The Alpine Gardener - September 2012

329 THE ALPINE GARDENER

Alpine Gardener the

JOURNAL OF THE ALPINE GARDEN SOCIETY

VOL. 80 No. 3 SEPTEMBER 2012 pp. 233-351

ISSN 1475-0449

the international society for the cultivation, conservation and exploration of alpine and rock garden plants

Volume 80 No. 3

September 2012

Alpine Gardener THE

CONTENTS 288 296

235 EDITOR’S LETTER 237 ALPINE DIARY

An alpine nursery’s success at Chelsea; the AGS Seed Exchange; an embarrassing escapade in the compost heap; book review.

250 ROBERT ROLFE

Choice plants that can offer a quick fix in the garden.

272 ALPINES IN CYPRUS

Yiannis Christofides presents an alluring portfolio of photographs from the Troodos Mountains.

282 ARISAEMAS IN CHINA Phillip Cribb reports on an expedition to see these striking plants in the wild.

272

288 ART FROM THE SHOWS

Jon Evans brings us some of the highlights from the Artistic Section at AGS shows in 2011.

296 BRINKFIELDS

The second part of Robert Rolfe’s report from this accomplished Leicestershire garden.

September 2012 Volume 80 No 3

PRACTICAL GARDENING

258 pH EXPLAINED Vic Aspland unravels the mysteries of soil pH.

265 BOG GARDENS

Vic Aspland on successes and failures in his bog garden.

265 340

316 SHOW REPORTS

This year’s Blackpool, Kent, East Lancashire, Northumberland, South West and Ulster shows.

340 THE CZECH CONNECTION

Zdeněk Zvolánek on the history and influence of Czech rock gardening.

COVER PHOTOGRAPHS

Front: Dianthus strictus subsp. troodi (Yiannis Christofides; see page 272) Back: Daphne modesta exhibited by Robin White at the South West Show (Jon Evans; see page 332) ON THESE PAGES Left: Eritrichium nanum in the Engadine Alps; an alpine house at Brinkfields; Nepeta troodi Right: Primula denticulata var. alba; Draba polytricha; Ipheion ‘Rolf Fiedler’ exhibited by Ivor Betteridge at the Blackpool Show

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Published by the

Alpine Garden Society

The international society for the cultivation, conservation and exploration of alpine and rock garden plants, small hardy herbaceous plants, hardy and half-hardy bulbs, hardy ferns and small shrubs AGS Centre, Avon Bank, Pershore, Worcestershire WR10 3JP, UK Tel: +44(0)1386 554790 Fax: +44(0)1386 554801 Email: ags@alpinegardensociety.net Director of the Alpine Garden Society: Christine McGregor Registered charity No. 207478 Annual subscriptions: Single (UK and Ireland) £28* Family (two people at same address) £32* Junior (under 18/student) £10 Overseas single US$54 £30 Overseas family US$60 £33 * £2 deduction for direct debit subscribers For details of life membership and joint life membership apply to the Alpine Garden Society at the address above.

Printed by Butler Tanner & Dennis, Caxton Road, Frome, Somerset BA11 1NE Price to non-members £6.00 Second-class postage paid at Rahway, New Jersey.

US Postmaster: send address corrections to AGS Bulletin, c/o Mercury Airfreight International Ltd. Inc., 2323 Randolph Avenue, Avenel, NJ 07001. USPS 450-210.

© The Alpine Garden Society ISSN 1475-0449

Editor: John Fitzpatrick Tel: +44(0)1981 580134 Email: editor@agsgroups.org Associate Editor: Robert Rolfe Tel: +44(0)1159 231928 Email: robert.rolfe@agsgroups.org Practical Gardening Correspondent: Vic Aspland CChem. MRSC Tel: +44(0)1384 396331 Email: vic.aspland@agsgroups.org Custodian AGS Digital Library: Jon Evans Tel: +44(0)1252 724416 Email: jon.evans@agsgroups.org Custodian AGS Slide Library: Peter Sheasby Tel/fax: +44(0)1295 720502 Advertisement Manager: Julie Slimm Tel: +44(0)1788 574680 Email: adverts@agsgroups.org The Editor welcomes contributions of articles and photographs. Please call or email the Editor to discuss relevant formats for photographs before sending. The Editor cannot accept responsibility for loss of, or damage to, articles, artwork or photographs sent by post.

The views expressed in The Alpine Gardener do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor or of the Alpine Garden Society. The Alpine Gardener is published four times a year in March, June, September and December.

www.alpinegardensociety.net

Raised beds filled with easy alpines in the AGS garden at Pershore

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s a member of the Alpine Garden Society, I value all the activities and services that it provides. Whether I am attending shows, taking advantage of the seed exchange, browsing the mine of information on the website, joining in local group activities or enjoying the articles and photographs in this journal, I appreciate that the Society offers a great deal and good value for money – which was one of the reasons I joined in the first place.

As the secretary of my Cotswold and Malvern Local Group show, which is held every Easter Monday, I appreciate the assistance offered by the AGS Centre. And whenever I am in Pershore it is always a pleasure to walk around the SEPTEMBER 2012

Legacies that secure our future Editor ’s letter AGS garden, which this year has looked wonderful and, earlier in the season, was a blaze of colour. The garden has recently been named to honour the AGS member who was largely responsible for financing its construction. It will now be the Stirt Piggin Memorial Garden to 235

EDITORIAL mark the fact that he left £225,000 to the AGS, expressing a wish that some of the money should be used to create and maintain an educational garden in the UK, with the remainder used for general purposes.

The garden certainly fulfils an educational role. It is situated next to Pershore College and is visited regularly by horticultural students as part of their courses.

In 1988, Anthony Edward Pettit left £504,000 to the AGS, which enabled the Society to build AGS Centre. Numerous smaller but nevertheless equally valued amounts have been bequeathed by other members. Some legacies, like Mr Piggin’s, are given with a specific purpose in mind. In 1994, Muriel Hodgman left £36,100 with a wish that it should be used for travel and subsistence awards for botanical expeditions.

Evelyn F. Hendry bequeathed a significant part of her estate to the East Surrey Local Group of the AGS when she died in 1993. This was used to establish a fund that awards grants for alpine plant-related projects, which have included the upkeep and improvements to the AGS garden.

Of course it is not only money that the AGS inherits. Collections of books, Bulletins, seeds, slides and probably, in the future, digital photographs are often handed over to the Society when a member dies.

Legacies play an important role in financing the AGS’s services and activities. The Society has been operating at a loss for several years, and although administration costs have been cut substantially, any further pruning 236

would inevitably have a knock-on effect on services and activities. Legacies have enabled the Society to maintain these, benefiting every member in some way.

If you enjoy your membership of the AGS, please consider remembering the Society in your will. It is important that we secure, for generations to come, the benefits of all the work put in by thousands of AGS members since the Society was set up in 1929. Alpines and associated plants are fascinating in all their diverse forms and habitats, a fascination that our descendants should be privileged to enjoy, just as we are privileged to do so today.

A

t this year’s AGS Malvern Show, I was admiring the exhibits when I noticed a visitor pick up a pot of pleiones from the bench. I approached her, intending to ask her to replace it, but she walked away from the bench, pot in hand. ‘Excuse me,’ I called out, ‘can I help?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘How much is this and where do I pay for it?’ Not for a second, of course, was I tempted to take her money. But are AGS exhibitors missing a trick?

John Fitzpatrick  We’d like to hear your views about articles in The Alpine Gardener, and also about your experiences of growing plants or searching for them in the wild.

Please write to the Editor at AGS Centre (address on title page) or email editor@agsgroups.org.

THE ALPINE GARDENER

ALPINE DIARY

Gary McDermott beside Harperley Hall Farm Nurseries’ exhibit at Chelsea

Chelsea gold for alpine grower in just four years

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nursery has won a Gold Medal for a display of alpines at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show just four years after it started growing them.

Harperley Hall Farm Nurseries, set up in 2005 by business partners Gary McDermott and Paul Hutchinson, is based at Stanley, County Durham, in north-east England.

Initially they grew hardy perennials SEPTEMBER 2012

and shrubs but have now established a range of alpine and woodland plants and hardy orchids.

Just a few weeks after their Chelsea success they picked up another RHS Gold Medal for an alpine exhibit at Hampton Court.

Gary, an AGS member, said: ‘We grow a wide range of plants including shrubs, perennials and even bedding. However, 237

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Meconopsis mingle with pleiones in Harperley Hall’s Chelsea display

we intend to reduce the number of these we grow and concentrate more on alpines and woodlanders.

‘I’ve always been interested in alpines but only got into them seriously about four years ago when we started to grow them commercially. We now list more than 200 alpines and around 100 woodlanders, including a range of primulas.’

Gary and Paul are helped on the nursery by a small, experienced team.

They also supply large specimen plants including bamboos, palms, conifers and shrubs. ‘We work with landscapers and garden designers and particularly 238

enjoy helping enthusiasts to create new gardens,’ said Gary.

Harperley Hall’s Chelsea exhibit consisted mostly of plants in containers on a landscaped raised platform, and included saxifrages, pleiones, sedums, Rhodohypoxis, Corydalis, Dianthus and Meconopsis. ‘Preparing for Chelsea was very hard work, especially given the poor weather in the run-up to the show,’ admitted Gary. ‘Luckily everything fell into place at the last minute. We had planned which plants we wanted to take. A few didn’t flower in time but in the main we were able to put on the display that we had intended. Some had THE ALPINE GARDENER

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A creamy-yellow form of Roscoea cautleyoides grown at Harperley Hall

been growing in their containers for a while and others were planted up just before the show. We simply selected the best plants we had available.’

Gary has had a busy year on the road, attending 12 shows. He put on a display at the RHS show at Tatton Park but had to settle for a Silver Gilt Medal.

‘We struggled to get enough plants into flower for that show,’ he said.

‘We have applied to do Chelsea again next year. We had intended to take a break for a year but there was such an enthusiastic public response to our exhibit this year that we want to do it again as soon as possible.

SEPTEMBER 2012

‘We have ventured out to some AGS shows in the north-east. At the moment our collection of plants is probably not specialised enough to appeal to some AGS members.

‘However, we believe that to get people interested in growing alpines we must supply plants that will do well in their gardens. There’s no point in offering a novice alpine gardener something that will turn up its nose at the first shower of rain. People want plants that will thrive, and once they have had success with easier plants they may try more challenging specimens.’

Gary started working in horticulture 239

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Christine Skelmersdale attracts media attention at her final Chelsea display

15 years ago after making a career switch. ‘I did work in local government,’ he said, ‘but I decided to give that up to do something that I enjoyed.

‘I have never had any formal horticultural training. I just taught myself and learned on my previous jobs, working in a large garden centre and then on another nursery before starting my own.

‘Harperley Hall is a wholesale operation and isn’t normally open to the public. But we have open days in spring and autumn and AGS members are welcome to visit us by appointment.

We also offer an online mail-order service or we can bring plants to shows for collection.’

Also at Chelsea this year, a reception 240

to mark a double celebration was held at the Broadleigh Bulbs exhibit in the Great Pavilion.

Members of the Joint Rock Garden Plant Committee and other friends from horticulture gathered to toast Michael Upward’s 80th birthday, while Broadleigh itself celebrated 40 years of exhibits at the show.

Michael, who served for many years as Secretary of the AGS, often used to roll up his sleeves to help build AGS exhibits at Chelsea. Some he co-designed or devised himself, most notably the ‘Magic of the Mountains’ garden, constructed on the Rock Bank in 2000.

For Broadleigh owner Christine Skelmersdale, this year’s exhibit was THE ALPINE GARDENER

ALPINE DIARY

Tulips and alliums played a big part in the Broadleigh Bulbs exhibit

her final one at Chelsea and she was able to celebrate with a Gold Medal.

Broadleigh, based near Taunton in Somerset, specialises in bulbs and also offers a range of complementary herbaceous plants including hellebores, hepaticas, pulsatillas and a selection of Pacific Coast irises.

Lady Skelmersdale, who is the author of Creative Gardening with Bulbs (1989), has finished work on a new book, A Gardener’s Guide to Bulbs, due to be published this year.

She has held many positions within the RHS and other horticultural organisations, and in 2009 was presented with the Victoria Medal of Honour (VMH), the RHS’s highest award for services to horticulture.

SEPTEMBER 2012

Michael Upward enjoys his reception 241

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I

t’s at this time of the year that the AGS Seed Exchange starts to swing into action. Our Seed Reception Team is currently receiving seed from all over the world and in November more than 100,000 packets will be racked up in the AGS Centre at Pershore to allow the order-pickers to get to work.

Last year we sent out more than 80,000 packets of seed to over 2,000 members in 30 different countries. This is a huge operation, probably the largest of its kind in the world, and is staffed entirely by volunteers.

Over the past few years, the number of seed orders being received online via the AGS website has increased substantially. Now about 40 per cent of all orders are received this way. It’s by far the easiest and most efficient way to order your seed, so if you have not tried the online ordering system, please consider doing so this year.

It’s very easy to use: you can make up a wish-list, choosing by catalogue number or name, and then revise your choices until you are happy. It’s particularly helpful if you are not familiar with the Latin botanical names, as a click on each name leads to a Google search for a picture of the plant.

Online orders save our seed volunteers a lot of extra work and the order forms are more legible! When we receive online orders we make an allowance for posting time so that the system is equally fair for those who still send their orders by post. But remember that it is the donors who get priority when we make up orders because without them there would be no seed exchange.

242

Sowing the seeds of a successful exchange Diane Clement, Director of the AGS Seed Exchange, offers advice on donating and ordering seed and makes an appeal for volunteers to help with this huge operation One of the main problems we face is misidentified seed. This can be as a result of various factors. Perhaps a member has purchased a wrongly labelled plant, has wrongly identified a plant, has a selection of plants from the same genus and has failed to label them clearly while in flower, or has simply written the wrong name on a packet.

Our seed receivers and packers can often spot wrongly labelled seed and we can sometimes take steps to identify it properly. Inevitably, though, some misnamed seed does slip through. If you are sending in seed – and I hope you are – please take all measures you can to make sure it is properly identified.

It is frustrating for any gardener to find that the seedlings he or she has THE ALPINE GARDENER

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Diane has marked these Erythronium seedheads with a coloured tie so that the seed can be identified correctly upon collection

been nurturing are those of a different plant. Conversely, it can also provide a pleasant surprise. If you are unsure of a plant’s name, please ask for help at your local group or post a picture for identification on the AGS website.

Sadly, every year a percentage of seed is wasted because of poorly sealed packets. Before you send in seed, check your packets by shaking them. If seed leaks out at this stage, then it will do so in the postal system, so please use more tape to seal it properly.

As I’ve already mentioned, the whole operation relies solely on volunteers. If you live near enough to Wolverhampton or Warrington to be able to help out in those locations for an odd day or two at specific times of year, please let me SEPTEMBER 2012

know. Or if you’d like to help with packing seed at home or making up the orders at Pershore, I’d love to hear from you.

Perhaps your local group would consider sending a carload of volunteers to Pershore for a day or two to make up orders during December and January?

Last year groups travelled from as far away as Devon and the Chilterns and they all had a pleasant day out, with an opportunity to visit the AGS Centre and garden – and there’s always an ample supply of cake and biscuits!  Diane Clement can be contacted by email at diane.clement@agsgroups.org or by phone on 01902 426024.

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I

A prisoner in my own compost bin

would guess that 25 per cent of our home-made compost derives from household vegetable waste. We like to pride ourselves on our contribution to a better environment. Every time I empty the bucket from under the sink I feel virtuous. Even alpine gardeners like to make compost.

However, I become less virtuous and less pleased when a bin full of mature compost has to be emptied. Work is involved! Even before this stage we are told that the compost should be regularly turned over. This advice is often given by smart TV gardeners who I strongly feel have never been near a compost bin. It’s mucky work.

Several years ago I constructed two bins, but both of them are beginning to disintegrate, eventually to self-compost or end up on the front-room fire. Two new bins need to be produced. More work! I may leave them for one more year, but by then I will be another year older and feebler.

The real work starts when both bins are full, which happens once a year.

One has been maturing with no further material added for a year while the other has been topped up regularly. The matured bin now has to be emptied.

It’s wonderful to discover how all the compost ingredients have rotted down to a friable mix that can be spread 244

John Noakes, Secretary of the AGS’s Chiltern Local Group, recalls an embarrassing episode at the bottom of his garden around the garden as a soil-improving mulch. This derives from a combination of grass cuttings, weeds and vegetable waste, to which is added a volume of shredded confidential and sensitive documents such as bank statements. All this material generates a lot of heat, as did some of the shredded documents in their past life, too. One disadvantage is that the heat is not sufficient to kill off all the weed seeds, which later germinate prolifically in an unwelcome manner when the material is spread around.

Fortuitously the emptying operation uncovered a long-lost kitchen knife half way down the pile. It brought back memories of chopping off the roots and green leaves of leeks on a cold winter’s day. Then I spotted a gleaming piece of steel – a very special trowel which I treasured and thought I had lost for ever. It had been replaced at some cost. Can I now use two trowels at once?

Emptying the compost bin resulted in an unexpected problem. As the pile THE ALPINE GARDENER

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inside diminished I had to climb into the bin to dig out the remainder. As I neared the bottom I could still toss the material into a wheelbarrow but realised that I couldn’t get out myself.

I was stuck! How ignominious to be marooned in a compost heap at the end of one’s garden. Would help arrive?

Where was my wife? Would anyone bring me a cup of coffee?

