How to defeat the enemy peacefully

Slugs are particularly fine connoisseurs when it comes to plants. They will spot the newest and rarest of one’s plant collection and if they could speak to us, would comment on how…tasty it all is. Mature Delphiniums vaporise overnight, especially the coveted ‘Sandpiper’. It is simply caviar to them. But like a guest leaving a vintage red wine stain on your carpet after a party to remind you of the expense, slugs will leave you a slimy stem and, if you are lucky, a few midribs. Not succulent enough, they’ve moved on to the imperial dahlia.
Despite all this, I begrudge putting pellets down. It’s like land mines; it also harms untargeted benign things. No, I much prefer to put beer baths for them to drown in (although that means disposing of swollen bodies on a regular basis), but admittedly not everyone is alcoholic and some prefer to binge on food rather than booze. Farewell giant lilies then. Sometimes I feel I might as well put a special label saying ‘rare and precious, enjoy the feast’. My last resort is nematodes, which apparently parasite the body of slugs with bacterium, slowly driving them to their grave, but it’s pretty costly and has to be reapplied every 6 weeks. Clearly I’ll have to re-mortgage the house if I want a slug-free garden.
Perhaps the thing to do instead is to grow plants that molluscs don’t like. Oriental poppy should be the perfect candidate, having hairy leaves that slugs surely won’t touch. That’s two weeks of the year covered with flowers then…and bare earth for the rest of the year. For poppies’ leaves have the bad habit of dying down completely after the plant has flowered, leaving a great gash in the borders at the worse time of year - the height of summer. One cannot really plant annuals in their place either. A few years ago, I thought I was clever planting white cosmos around my ‘Perry's White’ poppy. Easily raised in a pot whilst the crepe flowers of the poppy were out dancing, popped in a couple of weeks later, they grew beautifully supplying the border with the same fluttering white feeling. I felt so proud, surely even Gertrude Jekyll couldn’t have done better! Well, I was put right in my place before long. The wretched poppy resumed its growth when the cosmos was at its best in late summer. Or tried to do so, completely shaded by the annual. I couldn’t put myself to dig what was the finest clump of cosmos I had ever grown and so the poppy gave up the ghost.
And that was a dramatic event for me because, despite all their foliar faults, oriental poppies are amongst my most favourite of all flowers. It’s the way they make the light dance and reflect on their petals that do it. If one were to believe in fairies, one would imagine their wings made of the same material. And for the colourphile in me, the fact that they come in just the most glorified shades in the vegetable world is not a negligible thing at all. The straight orange one needs revisiting, and admittedly is not for the faint hearted. I have a bold(er) friend who has mixed it with the apricot ‘Prinzessin Victoria Louise’, lots of blue flax, cerise Astrantia and tons of greenery (later perennials such as Phlox and Monarda) in her border and it looked ravishing. I shall have a picture of it imprinted in my mind forever. It really was bliss.
‘Watermelon’ (photo, below) is another daunting one to place with particularly vibrant pink petals, whilst ‘Royal Chocolate Distinction’ is dusky purple/brown and dramatic. Ugly but essential, if only for the name. There is also another one I adore called ‘Karine’. Its flowers are smallish, but of a sweet blush-pink colour and they open wide, like those of a Flanders poppy. Perhaps equally reminiscent of the Flanders poppy, but this time because of the colour is the excellent ‘King Kong’ with large red frilly flowers on strong stems – no less is expect from Mr. Gorilla!
I didn’t replant ‘Perry's White' but put in its cousin Romneya coulteri instead and it delights me as much, perhaps even more, having not only white crepe paper petals, but also a nice bright yellow boss of stamens in the centre and lovely semi-evergreen blue foliage to boot.
It is a temperamental plant to accommodate though (the climate of England is not very similar to that of its native California!) and mine is not yet the thug it can become where it is happy. I have admired it at its best in Hyde Park and also at at Sissinghurst where it was so happy it grew out of cracks in an old wall. Perhaps it is better behaved on chalk.
We'll soon find out.

