every home should a purple patch
As Camilla reveals her passion for its charms on Gardeners’ Question Time, GRIFF RHYS JONES reveals his lifelong love affair with lavender — the treasure that makes borders works of art
BEST of luck to Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall, who will this week appear on Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time with a query about certain types of Scottish lavender. This is a timely and burning issue around my way. After all, we have just lived through one of the worst crises in living memory in Ipswich — this terrible drought.
Yes, there has been an outbreak of some dangerous flu-type thing as well, but here in East Anglia it is the lack of rain that has been keeping us locked into our gardens.
And if we have learned anything, it is that lavender is an ideal plant for the dry spells. When wadis and cracks appear in the lawn and a sand dune starts to cover your cabbage patch, you’ll find lavender will still spring forth.
Having said that, I doubt that the programme will really help the Duchess. Not because, as some say, GQT is not what it was. If you ask me, it gets better and better.
It’s brilliantly cast, if only by name alone. How do they find them? Kathy Clugston? Bob Flowerdew? Pippa Greenwood? Matthew Pottage? Arthur Fallowfield? They’re making them up. OK, the last one was made up — by
Marty Feldman — so that Kenneth Williams in Beyond Our Ken could intone ‘The answer lies in the soil’, whatever the question.
But even Fallowfield pales beside the real silly names of the actual gardening experts. Soil is no doubt the very thing that Chris Beardshaw (Ooh arrh!) will bring up, when Camilla appears on Friday’s show, and I suspect the term ‘well-drained’ will feature, too.
But the great joy of the programme is that the Duchess of Cornwall will be lucky if she gets a straight answer.
As all fans know, whatever Bob Flowerdew says is instantly contradicted by Bunny Guinness. If he pronounces lavender likes lots of sun, she will tell us she grows it in her garage.
And then James Wong will chip in with stuff about hydroponic lights and subterranean lavender farms in the Siberian arctic before heading off to a garden centre in Lanarkshire.
But what Camilla will ask is quite straightforward — namely, the type of lavender that was grown so successfully in Banchory in Scotland when she visited several years ago.
She should have come to me. I lived in Banchory. I was only three, and I noted even then, especially then, that lavender is what all old Scottish ladies smell of.
The French like to think that they have a monopoly on this pungent aromatic, with fields of the stuff being grown in parts of Provence.
But this is mere Gallic nonsense. French grandes-dames stink of Chanel. All my aunties used lavender like catnip (which is a cousin of lavender anyway). They were drenched in the stuff. Open a drawer and the pong would knock you senseless. You could even make cakes out of it, though apparently Queen Victoria preferred lavender jelly. Some still claim to have it with lamb, instead of rosemary. But, sorry, that’s just having a bar of soap with your lamb, isn’t it?
When it wasn’t used in the kitchen, letters were perfumed with the stuff or were written, just like the one reported to contain Harold Wilson’s notorious resignation honours list, on lavender-coloured paper.
The notion of a pomander scent that never quite disguised the stench of corruption rising off the list obviously seemed to appeal to hacks, who promptly dubbed it the ‘Lavender list’.
I was more concerned by the idea of this sickly coloured purple notepaper circulating in No 10.
But while English matrons, the Marcias of this world, may have corralled the colour, it was actually lavender’s pungent, acrid, antiseptic smell that spread its fame.
If you walk on to a hillside in Corsica in early summer, you are physically assailed by the odour of heavily scented plants. Thyme, mint and lavender notes hang in the air and rattle at the back of your nostrils. It’s like walking past a candle shop.
This is the birthplace of lavender. The ancient Egyptians and Romans associated the acrid smell with cleanliness. And because fleas and moths don’t like it, it did actually keep the plague away by frightening off the disease’s carriers.
Fast forward a few centuries and, long before bathing, the Elizabethans simply rubbed clothing and sheets with lavender to get that just-washed smell into their filthy dirty soiled clothes and bed sheets.
Well, we’ve all done that, I suppose. Personally, I can’t really take the taste or the smell. But while I am not a moth, I do adore the strong purple flowers.