I resorted to idle daydreaming and looking at small plastic labels with ‘Jaffa from Israel’ printed on them, which had survived in the heap without degrading.

So had the vacuum cleaner bags which I thought would have rotted down. I tried to calculate how many tea bags had been deposited in the bin to be spread around the garden. On average we have about six cups of tea per day between SEPTEMBER 2012

us. This adds up to more than 2,000 tea bags over the course of a year. What effect would this have on the plants?

Maybe there is a research project to be done here. We seem to be all right with this indulgence, so presumably it doesn’t worry the plants.

Suddenly I was woken from this daydreaming when I spotted some movement at my feet. It was a family of voles. Even if I didn’t like it here, they did. They had been cosy, with a good supply of worms, but now their home had been destroyed.

I scooped them up and popped them over the side so they could seek out new accommodation before the owls found them. Would anyone scoop me out?

Have paramedics or the fire brigade ever been asked to extract a geriatric 245

ALPINE DIARY from a compost bin? If so another bin, the loony bin, might be the destination.

I do have rather long legs but was never good at hurdling. Then I decided that I just couldn’t be found like this. It would be too humiliating and the talk of the village. So with one supreme heave I managed to get one leg over the edge of the bin. A second heave propelled me out, straight into the halffull wheelbarrow.

I landed on my back on a cushion of well-rotted compost and lay there for several minutes, staring up at the sky.

This was just as humiliating as being

By Caroline Seymour

W

e all know what we mean when we talk about the AGS, but what does it mean to others outside our Society? I typed AGS into an online acronym finder and got 118 results. So can they really compete with us?

As you might expect, the A covers continents, states, oceans and towns – American Guidance Service, Australian Government Solicitor, Arizona Gourd Society, Antarctic Geodesy Symposium, Alaska General Seafoods and Alabama Great Southern Railroad Company, to name a few.

The armed forces also have their share – Army General Staff, Alliance Ground Surveillance (Nato), Aviation Ground Support, Anti-G Suit, Analysis Ground Station and Armored Gun System.

The digital revolution has spawned its own rash of AGS – Advanced Graphics 246

stuck in the bin. It was as though I had decided to have a crazy mid-morning nap. Just then a red kite, with chestnut wings and forked tail, flew whistling above me. Perhaps he had spotted the voles. Clearly I was not yet dead and of no interest to him and he wheeled away.

Fortunately I found it easier to escape from the wheelbarrow than the bin itself, rolling off on to the ground. I distributed the compost around the garden and cleaned up the bread knife and the trowel. Finally I put the lid back on the bin – and the lid on my embarrassing escapade.

What exactly is the AGS? Software, Asynchronous Gateway Server, Adventure Game Studios and Adobe Graphics Server.

Science and engineering have their own versions such as Annualized GeoSolar, Aggressive Growth Strategy, Auxiliary General Survey, Applied Geographic Solutions, Alliance for Global Sustainability and Alternating Gradient Synchrotron.

There is a plethora of other societies, and the Americans take the lead here with the American Goat, Glovebox, Gerbil, Geriatrics, Gourd, Ghost and Guitar Societies. And the list goes on.

One of my favourites is the Association for Gravestone Studies. After all, they probably find some choice plants in the graveyards they visit.

THE ALPINE GARDENER

ALPINE DIARY

The master builders of Britain’s rock gardens BOOK REVIEW Rock Landscapes – The Pulham Legacy: Rock Gardens, Grottoes, Ferneries, Follies, Fountains and Garden Ornaments, by Claude Hitching, published by Garden Art Press, £35.

ISBN 9781870673761

J.R. Pulham, Secretary to the Committee of the Alpine Garden Society at the end of the Second World War, was the last of a dynasty of four James Pulhams who in turn led a company that manufactured garden ornaments and constructed rock gardens, water features and ferneries.

Their superbly fashioned fountains, urns, vases, sundials, balusters and so on had an enormous impact on the appearance of British gardens throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

The company was wound up in the late 1930s and is now perhaps best known for the many remarkable Pulhamite rock gardens. From the 1840s onwards – and at a time when rockwork was becoming ever more popular – the Pulhams exploited techniques they had developed in their ‘manufactory’ to create artificial rocks that were so geologically authentic they SEPTEMBER 2012

often deceived the experts. Pulhamite was simply a rendering, made using the company’s own cement formula and including dyes where necessary, that was applied on site to a foundation of skilfully laid bricks to achieve whatever shape the builders had in mind. The trick lay in the sculpted, finished surfaces which meticulously imitated those of natural rocks such as weathered or stratified limestones and sandstones.

It would be interesting to know which tools, other than trowels and brushes, they used to achieve these effects.

Not all their masterpieces have withstood the British weather over the 247

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An imposing archway constructed by the Pulhams at Bracken Hill, Bristol

years and conservation has become an issue. Wandsworth Council’s bungled attempt to restore the dramatic Pulhamite rockwork in London’s Battersea Park has been a stark reminder of the problems faced. This had been the Pulhams’ showpiece in the capital, but at least the travesty has prompted English Heritage to decree that all surviving Pulhamite rock gardens be listed and restored when necessary only by knowledgeable individuals.

Rather surprisingly, most of the important gardens are still in good order.

Pulham rockworks, works of art in themselves, may be found in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, Sandringham, Madresfield Court, Friar Park, Audley End, Waddesdon Manor, Abbotswood, 248

Batsford Park and Arboretum, Luton Hoo, Dewstow House and Sheffield Park among others, many of which seamlessly combine Pulhamite with the natural rock found locally.

Especially beautiful are the rockworks commissioned by the Wills family at Rayne Thatch in Bristol and those at nearby Bracken Hill, which until recently formed part of Bristol University’s Botanic Garden.

Not all the great Pulham commissions involved artificial rocks. Their 1911-12 north-facing rock garden on the slope at RHS Garden Wisley was constructed using Sussex sandstone, producing a fitting home for the alpine collection.

All these gardens feature among the 42 chapters dedicated to outstanding THE ALPINE GARDENER

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Pulhamite rockwork at Madresfield Court near Malvern, Worcestershire

Pulham sites in Claude Hitching’s splendid new book. A worthy account of the Pulham story has long been overdue and we owe the author a sincere debt of gratitude for the truly Herculean labours entailed in the tracing of hundreds of gardens and for his many years of dedicated research.

What began as a labour of love to tell the tale of his ancestors who worked for the Pulhams has blossomed into a substantial, superbly illustrated book of great importance to garden historians.

The copious illustrations, largely the work of photographer Jenny Lilly, are excellent. The chronological gazetteer of Pulham sites, which refers to hundreds of gardens, is invaluable.

AGS members unfamiliar with the SEPTEMBER 2012

name of Pulham and who are visiting the Society’s garden at Pershore should consider making an appointment to visit Madresfield Court near Malvern, Worcestershire, where they will find a rock garden that is one of the great Pulhamite creations.

John Page

 Dr Page is convenor of the AGS’s History of Rock and Alpine Gardens Study Group. Details of meetings may be found from time to time in Alpine News.  Rock Landscapes – The Pulham Legacy is available to AGS members at a discounted price of £28. To order please call 01386 554790 or visit the AGS bookshop at www. alpinegardensociety.net.

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I

n the garden, long-term plans are all very well, but what if you seek a speedier fix? For the alpine gardener, dwarf bulbs and annuals are the principal options.

Back in February in my garden, Iris ‘Pixie’ beat all the other selections of its ilk hands down. It doesn’t need lifting for several years following planting, is truly vibrant and has flowers of excellent substance. Buried under a heavy fall of sleety snow, they emerged undiminished, whereas those of I. unguicularis were ruined.

For reliability, affordability and companionability, one could hardly choose better than I. ‘Pixie’ among the ‘reticulata’ irises, of which quite a few involve the input of I. histrioides. I have planted a generous drift on a sunny mound, interplanted with the lemon Triteleia ixioides ‘Starlight’ and the bold yellow Allium moly ‘Jeannine’, both of which flower in early June, by when the iris’s leaves are dying down. Others are at the edge of a terrace, associating very happily with Crocus flavus, which they conveniently overtop. Just behind, at the base of a tree, ‘Pixie’ is effective intermixed with C. tommasinianus (palish selections, though the whites would also look good if yours is a garden in which they can be persuaded to proliferate). Not too crowded, please, or the individual appeal of the flowers will be forfeited.

All these are in casual groupings of 12 to 18, with nearby repeats and staggered companion clumps. Given their affordability, I also filled a large, circular, stoneware vessel with a generous 250

The plants I can rely on when a quick fix is required ROBERT ROLFE supply of I. ‘Pixie’ bulbs, plump with promise in September, intending that in late winter visitors might look through the French windows of my sitting room and admire a vivid spectacle. All went according to plan for the first two years, the only requirements to perpetuate the display being an annual top-dressing and liquid feeds before and after flowering.

But then came a winter cruel enough to decimate all manner of bulbs grown in containers. I imagined that all had perished, frozen to a pulp, for not even a leaf appeared after the cold relented.

Yet the following February a mini-forest of glaucous leaves emerged. Under glass, Fritillaria aurea also spent a year without showing any sign of life, only THE ALPINE GARDENER

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Iris ‘Pixie’ associates well with Crocus tommasinianus in Robert’s garden

to come through strongly this spring, flowering as if nothing had happened.

Irritatingly, several intended companion plantings lagged behind a week or more, and so fell out of synchrony. Eranthis hyemalis Tubergenii Group ‘Guinea Gold’ defaulted in this manner, as did Scilla mischtschenkoana ‘Tubergeniana’, which I obtained direct from the Van Tubergen nursery 30 years ago. Arguably the best of the genus for garden purposes, it multiplies steadily by division and also seeds around in a measured manner, so that it never intrudes – the same cannot be said of several other scillas. Sent over from north-west Iran (it is also reported from Transcaucasia) by Georg Egger as SEPTEMBER 2012

long ago as 1931, in a consignment of similarly coloured Puschkinia, the Scilla sometimes emerges as early as midJanuary and is far more widely grown than the slightly deeper blue S. m.

‘Zwanenburg’, also from that nursery.

Anyway, I’ve substituted the scillas and winter aconites with Crocus sieberi ‘Albus’ (a revision of ‘Bowles’ White’, a name I still prefer) and Galanthus ‘Straffan’, a snowdrop that has decent-sized flowers, though not so large or lofty that they are out of scale with the 12cm tall Iris.

Times and the tide have changed markedly with regard to plant introductions. Re-reading the report of the 1961 International Rock Garden Conference, I came upon a comment 251

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by Rear Admiral Paul Furse – at the conclusion of a lecture on ‘Interesting Plants of the eastern Mediterranean’ – that would nowadays cause uproar. ‘I hope,’ he told the audience, ‘that many of our members will make collecting trips to this area and bring back a good range of plants.’

Long before then, however, this view had been challenged. In 1939, for example, Cook’s World Travel Service offered in these pages a series of tours ‘under the expert leadership of enthusiastic botanists... They have been arranged not with a view to acquiring specimens...’

Yet in the same year, Hugh RogerSmith reviewed Three Acres and a Mill

by Robert Gathorne-Hardy, whose ‘accounts of his various alcoholic bouts’ were dismissed as ‘neither interesting nor amusing’, though greater enthusiasm was expressed for the ‘collected treasures’ in his garden.

Their evocation of ‘exciting expeditions to distant lands’ was considered ‘one of the chief excuses for collecting plants in their native surroundings, if excuse be needed ’. My italics.

From bulbs and tubers to dwarf shrubs. In earliest April, Rhododendron mucronulatum var. taquetii (often still seen labelled as either var. chejuense or under the cultivar name ‘Cheju Dwarf ’) was the showiest plant in the entire garden.

Its diaphanous display lasted fully a fortnight. I do not know of a better dwarf, deciduous rhododendron, for at a quarter the height of the full-sized species it takes many years to reach 60cm and has a pleasingly irregular, gnarled contouring at maturity. To boot, 252

it colours beautifully in late October, the small, aromatic leaves turning almost crimson. In spring, the crimpled, saucer-shaped, purple-pink flowers, with seductively curled stamens, are borne in billowing abundance at up to 4cm across.

For all their seemingly tissue paperlike fragility, the flowers stand up well to strong sun (although the oldest ones will fade if this is relentless), driving rain and unseasonable cold (within reason – a heavy frost will end the show). As with the best rhododendrons, it is very long-lived. Mine is at least 25 years old, and although an undiagnosed malaise caused the sudden dieback of a sizeable bough, the prompt excision of this went well and an abundance of new shoots appeared around the stump within two months.

As it fades, spilling its blooms wantonly, nearby an even older, rather dwarfer Asiatic species, R. racemosum (white form) comes to the fore. It is rarely offered but I obtained a plant long ago from Glendoick Gardens, still the best source of such plants by far in the British Isles. This has flowered reliably, though most unusually last autumn some of the overwintering buds opened prematurely in the balmy temperatures of mid-October.

Thankfully their loss wasn’t apparent in April, when the main display took place. The thimble-like, slightly flared flowers, creamish in bud but pure white when open, enlivened by rust-tipped stamens, are under half the size of its aforementioned neighbour, but equally profuse and equally admired.

Availability aside, why it isn’t more THE ALPINE GARDENER

ALPINE DIARY

A foaming stand of Omphalodes linifolia, Robert’s favourite annual, blending well with aethionemas

often grown is not so much a mystery (instant gardening being all the rage) as a disappointment. Admittedly, a late frost will wreak havoc. This year, the display turned at its peak from white to the colour of used teabags overnight despite my efforts to swathe the growth in several layers of sheeting. A few days later, from within the tangle of branches, a further series of pristine flowers was produced, but as with many camellias, SEPTEMBER 2012

the presence of the vanquished spoiled the display. Dead-heading would have taken an eternity.

And so to the Chelsea Flower Show, surely the acme of instant-effect gardening. It was decidedly ‘thin’ on alpines this year, though the Harperley Hall Farm Nurseries stand was well worth close study. Some subtle interplantings and a magnificent spike of Saxifraga longifolia were brought 253

ALPINE DIARY into full flower by midweek, when temperatures soared. Turn to page 237 for more on this.

But even those of us who focus mainly on alpines can have our heads turned by showstoppers from other branches of gardening. You would have to be very cussed (and immune to the cheering effect of a lively performance from a nearby steel drum ensemble) to have stomped single-mindedly past a spectacular display by the Taiwan Orchid Growers Association. This included a laburnum-mimicking tree, some 3m tall, on which thousands of sprigs of a bright yellow Oncidium had been painstakingly tied into position and fairly dripped from the branches. Also, an immense arch was immaculately clad with huge numbers of a subtle pink, large-flowered Phalaenopsis.

There was a very fragrant, very accomplished exhibit from Whetman Pinks (a Devon nursery, established in 1936) that culminated in a daring criss-cross of arches, making the whole exhibit seem like some giant trug. The handles had been painstakingly covered in flowers of Dianthus cultivars in all hues, married together as if assembled for one of the Derbyshire well-dressings I remember from my childhood, where biblical tableaux are depicted in petal, bud and floret.

These had much to recommend them, whereas on reaching the show’s Plant of the Year entrants I was decidedly unimpressed by a bracteate, non-scented, nonsensical Sweet William, Dianthus barbatus Green Trick ‘Temarison’. It is said to perform for fully six weeks which, in my view, is a 254

drawback, not a recommendation. What good is a Dianthus without perfume or delicacy?

Back to the main theme: quick fixes.

I’ve tried out a couple rather successfully this year, the most recent involving my favourite annual, Omphalodes linifolia.

I spread its seed intentionally across a recently cleared piece of ground, as well as in various gaps. Every single one must have germinated! The first came up in early autumn following a heavy shower. By the following May they were flowering at a height of 30-50cm, which was very attractive but rather too much of a good thing. A later, denser sowing didn’t germinate until spring, and given the cramped conditions (no thinning out was practised) they reached only 1015cm tall, flowering far more densely and more appealingly.

In some areas violas have infiltrated colourfully in black and blue, but the several stands of Aquilegia viridiflora – green and maroon and 30cm tall, they should have contrasted beautifully – were in fact overwhelmed. Only ruthless weeding saved them from suffocation.

Various aethionemas proved a more successful combination during the fortnight when both were in peak flower, though it was tricky to locate the stepping stones in order to admire them at clear quarters and trickier still to take photographs without stepping back and trampling other plants.

It’s not that I decry a quick fix. Earlier in the spring I purchased several bountiful tuffets of Gentiana verna ‘Alba’, each with at least 20 buds apiece, which performed very well for several weeks through to late May, even if the THE ALPINE GARDENER

ALPINE DIARY

Gentiana verna ‘Alba’ provided a quick fix in a trough planted with Rhodiola trollii and Achillea umbellata

stems lengthened towards the end.

They afforded an instant upgrade in a trough planted in the main with Rhodiola trollii (which doesn’t flower until June) and Achillea umbellata (an Arne Strid gathering from Mount Parnon at 1,900m). The latter has a similar flowering period and is noted chiefly SEPTEMBER 2012

for its silvery-white foliage, which gleams from mid-spring onwards.

This instant gardening is all very well, but requires a little forethought and, importantly, attention to detail if it is to convince. It helps, for example, to blend like with like, at least until you get the hang of things. Not long 255

ALPINE DIARY ago, however, I went round a garden (one of a dozen along the same road, open simultaneously over two days) in which someone had been infernally busy with the busy lizzies – Impatiens walleriana hybrids, if you prefer – shortly beforehand. It didn’t matter where you looked or what plantings were already in place; every gap had been stuffed full with the things. It brought to mind the story of an eminent member of our Society who left his wife in charge of the rock garden while he went off to Nepal. He returned to be confronted with petunias by the score, consorting with his daphnes and dwarf Dianthus.

