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Sally Nex

Category Archives: new plants

Postcard from Chelsea: Edible Chelsea

26 Friday May 2017

Posted by sallynex in exotic edibles, new plants, shows

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

chillies, dragon's breath, giant vegetables, oranges, potatoes, RHS Chelsea Flower Show, snake gourds, vertical gardening

Great to see the veg back at Chelsea. We had a brief flurry of edible love back in the mid-noughties, when the GYO trend was riding high, but in recent years they’ve gone back to hiding behind the skirts of flouncier irises, alliums and other glamourpusses.

No longer. This year there were pistachios on the Best in Show garden and potatoes in the Pavilion (to be fair, they never really went away). Even the RHS Plant of the Year was an edible (the genuinely ground-breaking dwarf mulberry ‘Charlotte Russe’). For a dedicated food grower like me, it was heaven.

The Chris Evans Taste Garden


I really liked the Radio 2 Feel Good gardens this year. They had all the Chelsea pizazz but were more accessible than the more highbrow show gardens: these were true crowd-pleasers, and unashamedly so. None more than the Chris Evans Taste Garden, designed by talented edibles specialist Jon Wheatley and packed with astonishingly perfect vegetables grown by Suttons Seeds’ secret weapon, Terry Porter, whose slightly arcane specialism is producing show-standard vegetables out of season for the flower shows.

I loved everything about this garden: and particularly the big trough full of cutting flowers at the back (including a ginger dahlia, ‘Cheyenne’, in tribute to Chris Evans’s famous carrot top). Just goes to show, you can squeeze a cutting garden in just about anywhere.

The Viking Cruises Garden of Inspiration (gold)

Sarah Eberle


My favourite of all the Artisan Gardens this year. And just look at that orange tree. I have seen orange trees in Italy, France and Florida. But never have I seen one as perfectly orangey as this one. Mouthwatering.

The Potato Story (gold)

Morrice and Ann Innes

Into the Pavilion now, and potato enthusiasts Morrice and Ann Innes became the first exhibit in the history of the show to win a gold medal for a display of potatoes. But what a display. I thought I know a bit about spuds, but came away from this realising quite how far I have yet to go. Morrice (resplendent in his kilt) told me he grows every single one of the 140 varieties on display each year. Only six or so tubers of each, granted, but they take up about half a hectare of back garden. Now that’s dedication.

Robinson Seed & Plants (Silver Gilt)

Loads of unusual veg on the immaculate Robinsons stand. Many, like achocha and cucamelons, I’ve grown already. But these snake gourds turned my head. Apparently, as well as eating them or making medicines from them, you can also turn them into didgeridoos. Who knew.

Also on the Robinsons stand was a rather fabulous edible wall, planted in pockets. This lot included American land cress, watercress, parsley, red-veined sorrel, Bull’s Blood beetroot, rocket, two types of lettuce, electric daisies, New Zealand spinach and asparagus peas. Not bad for a ‘wall’ that measured no more than about 3ft wide by 2ft high.

Tom Smith Plants (Silver Gilt)


And I just had to give a mention to the hottest exhibit in the Pavilion. One for masochists, sorry, chilli lovers everywhere, ‘Dragon’s Breath’ was bred pretty much by accident by Mike Smith, owner of Denbighshire nursery Tom Smith’s Plants. He sent the fruits off to Nottingham Trent University, and much to his surprise they returned with a scorching 2.48 million reading on the Scoville Heat scale. Just to put that into context, the current world record holder, the notorious Carolina Reaper, hits a mere 2.2 million. Mike is now awaiting confirmation from the Guinness Book of Records. Apparently if you were actually stupid enough to swallow one of these little fruits – just a couple of centimetres across – you would be fairly likely to die of anaphylactic shock. The law of natural selection in action, you might say.

Postcard from Chelsea: New plants

24 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by sallynex in new plants, shows, unusual plants

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new plants, RHS Chelsea Flower Show

The RHS Chelsea Plant of the Year competition, launched in 2010, brings new and genuinely different plants into the light each year, these days attracting dozens of entries from growers all over the Pavilion. Here are the ones that caught my eye this year.

