Cranbourne, and then Kuranga Nursery was a memorable one. For me it was a meeting with old friends.

Banksia marginata
A zillion years ago, in the late eighties and early nineties, I had a small nursery business near Bristol. Mostly growing perennials. Which, for the youngsters amongst the blog-readers, were not particularly widely grown at the time - astonishing though this might seem to you. But, I grew a rather zany range of half-hardy stuff as well, with a particular focus on Australian plants. The reason for this rather eccentric choice was that there was a sudden fashion for conservatories but hardly anyone growing plants for them. Most of the new conservatories popping up featured little more than a dehydrated Ficus benjamina and a few spider plants. Looking at the prevailing conditions and doing a bit of research into what the Victorians grew in conservatories, an obvious choice seemed to plants from southern Australia. Important was the ability to cope with occasional high temperatures and lows to near, or just below freezing. 

Xanthorrhoea australis - the Grass Tree, at Cranbourne
The idea of actually using your conservatory to grow plants in never took off, unfortunately, and today many conservatories, if they have any flora at all, are still likely to have only a dehydrated Ficus benjamina and three spider plants. However, I found myself selling plants to many people in the South West, including some heritage gardens like Tresco which had had some bad winters and needed to replenish their stocks. I used to trek up to London every month to set up a stand at what were then the monthly Royal Horticultural Society shows. Although the Australian and other exotica were only a small part of what I grew, they were a useful flagship for getting interest in the nursery and publicity generally.
My choice in growing the range of plants I did had been bolstered by researching (in the RHS library) what early 19th century gardeners grew. Early glasshouses and conservatories had pretty primitive heating systems, which produced dry air and often failed. The technology coincided with the botanical exploration of South Africa and Australia, and gardening journals of the time are full of beautiful hand-coloured prints of Cape Heaths (Erica species), Australian Banksias and Melaleucas. So it was these that I focussed on growing. Seed was easily come by and they germinated easily enough. Well, I grew the ones that were easy to germinate – there is a whole tranche of Australian flora that is notoriously difficult from seed - I never bothered with them. Species of Banksia and Dryandra from Western Australia were particular favourites, both with myself and the public at the RHS shows. With tough, slightly silvery leaves, often looking as if they had been cut with scissors, and extraordinary flowers that looked and felt like plastic, they seemed like plants from another planet. Tending to be small and compact, they were ideal as container plants. Perfect 'talking point' plants. However the Australian literature on them at the time stressed how difficult they were to grow. As it turned out, this was a reflection of the fact that species from the Mediterranean climate of Southwest Australia did not adapt very well to the humid summers of the southeasterly states of Victoria and New South Wales where the majority of the gardening population live. Adapted to soils of extreme infertility they did not like conditions in 'ordinary' soil either.
Banksia blechnifolia - the flowers mimic hair curlers -its officially a shrub by the way

Growing many of my 'Australians' in a mix of three-quarters sharp grit and one quarter peat, I found Banksia and Dryandra thrived, flowering in three years. Doing better in a richer compost were various species and cultivars of Callistemon, Melaleuca and Correa. Although I failed to displace the sad-looking Ficus benjamina and spider plants from the conservatories of England, something else happened. People started buying the these plants and sticking them outside in sheltered places. Many did very well in coastal Cornwall and Devon, or even inner London. The 1990s saw milder winters, increasing importation of southern hemisphere species and a taste for 'architectural' plants, bringing about radical changes in what we grew.

Back to the ALC speakers' outing. At Kuranga Nursery we saw the largest range of Australian native species commercially available. For me it was thrilling, never having been here before, to see so many of these plants growing to full size. I have not grown any of these for years, but seeing them brought back a rush of memories. And reading names on labels, particularly where I had read about genera that were 'impossible' to grow from seed, and seeing the plants for the first time, was a real thrill.

