Uruguay gardening

Trachelospermum jasminoides is one of the classic Argentinian/Uruguayan plants, it clearly flourishes here, but then its east Asian home has a similar climate to the area around the Rio de la Plata - hot and sticky summers. After a while though you get a bit fed up with seeing it again and again and again. The range of plants in nurseries here is very limited - the subject coming up again and again. Agapanthus are the kind of ur-plant for landscaping - I teased local colleagues by asking them to list all the varieties available - five I think was the highest; the RHS Plant Finder (UK) lists an incredible 566!

There are a lot of little neighbourhood nurseries, of the kind which we have sadly lost in the UK. Many of them are very good, but again, the same old familiar faces. I met one enterprising nurseryman (Vivero Pilar, outside Buenos Aires, AR) who had imported some plants from the USA and from Brazil, to propagate. Given how there is something of a gardening boom here, this situation must surely change.

The climate here is a good one for growing - if you choose the right plants that is! Hot humid summers with plentiful rain, and cool summers, just touching freezing - so it is a very long growing season.

The trouble is that a lot of the plants that nurseries sell aren't really suited to the climate -the plant selection is based on what might work in Spain or Italy. Maybe this is part of the Argentine condition, to be ever looking over the seas to Europe. (Let's not take this too far, I am a European on a lecture tour!). Lavenders for example rot in the humidity, lasting about two years. In some ways there is a real similarity with the hot humid summers of the American Midwest, with a similar problem with fungal etc, diseases. However what grows well, grows very well. There are so many plants that would thrive here. One group which everyone says does well, and which offer so much, are Salvia, any of the Mexican species for example, and Argentina has several natives. There is the well-known S.guarantica, and one which I had never seen before S. procurrens, which runs by means of stems rooting in, like a strawberry. 

There are so many fantastic plants in the wild here, just waiting to be developed commercially. Amalia and I found a striking scarlet perennial, which obviously ran underground amongst rocks on her uncle's property, just south of the Brazilian border. We had no idea what it was, but the leaves looked strangely familiar. I broke one in half and out came white sap, so my intuition said "Apocynaceae". Later on we checked online, and ID'd it as Mandevillea coccinea. In the conservatory at home we have a 20 year old Mandevillea splendens in the conservatory, so no wonder the leaves looked so familiar.

Amalia's uncle, Martin Braun, is preserving this fascinating habitat, a rocky island of biodiversity in a vast plain where everything is given over to grassland for feeding cattle. Cattle are now (I read somewhere) the dominant biomass on the planet. They are very inefficient converters of plant protein to meat. A big reason why I don't eat them!

Colonia del Sacramento is a rather pretty little place in Uruguay, with an interesting line in planting up and otherwise making artistic use of elderly cars.

What North Americans call the 'hellstrip' between pavement/sidewalk and road. Someone has planted up what really does thrive here, a selection of mostly tropicals, very densely, so every space taken. There is a tree as well, planted up with epiphytes. The only time i have seen this done before is in Singapore, by local government. At a rough guess there were twenty species here, in about six metres , but there could be more.

A cactus pokes up from amongst the rest of the greenery. Some cacti grow as part of many well-watered forest habitats, and cope with summer humidity better than we might think.

This is actually from later on, when we got to Bolivia, the convent of Santa Teresa, in Potosí, Bolivia. A garden at 4000m.

Read more about my trip to South America below and on Gardening gone Wild.

Episode six of Dig, Plant and Bitch, the soap opera for gardeners is now out.

Tango at La Pasionaria

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Finally - a visit to La Pasionaria in Uruguay.

I first met Amalia Robredo in 2007, on a Gardens Illustrated trip to Germany. She was about as pregnant as it was possible to be before being forbidden to fly – which I think illustrates something about her determination. We talked about her interest in using the wild plants of the region where she lives in her garden design work. Over the next couple of years I have acted as mentor, offering advice by email and blog, and she just went on to follow it all and take lots of initiatives of her own. She even got grants to publish the first ever illustrated guide to the flowers of the Maldonado Coast, and support further research. So finally, I get to see how my 'student' is getting on.

