Tag Archives: tropical

Postcard from Chelsea #3: Floating pretty

25 Wednesday May 2016

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It takes some doing to create a garden in a 7m x 5m space which is so complex, so detailed and so atmospheric it can take you halfway across the world in a second.

But so it is with Sarah Eberle’s lushly planted slice of the Mekong Delta for Viking Cruises – winner of a gold medal and Best Artisan garden (by miles, if I had my way). So luxuriant, so densely-planted, so detailed is it that there’s just no way to do it justice with a few snatched pictures – so you’ll have to take my word for it. It’s a true piece of theatre.

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The planting floats in flat-bottomed traditional Cambodian fishing boats, dripping leaves and flowers over the sides into the water beneath. A riotous mix of dahlias, gloriosa lilies, philodendrons and orchids crammed into every inch of space conjures up the steamy South Asian jungle in a few deft sweeps of exotic, tropical-looking foliage and flowers.

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And I did love that there were vegetables here too. I’m always on the lookout for veg at Chelsea and these were as lush as the flowers that surrounded them. Some veg just have that jungly look, so it wasn’t a surprise to see gourds, okra and aubergines. But who knew cabbage and spinach could look exotic? Must add dahlias to the cabbage patch next year….

 

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The Grand Tour #2: The Sunny Bit

02 Tuesday Nov 2010

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Now for the one bit of my garden that is undeniably Very Sunny Indeed. It is on the south-facing side, there are, for once, no trees shading it, no house in the way, no high banks blocking out the sun. It isn’t even concreted over. For this reason it is, the garden plan in my head dictates:

The Tropical Garden

(you are allowed to laugh)
Turn your back to the house, look a little over to your right, and you will see to one side of the path (the sunny side, natch) a flat bit. This is remarkable in itself as it is the only flat bit in the whole garden (apart from a concreted-over bit behind it, just visible to the left of the picture, which is where my garden office is going to go so that I can look out over this bit of the garden whenever I tire of my computer screen, which will be often).

It measures around 25ft x 40ft: not enormous, but quite big enough to house a selection of exotic and exotic-looking plants. I have for a long time nursed a secret hankering for a tropical edibles garden and this is going to be it.

At the moment my tropical edibles collection includes a big (and splitting) pot of yacon and a fig tree. Not very impressive, really. I hope to add ginger (Zingiber, proper ginger, not Hedychium – although I have two of those too which will no doubt go in there somewhere), some taro roots (Colocasia esculenta to you botanical types), edible passion fruits, kiwi vines, some acocha and a few bananas just for fun. The idea is that it will eventually be the kind of jungly mass of shoots, leaves and, no doubt, eats to pluck romantically from the vine as you waft through its sunshiny shade.

But all that is in the future: here, unfortunately, is it in its current unadorned state.

There is – of course! this is my garden! – a bank. A particularly steep, in fact nearly vertical bank at that. However: ever one to pluck opportunity from the teeth of a bloody ridiculous situation, I am getting quietly quite excited about this particular bank. I see vertical planting a go-go: beans tumbling down from soil pockets near the top, dangling their purple pods among clambering vines of kiwi, passion fruit and acocha…. now all I have to figure out is how to a) support the ones I’m not actually going to plant into the bank, and b) get the bank’s current occupants – mainly stinging nettles and harts-tongue ferns – under control.

The emergency pond lives here, right at the front bit where it curves round to the house. I call it the emergency pond as Mango, who you can just about see under those iris leaves, only just survived the house move: poor old Peanut floated to the top of the rather inadequate fishtank they were living in while we got around to digging holes for ponds (not, admittedly, top of our to-do list on the day after the removal men left). After that and with the anguished wailing of small children echoing in our ears, the fishpond was in within two hours. And very nice it looks: I’m hoping the taro will drape rather elegantly over the edge of it in times to come.