"Le future appartient à ceux qui croient en la beauté de leurs rêves. Le voyage de découverte ne repose non pas dans la découverte de nouveaux paysages, mais dans la découverte d'un regard nouveau. Ce que la voix peut cacher, le regard le livre. Il faut faire en sorte que les rêves dévorent notre vie afin que la vie ne dévore pas nos rêves. On ne peut diriger le vent, mais on peut orienter les voiles... "

I knew this was going to happen. I have to face the ultimate dilemma: choose between the carriage (with the princess in it) or the pumpkin. Now, wait before you make a blind suggestion. You don’t know yet about that one addiction of mine that makes the decision so difficult. You see, I am obsessed with pumpkins. Not just the Jack O’Lantern at Halloween, but all of the ones that make up the genre Cucurbita. They are everything a lonely kitchen gardener like me could want. They are sensuous, have a gentle touch and shine with singular personalities. True, they are demanding and take an awful lot of space, but that is expected from any richly coloured company, isn’t it?
My infatuation began quite casually with a visit to friends who cultivate the land for a living. They have for dwelling a beautiful colonial house clad with bleached cedar shingles and a white veranda of noble proportions. There doesn’t appear to be any design about the garden surrounding it, and yet it looks marvelous with tall ash trees affording shade to Solomon’s seals, self-sown impatiens balfourii, martagon lilies, lady’s mantle and the misunderstood Apios Americana which, for once, is left to climb and clamber on the aforementioned veranda’s balustrade. It is through the veil of this vine that I saw the first collection of pumpkins that sparked my interest in them. You might not be familiar with the Apios, and it is therefore necessary that should I make a brief description of it so that you can picture the portrait as I saw it myself on that day. It is a very pretty vine, similar in leaf to a wisteria, with clusters of ‘Etruscan Red’ pea flowers in late summer. It is herbaceous and grows back from spreading underground rhizomes every year. It is too boisterous for the manicured border but otherwise a worthy garden plant if kept under control. This is made easy in the fact that the round rhizomes are attached together like a string of pearls (hence its quirky name of ‘patate en chapelet’ or rosary potato in French parts of Canada where it grows wild and where it used to be eaten in meager times).
Back at our picture then; here we were, on a hot autumn day. I had just walked through my friend’s exhaustive gardens and was still intoxicated by the beauty of the marsh mallows and seedy red orach when I came to the front of the house and was hit by the beauty of the scene. There stood two dozens, or three perhaps, of the loveliest deep orange fruits in an old decrepit willow basket, clothed with the flowers of the Apios. ‘They are ‘Ushiki Kuri’ those’ said my friend when he caught the sight of me transfixed. ‘Rather a good season for the squashes, we’ve got other sorts curing in the attic. I tried ‘Melonette Jaspée de Vendée’ and ‘Galeuse d’Eysines’ this year’.
The Melonette turned out to be a sweet round buff-coloured (jaspée; after the crystalline stone jasper) fruit with sweet, nutty flesh and the other a squat, flesh-coloured pumpkin covered in corky warts (‘Galeuse’; warty) that looks more like a sculpture than a vegetable. Quite wonderful!
I had already grown the ubiquitous orange belly pumpkin as a teenager, the ancient ‘Connecticut Field’ variety I still love so much, although I now grow a similar but less rampant sort called ‘Appalachian’. It was so easy, all one had to do was to put the wheel barrow behind the horse, feed it a little hay, let time take its course, collect the barrow, drop it’s content in a pile in the vegetable garden, and throw a couple of seeds in the centre. No need to water, the manure being quite damp enough, no need to worry about cold nights that still pervaded the air this early in the season, the manure supplying the necessary heat for germination. I was always rewarded with healthy plants that grew, grew and kept growing. I always planted them too closely, I still do; it is almost impossible to believe that something can grow so quickly as to cover an entire neighbourhood in one season! In the early autumn, once the foliage had been killed by the frost appeared the big fruits. Well, they appeared to other people, I already knew exactly where each fruit was, having inspected under the vines through the summer, an operation that I had to do in long trousers, since the leaves and stalks of cucurbits are distastefully coarse and prickly. I had also grown the spaghetti squash to please an old lady friend who had introduced it and extolled its virtues to me, a strange oddity for which I still keep a particular affection. If cut in half and steamed head down, it yields deliciously crunchy fibers similar to spaghetti that can be eaten in the same way, with a thin tomato sauce and lots of garlic. I had also grown (rather too successfully to my mother’s liking) a few small ornamental gourds from a penny packet but it had never occurred to me that there should be so many other types like the luscious greys from Australia and New Zealand, the delicious American Hubbards, the pretty but bland French giraumons, or best of all, the Japanese Kuri or Chestnuts. Each region of the world seems to have its own distinct variety and my seed collection increases as I manage to source new ones every year, yet space does not multiply itself and it has now become an ordeal to choose which ones to plant in the spring.
I think I have just answered the question that plagued me at the beginning of this essay; forget Cinderella and her glittery carriage, I much prefer a pumpkin after midnight anytime!