Others on the tour were perplexed. It was particularly funny watching Cassian and Bettina, who, being from Germany, are unable to grow any of this outside, had no familiarity with anything they saw. They appeared to be completely disorientated, truly suffering the shock of 'arriving on another botanical planet'. The fact that so much had a superficial similarity with the familiar, added to the disorientation. Plants from dry environments have a strong tendency to look the same, but then surprise by producing exotically different flowers to their northern hemisphere look-alikes. At one point Bettina came up to me waving a plant in a pot, “it looks so much like a cistus” she exclaimed, “but it isn't, the name means nothing to me”; she looked genuinely upset. Cassian was complaining about families he had never heard of. Densely-packed sales benches offered novelty, thrill and disorientation in equal measure.

I'll leave with two little snippets. One was the thrill of seeing Epacris for the first time. A genus of heather-like plants (all Epacridaceae have now been disgorged into Ericaceae by the way) these appeared to have been very popular throughout the 19th century. Winter-flowering, they must have been easy to propagate from cuttings as they must have been widely sold as flowering pot plants, and given what can be read about their cultivation in Victorian gardening journals, often kept from year to year. There were around twenty or so named cultivars. And then they vanished. When I had the nursery I was never able to source seed. I never even saw one at Kew Gardens. Seeing them on this trip was the first time I had ever set eyes on them. Roger Elliott, the leading writer on Australian natives who accompanied us on this trip did explain that there is a great deal of variation in flower colour, which was probably one reason for their popularity.

Epacris impressa
Finally, Dryandra. When I grew these at the nursery, I was struck by the extraordinary scent of their flowers. Sweet, exotic, quite unlike anything else. No mention in any of the literature about them. Leafing through a couple of more recently-published books on the well-stocked Kuranga Nursery shelves, only the most minimal mention. Perhaps they are only fragrant abroad. 

Thursday, March 8, 2018

The New Zealand look - the colony's revenge?



Blechnum novae-zelandiae covers a great many near vertical rock surfaces



Sticherus cunninghamii, Umbrella Fern





Sunday, February 18, 2018

Singapore's Garden Extravaganza - with a focus on cloud forests

The last time I was in Singapore which must have been getting on for ten years ago, Gardens by the Bay was under construction. The roads near the Marina were lined by trees in enormous containers, making you feel as if you had just driven into a garden centre or nursery that catered to giants. All were destined for one of the world's largest and most ambitious horticulture projects.

So, the first thing on re-visiting, was to get down there and see how the project was doing. The first impressions were very much that this was opulent public horticulture, walking a path between well-funded amenity horticulture and something more educational, but without any pretence at it being a botanical garden. Spectacular constructions, such as the signature 'super trees' and huge scale plantings make a powerful impact, but don't help define quite what the garden is for, other than impressing the visitor. Public gardens have often had this role. In trying to make sense of this extremely large, very well-funded and ambitious project it helps to think back to the Victorian era.
One of the Supertrees
In that golden age of gardening, public parks were about municipal pride, and declaring the status of the city or community that funded them. Not much chance of that happening in today's Britain, the most centrally-controlled country in Europe, where local government is so squeezed by the politics of austerity that basic services are beginning to break down. Singapore, like other successful Asian economies, are in a similar situation to where we were in the Victorian era. With its reputation as a garden city (an inheritance from the British Empire) and the world's leading centre for urban greening, the use of gardens as a national icon seems natural.
These are dogs, since you ask. It is the Chinese Year of the Dog this year.
The scale and level of control is all a bit overwhelming. The control is again, very Victorian, and likewise dependent on cheap labour (mostly south Indian Tamils). It is also very Chinese. Singapore is the ultimate state run on Confucian lines. “We think of the government as being like our parents” says a Chinese friend (and no particular fan of her government in Beijing and in fact having deep personal reasons for thinking quite the opposite). 'Planning' and maintaining control have been key to the city-state's (amazing) success as an economy. Nice tidy public gardening on a mega scale is all part and parcel of a paternalistic state which wants its citizens to enjoy their spare time in suitably safe and unthreatening ways. Its not somewhere where many western liberals would like to live, but it's the only place I have been where multi-lingual poster campaigns invite people to grass up their employers if they face unsafe working practices.
See those little figures down in the bottom right? They give you some idea of the scale.
Possibly inspired by, or aiming to go beyond, Cornwall's Eden Project, there are two vast 'greenhouses', kept cool rather than warm, using a clever heat-exchange system powered by decaying compost. We went into the Mediterranean one first. Here there are some good displays based on the various Mediterranean climate zones around the world, and good interpretation. Trouble is, someone's been unable to stop themselves having a go at some of the shrubs with their hedgetrimmer. There's a terribly kitschy faux-Chinese garden, planted with loads of forced-looking dahlias.

