What serves in Yorkshire Loam is fatal in Suffolk Sand
The celebrated American gardening writer Elizabeth Lawrence said, in friendly vein, that ‘all rock gardeners are snobs’. Perhaps we can agree with her if we accept a justifiable pride that comes from learning about these plants and cultivating them successfully. While few may become as enraptured as the patron saint of rock gardening, Reginald Farrer, plenty of gardeners derive a deep fascination from alpine plants and the places they come from, which gives them a presence in the garden out of all proportion to their size. Elizabeth Lawrence went on to say that ‘all gardeners eventually become rock gardeners’. I am not sure this was really meant literally - her book after all was entitled ‘A Rock Gardener in the South’ - but the enchantment that alpine growers find in the individual nature of plants and their origins is much less evident in other gardens where drama and colour predominate. It is clear from her writings that she was just as interested in other people as their plants, and the devoted gardener always cultivates friends as much as their garden.
Alpine plants in particular do seem to occupy a gardening territory that only few discover. Whether this is due to their historical associations with the large rock gardens of the over indulged or, at the other extreme, the arcane skills of the exhibitor, few gardeners think of gardening with alpines these days. As someone who has loved these plants since childhood - but not at the expense of many others - I am convinced they really do deserve a bigger audience. But this is only likely to come if they find their place in the garden designer’s canon. And for this to happen there need to be archetypes that appeal to new gardeners who haven’t yet appreciated how wonderful these plants are!
Alpine plants more than any others, except those of deserts, are adapted to place. They are moulded more by climate and geography than by competition and this is the essence of their individuality. They are also infinitely more variable than most gardeners realise who are brought up on the blue poppies, primulas and gentians of Himalayan hillsides, or even the saxifrages, androsaces and edleweiss closer to home in the Alps. Gardeners in the dry south can struggle with such plants, beautiful as they are, and once bitten twice shy. But there are plenty of alpines from dry places; chalk downlands are home to the opulent Pasque Flower (Pulsatilla vulgaris) and the exquisite little blue Polygala calcarea, which is one of the longest flowering plants in my garden. Very many more come from the hills and mountains around the Mediterranean, bringing the magic of the High Atlas or Mount Olympus into the garden, and places like Turkey, which has the richest of floras, just as it has been a meeting place for different peoples over millenia. In North America the Rockies and Californian hills have many other exciting plants rarely seen in British gardens. So alpines are not all one and the same and give unique opportunities for gardeners living in driest Essex or under the downpours of the Cumbrian Lakes.
Frank Kingdon Ward, who knew a little about these plants in the wild, described rock gardening as ‘fun’, and perhaps the point is that it does appeal to the explorer in us all. Like any good garden you have to work at it, but unlike many it really does draw you out into the world to discover where plants come from and why they grow as they do. There is a thrill in this diversity and capturing it in your own garden, however fleetingly at times.
Rock gardens may no longer be the thing - and the last one at the Chelsea Show was made for the 60th Anniversary of the Alpine Garden Society in 1989 - but there are other equally effective ways of growing these plants. For many species the absolute prerequisites are good drainage and sunshine. In Sweden the literally groundbreaking gardener, Peter Korn, is building an alpine garden on the scale of no other, simply using piles of sand surfaced with varying grades of stone and rocks. Sand provides superb drainage and freedom from many pests and diseases. The plants grow hard and in character and their roots can range widely in search of moisture and nutrients. It is a simple and, on a smaller scale, inexpensive way of providing ideal conditions for many plants - and everyone knows that a large pile of sand never dries out! In North America alpine growers use sand to make ‘berms’ which are especially suited to the dry loving plants of the Wild West, epitomised at Denver Botanic Garden, which climatically is similar to Ankara in Turkey, and grows many species from such summer dry places very well.
These may be a long way from the traditional image of an alpine garden but they open up possibilities of new ways of growing these plants which could be incorporated into the modern garden palette, and can succeed on any scale. All that is needed is imagination and the desire to discover how to grow these plants well. Maybe not all gardeners end up as rock gardeners, but those that do undoubtedly have fun.
The Modern Day Alpine Garden
If you can imagine a garden condensed down to table top size, but holding as much interest as one a hundred times as large you have ‘The Modern Day Alpine Garden’. Alpine plants have always been grown in raised beds and troughs, where soil and drainage can easily be modified and the plants enjoyed closer to eye level. But traditionally alpines are generally associated with rocks and rock gardens, at least in the mind’s eye of the gardener who does not grow them; or worse planted amongst the unappetising clinker and concrete in a neglected corner, as uncongenial a home as it would be possible to give them. No wonder then, that alpines are seldom grown by gardeners in ways that express their true glory.
The tide is beginning to turn with some exceptional present day gardens and gardeners who are relearning old tricks. There have always been remarkable alpine gardens, notably in the north of Britain where many such plants prosper in the hands of those who have discovered how to grow them well. Like many things the skill is in finding what suits your particular conditions, whether 1800mm of rain at Holehird (home of the Lakeland Horticultural Society and a garden that has always had a good planting of alpines), or 600mm in driest Essex (for example Wol and Sue Staines fine garden, Glen Chantry, which contains an extensive limestone rockery beautifully planted with species from drier places). One of the most famous alpine nurseries, Jack Drake’s, at Aviemore, experiences the coldest winters in the British Isles, dropping to -25°C or lower. But the lowest ever temperature recorded on the Isles of Scilly is only -6.4°C, and such temperatures are very rare. Any alpines growing here would be in the Riviera, except for the blistering Atlantic gales which would remind them of home!
So what is it about these plants that should make gardeners sit up and take notice? It is more than their extraordinary beauty; it is the very fact that they capture that intense drama of their natural home in their form and flower. That they can be grown in a garden at all is a revelation and one that many more gardeners should take advantage of. They bring the world into your garden in its truist sense.
Traditionally alpines have been set about with a mystique that separates them from other forms of gardening. The complexity of rock formations and the unfortunate legacy of aristocratic grottoes and ferneries, where the structure of the garden predominates, if not ignores the plants. At a different, and actually very wonderful, extreme alpines are seen as the preserve of a select few who grow them to perfection in pots and exhibit them at Alpine Shows around the country. These are undoubtedly an epitome of the gardeners skill and show the great variety of these plants in a better way than any other. But it is possible to grow many species very successfully in the garden at very little cost and immense satisfaction.