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Amalia and her husband Marcelo bought the five hectare property some ten years ago, as part of a move out of the city into the country; the city being Buenos Aires and the country the coastline of Uruguay north of the über-fashionable Punta del Este. Amalia and Marcelo were pioneers, just outside what was once the quiet fishing village of José Ignacio (but which is now one of those places where incredibly cool people eye up other incredibly cool people in shops full of artificially distressed furniture). They have now been joined by many more, and the entire coastline between here and Punta (half an hour's drive) is steadily getting built up. Almost all natural habitat has been lost. There is not much in eastern Uruguay anyway - several centuries of cattle rearing and eucalyptus planting have seen to that. Amalia does very good conventional garden design, but has always wanted to use locally native plants and preserve or re-create as much of the natural wild plant communities as possible.

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Amalia and Marcelo's house says something about their respect for the landscape. Unlike most houses round here which stick out like, well … like the fantasies of macho architects which many of them are, La Pasionaria is almost hidden, its granite-block construction making it look like an old fort. Just peeping above thick woodland its windows give it a fantastic view over a nearby marshland and lagoon. The woodland in question is a piece of the local monte.

A 'mousehole' into the monte, note the cactus poking up as part of the woodland community

Montewas the first new word and concept Amalia introduced me to, back in Piet Oudolf's barn in 2007 when she gave us a short presentation about her work. It means a kind of dwarf woodland, much sculpted by wind, almost impenetrable, and in conventional terms, with no economic value whatever – which accounts for there being not very much of it left. It includes relatively few species (a berberis is the only one whose name meant anything to me) but shelters many more, including ferns and other ground floor species.

 

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Amalia has learnt how to sculpt the monte, without damaging it. The Maldonado coast does wind big time, all year round, so once you cut into the monte you open it up to the wind which can then cause a lot damage. So she cuts what she calls 'mouse holes' to minimize damage in the outer skin of the monte where it faces open areas. This skin is an interesting plant community in its own right: an incredibly dense mesh of interwoven branches, including some pioneer species such as various Baccharisand the incredibly vicious-looking Colletia paradoxa. The lower level is a thicket of ferns escaping from the monte understorey and very dense grass, with a few flowering forbs poking out. 'Inside' are a number of areas where she has removed the understorey to create shaded seating areas beneath the intriguing forms of the tree branches.

Prado grassland

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The surviving monte is set amongst grassland, which we would call meadow – indeed from the distance it could be British meadow grass; get closer to though and it is clear the grass flora is different and really very interesting. There are a lot of very attractive grass species here, which look good not just as border elements but make quite a show as part of a meadow grass type community. There's a lot more than just pampas grass!

Deyeuxia alba, formerly regarded as a Calmagrostis

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Looking at Amalia's grassland, it's time to learn some more new words: prado and pradera. In fact so useful are these words and the concepts they clothe that I am seriously considering trying to get them used in English. By prado she means grassland which gets cut short through the summer, but is allowed to grow through the (virtually frostfree) winters to flower in spring and early summer. The result is a tidy meadow-like grassland with a rich variety of grasses and about the same proportion of forbs as might be expected in Britain – mostly yellow daisy family. The forb (flowering perennial) component of the flora here is quite limited – beach sand habitats support quite a number but there is relatively little which consorts with grass. In early summer, the two most showy and interesting are Vernonia flexuosa, a short-growing relative of North America's mighty ironweeds (although very similar to V. lettermannii, an Ozark limestone plateau plant recently launched into commercial horticulture), and the terrestrial bromeliad Dyckia remotiflora var. remotiflora, with its bright orange flowers. Not showy but a great favourite of Amalia's is Eryngium sanguisorba, which has a large but sparse panicle of tight little dark red buttons, just like, you've guessed, a Sanguisorba. In the strong sunlight of this latitude its hard shape stands out very well against the grasses.

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As at home, the lower fertility areas of soil support thinner grass and (possibly) more species. Different grass species dominate different areas, just as at home, but make considerably more visual impact. High fertility areas tend to get dominated by European ryegrass monoculture. The native grasses are mostly of genera familiar to North Americans, while Melica brasilensis would go unnoticed on an Austrian Trockenrasen (dry meadow) to all but the dedicated grass lover.