Keepers of the rainforest

There are times and places that remain forever imprinted in one's mind as a gift of the past. Three years ago, as I made my way to Whyanbeel valley, I knew one such gift was unfolding in front of me. I had never worked in the tropics and I felt like a child in a candy shop - so many unusual flowers, flavours and colours to excite my senses! I had stumbled upon a book on my travels in Australia about a private farm called the Botanical Ark and was so taken by the philosophy of the owners that I called them to offer my services as a gardener for free for a month. It was a truly magical experience and when time came to go, I left the heart heavy, but filled with sunshine and hope for a better future. Alan and Susan Carle are the most amazing people I have ever met. Whilst we all talk of the destruction of the planet and cry on each other's shoulder, they are hard at task, planting trees on their tropical paradise farm in order to help preserve a small portion of the remaining rainforests. Their passion for the tropical forests of the world is infectious and they instigated in me the belief that we can all make a difference, whoever we are and wherever we are to help protect the 'lungs' of the planet.

Upon returning here in England, I decided I must do something to spread the word about the role of plants and the rainforests. I didn't quite know how to set about doing so but, as luck would have it, I was offered a position as a tour guide for the Botanical Gardens at Kew. I was thrilled, it was the perfect window to share my knowledge and experience in helping the rainforests. That is why I can now be heard extolling the virtues of plants at the top of my lungs in the Palm House most every week.

People often ask me what they can do to help when the rainforests are so far away and not a tangible part of their daily life. They are always very suprised to hear me retorting that in fact they probably consume a particular product from the rainforest on a regular if not daily basis and that they can help by avoiding it. I am talking here of the insidious palm oil. You probably have never bought it on its own, but if you start looking at manufactured biscuits, crackers, crisps, cakes and sweets in your cupboards, you'll find that it is in everything crispy, crunchy, fatty or oily. Why the food industry uses palm oil is because it is hard at room temperature, helping food keep its bite for longer. Previously, hydrogenated fat was used for that purpose but it got bad press from the health authorities and most companies took it out of their production because they had to declare it on the packaging.

The problem with palm oil (other than the fact that it plugs one's arteries) is that it comes from a huge palm tree that can only be grown in the hot tropics and to make way to the crop, more and more forest is being cleared as demand increases, fuelled by us, the western world. This is especially potent in South East and Austral Asia. One can therefore help the preservation of the Malaysian and Papuan forests by simply boycoting palm oil!

It can be frustrating to try to avoid this darn oil completely - it is so widely used now - but there are options: most oatcakes for example are made with it but not Paterson's or Waitrose's own brand. Same with sweet biscuits, although shortbread, amaretti and cantuccini don't have any. Cadbury chocolates use it in their products, but not companies like Green and Black's or Montezuma. Cheap pastries have it too (it leaves a greasy taste in one's mouth after eating it), but all butter croissants don't (can you believe butter puffs do though?!). I urge you to try having a go next time you do your shopping, it is worth every effort. The Orang Outang will thank you for it. And me too!

I only visited Lisbon once, three years ago. I was quite taken by its charming shabby appearance and lush Jacaranda avenues. I long to return and wander down the small streets of Alfama. Meanwhile I listen to Mariza and let myself be smitten by her unique voice and extraordinary persona. Her album 'Concerto em Lisboa' is a pearl in the sea of music
Look her up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzrUs08-SWs&feature=related

There is no place like home...

Baie des Chaleurs

''Avec ton nom prédestiné, tes échancrures de mer bonne, aurais-tu rencontré Cartier bien avant qu’il ne te nomme?
Seraient-ce les mûres sauvages, la salmonie, le vent d’en bas, la truite rosée des montagnes qui le saoulèrent tant de fois?
Aurait-il bu le paysage? Troué le rocher en fleur? Voulu aussi lui rendre hommage sans se soucier de ses humeurs? Ou bien croisé les canicules, vêtu de fourrures et d’écorces?
Était-il donc si incrédule, ignorant du froid qui immole?
Quand il s’est mouillé dans la baie, Adam ne savait point la pomme, la pierre à fusil, l’aparté, le commerce qui tuerait l’homme. Ne connaissait que l’Indien, le morse gris à dents longues, l’aube frileuse et le matin, l’écume furetant sur l’onde.

Naviguant à l’estime de soi, par longitude et par degré, il s’enhardit au nom du roi, prenant possession de l’été, lorgnant le pays dans la glace de pacotille déballée, reflet de miroirs à deux faces, farcis de plumes et de gibiers.
Jusqu’aux hanches utérines d’Honguedo de Tracadièche, il défila si bien sa rime en son journal de surpêche, qu’avant que le vent l’encalmine sur les rives de Restigouche, l’Espéranza dans sa frime lui avait mis l’or en bouche.Ce n’était qu’un pays mirage pour roi trop vaniteux.