There is a nod at planting: a slightly dislocated herb garden of mint, lavender, rosemary and sage all looking very healthy, if a little without context.

And a splash of colour from bedding. Flowering! In November!

The real splash of colour at the moment, though, is from this viburnum: I’m thinking x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ as it has the most incredible burnished bronze-purple autumn foliage.

And last but not least: some absolutely giant sunflowers. They must be (and I am not boasting here as I had nothing to do with growing them) 12ft tall. It bodes well for the fertility of the soil that they can pull this off in supposedly thin chalk: in fact I think sunflowers, being edible in both seed and seedling stages, definitely qualify for the tropical look.

Postcard from Hampton Court: Friday

09 Friday Jul 2010

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Hot, hot, hoooottttt….. This is weather the Reflections of Thailand garden was made for. If you go across the bridge and round the back it’s lovely and cool and shady in a jungly sort of way: I do like the planting on this garden. Here it’s bat plant (Tacca chantrieri) teamed with a spectacular alocasia and a ferny sort of plant which designer James Clarke said he’d grabbed off the trolley to use as a filler. Some filler.
This one won not only the only gold medal in the show (everyone a bit stumped by that: not by the fact that this garden won a gold, but that none of the other large show gardens else did. I thought the judges were pretty harsh this year)…. but also Best in Show. Any snide comments about hotel gardens are easily squashed by a closer look at the planting: quite sublime, and for a foodie like me fascinating what with lotus lilies, turmeric, kaffir limes and lemongrass. Fantastic.

I’ve got a triffid

02 Friday Oct 2009

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I’ve been given a triffid.

It’s about 9ft tall and it’s rather scarily making a bid to burst out of its (14″ or so) pot.

So, it’s a Hedychium gardnerianum, aka ginger lily or Kahlili ginger. Now, not to brag or anything but I’ve seen these in the wild in the Caribbean, but never attempted to look after one myself. Luckily, after much internet research I’ve discovered that they’re quite robust even in a British climate: in fact they have been described as ‘quite invasive’ when given good drainage and a southerly bit of the UK. You can even leave them outside all winter with a thick mulch and a cover over to keep the rain off (as with so many things, it’s the winter wet that gets ’em, not the cold).

I’m quite hopeful of success in my free-draining sand, but just in case I’m splitting it in three (it desperately needs it, after all) and putting one bit in the (frost-free) greenhouse and another bit in my dining room, much to poor non-gardening husband’s despair.

Only question now is, how to split it. Whaddya reckon – breadknife? Bandsaw? Chainsaw?!

(PS: you are seeing far more of my garden than I usually allow onto these pages in the above photos, mainly because this is a plant that resolutely defies my usual refuge in the macro lens. The reason there is straw all over my lawn, in case you were wondering, is because that’s where the guineapigs live).

A taste of the Caribbean: The Tower

12 Tuesday May 2009

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One of the last gardens we went to see was also one of the most beautiful. The Tower is an extraordinary relic of the past: an old Victorian house built by an Englishman purely so that his wife would feel at home when she came out to the West Indies.

He perched it as high up on a hill as he could, 250m above sea level, to keep her cool, and filled it with every comfort of the day, from stained glass windows to great airy dining rooms so that she would have nothing to complain of. You can only guess how much he must have missed her while he waited for her to arrive.

Unfortunately she didn’t feel at home at all and hightailed it home in disgust after a few months. He was probably well shot of her – anyone who’s not capable of falling in love with Grenada is a few sandwiches short of a picnic if you ask me. But you try telling him that. Obviously addled by the wonky logic that is love, he was so broken hearted he couldn’t bear to live in the house and moved back into the town at the foot of the hill. A few decades later, in the 1940s, he sold it to the father of the current owner, Paul Slinger, for a mere £4,000. It’s now home to Paul and his wife Victoria, plus three more generations of their family: at last it’s being lived in as it should be.
The house is preserved almost exactly as it was built, even down to the stained glass, made of individual grains of coloured sand held in place between sheets of glass. But even more spectacular is the garden: eight acres of beautifully landscaped tropical paradise.

