Gardening
SPRING AWAKENING
I address you as the Bionic Gardener.
Your earthy scribe has been recently robbed of two vertebrae, my ‘infected’ spine now reinforced by titanium plates. And I mean infected – by some stubborn, rare and disobliging bacterium – not a physical injury caused by accident.
The long and painful procedure meant I’ve been in and out of various hospitals since last November.
But... what a spring it’s been! I can half close my eyes, gaze southwards over a surprisingly leafy part of Birmingham from the Dubai-hotel-like Queen Elizabeth Hospital and imagine the cracking open of leaf and flower buds throughout the boroughs – so much more spring-like than last year’s.
How can I not be obsessed by the goings-on in my own riverine garden, safely in the hands of my partner and a couple of day-a-week lads keen to keep our show on the road?
My mightily shrunken world (I made 36 international flights last year in pursuit of horticultural and botanical interests) has, curiously, caused me to concentrate on old familiars, long-loved plants – good doers all – my friends for more than 40 years. Readers of The Oldie for different reasons will doubtless treasure similar individuals.
I do of course want to know about new plant introductions and newly opened gardens. But it’s such stalwarts as pasque flowers (pulsatillas), pulmonarias (is there one more covetable than ‘Mawson’s Blue’, sans any hint of mutinous pink?), early season irises, late tulips (especially military-red Tulipa sprengeri from Turkey’s Pontic coast) and pheasant-eye narcissi that cope so well with neglect in rough grass.
And what about those more fussy fritillaries that come in hues so mysterious as to make you think they were bred by a medieval alchemist, cloaked himself in damasked robes, his fingers weighed down by gems unknown?
Much of the taller euphorbia tribe, bearing lime-green torches of cupshaped flowers, are essential companions. They do the same job as ground-hugging Alchemilla mollis. ‘Cut it to the base when it finishes flowering,’ the late Cotswold gardening goddess Rosemary Verey once told me, ‘and you’ll be rewarded with a second coming within just a few weeks.’
These front-of-house host plants help settle everything in place and ensure by contrast that their neighbours flaunt the colourful merits for which they’re so genuinely treasured.
Magnolias – I added another dozen to my collection last year – need frost-free weather when their flowers begin to open. Apple blossom is tougher but sub-zero temperatures inhibit insect activity, risking poor pollination: that means less fruit, come September’s mouth-watering harvest.
The small-flowered viticella clematis are pretty much bombproof, imbued as they are with a tried-and-tested hardy bloodline reaching back to their centuries’-old southern-european ancestors. This now large and beautiful group of flowering climbers (also known as the Italian leather plant – why? – or Virgin’s bower) was first grown in England in the 1560s by Hugh Morgan, apothecary to Queen Elizabeth I. Nongardeners are surprised to learn that clematis belong to the buttercup family.
Post-surgery, I anticipate a deeper interest in climbing plants, with flowers and intricate seedheads at shoulder level; in raised beds, too, as I move from what my chums have long called my supercharged Peter Pan years to possibly less physically agile times ahead.
I’ll drag many of these favourite plants along with me, avoiding for now the all-too-painful pun that they are, indeed, the ‘backbone’ of my gardening life.