Quand l’hiver soudain fit rage, le scorbut vint ouvrir son jeu. De l’œil pour œil, au dent pour dent. Le chaman a beau être vieux, reste encore le plus savant pour guérir le blanc envieux.
Au printemps il leva les voiles, emportant les fils de tribu; à défaut de joindre l’étoile, le roi verrait de ses yeux vus, tous ses trésors souvent trompeurs, dont l’Anglais ferait son affaire. En toute langue, en tout honneur, le paria dû faire la guerre.
Encore aujourd’hui, ce pays porte le nom de tes espoirs. La chaleur dont il se nourrit, depuis a cassé tes miroirs.
Sur les poumons de ta savane, le tamtam a rejoint le monde. Au stéréo du qui perd gagne l’écume ne court plus sur l’onde.
C’est un pays encore à faire, à dire, à naître et à nommer. C’est un ancêtre à son affaire, occupé à semer le blé. Entre les souches et les fardoches, la conscience et l’identité, l’audace et le trou dans la poche de son, de la fleur a germée''

Hankering for the sky

Caeruleus, the colour of the sky, is as evasive as the sky itself. If the outerspace is full of darkness, then why is the imaginary roof over our heads such a tender and kind shade of pale? Of course, to most decent law-abiding citizen this can be explained with science, but aren't Rayleigh scatterings and wavelenghts dispersal rather dull things? The sky is blue surely because we would find it oppressive if it was purple, enraging if it was red and a bit too monochrome if it was green like the vegetation down below! I adore the true blue colour and as a gardener I have often wondered why it should be so rare in the plant world. There are countless shades of colours in flowers but none the more desirable than caerulea. Most gardeners would give a lot to have a few blue flowers of the Himalayan poppy in their garden - even those who usually overlook poppies altogether. The petals of this perennial have ethereal qualities that mesmerizes who sees it. And I don't escape the enchantment. I have long abandoned the idea of growing the fragile, acid-loving Meconopsis in my windy, chalky garden but I still gasp at the sight of its flowers when I encounter them on one of my visits to Scotland or my native Canada (I'll write more about this later..).
Here I have to resort to other plants for a dose of sky in my borders and by far the best plant to supply me with it is the Delphinium. One of my fondest memories as a burgeoning horticulturist, aged 14, is the sight of a tremendously successful planting of 'Pacific Giants' Delphiniums in my friend Corinne's garden. It was my first summer's work at the local garden centre and Corinne, who also worked there, used to give me a lift in her (interestingly enough) sky blue car. I would cycle to her house and always made sure I did so a little early, in order to have the time to wonder about her garden before we left. The sight of her towering Delphiniums on a dewy summer's morning will always remain imprinted in a gilted sort of way in my mind. I tried to grow them without the success I had hoped for, and then mostly forgot about them until I moved here and inherited a clump of the wonderful 'Lord Butler'. This plant of unequalled stature and beauty rekinkdled my love for all Delphiniums. Never has the higher being offered us a more generous and impressive blue flower to dress our gardens! See it here, pictured with a tall member of my entourage.

One could perhaps compile a short list of true blue flowers - Lithodora diffusa, Corydalis elata, Ceratostigmas, Mertensia sibirica, Omphalodes cappadocica and O. verna, Scilla sibirica, Tecophilea cyanocrocus, Lindelofia, Salvia patens, Muscari 'Valerie Finnis', Lobelia valida, some gentians - but it could by no means be extensive. Still we, gardeners of the temperate world, should think ourselves lucky for the meagre choice that we have - the colour is even rarer in the tropics. I can only think of one truly tropical plant that has pure blue flowers, Convolvulus 'Heavenly Blue'. A couple of other tender plants might be incorporated too - Tweedia caerulea, Plumbago caerulea and Myosotidium hortensia - but they are really subtropicals, so somewhat of a cheat. True blue colour is scarce indeed under the equatorial sun but then who needs blue in flowers where the sky is so intense?

Food for thought

I have had this in my files for a long time now, I don't know who wrote it unfortunately but I should like to find out and meet that person for tea.

''Today we have higher buildings and wider highways, but shorter temperaments and narrow point of view. We spend more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses but smaller families. We have more compromises, but less time. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our value, we only love a little and hate too much. We reached the moon and came back, but we find troublesome to cross our own street to greet our neighbours. We conquered outerspace, but not our inner space. We have higher income, but less morals.... these are tiles with more liberty but less joy....with so much food, but less nutrition...''

