DAVID WHEELER
MY ADDICTION TO PLANTS
If, with ordinary words, we can tell remarkable stories, so too can we make a beautiful garden with ordinary plants. By ‘ordinary’, I mean the familiar: those we widely grow; those to which even the least committed gardener can put a name.
During lockdown, it was impossible for the insatiable plantaholic to visit nurseries in quest of parvenus – unless, that is, we ordered them by post or grew them from seeds dropped through our letter boxes.
If you were self-isolating and relying on family, friends or neighbours to buy your groceries, you’ll know that you got only what you asked for (assuming you didn’t request flour, yeast or loo rolls).
Compare your possibly austere, little shopping list with what you might have put in your trolley had you gone to the supermarket yourself. It’s the same at plant nurseries.
We are seduced by the unexpected or are simply delighted to spot something we have long craved but hitherto been unable to source. We garden-makers need plants the way painters need paint and pianists need pianos. We might opt for more of fewer kinds, or we can take the sweetshop route and bag one of everything that takes our fancy.
I think I probably fall somewhere between the two camps. If I truly like a plant – and, more importantly, it grows well for me – then why not increase its number?
Take foxgloves – there’s nothing more ordinary. They self-seed riotously in our garden and, for their sentinel, earlysummer bravado and swaying demeanour, I let them loose. It’s a second’s work to extricate any in the wrong place or of an unwanted colour (some of the lifeless pinks can lower one’s spirits), leaving the chosen horde to reign supreme for their allotted time.
Our orchard sprouts perhaps 10,000 mid-blue Siberian irises, and every year, in May, we celebrate their modest increase – more, again, is definitely more.
Similarly, martagon lilies have naturalised themselves in shrub borders nearby, multiplying freely, to the frustration of some visitors who struggle to coax just one bulb into flowering. But then I might well battle with something that those very same visitors claim is a rampant weed with them. That’s gardening.
On the other hand, less is more when it comes to the truly exotic, the hard to grow, the unfamiliar and, perhaps, the uniquely showy.
Although living on the sparsely populated border in mid-wales, we have several outstanding plant nurseries within less than an hour’s drive.
Looking at last year’s entries in our acquisitions book, I can relive the excitement of buying such lovelies as Amsonia ‘Blue Ice’, Campanula ‘Sarastro’ and Penstemon ‘Czar’. Being perennial, they adorn the summer garden again this year and are set to do so for many years to come.
None of them is ordinary in the sense outlined above – so a single specimen of each more than satisfies me. They introduce curiosity, subtlety or drama into a particular planting scheme, please or intrigue the casual onlooker and gratify me, the covetous gardener.
As a teenager, taking over the family garden after my father’s early death, I wallowed in the ordinary: filling beds, according to season, with primroses and auriculas, tulips, cosmos, dahlias, chrysanthemums and fuchsias (of which I was insanely fond and through which I learned whatever propagating skills I may still have).
Penniless in those days, I raised them from seed or cuttings and divisions scrounged from gardeners older than myself – adolescent boys did not in those days trumpet their horticultural passions. Now, blessedly, it’s quite an ordinary thing for them to do.