The guest list Uninvited garden plants aren’t necessarily a bad thing, says naturalist Richard Mabey. His own patch is all the richer for an array of incomers that rouse fond memories, reveal the garden’s history or have a tale to tell
Not every gatecrasher to Richard Mabey’s garden is unwelcome – some carry memories of summer holidays, some provide a link to the garden’s past – although at least one has found itself on the Home Office’s proscribed list
When I lived in the Chilterns, a mysterious rambler appeared among the old roses one spring. It had elegant pinnate leaves and very few spines and months passed before I nailed it as cut-leaved bramble, Rubus laciniatus. This is a teasing species for botanists of an historical inclination, because no one has the remotest idea about where or how it originated. I wondered how it had reached my garden until I remembered where I’d seen it before, growing on a heath behind a Suffolk cottage I’d lived in a few years previously. I’d made jam from the fruits, brought a jar back to the Chilterns, thrown the fermenting contents on to the compost heap, and the compost on to the roses. The bramble seeds had survived cooking and translocation and rot, and the comely bush that ensued became a small memorial to my own migrations and habits.
Our current Norfolk garden has more than 150 species that were not deliberately planted, a good few with comparable origin stories. After we’d returned from a holiday in Crete, an exquisite dwarf Campanula, endemic to the island, shot up in the herb bed. A couple of years later a nest of blue-flowered snakes uncoiled on the gravel, eventually revealing itself to be the Mediterranean annual, smallflowered viper’s bugloss, Echium parviflorum, whose seed I guess we must have picked up on our boots hiking in Provence the previous summer, or brought home in a box of figs. As for the double-flowered, greater celandine, it seems to follow me wherever I go, after I pilfered a seedpod from a specimen in the Queen’s Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Increasingly, I find that these incomers (I refuse to call them weeds) are far from happenstance; that we, as users and workers of the garden are generating them – cultivating them if you like – by our behaviour and personal affections. They reflect the people we are, our histories and hoardings, the walks and holidays we take.
Some have deeper historical roots. Tansy, feverfew, evergreen alkanet (which crops up all over the garden – in the potato patch, the paths, and studding the white lace of cow parsley with cobalt buttons) were here when we arrived, and may be relics of old herb garden cultivation. The earliest map of the property I have been able to trace is from the early 19th century and shows a smallholding with rows of fruit trees at the front and a pond (still here) at the back. What is now our meadow was the corner of a large field labelled ‘Hempland’. The two bachelors who lived here at the time were farming cannabis – except that this was a non-psychoactive variety used for making linen. The cloth from this stretch of the Waveney Valley was renowned and sent to Kensington Palace and the Russian Embassy. I thought it would be a nice tribute to grow a patch of the fibrous variety on the land it had occupied two centuries before, so applied to the Home Office for a licence to raise this proscribed herb. Their frosty reply made it clear that home-growing was precisely what legislation was intended to prevent.
In the end the lack of a licence proved irrelevant. One warm summer a single cannabis plant appeared of its own accord in the herbaceous border, its famously five-fingered leaves waving mischievously between the phlox and the clarkias. It grew to about three feet high, put out its dull-yellow flowers in autumn, and keeled over with the first frost. I’d like to think it was a longdormant descendant of the crop our 19th-century smallholders grew for the London linen trade, but most likely it had sprung from bird seed, as had the millet nearby.
Many of the incomers, ancient and new, put on more vivid displays. Inside the walled garden, the beds are subject to just the kind of regular disturbance gatecrashers relish. Headlands and knots of self-sown poppies, fever few, marigold, datura edge the neat rectangles of vegetables, giving them the air of cubist paintings. They hang out there like popinjays, harmless, useless, but brilliantly and unpredictably decorative.
The most dramatic of our stowaways arrived via a Trojan Horse manoeuvre for which we were entirely responsible. We have a house custom at Christmas of using somewhat eccentric growths as our seasonal trees (a wilding apple branch complete with yellow apples was 2016’s). A few years back we noticed the wonderfully statuesque skeleton of a giant hogweed in the corner of a neighbouring field, desiccated enough to be no danger as a source of skin irritation. We carted it home like a captured flag and hung it with baubles. It looked strange and spectacular, a Yuletide triffid. On Twelfth Night we took it to the bonfire and thought no more about it. The following summer the unmistakable basal leaves of a giant hogweed, vast and jagged, appeared in the gravel directly outside the front door. Trimmed of its venomous lower leaves for the sake of callers it eventually grew so tall that its white umbels, the size of cartwheels, bloomed dramatically just outside our bedroom window. A couple of years later the whole cycle was repeated by the back door.
Giant hogweed survives in our garden only as a stunted bonfire-site plant. But we have modelled a scrap-iron bird feeder in its honour – a story that belongs later in the year.
“We carted home the statuesque skeleton of a giant hogweed and hung it with baubles. It looked strange and spectacular, a Yuletide triffid”