• Home
  • Features
  • Talks
  • Learn with me

Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Tag Archives: bromeliads

Torquay treasures

02 Monday Nov 2009

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

bromeliads, glasshouses, palm trees, public planting, Torquay, Torre Abbey

Torquay.

That’s Fawlty Towers, kiss-me-quick hats, blokes with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads and deckchairs, right?

Wrong.

It’s the proud home of quite the best municipal planting I’ve ever seen. VP – you should get down there and take some pics for that OOTS strand of yours asap.

We’ve just come back from a little break there: I won’t bore you too much with what we got up to, though we did find a hotel John Cleese would have been proud of to stay in.

Instead I shall just introduce you to the Palm House at Torre Abbey. The head gardener – employed, take note, by the Torbay Council’s Parks Department – is career changer Ali Marshall, who used to be something in business administration but for the last year (only a year?!) has taken the helm at Torre Abbey. And my goodness, is she an inspired plantswoman.

It’s a small garden, but there’s a lot packed in. A dahlia border so densely-planted I mistook it for a rose garden from a distance; a cactus house with three-foot-across hummocks; palms a go-go and a bank of cannas. There was even a recently-planted Agatha Christie garden which owed a great deal to the Poison Garden at Alnwick but with a sleuthing twist.

But it was the recently-restored (as is everything at Torre Abbey, thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund, gawd bless ’em) 1960s Palm House which stole the show for me. There weren’t many labels so I gave up trying to identify everything in the end and just marvelled.

You wouldn’t believe it’s a public garden run by the Parks Department, would you? Talk about showing everyone else how it’s done…

A taste of the Caribbean: Sunnyside Gardens

07 Thursday May 2009

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

bromeliads, calabash, flamboyant tree, Grenada, jade vine, palm trees, staghorn ferns, travellers palm, tropical, tropical waterlilies, vanilla vine

One of the lovely things about blogging is you can write about what your editor hasn’t asked you to write about (whether for space reasons or just cos they wanted something else), yet which you’re just bursting to tell someone about.

So – at the risk of making everyone look at my holiday snaps with accompanying stifled yawns and glances at watches – there follows, over the next few posts, just a soupçon from the 250-odd photos I took at the amazing gardens I went to see while I was in Grenada recently. I can’t include all the gardens – there were about ten of them and I wouldn’t inflict that on you – but I’ll pick out a few favourites.

The first is typical of some more formal gardens we went to. A lot were designed by a Venezuelan garden designer called Chris Baasch who seems to have a monopoly on the island’s gardens. Sunnyside, near the capital, St George’s, is a fine example of his work, as well as a tribute to the gardening skills of owner Jean Renwick and her son Randy.

Aloe, scarlet spikes of the red ginger, Alpinia purpurata and mango trees – this is a densely-planted garden of island beds separated by that tropical grass you get that’s a bit coarser than an English lawn. It’s on a hill, like nearly everything in Grenada, so there are views everywhere:

That little pond to the bottom left houses a tropical waterlily, just coming into bloom when we were there.

The copper basin it’s in is about 5ft across – they’re used everywhere on the island for all sorts of things, mainly ponds though. They were used to ‘tread’ cocoa beans to help fermentation, a bit similar to treading grapes – three to a copper and bare feet. Since cocoa beans are slimy and squishy it must have been akin to dancing in the flats of Portsmouth Harbour at low tide. Only warmer.

Allotmenteers – eat your heart out. This is a calabash tree, and those fruits are about the size of a baby’s head. They’re not very tasty, but when dried, cut in half and hollowed out they make handy soup bowls.

This was one you’ll probably recognise: the jade vine, Strongylodon macrobotrys. Here it was quietly strangling a cashew nut tree. They’re heavy and rampant climbers which quickly overcome less thuggish plants but with flowers like that, you can understand Jean’s reluctance to do anything about it.

This is a wierd and wonderful climber, too: it’s the vanilla vine, of vanilla pod fame. Trouble is, it’s not native to Grenada (it comes from a neighbouring Caribbean island – Trinidad, I think) and neither is the single species of bee that pollinates it. So if you want it to produce pods here, you have to get up before 8am and do it yourself with a paintbrush. It’s testament to the obsession with gardening in Grenada that a lot of people do actually do this.

Cute little wendy house, but if you’re wondering how they mow that humpy ol’ lawn, they don’t. That’s because it’s not a lawn: it’s a Japanese hummock grass called Zoysia matrella. The amusing thing – for Jean, anyway – is that those hummocks are entirely hollow, so any visitors happening to think it might be a lawn fall in.

Another Chris Baasch composition: those palms are Travellers’ palms, which I entirely fell in love with while I was on the island. Just look at those architectural stems.

Bromeliads cascading down (up?) a mahogany tree. The bromeliads have little cups of water in their hearts, colonised by insects: the Grenadan government decided they might be breeding places for malarial mosquitos so tried to get Jean to remove them all. You can imagine how well that went down. In the end, they decided the line of least resistance would be the dazzlingly impractical solution of anti-mosquito tablets to place in the centre of each plant. That’s a philodendron scrambling its way up the mahogany tree.

The national tree of Grenada: the Flamboyant tree (Delonix regia). The flowers are bright orange, and you see them dotted all over the hillsides when they’re out. We were there just afterwards, when they were loaded with pods: the kids here use them as musical instruments because the beans inside rattle. They call them “shack-shack” trees for the same reason.

Flamboyant wood is very weak, and if you look at the tree above you’ll see it has a typically hollow stem. Luckily this is an ideal habitat for things like airplants, bromeliads and orchids – and this particularly fine staghorn fern:

I have one of these in my greenhouse at the moment but… well, suffice it to say it doesn’t look much like this!

Thank you to Jean and her irrepressible son Randy (and his alarmingly active koi carp) for their generous and warm hospitality. I can’t hope to do proper justice to their garden here, so either go visit it if you’re ever over Grenada way – it’s open to visitors by appointment – or read on at their own website here.

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • June 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • September 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • May 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006

Categories

  • book review
  • chicken garden
  • children gardening
  • climate change
  • container growing
  • cutting garden
  • design
  • education
  • end of month view
  • exotic edibles
  • France
  • Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day
  • garden design
  • garden history
  • garden words
  • gardening without plastic
  • Gardens of Somerset
  • giveaways
  • greenhouse
  • herbs
  • kitchen garden
  • landscaping
  • my garden
  • new plants
  • new veg garden
  • news
  • overseas gardens
  • Painting Paradise
  • permaculture
  • pick of the month
  • plant of the month
  • pond
  • poultry
  • pruning
  • recipes
  • seeds
  • self sufficiency
  • sheep
  • shows
  • sustainability
  • this month in the garden
  • Uncategorized
  • unusual plants
  • videos
  • walk on the wild side
  • wildlife gardening
  • wordless wednesday

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Sally Nex
    • Join 6,908 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Sally Nex
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar