Garden plants, native plants, invasive plants, more stuff about more plants - from both sides of the Atlantic - with occasional asides on wildflowers and wildlife, books and magazines about plants, mail order catalog(ue)s, the smartness and the absurdity of plant names, the transatlantic life and perhaps occasionally fishing, music and books on subjects other than plants. Scroll down, and look left, for pix of our pussycats.
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Since the last snow fell - what, about a week ago - someone's been doing a job on one of our birches.
I saw this in the distance across in the woods and couldn't quite see what was going on (click to enlarge). So I went to investigate (trudging through a foot of snow - where are those snowshoes?)
To be honest, we like to leave the dead trees in place for exactly this reason. The grubs munch their way through the dead wood and the pileated woodpecker, (right, click to enlarge) all 18in/45in of him or her, chips away at the wood to munch on the grubs.
But that's big pile of chips to create in just a few days. They come to the bird feeders sometimes, and it's a treat to see them, they're just so huge! And they can do an elegant flute-like job on some trees.
Oh! And a red-tailed hawk just flew by my window and sat on a branch... Not a squirrel in sight, needless to say. They're probably all quivering in the woodpile.
Quite a lot of flowers, actually – but all on the one plant. While the hellebores and snowdrops are still under a foot or more of snow, the hamamelis is in full flower. So it must be spring. But not another flower in sight.
And this morning we had a red-winged blackbird on the feeder. “It’s a sure sign of spring when the red-winged blackbird returns to the marshes,” says the book (Birds of Pennsylvania Field Guide). Well, tough on the poor blackbird. The marshes are still frozen solid.
Actually, I’m worried about that hamamelis – Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Pallida’. It seems to me that the petals are little bit short, and not quite pallid enough – and it doesn’t really have as much scent as I remember. “Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Pallida’ probably has the strongest scent” says last year’s blog post from RHS Rosemoor. Not this one, it doesn't.
Well, if you must buy shrubs in a sale…
And I wonder what's going on under all that snow? It's basically melting from the underneath so the soil must be warm enough not only to melt snow but encourage a little growth... I'm intrigued.
He discusses techniques and equipment and ways to think about macro photography in the accessible way that he’s developed in years of teaching photography workshops.
Well worth a listen, it comes in six parts. Just click to listen.
The Journal of the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) arrives. Always intriguing. This issue features, apart from the arcane (but valuable) botanical stuff like eight pages on the identification of two hybrid Juncus (rush) species, something much more exciting.
At their Annual General Meeting in June there’ll be a demonstration of “DNA extraction from a fruit smoothie – using only household reagents”! Sounds great. Actually, it turns out that this is not a unique idea but still – impressive, I’d say. All we need now is advice on how to determine the cultivar of strawberry in the smoothie using tools found in the average suburban garage.
But there are two other valuable features of this issue. One is the list of new plant records for the British Isles – ten and a half pages of them, six pages of which are records of newly introduced species. [For US readers, the area of the British Isles is about the same as that of Michigan, the 11th largest state.] It’s invaluable that discoveries of individual species, sometimes just single plants like the Berberis darwinii found on Sark in the Channel Islands, are recorded as this vital information is crucial to our understanding of the spread (or more often the lack if it) on non-native species. News of similar, state-by-state, records in the US would be appreciated.
Finally, there’s a ten page paper from Michael Braithwaite, President of the BSBI, on how successfully the BSBI has recorded the spread of non-native plants. I may well come back to this important piece another time but one thing jumps out: when referring to non-native plants he encourages us not to use the term “alien” but instead to call these plants “incomers… to avoid being judgmental.”
Here in the US, the term “alien” is routinely used - sometimes, I have to say, with the intention of being judgmental.
We take it for granted that we can get online. But traveling about Britain recently it’s been, well, tricky. Fine at home, DSL line. No problem. Bought a Vodafone wireless dongle so I could get online anywhere over the mobile phone network. Seemed the obvious solution. But.
At Mum’s retirement community in suburban Surrey, on the southern edge of London, the connection is so slow that websites won’t even load and it’s impossible to know if email has gone off or not. This is an area packed full of heavy mobile phone users. Ten miles away, at the RHS Wisley Garden – nothing: no signal at all. Nothing. At the nearby railway station – we’re back to half a bar.
So, I stop at the service station on the motorway. Free wireless internet! Except that after ten minutes they bump you off the website site you’re browsing – or, in my case, the blog post I’m half way through writing – to make you log on again. Bye bye blog post. At the RHS London Flower show the other day, from where I was expecting to post about all the sparkling primroses and snowdrops and hellebores - the Vodafone dongle connection is so slow that it’s completely impossible. Ah - but the Horticultural Halls have wireless internet access – it’s £5/$7.60 for one hour! Not a day, an hour. I’m not paying that. The rather resigned man on reception says he’s had lots of complaints. OK, the RHS is hard up – but why price it so that no one in their right mind would ever buy an hour of access.
Vodafone is hoping for an exclusive on the iPad in Britain. My nephew in New York didn’t buy an iPhone because the AT&T service in the city is so terrible. Here’s the thing. If the government nationalized the tower network, or handed it all over to one company, and let all the phone companies use all the towers – then everyone would have access to the best possible connections. The mobile phone companies could then compete on other aspects of their service. And I could post pictures of the hellebores and primroses at the show – from the show. Instead of from back here in Pennsylvania.
Oh, yes - the plants! One of the splendid new British bred Belarina Series of double primroses, 'Belarina Cream', developed by David Kerley who also created the Tumbelina double petunias. And the 'Briar Rose' hellebore, an unlikely cross between H. niger and H. vesicarius, was created by Kevin Belcher at Ashwood Nurseries.
News today that the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world may have to close as it will soon be falling down.
An independent review of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reveals that The Temperate House is in need of prompt restoration without which it could pose safety risks to public, and staff, in the next two or three years. The report also points out that there’s a huge backlog of other maintenance and repair on Kew’s buildings that will cost £80million/$125million to put right.
So, basically, they have not been spending what they should on regular maintenance. Someone needs a bollocking seems to have been derelict in their duty, over the years.
Twice as large as the more famous Palm House at Kew, The Temperate House was completed in 1899 and is home to a huge collection of plants which are too tender to be grown outside but which don’t require the humid and hot tropical conditions of The Palm House.
As it happens, I remember the last time The Temperate House went through a dramatic restoration. For what seemed like years in the late 1970s, I think, most of the plants were moved out and hard hats were compulsory. Clearly, this spectacular building, with its high observation platform from which to look down on the plants, has been neglected since.
But where’s the money to come from? Not, please by upping the entrance fee. At present it costs £13/$20 to get in – that’s for just one person. With car parking on top. Enough to deter a huge number of people from visiting. And take a look at this video to see how much there is to see.
Shows my age again, I suppose, but when I was a kid it cost just a penny to get in and collecting the money cost more than people paid. There was even a plan to close the gardens to the public altogether – Kew is a scientific institution, after all - and so make significant savings on all that has to be done to accommodate the visiting public. Instead the price went up – and up and up.
So what’s the answer? A tricky question in these hard times. The report suggests that grants have not kept pace with the increased rate of grant help to museums – good – and that Kew should raise more than the existing, very impressive, £23.4million/$36.5million from commercial activities. The trick is to balance commerce and science – even assuming Kew can compete successfully for the commercial revenue being sought by so many other venues.
Looks like grants, then. And don’t forget that increased grants not only means repairing buildings, it means hiring more people. Which with unemployment so high, is exactly what we need. Kew’s own stimulus package, if you like, both to restore the gardens and provide jobs. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Magnolia sieboldii is a lovely shrub, or even a small tree. But don’t expect it ever to look like this – unless you cut the branches off your flowering tree and stuff them into a pot. As seen here. This is not a patio plant, it can be a 30ft+/10m+ tree!
What’s more, although it’s one of the magnolias which flowers when quite young – usually when about five or six years old – it never ever flowers at the size seen in this picture from Britain’s Daily Telegraph’s online garden shop.
Neverthless… Magnolia sieboldii is one of the finest of all magnolias, and fragrant too. Just be sure to plant it in moisture retentive, acid soil. And not in a patio pot!
Just popped in to the RHS garden at Wisley in Surrey yesterday afternoon – in the rain – and the first plant to greet me inside the gate is the hybrid hellebore I’ve been bashing on about for the last eighteen months or so. A big drift of it… Looking splendid.
Helleborus Walberton’s Rosemary (‘Walhero’) – well, I’m not going to go into all the detail again. Suffice it to say that it’s the first widely available hybrid between the Christmas rose, H. niger, and the Lenten Rose, H. x hybridus.
And here at Wisley today, in the rain, after the coldest British winter in decades… it’s looking marvellous.
Sometimes, being stuck in the traffic provides an opportunity.
Just back in Britain for a visit, I was stuck on the infamous M25 (that’s London's vast orbital motorway). So I was able to snap these three sources of alternative energy in one picture as I waited for the traffic to move. (Click the image to to enlarge it.)
There’s the wind turbine, of course. And there’s the bank of solar panels. And there’s the field of Miscanthus being grown as a biomass crop.
Jackanapes is an old English word meaning a saucy or mischievous person. And I suppose the streaks running through the enlarged calyx of the Jackanapes polyanthus do give the flowers an impudent air.
This is one of the less common of what are often referred to as “anomalous” primroses and polyanthus, the oddities that intrigue so many people more than the familiar kinds. In the Jackanapes the green calyx of each flower is striped through with a flash of color which is the same as that of the petals - click to enlarge the disassembled flower below.
These have always been rare, but now through the work of British plant breeder Simon Crawford and especially Otka Plavcova at the Silva Tarouca Institute at Pruhonice near Prague they are available as the Sylvan Series in four colors and a mixture.
Like the You and Me Series, these are polyanthus plants with the clusters of Jackanapes flowers held on strong stems so that their detail can be seen more easily and they're lifted away from mud splash.
The basic material for this breeding work came from Barnhaven Primroses when it was still in Cumbria in England (it’s now moved to France). To go technical for a moment, Jack-in-the-Green lines (with an enlarged green calyx) have been selected so they are homozygous for the dominant gene. Meanwhile Otka Plavcova's hybridization with hardy polyanthus has yielded some parent lines which are true-breeding for the dominant Hose-in-Hose gene. This is no easy feat using conventional breeding methods with pin and thrum primulas! Bring the two together and Jackanapes is the result.
Newly launched, the number of colors and seed quantity available at the moment is still limited and therefore there's only enough stock for one North American source and one British source.
). Well, tough on the poor blackbird. The marshes are still frozen solid.
, now has a series of podcasts available from his publisher, 
