A walk in the (Mexican) woods.

Mexico has incredible biodiversity, with the state of Oaxaca having 60% of the country's higher plant species - some 6,500, that's four times the plant biodiversity of Britain. And its safe and very well organised for trekking.

An Eryngium - a classic Mexican genus - their biodiversity starts to get good here and carries on right down to Argentina.

We went with Tierraventura, a long-established eco-tourism company in the region, the pueblos mancomunados which is a unique co-operation between 8 indigenous (Zapotec) villages to promote rural development and eco-tourism.

 Latuvi, where we stayed overnight. Isolated but clearly going places. Mexico's indigenous people are finally catching up. Their strong sense of community self-help counts for a lot, indeed there is a lot going on here which the rest of us could learn from. Many of the social problems which plague other parts of the country seem absent.
Agaves are very much part of the landscape and used for a kind of crude hedging along roads.

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They don't need dry conditions, sneaking up to the water when they can! 

 

With mostly acidic ingneous rock, Arbutus, i.e. madrone with amazing peeling bark is a minor tree element amidst pine and further down, various oaks. Arctostaphylos, i.e. manzanita species also very common, reminding me of trekking in California.

 

Doesn't this remind you of Deep South longleaf pine and wiregrass? According to our guides it is not a fire-mediated plant community however. The interesting news is that all this young pine is re-afforestation as the area used to be used for potato growing.

Gentians! Just like Switzerland, but much paler. Later we found another gentian species.

Is that a bullet hole in the sign?

Saw a lot of this little alchemilla. I never realised that the genus exists in the New World.

 

Epiphytes are what make this trip. Huge numbers especially on west facing tops of slopes or escarpments where humid air is forced up.

 A Tillandsia species, sitting on a twig like birds on a cable. Distribution varies, some species dominate in some locations, but then are replaced by others a few kms further on. 

 

Surely one of the strangest and most specialised of flowering plants, Spanish moss is neither Spanish nor a moss so lets stick to calling it Tillandsia usneoides. 

Cordyline/Dracaena/Yucca relatives, not sure of identity look surreal in woodland, as do agaves, but that is how they grow. I am reminded of Philip Brown's planting of cordyline and phormium in native woodland at Portmeirion in North Wales. We tend not to think of these as woodland plants but why not?

 Some orchids, ID? on damp rock, later we saw some on trees, mostly older trees. 

Always intriguing to see which plant families dominate an unfamiliar area. Mexico is famous for Salvia - we saw quite a few but this was the dry season so they were not very prominent. Also many and this is true of a lot of shrubs here are messy gappy plants in the wild, often in shade (the sun is very strong) and do not make much impact. A lot of shrubby Asteraceae, which we are not familiar with at all, Many would make good plants for horticulture in areas which get only light frosts.

Interesting to see shrubby species of general familiar as herbaceous in North America, like this gorgeous Vernonia, from which i did get seed :) . It fades to white from mauve. 

Lots of shrubby Ageratina (a group of formerly Eupatorium). this one was out in the sun and had lost its leaves but it made a great impact and a reminder that in the right place they can form nicely shaped shrubs. We have A. ligustrinum in cultivation in milder parts of Britain, but there are others here. Would be good for autumn flower. Notice the warm shirt, as it starts off jolly cold at 3000m +.

 

Finally the cacti, of which we saw a lot on rock outcrops on the last part of our two day trek, the most uphill and hottest part, often on rock outcrops and sometimes in company with ferns - the fern flora here has many species which die right back in the dry season. 

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If you like my blog, why not check out my e-books, which are round-ups of some writing I did for Hortus magazine back in the early 2000s, along with an interview with the amazing Beth Chatto. You can read them on Kindle, or Kindle packages for smartphones or the computer. You can find them on my Amazon page here. You will also find my soap opera for gardeners - currently running at eight episodes.

Saving Mexico's plant heritage

A wonderfully colourful Tillandsia species.

A holiday in Mexico, driven from England by the endless rain. Can't really afford it, but essential for our sanity! I've been twice before, but in a work capacity. So, nice to explore an extraordinarily colourful and vibrant country, with immense cultural richness - although if you keep up with the news you realise also that this is a deeply troubled country too. It has fantastic biodiversity, which needless to say, faces all sorts of threats, although opinion polls show Mexicans to be very supportive of conservation and environmental policies.

In Chiapas, the main problem is poor farmers, driven mostly by population increase, clearing forest to farm, although a lot of the land is very steep. A problem exacerbated by the social divisions created by fundamentalist christians (missionaries funded by US churches who turn people, especially kids against their native culture), who then go off and form their own separate communities, which need yet more land. Trees are felled and the orchids, ferns and bromeliads that make up the very rich epiphyte communities in the branches are burned.

