Suburbia, red in tooth and claw

On a recent trip to the US I found myself in several conversations with people about animals in the garden. Some astonishment that we do not have coyotes in Britain, nor racoons, or groundhogs, and that our deer are relatively small and tend to run off at the mere glimpse or whiff of a human, and unless you are very unlucky, do little damage to the garden. There's a lot more wildlife out there in those American woods, and for gardeners a lot more capacity for damage. The deer for a start, are enormous, and remarkably fearless. No wonder so many gardeners get obsessed with them, or more accurately how to keep them out. Actually they are a much more serious problem, as nature reserves and other areas of habitat can suffer some pretty serious impact from continued deer browsing - to the point of major ecological damage.

Soon after I got back I got an email from Helen Yoest in Raleigh, NC, with a book review about this very issue. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/visitors/?pagination=falseHow the woods are reclaiming the suburbs and the wildlife problems that result, or is it the suburbs invading the woods? Interesting stuff, and something which follows on from my recent blog with the rather lurid Martha Schwartz quote. The first few generations of European settlers felled every tree in sight, farmed, then realised that much of the land was too poor, and moved west, to plough up the much more fertile prairie. The woodland fought back. Very successfully. Whereas in Britain, woodland re-establishes itself through a fairly slow process, in the US, I feel that if all human beings disappeared one day (selective gamma ray burst that leaves other species standing?), then ten years later there would almost be no trace left of their presence. Trees re-establish so quickly. The upshot is that much of the area where people live is actually forest: roads, houses, gardens etc. are carved out of the forest. The wildlife, deer especially, have bounced back from the days when they hunted by anyone and everyone, to enormous numbers, numbers which in the absence of enough predators (i.e. not enough coyotes, bears, wolves, guys with guns who can shoot straight) have rocketed. Not good for gardeners, not actually very good for the environment, or even for the health of deer populations. For much of the wildlife, humanity is no longer a threat, but a source of food and habitat.

I am reminded of the British equivalent, the urban fox; cities support far more foxes than the countryside - all those bins to raid, discarded take-away meals, food left out for hedgehogs etc. No longer afraid, the wild animals creep back. Except that having exterminated all the big predators centuries ago (wolves, wild cats, bears, lynx) the urban wildlife we have is very unbalanced. Bring back the wolf? except that the farmers would complain (more than farmers complain anyway) and I somehow don't see large predators being welcome in British cities and suburbs.

Deer clearly need intelligent culling, and a more natural source of meat cannot be imagined. But in both the US and Britain, any mention of a cull brings storms of protest - often from people who are quite happy to sit down and eat meat from farmed animals. Another symptom of a failure to engage with the realities of life on earth.

What is so strange about this suburban woodland which so many US citizens choose to live in, is the extreme contrast with areas deemed to be landscaped: the vast deserts of grass mown to within an inch of its life, the extensive mulchscape which surround 'plantings' of evergreen shrubs ruthlessly pruned into meatballs. Much US landscaping and its management seems to express almost a hatred of vegetation, or as often with hatred, is it really fear (as with misogynist men). Or is it just job-creation? In the land of the ruthless corporate downsize, it seems strange that so many hands are paid to keep doing what is so apparently pointless. At one stage I got talking to a guy who worked as a landscape architect, he was fairly new into his career and was clearly on the bottom rung, designing landscapes for MacDonalds outlets etc.; he had almost no room for creativity - local zoning/planning requirements are incredibly prescriptive about how many shrubs had to be planted, what size, spacing etc. Driving through the junkscape outside Raleigh: endless auto retail outlets, strip malls, fast food outlets, box stores, made me feel very depressed. Such waste of space, such mediocrity on an epic scale, such obsession with control, above all the CONFORMITY. The conformity that we expected from Soviet communism, but which these supposedly free citizens embraced.