One of the most simple and effective ways of growing these plants is the sand bed. This idea has been imported from North America where gardeners have a more straightforward and pioneering spirit. For one thing it is economical and easy to make, and solves many of the difficulties in growing alpines, good drainage, sparse growing medium, and relative freedom from pests and diseases, in one fell swoop. The sand bed doubles for the more traditional scree and is especially well suited to species from drier habitats. Some growers use simply sharp sand, others ballast, both of which are easily obtained from builder’s merchants. In our garden we have used a fine sharp potting grit, which has worked well with supplementary watering in very dry spells (once plants become well established this becomes much less necessary). This is a start to growing many alpines well, but any gardener worth his salt will also want to make other places in which to grow plants requiring very different conditions; a moist acid bed for small ericaceous plants for example; richer fare for species from mountain meadows; and the rather wonderful modern expression of the rockery, the crevice garden, which has come to us in large part from skilled growers in the Czech Republic who have kept the traditions of alpine ‘gardening’ alive better than any others.
The essence of all these is that they steadily teach by example; finding how to grow plants well is fundamentally what a garden is all about. Alpine plants need the same attention as any other speciality and repay this many times over. If you enjoy the chase you will enjoy growing these plants; they have to be studied, sometimes cossetted, more often left to their own devices; simply discovered!
So how do alpines fit into a garden of many other plants? Well they only do so if the gardener wants them to and is prepared to be patient. They find perfect expression in open sunny places around the house, especially in raised beds and troughs. They are certainly more the preserve of the botanically minded because of their individuality, but equally they can be planted in very artistic and attractive ways. They make the garden something more than a garden usually is, much in the way that a cabinet maker can evolve from the carpenter. In a benign way they are just addictive.
One of the least appreciated aspects of alpines is their very diversity. They grow in mountains as different as the Himalayas and American Rockies; from the hot dry steppes of Central Asia to the wet peaks of New Zealand. There are alpines suitable for all climates in the garden, and no garden that cannot find a home for them. Having said this the true enthusiast always wants to try the impossible, to learn for themselves rather than follow the line of the pundits, and alpines give as much chance as any others to plough your own furrow - probably more because they appeal to the non-conformist within us.
Styles of gardening come and go but the celebrated American gardener and writer Elizabeth Lawrence, wrote that all gardeners eventually become rock gardeners. Why is this? If you have ever seen the Spring Gentian studding alpine meadows or Mountain Avens flowering near to the Arctic Circle, or simply Aubrieta cascading from a garden wall, you will know why!
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5th July 2013
Some Essays prompted by reading about Alpine Plants and seeing them used in Gardens. These are a continuation of notes written on the Alpine Garden Society Website over the last year or so, from which they can be put into context. They compare gardener’s views of these plants at different times and suggest how these can be of inspiration and value in our gardening today.
Temporary Fillers
This article by E. C. M. Haes (AGS Bulletin Vol. 27, p. 141) appeals to me because of its wonderful opening paragraph which must sum up growing alpines in the garden better than most:-
‘A good alpine garden is as much a true work of art as a serious painting or piece of soundly composed music, and life surely offers few greater joys to the initiated than that of guiding the development of one’s own alpine garden through its early stages and subsequent years of maturity. With a living work of art of this kind a creative urge may be satisfied over and over again. There is also the fascinating suggestion of evolutionary change in the development of the garden - not just year by year, but within each individual season as well...’.
But as he says nothing starts like this and in the first few years there are likely to be gaps (and equally a mature garden needs regularly remodelling on the smaller scales to keep its vitality). His article, then, is about some of the plants that can be introduced to give colour and interest over shorter periods - they may be temporary, but that is their nature, and given the opportunity many will maintain themselves by self-seeding.
The vivid blue Delphinium tatsiense can be as striking a plant as you could hope for in the garden, and for those whose impression of the genus is the remarkable displays by Blackmore and Langdon at the Chelsea Show, coupled with the inevitable depredations by molluscs in the garden, there are very many smaller species preferring poorer, well drained soils. Haes mentions a pale forget-me-not blue form of D. chinensis (now D. grandiflorum), called ‘Azure Fairy’. Another, D. cashmirianum, ‘is an imposing fifteen-inch species with numerous large flowers of deep-purple...’. For dry gardens the Western American D. nudicaule is quite a surprise for its red or sometimes orange flowers, rarely growing above a foot or so in height. In a classic book on ‘Western American Alpines’, written by Ira Gabrielson in 1932, he says of it: ‘The small scarlet and yellow bugles are much too scattered to make an effective color display, although they are exceedingly dainty and well bred in appearance’. The closely related D. luteum is a rare and endangered species in Nature with the expected flowers of pure yellow - this grew well on a raised bed for us for five or six years, maintaining itself from freely set seed. Both are adapted to summer drought, dying down to resting tubers over the hottest time of the year.
Even given ideal growing conditions many primulas are not long lived, and Haes mentions several that most alpine gardeners are likely to have tried: P. nutans (now P. flaccida), P. Vialii - an extraordinary species which always catches the eye, and the pretty little P. farinosa. Although they may be ‘fillers’, gardeners who can grow these well will probably be on the way to growing many more choice species too. (Note: I am using the binomials from the original articles, which in the earlier Bulletins quite often included capitalised specific names).
Campanula calaminthifolia (and the very similar C. sartorii) are good in very dry spots. In his gardening monograph Graham Nicholls recommends sunny dry rock crevices for these, given some winter protection, and there are many wonderful monocarpic bellflowers, especially from Greece, which also look stunning in such situations. Haes also advocates Viola Yakusimanae (a tiny form of V. verecunda from Japan) for a scree. This is so small that it sounds as though it could vie with Mentha requienii for cracks and crevices between paving stones; Haes calls it: ‘a lilliputian dog-violet with quaint narrow-petalled mauve flowers streaked with white, opening successively through the summer’.
The ‘rampions’ Phyteuma hemisphaericum and P. Scheuzeri are much less grown than they deserve - rather unexpected relatives of the campanulas - as is Jasione Jankae, which gives ‘many months of pleasure with a Summer-long succession of clear blue powder-puff clusters of tiny flowers [and] associates well with another good “filler” Papaver alpinum; particularly the form that has pale yellow flowers and very glaucous leaves’.
Most temporary of all are annuals and apart from the lovely Omphalodes linifolia these are rarely planted in rock gardens. Haes mentions the annual grass Mibora verna, ‘valuable as a matrix plant’ and associating well with the crucifer Ionopsidium acaule. White flowered Saxifraga tridactylites, Helipterum roseum (now Rhodanthe chlorocephala subsp. rosea) - which in poor soils only grows to 6 in or so with papery pale-pink everlasting flowers - and Sedum caeruleum; all he lists as worthwhile. This last I have never managed to establish from seed, but the combination of reddish-purple leaves and starry blue to rich-mauve flowers is hard to beat. It is another plant to be tried in a sandy crevice trough on the patio. Saxifraga tridactylites is a tiny annual with a huge distribution across Europe, N. Africa, to Iran and Iraq; good in the poorest of dry spots like old walls. Really small annuals like this are rare, when not more likely to be weeded out of the garden!