THE oil from the seeds is considered a valuable commodity — with some suggesting it can help with anxiety, insomnia and even cancer.
But back to the Duchess’s quandary, who only heard Banchory’s variety referred to as ‘Dee Lavender’.
She is concerned that she may be a little too far north for cultivating this child of the Mediterranean.
Fortunately for the Duchess, while lavender may have its origins in the deep south, the plant is actually hardy to minus 29 degrees celsius.
You might struggle to grow it in the north of Sweden, but not on Deeside. So do plant away in the braes.
And, distressing through this may be to the Sturge-only-minded, it is technically ‘ English lavender’ the Duchess is so enamoured with.
No doubt, that will come as a surprise to many south of the border, too — not least because ‘ French Lavender’ has become a brand in its own right. But the past century has seen a surge in outstanding lavender being cultivated and grown commercially in England, even though the Romans did bring it to these shores.
The recent uptake here is principally a response to the French being so slow to grow it on farms. After all, the stuff was free on the hillsides. The collectors just went for a walk.
But with perfume and chemical companies prioritising efficiency, the English took it upon themselves to bring lavender farming under control and improve it as a species.
English lavender became the generic term for the original and still the best, with Hidcote or Munstead becoming the world-beaters.
The essential oil beloved by mothers to this day comes from those hairy leaves and is considered a valuable commodity.
In fact, sensing a business opportunity, it was this that inspired an enterprising post-war pharmacist and keen gardener from Shetland called Andrew Inkster to farm lavender in Deeside.
During the 1960s, some 25,000 people a year used to visit his farm to get a whiff of the lavender and wander about his fields.
He developed more than a dozen products, including an effective mosquito repellent and a very successful haemorrhoid cream that was enthusiastically adopted by the British Army — though I don’t know whether that was lavender-scented.
I do know, however, that the Duchy of Cornwall is quite a thriving business and perhaps a Crown-endorsed lavender pile ointment will set the cash registers tinkling in this economic crisis. Who knows what the private thinking behind this very public question really is? Me, I just grew lavender for the look. Those perfect grey-green leaves. The bold splash of purple. It’s a wonder I don’t have fields of the stuff.
There are two reasons I plant it
though. Firstly, it will form a pleasing mat in any garden. And secondly, it’s because I am lazy. Lavender is a reliable ground cover which can be ruthlessly snipped into place after doing its flower thing, contained inside a box square, or along the edge of a path.
I love it as a block of colour somewhere, rather than a showy single specimen in a border. Of course, the main disadvantage is that the effusive blooms on my own lavender don’t seem to last that long. One week there’s enough humming purple to excite Jimi Hendrix, the next it’s gone.
The seeds, however, do linger.
And if you are lucky (and, sorry, but I am) little flocks of exquisitely plumed goldcrests will come and feast on your seed heads in the late summer.
But I like it most because, you see, your Royal Highness, round my way, you can stick lavender in the dirt and off it goes. Years ago, I planted a dwarf variety and now I can basically shade under the thing. It’s huge.
So my recommendation would be not get a ‘dwarf’, but some sort of ‘minuscule’ variety. And be careful what you wish for. It can certainly get leggy. I have some lavender plants that look like witch’s brooms.
Don’t be put off by experts who will tell you that you can’t get it to grow new blooms from the woody parts. I cut my low hedge back with abandon and it sprouts all right. This is because there are so many seeds that they are always making new seedlings under the existing bush.
As for varieties, I tend to leave that to Mrs Jones. It’s what proper mistresses of the garden do well.
Fortunately for the Duchess, in 2004 experts from Kew Gardens did identify the Deeside Lavender as a specific new cultivar and named it Torramhor, after the Inkster family home on the Glassel road.
My advice to the Royal Highness, though, if I may be so bold, is to make sure the man of the house gets his princely hands dirty, clipping it regularly to retain its shape.
And the real reason it flourished in Banchory? Yes. Indeed. The answer lies in the soil: sandy and, would you believe it, well-drained. Hem hem.
I think I am ready to go on GQT now — even if I would have to change my name to Griff Rhys Bonemeal.