July 2014 | The Garden 19

The Garden, RHS Media, Churchgate, New Road, Peterborough PE1 1TT

Comment

Last year, our refreshingly opinionated columnist Helen Dillon wrote that gardening tasks such as mowing the lawn were more male than female (Comment, June 2013, p17). It caused a strong reaction from members, especially some men who argued that her view reinforced stereotypes. But recently the subject came back to me when I was sent a press release by a leading gardening equipment manufacturer.

Having surveyed 2,000 people, the manufacturer identified that some gardening tasks are perceived as ‘blue’ (male) while others are ‘pink’ (female). Pulling up weeds and digging the soil are the domain of men, while women (apparently) prefer watering and choosing plants for display. Although I can see tasks

being divided up in such a way after a convivial husband-and-wife discussion, is this not an outdated, sexist delineation?

The reality in the wider horticultural world is that there is no difference in the abilities of men and women. Whether pruning roses; mowing lawns; propagating plants; undertaking scientific research; growing vegetables; designing a garden; serving garden centre customers; marketing a garden; leading an organisation… need I go on? Few other industries are as equitable or as inspiring for individuals (regardless of gender) and this open, accessible oppor-tunity is something we must celebrate. For proof of this, let a snapshot of RHS Flower Shows confound sexist assumptions – many of the leading garden designers are male,

combining and refining plants to fine effect; yet many owners of independent nursery businesses are female. Some people might have assumed the opposite is the case, but in reality there just isn’t a pink or blue split.

As the horticultural industry comes together to attract a wider range of people in the ‘Horticulture Matters’ campaign, we must recruit based on ability, passion and outlook. Whether they are male or female is the last thing on my mind.

Garden lore has much to answer for regarding Alstroemeria. The first plants in cultivation (in the 1830s) were mad colonisers, and then garden books spent years persuading people that A. ligtu hybrids behaved better and had nicer colours.

Folk memory lingers on, even though I constantly tell people that alstroemerias are brilliant. I grow 20 plants in pots, and move them around to provide extra colour. The best plants are tall and boast an RHS Award of Garden Merit (I don’t favour any selections with Little Miss or Princess in the name – I find they are blobby and lack grace). Mine seem to have a rest in early July, so I give them a big feed to carry them through to autumn.

I had an eight-year struggle to establish Romneya coulteri. But

30 years on it grows through the floor of the henhouse, has burrowed under a cobbled path, annexed the nearby rose bed and waves crinkled, white taffeta flowers with a golden boss of stamens (pictured, right; see also p57) from the far side of the runner beans. Still, it is the most beautiful plant in the garden despite such lack of restraint.

The other day I was just thinking how good the garden was looking, with the agapanthus, dieramas, dahlias, hydrangeas and lilies all in flower, when a garden visitor brought me back to earth with a thud by saying, ‘Tell me, what would you suggest is a good time to see this garden?’

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beauty is in the eye of the beholderAuthor: Helen Dillon, gardener and writer living in the Republic of Ireland

Thinking pink and blue? Editor of The Garden, Chris Young

l e t t e r f rom t h e e d i t o r

…the way in which the crumpled petals expand from the buds like the wings of a butterfly are why we find them so enticing.

Christopher Grey-Wilson: Poppies on parade (pp52–57)r

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July 2014 | The Garden 21

Letterscontact usWrite to: The Garden, RHS Media, Churchgate, New Rd, Peterborough PE1 1TT or email: thegarden@rhs.org.uk (please include your postal address). Letters on all gardening topics are welcome, but may be edited for publication.

m e m b e r’ s v i e w

not just for tree-huggers

RHs member Lia Hervey believes that government and businesses should be

promoting permaculture, for its many benefits to everyday lives.Permaculture – a niche concept among gardeners and ecologists but surely something government, local councils, schools and businesses could push to become mainstream?

Everyone with a garden can com­post green waste, which could help free up council resources. Why let gardens flood when winter rain water can be saved in butts for use in dry spells? Wasteland could become allot­ments, meaning less dependency on supermarket car trips and an ease on air travel for foreign imports – I’m told that home­grown crops can have more nutritional content than those flown for days from long distances.

I have worked in sports news journalism for some years now, and have heard governments worldwide extolling the benefits of sport on health and wellbeing. Governments spend millions trying to get people more active. Gardening beats the gym any day, and what better for mental health than a good dose of sunshine, exercise and natures’ sensory overload? Why not promote sustainable permaculture gardening? It could reduce the drain on our burdened health service.