In our sand bed we have the red-flowered Collomia biflora, which here grows only to 10 or 15cm and looks in keeping with alpine plants, as does the pretty native Centuary. But one of the most beautiful of alpine annuals, the tiny vivid blue Gentiana nivalis, has never been tamed.
(13th July 2013)
‘A Golden Age?’
Can there be said to have been a ‘Golden Age’ in alpine gardening, or is it always just the one you remember? History tends to record the results of error rather than enlightenment but even on the smallest and most intimate scale of your own garden it is the latter that leads to progress, and by definition, understanding. The Alpine Bulletins are an historical record of growing plants, generally of successes rather than failures. The former though can never arise without experience of the latter, and a proper understanding of gardening which can be passed on to others, can only come from acknowledgement of failure. Even so, why is it that when given clear advice on cultivation we are unable to all have wonderful screes full of thriving plants, or grow saxifrages and dionysias until they overlap the largest of pots? The Bulletins give all the information that is necessary. One reason is that the plants themselves do not always co-operate, but another is that guidance and stimulation that comes more directly from others, and not least the individual perception of what it is that satisfies.
Lionel Bacon puts this well at the end of an article ‘De Mortuis’ (AGS Bulletin Vol. 28, p. 230) when he says: ‘And if you should observe, ungentle reader, (as well you may) that we could have read all this twelve years ago in any good book on the subject, then we can but retort that as a matter of fact we did - or most of it. But it had no depth of meaning for us: the price was not yet paid’. So do you read of others failures in order not make the same mistakes yourself, or to reconcile yourself with the fact that you have already made them and are likely to go on doing so? How can you identify a ‘Golden Age’ unless you have some personal sense of what this must be? And how can you have this unless you have an historical narrative with which to compare? A ‘Golden Age’ for one person may be nothing of the sort for another.
Lionel Bacon’s plant woes will find a resonance with anyone who has gardened for many years, and for the same reason provide a little comfort in a world which often strives for the unrealistic. The important point is that he learns from his mistakes and identifies them for the reader. The mantra of ‘Drainage, drainage, drainage’, true for Farrer’s Ingleborough soil, left his Chiltern chalk as dry as a bone. Calciphobes like Aethionema ‘Warley Rose’, Houstonia coerulea, Nierembergia hippomanica and Narcissus triandrus ‘Albus’ were only discovered as such through bitter experience. Interestingly though his desire to grow plants such as Gentiana sino-ornata by making a special contained lime-free bed was successful, and a lesson learned here was that in summer even ‘the risk of chlorosis was better than the certainty of death by drought’, and hard water from the hose had little or no deleterious effect on the plants - though many gardeners would swear by rain water. It could be argued that it is foolish to try and grow soldanellas, Gentiana pyrenaica, and Ranunculus alpestris in a chalky Hampshire garden, but how many alpine gardeners would not feel equally foolish when they look at the range of plants in their garden or alpine house?
Moles, which touch wood we have never had, have the same discrimination as rabbits (which we have) in discovering the latest treasure planted in loose moist soil and unearthing it. Blackbirds have their own prediliction for androsaces and saxifrages (and along the way providing unscheduled propagating material). Lionel Bacon’s particular experience was in a bog garden freshly planted with pinguiculas and small seedlings of Gentiana Pneumonanthe and G. utriculosa.
Gardening heightens perception to all sorts of ‘creepy crawlies’ so that one becomes expert on the life cycles of lily beetle, vine weevil and narcissus fly, even if it provides no great consolation. Lionel Bacon recounts how ‘six of a block of flourishing Gentiana verna plants in the moraine died on successive days, all neatly nipped through at the neck. I finally unearthed, not the cut-worm that I expected, but a single millipede less than half an inch long... and the damage ceased’. It is always nice to learn of another’s misfortunes!
There are subtle distinctions and at first he says their rule was: “If you don’t recognise it as a plant, it’s a weed”. Later this changed to: “if you don’t recognise it as a weed, it’s a plant”. Close observation of the garden like this results from the practical nitty gritty of getting down on your hands and knees regularly and tending the plants. With this comes the importance of propagation in maintaining many plants from year to year, which is a whole subject in itself.
Why do plants die from sheer cussedness? ‘Why did Polygala calcarea, collected from the chalk of a near-by road cutting, perish not once but thrice in the chalky part of our rock garden? - not without trace for it left a seedling in the gravel drive which has flourished untended for the past four years!’ Penstemons would not grow and flower but Silene hookeri, Gentiana amoena and Calceolaria Darwinii thrived.
It is not as if Lionel Bacon was a novice gardener or not a highly respected member of the AGS, but he was perhaps more honest than most in acknowledging failure. At the end though he elucidates the problem when he says: ‘We hoped to find proof of this [gain in the form of experience] in lessening increments to the list [of losses] in successive years; in fact we found no such thing - and came to the conclusion that any improvement has been cancelled out by our tendency to try and grow more and more difficult plants!’ How true.
(20th July 2013)
‘Flight into Fiordland’
As an impecunious student in London one of the first books I bought on alpine plants was ‘Rock Garden Plants of the Southern Alps’ by W. R. Philipson and D. Hearn. As a no more pecunious gardener now these plants of the New Zealand mountains still hold that same fascination. In Vol. 28 of the AGS Bulletin (p. 124), Philipson writes of a ‘Flight into Fiordland’. This very southwestern corner of the South Island was, and presumably still is, largely unfrequented, and cut by deep fiords with names that recall exploration by sailors such as Cook: ‘Doubtful Sound’ and ‘Preservation Inlet’. In her absorbing book ‘Captain Cook’, Vanessa Collingridge describes how Joseph Banks and other naturalists on the voyage had a strong desire to land on this coast. ‘Doubtful Sound’ was so named because of the risk that once inside, they might never have got out again. To the north is the famous ‘Milford Sound’. Philipson’s description of making progress in this country is reminiscent of stories from the wilderness of southwest Tasmania: ‘In one day we progressed four hundred yards... The reason is to be found in the extreme ruggedness and the density of the vegetation’. His trip was stimulated by the rediscovery of the supposedly extinct flightless rail, the Takeha, or Notornis (and just imagine what excitement would be generated by confirmed sightings of the Tasmanian Tiger!). Philipson was a botanist amongst ornithologists and he writes of many of the plants they encountered ‘... delicately beautiful but so difficult Fostera tenella... which reminds me of Linnaea borealis...’, Ourisia caespitosa ‘... is most at home with its roots deep among gravel through which the clear water of an alpine stream is percolating’. New Zealand is famed for its celmisias, but the ‘Handsome salmon-pink or white Senecio scorzoneroides’ also looks most appealing.