The offending plants were hoicked out before his suitcase was unpacked.

Back to the open day, for which the local garden centre had obviously done a roaring trade. At a different address, what was billed as ‘a mixed border’ had patently been put together using whatever could be bought in bloom earlier that week. Even the illustrated labels had been dibbled in behind each plant to boost the amount of colour.

That said, it was better than the ‘easy maintenance garden’ a few houses away, where there was an extensive lawn, a rather nice gazebo and a lilac underplanted with Geranium macrorrhizum ‘Album’. Nothing else.

I’d gone to the open garden weekend after reading in the local newspaper about ‘an international rockery brought back personally from all over the world’.

As I half-suspected, it was rocks, not plants, that had been lovingly assembled over the years. They had come from northern Brazil, Australia’s Outback, Bolivia, Texas and Scunthorpe (a visit 256

there had yielded a particularly fine ammonite). It was evident that no stone had been left unturned.

The kindly owner, a geologist by training, explained that he and his wife went on such trips with only hand luggage and an empty suitcase, pooling their luggage allowance to import as many rocks as possible. A rock pool with a difference, clearly. ‘What about other clothing?’ I asked.

‘Just what we stand up in,’ he replied.

‘And if it gets filthy after a day scrambling about?’

‘Never mind about that,’ I was told.

But I most certainly would. There’s a photograph of me, taken high up in the Andes 25 years ago, in which I’m wearing a formal shirt and a tie.

Changing the subject, I learned a lot about geology, politely admired the rock samples arranged in an island bed with a sorry collection of heathers and conifers, then headed home.

Once back, a quick look round the first greenhouse confirmed that Lamium armenum subsp. sintenisii, the pinkest member of its Turkish alliance, was at its finest. Short-lived in peak bloom, short-lived by nature (it almost always flowers itself to death), I have grown it on and off since 1994.

This default monocarpic tendency led to it dying out eight years ago, until a thorough stirring of the alpine house sand plunge inadvertently brought long-dormant seed to the surface.

Just one sprouted, in 2010, yet set an abundant crop, which germinated best in the sand. Those sown in pots came up in very modest numbers. I’ve potted up a dozen for myself, given twice as THE ALPINE GARDENER

ALPINE DIARY

Lamium armenum subsp. sintenisii, which reappeared when seeds germinated after a stirring of the alpine house sand plunge

many away, and still others emerge week after week. The flowers attract every bee in the vicinity, so I hope for a similarly generous seed-set this time round. The current seedlings (which require potting on several times from March to September in a sandy, welldrained, friable mix) promise well.

SEPTEMBER 2012

Such comings and goings, some unexpected, some necessary to take in hand and restrain, enliven set performances virtually guaranteed from one year to the next. Predictability is all very well, but who would forego an element of theatre, involving bravura performances from gifted newcomers?

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PRACTICAL GARDENING

Practical Gardening Correspondent Vic Aspland unravels the mysteries of pH and explains how it plays such an important part in the successful cultivation of plants in any situation

W

ith so many sources of information available these days, most gardeners will have some idea of the significance of the term pH. It’s straightforward, isn’t it? The scale runs from 0 to 14. A pH value of 7 is neutral. Any value lower than 7 is acidic, any value above 7 is alkaline.

What is much less well-known is that the pH scale was invented in 1909 by a Danish chemist, one Soren Sörensen. He was director of the chemical department of the Carlsberg Laboratory, which was financially supported by, yes, that beer company.

In Sörensen’s time, methods of measuring the acidity and alkalinity of liquids (like beer) were poor and inaccurate and, as a result of his research, he came up with the concept of the pH scale. I remember learning by rote in my first-year chemistry classes at secondary school that pH was ‘the negative logarithm to the base ten of the hydrogen ion concentration’, and could soon dash down the formula pH = -log10 [H+], with [H+] being the concentration of hydrogen ions in solution.

If I can remember this, why do I forget people’s names within 30 seconds of being introduced to them? So much for the ancient scientific bit, but to bring it 258

pH: what is it and why does it matter in the garden? up to date, a hydrogen ion is, in fact, a proton, and you will now know that protons are the things being whizzed around at near-light speed and bashed together in the Large Hadron Collider.

Don’t panic, though – in normal life they are much more docile.

So how do we translate all this to the garden? I know that it can be difficult to get a feel for what the scale means in real life, so I have compiled a chart showing the pH values I have measured in the garden, where plants grow in the wild, and in the home. Let us begin near the middle of the chart with human blood, which has a pH of 7.4, which is slightly alkaline. I have put this on both sides of the chart, as a clumsy person THE ALPINE GARDENER

pH IN THE GARDEN

SEPTEMBER 2012

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PRACTICAL GARDENING is likely to provide a sample either at home or outside.

Wash away the blood with tap water, which typically has a pH of 6.9-7.0, so it is either neutral or very slightly acidic.

Having been bandaged up, our clumsy unfortunate may need a snack. With very few exceptions, all the fruit or vegetables he is likely to eat are acidic.

This is what gives them their ‘zing’.

Most people appreciate that a banana is relatively bland, a tomato has a sharper flavour, apples and grapes even more so, and lemon and lime juices have real ‘bite’. The pH values confirm what your mouth tells you.

Note that the scale is logarithmic, so each value differs from the next by a factor of ten. This means that a pH of 5 has ten times the acidity of pH 6; pH 4 is 100 times more acidic; pH 3 1,000 times more acidic. Lemon juice, therefore, possesses roughly 1,000 times the acidity of a banana. No wonder it has such a strong effect on your taste-buds.

I did not sample my own stomach acid – this one I looked up. It varies between pH 2 and 3, depending upon the individual and the state of the stomach at the time.

Moving to the alkaline side, I begin with borax (sodium borate). When I was a child, a weak solution was used to bathe sore or tired eyes. I doubt that your pharmacist would recommend it for this purpose now. Yet it still finds a place in the home in household laundry boosters and in an anti-fungal foot soak.

In the garden, it can be used to correct a deficiency of the trace-element boron.

If our clumsy victim has no problem 260

with his feet, he may contract indigestion as a result of over-indulging in the aforementioned fruits. A Rennie indigestion tablet (pH 9.6) will sort it out.

A freshen up? Would you consider washing your face in a 2 per cent solution of washing soda? I suspect not, but its pH (10) is very close to that of the foam from best quality toilet soap (9.9). Part of the effectiveness of soaps is that they are mildly corrosive.

They actually dissolve a thin layer of the skin surface, together with the grime attached to it. In part the slimy (sorry, the smooth and creamy) feel is due to the partly dissolved skin. The dilute washing soda solution will give you the same feel.

Having got a grip on pH in the home, let us move to the garden. Bonfire ash, preferably from woody material, is a rich source of potassium (it can contain up to 9 per cent). This is one of the essential plant nutrients (and the K in the NPK list that you see on packets or bottles of fertiliser). A sample of my own bonfire ash had a pH of 10.1.

Ash is, indirectly, the origin of the term potash, so widely used in gardening circles: ‘It’s not flowering? Give it a dose of potash!’

In past times, bonfire ash would be heated with water in a vessel, the solids filtered out and the clear solution evaporated to obtain the potassium salts.

Bonfire ash, in spite of its alkalinity, is OK to handle provided that your hands are dry. If they are wet, you will soon begin to experience its effects, especially if you have any small cut or abrasion.

It makes an excellent top-dressing for THE ALPINE GARDENER

pH IN THE GARDEN

This collection of ericaceous plants is thriving, so the soil pH must be below 7

the garden to improve flowering and fruiting. Although it is strongly alkaline, the small quantities used are unlikely to change the pH of your soil.

A 2 per cent suspension of garden lime (8.1) is quite corrosive to the skin. Solid lime can be a useful topdressing to increase pH on very acidic soils. Brassicaceae in particular seem to benefit from this. But, of course, I could not measure the pH of solid lime.

Clay soils are a source of much discussion between gardeners – poorly drained, difficult to cultivate and guaranteeing years of work. While I was composing this article in my head, I thought a sample of clay would be interesting, but why, you may ask, SEPTEMBER 2012

did I choose Reading clay? Simple. I happened to meet Phöbe Friar, who has a clay soil and lives, you know where, and she kindly supplied me with a sample, which had a pH of 7.3. I have little doubt that other clays will be quite similar.

Now, let’s look at my own garden compost. It had a pH of 7.3 despite the fact that my garden soil has a pH of 6.97.0. What is used to make it has been covered in an earlier article. A sample of Ashwood Nurseries’ John Innes No. 2 came out at 6.1, a good level at which to make plant nutrients available.

Composted bark, which I also use, was 5.7. Some people use this for topdressing as well as a compost ingredient, 261

PRACTICAL GARDENING and I measured another recommended material: cocoa shell mulch. If you have never tried it, you should use at least one bag just for the experience.

Within a short time of spreading it on the soil, it will emit a very strong odour of chocolate. You will either love it or hate it. More alarming is the fact that after a few days it can be seen to be permeated by tendrils of white mould.

Don’t panic! This is harmless to plants and disappears in a week or two. Cocoa shell is a weak fertiliser, with an NPK content of about 3:1:3 and a pH of 6.5.

Personally, I consider cocoa shell to be rather expensive. Why? Cocoa beans are imported into the UK, roasted and shelled, and the beans supplied to the chocolate manufacturers. Presumably, in the past, the cocoa manufacturers had to pay to dispose of the shells.

Now, the gardener pays them for the waste product – a win-win situation for the manufacturers.

Finally, I drop down to moss peat. This wonderful fibrous material has a pH of just 4 – the most acidic material that the average gardener is likely to encounter, and has been a mainstay of composts for generations. I will not rehearse its virtues here, as these are well-known to all.

I have missed three items on my diagram. All of these were measured in the wild, in the course of Cyclamen Society field studies. The lowest rating comes from a sweet chestnut grove on the south side of the White Mountains in western Crete. There I saw Cyclamen creticum growing in much-decomposed leaves, with a small runnel of water flowing around the tuber. The water was the colour of very strong tea and had 262

a pH of 2.8. My immediate comment was: ‘You can’t grow rhododendrons in that!’

Jumping to Turkey, I observed Cyclamen alpinum growing in the leaf detritus below Juniperus excelsa trees. This is a strange material which can hardly be called leaf-mould, and is reminiscent of little dry worms. Its pH of 5.6 was almost the same as my composted bark. Terra rossa can be seen almost anywhere around the Mediterranean.

It is the red earth produced by the weathering of limestone rocks and is home to an enormous bulbous flora (in the widest interpretation of the term), including many Cyclamen and Crocus species. I have measured many samples in various locations and found the pH to be in the range 9.4-10.2.

So how exactly does pH affect plants?

My next diagram gives some clues.

The scale across the top shows pH. The horizontal bars show the relative availability of various plant nutrients at differing pHs. The top three bars represent the three major nutrients (back to NPK again): nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Then follow the minor nutrients: sulphur, calcium and magnesium. Lower down come the trace nutrients, needed by plants in much smaller quantities: iron, manganese, boron, copper and zinc.

Note that nitrogen is freely available between 6 and 8. Above or below these values, it becomes less so. Phosphorus is more interesting. Between 6.5 and 7.5 it is freely available. As pH rises, it is progressively locked-up in the soil, with a low at about 8.5, then is released above about 8.7. Having got the hang THE ALPINE GARDENER

pH IN THE GARDEN

This chart shows how pH levels affect the availability of nutrients to plants

of it, I will let you interpret the rest, but note how similar the behaviour of boron is to that of phosphorus.

Now the importance of pH in composts becomes clear. The best availability of all the plant nutrients occurs between pHs of about 6 and 7.5. That is why John Innes composts are adjusted to somewhere within this range, and this is also ideal in the garden.

If you have a very acidic, peat-rich soil, some of your alpines (excluding Ericaceae) might not flourish. Now the reason becomes clear: they are starving because the low pH is preventing them from taking up nutrients. A quick fix (but it is difficult to get the quantity just right) is to lime the soil to raise the SEPTEMBER 2012

pH. A slower but more controllable recipe is to work in ground limestone or Dolomite.

So how did my Cyclamen creticum survive? I can only suppose that, as a relatively slow-growing tuber, it could gradually assimilate the necessary nutrients over a long period. Of much greater interest to many alpine gardeners will be what is going on in terra rossa.

A few weeks ago, a member commented to me: ‘The Turkish Crocus that I grow do not seem to flower as well as those I have seen in the wild.’

Many people also find it difficult to flower Cyclamen graecum well. Some specimens (‘It has never flowered!’) are 263

PRACTICAL GARDENING

Menziesia ciliicalyx, an ericaceous shrub that would struggle in alkaline soil

dismissed as poor forms because they do not perfrom. Perhaps the answer to both of these problems lies in the soil and in the diagram.

In the wild, the plants experience high pH. All the major plant nutrients are freely available EXCEPT nitrogen.

This leads me to deduce that feeding with a balanced fertiliser and growing in a near-neutral compost will supply far too much nitrogen, hence the poor flowering. There are two possible answers: either increase the pH of the compost by mixing in limestone chips, ground limestone or ground Dolomite, or feed with tomato fertiliser, which is low in nitrogen.

Some plants have their own metabolic ways of dealing with nutrient 264

imbalances. For example, Fritillaria serpenticola manages to grow in areas of serpentinite rock that contain levels of heavy metals such as nickel and chromium, which are toxic to many plants.

Of course, many plants do not have mechanisms to adapt to altered nutrient levels, so do less well in cultivation than in the wild.

I suspect that a whole tribe of successful growers will now be reaching for their pens (or, more likely, their keyboards) to let me know that they never go to the trouble of checking pH and always have good flowering results. I will simply ask: ‘Always? Have you never got rid of a plant because it wouldn’t flower well?’

THE ALPINE GARDENER

THE BOG GARDEN

Two colour forms of Dactylorhiza fuchsii, which is seeding itself liberally

Successes and failures in the bog garden

I

n The Alpine Gardener of March 2007 (vol. 75, page 29), I told the story of how I converted an unsuccessful concrete garden pool into a bog. I thought that perhaps now would be a good time to revisit it and report on how the plants performed.

Just to recap, I lowered the water level to 15cm below the top of the pool by cutting a drainage channel in the concrete shell using a hammer and chisel. Turf skimmed off the front

SEPTEMBER 2012

Many plants are thriving in Vic Aspland’s bog garden, but not in the perfect conditions that he had arranged for them... garden – which is another story – was dropped into the water until this infill reached the 15cm line.

I topped it up with a 15cm layer of fine265

PRACTICAL GARDENING

Primula prolifera has a habit of living up to its name 266

THE ALPINE GARDENER

THE BOG GARDEN grade composted bark. I used Cambark Fine, unfortunately no longer available.

I now use Melcourt Propagating Bark, which is similar, but to my mind not of such good quality.

The theory was that the plants would benefit from having their roots in an open, porous compost that would allow the free downward passage of rainwater while still containing lots of air.

Conversely, below the 15cm line the compost would be permanently waterlogged, so the roots could delve down to reach moisture even in the driest summer. Ah! Do you remember sunny, dry summers?

This part of the plan worked very well. Even at the end of a dry summer, I could dig down and find the water level virtually unchanged. In July this year, after a remarkably wet period, it was the same story, so drainage of excess water was not a problem.

But what of the plants? Some did too well. Iris pallida ‘Variegata’ flourished amazingly, to the point that it became almost a pest. In April this year, half of it had to be dug out because it had begun to encroach on various orchids.

Two candelabra primulas were planted: Primula prolifera and P. japonica.

The former lived up to its name and was a little too prolific. While we were on holiday one year, the seed was shed and germination was amazing. Fortunately the faster-growing seedlings swamped the others, otherwise we would have ended up with nothing else in the bog.

The surplus plants have been put to good use. The cascade in the historic rock garden at Birmingham Botanical Gardens (built by Backhouses of York SEPTEMBER 2012

and finished in 1896) has recently been rebuilt, and the surrounding area is being replanted with Himalayan plants.

P. prolifera fits the bill, so is finding a new home.

This species has two great merits: as the whorls of flowers open in succession, beginning at the bottom, the flowering period extends over about six weeks, and it does not interbreed with other candelabra primulas, so the colour of the seedlings is the same amazing chrome yellow.

If you grow other candelabras such as P. beesiana, bulleyana and burmanica together, they will hybridise. If you are lucky, the results will be good, but I have seen beds in which the flower colours in the resulting hybrid swarm could at best be described as ‘uninteresting’ and at worst ‘dingy’.

P. japonica, on the other hand, has increased only slowly. I bought a single plant at an AGS show for its bright red flowers and, because in general primulas need to be cross-pollinated between pin and thrum-flowered forms to set seed, it sets hardly any. Vegetative increase has proved to be slow. Other primulas that do nicely include P. rosea and P. warshenewskiana. The former is ideal. It is neat (10cm or so tall), with bright pink/red flowers and increases from seed, but not too quickly. From my point of view it’s the perfect plant because it makes no work for me. The low mat of the latter has performed well over the years and always offers a generous scattering of its tiny pink, white-eyed flowers. Strangely, in 2012 it was not nearly as generous. Was there too much water, too little light – what a 267

PRACTICAL GARDENING

Vic’s excavation to show the bog’s ‘water table’, but where has all the bark gone?

dismal spring we had – or did it struggle because it had been invaded by moss?

