Is it thirst?
18 September 2009

Moaning about drought doesn’t get you anywhere, especially among friends who have just spent two weeks on Mull without a single dry hour. With 360 millimetres in the pot, moreover, we have had a fair proportion of our expected 500 mm annual allowance. So why are my arms so long from carrying cans, and why are my recent plantations so desperate for a drink?

Most of the rain fell, it is true, last winter and in July. The longest sequence of rainless days was in June and August, when the other side of the island was being soaked, but never more than 12 days or so without some dampening shower. The truth is that watering individual plants is never a substitute for

a good hou of rain. Even putting the

Happy Chance
4 September 2009

It is tempting to take credit for the happy accidents of gardening, to pretend that you planned a chromatic chord due solely to the almighty or (as is happening just now) the look of airy intricacy in borders buffeted by the wind.

It takes a lot to reconcile me to wind in the garden. Out in the fields I love to watch the straining grass-heads and the tossing trees. A line of Browning’s came to me just now as I climbed from the sheltered streamside out on to what passes in Essex for downland: ‘an everlasting wash of air’. Browning was in the Roman campagna where the grasses and rushes wave mile after level mile.

The border looks airy partly because I have taken the shears to tired plants with

Fred Whitsey
26 August 2009

I was sad to read the obituary in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday for Fred Whitsey, the paper’s gardening correspondent for 45 years, who died at the age of 90.

It brought back memories of when the R.H.S. had a Publications Committee and Fred and I were both members. Those were the days before the Society went professional, as it were. Decisions were taken by committees of members, which meant in general committed amateurs, and their implementation left to the Society’s employees. We had, for example, issue-by-issue post mortems on The Garden (which was still described as The Society’s Journal). In fact the Society was just that, rather than describing itself as Britain’s leading Gardening Charity.

rainmaker on is a pis aller. I suppose the reason is that competition among the congregation of roots that fills the soil. It is easy to think of plants that you can pull up with a neat tuft – but they are the minority.

Most plants insinuate their roots into as much ground as they can, whether others are occupying it or not. My can of water is the invitation to beat up the poor new boy in the class.

Is this the reason my salvias have been so slow to perform – the ones I scrounged in Scotland last summer? We paid a call to Powys Castle last weekend to see Wales’s great window-box at its most floriferous. Powys is famous for overflowing pots and vases of tender things in daring combinations, and by September all its hanging terraces, stacked below the red stone castle, bubble and froth with exotica. I drooled over it all – but especially over the salvias, in varieties I had never dreamed of, pouring down, rearing up, infiltrating their neighbours with their predictable but still somehow surprising pouty flowers in every colour from scarlet to searing blue to black and
green.

What did I do wrong? By the time mine are flowering in earnest the frost will be getting them – or even, fingers crossed, serious rain.

more resolution than usual, hoping for a second coming of delphiniums, thalictrums, campanulas, geraniums, valerian, even phlox. September flowers, as a result, are clear of clutter. My favourite of the moment is a clump of Francoa ’Bridal Wreath’, its white wands of flowers rising from its solid saxifrage basal clumps. Last winter nearly put paid to it; it struggled in spring, and as a result is late enough in flower to mingle with the lovely bright blue Salvia ‘Guanajato’ that is just getting into its stride. Is my Francoa sonchifolia, the default species in Graham Thomas? I think not: the flowers are pure white with none of the red spots G.S.T. mentions. Almost certainly F. ramosa.

Margaret Waterfield (am I her last fan?) in her book Flower Grouping in English, Scotch & Irish Gardens (no publisher would call a book that today) painted a group of F. ramosa with Dierama (then Sparaxis) pulcherrinia, an image that haunts me with its beauty, but I have never achieved. She says, surprisingly, that the Francoa is hardier than the Sparaxis. Watercolours like hers (the book was published in 1907, by J.M. Dent) are an almost-forgotten treasure, conveying airy intricacy, or any other happy effect, more precisely and evocatively than photography has ever done.

Fred Whitsey and I were, I suppose, the only two professional writers (he a newspaper journalist, I more of a magazine man) on the committee. We were also the awkward squad, although in my memory we were usually querying different things. Fred was a winning mixture of smile and resolve, courteous, patient and fundamentally unbudgeable. I remember (they are hard to imagine today) the discussions about advertising in the Journal: how much to allow on what subjects. I argued (goodness, I was the pushy liberal) that non-horticultural ads could do no harm. The majority seemed to think that a bank, a car maker or a jeweller would corrupt members’ morals, however much we could have spent the money on photography and writers. Fred was firm on what was relevant, tested and authoritative in pure horticulture – though if this makes him sound strait-laced and humourless it gives quite the wrong impression.

As the obituary says, no professional colleagues ever seem to have seen his own garden in Surrey. I wish I had, because a visit with him would have been an education. The departure of people like him underlines the change of the R.H.S. from a learned Society to a members’ organization almost analogous to the A.A. It is a parable of our times.