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I did not get to really appreciate Amalia's pradera, which is a late summer community. Pradera is cut only once a year, or even less. In fact, Amalia reckons cutting every two years is better because it allows grasses to build up some good tussocks. The community which results is much coarser in appearance but includes some good late flowering perennials, such as several species of Eupatorium, which can make a real impact. There is one goldenrod here too – Solidago chilensis.

Senecio brasilensis in the unmanaged marshland at the bottom of the property - here be snakes, armadillos and incredibly noisy frogs.

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The remaining naturalistic habitat at La Pasionaria is essentially unmanaged, much of it marshland. Cortaderia (yes! at last pampas grass!) and Eryngium pandanifoliumdominates – big rosettes which look a bit like an attenuated agave which later on produce impressive 2m+ flower spikes. There are a lot of Eryngiumspecies here – possibly this is the genus's centre of diversity? Some are aggressive thistle look-alikes – the aptly named E. horridum appears everywhere; most however are garden-worthy. If I were doing serious plant hunting here, especially focussing on variety selection, I think I'd start with them (apart from the grasses that is).

Elionurus muticus - a very variable local grass, well worthy of a place in the garden.

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Education is a big part of what Amalia does here. Increasingly people are wanting to come and visit. On this trip we agreed to run a workshop together, which got oversubscribed very quickly, so we put on another one a week later. In the workshops I like to think that we are dancing a tango, except that she (despite being Argentine) is no more capable of dancing a tango than Jo or I am. I take the lead and she translates into Spanish, and often adds her own thoughts, so it is a kind of tango. During a presentation she does on her own work, before taking around her property, there are constant interruptions of incredibly lively discussion – people here are more forthright in their opinions than back home and there is a great deal of curiosity.

Erygnium serra

The workshop was in her garage, improvised screen for the projector from an old sheet, and an ingenous home-made flipchart, at times we lean against her car to do our double act. It goes down incredibly well, the linking of plant ecology science to gardening is a completely new message. People are so enthusiastic. Most of the audiences are professionals – unlike home, almost no 'ladies who lunch'. I feel very proud, and deeply moved, to have played a part in pioneering a new approach to garden making here – and so far from home!

Eryngium sanguisorba (in the wild)

Stipa filifolia - another very good potential garden grass

Vernonia flexuosa

Amalia's website: www.amaliarobredo.com
and more on her work on The View From Federal Twist blog

View from the welcoming south - Argentina

A figure who was part of an exhibition at Villa Ocampo, at San Isidro, Argentina, last week.

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I am almost overwhelmed! So much enthusiasm, interest and passion here, in Argentina and Uruguay. Several people say that there is something of a gardening boom going on. There is certainly an incredible thirst for ideas and knowledge in a small but tightly-knit garden and landscape community. It is a fantastic experience being amongst such enthusiastic and receptive people, but also the feeling that I have so much to learn – every time I open my mouth I am aware that I am about to say something which does not apply to this part of the world.

Martinq Barzi, me, Josefina Casares and John Brookes.

Jo and I are here primarily to visit Amalia Robredo, a garden designer who works on the Maldonado coast (that's the bit which goes up from the deep cut on the right hand side of the southern cone of South America). More about her in a later blog. She introduced me to Josefina Casares and Martina Barzi, who run Pampa Infinita, a garden design school they set up some years ago with the support of John Brookes. Josefina and Martina are clearly one of those very effective partnerships where the whole is greater than the sum of the (very capable) parts. Working primarily as designers (throughout the southern cone), they have a determination to share their knowledge and skills and involve others in doing likewise.

A wonderful courtyard space at Josefina's.

An ingeneous 'screen' in the garden of Gracie Ullman, one of the Pampa Infinita graduates. The idea is that some interestingly painted poles will distract the eye from the view behind, without going to the trouble of building something more substantial.

Dear old John Brookes, now in his early eighties, I think. I hope I am as energetic as he is when I get to that age. Russia, USA, Argentina, he seems to be constantly on the move. One evening I watch him as he sits with Josefina and Martina, like a genial buddha with his top disciples, gently radiating wisdom. His garden design methodology has proved enormously successful at getting people to think creatively, and is the core of the teaching here. Not everyone finds it useful, but then those who don't, probably have their own strong design sense. I suppose I have a similar kind of core methodology – about plant selection, which I am trying to get across to people here in a series of lectures and workshops.