 Will it ever change? I thought about the various people over the years I have met who have fought for the right to grow meadow or prairie in their front yards. It is a battle that is still being fought, against the totalitarian instincts of lawn ordinances and neighbourhood associations. Thinking of the Highline, and the other projects which it is beginning to inspire which embrace wildness, I realised that it may be a very slow process, but things are changing. And - that I, with my writing and lecturing, am part of this process. My first American lecture tour was in 1996, as part of a group, organised by Horticulture magazine and called 'Wild Style'. My realisation made me feel less depressed, and left me with a strange feeling of subversive power; I, chuntering down the freeway in my anonymous rental Ford Fiesta (BTW Ford have a green roof on their Dearborn, MI, plant) am doing something about this. The ability of nature to take back lost ground is so obvious here, much more so than at home, it only needs permission. Let's give it, but remember, it will have some consequences which we need to be brave and sensible about.

Plant Delights Nursery

A particularly delicious Trillium underwoodii form.

Tony Avent's Plant Delights Nursery near Raleigh in North Carolina is legendary. 20,000 plus taxa. Primarily for the huge range of plants of course, but also for its display garden, its whacky sculpture and provocative, hate-mail-generating cartoon catalogue covers. Plant Delights shows that it is possible to stand out againt the herd and run a successful business selling a huge range of plants, many of them distinctly slow to grow.

Asarum takoi 'Roundabout'

Organisation is key here; everything is incredibly tidy, and very well-labelled. With an emphasis on woodland species, you can wander around, see and photograph more new plants in a couple of hours than many would believe possible. Researchers get involved too – for them the meticulously labelled clumps of innumerable geographic and other forms of plants are perfect material.

One of several dry berms, mostly but not entirely for dry land stuff.

“I'm very keen on ex situ conservation” says Tony, “although everyone bangs on about conserving plants in their place”. He has a point, habitat destruction can wipe out a rare variant of a species out overnight, but well-labelled collections in a protected location like this, will ensure survival. What's more, the public display of such a vast array of biodiversity is powerfully educational in its own right.

The soil here is very sandy, very acid, and was stripped of its nutrients by a century plus of tobacco farming (this is the greediest of crops). Wood mulch is used for the paths, and as it rots it gets shovelled onto borders, so steadily building up the humus content. Apart from some berms of imported soil and gravel, largely used for dry habitat plants, little effort is made to provide special soil conditions for plants; Tony is adamant that one size pretty well fits all here, he stabs a finger at an agave sitting next to an azalea on one of the berms to prove the point.

These are Rohdea.

 The whole, ten acre plus, site is managed as a rain garden, so as little water is allowed to run off as possible, and all water from the greenhouses (the only environment in which synthetic fertilizers are used) is cleaned by running through beds of wetland vegetation.

Water detention is a part of the nursery's rain garden approach to water management

I was there frustratingly early in the year. Trilliums were just beginning to show, and they illustrate perfectly Tony's passion for genetic diversity, with vast numbers of distinct forms on display, and thousands of seedlings coming up in the glasshouses. With their often exquisite leaf markings and mysteriously-coloured flowers, these are the ultimate collector plants. The US south-east is a major centre of diversity for them.

This is a floating island made from old drinks bottles, gently moving round the largest pool in the wind. 

Natural biodiversity may be the central passion, but Tony also oversees a number of breeding programmes to improve the plants available to gardeners; primarily with Epimedium, Baptisia and Hellebore. “With hellebores” he says, “we practice redneck breeding, just putting together groups of plants we want to cross, isolated from others, and let the bees get on with it.”

I can't wait to get back at another time of year.