Some field trials will be needed!

Staying with primulas, P. denticulata var. alba has proved to be very satisfactory.

Planted elsewhere in the garden, in our light, fast-draining heathland soil, it lives and flowers with no problem but never quite produces perfect golfball heads of flowers – there is always a small ‘bald patch’ of greenish bud bases at the tip of the flower head. In the bog, however, it is perfect, thanks to that deep-down water supply.

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A later addition to the bog was Primula florindae ‘Ray’s Ruby’. I used to grow the normal, yellow-flowered form of this in our previous garden, which had poor, sandy, very fast-draining soil.

In the shade of an apple tree (James Grieve, which is probably irrelevant), it persisted, flowered and was very pleasing, although it did not live up to John Richards’ description of it (in his book Primula) as ‘a massive plant, the largest Primula’. But really that is no surprise because he describes its habitat as: ‘Riversides and islands... very THE ALPINE GARDENER

THE BOG GARDEN

Primula denticulata var. alba has grown to perfection in the boggy conditions

wet rivulets and forest bogs.’ In the conditions I gave it, it is a tribute to the plant’s vigour that it has survived at all.

In the bog, the red-flowered form is quite restrained. Again it is a single clone (a pin-eyed form) and although it appears to set seed, which I let fall on to the surface, it only seems to increase vegetatively – and quite slowly at that.

In the past I have been mildly critical of the flower colour, ‘a reddish-brown’, but this year the flowers have been a true, bright red. By contrast the inside of the flowers was covered with a creamy SEPTEMBER 2012

farina, quite a startling contrast. At the AGS’s Tewkesbury Show I spotted the normal yellow-flowered form on Rob Potterton’s stand. It looked so desirable that I succumbed, and bought a couple of plants, being careful to pick both pin and thrum-eyed forms in the hope of obtaining seed. I hope that its flowering season will be slightly different from that of P. prolifera.

Staying with the red theme, the South American Ourisia coccinea has continued to increase steadily, to the point that I can now give away wodges (a Midlands 269

PRACTICAL GARDENING technical term for a hefty division) to friends. It continues to flower every year but not as generously as I would wish, so I will soon be moving some to the opposite end of the bog, where it might get an extra hour or two of sun each day.

The primulas have done well, but the outstanding success of the bog has been the Dactylorhiza orchids. A couple of specimens of Dactylorhiza fuchsii, a British native plant, have increased to form substantial clumps (again to the point that I could give plants to another Birmingham Group member to plant in his... yes, you have guessed it, bog created from a garden pool). I am now finding seedlings flowering for the first time, with the flower colour varying from almost white to quite deep pink.

Surprisingly, they are all appearing in an apparently hostile location – in the minute gaps between the tightly packed rhizomes of Iris pallida ‘Variegata’. I know it is said that orchids do best in locations with low nutrient levels, but this is ridiculous.

A Dactylorhiza seedling which appeared in a Cambark plunge was also transferred to the bog. The parent was obtained from Slack Top Alpine Nursery as a ‘spotted-leaf orchid’.

The variation of the seedlings made it apparent that it was a hybrid between D. fuchsii and purpurella.

Beginners may suppose that a hybrid will have characteristics midway between those of the two parents, but this is not the case. Hybrids can be 99 per cent like one parent or the other, or anything in between. In this case, I have a dwarf plant (perhaps 12cm tall) 270

with good purple flowers and plain leaves, rather like the latter parent.

Interestingly, it has already produced a dwarf seedling of similar stature but with a spotted leaf. If you have never tried growing orchids, but have always wanted to, these hybrids are a good start because seedlings can appear in both very wet and very dry places in your garden.

Three plants have not done well.

The red-flowered form of Primula veris (cowslip) has decreased somewhat, Dactylorhiza majalis did not increase, and Primula x ‘Johanna’ disappeared completely. This was a mystery, but a possible reason emerged when I was taking photographs for this article.

In order to show the position of the water table, I dug a hole and learned that my nice neat plan was no more.

The 15cm top layer of pure bark had disappeared. Worms had been at work and completely mixed up the contents of the bog. How they coped with the waterlogged layer I cannot imagine.

So, no more open, airy, well-drained bark on top. It had been replaced by… how does one describe a silty, sandy, non-draining stodge? Sludge, gloop or something even less charitable?

What do I do now? I could remove the top layer and replace it with bark, or perhaps just replace pockets for the plants that have not done well. The strange thing is that most plants have continued to thrive despite my careful plans going awry. They did fine in the bark, as planned, but now they are equally happy in gloop. Ah well, the plants know best. Perhaps I will run a rolling programme of replacement. I THE ALPINE GARDENER

THE BOG GARDEN

A Sedum doing so well in the damp conditions that it is almost a pest

will probably plant Epipactis gigantea (the chatterbox orchid) and am debating whether or not to add Cypripedium reginae.

But there is a final plant that has done surprisingly well. A Sedum present in the garden when we first moved here – it could be Sedum kamtschaticum – found its way into the bog, presumably by seed, and has romped away. Although the fleshy, glossy green leaves are attractive, and the bright yellow star flowers borne in July even more so, it is nearing the SEPTEMBER 2012

status of invasive pest. But sedums, I hear you cry, are drought-resistant plants that thrive in sunny situations.

That may be so, but give this one a fat, easy life, and it will really thrive!

Since I wrote the original article on the bog, and mentioned it in a number of talks, quite a few members have told me that they have followed my lead – as the saying goes: ‘If I had a pound for every one...’ – and created a bog of their own. Why not give it a go? You could be very pleased with the result.

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Cyprus isn’t most people’s first choice for a botanical holiday. But this portfolio of photographs taken by AGS member Dr Yiannis Christofides in the Troodos Mountains may persuade many to venture there

Treasure island

EXPLORATION

Stands of Pinus nigra can be found above 1,500m

D

oes Cyprus have alpine plants?

It’s an interesting question to ask of an island lying at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, where temperatures in the summer soar to over 40C. But at the heart of Cyprus lie the Troodos Mountains, rising to just under 2,000m (6,500ft) and covered by snow from December to March. The Troodos dominate the south-west of the island and host its forests and water resources.

Unlike many European mountain ranges, which consist of sedimentary limestone, the Troodos are igneous in origin. The mountains are a section

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of the earth’s oceanic crust that has been lifted well above sea level. The upper rocks are mantle rocks, having originated deep within the earth and been brought to the surface through the tectonic movements of the African and Eurasian plates. Indeed the study of Troodos geology has contributed greatly to the theories of plate tectonics.

Vegetation in the Troodos can be broadly divided into two zones: below and above 1,500m (4,900ft). The first zone of forest consists of Pinus brutia and an understory of the endemic oak Quercus alnifolia and Arbutus andrachne. Many other plants such as THE ALPINE GARDENER

CYPRUS

The cushion-forming and strongly aromatic Teucrium cyprium

Cistus, Helianthemum, Styrax, Salvia and Teucrium are also found here. The deep valleys each host rare endemic plants such as Origanum cordifolium, Erysimum kykkoticum and Ranunculus kykkoensis.

The combination of interesting geology, alpine conditions and isolation has contributed, at altitudes over 1,500m, to the evolution of a unique flora, most of which is endemic to Cyprus and indeed to the Troodos.

This zone hosts stands of Pinus nigra and Juniperus foetidissima, while open ground is covered with mats of lowgrowing plants. This habitat, known as the serpentinophilous grasslands SEPTEMBER 2012

of Cyprus, consists of associations of small, mostly endemic, perennial plants growing on the rocks of the plutonic complex.

Long after the plants of the lowlands have finished flowering, the upper slopes of the Troodos are a mass of flowers. The season is a long one, starting in March with the melting of the snow and the appearance of the first three endemic plants: Crocus cyprius, Corydalis rutifolia and Ranunculus cadmicus subsp. cypricus, a buttercup with deep golden flowers subtended by compact foliage, deep green on the upper side and bronze underneath.

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Alyssum troodi flowering in a typical rocky habitat and, below, Scorzonera troodea

54

THE ALPINE GARDENER

CYPRUS

Arabis purpurea in full flower on a rock face in late April

At lower altitudes the rare and lovely Chionodoxa (now Scilla) lochiae dots woodland floors. A little later, at the end of April, the forest in this area is ablaze with the pink flowers of Paeonia mascula while vertical rock faces are coloured by the endemics Arabis purpurea and Euphorbia veneris.

The mass flowering of the cushion plants takes place in late May to July.

The most common are Alyssum troodi and Alyssum cypricum, which is also found in Turkey. Other plants, mostly SEPTEMBER 2012

endemic, include Cephalorrhynchus cypricus, Hypericum confertum subsp. stenobotrys, Scorzonera troodea, Teucrium cyprium, Cynoglossum troodi, Saponaria cypria, Scutellaria cypria, Ornithogalum chionophilum, Nepeta troodi, Acinos troodi, Acinos exiguus and Dianthus strictus subsp. troodi (pictured on the cover of this issue). Cushions of Genista sphacelata var. crudelis are often to be seen with clouds of the butterfly, Glaucopsyche paphos, whose food-plant it is.

A number of interesting annual plants 277

EXPLORATION

The mottled flowers of Nepeta troodi and, left, the flowers of Saponaria cypria, which are held above cushions of glaucous, bluegreen leaves

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THE ALPINE GARDENER

CYPRUS

Crocus cyprius is one of the earliest plants to flower in the Troodos

such as Viola heldreichiana, Arenaria rhodia subsp. cypria and Minuartia sintenisii are also to be found here.

The region is not without its orchids and Cephalanthera rubra, Epipactis troodi and Epipactis condensata are to be found on the higher slopes of the Troodos, while Dactylorhiza iberica and Epipactis veratrifolia prefer mountain streams.

The sheer and inhospitable slopes of serpentine rock that cover the eastern flank of the Troodos are home to one of SEPTEMBER 2012

our rarer plants, Pinguicula crystallina, often found growing with Solenopsis minuta.

The alpine area is easily accessible by road and there are several circular nature trails. The resorts of Platres and Troodos make good bases from which to explore the flora and fauna.  Dr Yiannis Christofides is the author of Orchids of Cyprus, lives in Platres, Cyprus, and leads botanical trips to Cyprus, Greece and Turkey.

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EXPLORATION

Ranunculus cadmicus subsp. cyprius

FURTHER READING ON CYPRUS Christofides, Y. (2001) The Orchids of Cyprus. ISBN 9963-8542-0-6.

Meikle, R.D. (1977) Flora of Cyprus Vol. 1. Bentham-Moxon Trust, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Meikle, R.D. (1985) Flora of Cyprus Vol. 2. Bentham-Moxon Trust, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Tsintides, T., Christodoulou, C. S., Delipetrou, P. and Georgiou, K. (2007) The Red Data Book of the Flora of Cyprus. Cyprus Forestry Association.

Tsintides, T. C. (1998) The endemic plants of Cyprus. Nicosia.

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THE ALPINE GARDENER

Four gems from the Troodos: clockwise from above left: Cephalanthera rubra, Chionodoxa lochiae, Hypericum confertum subsp. stenobotrys and Scutellaria cypria

EXPLORATION

A

risaema candidissimum is, without doubt, the most garden-worthy and one of the hardiest of all the many species of cobra lily. It was introduced into cultivation by George Forrest, who discovered it in June 1914 in the Fengkaw valley, 15km west of Yungning [Yongning] in north-west Yunnan. Based upon this collection, W.W. Smith at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh described it in 1917.

Forrest also found it in June 1918 in adjacent south-west Sichuan. His third collection was from the Chien Chuan [Jianchuan]-Mekong divide, also in Yunnan and some 40 miles south-west of Lijiang. Frank Kingdon Ward also collected it in the Yungning area. All collections were at elevations of 2,4002,740m (7,900-9,000ft).

Two clones were introduced by Forrest. The first, with the upper part of the spathe pure white, was shown at Chelsea by A.K. Bulley in May 1924 and received an Award of Merit. The other and more celebrated clone, which survives in cultivation in many collections, received a First Class Certificate (FCC) from the Royal Horticultural Society on April 28, 1970, when shown by W.V. Bishop of Harrogate Parks Department. It was graphically described in the Alpine Garden Society Bulletin as having flowers like ‘ships’ ventilation funnels’.

After many years in which western botanists were denied access to China, Ron McBeath rediscovered A. candidissimum in 1994 at 2,000-2,300m (6,560-7,550ft) in the gorge of the Jiang He River not far above its confluence 282

On the trail of China’s arisaemas The distribution of Arisaema species in south-west Sichuan and western Hubei is explored

by Phillip Cribb, Colin Crosbie and Terry Want with the Jinsha Jiang (the upper Yangtze). It grows there in a very steepsided, partly wooded gorge running north to south, on slopes among shale rocks and in dry soils with grasses, bracken, indigoferas, Incarvillea arguta and other plants. Three other arisaemas grow with it: A. elephas, A. consanguineum and A. yunnanense.

When first rediscovered, A. candidissimum was common and the sides of the gorge in early June looked as if they had been scattered with white candles. The habitat closely matches Kingdon Ward’s description of it growing with its ‘roots exceptionally well drained, but also receive a constant supply of water deep down’. However, he noted it growing with ‘Nomocharis, Cypripedium, Roscoea, Hemerocallis, Morina, THE ALPINE GARDENER

ARISAEMAS IN WESTERN CHINA

Arisaema candidissimum growing in a typical rocky habitat at Muli

Lilium, Stellera, Androsace spinulifera, Pleione yunnanensis ’. In our experience, these plants are never associated with A. candidisissimum, although they all grow nearby on limestone substrates but not on the shales.

A. candidissimum is variable in flower colour on the slopes of the Zhongdian SEPTEMBER 2012

River, the spathe ranging from pure white to white striped with green or rose-pink. Its shape is also variable, a particularly fine form having a broad spathe with a frilled margin.

Of course, it has been reintroduced in large quantities in recent years – mainly, we suspect, from the area where Ron 283

EXPLORATION

A colony of roscoeas and incarvilleas at Muli in south-west Sichuan

rediscovered it, judging by the depletion of stock that we have noted on subsequent visits and by the range of variation seen in the recently introduced plants when they have flowered.

On a visit to Muli (Bowa) in southwest Sichuan we found A. candidissimum in several places growing on steep shale banks and landslips in open forest of Pinus tabuliformis with bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) and the mountain sorrel (Oxyria sinensis). The habitat was desolate with expanses of bare shale rocks and nutrient-poor soil but, no doubt, the plants received a water supply deep down from run-off from the high mountains around. The plants were flowering in full sun or in the light shade of occasional bushes.

Variation in flower colour, size and shape was considerable, with spathes 284

ranging from pure white to white striped with either green or rose-pink.

Occasional plants closely resembled the FCC clone.

We found A. candidissimum in several places around Muli, first spotting it above the road to the south-east of Muli on the way from Yaan Yuan, growing on steep unstable slopes at around 2,550m (8,370ft) and overlooking the deep gorge of the Litang River. It was also common at about the same elevation for a stretch of three or four kilometres above Muli in the valley leading to Lake Chang Hai. Here it was growing on steep shale slopes with the green-flowered species A. consanguineum and A. yunnanense.

Elsewhere, A. consanguineum and A. ciliatum were common, scattered on the steep hillsides to well over 3,000m THE ALPINE GARDENER

ARISAEMAS IN WESTERN CHINA

The valley leading to Lake Chang Hai at Muli, where arisaemas are widespread

(9,850ft). Above 3,400m (11,150ft), dark forms of A. elephas were frequent, especially in steep rocky gulleys running through the montane forests of fir, spruce, hemlock, limes, birches, maples and rowans. One fine clump was found at 3,750m (12,300ft) on a grassy roadside under birches and maples with Maianthemum (Smilacina) henryi, Primula deflexa, a white-flowered Allium and Beesia calthifolia.

Hubei lies off the beaten track for modern plant-hunting tours, yet its pedigree matches that of western Yunnan and Sichuan for garden-worthy plants. Augustine Henry and Ernest Wilson both collected plants there that now grace our gardens, particularly some spectacular trees and shrubs, such as Dipelta floribunda, Cornus kousa var. chinensis, Emmenopteris henryi, Davidia SEPTEMBER 2012

involucrata, Acer griseum, Acer davidii and numerous viburnums, hydrangeas and deutzias.

We visited Shennongjia National Park in western Hubei, a day’s drive to the north-west of Yichang [formerly Ichang], the site of the controversial Three Gorges dam.

Access to the park is heavily controlled. We were able to visit only a small portion of it but, sadly, none of the limestone areas. However, our mood was brightened by the splendid display of flowering Cornus kousa var. chinensis that splashed the hillsides with white. We were able to drive deep into the park along a well-constructed tarred road up to 2,800m (9,200ft).

At 2,600m (8,500ft) a track leads into an area of rocky outcrops set in grassland and rather dense montane 285

EXPLORATION forest, with Abies fargesii the dominant tree just below the peak area. The understorey comprised a bamboo, Fargesii nitida, which had just undergone a mass flowering, and several Lonicera, Betula, Rosa, Rubus and Prunus species.

The herbaceous flora here was particularly rich, the showiest plant being Primula beesiana.

On the outcrops, clusters of bright yellow Lloydia tibetica and white L. yunnanensis grew in every crack.