After having seen the damage caused by the development of one such village, an American living in Mexico, Craig Dietz, known as 'Cisco' rescued a load of plants and set up a plant rescue mission. His work, all over Chiapas state has provided a lot of useful data for the academic botanists who rarely get out. Local environmental organisations have linked with him - his 'Orquidario Moxviquil' - essentially a privately run botanic garden, is a great focus for their work and publicising what they do.

One of the spectacular tillandsias whose flower spike takes two years to grow, and suffers from being very popular for church and shrine decoration - creation threatened by religion! One of the things Cisco does is to encourage people in the villages to do their own plant rescue and grow epiphytes themselves.

Cisco, with Jo. He is one of those amazing guys, an old California hippy of course, who is just doing such important work, and seemingly achieving a lot, that makes the rest of us feel inadequate.

 

There are some wonderful whacky structures around the place, such as an amphitheatre for school parties and a greenhouse for the plants from lower down in Chiapas that cannot take the minus 3 temperatures which you can get in San Cristobal de las Casas. He's now got funding from the Mexican government for a massive new house for lower altitude plants too.

And Cisco was adamant that i had to photograph the rubbish bins. This is an incredible place, and a very good model for other regions. The world needs more Ciscos!

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If you like my blog, why not check out my e-books, which are round-ups of some writing I did for Hortus magazine back in the early 2000s, along with an interview with the amazing Beth Chatto. You can read them on Kindle, or Kindle packages for smartphones or the computer. You can find them on my Amazon page here. You will also find my soap opera for gardeners - currently running at eight episodes.

A window into the past

A friend gave me this for Christmas, a little book published in 1955, which includes a whole year's worth of a cartoon strip from the 1950s from The Sunday Express. The strip illustrates gardening operations for the week using this character - Adam, who must have been based on a real person I suspect.

 Adam, with the same set lugubrious expression on his face, unsmiling, sets about showing Express readers what to do. A lot is pretty advanced stuff, unthinkably so for a popular information sources on gardening today. On one page there is some material on grafting, going over crown, cleft, saddle and tongue. There is even a reference to grafting cacti!

Some of it leaves me with the feeling that there is nothing new under the sun. There are references to using herbs to keep insects away from other plants (saves having to douse them in DDT), to growing dandelions as a spring salad, and for using marigold flowers in salads.

Express newspapers sold to the middle class and aspirational working class, i.e. people who could not afford a gardeners - unlike a lot of the folk who took The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Or the Observer, where the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West would boom on, her readers perhaps arranging a few pots, for their weekly help to actually plant. This is serious skills-based, craft gardening. It makes me think about just how many skills we have actually lost - an enormous amount of knowledge which once would have been much more widespread. So there are things we can learn from here. I liked the tip about digging up parsley roots in autumn and growing them on in pots in the greenhouse as a winter herb. There is far more knowledge here than you'd get from the bunch of dilettante lightweight presenters who currently grace our TV screens, or write columns for newspapers. There is no dumbing down; no fear of things being difficult.

There is some additional material at the back, which does include some design stuff, such as this b/w rendition of the colour wheel.

And some borders which show what aspirational gardeners might be making. By 1955 wartime rationing would have ended 3 years ago, so the food situation would have been getting better, and a lot of people would have been giving up their vegetable plots and wanting to make ornamental gardens again. The model is very much Arts and Crafts.

This looks so basic by today's standards. Plant availability was pretty low - something I shall be touching on in a future post.

The 1950s was the high point of the chemical warfare approach to gardening. Notice the reference to 'the safe insecticide' - organochlorines like DDT were safe, compared to a lot of the mercury and arsenic based compounds that had been used before! In one strip Adam recommends using mercuric chloride as a wormkiller - apparently people didn't like worm casts ruining their velvety lawns! Another horror was a technique to encourage fruit trees to grow, by ring barking them on one side and painting with lead paint!

In some ways at least we have gotten wiser.

How green is our winter

The tents of an invading army of Hobbits? The emergency accommodation put up to welcome the army of Romanian guest-workers our idiot government are trying to convince us are about to descend?
No, the leaves of Gunnera manicata all heaped up by Wisley staff to protect the crowns. Just in case we have a hard winter.

I was down at the RHS garden in Surrey last week to do some work in the library and had a quick look around the garden. So far we have hardly had temperatures below freezing, and I have never known trees hang on to their leaves so close to Christmas. It really feels like a phoney winter.

 

The inner part of the seed cases of Lunaria rediviva. One of the best seedhead plants.