‘Of the sub-alpine Coprosmas none can compare with the C. pseudocuneata if the right form is obtained... on rocky fell-sides its prostrate stems hug the ground... But it is in winter that it is at its best for then the whole plant is studded with spherical translucent-red berries’.
The early explorers of these regions were not botanists, more likely prospectors or whalers, but had an eye for a striking plant: ‘Among the rocks about a tarn we found the ridiculously named Mt. Cook Lily (Ranunculus Lyalli) and the elegant Ourisia macrocarpa, also with an odd name - the Mountain Foxglove’. Philipson prefers the charm of O. sessiliflora which has the habit and habitat of a ramonda.
No wonder so many gardeners struggle with many New Zealand alpines: ‘The slopes above the tarn were a true herb-field... The soil is a rich deep peat, which is always spongy and sodden even in mid-summer. The dominant plants are Celmisias...’. The very choice Geum uniflorum is nicely described along with the whipcord Hebe Hectori. Higher still and the plants become true cushions and carpets: Raoulia grandiflora, Celmisia sessiliflora, Phyllachne Colensoi, and Donatia novae-zealandiae (these last two are also found high in the Tasmanian mountains). Many of these species of such extreme habitats have rare relatives and/or remarkable distributions across the widely spread lands and islands of the Southern Hemisphere. Philipson tells an interesting story of Lyallia kerguellensis from remote Kerguelen (which sits close to Antartica in about as isolated a spot as you can imagine). He received a plant by way of a French weather station, but only after it had first travelled to Paris!
There were still more choice plants to come: at 5000ft near to Coronation Peak were Ranunculus sericophyllus and R. Buchananii, Leucogynes grandiceps (nicely shown growing in N. Wales in John Good’s diary on the AGS Website recently) and Gentiana divisa.
For anyone fascinated by the Plant Kingdom, seeing and hearing of the New Zealand flora must be as exciting now as it was for Joseph Banks and his colleagues when they first encountered them. And the same must be true for those who have the good fortune to botanize these amazing places now too.
(27th July 2013)
(After discussion of the south-west corner of New Zealand last week, two rather beautiful and different books have arrived on the doorstep: ‘Above the Treeline - A Nature Guide to Alpine New Zealand’ by Alan F. Mark, and ‘Ghosts of Gondwana - The History of Life in New Zealand’ by George Gibbs. They deserve a close read, but for anyone with a fascination in the distribution of plants in the Southern Hemisphere, and the wonderfully distinct flora and fauna of these regions, they are bound to be illuminating).
‘Corsican Spring’
In a moment of naive expectation, we advertised one of our Group meetings with a poster in Wild West style saying: ‘Wanted: An Audience for a Talk on Alpine Plants’! Those prospective visitors who were not tempted by our efforts missed one of the finest talks and most accomplished growers that most of us have known. I am not sure what Jim Archibald spoke about that evening, but it would have mattered little what was chosen for the subject because Jim was fluent at anything he put his mind to - a fine writer, a great plantsman and gardener, and a nurseryman and seed collector who shared his passion for the world of alpines completely on his own terms.
In Vol. 31, p. 205 of the AGS Bulletin Jim wrote of a ‘Corsican Spring’, illustrated with photographs by Janette Stephen and line drawings of his own. Botanically islands are always interesting for their degree of isolation, and the same must be true for many of their inhabitants. We are used to describing plants in quite rigorous botanical terms, and no-one could accuse Jim of doing any other in his and Jenny’s wonderful seedlists, but how nice it
is to have descriptions like this as well: ‘Down in a glade by the stream, an ancient Prunus avium wore a trousseau of white, with golden-green hellebores as bridesmaids; nearby, beneath an equally venerable chestnut, a colony of Romuleas grew in the hard clay... I found two corms still with abortive flowers - so tiny as to be worthless to most gardeners - but how exquisite was their intricacy of shading in white, mauve and deep-yellow, pencilled with violet and green!’ On climbing a hillside they ‘skipped from boulder to boulder, trying to ignore the awesome darkness of the spaces between them, to the cliffs, where a remarkable and isolated plant of Rosmarinus prostratus draped thirty feet of pink granite with pendant cobwebs of pure blue...’.
Helleborus argutifolius must be one of the most widely grown of the genus in gardens - it grows for us in the driest of spots under conifers - and it is surprising to learn that it can grow to 6ft in the maquis, along with Euphorbia wulfenii reaching almost 8ft! In complete contrast he also describes Senecio crassifolius, dwarfed to ‘alpine status’ by the sea at Pointe de Revellata, growing near to Genista lobelii, ‘an excellent dwarf shrub almost unknown in gardens’.
Perhaps now Jim would have modified his comment about Romulea requienii: ‘its little goblet of intense Tyrian purple opened flat in the morning sun to the size of a florin, showing its golden anthers and infinitely more lovely than any crocus’. Crocuses featured extensively in those amazing seedlists in recent years and must have a select following like no other bulb. But there is truth in what he says; Romuleas are more vivid in the landscape and certainly in the garden, though probably much less grown.
On the roots of Cistus monspeliensis lived ‘that spectacular parasite Cytinus hypocistus, moulded from translucent wax in brilliant scarlet, orange or chrome-yellow...’. Salvia clandestina sounds most appealing ‘with pale-blue flowers... above clumps of wrinkled leaves to but six inches or so’. Jim, as a gardener and nurseryman, had an eye for a good plant, as well as a fascination with their variation in the natural environment. His description of Ferula communis - ‘lay like piles of bright-green soap-suds by the ditches’, is inspired.
Anyone spending time looking at plants in the wild tends to capture the interest of officials in different parts of the world, in this case by ‘two passing gendarmes’. But they were rapidly disarmed, no doubt by the charm of the seed collectors. The French word for the wild, or nature, “sauvage”. does somehow give it a different connotation, which may be closer to how many people see it.
The annual lupin L. pilosus var. costentinii sounds delightful, with soft woolly foliage and three-inch spikes of bright blue. On Corsica and Sardinia stemless forms of the stock Matthiola tricuspidata occur ‘of wondrous beauty’, growing on steep unstable slopes and cliffs of ‘clay bound with flakes of diorite’.
Jim Archibald finished with some lines that many people who have travelled and discovered plants and landscapes must identify with: ‘The island had not made plant-hunting any too easy for us but we bore her no malice. How could we presume to do so when her own people, whom she has treated so harshly since time began, loved her so much. We then realised that we, too, had fallen in love with Corsica’. There is a strong romantic streak in the gardener and it is wonderful to read of plants and landscapes written about with such perception.