The white-flowered Hepatica henryi, anemones and Corydalis formed mats on the shallow shelves. Deep purple Cypripedium tibeticum was in full flower, while the occasional C. flavum had yet to produce its blooms.

In the grassland, fine stands of Arisaema asperatum grew at the base of the rocky outcrops and under bushes.

Its spathes were green with some blackish maroon stripes. The woodland has a rich groundcover including Viola biflora, Corydalis temulifolia, Neottia micrantha, Primula beesiana and Trillum tschonoskii. In shady places Arisaema ciliatum and A. omeiense were frequent.

The former has an umbrella of several narrow leaves above a simple spathe boldly lined with brownish purple. The latter has two prominent wings either side of the mouth of the spathe, which is striped in ochre. The English edition of the Flora of China does not list Hubei in the distribution of this species.

Arisaema yunnanense at Muli 286

 Further reading on arisaemas: McBeath, R. (1996), AGS Bulletin, vol.

64, pages 185-189. Sealey, J.R. (1939), Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 161: t. 9549.

THE ALPINE GARDENER

ARISAEMAS IN WESTERN CHINA

Doing well in cultivation: the rose-pink striped form of Arisaema candidissimum photographed by Graham Rankin at Aberglasney Gardens in Carmarthenshire SEPTEMBER 2012

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ART FROM THE SHOWS

The classes for photographs taken in the wild grow ever more popular. Above, Peter Maguire’s outstanding image of Eritrichium nanum on Piz Nair, above St Moritz in the Engadine Alps. Left, Oxalis enneaphylla taken by Kath Baker above Lago del Toro, near Estancia Rio Capitán, Patagonia

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ART FROM THE SHOWS

Inspired by nature’s wonders The Artistic Section at AGS shows goes from strength to strength. Here Jon Evans, the Judging Co-ordinator for artistic exhibits and himself a keen photographic exhibitor, presents some highlights from 2011

T

he aim over the next few pages is to present some of the best images exhibited in the Artistic Section at AGS shows during 2011, particularly for the many members who are unable to visit shows – for example, those who live overseas.

Sadly, this year saw the passing of one of our best and most enthusiastic artists, Rosemary Powis. She followed her entries in the shows to the last and was filled with joy whenever one of her photos or exquisite paintings met with success. This year’s Kent Show saw a wonderful retrospective exhibit of her work.

The artistic classes provide a muchadmired extra dimension to our shows.

If you would like to enter, please contact me by email at jon.evans@ agsgroups.org or phone 01252 724416.

SEPTEMBER 2012

This close-up of a Polygonatum sp. was taken in Wanglang, Sichuan,

by David Hughes 289

ART FROM THE SHOWS

Two images from Martin and Anna Sheader: Calandrinia affinis taken on Argentina’s only active volcano, Volcan Copahue, in Neuquen Province.

Right: Chloraea alpina on the lower slopes of Cerro Atravesada, also in Neuquen Province. This orchid also inspired a watercolour entry (see page 438) 290

THE ALPINE GARDENER

ART FROM THE SHOWS

One of the most striking close-ups exhibited in 2011 was this photograph of Hepatica nobilis, submitted by nurseryman Graham Nicholls

There are two classes for digital manipulation – one for images showing modification of a single original photograph, and one for images that combine elements from multiple original images. In 2011, both classes were hotly contested. In the first class, I entered this ‘paperweight’ created from the flowers of Hepatica japonica. In the second class, a montage of sempervivums (on the following pages) showing variety in colour and form was entered by Howard and Sally Wills, who hold the National Collection of the genus SEPTEMBER 2012

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ART FROM THE SHOWS

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ART FROM THE SHOWS

The classes for paintings, drawings and needlework were distinguished by a strong entry from Kath Baker, who exhibited several paintings of South American plants following a trip to Patagonia. These included her rendering of Chloraea alpina on the opposite page This page: the two watercolours are Clematis alpina by Peggy Dawe and Iris sprengeri by Rannveig Wallis. Below, one of Jean Morris’s exquisite pieces of needlework – Cypripedium Emil grex

SEPTEMBER 2012

295

A bravura performance

A carpet of Crocus tommasinianus and winter aconites at Brinkfields in late February

GARDENS

Robert Rolfe concludes his visit to the Leicestershire garden of AGS member and accomplished plantsman John Gennard, pictured left. The first part of this article – featuring a garden plan – was published in the March issue of The Alpine Gardener, and new members can read it on the AGS website by following the link for The Alpine Gardener.

I

n the first part of my walk around the sumptuous Leicestershire garden of John and Gwen Gennard, I started at the house and headed across the southern side of the three-acre plot to the south-west corner, relishing an impressive collection of plants en route.

The return leg is every bit as enjoyable and as diverse. There are surprises and new vistas at every turn. From the paddock - which in its early years extended back as far as the rock garden fringes, when the owners’ daughters were in the saddle every other day - you enter one of the garden’s set-pieces.

In this, a subtly Japanese theme pervades the margins, courtesy of the planting rather than any kitsch props.

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You will search in vain for stone lanterns, wind chimes or bamboo screens. At ground level the mood is conveyed by the pitch-black Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ and striped forms of Carex morrowii. Both are evergreen and both associate elegantly with drifts of snowdrops, but the Ophiopogon in particular must be kept firmly in control if it is to fulfill its function as a foil rather than overwhelming everything within suckering distance. A banzai charge with a mattock is required if it gets its feet under the table and abuses the hospitality received, not some tentative, bonsai-style polite snipping back.

Its popularity in British gardens is more recent than you might imagine, THE ALPINE GARDENER

BRINKFIELDS

Hylomecon japonica nestles at the foot of the blue Rhododendron augustinii

for it was described in one mid-1970s catalogue as ‘very rare and requiring a choice position’. Emphatically, this is no longer the case. But who would be without it?

What you first notice, however, respectively at their peak in early May and then a month later, are that evocatively named tree peony, ‘Flight of Cranes’ (more correctly Paeonia suffruticosa ‘Renkaku’), whose pure white, semi-double flowers are dinner plate-sized, and a multi-stemmed, 3m tall Cornus kousa, which stands guard at the entrance to the gully mentioned in the first part of this article.

Occasionally the performance of the Cornus is restrained but last year was SEPTEMBER 2012

a vintage one, the branches weighed down by a mantle of blossom-like bracts, starting creamy-white and turning to parchment. Those who garden on a neutral or slightly acid soil, or else manage to dig in plenty of lime-free humus, could hardly choose a better small tree, the leaves in some selections turning brilliant scarlet come mid-autumn as a bonus.

Later on, it is attended by platoons of Lilium martagon, while winter aconites and stands of Galanthus ‘S. Arnott’ also do their duty. Intermingled are clumps of Arum italicum subsp. italicum ‘Marmoratum’, one of the finest foliage plants for the winter garden, though the spikes of holly-red berries that precede 299

GARDENS the leaves justify its choice alone. In some gardens it can seed around rather too freely. In others, such as this, it does well enough but never needs restraining.

Looking in the direction of the house, 100m away and hidden from view by a profusion of shrubs and trees, another garden within a garden is laid out before you. To the right there is a 3-4m tall flanking of subsection Triflora rhododendrons such as the showy, pink, dark-spotted R. yunnanense; elegantly arching R. davidsonianum, typically pink in gardens, though white through to lavender selections can nowadays be sourced; blue R. augustinii; and several waist-high hybrids bred at Glendoick Gardens. Elsewhere, R. augustinii is daringly teamed with a low foil of the well-behaved, bright yellow Hylomecon japonica. Its April flowers – refined versions of the notoriously badly behaved, soon to be renamed Meconopsis cambrica – are short-lived but produced in succession.

Many of the garden’s rhododendrons have been obtained by post over the past 40 years from Glendoick. They have done well, despite the alkalinity of the boulder clay, chiefly thanks to lavish annual applications of bark and shelterbelt plantings.

To the left of the ‘Trifloras’, and backed by a high hornbeam hedge, a wide, long border, at its peak in late winter and throughout spring, has been improved greatly within the past decade. A peripheral grass path, lightly mown and slightly infiltrated by various bulbs to good effect, is marked along its inner edge by an informal, wellspaced scattering of trees including 300

a mulberry, ornamental cherries and a free-standing, flourishing Carpinus betulus ‘Globus’, echoing the hornbeam arch under which you have just passed.

Between these, contrasting variants of the Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), now semi-mature at 2-4m and often ‘pruned-up’, were added some ten years ago. They include ‘Omurayama’, ‘Red Pygmy’, ‘Shindeshōjō’ and ‘Shishigashira’. In this sheltered glade their variously brilliant green through to copper and purple-red foliage is protected from wind scorch. It is at its best when newly expanded in May and again in late October, just before it is shed.

The centre stage is a secluded meadow area that has two main vernal periods of glory and a judiciously contrived intermezzo, this last easily controlled in that the star performer is sterile and therefore obviously cannot self-sow.

Early in the year, the unremarkable sward is transmogrified around midFebruary by a splendid flowering of Crocus tommasinianus in shades of lilac, mauve and purple – curiously, white forms are absent. Only along the tree-lined entrance to Trinity College, Cambridge, have I witnessed a display that could compete.

There are interlinking scatterings of snowdrops and masses of winter aconites that serve to weave the throng into a lavish panoply. On a sunny day, when the temperature rises sufficiently to allow the Crocus flowers to open wide, a multi-coloured carpet stretches some 20m long long and 10m wide.

The inhabitants go from strength to strength, fostered only by a topdressing THE ALPINE GARDENER

BRINKFIELDS

Broad drifts of Narcissus ‘February Gold’ light up the meadow in March

of hoof and horn in early autumn, selective weeding (fertile ground will always act as a seed-bed for both welcome and pernicious settlers), and a no-mow regime until the end of June, by which time the bulb foliage has died down and the year’s crop of seed has been shed.

North American erythroniums thrive elsewhere in the garden, yet here plantings of the European E. dens-canis, while holding their own, have not seeded around to any extent.

Possibly they simply need more space, free from competitors, whereas at Brinkfields they are constrained by a lavish succession of growth that SEPTEMBER 2012

includes broad drifts of Narcissus ‘February Gold’ (normally at its best in March) and then, around midApril, thousands upon thousands of Fritillaria meleagris, with albinos similar to ‘Aphrodite’ in abundance among the predominantly dark purple, tessellated bells.

In the early years, seed of this was sown annually in pots and the mature bulbs planted out three or four years later where a gap in the ranks had been identified. Latterly, seed has been selfsown or scattered thickly in suitable spots. This is done in midwinter, so avoiding possible collection by the mower if sown earlier. Clearly some 301

BRINKFIELDS

Galanthus ‘Brenda Troyle’ and, left, Fritillaria meleagris en masse

of the clumps are clonal, rather than representing clusters of seedlings.

Often only when pot-grown or cultivated in special beds, free from competition, is such vegetative increase quite so enthusiastic.

Separating this to the north-east from the still partly functioning kitchen garden is a meandering border in which the shrub roses that once held sway have been uprooted and replaced with almost every hardy, winter-performing shrub you can name. Daphne bholua, of course (there are further fine specimens of this behind the house). Viburnum x bodnantense, first sentinel of a genus deployed throughout the garden, with a SEPTEMBER 2012

mighty V. plicatum near to the entrance to the old tennis court extending the season well into May. Stands of Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’ and C. sericea ‘Flaviramea’ that are pollarded every other year, with the tiny, greenish-yellow flower clusters of C. mas ‘Golden Glory’. And several mature witch hazels, generously spaced rather than boxed in, as one all too often sees. The trick is to provide sufficient shelter to foster the early display and allow delicate scents to linger while letting in enough light to illuminate the scene, causing the stems of the dogwoods and others to gleam.

Down at knee to ankle level, in the most overshadowed areas, restrained 303

GARDENS Galanthus ‘Straffan’, left, increases well if the clumps are divided every few years. Right, G. plicatus ‘Wendy’s Gold’

use is made of the variegated Euonymus fortunei ‘Silver Queen’. This illuminates some tricky recesses and makes a happy foil for Galanthus ‘Straffan’, which increases well if the clumps are divided every few years. A bold clump of G. plicatus ‘Wendy’s Gold’ relishes the deep, fairly heavy soil. It is best to split the group at this stage, for if not replanted in fresh ground every few years, capriciously, dwindling can occur. In a separate bed, a stand of a tall, well-formed snowdrop, received 304

long ago labelled ‘Brenda Troyle’, is unarguably distinguished, for all that devotees continue to debate which stocks represent the true plant.

For weeks on end a large clump of Helleborus x nigercors draws attention, awakening when plantings of H. x hybridus (well represented in this garden) are still slumbering, though the firmtextured flowers of nigercors are still attractive when its relative neighbours reach their peak. Sensibly positioned at the front of the border, where its crowded heads of flowers – at first greenish-cream and later lime-coloured – glow in the midday sun, it is well into its stride by the time that the main snowdrop season comes round.

In late March, when spring is properly under way and brimstone butterflies are on the wing, a large Prunus incisa ‘The Bride’ has its short-lived moment of glory, while in the main border Scilla siberica ‘Spring Beauty’ puts on an eyecatching display, with generous drifts of Chionodoxa sardensis at the margins or intermingling, but apparently never hybridising. The softer blue, white-centred Chionodoxa is a very appealing support act, seeding around energetically enough not to be engulfed by the purplish-blue tide of the Scilla.

The tail-end of the border lies at right angles to the main stretch. Here a judiciously placed Lonicera x purpusii ‘Winter Beauty’ has been trained up an arch framing an entrance to the kitchen THE ALPINE GARDENER

GARDENS

Scilla siberica ‘Spring Beauty’ with generous drifts of Chionodoxa sardensis

garden, scenting the air on a mild, still day as early as February. The clonal name is misleading, scent being the plant’s chief virtue. The small, creamy-white flowers are more modest than almost any other honeysuckle. Sweet box, Sarcococca humilis, is also grown primarily for its perfume, though some gardeners use it as ground-cover, given its tolerance of a wide range of conditions. Helleborus x hybridus is present in a multitude of guises – anemone-centred; spotted and freckled seedlings of the sort that used to be grown under the name H. orientalis subsp. guttatus, whatever their provenance; yellows, pinks and slate 306

purples; and double forms derived from Blackthorn Nursery’s Party Dress Group. All have established well.

Some self-sow, a useful source of youngsters that are then distributed around the garden. But in truth there is no shortage of such plants, for a few years ago a sowing was made of seed sold as H. x hybridus Ashwood Garden Hybrids. This came from the renowned West Midlands nursery, and at one time the Gennards regularly travelled to London in order to enjoy its January and February displays of hellebores in the RHS Lawrence Hall.

These plants were lined out as twoTHE ALPINE GARDENER

BRINKFIELDS

Helleborus x hybridus is planted throughout the garden

year-olds in an area once occupied by a fruit cage in the large kitchen garden. In the well-worked, fertile loam they soon formed large clumps, scores of them given away to the couple’s family and friends or taken along to plant sales. All produced large, rounded flowers - white, pink, cream, yellow, heavily freckled or picotée-edged – which thrive alongside a smart trio of selected H. torquatus hybrids whose heads nod rather than face outwards, their colour both inside and out such a dark reddish-purple as to appear black.

I have referred to this general area as a kitchen garden. As you enter, a very SEPTEMBER 2012

precise, orderly set of beds can be seen, the rows marked out with a line, ridged where appropriate, and yielding crops as diverse as potatoes, beetroot, peas, runner beans and peonies. P. ‘Coral Charm’ and others were bought in quantity from a West Lothian nursery and are grown to provide cut flowers for the house.

Yet there is also a peripheral series of hooped frames with mist spraylines in place where trays full of plants, notably a pale lilac form of Primula vulgaris subsp. sibthorpii, are bulked up for deployment in relatively new areas such as the old tennis court. And to the 307

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right of the path there is a run of three greenhouses, shielded from the road not far behind by a tall, thick hawthorn hedge. The first of these is the smallest, yet includes a wide variety of plants – tibouchinas, for example, which are taken outdoors on mild days in early spring to harden off before producing their sumptuous blue-purple flowers from late spring onwards. I remember seeing them on forested mountain slopes in Ecuador but would hesitate to label them ‘alpine’.

A second greenhouse is primarily home to a large collection of hepaticas including named clones of H. nobilis var. japonica forma magna, which are slow to propagate, though great emphasis is placed on raising new stocks from seed.

(It has been mooted by Ben Zonneveld that the designation H. asiatica subsp. japonica is preferable, based on DNA work indicating a closer relationship with the other Asian species.)

Soaking old seed for 48 hours is recommended. Even so, for preference the pip-like, clustered seeds are harvested as soon as they dislodge from the ovary if brushed gently, typically in late April or early May. Sown straightaway and rather thinly, because germination can be prolific, they first push their cotyledons through in late winter and, apart from thinning, are much better left untouched until autumn of the following year before pricking out.

Numerous potfuls are reared, the fledglings planted in woodland beds and the rock garden when they reach flowering size, typically after three 308

years. Even when the flowering season is at an end, the exquisite leaf markings of certain species fascinate and give pleasure. Most noteworthy are H. americana and H. nobilis in some examples, such as those cultivated as ‘var. pyrenaica’ and H. n. var. japonica.

Crenate-lobed forms of H. nobilis, from a Lapland stock first built up in Sweden by that past champion of the genus Severin Schlyter, are also present, these ‘geranium-leaved’ morphs appealing to lovers of the offbeat.