Plectranthus neochilus - plant selection is not great here, but several nice members of this mint family genus which we never see back home. Not hardy but very good for summer displays.

Nearly all of what I do has to be interpreted. Thank you Josefina, Amalia and Mariana Hogg. You've done a great job. Being interpreted rather cramps your style but it is an incredibly effective way of focussing the mind. Everything you say is like a haiku poem – it has to be self-contained, and coherent …. and simple. Different interpreters force you to work in different ways: Josefina is very experienced and I can pitch her several complex sentences. Amalia has never done this before, and I have to half the number of sentences – which makes the need to concentrate information into little nuggets even more important. 

Landscapers in a landscape - Amalia Robredo at La Pasionaria with colleagues.

Ideally I run workshops in gardens so we can look at plants. Getting people to look at the leaf/stem/root relationship is very important, hence the name 'Rabbit's eye view' for what is currently my most popular workshop. Except I was told this did not translate well into Spanish - or more likely would be read as "what is this mad Englishman on about?". Plant selection here is limited, although there are plenty of little nurseries. We've had to borrow plants from them in containers so these can be passed around. At Villa Ocampo we had to stage a breakfast time raid on a nursery to get plants, croissants and coffee in hand.

 On to Uruguay - so more later!

 

The view AT Federal Twist

James Golden's blog View from Federal Twist is one I've followed for years, but James has been a follower of mine for longer - he read my 1996 book The New Perennial Garden when no-one knew what a blog was.So it was with great interest I drove up last week from Philadelphia just over the Delaware into New Jersey.

I feel honored when gardeners follow my ideas and I love seeing what they do with them. The garden at Federal Twist is very much what I have in mind when I write – a journey through lots of rambunctious vegetation. Its the end of the season so the grasses dominate, miscanthus varieties especially, but some Aster tartaricushanging on, the native asters and even ironweed having gone to seedy silhouettes. There's a big Inula which has self-sown a bit, and I can't help feeling I'm glad it doesn't with me. We are surrounded by forest: tall maple, beech and oak, and the colours are magnificent, the perfect setting for a glade of perennial seedheads.

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I wander around with James, talking about the various people in the garden world he comes across through his blog. Strong sunlight makes every shade of dead grass and perennial glow. I try to imagine it with flowers, but realize that I'm not that bothered, this late-season look is good enough for me.

These forest glade gardens are very American. So much of people's living space is carved out of forest – most of it secondary or tertiary growth after being cleared in the 19^thcentury. Woodland here has the most remarkable powers of recovery. There are huge problems with invasive exotic species, but I can't help the feeling that if a property is abandoned, the forest will just envelop it, and eventually shade out everything that doesn't belong. Its a feeling we don't have back home. It makes Federal Twist seem very temporary, almost a gesture against the wind, which is perhaps how a garden should be.

James visits every weekend, so I should imagine maintenance is pretty light. He leaves it standing and burns it all in spring - "stand back when the Miscanthus catches fire" he warns. He's lucky he can, as fire departments can get pretty uptight about this in many areas, which is a pity as burning is such an effective and natural way of getting rid of dealing with dead herbaceous vegetation and with aggressively spreading exotics. I write this visiting another colleague, whose garden has been overrun with something he calls Chinese stilt grass, which is the most horrific spreader, shade tolerant and smothers native vegetation. I am sure burning would be the most effective way of dealing with it but he can't. I'd been to a fantastic conference earlier in the week, organized by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, where we end up listening to Neil Diboll, of prairie nursery, whose extremely lively presentations always end with praise for the burn as an essential annual maintenance tool. “There are three conditions to be met regarding my place of residence” he says, “to be able to leave my keys in the car overnight, to pee off my own deck and to burn my prairie”.

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The PHS conference is a fantastically lively event, the energy of 560 gardeners and landscape professionals is warm and positive. People are surprised when I tell them that we don't have events like this back home. There's piles of nursery catalogues to pick up and browse through, and the glories of the Scott Arboretum to explore during break-out time and afterward. Everything is very well maintained and very well labelled, it must be a wonderful place to learn about gardening.