And then, the other 'biome'. Something completely different. Dedicated to cloud forests, this is the most sustained, visionary, high-investment naturalistic planting extravaganza ever. One of those things that gives one real hope. I'm assuming most readers will know what a cloud forest is, but for those who don't it is a mountain region that gets very high precipitation, much of it from being in the clouds. Cloud forests are biodiversity hotspots, often with very high rates of evolution, as every mountain side and valley will have slightly different conditions and the physical fragmentation of the territory allows for isolation and evolution. Think orchids, bromeliads, vireya rhododendrons, tropical begonias. The Gardens by the Bay Cloud Forest biome sends its visitors up in a lift to descend on a vertiginous series of aerial walkways around an artificial mountain covered in plants growing practically vertically.Vertical planting has had a bit of a chequered career in the temperate zone, but here, in a cloud forest zone (real or artificial) a lot of species grow like this naturally.

The standard of everything is just so high, the interpretation spot-on, with firm and imaginatively-driven messages on conservation and climate change. Given that we are entering the Chinese century, it is really encouraging to see such conservation leadership coming from within the Chinese language community.

Lycopodium and Huperzia species, club mosses - fern relatives. Having such botanical curiosities shows just how serious they are here about their plant diversity.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

House Plants are back!

After many years of being seriously uncool, house plants seem to be back in fashion. My son, more in tune with the zeitgeist than I (after all he lives in Clapton in east London – Clapton-the-new-Brooklyn (but hasten to add is NOT a bearded hipster) has started to pack his windowsills. A few trendy looking books have started to appear as well, usually in furnishings and accessories outlets that don't generally sell books, which is always a sign that something is 'on trend'. 

I have long been puzzled by the lack of interest in house plants, particularly amongst dedicated gardeners. So many really good plantspeople seem to suspend all interest once they step inside the house. I am always slightly surprised that a lot of good gardeners and plantspeople don't grow their own veg, but then not everyone is a foodie and growing things to eat is very time-consuming and requires a lot of organisation, so I more or less understand that; to turn from weeding the Arisaemas to nipping down to the local supermarket to busy some packeted veg. is understandable. But not to grow anything inside? I am genuinely puzzled.

For myself, and I think for quite a few gardeners who started in their teenage years, the first plants we grew were indoor ones. Tropical stuff, cacti, orchids, insectivorous things, kinda adolescent slightly nerdy things. Most of us then soon moved outside, but the love of plants on windowsills or atop cupboards has never left some of us. 

Those who started as 'outside gardeners' don't often seem to be able to make the transition to keeping plants inside. One reason might be the sheer artificiality of keeping plants growing in what is, after all, a very alien environment. The quality of growth that it is possible to get from plants growing in the ground is so much more difficult to achieve from indoor plants. House plants are incredibly dependent on their owners and keepers for their most basic needs. Many plants also respond to seasonal changes, primarily to temperature, and since we humans seem happy only if we are kept at around 21ºC that limits possibilities. Small failures build up, and if things go slightly wrong, we are then stuck with a below-par plant which given the shortage of spaces to grow plants in most houses, is always on view. We are then constantly confronted with evidence of our own failure as gardeners in other words (and the horti-social embarassment).