(4th September 2013)
The long hot dry summer we have been having has made gardening quite difficult, but enabled a concerted effort to paint the house! So no articles for a period. This was written a while ago to follow on from the last...
‘Let us protect our Native Alpines’
‘... and immediately before you is the great gash in the side of the mountain that is so rich in alpine treasures as to be almost unbelievable to anyone who has been led to think that the flora of the Scottish Hills was but the dimmest shadow of the European Alps. In this sheltered and inaccessible chasm are collected together the cream of alpines of the district’.
E. C. M. Haes (AGS Bulletin Vol. 30, p. 23) was writing about the Ben Lawers Nature Reserve in an article arguing for more alpine plant sanctuaries. He mentions the exciting flora of Snowdonia and ‘tiny Ling Gill’ in the West Riding, and suggests sites for several more reserves. The article though is really about Ben Lawers itself and the walk up, ideally from Killin. Low down grow ‘such interesting plants as the Aspen (Populus tremula), the fragrant orchid (Gymnadenia conopsea) in good numbers, water avens (Geum rivale), Geranium sylvaticum, Trollius europeaus, and, very rarely, Pyrola rotundifolia’. Higher up a stream flows down the broad peat-filled valley interrupted by large boulders in its bed. Haes recommends ‘one particularly huge boulder as the first “port of call” for it is adorned with Antennaria dioica, Saxifraga oppostifolia, Silene acaulis, ubiquitous silvery Alchemilla alpina and harebells’. Beyond three thousand feet ‘the turf becomes, in places, almost pure Silene acaulis’. This must be a wonderful sight at flowering time, and even out of flower the moss campion is very attractive. Towards the top of Beinn Ghlas, ‘the turf becomes a thin mat of Salix herbacea, dwarf billberry, and grey-leaved sedges, dotted with the delightful miniature Edelweiss Gnaphalium supinum’. And just beyond here you find the place described in the opening paragraph.
I’ve not been to Ben Lawers, though have always wanted to explore the Scottish Highlands. After the more overwhelming range of plants we grow in the garden and on the nursery, the simpler but beautiful natural flora of the mountains has a different lure. And the common names, purple saxifrage, moss campion and cyphel (Cherleria - now Minuartia - sedoides), have a more universal appeal.
‘Alpine Gardening - Past and Present’ (14th September 2013)
Working through articles in the AGS Bulletin since its founding is historically fascinating and has strong resonances with alpine gardening today (in the same way that a scientific education is based on a cumulative understanding of the world). As you come closer to the present day, the perspective on plants and gardening inevitably becomes more personal and there is the sense that individually one can influence this, rather than just holding an historical view.
At the 2011 Nottingham Alpine Conference, ‘Alpines without Frontiers’, there were attendees involved in running Alpine and Arctic Botanical Gardens, and one booklet that I picked up was the ‘Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of Alpine and Arctic Botanical Gardens’. Like many ‘amateur’ gardeners (in the truest sense of that word) I found many of these articles extremely interesting, and many are of strong relevance to alpine gardeners (for instance on the Schachan Garden and Schynige Platte, both described on the AGS website, and on the Betty Ford Alpine Garden in North America). For many members of the alpine garden societies there must be the underlying feeling that our gardening has similar aims in understanding plants as are expressed in these Proceedings, even if coming from a different perspective and generally with more limited resources and rigour.
Several of the articles that I found especially interesting include Arve Elvebakk on ‘Rock garden landscapes in Tromso Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden (notably after listening to Martin Hajman talking on this at the Czech Conference); ‘Experiences in the introduction of southern hemisphere alpines: Southern Andes and Patagonia’ by gardeners from Lauterat and Grenoble, which resonates with the forthcoming book by Martin Sheader; Katie Price from Kew on the Davies Alpine House, which always generates a lot of controversy amongst gardeners, but possibly in part because of a degree of envy (and the alpines at Kew have been my first port of call there ever since the 1970’s). There are more technical articles on climate change and plant conservation which many gardeners may well tend to shy away from because they reflect concerns about our management of the world which can be difficult to come to terms with, and also are on occasion presented in rather dogmatic or lawyerly ways - and are complex politically, but relatively simple at heart.
In recent years horticulture/gardening and a deeper scientific understanding of plants have become more divorced from one another, implying that the one is a pastime that many people enjoy (and with a commercial and economic basis), but doesn’t have the more educated and professional outlook of the other - true in many cases, but the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Reading through the AGS Bulletins and now these Proceedings from the Arctic and Alpine Botanical Gardens, reinforces the view of how close these two aspects of plants can and should be. The Czech Alpine Conference (which I have reviewed elsewhere) captured the spirit of both a close study of plants in Nature and Botanical Gardens, and in the smaller and more intimate surroundings of our own gardens, and for me emphasises how much relevance the latter have in a proper understanding of plants, an arguement that runs through much of what I have written on the website. The two together should get a great deal more thoughtful coverage in the media. Specialist Garden Societies and member’s gardens are as close as any to Botanical Gardens and to those with professional and long held insights into the world of plants, and must be of equal, if more personal, importance. The AGS and SRGC certainly have many members that encompass both and gain greatly from this, but perhaps in ways that are not expressed strongly enough and sometimes more inclusively.
‘Raised Beds and Pavements’ (31st October 2013)
The practical craft of growing alpines inevitably is always subordinate to the end result. In the mid 1960’s, however, the Alpine Garden Society published a ‘Handbook of Rock Gardening’ which was given to all new members and also published as Vol. 32, No. 135 of the Quarterly Bulletin. There are a wide range of helpful articles, from ‘Rock Garden Construction’ by W. K. Aslet, to ‘Colour in the Winter Garden’ by P. M. Synge; from ‘Propagation’ by A. J. H. Tomlinson, to ‘Alpine Pilgrimages’ by L. J. Bacon. After you have gardened for many years it is easy to get set in your ways. So I am drawn particularly to E. B. Anderson’s article ‘Rock Beds and Pavements’, which he begins with the line that “Few people if any are able to afford large rock gardens these days...”. The rock pavement is like a horizontal version of the crevice garden in effect, and in it he recommends planting smaller alpines which form “tuffets or cushions, such as Dianthus alpinus, drabas, edraianthus, Erigeron simplex and its like, Silene acaulis etc.”. His example was 14’ long and 3’ 6” wide and contained 125 plants. As an alternative to a raised bed, scree or sand bed, or crevice garden, the rock pavement is something I have not considered. However, it would associate very well with a collection of troughs near the house and may make our garden less set in its ways in the future. The last sentence of his article might ring some bells: “I can assure you that if you once start growing rock plants you will never stop, and will provide yourself and friends with an inexhaustible source of pleasure”.