Trillium maculatum

Episode Seven of Dig, Plant and Bitch, the world's only soap opera for gardeners is now available.
Iris stakes her claim
For years, Iris and Johnny Dalton have rather treated the almost-abandoned walled garden at Mere Castle as their own territory. Now aware that the Watkins-Smythes are thinking of renting it out, Iris decides to take matters into her own hands. Elsewhere, garden designer Sebastian Gilling-Jones is discovering that being a TV gardening personality pays a heavy price; nurseryman James Treasby increasingly feels like he is running a remedial class in basic horticulture, the Watkins-Smythes and their rivals, Wayne and Petunia Martin are playing a war of nerves over supplies of cakes for their respective tea-rooms, while Petunia makes a discovery that might be good news for local connoisseur gardeners, but will not be welcomed at Treasby’s Plants of Distinction.

Ever green in North Carolina

Prunus mume, an exquisite early-flowering plum,  thrives in the South, where the hot sticky summers are so much like its native Far East, almost ungrowable in England because of fungal diseases,. So unfair!

Don't they just luurve their evergreens in the South?
Am currently in North Carolina doing some lectures, brought here by the Davidson Symposium next week. I last came her 21 years ago, on the my first trip ever to the US. Its one one of those places which is a real gardening hot-spot. At the weather feels like home - cold - but the camellias are flowering well, and that's what reminds you that you are in the South. Look more closely, and you see lots of of evergreens. They are a big part of the garden culture here. Partly I suppose its because there are some very good native evergreens here, such as Magnolia grandiflora and M. virginiana, some good hollies including the charmingly named Ilex vomitoria. Partly also I suppose its a mark of distinction - most evergreens get treated very badly by the weather north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Buxus sempervirens 'Dee Runk'

Box, or boxwood as the natives so quaintly call it, has always been grown from, and often grown in a different way to the way Europeans treat it - it hasn't always been clipped, but sometimes allowed to grow free; I remember years ago visiting the Cathedral Garden in DC and seeing box 'grown loose', and rather liking it. If you always clip box you are not actually going to be that interested in what shapes it adopts naturally, whereas if you let it loose, then the shape is going to be very important. So people here started collecting and selecting different cultivars, so there has always been much more awareness here than back home of the genetic diversity of box.

Arbutus unedo 'Elfin King'. Whoever named this was a bit optimistic about it being dwarf, but the leaves are very distinctive.

One place I was really confronted with the incredible diversity of evergreens available here, and indeed of woody plants generally (try and find a nursery that does an interesting range of woodies in Britain now) was Camellia Forest Nursery, where Bri Gluvna Arthur had invited me to drop in. I didn't go to see camellias, which quite honestly, if I wanted a flower like a piece of soap I'd buy the soap. Polytunnel packed with loads of plants which i have never heard of - which always gets me excited, especially since most of them would be growable back home: Distyllum, Eurya, Gordonia, Schima, Serissa, then loads of species of genera where we have only a limited selection back home like Osmanthus and Illicium, or general we really couldn't grow outside like Gardenia  and Cinnamomum.

Ilex 'Carolina Sentinel' - a very nice upright-growing holly. The hollies here are wonderful.

Then to be fair to Camellia, BTW, of which there are 100+ species, there were some wonderful camellias here. I've always loved 'Cornish Snow' with little white single flowers, many of the species look like that, but with many different variations in their foliage: nice n'smelly C. odorata, C. fraterna and many more.

Not just a nice smell - Gardenia augusta 'Michael'

Would you believe it, this is a camellia - C. sasanqua 'Silverado'.

While a lot of evergreens were showing signs of winter stress, boxes in particular, this shrub (trained as a standard) looked incredibly fresh and unfazed; I was very impressed by the quality of the foliage, it's an intergeneric hybrid involving Raphiolepis and Eriobotrya (loquat) - x Raphiobotrya 'Conda'.

Another chance to appreciate the southern love of evergreens, and the incredibly adventurous US nursery industry is the Paul C. Ciener Botanic Garden where I did my first lecture of this little tour. The botanic garden isn't there yet, but it will be; they have a car park and a very nice building, and the first plantings, a plan, and what looks like the ability to pull in sponsorship and achieve things. Horticulturalist Adrienne Roethling has got the enviable job of gardening the place into existence, she worked for Plant Delights Nursery for 8 years ("we call it graduate school round here" Bri Arthur says), so almost every plant is one which is new on me, and all incredibly well-labelled. Its all a very good start to what should be an exceptional small-town botanic garden. Kernersville is a lucky place.