 

Fruit - mini-apples, on Malus hupehensis. Berries/fruit and seedheads are the classic elements of the early winter garden, now joined of course by seedheads and grasses. This stroll around Wisley however is a reminder of how green winter can be, especially if temperatures do not dip too much.  A good opportunity to reflect on just what sort of a climate we have and how that impacts on plant selection. You see, for some time, I have realised the rather counter-intuitive notion that we have more in common with a Mediterranean climate than a continental one even though most of our garden plants are from regions with the latter climate. Mediterranean winters are cool and wet, a bit like ours are a lot of the time, even before the current run of mild winters started in the 1980s. We can have the luxury of green foliage for quite a lot of our winters as a result.

 

 Things like Acanthus mollis, Mediterranean perennials which make a great leafy show right now. The paradox is that many (all?) Mediterranean plants will make active growth at lower temperatures than those from continental climates - the risk of growth being zapped by hard frosts is low. A walk around a garden now can tell you a lot about what climate zones plants are from.

Blechnum chilense, a Chilean fern also used to mild winters. A great winter foliage plant if you can get away with it.

 

Geranium palmatum, from the Canaries. We can do well with these plants from the middle Atlantic Isles, with their moderate climates, not too cold or hot.

And a libertia - foliage still fresh and green - indeed evergreen in most winters. From Chile and New Zealand - again that moderate, equable, climate.

Looking a bit ropey, but not completly dormant, Gerananium macrorrhizum from the Balkans, an area which gets cold winters and a lot of snow but which sometimes has milder spells, so it helps being able to photosynthesise in warmer periods.

A nepeta (catmint), another genus with quite a few from the Mediterranean. We tend to think of plants from the Med as being not hardy, but much of the region gets occasional severe winters, especially the eastern part when cold air masses can come down from Russia and central Asia via Turkey.

Now, the borders which Piet Oudolf designed in 2000, looking fantastic right now, but hardly any green. These are plants from continental climates for the most part; for their own protection they have to totally shut down for the winter, and not come out of hibernation until temperatures are relatively warm which means all danger of frost is past. I find these grass, seedhead combinations incredibly beautiful, all the more so for their stark contrast to the amount of green elsewhere at this time of year in a garden like Wisley.

But what is this? Greenery amongst the not-anymore-Oudolf borders. Piet is no longer involved with overseeing these borders, which is a shame, as they do need a very particular kind of guidance -
certain people on the RHS General Council have expressed disatisfaction with the way things are maintained here too "they just don't seem to get it" she said. And new plants - such as Pennisetum macrourum, a South African species with nice heads but an aggressive spreader. Didn't anybody know that once this plant is in, it will run and run and completely blur whats left of the design? Good plant - wrong place. One of many South Africans that seem to be doing very well here, like the Diearamas that seed madly in my own garden.

Box and grasses - I think this was Anemanthele lessoniana - don't they look good together? Surprised you don't see this more often, very much the old and the new together. Again, box and most other evergreen broadleaves are part of that flora of 'Atlantic' Europe (actually we should include north-west Africa in here too) , plants of mildish winters, species of the western Mediterranean, hardy enough in normal circumstances but not so capable of taking the constant very cold winters of central Europe. Ivy is another one, the semi-evergreen bramble another.

Being aware of all this winter greenery gives me a strong sense of geographically where we are, on the fringe of Europe, with connections to all those other places our plants come from where winters are mild and occasions to grow (albeit fitfully) rather than hunker down and hibernate.

Having 'the holly and the ivy' is something of a luxury for us, living where we are. A green element in our gardens I wouldn't want to live without.

Updates - EU legislation and Oudolf meadow

Two updates: one on the EU proposed legislation on plant cultivars, and the other on the perennial meadow at Hummelo.

Miscanthus 'Yaku-jima', in our garden last week, a good small miscanthus, but still growing a lot bigger than it does with many - that high level of phosphorus in the soil i suppose!

First, I've had detailed responses from two UK Members of the European Parliament, who are very well aware of this issue, and trying to change it. Thank you to Julie Girling and Anthea McIntyre.

I have also been in correspondence with Dutch nurseryman Coen Jansen who writes: “Since the article in "The Garden" and yours in the newspaper, things are changing here too: after your article I received a mail from a rather worried Belgian nurserywoman, who had read your article, and she also asked her MP what is going on really. He answered that a lot of MP's are working on it, asking mainly for exceptions for small nurseries with a turnover under € 2 million a year, and/or for nurseries  employing less than 10 people.

Last week our horticultural magazine "De Boomkwekerij" -for the trade, not for the general gardening public- also picked it up... at last there seems to be something happening, one MEP i wrote to said she had had 200+ emails on the subject. We can hope for some common sense.”

Secondly, Piet Oudolf's meadow - the mystery deepens. Piet and Anja are back from their trip to visit their son and family in Ecuador, and Piet has corrected me on the soil below the wonderful perennial planting featured in my last posting. It is actually soil, NOT sand, some soil was actually imported to make up the ground here, although it looks very sandy and has a high sand content.