The Rock Garden at Hall Place, Bexley (1st December 2013)
At the end of June this year we attended a small but select Plant Fair at Hall Place Garden, Bexley. This garden is on the eastern outskirts of London with easy access from the A2 close by. A most notable feature is an extensive rock garden, originally constructed in the 1950’s using ninety-five tons of Kentish ragstone. This was supplemented with a further seventy-five tons four years later, making one of the most significant rock gardens in the country (see Quarterly Bulletin of the Alpine Garden Society, Vol. 33, p.59, 1965). The planting of the garden is described by F. H. Eul. In 1964 widening of the adjacent A2 encompassed the rock garden and nearby woodland plantings leading to reconstruction on a new site - as Eul says: ‘... beauty must give way to progress.’
The range of plants he describes growing in the rock garden is very diverse, including rarely grown species such as Geranium napauligerum (farreri) and the dwarf Astilbe crispa. Many more familiar plants were also used, including Mountain Avens (Dryas octopetala), a variety of gentians, and especially suited to the sandy soil and dry climate, succulents like sedums and sempervivums. A stream, pool and boggy area provided for Water Lilies, the pink flowering rush, Butomus umbellatus, and a wide range of primulas. Pictures taken of the garden at that time also show very many dwarf conifers which give good winter structure to such a garden.
Although now some 50 years later the garden is very different and mature, it retains much of the fascination it must have had when first constructed, showing how well suited it is to the site. In the long dry summer of 2013 succulent species thrived and flowered very well. Sun loving plants like rock roses, hypericum, osteospermum, anthemis and geraniums made a colourful carpet amongst the rocks. Many of the conifers have now developed into fine specimens, giving the planting real presence.
As a location for a choice and special Plant Fair, Hall Place is ideal - the garden itself has a wide variety of plantings, including an excellent vegetable garden and range of ornamental glasshouses. June this year saw ten specialist nurseries offering a very wide range of plants, and a stand from the Hardy Plant Society, which has a strong following in the south-east from keen gardeners, especially those who grow and seek out rare and unusual perennials. 2014 will see this event developing and becoming a strong feature of the gardening scene in the east of London and further afield.
The Genus Cassiope (4th December 2013)
Over the years there have been many special displays staged by members of the Alpine Garden Society. Few though can have been as fine as an exhibit of the genus Cassiope by S. E. Lilley at the main London Show in late April 1965. This is pictured across pp. 190 & 191 in Vol. 33 of the Quarterly Bulletin of the AGS and included almost every species in cultivation at that time. Several mature specimens in full flower look quite remarkable. Interspersed with the cassiopes are a number of rhododendrons and woodland perennials such as trilliums and primulas. Four years earlier Lilley had written authoritatively and informatively on ‘The genus Cassiope’ as part of the Proceedings of the Third International Rock Garden Conference, organised jointly by the Alpine Garden Society and the Scottish Rock Garden Club in 1961 (see Quarterly Bulletin of the AGS, Vol. 29, p.72). Unfortunately in my copy of this Bulletin the last section of his article is missing, but he begins by defining the attraction of cassiope to gardeners: ‘The flowers themselves cannot be classed as exciting, flamboyant, or even outstanding; it is difficult to understand the appeal this genus has for many cultivators of alpine plants, and if one were asked to define it in a word, that word would have to be delicacy’. He carries on ‘... that this delicate beauty is coupled with a certain reluctance to grow as well in cultivation as they do in the wild, presents a challenge, and these notes are penned by one who long ago took up this challenge’. A photograph of C. lycopodioides on p. 74 shows how stunningly beautiful these plants can be. On the previous page he presents a composite picture of leaf variations in nine different species and cultivars, and his fascination with the genus is easy to understand.
Growing them in the garden requires a clear knowledge of their ecological requirements. He describes Mr R. B. Cooke’s garden, ‘...at the foot of a sloping hillside in Northumberland, where the water from the fell above drains down below the surface and moisture is in the air...’. This is exactly similar to Alan Furness’ garden near to Hexham where another genus of plants of like habitat - the celmisias - grow so perfectly. However, growers in drier regions have also had good success in cool raised beds filled with open moisture retentive soil (Lilley recommends good heavy lime-free loam, peat, lime-free leaf-mould and coarse sand, all in equal parts). Conditions that never dry out are essential. This recalls the peat plunge bed that Gwendolyn Anley described for species of dwarf rhododendrons (recorded earlier in the notes on the Alpine Garden Society website), and which with suitable shade and care can enable many choice ericaceous plants to be grown even in relatively dry gardens in the south.
Lilley’s exhibit at the London Show included the ‘...tiny moss-like C. hypnoides, no more than one inch high’ to the fabulous C. wardii. Even in our dry south-east garden in Kent cassiope succeeds at the shady base of a raised bed, showing that conditions for these plants can be found in many gardens with care.
‘A Five Footed Cat’ (23rd December 2013)
Tufa is the magical component of the alpine garden, even if rarely available and viewed enviously when seen in others’ gardens. One of the most famous examples of growing alpines in this way was Roy Elliott’s ‘Cliff Garden’, inspired by an earlier covered garden built by Dwight Ripley. In Vol. 34, p. 246 (1966) of the Quarterly Bulletin of the Alpine Garden Society, Roy Elliott describes this Tufa Cliff some six years after it was first constructed, and highlights the many successes (and a few failures) that he had growing plants generally impossible in the open garden. One of these, a fifteen-year-old hummock of Draba imbricata occasionally bore ‘the deep imprint of five paws straight across its immaculate hummock. I have been looking for this cat for some time; after all a five-footed cat should be easy to identify’. All in all he grew around five hundred plants on this cliff, giving a wealth of interest and much freer flowering in recalcitrant species such as Douglasia vitaliana and Silene acaulis. Dionysia curviflora made a ‘spreading film of green’ but like a clone I once grew never flowered. The exquisite Omphalodes luciliae was a great success, self-sowing freely, and silver foliage alpines from Helichrysum virgineum, doerfleri and orientale to Verbascum pestalozzae and dumulosum flowered all summer long. Campanula isophylla, ‘in its blue, white and variegated form (var. mayi) is always superb. This lovely plant drapes itself down the cliff in a glorious sheet of colour and seems perfectly hardy...’. In the Birmingham air of the 1960’s Roy Elliott found Erinus alpinus impossible to grow in the open rock garden but it seeded freely - all too freely - on his Tufa Cliff. The most successful plant was Saxifraga longifolia ‘Tumbling Waters’, which is pictured flowering magnificently in his article.