It's autumn so it's daisy time

The garden now is daisy-heaven. There is an incredible array of this versatile family for late season flower. Most of them North American - the Asteraceae must have gone on an evolutionary binge during some or all of the interglacials of the last million years. Maybe it was the way plantlife was pushed down by the ice every few 100,000 years and had to reconquer territory that drove the evolution of prairie flora. Heliopsis helianthoides (above) is a classic daisy. Its common as a cottage garden plant in British country villages, one of those plants that gets divided up and given to people or sold in yogurt pots or plastic bags at the church fete, losing its identity in the process. I actually grew this from seed from Prairie Moon in Wisconsin, but I prefer the church fete version, which has darker foliage.

 

Aster 'Little Carlow' is the gold standard aster - free flowering for a long time, disease free and slowly spreading. This lot are ok, but the row in the pic below have o-deed on this years rain and the general fertility of the soil and flopped horribly, which is most uncharacteristic of them. I got the glass ornament from a factory shop near Passau, Germany.

There are zillions of named cultivars of Aster novae-angliae. In fact you could make your own selection by stopping by the side of many an interstate in the eastern US and digging up a few clumps - the level of natural variation is quite amazing. But of course there aren't any varieties called 'New Jersey Turnpike no.2' because it was enterprising Brit and German nurserymen in the early 20th century who realized their value as garden plants. They stand upright (usually) and flower brilliantly. Shame about the bare legs mind.

I was introduced to Aster pyrenaeus 'Lutetia' by Chris Marchant of Orchard Dene nurseries, where all cool garden designers in southern England buy their perennials. It is one of Europe's very few really garden-worthy asters, but a rare plant in nature apparently.

A. turbinellus is a new one for me, a bit disappointed so far, insubstantial and wishy-washy, but maybe i should be patient and see what it does next year.

This is a real favourite. Yes, I know that things you collect yourself are going to be regarded with as much objectivity as looking at one's own children. Aster puniceus though is a damned good plant - and it used to be in cultivation in Europe but died out sometime in the 20th century - heaven knows why as it seeds like crazy (but does not spread vegetatively). It flowers from late August on for up to two months and makes a nice misty blue backdrop for lots of other colours. I got the seed off a few plants by a roadside swamp in the Catskills sometime in the early 2000s.

Kalimeris mongolica is a member of an Asian genus close to Aster. Pretty, free-flowering but grows stems at an awkward angle. Some idiot, in a desperate attempt at making it memorable for the latin-name-phobic has named it the 'Genghis Khan' aster. Which makes you think it spreads like mad and lays waste everything in sight, which it does not.

Not sure about Aster praealtus yet. Very robust, does not appear to spread (yet!) and very tall. Palest mauve flowers. Might be a good back of border or pretend-prairie plant.

 There was a fashion for creating dwarf asters in the early 20the century, much of it driven by the need to have flowers on war graves. This is 'Purple Dome', originally German apparently. But, as you can see, they occasionally throw out 'normal' shoots which grow so much taller.

Aster umbellatus is anything but dwarf, at nearly 2m. This lot have flopped badly but after our horrendously wet summer that is not entirely surprising. Masses of white flowers and an erratically spreading habit.  

Helianthus 'Lemon Queen' just has to be one of the best perennials of the last 20 years. Does not spread aggressively but very robust.

Its big sister is H. 'Sheila's Sunshine' which is the very tall (3m +) at the back here, not quite in flower yet, but primrose greeny-yellow when it does. Fantastically strong, but I suspect too tall for most people- who lets face it do not like being shorter than their perennials. Eupatorium 'Orchard Dene' in front - around the onepointsomething metre mark - again useful for those who can't cope with the 3m joe pye weeds.

 Rudbeckia laciniata has turned out to be a ruthless thug, overwhelming other prairie perennials in one of my plots. So its going to be banished to a new project I'm developing elsewhere.

Rudbeckia triloba is a short-lived species which smothers itself in flowers. Looks great with blue asters, like A. puniceus. So exuberant.This seed is from Prairie Moon too, with much more star-shaped flowers than the usual rather rounded form we see.

Rudbeckia fulgida 'Goldsturm' is simply the best yellow, and a useful not overwhelming height.