The Chinese H. yamatutai is the first to bloom, often in November. It is still performing well several months later, when the rest of the collection comes into flower. Apart from a few specimen plants, for which clay half-pots are provided, the majority occupy plastic containers filled with leaf-mould, homemade (and heat-sterilised) compost, loam, sand, and perlite in place of grit.

The black ‘long tom’ pots sold under the labels Plantpak and Optipot are particularly useful, given that the wiry roots can go quite deep.

Having created an open, leafy structure, preserve this by potting up with a light touch: a good initial watering will suffice. Eschew the sort of downward ramming with fingers and thumbs akin to a pianist hammering out an all-digits-drubbing version of Chopsticks.

These are woodland plants, and while good light is advisable early in the year, A typically crowded bench in one of John Gennard’s alpine houses THE ALPINE GARDENER

GARDENS

As the flowers of hepaticas go over, the beautifully marbled foliage stands out

by mid-spring at the latest, through to October, artificial shading will greatly benefit plants grown under glass.

Plasticised green mesh as sold in almost any garden centre has long since taken over from the wooden laths that were routinely used 30 years ago or more – yet consider the latter, for they still have merit, if only you can source a supplier.

That said, new materials have now come on to the market, superseding the above, and there’s also the milkywhite deposit (‘Coolglass’) that has habitually been sprayed on to external glass surfaces. Specifically, a woven nylon netting, coated with intermittent 310

aluminium strips, deflects heat on its outer surface, while its white underside reflects incidental light within the greenhouse. Sold in 2.1m or 4.2m widths, it lasts on average four or five years and can be sourced from Simply Control, Blair Atholl, Perthshire (www. simplycontrol.com). It is available in several densities and the highest (70 per cent) is draped over the Hepatica greenhouse, whereas a 50 per cent grade is preferred for the neighbouring alpine house.

Before leaving the former, it is worth mentioning two long-standing residents: Primula ‘Arduaine’ (= P. bhutanica x THE ALPINE GARDENER

BRINKFIELDS

Primula bhutanica from the Kingdon Ward introduction of the 1930s

whitei) and P. bhutanica itself, from the Kingdon Ward introduction of the 1930s, which are regularly divided and thrive in the shelter and humidity of this well-ordered refuge. Even in Scotland, there are nowadays all too few gardens where this peerless Petiolarid, or even its hybrids, are long-term occupants.

More primulas, Europeans this time, can be found in the large alpine house, a cantilevered, 20ft x 10ft affair, with waist-high, reinforced aluminium staging and, on the outside, further benching running the length of the house either side, the shallow trays crowded with trilliums, cypripediums, SEPTEMBER 2012

hostas, a dozen Meconopsis integrifolia (their first flowers removed to build up the plants), other woodlanders, and that earliest flowering of showy buttercups, the Moroccan Ranunculus calandrinioides, which resented but easily survived its frosty singeing in the 2010-11 winter.

Indoors two Hotbox Levant fans are suspended from the eaves to boost air circulation. They do their job very well, for even in high summer, to enter is like retreating to a cool room, rather than – as can be the case with poorly ventilated examples – a walk-in baker’s oven.

Heaters from the same manufacturer are positioned on the floor at either end 311

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Pot-grown Lewisia tweedyi packed together in the alpine house

of the house. Disapprove if you wish, but then compare your losses under glass during the winter of 2010-11 with the negligible casualties here.

At one end there is a large clock, lest the owner loses all track of time while performing the innumerable tasks necessary to keep such a large collection in good order. Capillary matting has served very well throughout, allowing an extremely catholic range of plants to be gathered together side by side. Potgrown cassiopes sit next to a dozen very healthy Androsace vandellii, while Primula ‘Broadwell Milkmaid’ by the score 312

share a bench with their brasher, largerflowered sisters, P. ‘Clarence Elliott, with Lilium mackliniae seedlings jostling for position.

Multi-cell polystyrene plug trays are filled with bristly Meconopsis George Sherriff Group at their first true leaf stage. The list goes on: a block of Lewisia rediviva grown as single crowns in plastic pots; a multitudinous grouping of L. tweedyi as floriferous and in character as could be wished; a singular Helleborus thibetanus differing from the general run in unusual median pink striping distinguishing its February THE ALPINE GARDENER

BRINKFIELDS

Trillium albidum and Anemonella thalictroides in the shade of Osmanthus

flowers; Primula allionii ‘Anna Griffith’ in quantity; Clematis x cartmanii ‘Joe’ cascading over the side of the opposite bench, and Anemonella thalictroides ‘Oscar Schoaf ’ in rude good health. Not even a square inch stays unoccupied for long, though as in any productive alpine house, rearranging in response to repotting, pricking out and an influx of gifts and purchases is a never-ending discipline.

Inside and out, a tri-colour label system is used: yellow for a plant that needs repotting, green for those from which seed is wanted, and red for SEPTEMBER 2012

anything that is considered exceptional.

When growing plants in these sorts of numbers, a systematic form of marshalling makes very good sense.

Leaving the kitchen garden and greenhouse area and heading back towards the house, on the left is a curving bed where Cyclamen hederifolium is resoundingly at home, those further back interspersed with peonies. Some of the huge Cyclamen yield flowers in the hundreds. Among them, the silver and reddish leaf patterns of clumps belonging to Bowles’s Apollo Group stand out in the spring. After the 313

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Cyclamen hederifolium is present in the full range of pinks and whites

foliage has died away in early summer the ground is liberally top-dressed with composted bark fines, which provide a sufficient fillip in themselves. No supplementary fertiliser is necessary.

Usually the first flowers appear in July, with a climactic blooming in late August through to the middle of September.

In some gardens white seedlings predominate (‘albino vigour’ in action) but here the full range of pink and pure or pink-nosed whites are in congenial balance.

A narrow, snaking path cuts through two back-to-back shaded borders.

Moss-covered sections of branches 314

subtly define the route, and the boundaries have been softened by judicious plantings of ferns and the dwarf Hosta ‘Lemon Lime’, small divisions of which have now linked to blur the initially stark demarcations.

In April erythroniums (‘White Beauty’ especially) crowd the immediate hinterland, joined by a long-established clump of Arum creticum. In this rather cold garden it has come through various hard winters unscathed, a wellsheltered niche no doubt the reason for its resilience.

When you emerge at the other end, various woodlanders are chiefly at their THE ALPINE GARDENER

BRINKFIELDS

Arum creticum has survived hard winters in a well-sheltered niche

best in spring. Jeffersonia dubia has settled down well, while Trillium albidum (one of a dozen species grown in quantity at Brinkfields) revels in the overhead shade, with a foreground of Anemonella thalictroides, also used in several other areas. The Chinese, panicle-forming Mukdenia rossii, sometimes classified as a saxifrage (it belongs to the same family) and nowadays available in a number of versions including a variegated oddity, is thankfully represented by an ‘ordinary’ form.

Overarching all these, in April Osmanthus x burkwoodii (O. decorus x delavayi, syn. x Osmarea) is in full flower, SEPTEMBER 2012

dropping its scented flowers towards the end of the display to form a white carpet of confetti. Usually given as at most 3m tall, the tree at Brinkfields is almost twice that height.

This is no great surprise, however, because this is a garden where at almost every turn you can expect to have your preconceived notions of how plants behave redefined, and where bravura performances are given on a weekly basis.  John Gennard regrets that he is unable to accept visitors to Brinkfields.

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BLACKPOOL SHOW

Geoff ’s winning saxifrage is a ‘Gem’ MARCH 17, 2012 Report: Dave Riley Pictures: Don Peace

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he spring momentum that was in evidence a week earlier at the Loughborough Show continued apace at Blackpool, where Lionel Clarkson has chalked up 24 years as show secretary and is one of several unsung heroes nationally who mastermind our shows for the pleasure of the membership.

The show was enhanced by two noncompetitive exhibits, both of which received Silver Awards. Diane Clement staged a colourful display of hepaticas,

while Syd Cumbus put together a photographic exhibit depicting the flora of the Spanish Pyrenees.

Geoff Rollinson notched up a remarkable 32nd Farrer Medal with his Saxifraga ‘Coolock Gem’, which at the end of the show he handed over to a nurseryman. The potential number of cuttings will run into the high hundreds.

It was nine years before that Geoff first brought this outstanding raising to wider attention at a Loughborough Show, and while it is now a popular plant at the March shows, few if any other exhibitors grow it to a comparable standard. The Coolock clan also includes pink variants – ‘Coolock Kate’ and the

The Asian native Primula warshenewskiana, exhibited by Stan de Prato 316

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larger-flowered but paler ‘Coolock Jean’ – both also grown by Geoff.

Stan de Prato showed a large pan of Primula warshenewskiana, an all-tooseldom exhibited species from northwest Afghanistan, north Pakistan and Tajikistan. It is best described as a very short-stemmed Primula rosea relative, though with flowers borne seemingly singly on short, delicate stems. In fact they arise from the shortest of scapes which lengthen with age, just as the initially tight-clustered leaves can reach 7cm including the petiole. This is a plant of wet grassland and stream beds at altitudes up to 4,500m (14,750ft) and benefits from a humus-rich, friable soil and regular watering in summer.

Frequent division is recommended.

Ivor Betteridge regularly brings along plants that make you wonder: ‘Why am I not growing that?’ His Ipheion ‘Rolf Fiedler’, perfectly presented and the recipient of a Certificate of Merit, is SEPTEMBER 2012

Geoff Rollinson’s impressive Saxifraga ‘Coolock Gem’

named for the man who regularly sent seed to British gardeners from the southern Andes, especially in the 1970s and early 1980s when these mountains were little-visited by plant-hunting tourists. He also distributed material from much further east, originating in the Argentinian pampas and the areas north of Buenos Aires, where the land seldom rises above 500m (1,650ft).

This onion-scented native of Uruguay was for a long time known from only two hilltops, although recent reports suggest further sites have been discovered. Ivor considers that keeping the bulbs pot-bound promotes better flowering. Tony Hall at Kew raised a seedling from ‘Rolf Fiedler’ with darker blue flowers, named ‘Jessie’. Both are commercially available, though you will have to search harder for the 317

BLACKPOOL SHOW

Ipheion ‘Rolf Fiedler’ grown

by Ivor Betteridge and, right, Don Peace’s pan of Tulipa cretica

latter. Ivor also received the Hollett Trophy for the Open Section aggregate.

Snowdrops, so abundant just a few weeks earlier, were reduced to just one entry, but a notable one. Those expert cultivators Mike and Christine Brown brought along the late-flowering Galanthus elwesii ‘David Shackleton’.

Although linked by others with David Shackleton, who gardened at Beech Park, Clonsilla, County Dublin, he emphatically denied either rearing it or having supplied it from his garden. In this particular clump, some variation in the green basal markings of the inner tepals perhaps suggested that it had been infiltrated by subtly different seedlings, or it might simply have demonstrated that not all snowdrop markings are consistent and of a standard size.

On much the same theme, the classes 318

for seed-raised primulas are always well-entered. But several judges have requested that exhibitors make it clear when entering plants raised from seed that any plant bearing a clonal name is what the label says it is, and not a second generation (F2) seedling, which should not bear the same name.

How many plants shown as Primula allionii ‘Crowsley Variety’, for example, conform to the original description?

Two forms of Tulipa cretica were on show, the larger entered by Don Peace and grown in two parts John Innes No. 3 and one part grit. It is repotted in late summer, but in some years the bulbs are left in situ and only the compost above the base of the bulbs is replaced. Neither variant appeared to be stoloniferous, though the species can increase well from ‘droppers’ in some THE ALPINE GARDENER

Galanthus elwesii ‘David Shackleton’

examples. In others, vegetative increase is minimal and seed is the only option.

The winning silver/grey entry, Celmisia aff. gracilenta, also received the Kirby SEPTEMBER 2012

Cup for the best foliage plant in the show. Alan Furness had sown seed in January 2001, adding this distinctive plant to an already large collection of the genus. The leaves, an intoxicating mix of silver and dark markings, were clean and neatly presented.

Local member George Jaworski had a good day, winning the Donald Lowndes Memorial Bowl for the best plant in the Novice Section with Pleione Tongariro grex, a fascinating combination of salmon pink and orange with white and yellow lip markings. It is named after a National Park in New Zealand and was raised by Ian Butterfield from a cross between P. Versailles grex and P. pleionoides. George also took the Reginald Kaye Trophy for most first prize points in the section.

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KENT SHOW

Early-flowering orchid takes the top award MARCH 17, 2012 Report: Martin Sheader Pictures: Jon Evans

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he weather in the weeks before this show was predominantly mild, following a short cold spell. In response, plants in many gardens and greenhouses flowered rather patchily. However, as the benches filled with creditable exhibits, it quickly became apparent that at least some growers had succeeded in producing the goods, though numbers of dionysias and saxifrages were noticeably down.

The Farrer Medal was awarded to Ian Robertson’s large pan of Cypripedium formosanum, which typically blooms a month or more before any of the other species and hybrids. Ian uses a ‘synthetic’ compost of equal parts Seramis, grit and perlite and repots every three years.

His ten-year-old plant has routinely been taken outdoors during summer from the end of May to September.

In winter it is kept under staging in a frost-free greenhouse and started into growth in January, when it is fed using quarter-strength Maxicrop liquid feed.

Ian was also presented with the Cyclamen Society Salver for his notably well-grown and floriferous Cyclamen x schwarzii. This artificial hybrid between two narrow endemics, the Lebanese C. libanoticum and the southernmost 320

A single bloom of Ian Robertson’s Cypripedium formosanum

Turkish C. pseudibericum, can be either light pink or (as here) white. The cross was first reported almost 25 years ago but it is rarely shown, whereas another such cross, C. x wellensieckii (C. libanoticum x cyprium), appears frequently courtesy of several exhibitors.

It was good to see so many exhibitors in the Novice and Intermediate Sections.

John Millen won the Invicta Trophy for THE ALPINE GARDENER

the best plant in the first of these. His Saxifraga ‘Peach Melba’ had burgeoned over four years to fill a 19cm pot. Grown in a 60:40 mix of sand and leaf-mould, it had been kept outside until the flower buds started to open, then brought into the greenhouse to flower. The range of Kabschia saxifrage hybrids expands year on year, with British and Czech breeders proving particularly inventive.

In the Intermediate Section, a wellflowered pan of Hepatica nobilis var. japonica gained the Longfield Trophy for Peter Jacob. This woodlander will grow well in suitable spots in the garden as well as in containers, selfsowing from seed that is shed rapidly in earliest summer. Peter grows his plant in a mix of equal parts grit, JI2 and fine bark, preferring not to repot every year. The appearance of the plant can be greatly improved for exhibition SEPTEMBER 2012

Cyclamen x schwarzii and, below, the South African Geissorhiza inaequalis

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by carefully removing the old leaves once growth starts in late winter. The fresh crop of glossy leaves provides an attractive foil for the opening flowers and, particularly if shaded, these remain in good condition well into summer.

Another interesting hepatica, H. yamatutai, shown by Rosina Abbiss, was awarded a Certificate of Merit.

This western Chinese introduction is somewhat similar to H. henryi but has distinctively notched foliage. In most winters it has an extremely long flowering period, from just after Christmas until almost Easter. It benefits from the addition of dolomite to the compost.

George Elder again brought along some seldom-exhibited South African bulbs, including the rather elegant Geissorhiza inaequalis. This is a species found on rocky slopes of the Bokkeveld Escarpment and western Karoo, 322

growing in heavy clay in areas of winter rainfall. Seed obtained from Silverhill Seeds (Cape Town) was sown in 2011 and grown on in a mix of equal parts of John Innes No. 2, perlite and sand – very different from its clay-based substrate in nature. A comparable tolerance of different conditions in cultivation seems to be true for many species. G. inaequalis is summer-dormant, dying down shortly after flowering. Corms produce numerous cormlets, which grow rapidly to flowering size. There are more than 80 species in this showy, diverse genus. Some, such as G. alticola and G. nubicola, are bona fide mountain plants and it would be splendid to see them on our show benches.

Cecilia Coller has had greater success than most in cultivating asarums. One species in particular, Asarum trigynum f. album, always attracts attention when THE ALPINE GARDENER

Two prizewinning hepaticas: left, H. yamatutai shown by Rosina Abbiss and, right, Peter Jacob’s H. nobilis var. japonica

Eric Jarrett’s Dionysia ‘Inka Gold’

she brings it to a show and, in addition to being part of a successful six-pan exhibit, was awarded a Certificate of Merit. Compared with most of the species in the genus, it is much more compact and this year was flowering extraordinarily well. Cecilia grows her asarums in a leaf-mould-based compost SEPTEMBER 2012

and all are kept under a bench in the greenhouse. Old leaves are removed in spring and new leaves appear towards the end of and after flowering.

Kent has consistently been one of the best shows at which to witness exemplary dionysias and, although numbers were down this year, there were some interesting plants. Eric Jarrett, who used to organise this show but now lives in Gloucestershire, travelled back east with a particularly good Dionysia ‘Inka Gold’ that received a Certificate of Merit. This really outstanding variety, with flowers the colour of free-range egg yolks, is a Michael Kammerlander introduction, representing D. odora x tapetodes. An extremely gritty compost, good ventilation the year round and summer shading are essential.

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EAST LANCASHIRE SHOW

Exhibitors score their first double six

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he benches were colourfully congested as stewards rearranged the marker canes to squeeze in entries at this very well supported show. The sun shone too (no snow or torrential rain this year), so staging and collection of exhibits was a pleasurable experience.