Tufa cliffs have become all the rage in recent years, especially on the continent in alpine gardens and botanical collections. For the average rock gardener they are something of a dream, unless and until a source of tufa is discovered and allows a whole new gardening project to be entered into. Artificial tufa (hypertufa), though, opens up the possibility of building something similar and of growing a range of plants which can bring the same excitement today as they did to Roy Elliott nearly fifty years ago.
‘The Great British Garden Revival - Rock Gardening’ (8th January 2014)
A critique taken from the Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum...
(September 9th 2013 - SRGC Forum)
Since no one has commented on this I thought it would be interesting to put a few thoughts. Whenever a group of alpine gardeners get together we tend to bemoan the lack of more interesting and stimulating programmes on gardening on television, presumably because our perspective on gardening is rather more sophisticated and botanical (and individualistic). There seems great validity in this criticism because other aspects of artistic endeavour and Natural History are often given more thoughtful representation on TV. Plants have an interest which is wonderfully expressed in books, and often now on the internet (for example here!), but doesn't seem to work its way onto television, which has the capacity to inform so many more people when done really well. The idea of seeing a programme on the development of an alpine garden is great, so I don't want to criticise it, but it still seems to be based on the sense of garden transformation and 'massive design dreams'. Surely that is the antithesis of gardening for many of us - we make gardens steadily and based on a growing knowledge about the world of plants. A more adventurous programme that looked at natural plant communities (which after all are often much more beautiful than any gardener can make), and then using this background to look in more detail at established plantsman's gardens - those who have had a long passion for plants and a great deal of knowledge about them - and the successes and failures that we have had, would be more illuminating. That is also the basis of how we might go about making a garden, and the idea of showing this too is a good one. What about Peter Korn's extraordinary endeavours in Sweden, or gardens like Tromsø Botanical Garden in Norway? They are gardens which are always pushing boundaries and discovering new ways to succeed with plants - and using the natural climate and situation to best advantage. Whenever we discuss this, the conclusion is that it will never happen because there is simply not enough interest to get viewers to watch it on TV. Is this true? This is not to reflect on many of the garden programmes which lots of gardeners must enjoy, but to ask for something different. Does TV have to cater to all, or can it sometimes take a more specialised approach? I would have thought there is easily room for both and immense scope to look at plants more imaginitively. The Czech rock gardens, for example, were a revelation to me and I have been growing alpines since I was in my teens. Some of the gardens in the States, shown on this Forum, look equally exciting. There might even be a few alpine gardens in the UK that have that same wonder (he says tongue in cheek! - because I have certainly seen some). Could there be a new fashion for alpine gardening coming along? Who knows?
(January 7th 2014 - SRGC Forum)
Well, what did viewers make of this programme on rock gardening? Carol Klein is best when she is speaking about the practice of gardening, rather than trying to evangelise about a 'Great British Revival'. So quite a bit of the programme was instructive and informative. There were comments that would tally with many alpine gardeners experiences - John Massey saying that you get out of gardening what you put into it and that it is very much an ongoing process; the criticism of rock gardening that Reginald Farrer made in the early 20th century, when plants were often subsiduary to extravagent rock work; the comparison right at the end with Japanese style gardens and the way that children can be drawn into the garden, and the fact that a rock garden can be made on the smaller scale and incorporated into any garden. Revival though implies a beginning and for many committed alpine gardeners (and certainly plantspeople) this programme is only a start. It would be nice to look at gardens in a more detailed and one could say almost literary way, and to compare gardening with these plants with their natural occurrences around the world. Quieter and more appropriate music and a higher plane of presentation could begin to give alpine gardening a truer and deeper appeal. Literary and artistic criticism is de rigeur in the world of books and art, but is rarely found in the televised world of gardening, even though plants have a beauty and history of equal significance. The programme was good, but still in the 'Gardener's World' style rather than taking on a style closer to Natural History or skilled craftsmanship which gardening, and particularly propagating, lacks no less than many other crafts. The comments right at the beginning about the thanks due to collectors and explorers who have introduced plants is certainly true (and nurserymen and botanists might well be included here as well), but how about 'gardening' programmes that actually tell us about these and some of the drama and sometimes misfortune that accompanied them. Gardening is unusual in being at the one time so down to earth and at another so thoroughly an individual education. It has its Jane Austen, George Eliot and Gerald Durrell as well as Ian Fleming, le Carré and John Wyndham, not to say the wonderful writings of Christopher Lloyd, Vita Sackville-West and E. A. Bowles.
(24th April 2015 - a description of the talks given by the Russian botanist and plants-lady Olga Bondareva, hosted by the Scottish Rock Garden Club at Dunblane last summer. See also my Kent Diary on the AGS website)
The SRGC Summer Meeting - 23rd August 2014
Voronezh, Vladivostok and the Caucasus.
Who would travel 500 miles (and another 500 miles home) to listen to four talks on alpine plants? When the talks are by an adventurous Russian botanist and gardener at perhaps the second smallest city in the British Isles, not far from an area of outstanding natural beauty (with one of the most charming tea shops you could find anywhere), and close to a remarkable small garden devoted to alpine plants, amongst much more, then there is no debate. Add to this detours to Edrom Alpine Nursery, to Dunbar - the birthplace of John Muir - and to the ‘Botanics’ at Edinburgh, and you have an experience to remember.
The botanist is Olga Bondareva, the city Dunblane, the natural beauty Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, and the garden, Branklyn.
Olga was invited by Cyril Lafong and the Scottish Rock Garden Club to speak on her exploits botanising in the Caucasus and far to the east near to Vladivostok. She is not only widely travelled and a fine plants-lady and photographer, but talented in presenting her knowledge of plants to an audience in a language not of her own, and was received with the highest regard. Before describing something of Olga’s talks I should mention the venue, Dunblane, which is strategically and centrally located for gardeners in Scotland. Dunblane, like the plants we have come to be so fascinated by, is small and perfectly formed: a ‘city’ - because it has a cathedral - which is more like a village, close to both Edinburgh and Glasgow but closer still to the natural beauty of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. It would be hard to find a better place to learn about and celebrate the alpine plants of the world. The Scottish Rock Garden Club has also had an influence here by part sponsering the Riverside Rock Garden, made by local gardeners in 2012. Appropriately, for the alpine gardener, the little rock fern, Asplenium trichomanes, also grows in profusion in the wall alongside the cathedral.
