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Tales from a

February, with its frosty mornings and bitter winds, always reminds me of summer berries. Or more specifically, of summer berry bush management. The half-wild garden is home to an

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Home & Garden a half-wild garden... ...with Carrie Triffet

abundance of berry bushes planted long ago, and they’ve been left on their own to colonise the area at will. It’s a mini-madhouse-wilderness down in Berry Bottom, and February is the only time of year the vegetation dies back enough for me to get in there with intent to prune. When we first took on this overgrown acre, we didn’t even know the berries were there. All by themselves in that first year, those bushes did their crazy half-wild thing, rewarding us with buckets of plump, ripe blackcurrants and raspberries throughout the summer and autumn. It’s become a sort of tradition, now. I prune once in February, then completely neglect that area for the rest of the year. The bushes self-mulch with a dense mat of nutritious decomposing weed material, which feeds them and helps them store water in dry months. And we, in turn, reap the ridiculously healthy harvest, with plenty of fruit left over on hard-to-reach branches for birds and insects to enjoy. It’s a good system. If only we could figure out how to apply it to cauliflowers. But I suppose this berry example is essentially what the Japanese natural forest gardening folk must be talking about: Letting Nature do virtually all of the work, and just showing up in time to collect the harvest. This wouldn’t work in every garden, of course. It takes plenty of space, a pretty high tolerance for uncultivated chaos (at least in certain designated areas), and a willingness to leave well enough alone. But oh, those glorious berries, bursting with goodness. Not to mention the butterflies and bees, the wildflowers and dog roses, the brambles and toads and grasshoppers and a thousand other species I can’t begin to name, all of whom thrive cheek by jowl with unchecked abandon. The thought of it cheers me even now, in the stark February chill. So I’m off for a hot date with a cold pair of secateurs, for my annual bit of controlled berry bush meddling. I’ll be pruning out the deadwood—bringing the temporary illusion of order to chaos, as I dream of berrylicious summers to come.

Carrie Triffet is an award winning author of four books, none of which are about gardening.

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Spring will soon be upon us, heralding more favourable conditions that tempt dormant seeds out of their winter slumber. The chances are you will be planning what to grow and perhaps opening a few packets of seeds over the next few weeks. I thought it an appropriate time to highlight several aspects about seeds that may fascinate. Time travel may be a popular subject in science fiction, but where plants are concerned this journey is science fact. Most plants produce seeds –packages of life that under certain circumstances remain dormant until tempted to wake by more favourable conditions. The amount of time seeds remain dormant and viable depends on the genetics of the plant and on the environment they experience during dormancy. Gardeners know that parsnip seeds (and their related kin) lose viability within a year or two, so fresh seeds are best purchased annually. At one extreme some plants (mainly from tropical regions) lack dormancy. These germinate when still attached to the parent plant. You can investigate this yourself the next time you eat a fresh mango. Carefully open the tough fibrous seed coat and you will discover an emerging root and shoot. Pot them up and you will have a houseplant for free. Plants that come from areas where seasonality is more pronounced often experience less favourable growing conditions. These plants adopt a range of mechanisms (hard seed coats, chemicals that need to be broken down prior to germination) that ensure their seeds do not germinate at the wrong time of year. Seedbanks, scientific laboratories specialising in saving the world’s flora, adopt clever techniques to extend seed dormancy without affecting their viability. The most used is careful drying then placing them in a freezer at 20˚C below zero. Under these conditions some seeds should remain viable for several thousands of years. While this may seem a bit fanciful and hard to prove, the natural world has demonstrated just this. In 2007, seeds from a type of campion were discovered in frozen arctic tundra. Radiocarbon dating revealed the seeds to around 32,000 years old. Amazingly, scientists were able to coax them to germinate and flower. This just goes to show the remarkable resilience of seeds, so if you happen to discover a long-lost packet of seeds it might be worth giving them a go. In this instance, select just a few seeds and sprinkle them onto damp tissue, place them somewhere warm. If they germinate then you’re in luck, follow the directions on the packet for the remaining seeds and enjoy the fruits of your labour. Next week we will investigate how to make a wildflower meadow. soilvalues.com

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