Look! the agave has impaled that SUV! If only. The car park at the Ciener Botanic Garden. Notice the kerb insets for sempervivum.

Euphorbia rigida, in the planting above, good early colour, and superior to myrsinites. Must get it.

A great idea planting up the border between the fence and the sidewalk.The hell-strip though is going to take some more determined plant selection though. Yucca rostrata is clearly visible, and its soft enough not to risk impaling small dogs.

There will be a garden here one day.

And it will look like this!

Nature improved upon in hellebore heaven

This almost-black hellebore looks like something straight out of a Victoran funeral. Of all black flowers they have to be the best

A wonderful day spent at Ashwood Nurseries in the Midlands, looking at hellebores and being more impressed than ever by their breeding programme but also by the plant itself, which seems to challenge and transcend our notions about the difference between the wild and the bred. This is their mother-plant greenhouse, where the plants are grown for the hand-pollinated seed. Seed to saleable plant is three years - unlike the one year of most perennials which are sold.

We are used to heavily hybridised plants looking very different to their wild ancestors, and making a big distinction between the two. Those of us who go for naturalistic planting tend to look askance at heavily-bred plants, but with hellebores it is somehow different. Here are plants which work very well indeed in naturalistic planting schemes and are not highly-strung cultivation-dependent like most intensively-bred groups. No do they have the mutant-with-a-cultivar-name look of many either. In fact they do not have cultivar names - and this is very important. They have broken free of the tyranny of the identical cloned cultivar trap which ornamental horticulture has got itself stuck in. Genetic variability rules!

Kevin Belcher cross-pollinates selected plants from mid-January. Hopefully not too many bees sneak into the glasshouse to wreak genetic havoc. Very simple crossing procedures. Everything is recorded but there are no complicated genetics here. This plant breeding is at the first level, where intuition is everything.

This is one of the 'Neon' strain, with yellow and apricoty colours predominant. The naming of particular genetic lineages which express particular colours is the nearest Ashwood get to giving names. The variation from one flower to another is one of the things which is most entrancing about them; looking at the plants in their sales glasshouse, thinking about what to buy (needless to say they are amongst the most expensive of perennials); spotting the little differences between two flowers which at first look identical - this is all part of the joy and you wonder why we are so hung up on the concept of the cultivar, where every individual must look the same. Clonal cultivars seem just so boring by comparison.

The doubles are beautiful but most of us are not so sure. For one thing the flowers are so heavy they hang down and are not so easy to see. And they do rupture that fundamental belief we have that they are not natural and there isn't one just like this in a wood in Croatia somewhere.

Single hellebores look - well, so natural. They are indeed not so far from their ancestors which are very common in the woods and meadow edges of the Balkans. Above all, they are so robust, long-lived plants which in our gardens in Britain at any rate, are very easy-going about where they grow.

The dark ones are the most vigorous by far, and look best when backlit. At our last house we had them on top of a wall so we could look up at them. A few years ago I planted out some of the many seedlings which were sprouting around the plants I bought from Ashwood 14 years ago. The ones which grew really fast all turned out to be red. However good plants did tend to produce good children, there was not much reversion to inferior forms.

I love spotted flowers. The level of spotting is highly variable. Early Ashwood spotties were red on white - they now have a strain with red on yellow.

And now there are double spotties.

The blacks are really special but difficult to use in the garden as they merge with the background. I like to plant snowdrops as contrast, and later on, dark-leaved Lysimachia 'Firecracker' makes a nice complement.

 

All of the ones so far are H. x hybridus, derived mostly from the very variable Balkan H. orientalis.