Morus rotundiloba ‘Charlotte Russe’

Winner, RHS Chelsea Plant of the Year 2017

Not the most spectacular of pictures to start with, but then May isn’t the best time to be showing off a new mulberry either. I spotted this one at the Garden Press Event back in February where it was attracting much interest: it is the first genuinely dwarf mulberry bush, small enough to grow in a container and a real breakthrough in small-scale fruit production. It’s even said to fruit in its first year (unlike tree mulberries, which take at least seven).

Rosa ‘Dame Judi Dench’ (‘Ausquaker’)

Meet Judi Dench: one of the five or six new roses which has made it through the rigorous 10-year selection process at David Austin Roses this year. Peachy-apricot, sweetly fragrant, and a little louche in habit: Michael Marriott at David Austin’s says they could be amenable to training as a climber, too.

Lewisia longipetala ‘Little Snowberry’

A truly lovely lewisia from alpine specialists D’Arcy & Everest, delicate, pretty, dainty, and carefully selected for the purity of colour of its flowers and for its robustness.

Lilium ‘Sunset Joy’

 I found this one bursting from containers on the Horticultural Trades Association stand – actually, you couldn’t miss it. Asiatic lilies are usually single colours but this one is a bicolour: it’s also a compact and vigorous little thing, great for summer patios.

Digitalis ‘Lemoncello’


Another chance discovery among foxgloves in the National Collection at the Botanic Nursery in Wiltshire: yellow foxgloves are rare, and this is a particularly interesting shade of lemony, limey yellow which looks lovely among brighter shades. It’s also quite compact, so could be a good one for containers.

Corydalis ‘Porcelain Blue’

There were mixed reactions to this little plant, tucked into the side of the Hilliers exhibit. But I liked it, especially that pretty bicoloured effect as flowers open blue and fade to white with age.

Clematis ‘Taiga’

I am usually a little wary of brightly-coloured clematis, but this one had something. The flower matures from spiky to rosette, then opens fully into a full double, each purple petal tipped with white like a little icicle.

Sweet pepper ‘Popti’

I am possibly a little biased here as I’m always on the lookout for new veg varieties coming onto the market. But this little bell pepper on the Pennard Plants stand did turn my head: it’s a bushy plant but still compact, and covered with peppers, unusually for a pot-grown plant. It’s disease-resistant and early-ripening, too.

Pelargonium ‘Rushmoor Amazon’

Well, who knew. A yellow pelargonium. And what a pretty one, too. This is the result of 30 years of breeding in Australia, the first in a series to be known as the Rushmoor River Series. Its habit is so different it’s even invented a new type of pelargonium, the Zonartic pelargonium, with big, open flowers and that delicate yellow colouring, this one just brushed with a smidge of pale pink. I loved it.

So… what’s new?

03 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by sallynex in exotic edibles, new plants, news, shows

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

charles dowding, Garden Press Day, grow lights, mulberries, propagation, tiger nuts, Vitopod

large_6a017d41d9ea05970c01a5116c8aa0970c-piA quick whizz round the Garden Press Event up in London the other week – and I do mean quick, as I didn’t arrive till lunchtime having flown in from Bordeaux in France that morning, fingernails still muddy from clearing the garden in the little house my family has bought there.

It’s tempting at this point to get diverted into a little rhapsody about the delights of sitting outside eating a lunch of ham-stuffed baguettes baked that morning, sun shining and temperature a balmy 19 degrees (in February!), back aching pleasantly from raking leaves, loading bonfires, dismantling rotten-roofed sheds and climbing a lot of old trees to pull out ivy.

But I will resist the temptation (until later, anyway) and instead talk about the many little things I came across at the show which caught my eye. The Press Event has become one of those must-attend punctuations to the gardening year: it sort of kicks things off as everyone lines up to show you what the horticultural talking points are likely to be this year.

There’s quite a lot of toot there too, of course, but I tend to avert my eyes tactfully from the stuff that I can’t see the point of or of which I frankly disapprove (one year I listened open-mouthed as an earnest lawn company representative described how their new product would efficiently murder every earthworm in your garden. Not that she put it in quite those words, but I politely refused the free sample she offered: quickest way I know to kill a lawn stone dead).

So here is a little distillation of the good stuff: the half-dozen bits of kit, new plants and innovations which I hope will find their way onto my plot too before too many seasons have passed by.