Don’t you just want to sit in those chairs? This was such an informal, homely garden: artless, in fact. A sure sign that a great deal of care has gone into every last detail.

See those philodendrons just behind the chairs?

At least, I think they were philodendrons. They might just be alocasias – I got a bit fuzzy about the distinctions. But they looked very nice there.

Now I was going on about John Criswick’s ability to weave coloured foliage through the greenery in the rainforest at the St Rose Nursery the other day: well Victoria has done something similar here. A little more deliberate, perhaps, but nonetheless effective: she’s a painter by trade, which explains the very colour-led approach. She’s threaded coloured crotons through different types of Graptophyllum pictum – yet another plant new to me but the ones I liked best were deepest green with subtle white splashes on the leaves.

Another example of Victoria’s fine planting sense: bougainvillea, crotons, and that’s a juvenile fishtail palm in front there.

Now these are definitely alocasias. Or maybe colocasias. They’re all over the place in Grenada – they eat the leaves of colocasia (a bigger-leaved variety than this one, if it is colocasia, which I doubt) like spinach, and call it callaloo.

This confused me no end. I’d always thought that callaloo referred to amaranth, and in fact I’m positive I’ve heard people on allotments on the telly here referring to amaranth as callaloo – but everyone was adamant here, it refers to colocasia.

Anyway, these were growing in a copper – the same as the one the pond was made of at Sunnyside (and countless other gardens too). Lovely, aren’t they? The kind of thing your average architectural salvage merchant would eat his own arm for.

I loved this group – a huge torch ginger, around 30ft or so high, with those bright bromeliads flowing across the ground in front. There were blooms like fat orange tulips coming up, rather wierdly, straight from the ground among those huge great stems, too.

This was a beautifully flowery garden all round, in fact – just the right balance between foliage and blooms. Here it’s the heliconia – a flower so ubiquitous here as to be common. Nothing common about this: Victoria tells me it’s the variety ‘She’, and I was very taken with those oh-so-subtle green-tipped flowers. The bright orange bits are bracts – it’s the sticky-up bits which are the flowers (usually much smaller than in this variety). They’re pollinated by hummingbirds. Obviously.

Another nice vista (despite the hosepipe: we were coming into the dry season so they have to water things endlessly if they’re not to look out on a brown and crispy desert of sleeping plants). Bougainvillea to the left, palms to the right: and they had some nifty crotons along here which had half the leaf missing in the middle:

Wierd, huh? Another very beautiful flower along the same stretch:

My note-taking powers failed me on this one and I have no idea what it is but I liked it (and the photo didn’t come out too bad either).

One last one to finish: this might look like a greenhouse, but it’s actually a chicken shed. Some chicken shed. The disastrous hurricane, known as Ivan, which struck the islands in 2004 and flattened much of the vegetation (as well as countless houses, several churches and a lot of people’s livelihoods) did for most of it and it hasn’t been repaired since. I quite liked it as it was, in fact: spookily atmospheric, somehow.

Thanks to Paul and Victoria and their family for giving us such a very memorable day, and to Paul’s father who makes a mean rum punch. They do occasional tours, though you have to go through an agent to organise it: Suzanne’s web page has the details, just scroll down to the bottom.

A taste of the Caribbean: St Rose Nursery

10 Sunday May 2009

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Sometimes when gardens have a powerful resonance with natural landscapes – I’m talking about wildlife gardens, very “naturalistic” planting and a lot of woodland gardens – there’s a fine line between it being a garden or countryside that’s been tweaked a bit. This garden teeters delicately right on that line, and on occasions falls off – in places, it’s more rainforest than garden. But then that recognition and respect for the natural beauty of the forest is why St Rose is so special.