This is one of the x sternii group, where there is a lot of active breeding amongst several nurseries. Different hellebore species do not necessarily cross-breed (yet - someone will crack it one day, with a lab technique like 'embryo rescue', the plant equivalent of test-tube babies. At the moment varieties with good flowers tend not to have great foliage and vica versa, but I am sure this will change. There are so many species to play with. 

For more on hellebores this is a good introduction.

Beyond 'nature as virgin – garden as whore'.

Nature in the city has gotta look pretty. The New York High Line

In a recent, and well-argued post, fellow blogger Thomas Rainer quotes landscape architect Martha Schwartz as saying that “Americans treat nature like Victorians treated women: as virgins or whores”.

I know what she means: landscapes are either wild or they are not, and not-wild-landscapes in the US tend to be treated in a way which is almost abusive – the sadistically-mown grass and cruelly-clipped evergreens. Thomas though is interested in the nature side of the quotation – that “if nature (OUT THERE) is not some pristine wilderness, then it’s not nature”. As he points out there is very little pristine nature left.

All this is part of a discussion about a very thought-provoking book (Rambunctious Nature by scince writer Emma Marris) which I raised in a blog last year. I'd like to carry on the conversation.

Thomas announces that “now is the era of the designer”, that landscape designers will have an increasingly important role in designing nature, that “(t)he ecological warriors of the future will be gardeners, horticulturists, land managers, Department of Transportation staff, elementary school teachers, and community association board members. Anyone who can influence a small patch of land has the ability to create more nature. And the future nature will look more and more like a garden.”

Too right. Which raises all sorts of questions about “what is nature?”, “what is a garden?”.

They are liking it wild at last! - changing public perceptions of what a garden is

Increasingly people are appreciating gardens and public plantings that are far wilder than anything that would have been acceptable in the past. The New York High Line is probably the best example of that. Nature in the city is now seen as not just ok but highly desirable. At least in the industrialised world (it'll take a while to catch on in China!). Managing nature in the city involves habitat creation and management which is a kind of gardening. This is not actually that new – the Dutch have been doing this since the 1930s in the parks of Amstelveen.

Recently, on a trip to South America, I saw what garden designer Amalia Robredo was doing with her land in Uruguay. A lot of her 'gardening' is actually land management – deciding what to cut, when to cut it, on the basis of aesthetic decisions (to encourage spring or summer flowers for example) or functional (such as short-grass around seating areas to discourage snakes). Increasingly this land management will be seen as part and parcel of normal garden practice. Part of the reason for this is that more and more of us are gardening places which used to be farmland, but which is now uneconomic to farm; Amalia's land used to be rangeland, my own here in the Welsh borders used to be sheep pasture, and before that, arable crops.

BUT - people like their nature stylised

Especially in urban areas. Hence the incredible success of the Dunnett and Hitchmough Olympic Park plantings in London  and of course the High Line. There is nothing wrong with this, so long as people realise that this is 'enhanced nature' or 'stylised nature' and not the real thing. Given how difficult it is to actually see the 'real thing', it is probably more important for us all to realise that what we are looking at may be a fantastic wildlife habitat, but that there are a whole lot of species (mammal, bird, primarily) which will not choose to live here, because they need bigger territories or need to be well away from humans. The ReservaEcológica Costenera Sur in the middle of Buenos Aires for example is never going to have any jaguars, nor the NY High Line any mountain lions.

A point that Emma Marris makes in Rambunctious Natureis that this stylised nature offends some people, the 'ecologists' who are still wedded to the idea that 'nature' is something which can only happen 'out there' and untrammelled by us (Martha Schwartz's virgin/whore dichotomy). The central thrust of her book is that 'nature' should be seen as anywhere where natural processes have at least some leeway; certainly including the weedy waste ground at the end of the road.

Anyway, what is nature?

An awful lot of what we think of as 'natural' is actually human-managed, or human-impacted. This was one of the points I was trying to make from Bolivia a few weeks back.  So many cherished landscapes are actually farmland, or were trashed by our ancestors. Some human management actually improves biodiversity (a heretical thought for eco-purists), as in European hay meadows or fire-managed Midwest prairie and savannah.

Eco-illusions

One of the most insidious illusions of a particular romantic and often quite techno-phobic way of thinking is that our ancestors: 'traditional societies' or 'indigenous peoples', cherished nature, lived in balance with it, and we are somehow different. Hardly. We just have more destructive tools. Our ancestors consciously manipulated nature or made huge impacts on it in many different ways (again see the Bolivia post). These ways are sometimes so deep in the past that we are not aware of them – we do not even know what 'nature' is.

• Fire – some areas have had millennia of burning for game management (much of the grasslands of the Americas, Australia, Scotland)
• Mass extinction – our tribal ancestors wiped out wildlife on an epic scale, with the Maori killing of the giant moa birds in New Zealand simply one of the latest episodes.
• Farming – whether through slash-and-burn or more sophisticated methods, vast area of the globe have been cultivated at some stage.

I believe it is important that these illusions make it very difficult for us to appreciate the history of our wild and not-so-wild places, and therefore complicates the task of how we think about managing them in the future.

Farming, and more eco-illusions

Ok, we want wild: we like it, and we want it because we have finally recognised that the rest of creation has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of (whatever passes for happiness in a newt's brain) as we have. We are getting used to the idea of nature in cities, and gardens, and that we can garden in such a way as to maximise it. We want nature reserves and national parks and wilderness areas – the latter probably as much to feed our own illusions about the 'wilderness' as actually to protect nature. And many of us would actually like a lot more for this kind of nature than there is currently is. We like to hike in it, birdwatch in it, see in on telly in David Attenborough programmes, above all to know it is there.

But.

There is an awful lot of us, and we are getting more, and richer, and when people get richer they demand more food, and more cotton, and palm oil and all the other stuff that consumer-humans want.

And the biggest destroyer of unmanaged landscapes is the agriculture which produces all this stuff.

Which is why we need to ensure that agriculture uses land really efficiently. This is something which again attracts lots of feel-good sounding eco-illusions. Many of the so-called sustainable farming approaches, such as organics, may be good and appropriate for marginal regions but fail utterly to deliver the sheer volume of calories needed. It is right and proper that fertile flat places are used for intensive arable production – with some areas set aside for nature of course. They can take the pressure off more biodiverse, more vulnerable habitats.

In thinking about how we 'garden the earth' I would suggest that this is the biggest blind-spot many people have – the failure to appreciate how efficient farming and nature conservation actually dovetail. Think of the earth as a garden, with a well-run tidy vegetable patch, a lawn area to play on, some nice wild borders and a really wild unmanaged bit somewhere.

The nation as garden – the Dutch analogy

'Gardening the earth' – was an expression I dreamt up years ago, in a essay for a collection in a book called Vista – Culture and Politics of Gardens. 

It is interesting to develop this analogy: we need places to grow food, to live, and for nature. The Netherlands seems to have come pretty close to this, with its very dense juxtapositioning of land for living, working, recreation, some of the productive farming on the planet, and yet with a long and pioneering history of habitat creation, and one of the most radical departures in wilderness creation – the Oostvaardeersplassen.

We have far more to thank those sensible, level-headed Dutch for than just tulips!

Nurturing nature

So, we are getting used to the idea of the earth as a garden. Often badly managed by us, and by our deep ancestors, for sure, but as we learn more about our ecological history, and about ecological processes, we can become better managers. We need to. As we are just about to reach a point where designed vegetation will play a vital role in how we manage the planet.