100w-deluxe-double-height-vitopod-heated-propagator-with-lights-support-kit-1

Grow lights you can use: Oh I know I’ve been banging on about my Vitopod lately but it does have quite a major role in my life just at the moment. So it’s not that surprising that these natty grow lights caught my attention. The only grow lights I’ve come across have been offered me from slightly dodgy sources and are enormous industrial-scale things with questionable electrics. These on the other hand are dainty little things that just clip over your Vitopod lid and extend the day length to up to 12 hours. Daylight being just as important as warmth when starting early seedlings, this could be the missing piece of my jigsaw puzzle.

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Tiger nuts: So excited by these. They look a bit like chickpeas, but they’re actually the tubers of an unremarkable sedge, Cyperus esculentus, a close relation to papyrus (the kind you grow in your pond) only not quite as pretty. It’s quite prolific – an average clump yields about 1lb of dried tubers: the texture and taste is similar to coconut, with a little hint of almond, and they’re packed with nutrients. You can dry them for storing over winter, then rehydrate them overnight to eat raw or in cakes and bakes. On coming home to do a bit more research, though, they do seem to be a bit on the tender side. I’m making them this year’s experiment, anyway, to see how they do.

poppy

Ornaments that double up as bird feeders: I did think this was pretty, and useful too. I found it on the Crocus stand: you fill the central bowl with seeds, or cheese, or whatever you happen to be feeding the birds at the moment, and they can perch on the ledge to feast. Much prettier than your average wire-and-plastic peanut job.

untitled

Charles Dowding’s new book: Charles was there with his partner Steph – also a very talented kitchen gardener and writer – and a lot of copies of his latest publication, Charles Dowding’s Vegetable Garden Diary. a wire-bound allotment notebook-cum-diary interwoven with pages of Charles’s no nonsense advice based on sound practical experience. I have long admired Charles’s quiet ability to plough his own furrow: he draws his own conclusions, he only ever follows what other people say if he’s already proved it to himself, and as a result he is a true pioneer. And Steph gave me some parched peas, too (thanks Steph!)

mulberry

Dwarf mulberries: Alongside the tiger nuts on the Suttons stand was this little cutie: the first proper mulberry bush. By which I mean one bred to grow just 1.5m tall – or the size of a large-ish shrub, unlike the conventional mulberry bush which is actually a small tree (does anyone know why mulberry trees are called mulberry bushes in the song? The best I can find is this blog post which says it was originally a song about blackberry bushes, or possibly juniper bushes, though it all seems rather vague.) It goes by the pretty name of ‘Charlotte Russe’ and it’s got proper mulberries and everything (and within a year rather than the usual eight or so).

rudeveg

A rude veg competition: Ah yes: rude veg. We all love a bit of double-entendre when harvesting the carrots. Anyway: Van Meuwen enjoyed its Vulgar Veg competition so much last year that it’s doing the same again. There’s £500 of vouchers on offer: the winner last year was a positively pornographic carrot from Weston-super-Mare. What with wonky veg in the news (when you can find any veg at all in the shops, that is) there’s no better time to expose your oddities to a wider audience (double entendre entirely intended): just go to http://www.vanmeuwen.com/competitions and enjoy.

Cosmos at Wisley

27 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by sallynex in new plants

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

AGM, cosmos, Fleuroselect, flower trials, RHS Wisley

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The trials fields, at the back of Battleston Hill at RHS Wisley in Surrey, are easy to miss. You have to turn your back on the temptations of double herbaceous borders, rose gardens and the rest and walk over a socking great big hill to put yourself through a battering from thundering traffic noise from the A3 just the other side of the hedge. But it’s actually the most important bit of the whole garden.

That’s because this is the principal place where the RHS does its trials (they also run trials at other locations, like Brogdale in Kent and other RHS gardens just to see how plants perform in different climatic conditions).

Long beds are planted with dozens of different varieties of one particular genus: on the day I visited the trials included hibiscus, rosemary, petunias, beetroot and strawberries (and those are only the ones I can remember).

It is rare that you get to see multiple varieties of the same type of plant alongside each other, so you can compare and contrast, and perhaps decide which ones you might like in your own garden. Even better, if you wait till the trials report (they’re published on the RHS website at the end of each trial) you’ll find out how your chosen varieties perform, too. If they get an AGM you know you’re on to a winner.