I know it is idealistic and niche, and some would call me a tree­hugger, but it is only within the past 50 years that our throwaway society has emerged. If governments promote gardening and permaculture now, then in the next 50 years life could be different. We could all be out hugging trees.✤ See News, June, p10, about the health benefits of gardening, and benefits to the NHS.

f ro m t h e r h S L i n d L e y L i b r a ryYellow tomatoes by Ernst Benary (1819–1893) from a chromolithograph plate of ‘Tomatoes, or Love­Apples’ in the 1879 Album Benary.

From rhs.org.uk✤ Find out what to look forward to at this year’s

RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show (8–13 July), and RHS Flower Show Tatton Park (23–27 July).

Visit: www.rhs.org.uk/shows✤ Log into the exclusive RHS members area for videos, members podcasts and exclusive articles. Simply go to the

top of the RHS webpages and register, and then sign in with your email address and password.

adventures in chinaI have researched the life of William Mesny for a biography that I am writing. as a footnote to Roy Lancaster’s article about Jasminum mesnyi (People behind the plants, The Garden, april, pp86–87), his exciting life as a smuggler, arms dealer and soldier includes this remarkable story:

Mesny collected Jasminum mesnyi in 1880, while travelling from his home at Guiyang to the Yangzi river port of chongqing. His original route passed through the small town of Qianxi, whose citizens turned out to be violently anti-foreign and, aided by a rabble of local militia, led an attack on his inn that night. after shooting several of the mob dead with his pistol, Mesny – who was a major general in the chinese army at the time – picked up a fallen spear and used it to clear an escape route to the magistrate’s office, where he hid until being escorted back to Guiyang.

The authorities made Mesny take a safer alternative route to chongqing and it was on this second journey, near the hamlet of Meizhu on the Wu Jiang river, that he discovered the jasmine which bears his name today.david Leffman, West yorkshire

✤ nigel has ignited a long overdue discourse on the current wave of biological pesticides. It is worrying to see the promotion of pesticides such as nematodes, which do not discriminate between good and bad molluscs. Gardeners unwittingly create a vacuum that deprives predators of prey, while providing an attractive and slug friendly bed for other molluscs to move into. nigel reminds us that the gardener’s task is to work with what you’ve been given.barry King, Coventry

✤ I was delighted to see nigel colborn’s pitch for ‘more passive gardening’, despite his mild reproof for organic gardeners such as me. It marks a significant and welcome moment, as it would have been unimaginable to see such a page in The Garden when I first began gardening organically in 1976.

a key publication produced by Garden organic was the Organic Gardening Guidelines – a careful review of gardening products and practices, aiming to help gardeners to make choices based on clear environmental criteria. our environment has been abused by humans – it is important that

gardeners think carefully about how they manage land.

When a fine plantsman such as nigel observes the benefits of a less-aggressive approach to the garden, readers should take note.

I welcome the call to gardeners to think about how they garden and

to be prepared to yield to nature a little more, if they don’t already.bob Sherman, former Chief horticultural officer, Garden organic

✤ nigel mentions the French legislation project to ban pesticides throughout France by 2020. one of France’s leading landscape architects, Gilles clément, takes this concept further. Le jardin en mouvement sees gardens as places where plants are allowed to roam and are on equal terms with the gardener. What follows is observation, then intervention by sympathetic management.

Passive gardening is about more than avoiding pesticides. It inevitably leads to an ecological approach, which Gilles develops in his Jardin Planétaire, a concept demonstrated by the Domaine de Rayol, on the cote d’azur.Christa Gonschorrek, Central france

In praise of more passive gardeningIn May, Nigel Colborn discussed the future use of garden chemicals (Comment, p29). Here are some of your responses:

supplying MeconopsisFurther to the RHS Plant Trial article of Meconopsis (The Garden, May, pp100–105) by Christopher Grey-Wilson, these special plants are a particular passion of ours, and their beauty was clear to see in the photography.