Finally, forget not that goldenrods are daisies too. This is the view from my office, with Solidago rugosa as a component in some research plots looking at competition. Its much the best goldenrod, being robust and reliable but spreading only slowly, a graceful and elegant plant. There are many others though, which I am working my way through, and so many of them are quite unlike the thuggish S. canadensis types that have given them all a bad name.

And even more finally, Leucanthemella serotina, a Hungarian species which flowers pretty much last of all.

Plant hunting issues

Social deviants collecting seed in an unnamed central Asian country

I was at an interesting event today – curating it in fact. At London's Garden Museum. A symposium on the future of plant hunting, run as part of the current exhibition. Its something that several of us have been wanting to hold for years, to thrash out some difficult issues that have been caused by that most well-intentioned declaration – the 1992 Rio Convention on Bio-diversity (CBD).

The Convention has made the transfer of plants or wild-collected seed from one country to another technically illegal but set up no mechanism for 'buying' material. Yet another badly-thought out international agreement, that once signed, freezes everything in a place where nobody wants to be. The results have been botanical institutions wanting (and needing) to do everything by the book, and needing to keep well clear of non-botanists doing any plant collecting which does not have country of origin authority. The result is the sundering of the former good relations that often existed between botanical institutions and the horticulture community. I wrote about the background in an article in The Telegraph.

I kicked off saying that at least everyone is talking. The idea of getting someone from Kew (Tim Entwisle), Prof. James Hitchmough from Sheffield, Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones from Crûg Farm Plants (the UK's leading plant hunters) and maverick nurseryman Michael Wickenden of Cally Gardens together on the same platform would have almost unthinkable a few years ago. It could have been too incendiary. We also had John David, the acting Head of Science from the Royal Horticultural Society too, and, a special treat this, Roy Lancaster who gave us a great historical perspective.

Just before it began, Christopher Woodward, the Museum Director called me into his office. I knew he had something important to say. Which was that the RHS although they had helped the Museum put on and had refused to help publicise the symposium. Too much beyond their comfort zone apparently. Too politically sensitive.

The whole issue of industrialized countries acquiring the genetic resources of poorer ones is a sensitive one. The absurdity is that very little money is made by anybody doing so for ornamental or landscape plants. The world horticulture community is suffering blow-back from the issues raised by (e.g.) pharmaceutical multinationals and others engaged in 'bio-piracy' or plant-breeding companies acquiring crop genes from the global south and then selling them back to them in new varieties. Post-colonial elites in the south make a lot of noise, with justification in some cases, but all too often exploit liberal guilt in the north, resulting in a kind of defensive paranoia in the botanical community. In any case, the real damage to plants and habitat in many countries is not coming from plant hunters taking a few seeds away (depriving a mouse of its lunch as Michael Wickenden put it in his eloquent, punchy, radical presentation) but habitat destruction and the plundering of natural resources for traditional medicine (a lot of which doesn't work anyway).

James Hitchmough got us going. As articulate and entertaining as ever, he informed us of how limited the gene pool is for many ornamental plants, of how climate change is going to mean a lot of re-thinking about what we plant, of how different urban gardening is from rural (where most of the garden-designing, garden-writing, garden-opinion-forming classes live, and needless to say garden). We need more diverse genetic material amongst our cultivated plants, to improve the ecological fitness for conditions in our towns and cities. Sustainability is about the genes not technological short-cuts like irrigation or mulching. He stressed the incredible floral diversity of British gardens and how beneficial this is for wider bio-diversity. Above all he stressed how the damaging the CBD has been – how it makes plant hunters into pariahs.

Tony Entwisle from Kew (Director of Conservation, Living Collections and Estates)was good  - and very open-minded, the "sort of man one can do business with" unlike the negative approach that some at Kew and Edinburgh have taken in the past.

All in all, a good day, feeling like a logjam is beginning to loosen. 

Take a look at the new look Gardening Gone Wild site and my latest post on the autumnal garden

and Dig, Plant and Bitch, the soap opera for gardeners episode 5 - The Snowdrop Lunch is now up and running. Its a rather racy episode I'm particularly pleased with. If you want more information on the soap opera look here.