I have been comparing annual weather statistics between Arnhem and Hereford too, not much difference: Arnhem region has a more continental climate (i.e. warmer summer and colder winter) but there is not much in it, and they have quite a lot less rain, maybe 50% less, but still around 1000mm a year. The more continental the climate, the more that forbs (flowering perennials) are competitive vis a vis grasses.

The answer may still lie in the soil. This article here by Ken Thompsonpoints out the importance of phosphorus in determining wildflower diversity. I know we have a very high level of this plant nutrient, as indeed do many soils in Britain. Next time I go to Hummelo, a soil testing kit goes with me.

Perennial meadows - Piet pulls it off

Some time ago I did a post on growing perennials in grass, actually the second most read posting I have done. This is something of an unrealisable holy grail for many of us, the idea that you can have roughish grass with wildflowers and perennials growing in it. Our native grassland flora here in Britain and north-west Europe is very low on really bright ornamental species and there is so little that flowers after mid-summer. William Robinson suggested doing this in The Wild Garden, published in 1870, but he actually had very little experience of doing this when he wrote that book; in fact it was early in his career, and very much a rhetorical book rather than a practical one. It is a book which really does not deserve its reputation.

The tough reality is that in our maritime climate with its long growing season it is very difficult to get perennials established in grass. Most ornamental perennials originate from more continental climates and do not grow until temperatures reach a certain level; consequently they are dormant for the winter. Our native grasses and a few wildflower species like creeping buttercup grow at lower temperatures, which effectively means off and on through the entire winter. They inevitably take over so that any attempt at combining native grasses with ornamental perennials results in rough grass with steadily vanishing perennials. The only thing which can stop this happening is if they cannot get enough nutrients.

Three years ago, in April, I visited the Oudolfs (who live in the eastern Netherlands) on a radiantly sunny weekend. Piet was setting out a new planting, on the site of the old nursery sales area, where plants were lined out in pots. They had put down sand many years ago to provide good drainage and it was into the sand that some Calamagrostis 'Karl Foerster' and some perennials: heleniums, asters, eupatoriums, vernonias etc. were going. Piet told me he was going to sow the intermediate spaces with a wildflower seed mix i.e. mostly grass with a native forb element.

I must say I was a bit sceptical. If I tried this at home, the grass would run rampant and swamp everything. But - three growing seasons later, it looks fantastic. Really fantastic. Really super low-maintenance fantastic. Piet has pulled it off, again!

The perennials have all formed good clumps and flower well, although at a shorter height than they would do normally. The grass and wildflower mix has formed a dense sward but with a relatively low grass proportion. In fact a lot of it is yarrow (Achillea millefolium). It is very biodiverse - simply as a wildflower meadow it would be a great success.

The reason must be the sand. Despite many years of having nutrients washed into it from the container plants in the nursery, it must still be very too low in nitrogen and phosphorus for grasses to be able to dominate. The result is a true and very rarely seen balance between perennials, with their clearly defined growing season, and grasses and other wintergreen species, which can grow all year round.

It really is a triumph, and illustrates very beautifully and dramatically that we must not give up on trying to achieve perennial meadows. Substrate is clearly everything, which is good news for those on sand, or post-industrial waste! The rest of us, on the fertile and moisture-retentive soils which gardeners and farmers have traditionally regarded as desirable, if not essential, can only look on in admiration. Or buy several lorry loads of sand.

I am not sure of the sand depth here, my guess is probably 30cms  or so. This may be important; many perennials are able to get their roots down deeper than our native turf-forming grasses, which are very superficially rooted and are therefore unable to access deeper nutrient and moisture resources.

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Another point on how to encourage perennials and forbs vis a vis grasses. I just saw James Hitchmough on a trip to Sheffield and he tells me that at the Olympic Park they had some marquees and other temporary structures covering ground over the winter. In the spring where the ground had been covered, the forbs grew very well, but much of the grass had died. Grasses have very little ability to store nutrients in their roots whereas most forbs do, and so they are at an advantage in this situation. Differential starvation. Mimicking, he says the effect of heavy winter snow, which is one reason why places like central European mountains and central Asia have such fantastic wildflowers and so little grass - so-called herb fields. Winter covers for wildflower meadows? Whole new market for geotextiles? Who knows. Try it and see.

More pictures here.

URGENT ACTION! The end of 95% of all nurseries?

I think the European Union is a good thing. It has promoted peace and prosperity for our continent for half a century. However it does have an intensely bureaucratic regulatory side however which can work against both prosperity and liberty. A good example is the insane set of regulations being currently proposed for ornamental plants.

You can read about it in the Telegraph here:

More information here from Plant Heritage, and a useful list of UK MEPs to write to. And more here from Plant Heritage, with MEP contacts for other countries.

It is very important that all of us who are EU citizens to act on this. And soon. There is only a week left for submissions.