Frank and Barbara Hoyle won both

Frank and Barbara Hoyle use their potcarrier to transport Primula ‘Pink Aire’, part of their large six-pan entry 324

MARCH 24, 2012 Report: Jim Almond Pictures: Jim Almond and Robert Rolfe

AGS Medals − their first time, and always a noteworthy achievement − coming first in the Open Section large and small six-pan classes. They had even constructed an ingenious wooden device to transport the heaviest pans to and from the benches.

Among their many fine exhibits was a venerable pan of Cyclamen pseudibericum. This had been passed on to them by Mike and Christine Brown in 2009, the responsibility taken on with considerable apprehension.

One look at the pan revealed that the Hoyles, too, had mastered the art of growing it to the highest standard and a Certificate of Merit was awarded.

Immediate success was not achieved however, for after the change in ownership flowers were sparse in 2010.

The following year, the plant was not repotted and, after the dry leaf and flower remnants were removed, it was placed under a greenhouse bench. As the first new autumnal leaves appeared it was returned to a fairly dry plunge.

Then, in January, when it was in good leaf and a few flowers had already appeared, it was plunged briefly in water containing a dose of liquid seaweed. The plant was returned to a THE ALPINE GARDENER

moist plunge in full light and the alpine house was shaded from late March onwards with curtains of white fleece.

This particular specimen is unusually vigorous and it has proved beneficial to remove some foliage to allow room for the flowers to come through.

Plants are transported to our shows using all manner of cunning methods, but this was surely the first time that an old-fashioned metal bread bin had been used to ferry a Farrer Medal plant.

Weighing in at 32kg (70lbs), a large pot containing a 16-year-old Draba ossetica was hauled into a taxi, then on to a train, and so to a waiting car by Robert Rolfe.

It arrived at the show hall with scarcely a petal shed. The winter before last had hit it particularly hard, with all the stock suffering dieback – rapidly made good SEPTEMBER 2012

Robert Rolfe’s Farrer Medal-winning Draba ossetica, fresh from its bread bin

once the new growth started in April – and some plants were killed outright.

Within reason a later cold snap in February does less damage. Conditions this year were rather similar to those of 2006, when the same plant was awarded its first Farrer. A compost based on fine grit, silver sand, perlite, a small amount of peat and just a pinch of loam is advisable, with liquid feeds every few weeks during summer, keeping the plant lightly shaded throughout.

Although a score of seedlings was raised from the one and only 1996 introduction, these varied in both vigour and pulchritude. Robert 325

EAST LANCASHIRE SHOW

Fritillaria aurea x pinardii and, below, F. hermonis ‘Anti-Lebanon Form’

prefers to take cuttings of just one selected form in early summer.

One would normally expect the Grainger Trophy for the Open Section aggregate to go to the winner(s) of both six-pan classes, but Don Peace accrued enough first-prize points from a distinguished array of plants to clinch the award.

Three of his fritillarias garnered red stickers. Fritillaria hermonis ‘AntiLebanon Form’ is from the AntiLebanon range that predominantly forms the border between Lebanon and Syria. Taller than other clones of F. hermonis in cultivation, it bulks up readily, producing ‘rice grain’ offsets that can be potted separately and grown on to flowering size in three or four years.

Three bulbs of F. alfredae subsp.

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THE ALPINE GARDENER

Androsace laevigata grown from seed collected in the Columbia River Gorge

glaucoviridis obtained by Don from Kath Dryden in 1998 didn’t split during the first four years of ownership, so were ‘cracked’ in two each year in the autumn. Two 19cm potfuls exemplified his success.

F. aurea x pinardii, acquired from the same source, is thought to represent the Rix 1603 clone. From 2005 onwards, increase has been achieved by separating the ‘rice grains’ from the flowering-size bulbs, which are also split into two when repotted. Don finds that a bone-dry summer dormancy is resented. All three are grown in two parts John Innes No. 3 and one part grit. F. hermonis is repotted each year.

The other two receive this treatment every other year, with just the top half SEPTEMBER 2012

of the compost replaced in between.

Geographical variation is part of the appeal of some alpine plants. Two distinct variants of Androsace laevigata were in fine form for Chris Lilley.

One (the finest) originated from seed collected in the Columbia River Gorge, the other from Saddle Mountain.

They were potted in a mix of 50 per cent John Innes No. 2, 40 per cent grit and 10 per cent home-made compost.

Careful management of moisture is crucial, and not just care with watering the compost. In summer, water is poured beneficially over the cushion. In winter, no overhead moisture is given.

Good ventilation and shading from hot sun is important during high summer.

327

NORTHUMBERLAND SHOW

Local Group celebrates show’s ruby anniversary MARCH 31, 2012 Report: Diane Clement Pictures: Mike Dale

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exham is a popular venue and this year the show celebrated its 40th anniversary. To mark the occasion, the Northumberland Group put on an excellent display with the theme ‘The Colour Ruby’, masterminded by Mala Janes. There were sections covering taxonomy, Latin pronunciation and a comprehensive selection of photographs of plants with ruby colouring either in their flowers, foliage or fruit.

Also exhibited was an account of the first show, held in 1972, with memorable names among the participants. Connie Greenfield was one of the judges, Michael Upward presented the prizes, Eric Watson won a trophy for the best three-pan entry and Bette Ivey won best in show with Cassiope ‘George Taylor’.

Of those mentioned in 1972, the lastnamed was the only one present at this year’s show and fittingly she gave a speech, after which show secretary Peter Maguire and Scottish Rock Garden Club President Liz Mills cut a celebratory cake.

Primula petelotii won the Sandhoe Trophy for the best plant in a 19cm

Cryptantha humilis (var. nana) – oblivious to the fuss about its name – shown

by Alan Furness

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Robin Pickering showed the Vietnamese native Primula petelotii

pot, Robin Pickering having bought it from Aberconwy Nursery only last year. Found at 1,800-2,000m (5,9006,800ft) on Mount Chapa in Vietnam, it is generally regarded as slightly tender.

But Robin had forgotten this early last winter, so it had been left outdoors, where it survived a couple of early frosts. From then on it has been given frost-free conditions. The flowers last well – this Primula appeared week after week on the show bench, well into April. Propagation is conducted chiefly by growing on the plantlets that form at the end of freely produced stolons. Kept lightly shaded and always moist at the root, it is one of the most promising recent Primula introductions.

Cryptantha humilis (var. nana) was shown by Alan Furness in the class for SEPTEMBER 2012

a plant rare in cultivation. Originally described as C. nana, then more recently repositioned as C. humilis var. nana, according to the US Flora, it has now been subsumed within C. humilis along with several other varieties. The genus has its heartland in the intermontane Great Basin of Nevada and Utah, an area of low rainfall and cold winters, with low humus, ‘raw’ soils, often unique in texture and chemistry. This harsh environment is home to many endemic species, often of decidedly limited distribution. Seed obtained from Alan Bradshaw of Alplains had been sourced in Montrose County, western Colorado, at an altitude of 2,400m (7,900ft) from an area of gravel beds. Sown in January 2010, it had produced flowering plants the following year, aping the related 329

NORTHUMBERLAND SHOW

Chris Lilley’s exemplary Saxifraga x edithae ‘Bridget’

and quick-to-mature genus Myosotis.

The plant, kept in an alpine house and plunged but not watered directly in winter, has been grown in a compost of equal parts loam and flint grits with no added humus. Nestling close to the caespitose tufts of bristly foliage, the flattopped clusters of white flowers have petals fused into a five-lobed corolla, with a raised yellow ring in the centre. In some the centre had faded to a creamy white after just three days, even if pollination hadn’t occurred. The pale-centred flowers have reduced reproduction potential, the change in colour serving as a signal to discourage pollinators.Saxifraga x edithae ‘Bridget’, an Engleria favourite of longstanding, won a Forrest Medal for Chris Lilley. An old hybrid between Saxifraga marginata var. coriophylla and S. stribryni, dating from an unknown Irish breeder’s 330

efforts in the 1930s, it combines the crozier-stemmed, dark pink flowers of S. stribryni with the larger, flatter-shaped white flowers of Saxifraga marginata, resulting in a plant with multiple stems of pale pink flowers in generous quantities. The leaf rosettes retain the pronounced silvering of S. stribryni. S. marginata also manifests a silveriness in its smaller (sometimes much smaller) and shorter leaves. Now some 16 years old, this prize specimen grows in a clay pot that is kept outside the year round – an important point, for this ensures that the flowering stems remain short.

It grows very slowly, so does not need regular repotting. A weak liquid feed is applied a couple of times after flowering has finished, and on into early summer.

Primula elatior (Bradfield form), shown

by John Richards, was a genuine THE ALPINE GARDENER

Townsendia rothrockii won a Certificate of Merit for Tom Green

example of our native oxlip. There have been some outcrossed, reddish cowslips on the show benches of late, and similarly exhibits of P. elatior are sometimes more like alpine/subalpine versions from continental Europe, or else represent the hybrid between the primrose and cowslip, P. x polyantha (P. veris x vulgaris), known colloquially as ‘polyanthus’ or ‘the false oxlip’.

In Britain, the only truly wild populations of Primula elatior are found in broad-leaved woodlands, colonising damp, chalky soil on the county boundaries of Cambridge, Suffolk and Essex. The plant exhibited was of a more delicate nature than its close relative, the commonly seen Primula veris, and is easily distinguished by its one-sided umbel of paler, larger and flatter-shaped flowers with SEPTEMBER 2012

fewer orange markings in the throat.

Townsendia rothrockii earned a Certificate of Merit for local grower Tom Green.

He obtained it from an AGS members’ sales table some ten years ago. Raised from wild seed collected in Mesa, Colorado, it is best propagated at least every other year. The harvest of rapidly wind-dispersed seed is always worth collecting, for the parent plant can depart this life very suddenly. That said, Tom finds that his plant doesn’t set seed. He grows it in a 50-50 mixture of John Innes No. 2 and grit. The flower buds abort if it gets too dry, so the plant is placed outdoors in all but very heavy rain, then taken under glass protection for the winter, when it is kept just moist.

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SOUTH WEST SHOW

It’s a Daphne Day down in Devon MARCH 31, 2012 Report: Eric Jarrett Pictures: Jon Evans

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arch 2012 was one of the driest and sunniest in history, but it was perhaps no surprise that the day of the show was cold and grey. British readers will know that it ushered in one of the coldest, wettest Aprils on record.

No matter, for on entering the show hall, one soon forgot about the drought orders in parts of the country and enjoyed the spectacle within.

A new Daphne from Robin White,

entered in the class for a non-ericaceous shrub, was indeed a striking plant. D. ‘Colinton Crown’ is a hybrid between D. x eschmannii (itself a hybrid between D. cneorum and D. blagayana) and, surprisingly, D. petraea. It occurred in Cyril Lafong’s garden in Fife a few years ago. To me, it looked like a potentially fairly substantial, low-growing shrub, probably more suited to the open garden rather than a pot when it reaches maturity. The large, scented, clustered flowers were as suggestive of a very good Viburnum as a Daphne.

Receiving the Farrer Medal on its first outing, it had been temporarily placed

Peter Summers’ charming example of the Sichuan native Primula kialensis

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THE ALPINE GARDENER

Daphne ‘Colinton Crown’ won the Farrer Medal for Robin White on its first outing to a show

by its owner in a polytunnel occupied principally by broccoli. The pungency of the brassica meant that bees couldn’t detect the daphne’s sweet scent (they bite through the base of flowers without such subterfuge). Also, the shade of the crop kept the already open flowers sheltered from the sun, with just the back third positioned in full sun so that it caught up with the remainder, coming to its best on the day of the show. Robin also won the East Devon Trophy for the best plant in a 19cm pot with the yellow-flowered, western Chinese D. modesta (pictured on the back cover of this issue), and showed an impressive D. ‘Weber’s Findling’. As far as the judges were concerned, it was emphatically a Daphne Day. I always make a point of inspecting SEPTEMBER 2012

the classes for Intermediate and Novice exhibitors. Many of these will, one hopes, go on in due course to compete in the Open Section. I was impressed by the standard and quality of various exhibits, in particular Peter Summers’ plant of the Chinese Primula kialensis, a native of Sichuan resembling a delicate version of P. yunnanensis and originally introduced by Farrer in 1915. Peter carried off the Dartmoor Trophy for the most first-prize points in the Intermediate Section.

Margaret Grimbly’s Pleione bulbocodioides won the Otter Trophy for the best plant in the Novice Section, while the Cornwall Trophy for the best plant in the Intermediate Section went to P. formosana, grown by Alan Flack. It was interesting to see the different approaches adopted by these 333

SOUTH WEST SHOW

Margaret Grimbly’s Pleione bulbocodioides – best plant in the Novice Section

growers.Whereas P. bulbocodioides had been cultivated in the conventional manner, with the pseudobulbs grown on individually, the grouping of P. formosana had been left to bulk up naturally, resulting in a dense clump of bulbs. Surprisingly, this had not reduced the amount of flowers produced.

Bob and Rannveig Wallis just missed out on the premier award with their phenomenal Iris suaveolens (a former Farrer Medal plant, at its best for just one or two days before the main crop withers away), receiving consolation by winning the Ivor Barton Memorial Trophy for six pans of monocotyledonous plants.

The exhibit contained an assortment of seldom-seen and well-grown plants. I particularly liked Muscari macbeathianum.

This has been around for a few years but it is infrequently exhibited; seldom has it been grown as well. Another of 334

their plants, Fritillaria orientalis, drew comments that the exhibit was rather lax. These were quickly dispelled when it was explained that this was how it grew in nature. A cliff dweller, the foliage and flowers hang down, making it a trifle unruly when grown in a pot.

For me it was a plant ‘having a bad hair day’ but charming nonetheless.

Surprisingly, for a show at this time of the year, there were no six-pan exhibits in either the large or small AGS Medal classes. This doubtless benefited other classes by freeing-up plants that might otherwise have been deployed there. A particularly good threepan, shown by Lee and Julie Martin, brought together Narcissus bulbocodium subsp. obesus, Alkanna aucheriana and Androsace idahoensis x laevigata. These exhibitors are well known for their skill in producing excellent pans of the firstTHE ALPINE GARDENER

Androsace idahoensis x laevigata exhibited by Lee and Julie Martin

named: the example shown, although slightly smaller than we have sometimes seen, was still a fine demonstration of how to grow this showiest of dwarf daffodils. It was the Androsace that stood out, with its bright pink flowers almost completely covering the loose cushion. A chance hybrid between the two species, it makes rare appearances at shows. I’m sure that all who saw this exhibit put it down on their wish list.

Regular visitors to AGS shows will be well aware of Jean Morris’s exquisite needlecraft. It was a further delight that she entered the plant classes with some superb exhibits, her Primula ‘Broadwell Milkmaid’, P. allionii KRD668/87 and P. ‘Stella’ easily winning their class. This was only the start: she went on to gain the Peter Edwards Memorial Trophy for most points in the Primulaceae classes.

Some people assert that you have a SEPTEMBER 2012

chance of winning first places at shows only if you enter rare or difficult plants.

To prove them wrong, one only needed to look at Rhododendron ‘Pintail’. Considered an easy hybrid, it was presented in perfect condition by Sam and Mavis Lloyd and well deserved its first prize.

I was also impressed by the winning exhibit of six cut alpine flowers (a class not mentioned much in these reports). Barry Starling’s exhibit had all its components in perfect condition.

Particularly memorable was Rhododendron kongboense, with its dark raspberry pink flowers, complemented by the yellow of R. luteifolium, both rare in cultivation.

There was also a superb Erythronium revolutum from God’s Valley (Oregon) and the pale pink Shortia ‘Leona’. Given that these represented the exhibitor’s cut flowers, what must his garden be like?

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ULSTER SHOW

Happy faces – and the plants were smiling, too MARCH 31, 2012 Report: Billy Moore Pictures: Heather Smith

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here are obvious criteria for assessing the success or otherwise of a show, such as the number of exhibits and the quality of plants. But one factor is often overlooked: was it a happy occasion?

Answers to this question can only be subjective, for one person’s memorable show can be another’s disaster, depending on how the judging turns out.

For most of those present, this year’s Ulster Show was a very happy event.

While the number of exhibits was down, there were many plants of high quality.

My enjoyment came not from personal triumphs − I scraped just one first − but from seeing smiling faces everywhere.

Whatever steps show secretaries should take to bring this about, Pat Crossley − after over 30 years in the job, one of the longest-ever serving of this breed − got things just right.

Before coming to the plants, mention must be made of the excellent Artistic Section where, with six firsts, Joan and Liam McCaughey bagged the aggregate award, as well as Certificates of Merit for two of their entries. A

Cyclamen persicum shown by Mac Dunlop in the Novice Section.

Having more than one tuber in the pot is responsible for the variation in flower colour

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Gold Award went to David Lapsley’s non-competitive photographic exhibit, ‘Spring and early summer in my garden’.

Harold McBride typically had a very successful show, winning several awards including the Farrer Medal, unanimously bestowed on his sumptuously flowered Rhododendron ludlowii hybrid. He bought it in 2005 from a Suffolk nursery in a 10cm pot and grows it in the open garden, from where it was lifted in February and potted up for exhibition. (Robert Rolfe adds: This looks very much like one of the Glendoick ‘Bird’ hybrids involving R. keiskei var. ozawae ‘Yaku Fairy’, such as ‘Wren’, though flowering a week or two earlier than one might expect.)