We were a key supplier to the trial, and grow all of the plants that were awarded an Award of Garden Merit. We stock an unrivalled range of Meconopsis and, having been involved in the selection for the trial, our enthusiasm in raising and selling these plants continues unabated. Beryl and Gavin McNaughtonMacplants, Berrybank Nursery, 5 Boggs Holdings, Pencaitland, Tranent, East Lothian EH34 5BA; 01875 341179; www.macplants.co.uk

Beautiful honestyHelen Dillon is right to praise Lunaria annua ‘corfu Blue’ (comment, May, p25). I bought seeds of this beautiful plant from the Hardy Plant society in 2013. From these came four robust plants, creating a clump under a hawthorn which began flowering before any other honesty in my garden – the luminous blue splash they made was a joy. In late May there were still some flowers remaining.

amazingly, the slugs and snails in our garden largely ignore them. Thanks to Mary Keen, who originally discovered this remarkable plant, and also to the Hardy Plant society member for the seeds.ann tomlinson, Surrey

Byzantine gladiolusRegarding the RHs Plants profile of Gladiolus communis subsp. byzantinus (The Garden, May, p32), I believe the des-cription has been super seded. This plant is unusual and does not follow the normal rules.

after it has flowered, any seeds produced (while looking apparently sound) will often not

Comment

germinate, due to the number of chromo-

somes. The plant has 90

chromosomes, making it what

botanists call a hexaploid, and as a result is usually infertile.

Gardeners may assume that it spreads by seed but it doesn’t. as the plant has its origins in the Mediterranean, any seeds produced in the uK will be killed in a normal winter. The adult plant really only naturalises – and then purely vegetatively – in the southern half of Britain where its thickly coated cormlets escape deep frosts. so all the plants in the uK are just one, genetically identical clone.

over several decades

Gladiolus communis subsp. byzantinus

gardeners have raised seedlings under glass from self-pollinated byzantine gladiolus plants to see what would happen. Genetically this has been difficult – most die before they reach flowering stage. However, if they do flower, they will normally resemble Mediterranean G. illyricus which is the presumed natural wild parent of this uK-adopted horticultural gem. Gladiolus illyricus has a normal chromosome number of 60, is called a tetraploid and is fertile.

If any RHs members succeed in raising seed under glass so that it eventually flowers, please take photographs so that botanists can get as much information as possible. a detailed account can also be found in The Plantsman, March 2013, pp50–55.anthony hamilton, east Sussex

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Lunaria annua ‘Corfu Blue’

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July 2014 | The Garden 23

Some time ago the Government mooted the idea of ‘biodiversity offsetting’. In extreme circum­stances, even ancient woodlands might be replaced with newly

planted woodlands to make way for development. Petitions were signed and outrage vented via social media.

Commentators pointed out the folly of this childishly simplistic approach to beautiful, complex, ancient landscapes. Columnist George Monbiot has written that, under the policy, ‘No place is valued as a place: it is broken down into a list of habitats and animals and plants, which could, in theory, be shifted somewhere else.’ Garden writer and former environ­mental consultant Mark Diacono wrote in his Otter Farm blog, ‘To accept that ancient woodland can be offset with new planting is to believe that ancient woodland is just a collection of trees. Such thinking allows us to demolish St Paul’s Cathedral to be offset with a similarly sized pile of new bricks.’

I wish people would get as upset about allotments. For allotments have always been subject to a most unsophisticated and half­hearted type of offsetting, and the general acceptance of this has done them no favours. The Allotments Act 1925 specifies that a local authority, on appropriating a statutory allotment site, must ensure either that ‘adequate provision will be made for allotment holders displaced... or that such provision is unnecessary or not reasonably practicable’. I’m pretty sure this translates as: ‘You should probably find them somewhere else to plant stuff. You know, if it’s not too much trouble.’

Pushing for changeAn allotment site isn’t an ancient woodland, and I do not mean to diminish the righteous call to protect ancient woodland with my own complaint. An allotment is something else, and that is the point. It has its own place in our landscape, a place that has had

its status worn away by the idea that it can be swapped for a patch of random ground a mile down the road. At no stage of allot­ment development proceedings is any account taken of the patina age gives a site, the way the paths lose their way over the years, or the depth of a well­worked soil.

No account is ever taken of a site’s historic and cultural place in the landscape: this site over which we wish to build, was it created to alleviate urban overcrowding following the Industrial Revolution? Or earlier, to keep farm labourers from the poor­house following parliamentary enclosures? Or later, as one of hundreds of new allotment sites that pulled us back from the brink of starvation during the depths of the First World War? In the eyes of the law, of local authorities, of heritage organisations and of the general public none of this matters. One acre is as good as another, as long as it

falls within a two­mile radius.Resist offsetting and do it forcefully, but

please let’s also get angry about the fact that this has long been the law for allotments, and let’s push for change. Just as ancient wood lands are not simply collections of trees, allotments are not just blank squares of earth, and yet even the most ardent allotment supporters have become accus­tomed to the idea that replacements are perfectly acceptable. We’ll take what we are given, and gratefully. It’s time to reject this thinking, and I wish that heritage organisations and the National Allotment Society would do the same.