In April Piet Oudolf and I are bringing out another book – on planting design. The introduction however makes the point that we are expecting plants to do more and more for us: wetlands to manage sustainable drainage systems, green roofs to moderate the extremes of urban climates, bioremediation planting to purify effluent, living walls to clean the air. Managed vegetation will play a more and more important role in reducing the impacts of climate change, and might even help reverse the rise in CO_2. Nurturing nature will not just be about creating habitat, but about planet-management too. As we nurture nature it in turn will nurture us.

Back Home and Clearing Up, and thoughts on crimes against perennial growing.

Back home from two months away in South America, and there is a lot to do the garden, although our one-day-a-week gardener, Diana had got a lot done. Cutting back primarily. Usually I cut back most of the messier herbaceous stuff in November, leaving grasses and a few of the stronger structural elements.

Until late January or Feb. But this year, I thought I'd get rid of the lot in one go. On this border, dead stuff ends up on the compost heap - on others I am inclined to cut it all down with a brushcutter and leave to rot down in situ. Some folk go over it all with a mower on a mulch setting, but mine won't do that, so it just stays as a rather heavy mulch. This border, we do not rake up what we don't carry to the compost heap. It just has to sit there looking untidy until spring growth begins to hide it. I do appreciate how nice and neat a newly cleaned up late winter border can look, but quite honestly life is too short.
        Last week I was in the Savill Garden near Windsor. Their big herbaceous border was enough to convince me that I don't really want a nice tidied-up border after all. Horrendous! A vast swathe of bare earth with occasional perennial clumps (about one a metre in places - so many gaps!). Apparently they cut the grasses down in November - what a crime! Everything I can't stand about traditional perennial gardening all on show in one go.
       To summarise: crimes against perennial growing:
1) all composed of enormous groups of the same thing
2) all cut back at once, nothing left for Santa or anybody else visiting in winter to look at
3) huge areas of bare ground
4) so I am told.....all dug up and divided every four years, no matter what the natural lifespan of the plant is.
        Right got that off my chest! But the S Garden is magnif for its witch-hazels and (later) rhodies and other spring-flowering shrubs. One of their problems I suspect is too much money - or maybe the Queen likes it so tidy (it is hers I suppose after all). A problem which can wreck gardens through over-maintenance, and there was plenty of that on display here.

 One of the insights of cutting-back is to see perennial growth at ground level - the Rabbit's Eye View I am always on about. Phlox are interesting - some break up their clumps really quickly; traditionally they are the kind of perennial which benefited from dividing every four years; not this one though - see how tight its basal growth is after six years in the same spot. A very strong-grower, given us by a (posher than us) neighbour soon after we moved "have some phlox, frightfully vulgar pink". It is pink, it is vulgar, but oh so much better here than any other phlox we have tried. More research needed I think.

The garden here at Montpelier Cottage is more or less 'an evergreen free zone' - out of a desire to fit into the local landscape. Bamboos are the exception though, their wispy habit does not visually obtrude in the way that blocky shaped glossy-leaved evergreen shrubs do.  This is Chusquea culeou 'Weeping Form'.

Phyllostachys aureo-sulcata 'Lama Temple' looks so fresh in the snow. It has proved much hardier than some too.

Time to flag up some dates for your diary:

 I shall be in North Carolina in early March - dates see the column on the left. 

I shall be doing this for RHS Wisley on Feb.26, just before I leave for the US.

In July I shall be running a planting design workshop with Piet Oudolf at Hummelo (July 3), followed by a tour of gardens and landscapes in the northern Netherlands for Gardens Illustrated magazine, based on Groningen. Get in touch with me if you are interested in either of these.

 

Two hikes in the foothills of the Andes...

Two very different walking experiences in the foothills of the Andes; the first was beautiful but badly eroded scenery with only a little plantlife hanging on, the second was a tantalising glimpse into a botanical paradise.

Week before last we managed a hike in the hills around Sucre, in central Bolivia. Pretty catastrophically deforested (as is much of the whole central region of the country), but botanically interesting as always. Some surviving trees on very steep slopes, but otherwise pretty much like this.