*****
In her talks Olga took us first 500km south of her home in Moscow to the dry continental lowlands of Voronezh near to the Don River (which runs into the Black Sea), where winter temperatures can drop as low as -40°C. The region is mainly soft limestone and is home to many familiar garden plants from Anemone sylvestris and Primula veris to amazing meadows of Paeonia tenuifolia. There are the irises I. aphylla and I. pineticola and several species of Stipa, including feathery awned S. pennata. Amongst these grasses of stipa and festuca, which grow and flower later in the season, the springtime hills are covered in places with the low pink mounds of Daphne julia(e), a species close to D. cneorum and first described in 1921 but only recently studied in greater detail in its native habitat by Olga. The typical flower colour varies from soft to deep-pink, but in such large populations occur forms from ‘Appleblossom’ to pure white. Much of the variation seen in daphnes in cultivation is evident in these natural populations, with variegated and purplish leaved plants and some with ‘starry’ pink and white flowers. It is a good plant in the Moscow climate, only subject (like all daphnes) to occasional fungal dieback and to ‘sunburn’ in early spring when the soil remains frozen and restricts transpiration as the ambient temperatures rise. In nature, along with the more familiar Adonis vernalis and Genista tinctoria, it grows with other interesting species such as Onosma simplissima and Polygala cretacea. Though rarely cultivated this species has been successfully grown in gardens at least since the 1970’s and looks to be potentially of equal horticultural merit as its relative D. cneorum.
*****
Olga’s second talk was thousands of kilometres to the east in the hills close to Vladivostok and near to the borders with N. Korea and China. This is a wonderland of temperate plants with a relatively mild maritime climate of dry winters and wet summers and innumerable species suitable for European gardens. One thousand and five hundred vascular plants have been recorded here including a wide diversity of woody and woodland forms, and with real gems like cypripediums, corydalis and the beautiful (if fleeting) Jeffersonia dubia. The hills are volcanic, old and not so high (up to 2000m) and clothed in a woodland mix of Quercus, Acer and less familiar genera such as Maackia, Kalopanax and Phelodendron, which develop superb autumn colours. There are many coniferous species and a number of rhododendrons, but the real interests for the alpine gardener are the rich assemblages of woodland and higher meadow plants. Eranthis stellata, a white winter aconite, and rare in cultivation, grows everywhere in woodland glades, as do mixes of corydalis, anemone and fritillaria, and the curious composite, Syneileses aconitifolia. Learning to garden with such plants in a natural way is surely one of the great thrills of gardening, even if in an infinitely smaller space, but seeing them described in the wild in this way is truly exciting. Quite a few species are well known in British gardens and have been long cultivated - for example Lilium pumilum, Jeffersonia dubia and Paeonia obovata - but others would no doubt make equally good garden plants, in particular the corydalis which are often seasonally dominant parts of the woodland floor. Corydalis ambigua, buschii and remota (botanically correctly known as turtschaninovii) are all known to specialist gardeners and most successful in the cooler north of the UK. Many have been introduced to cultivation by the renowned plantsman in Latvia, Jānis Rukšāns, and scientifically studied at Gothenberg Botanic Garden in Sweden. Olga showed a most striking form of C. remota [sic] with deep-purple lips and sky-blue spurs, and it is as variable and fascinating a plant as the much more widely grown C. flexuosa and its allies, and suitable for similar conditions in the garden.
In dry grassy meadows near to the Suifun River grow three species of Pulsatilla - P. cernua, P. dahurica and P. chinensis - often together and showing no obvious signs of hybridisation. This genus has been closely studied and grown by Olga in her Moscow garden and, for the alpine gardener, is one of the most appealing of all. Field studies like this will most likely lead to more species becoming better known and grown in cultivation and add significantly to the recent monograph on the genus published by Christopher Grey-Wilson.
*****
One of the most enlightening aspects of learning about plants is gaining a sense of their origins and distributions around the world. Olga’s final two talks compared the floras in the immensely varied and dramatic terrain of the Caucasus, from the higher and continental interior to the almost sub-tropical Black Sea coast, where in places tea is cultivated commercially. The fact that certain species from each of these places are successful and valued plants in our gardens says a lot about the adaptability of plants in general, and leads to the great fascination that such places instill in the minds of gardeners.
The Caucasus contains some of the highest mountains anywhere in the world, reaching to over 5600m, and stretching north-west to south-east from the Black Sea to the Caspian. As a geographical and cultural divide between Russia in the north and Persia (in its widest sense) in the south, it can almost be compared with the Himalayas, and as a floristic region equally exciting. The genus Corydalis is again very notable and Olga showed a woodland floor composed of a wonderful mix of C. caucasica and C. marshalliana. The latter is closely discussed by Magnus Lidén and Henrik Zetterlund in their monograph on the genus, highly variable across its range and intergrades with C. cava. All can be excellent garden plants. The Caucasus is truly rich in endemic and near endemic species of snowdrops. For the Galanthophile Olga showed G. alpinus and G. angustifolius from her travels in the north, and the amazing range of species, G. krasnovii, G.panjutinii, G. platyphyllus, G.plicatus, G. rizehensis and G. woronowii from nearer the Black Sea. Several of these are exceptionally rare in cutlivation and it is very valuable to see and hear more of their natural situations. Galanthus woronowii, one of the easiest and most widely available of snowdrop species, shows variation in the wild that immediately appeals to the gardener, from greenish forms to a poculiform which Olga had specifically searched for over several years.
Almost as exciting, if not more so, is the rarely cultivated (and recognised) Erythronium caucasicum, usually white with a yellow or brown central marking but sometimes pink, and even more strikingly, spotted. The brownish-orange flower stems of this species also mark it out rather beautifully.
It is hard to choose from the many other plants that Olga showed: the variety of flower colour from white, through pale to the typical deep-yellow of Epimedium pinnatum subsp. colchicum shows that new forms of this easy and useful plant could come into cultivation; and the pure yellow form of Pulsatilla albana is a delight. The highlight, though, is undoubtedly the amazing variation found in Paeonia tenuifolia, highly attractive already for its tidy and neat habit and finely cut leaves, but here with flowers varying from white through pale-pink to orange and deep-red, albo-roseum and semi-double. The horticultural potential of this species is considerable.
The high Caucasus is home to so many true alpines such as the unique yellow form of G. verna, oschtenica, Pulsatilla violacea, Campanula biebersteiniana (which we obtained from Edrom Nursery) and an interesting small mountain Rhamnus, microcarpa. I would like to grow Gentiana djimilensis - which sometimes occurs in pink and bicoloured forms as well as blue - and Olga described Daphne circassica as having the best scent of all, a high recommendation, and a good excuse to grow more of this wonderful genus to compare! This, along with the purple and well scented Viola somchetica and so many other plants, illustrates the great botanical and horticultural fascination of the region, which has been so finely documented by Vojtěch Holubec and Pavel Křivka in ‘the Caucasus and its Flowers’ (2006). It was a privilege and a joy to see them described first hand in their natural habitat.
(I would like to express our thanks to the Scottish Rock Garden Club, and to Sandy Leven, for organising such an enjoyable day, and to Olga for her charming and enlightening talks).