The hard fact is that there are not very many plants which grow well inside. Light levels are generally too low; dry air is also often a factor that affects plants badly. Succulents do well, but only if they have really good light – so unless you have extensive sunny windowsills there is not much habitat for them. The range of houseplants which was developed during the 1960s, the high point of house plant history, was a pretty limited one. Essentially it built on what I call the 'aspidistra concept', the very idea being one which has been one of the factors which has limited interest in them over the years anyway. It was the Victorians who really were the pioneers in growing house plants, despite the fact that their homes were infamously dark, with big extremes of temperature and polluted (coal smoke pollution inside and out was horrendous in the 19th and much of the 20th century, making today's worries over diesel exhaust seem almost like minor niggles). 

Aspidistras survived the grim growing conditions of the Victorian home, along with a limited range of other, it-has-to-be-faced, rather dull plants. They grow incredibly slowly, with very long-lived leaves. They are as near to static and plastic as plants can be. The aspidistra is a plant of deep shade, where resource inputs are low, so it grows immensely slowly. Ivy (Hedera helix) will survive similar conditions, and of course if conditions are right, can move pretty fast, but if poor can just survive, for years; not surprisingly it too was common in the Victorian home. Much of the 1960s house plants were visually more exciting but in many ways not much better, many being tropical forest floor plants – happy at 'our' temperatures, but able to survive for long periods without growing much: Philodendron, Monstera, Aglaeomena, Anthurium – all tropical Araceae. If they do start to grow their new growth is often weak and unattractive. They are not really living plants, in the sense of something which grows and develops.

I did do a house plant book once – a long time ago. Unfortunately all packed up, which given my current peripatetic status is going to be the story of my life for some time from now on. So I can't share pictures, but will try to do so in a future blog. In researching the book, we did find a few people who had examples of the kind of plants I have been just discussing, but which had been cared for well and had actually grown pretty spectacularly. There was a Rhoicissus which had colonised the hallway of a substantial north London house (actually part of the family) and an enormous Swiss cheese plant (Monstera deliciosa) in a Liverpool sitting room (ditto, belonging to the late Tony Bradshaw, the botanist and ecologist). 

The static nature of much of the conventional house plants flora must be one of the main reasons as to why few 'real gardeners' can be bothered with them. Plants which grow more vigorously, in particular those which flower, generally need more light than we can give them, or many of them. An exception might be orchids, which are relatively common as house plants now, all but unknown as such forty years ago. And of course, gesneriads: Streptocarpus, African violets, Achimenes. Small, relatively quite fast growing, not needing too much light (good indirect is best) and often usefully dormant for part of the year, gesneriads are an amazingly diverse and fascinating family. Their slightly hairy foliage and compact size give them a sort of cuddly, teddy bear quality too. When I'm in my dotage, I shall surround myself with them in the old folks home.

Our houses are actually very badly designed for plants – another problem facing the 'home' gardener. There were some attempts in the 1950s and 1960s in Sweden, a period and a place for particularly bold re-thinking of the domestic environment to create houses with small integrated growing spaces. The only one I have ever actually seen was, I think, at Beth Chatto's, a modernist 1960s design. I have often had the fantasy of designing a house around growing spaces for plants: light in just the right places at just the right amount, small planting beds strategically placed. There is a disadvantage perhaps to having too much vegetation around: the dead leaves, flowers, occasional insect pests, all add to a confusion of housework and gardening. I suspect it was this dislike of 'mess' which so restricted the use of plants in the conservatories of the 1980s conservatory boom. Victorians loved conservatories but had lots of cheap labour in the form of servants to attend to the cleaning, picking up and primping. 

So, its good to see house plants as 'back' but I can't help feel that we could do so much more.

Thanks to my son, Kieran Bradshaw. for the pictures.