An erosion gully, a bad sign that the whole landscape is being eaten up. I would imagine the Spanish cleared the trees for silver smelting, as we are not so far from Potosí whose silver did so much to change the world economy in the 17 & 18th centuries, as well as swallow up to (it is estimated) several million human lives.

Drought-tolerant scrub mostly survives. I think this is a white ceanothus species.

What always intrigues me in places like this are cliffs, which act as 'refugia' for native species; not even the goats can get at them, and invasive aliens tend to be held at bay too. Here grasses, bromeliads, cacti, various bulbs, begonias and much else forms a rich plant community.

Compared to the opposite bank of the river, with eucalyptus but otherwise grazed to almost bare ground. Eucaluptus is a boon for the locals, as it provides such good firewood and so helps protect surviving native species. We saw a man planking up cut eucalyptus with a chainsaw, which is normal practice here - a real precision job!

I wish I could have got the Adiantum fern and the cactus in the same shot but not quite; they were actually growing a few metres from each other with identical aspect. Which does rather challenge ideas about 'what grows where'. In fact, I think there is plentiful water on this cliffs when it rains. The fern is a 'stress avoider' going dormant in the dry season, while the cactus is truly 'stress tolerant' as it can sits out the drought.

Air plants - Tillandsia species are the great survivors. Here growing on a shaded rockface.

They are very common on electricity cables. Here in downtown Sucre.

Verbena species have popped up all over the places we have been to.

No idea what this is, but a wonderful example of evolution in action, a seemingly self-supporting shrub but with tendrils on the ends of its leaves, ready to start climbing.

Our second hike (at around 2600m) was in Salta province, Argentina, with Veronica Saguier and her family. Veronica is a local garden designer who is also a keen trekker. There is a great deal of surviving undamaged forest in the area and many other habitats. Because of the interplay between altitude and aspect it is possible to have extreme habitat changes over relatively short distances. A bit like California, where you can drive from semi-desert to mistily-dripping redwood groves within half an hour. Cloud forest (see a previous blog) covers all land at a certain altitude.

Where we started our walk it had an oddly familiar feeling... could easily have been somewhere in Europe - a gently farmed landscape. Hedgerows around where we parked, with several salvia species, a penstemon and much to my surprise a geranium (I didn't realize there were any in South America). As soon as we got going we very subtly shifted into a somewhat drier zone and so we never got to see more of the flora of the place where we parked (and our car was at the bottom). It remains as a tantalising memory to make me come back.

Thrilling to see a Bomarea species, climbing relatives of Alstroemeria.

?Bignoniaceae, small shrub.

If not a Tradescania, then very closely related, and with definite garden potential.

 Giant cacti (known locally as Cardones) are a feature of the landscape, otherwise dominated by a rich array of drought-tolerant-looking shrubs. The cacti can be home to a remarkable number of epiphytes: ferns as well as air-plants.

A familiar friend, Stipa tenuissima (correctly now Nassella) growing by the side of the path.

A Loasa species, attractive annuals which were grown in Victorian times as ornamental annuals, even though they have nasty stinging hairs.

Down by the river we come across the bottom of what was obvious from further up - that whole slabs of rock and its accompanying vegetation are slipping down off the mountainside. This particular remnant is probably all going to disappear in the next few years. It contained no less than three rather spectacular bulbous species, including a very tall orange Alstroemeria and heavily scented white lily family species. The little figure on the right here is Veronica scrambling up the slope.

Some of the bulbs were actually hanging out of the eroding face of the soil, so Veronica's husband Julio rescued some.

This is somewhere I am dying to get back to. There are very fine distinctions between very different climate zones, so several very different floras seem to sit within a few hundred metres A lot would be hardy for mild temperate climates like ours, many other species could be usefully drought and stress tolerant. I very much hope to come back and work with local garden people in a few years and so some serious plant hunting.