One of the most eyecatching displays this year is the bed of Cosmos, in full spectacular flower on my visit and looking just glorious. It is – who knew? – the Year of the Cosmos, according to ornamental plant industry people Fleuroselect anyway. It’s as good an excuse as any to explore what this surprisingly diverse group of plants can do – and to get a sneak peek of the new varieties coming soon to a seed merchant’s near you. Here are a few which caught my eye:
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‘Casanova Red’ 3ft tall and delightful with three tones of flower on one plant
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C. sulphureus ‘Cosmic Red’ I had no idea cosmos come in orange, too. C. sulphureus produces smaller flowers (about 2″ across) than the more familiar C. bipinnatus but there are loads of them.
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‘Cosimo Red-White’ Quite short, at 2 1/2 ft, and very dainty with small, almost wild-looking flowers over sparse foliage: wouldn’t look out of place in an annual meadow
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‘Xanthos’ This is, I believe, already on the market and I’ll be buying it next year: lovely palest lemon flowers opening deeper primrose
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‘Carioca’ Beautiful clear orange over lush foliage, about 3ft tall
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‘Double Click Rose Bonbon’ Already a favourite of mine, only confirmed by seeing it en masse alongside other cosmos. I like the variability of the flowers, with some fully double, others semi-double and others (like this one) hardly double at all
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‘Cupcakes White’ A new shape of cosmos flower on the way with petals fused to make a large bowl-shaped bloom on a tall (5ft) plant. Not sure whether it’ll catch on: it loses some of the daintiness of a regular cosmos.
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‘Pied Piper Red’ And another curiosity: this time quilled petals. I like the two-tone effect from the inner and outer petals, but it’s not as elegant as a single.
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C. sulphureus ‘Tango’ Retina-searing shade of orange with quite small flowers but loads of them. Medium-sized plant, to about 4ft.

Postcard from Chelsea #6: Little stars

28 Saturday May 2016

Posted by sallynex in new plants, shows

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alpines, Diamond Jubilee Award, Great Pavilion, hepatica, RHS Chelsea Flower Show

IMG_3548

The Ashwood Nurseries exhibit, easy winner of the Diamond Jubilee award this year

The talk of the Pavilion this year was not the giant Pullman carriage at the Bowdens stand – but a diminutive little tumble of starry flowers spangling the mossy ground beneath Japanese cherries, pussy willows and artfully-placed branches of larch.

It’s the first time the consummate plantsman John Massey has brought his collection of hepaticas to Chelsea and they caused quite the stir, scooping the Diamond Jubilee Award for best display. They certainly made me see hepaticas in a whole new light: I’d always rather glanced past them before, convinced they were fussy little alpines which needed more care than I could sensibly give them. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

IMG_3683

Love this way of displaying the perfection of the flowers

Hepaticas are spring-flowering woodlanders (these had been held back for Chelsea: normally they’re in flower in February) for planting under deciduous shrubs and trees. They’re tolerant of all soils, but best where they have spring sunshine but summer shade. H. nobilis and H. transsylvanica are the ones for growing outside; there are many more to explore once you get hooked but you’ll need an alpine house. The Asian and American species, like teeny tiny H. insularis and even teenier H. henryi, are very, very special but need the care and attention to match.

IMG_3686

H. nobilis var pyrenaica ‘Stained Glass’

John has been working on developing interspecies hybrids, aiming at plentiful flowers but also bringing out the beauties of the foliage: I hadn’t realised hepatica leaves were quite so lovely. They are three-cornered, like a tricorn hat, and come in attractive variegations reminding me a little of the leaf patterning on cyclamen.

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H. ‘Ashwood Charm’

Two of the new varieties bred at Ashwood Nurseries and shown here for the first time were H. nobilis var pyrenaica ‘Stained Glass’, with quite the most gorgeous leaves, and H. ‘Ashwood Charm’ which earned its name in spades with a froth of exquisite little white flowers. Get your order in now to beat the rush (it’s http://www.ashwoodnurseries.com). My guess is that there will be a lot of hepatica talk come next spring: these are plants whose moment in the sun has arrived.