Allotments may be living, continually evolving landscapes, but they are just as important as bricks and mortar, and big old trees. Allotments should be valued as places, too, and the first step towards this is to at least start saying it.

Speaking up about the true value of allotmentsRegular The Garden columnist Lia Leendertz sees allotments as far more than patches of land

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Just as ancient woodlands are not simply collections of trees, allotments are not just blank squares of earth

July 2014 | The Garden 25

Last summer, while out for lunch with friends, I dipped my finger in a dollop of ketchup and held it out for a passing wasp. Within seconds one landed on my finger, eating the ketchup while my friends asked how I could do such a thing.

Rather than sting me, the wasp simply had its fill before flying off. My friends suggested I had given it fuel to sting someone else, but I like to think it carried on looking for other sugary treats.

Britain has many wasp species, but I am referring to social (rather than solitary) wasps – of which common wasp (Vespula vulgaris) is the most widespread. It is easily identified by its thin ‘waist’ and black-and-yellow striped abdomen, and if you get close enough you might notice the anchor-shaped mark on its face.

In late summer, wasps bother us at picnics and pub tables. Some-times they become aggressive and sting, but mostly they just land on our food and fly in our faces. ‘What is the point of wasps?’ friends ask.

Between April and August we hardly notice wasps, so we fail to see how amazing they are. They start the year in spring, when the queen emerges from hibernation. She chews wood and uses the pulp to create an intricate paper structure of hexagonal cells, in which she lays her first batch of eggs. These eggs hatch into grubs, which she feeds with protein-rich insects. Once she has raised sufficient adult wasps – sterile female workers – the queen stays in the nest to lay more eggs, and the workers gather insects for the grubs. The workers tirelessly forage for ‘pests’ such as caterpillars, flies and aphids, and in return the grubs secrete a sugary substance, which the workers eat.

But in late summer the queen stops laying eggs, so there are fewer grubs to feed. The workers, suddenly redundant, crave the sugary reward they have been used to. Suddenly, our jam sandwiches, fizzy drinks, fruit and dollops of ketchup become attractive alternatives.

Dipping my finger in ketchup is the least I can do for wasps, who have spent the last three months keeping my plants free from pests. I’ve not been stung yet – perhaps a reward for being nice to wasps.

A surprise invitation arrived, in May, to visit gardens in Italy. So instead of pulling out the dead wallflowers in our garden we found ourselves relaxing by the River Arno, sipping Prosecco and gazing at the silvery-grey-green hills of Tuscany.

The gardens exceeded our most extravagant expectations. Sculpted hedging, faultless vistas and statue-rich parterres all created wondrous

effects. But five days of continuous viewing can blunt the appetite for geometrical box and marble buttocks. One begins to crave a little floral chaos – a closer look, perhaps, at the wild orchids which lined the local lanes or a stroll in the local woods where nightingales sing.

But despite the classical overload, there was much to inspire – and in surprising ways. Italy’s gardeners have a honed instinct for style, knowing that small things can make huge differences. They under-stand the importance of context, of placing objects in the most

telling spots and – most of all – they have faultless colour sense. That instinct is similar to the talent which enables one person to flourish a silk square and look instantly elegant while another fiddles endlessly with an Hermès scarf, only to look expensively dressed. Goodness knows where they get the savvy. Perhaps it’s a Latin thing, or a culture-memory rooted in seven centuries of the world’s finest art.

Whatever the source, Italian gardeners combine boldness with know-how and instinct. Roses on a wall of the Villa la Massa, the hotel near Florence where we stayed, had stems trained in

a symmetrical grid. Contrived and fussy, you might think, but on the smooth sides of the building they created beautiful leafy patterns. And the warm salmon flowers – a risky choice against the peachy terracotta stucco – harmonised perfectly.

Outside the villa’s tiny chapel, white roses were trained on low supports, creating a screen which contrasted with dark evergreens cladding the building. Behind the roses, in a partly

overgrown niche occupied by weathered cherubs, two white balsams (Impatiens hawkeri) echoed the colour: a tiny addition – no more than an afterthought – but it spoke volumes. So, if you need advice on how to redeem a dull corner, ask a Tuscan.

No need to fear a sting in the tailKate Bradbury, wildlife and gardening writer, is amazed by wasps

Add a touch of Italian chicGarden writer and The Garden columnist Nigel Colborn finds inspiration among Italian classicism

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Italian gardeners combine boldness with know-how and instinct...

Common wasp