Harold also received Certificates of Merit for Rhododendron pumilum SEPTEMBER 2012

Rhododendron ludlowii hybrid, shown

by Harold McBride

and for a large pan of Veronica bombycina var. bolkardaghensis, a Turkish endemic suited to the alpine house.

The Novice Section was dominated by new exhibitor Mac Dunlop, who received most first-prize points. His Cyclamen persicum was deemed the best plant in flower. Seed-raised and potted on a couple of times, the tubers had been in their present pot for three years, receiving just an occasional feed. There were probably four of these, accounting for the variation in flower colour and leaf pattern, which made for an eye-catching exhibit.

The Betty Hill Trophy for best plant in the Intermediate Section 337

ULSTER SHOW

Ian Christie’s Primula denticulata ‘Rubin Ball’ and, right, Primula vulgaris ‘Maisie Michael’, staged by Liam Byrne

went to Joan and Liam McCaughey’s Draba longisiliqua (they’re not just photographers, you know). This relatively straightforward alpine house plant needs a free-draining compost and a draughty position. Kay McDowell won the J.A.E. Hill Trophy for the most first-prize points in the section.

Tropaeolums can be difficult to present for exhibition, often requiring elaborate structures to support their climbing growths. This is especially true of T. tricolor, which can grow 1m or more high. T. azureum is more restrained and as such more suitable for display, but even when its flowers are perfect and the upper foliage is fresh, the lower leaves tend to turn brown, spoiling the overall appearance of the plant. Not so Val Keegan’s pristine exhibit, which was only second in its class − an example of the stiff competition in the Open 338

Section. This desirable species, from the foothills of the Chilean Andes, is easily raised from seed and must be repotted regularly and kept completely dry when dormant. Hardier than is sometimes suggested, one specimen has endured several degrees of frost in my alpine house over a number of years.

Hepaticas seldom feature at the two Irish shows, usually having gone over by the customary April dates. But this year, Ian Christie showed the lovely Hepatica x media ‘Millstream Merlin’, which, having been brought from one of the coldest parts of Scotland, was still in good flower. Awarded the SRGC Quaich for the best plant in a 19cm pot, it is sterile and has to be reproduced by careful division either in very early spring or in autumn.

Another of Ian’s exhibits, the vividly coloured Primula denticulata ‘Rubin Ball’, THE ALPINE GARDENER

positively glowed on the bench. It is a German selection of this well-known and easy Asiatic species, which varies from pure white to almost crimson in flower colour. This example has been with Ian for more than ten years and is propagated only by division.

Liam Byrne again received the Cooke Cup for the most first-prize points in the Open Section as well as a Certificate of Merit for an excellent Lewisia tweedyi.

He also exhibited Primula vulgaris ‘Maisie Michael’, a plant raised by Joe Kennedy of Ballycastle, County Antrim, a lifelong amateur breeder of old Irish primroses who featured on BBC2’s Gardeners’ World the evening before the show. This lovely primrose, named for the late Maisie, a very popular member of the Ulster Group until her death 25 years ago, is an excellent garden plant that should be more widely grown.

SEPTEMBER 2012

Val Keegan’s Tropaeolum azureum 339

CZECH ROCK GARDENING

Rock gardening in the Bohemian style

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he Czech Rock Garden Society is preparing for the Second Czech International Rock Garden Conference in May next year. To set the scene for this, it is my privilege, pleasure and duty to introduce you to the methods we use to grow rock plants in this part of Europe. As well as the common Czech way of rock gardening, we have some rather unconventional styles.

First, allow me briefly to describe our part of Europe and its history. In ancient times, a happy and cultured Celtic tribe lived in the heart of Europe in a climatically calm lowland encircled by mountains. This tribe was called the Boii and their land and home was Boihaemum. The Boii were skilled craftsmen and musicians. History tells us that they were weakened by Germans (Marcomans) and later pushed towards the west by strong and barbaric Slavonic tribes. This led to the ‘hybridising’ of the Boii, which had one positive result: the Czechs. Here in Czechia or Bohemia (after Boihaemum) we have the qualities of heterozygosity – the vigour of complicated hybrids.

We have a good aptitude for the arts and have produced many fine talents, including the composer Antonín Dvořák and the painter Alfons Mucha.

Many Czech artists in Paris in the 19th Century were very unorthodox in their 340

Alpine gardeners around the globe owe a great debt to the Czechs, particularly for their innovations in rock garden construction and the breeding of Kabschia saxifrages. In this article, Zdeněk Zvolánek, President of the Czech Rock Garden Society, looks at the history and achievements of Bohemian rock gardeners ahead of next year’s Czech International Rock Garden Conference philosophy, shunned the accepted practices of day-to-day life and were called Bohemians. Like other nations with a Celtic origin, we are good at landscaping, building rockworks and collecting alpines in distant and dangerous places. In southern Bohemia we keep alive a tradition of playing bagpipes.

Previously Czechoslovakia had the shape of a fat carp but 15 years ago our destiny cut off its long tail (called Slovakia). I think that our only loss was the endemic Daphne arbuscula and the well known name of our state.

The Czech Republic has two hilly THE ALPINE GARDENER

CZECH ROCK GARDENING

This rock garden with a tufa outcrop is typical of many in the Czech Republic SEPTEMBER 2012

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CZECH ROCK GARDENING

Folded limestones in one of many old quarries in the Czech Republic

lowlands separated by the CzechMoravian Highland, around which is a complicated reef of mountains forming our boundaries with Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Austria. The western lowland is in Czechia (Bohemia) and the eastern one in Moravia. Both have lovely limestone areas (Czech Karst and Moravian Karst) and the local gardeners have the advantages and disadvantages of hot, dry and frosty continental weather. Here the elevation is 200-300m above sea level with an annual precipitation of 500-600mm.

Our limestone areas are relatively small and have plenty of protruding igneous 342

rocks such as dolerite (the basic diabase) together with alkaline shales.

These lowlands are surrounded by large areas of acid rocks, mainly granite, its relatives and other metamorphic rocks. Our best growers of true alpines garden on the acid foothills of mountains, where there is a naturally cooler and moister microclimate at an altitude of 400-600m and annual rainfall of 600-800mm. In winter, most snow falls on our Highland and on the flanks of our mountains.

From the geological point of view, both Moravia and Bohemia have old rock formations. Disused quarries mean THE ALPINE GARDENER

CZECH ROCK GARDENING

Penstemon ‘Puyallup Pink’ performs well in Zdeněk’s garden at Karlik

that there is good availability of free or relatively cheap rock and is one of the reasons that rock gardening thrives in this hollow of the Earth. Our muchdepleted deposits of tufa (a soft kind of travertine) are now protected in state reservations. Tufa from neighbouring Slovakia is very expensive, so some people source their tufa in Slovenia.

In the limestone lowlands, our deciduous forests – composed mainly of oak and hornbeam – offer our richest flora. The best display is in spring when millions of blue (rarely pink or white) Hepatica nobilis, white Anemone nemorosa (blended with Corydalis solida), pink SEPTEMBER 2012

Dictamnus albus and yellow Primula veris appear.

Also present, though in smaller numbers, are Daphne mezereum and Lilium martagon. In open ground with limestone rock we have Alyssum saxatile, Pulsatilla pratensis var. nigricans, Anemone sylvestris, Linum perenne and Centaurea triumfettii. Iris pumila, I. aphylla and I. arenaria offer charming but too brief displays. The rarest and the greatest treasures are Adonis vernalis, Daphne cneorum, Dracocephalum austriacum and various orchids.

We have lovely Cyclamen purpurascens in a narrow strip of deciduous forest near 343

CZECH ROCK GARDENING Austria, while Jovibarba sobolifera, Potentilla arenaria and Saxifraga paniculata decorate our cliffs. In my opinion, the best saxatile fern in Bohemia is Asplenium septentrionale, which can be found on vertical cliffs in almost full sun. The tiny star-of-Bethlehem, Gagea bohemica, is rare. We are fortunate in having large areas which are wet in spring and offer great displays of Galanthus nivalis and Leucojum vernum var. carpaticum.

Small Moravian areas of disintegrated granite offer elegant Pulsatilla grandis and we are proud of Pulsatilla patens in north-west Bohemia. Our lower mountains rarely offer the robust Soldanella montana, which is the emblem of the Prague Rock Garden Club. The highest mountain is Snežka (Snow Peak) at 1,603m (5,260ft). It is an old, bald peak above the tree-line with charming Primula minima forma sudetica and a few areas of Pulsatilla vernalis. This peak marks the edge of the last ice sheet.

The story of Czech rock gardening began with Count Sylva-Tarrouca, who built a great alpinum on natural outcrops in the valley of his famous Průhonice Park near Prague. He grew a modern assortment of alpines between 1890 and 1925.

Czechoslovakia was one of the most advanced cultural and industrial countries in Europe before the Second World War and it is natural that there was a keen interest in rock gardening here. We had at least four good nurseries specialising in alpines in the 1930s, and our plantswoman Marie Stivínová invented a method of selling Kabschia saxifrages established in small pieces of tufa.

The years after the war were 344

unfortunate for alpines in Bohemia.

Our communist rulers, puppets of the Soviet Union, destroyed the private ‘capitalist’ nurseries and stopped the official importing of rock garden plants. Only a few rock gardeners were permitted to make short journeys to capitalist countries and the only foreign language taught in schools was Russian.

For 40 years we lost the freedom of connection with the Western world and its modern technologies. Fortunately our English and German-speaking growers found secret ways to exchange plants with their Western friends. We were also helped by the seed exchanges of the Alpine Garden Society and the Scottish Rock Garden Club.

The North American Rock Garden Society paid the membership for about 15 of the best Czech rock gardeners and this was a great leap forward.

During this dark period, the most active Czech growers collected seed in eastern Europe (I was among them). Only a few lucky people with good contacts were given the privilege to search for bulbs and plants in the Soviet Union (I was not among them).

Our best growers set up the Prague Rock Garden Club in 1970 and at present there are 14 clubs of rock gardeners in our state of 10 million inhabitants. In October 2011, the Czech Rock Garden Society was born with the aims of running the international conference and fostering connections between Czech-speaking rock gardeners.

When I joined the Prague club in 1970, all the members who were considered to be the better growers had small outcrops of tufa planted THE ALPINE GARDENER

CZECH ROCK GARDENING

Draba polytricha growing in full sun in a tufa boulder in a Czech garden

with collections of Kabschia saxifrages, androsaces, drabas and other true alpines. A popular growing method was to keep planted-up tufa blocks soaking SEPTEMBER 2012

in shallow concrete ponds during the growing season. The ponds were drained during winter. In this way many alpines could withstand full sun. Other 345

CZECH ROCK GARDENING

Saxifraga ‘Laka’, left, and S. ‘Foxtrot’, centre, both Czech cultivars

advantages were that free-standing tufa could be taken to shows and that slugs found it difficult to traverse the rock to attack the plants. Today the most popular construction is a tufa wall with pipes dripping water into a thick sheet of felt behind the boulders.

Usually the most common rockwork (excluding tufa) in members’ gardens was a so-called free arrangement, which involved the aesthetic placing of rocks together without following strict geological rules. Some rock gardeners, such as Jaromír Grulich, Dušan Pangrác, Karel Lang and Ota Vydra, built handsome outcrops in this 346

style. It was a young member, Josef Halda, who started to build gardens using a system of parallel layers of pieces of rock arranged at an angle of 45 degrees or lower in the 1970s.

This was revolutionary, casting aside the prevailing old dogmatic styles and methods of building rock gardens.

This process of developing ideas about building natural outcrops has been regularly presented at our shows in Prague, which last for up to three weeks and where a few times the number of visitors has exceeded 30,000 people.

During the 35-year history of our shows, rock garden construction THE ALPINE GARDENER

CZECH ROCK GARDENING

Saxifraga ‘Czech Karst’ at the Prague Rock Garden Club Spring Show

has evolved with the creations of Dušan Pangrác, Josef Halda, Vojtěch Holubec, Ota Vlasák and myself. All the naturalistic outcrops seen at the shows have set a great example to our members and the general public. Many Czech rock gardens are now an inspiration for progressive rock gardeners around the world. The five-day post-conference tour from May 6-10 next year will visit 18 such gardens and the famous Prague May Show.

Another feather in the Czech cap is our breeding of Kabschia (section Porphyrion) saxifrages. Dr Radvan Horný is the father of the breeding SEPTEMBER 2012

movement. He revised the confusion of the old British and German cultivars and produced his book, Porophyllum Saxifrages, which is the bible for all saxifrage followers. Dr Horný bred his own cultivars such as the soft yellow S. ‘Lenka’. He also brought all the best American cultivars (bred by Lincoln Foster) into our collections.

The first real star among Czech Kabschia breeders was František Holenka, who bred classic cultivars such as ‘Golden Prague’, ‘Karel Čapek’ and ‘Galaxie’ as well as a dozen new hybrids named after parts of Prague including S. x ‘Dejvice’, ‘Florenc’ and ‘Bertramka’.

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A clone of Gentiana angustifolia in Zdeněk’s garden at Karlik 348

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CZECH ROCK GARDENING

A large trough packed with tufa at the Prague Rock Garden Club Spring Show

His S. x megasaeflora ‘Krakatit’ is the marvellous mother of Karel Lang’s new hybrids S. x ‘Johann Wolfgang Goethe’ (pollen parent S. lowndesii), ‘Golem’ and ‘Joyce Carruthers’ (pollen parent S. kotschyi).

The late Miroslav Kraus bred about 12 good cultivars such as the yellow S. ‘Thalia’, white ‘Jan Neruda’ and pale yellow ‘Humoreska’. Two younger breeders, Jan Burgel and Karel Lang, have produced a great spectrum of modern cultivars during the past 15 years. Jan used Saxifraga poluniniana to SEPTEMBER 2012

breed popular quick-growing hybrids such as S. x poluanglica ‘Your Success’, ‘Your Friend’ and ‘Your Kiss’.

The primary focus of Karel Lang was to cross new ‘species’ in cultivation to produce distinct and controlled hybrids for our gardens. He used material from the collections of Ron McBeath, George Smith, Henrik Zetterlund, Harry Jans and Josef Jurašek and made many new combinations. One of them I described as Saxifraga x caroli-langii (S. marginata x S. dinnikii), which is the lovely cultivar ‘Verona’.

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Saxifraga ‘Humoreska’, bred by the late Miroslav Kraus

Karel’s successful older hybrids include S. ‘Evening Star’ and ‘Joy Bishop’. Both have excellent blooming qualities and resistance to drier weather when grown in cooler crevices. Eastern Bohemia is one of a few cradles for the cultivation of saxifrages, with good collections in the hands of Jiří Novák, Dr Oldřich Maixner and Karel Pěch. Dr Maixner has produced the well-known 350

cultivars S. ‘Niobe’ and ‘Charon’ and half a dozen newly described ones.

The general rules for cultivating Porphyrion section saxifrages are very similar to those for saxatile true alpines.

Alpines are difficult in many garden environments where the weather, latitude and altitude are not optimal.

In places like Tromsø, North Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and the THE ALPINE GARDENER

CZECH ROCK GARDENING Czech Moravian Highland they can be relatively easy to grow. In difficult areas like the Czech Karst, which is hot, dry and low, crevice cultivation makes them easier to grow. Crevice gardens are also a good solution in warm lowlands with high rainfall, high humidity and poor drainage.

Generally speaking, saxatile alpines require a cool, deep root run with constant moisture at the roots. They thrive in an open position with plenty of overhead light but must be sheltered from scorching sun in summer.

In crevice gardens, the cool root run is provided by the crevice itself and the shading both from planting in a certain aspect (facing east or north) and from shadows cast by vertical rockwork.

Sometimes, however, in very hot areas this may not be sufficient and artificial shading becomes essential.

It is crucial not to water during and before shading. This is a recipe for fungal or bacterial problems, particularly in compost mixtures that contain unsterilised leaf-mould.

The use of tufa is very popular and successful in the Czech Republic, with

the best results at altitudes of 400m (1,300ft) and higher. It has the same advantages as crevice planting but requires a lot of water in the summer and a constant war against mosses and liverworts.

Tufa gardens with elongated crevices filled with absorbent materials, such as old bricks or coarse ash mixed with plenty of tufa grit, are more common now and often support the most difficult alpines.

Quite outstanding is the southern rock garden slope of Stanislav Čepička in Praha-Radotín. Half the slope is covered with tufa while the other half is a limestone crevice garden. Here, in full sunshine, the tufa needs double the normal amount of water during Stanislav’s early morning watering round.

PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS

264: Robert Rolfe. Page 265: Vic Aspland. Page 266: John Glover. Pages 268-271: Vic Aspland. Pages 272-281: Yiannis Christofides. Pages 283-286: Phillip Cribb. Page 287: Graham Rankin. Pages 288-295: photographs credited individually. Page 296: John Gennard. Pages 298-315: Robert Rolfe.

Pages 316-339: photographs credited on each show report. Pages 341-350: Zdeněk Zvolánek.

Page 235: Jon Evans. Page 237: John Fitzpatrick. Pages 238-241: Jim McGregor. Page 243: Diane Clement.

Pages 248, 249: Claude Hitching.

Pages 250-257: Robert Rolfe. Page 259: illustration by Martin Northrop.

Page 261: Chris Norton. Page 263: illustration by Martin Northrop. Page SEPTEMBER 2012

 The Second Czech International Rock Garden Conference will take place from May 2 to May 5, 2013, at the Wellness and Congress Hotel Dvořák in Tábor. For further details and to reserve a place, visit www.czrgs.cz.

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