Postcard from Chelsea #5: Shiny new plants

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by sallynex in new plants, shows

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new plants, Plant of the Year, RHS Chelsea Flower Show

IMG_3655

Clematis chiisanensis ‘Amber’: Plant of the Year 2016

The Plant of the Year competition at Chelsea has only been running a few years, but it’s really shone the spotlight on one of the things the show has always done well.

New plants first seen at Chelsea include favourites like Geranium ‘Rosanne’ and the ‘Yak’ (yakushimanum) rhododendron hybrids, as well as uncounted classic roses: in short, some of the best and widely-grown plants in the world.

Now the best new releases of the season compete for the chance to be crowned as the one to watch for this year. The worthy winner, from Taylors Clematis, was the somewhat unpronounceable but very beautiful Clematis chiinanensis ‘Amber’. It even flowers twice a year, to add good value to its considerable charms.

Here are a few more of the new arrivals on the horticultural scene this year. Not all were finalists in the Plant of the Year competition but all, I hope you agree, look likely to have an illustrious future in our gardens ahead of them.

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Iris ‘Libellule Jaune’ from Cayeux Iris

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Leucanthemum vulgare ‘Lollipop’ Wyndford Farm Plants

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Cirsium rivulare ‘Frosted Magic’ Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

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Rosa ‘Roald Dahl’ David Austin Roses

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Clematis ‘Volunteer’ Raymond Evison

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Rhododendron ‘Huisman’s Sun Star’ Millais Nurseries

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Chrysanthemum ‘Rossano Charlotte’ National Chrysanthemum Society

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Acer ‘Moonrise’ Hillier Nurseries

Nature’s own weedkiller

06 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in Gardens of Somerset, kitchen garden, new plants, unusual plants

≈ 4 Comments

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bindweed, biological controls, couch grass, ground elder, Mexican marigold, Tagetes minuta, Tyntesfield, weedkillers, weeds

tagetesminutaBefore we leave the veg garden at Tyntesfield, I thought I’d just share this bit of veg-growing geekery: just to demonstrate that it’s not only computer whizzes who get unfeasibly excited at obscure things that mean nothing to anyone else, this little patch of 1.5m high nondescript greenery had me jigging on the spot and getting quietly quite worked up while all around me were just wondering what the heck it was there for and hurrying past to have a look at the pretty orange pumpkins.

This is Tagetes minuta: aka the Mexican marigold. It’s a giant of a thing, well over head height. Unlike other tagetes, its flowers aren’t much to write home about either being small, yellow and nondescript: like ‘an impoverished pale yellow groundsel’ as Chiltern Seeds, one of the few who stock the seed, describe it.

But this in veg-gardening terms is the Hadron Collider of weed control. Totally cutting edge, and the very latest thing.

You see, it’s an allelopath: which is to say it emits powerful chemicals from its roots which inhibit the growth and indeed eventually kill any plants which dare to try and grow nearby.

Great Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest strategy: and coincidentally an effective poison against bindweed, couch grass and ground elder. I haven’t heard whether it tackles mares tail too.

Of course you can’t plant anything else while this natural weedkiller is growing: but if you have an area to clear sow it with Mexican marigold and it’s supposed to be a very effective way of doing it. Certainly better than the usual black plastic (which just makes the roots come to the surface in my experience: you still have to weed them out in the usual way and then they break and come back… you know the drill).

The reason I was getting so excited is because this is the first time I have seen it in action, properly growing in the ground. I don’t have an area in my own garden I can clear to give this a try (despite having the bindweed problem from hell) so I was delighted to find Tyntesfield’s gardeners are carrying out the experiment for me.

They won’t know results until the middle of next year: this has been growing in this patch all this summer and so we’ll have to wait till spring next year to see if the bindweed comes back. I will give them a ring in six months or so and find out how they got on. Watch this space.

 

Hampton Court in pictures: New varieties

12 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by sallynex in new plants

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agapanthus, cotinus, crocosmia, dahlias, eryngium, Hampton Court Flower Show, new varieties

hcfs_newvariety2

Agapanthus ‘Blueberry Cream’ from the Hoyland Plant Centre

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Crocosmia ‘Chrome Spray’ from Trecanna Nursery

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Eryngium ‘Neptune’s Gold’ from Hardy Plants: saw this one at Chelsea and still can’t make up my mind about it. That yellow foliage just looks… ill, somehow.

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Cotinus ‘Ruby Glow’ from Hilliers, celebrating their 150th anniversary.

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Dahlia ‘Bloom 50’, another new variety commemorating a special anniversary, this time the 50th birthday of the RHS’s Britain in Bloom

Postcard from Chelsea: New plants

28 Saturday May 2011

Posted by sallynex in new plants

≈ 2 Comments

Rosa ‘York Minster’
(Harkness Roses)

Clematis ‘Abilene’
(Raymond Evison Clematis)

Hakonechloa macra ‘Samurai’
(Knoll Gardens)

Lewisia ‘Little Mango’
(D’Arcy & Everest)

Iris ‘Discovered Treasure’
(Claire Austin)

Lilium ‘Lankon’
(HW Hyde)

Primula euprepes
(Kevock Plants)

Rosa ‘Friendship of Strangers’
(Peter Beales Roses)

Erythronium ‘Hidcote Beauty’
Harveys Garden Plants)
This is just a small selection of the new plants I discovered on my way round the Great Pavilion: if you want more, Matthew Biggs has said a bit more about a few of the ones above plus a few others in an article for the RHS, while Graham Rice has also been forthright and rather justified in his comments about ‘new’ plants which aren’t really new before for the Guardian: thankfully, none of the above are among the culprits…!

Discovering new plants: A is for….

26 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in new plants

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Tags

abelia, shrubs

Abelia


Welcome to another project of mine for this year. Now I grow a lot of plants, in my own and others’ gardens: but for some years now, they’ve all been pretty much the same plants. I’ve added a few to my repertoire, but they’ve usually been plants I know a lot about already, so they’re a pretty safe bet (and I’ve usually wanted to grow them for ages, finally got my hands on them… you know the drill).

It occurred to me some time about the end of last year that this might not be a very good thing. There are definite and really quite gaping gaps in my plant knowledge: I have never in my life, for example, grown a Deutzia of any description, even though they’re common as muck.

So I figured this year I’d change all that. I’ve picked up my well-thumbed bible, aka the Readers Digest New Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and Flowers, and I’m going to work my way through the alphabet picking a new (for me) genus for each letter to get to know in my garden. It’s a bit random, as plant studies go, but it’ll have to do.

So this month I’ve been off shopping for Abelias. A relative of the honeysuckle according to the late great Fred Whitsey, it’s late-summer flowering, some borderline hardy, but relishing conditions just such as I have in my garden – i.e. well-drained and sunny.

There are lots of them but I’ve gone for A. x grandiflora – a hybrid between A. chinensis and A. uniflora. Mr Whitsey says all abelias are named for a Dr Clarke-Abel who worked as a surgeon to a Chinese mission in the early 1800s (now that must have been a heck of a job). For light relief he went off plant collecting, and came back with A. chinensis – borderline hardy, very pale pink, and a bit pretty for my liking. Actually he didn’t quite come back with them as he was shipwrecked on the way home and lost his seeds, which seems a bit unfair, but luckily he’d already given some to a friend so they made it back to the UK without him.

Anyway: A. x grandiflora has an AGM which makes me well-disposed towards it right from the start. It’s semi-evergreen, only dropping its leaves in very cold winters, and looks a bit like a slightly chunky evergreen spiraea, if you can imagine such a thing.

Browsing around the garden centre I could only see variegated abelias with leaves in bilious shades of mottled pink and cream which rather put me off. But luckily in a corner there was a little shrub with vibrant non-variegated yellow leaves: promising, except abelias are known to be pink, and yellow leaves with pink flowers is the combination from hell (hide your head in shame, Spiraea japonica ‘Goldflame’). On closer inspection, though, the label says the flowers on this one are white: and what’s more it has “bronze-gold” leaves in autumn. Mmmmm…. sounds lovely.

Clutching my purchase I made a bee-line as soon as I got home for my online RHS Plantfinder only to find that the cultivar, ‘Brockhill Allgold’, isn’t listed anywhere. I appear to have chosen a fictitious plant.

Well, it’s not the most promising start to my voyage of discovery. But it’ll have to do. I shall keep you updated with how I’m getting on with all my new kids on the block later in the year.

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