Summer Sunshine Sowing the seeds today to enjoy our very own stars later in the year

In the garden, the sunflower is the easiest, most accommodating plant. It is quite greedy but also self-regulating, which means it always grows proportionately to the food it is given. Planted in a poor soil, it will only grow small, but its flower(s) will always be the right size for its stem, so will not look ill or deprived. Put in richer ground, it can grow quite large, but will always supply an adequately muscular stem and root system to hold it. I am talking here of the relatively un-aldultered wild one. Hybrids are another thing altogether and some are forced by their genes to grow in the most peculiar ways. I once planted seeds of the ‘Starbust’ sorts, thinking their double flowers would have potential as a cut bloom, but they only grew a foot high, and looked stumpy, the stem being so short I couldn’t even use them in bouquets. I also tried the branched sorts, which promised not one blossom at the end of a stem, but a myriad of them, all summer long. They did flower a lot, it must be said, but they often fell prey to the wind and rain, being so top heavy and I now reserve them for the most sheltered corners of the garden. The only one I grow without fear of collapse is the sweet ‘Italian White’ which has flowers demure enough for the stem. In truth, I probably would grow it even if it needed staking since it is of such a lovely shade of pale cream. It is, I read, of another species of sunflower called Helianthus debilis, which might explain its good humour and genteel behaviour.
Not all hybrids are bad sunflowers though. Some of them have beautifully intense colours and good vigour, which to the florist is a great help. I adore the naïve nature of the wild sunflower in bouquets, but I also like the more regimented nature of the ‘professional’ strains of sunflowers. To most people, a cut sunflower should have a black centre and saturated yellow petals and one will find this in the variety ‘Sunbright’. It is a very even strain that will give you perfectly formed blooms, all of the same size. The seeds will set you a lot of money however and need to be bought on a yearly basis as it is a sterile hybrid. This does have an advantage however, that of not having pollen and therefore not shedding on furniture etc. as the normal sunflower does. If you want a more lemony coloured flower, plant ‘Sunrich Lemon’. I tried the promising ‘Ikarus’ which also had bright lemon yellow flowers, but it disappointed me. Personally I like the Japanese ‘Taiyo’ (which means sunshine in Japanese) best, although it does grow a larger heart and isn’t all too easy to use in a mix bouquet because of its size.
Although I prefer to grow yellow sunflowers, there are a couple of other colours I like as well. ‘Ruby Eclipse’ (right) is probably the best pink one. It has beautiful pale salmoney pink and crimson combination with a near-black heart on strong but slender stems. ‘Terra Cotta’ has unlikely but lovely orange-brown flowers highlighted by a navy blue centre. ‘Ring of Fire’ is a bit coarse a plant, but is very aptly named and quite wonderful, pale yellow with a ring of red. There are also various dark red ones, fascinating in their own way, but all a bit too gloomy for my liking. I grew several different ones when I used to sell them to florists and I would suggest, if you must try one, ‘Moulin Rouge’. All of these couloured sunflowers have a branched habit and therefore smallish flowers, which work well in a border, but alas usually need a bit of support.

One cannot write of the sunflower without mentioning the giant Russian ones. They are truly the goliaths of the flower garden, reaching easily 12ft in a good year. If planted away from strong drafts they are quite capable of supporting themselves and never require staking either. They never cease to amaze me, each year I plant a handful of seeds of two varieties: ‘Tarahumara’, my favourite with floppy petals and white seeds and ‘Rostov’ because it is the ultimate giant with pendant plate-sized brown heart surrounded by a thin rim of petals. The birds love these two much and it is a delight to see them perch on the flowerheads and feed on the seeds in late autumn.

Staying on the path of righteousness

If the deadly sins of the bible still dictate a behavioural ideal, it is those formulated by the Mahatma Gandhi that seem, in my opinion, to make more tangible sense today.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's seven sins:


1.Wealth without work
2.Pleasure without conscience
3.Knowledge without character
4.Commerce without morality
5.Science without humility
6.Worship without sacrifice
7.Politics without principle

The artichoke is a pretty prickly thing and a bitter one too. But it also has the most colourful and delicious heart one could wish for.

Similarly, life is full of contradictions and our incongruous world can at times be incredibly sweet.

Here is my heart open like that of my beloved thisle on a hot summer's day; bright, fluffy and inviting to the industrious bumble bee. It somehow tastes best pickled in oil with crushed garlic and herbs; it is very distinctive and certainly very good for you. Welcome.