The owner, John Criswick, is a consummate plantsman, but one with such sensitivity to his unique surroundings that you can often barely tell where his hand has been. St Rose is perched on a mountainside, in the foothills of the dense rainforest reserve that covers Grenada like a green blanket. Here, foliage is king.

The word ‘jungle’ could have been invented for this garden. The density of the planting is mind-boggling: not only is there no bare earth (the very idea is laughable here) there isn’t enough room for hard landscaping either. We clambered down this steep hillside on a narrow path that would have been a sheep track if we’d been in Yorkshire (though of course quite a lot would have been different if we’d been in Yorkshire.)

It’s practically impossible to get an idea of the scale in photos – probably best to assume that the smallest leaves you’re looking at in these pictures are about half the length of your arm. The biggest are the kind of leaves you can comfortably stand underneath and still not be able to touch the end. Anyway – this gives you something of an idea:

The chap by the pond is slashing down kudzu vine with a machete – kudzu vine is like bindweed on steroids, and entire houses disappear beneath it within a few weeks if it’s left unchecked. They say Grenadian guys are all lovely once you get over the fact that they’re all carrying machetes: this is pretty accurate though it’s hard to concentrate on pleasant small talk while ignoring the murderously sharp knife.

As I said before, this is a garden that’s all about foliage. John uses coloured foliage to spectacular effect, weaving it in to the predominantly green rainforest with aplomb. Here it’s a river of purple cordylines trickling through the green. (By the way – yes those are cordylines. I’d always thought they were sharp, pointy sort of things. Not so: Grenadan cordylines are soft and the leaves are rounded, and most delightful of all, they come in a myriad of colours from green to yellow to purple to stripy. Altogether much, much nicer).

And in case you don’t like purple: how about yellow. This is golden crinum (that clump is waist-high – told you it was hard to capture the scale). This garden more than any other has taught me that you don’t need flowers for things to be colourful.

This is the nursery adjoining the garden. As you can see, there’s a tad more hard landscaping but otherwise it’s still a bit tricky to tell the difference. Look closely, though, and you’ll see this rainforest is in pots.

And there are flowers! All sorts, orchids and gingers and tons of things I hadn’t a hope of recognising – this garden stretches your plant ID skills to the limit and well beyond. These were my absolute favourites: elegant racemes about a foot long, growing across a pergola-like grid so they hung down gracefully. Here’s that flower close up:

We were told it was a Thunbergia, at which I thought, “nah – they’ve got that wrong”. The only Thunbergia I’d ever come across before was Black-eyed Susan, an annual climber with small, single orange flowers – no racemes and not a great deal of elegance, though it’s quite sweet if you like that kind of thing. Then I got back and googled it – well I should have known. The one lesson I learned in Grenada is that everything I think I know is as a grain of sand compared with the beach of stuff I don’t. Thunbergia mysorensis, or Red Glory Vine, is from India, and you can even get plants here – though you need a greenhouse or conservatory to grow them well.

Just before we left, Derek, the head gardener, brought this out. Have you ever seen a flower like it? It’s an aroid of some kind, but nobody knew its Latin name. They did, however, know its common name. Men of a certain age – look away now.
It’s called ‘Old Man’s Balls’. I expect you can see why.

Thanks go to John Criswick for sharing his fabulous garden and nursery with us – it was an unforgettable experience. The garden is open to the public, and the nursery sells rare and unusual plants, trees and palms – it’s stocked half the gardens in Grenada. If you’re ever over that way – don’t, on any account, miss it.

A taste of the Caribbean: Sunnyside Gardens

07 Thursday May 2009

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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.

Back from my travels

05 Tuesday May 2009

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Well – that’s what you call a lengthy spell out of the country.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on aeroplanes in the last few weeks – some of it planned, some unplanned (or at least, planned at the last minute). The result was, I just disappeared over the horizon for the whole of April. Sorry about that, but I’m afraid not only am I back – I’m back with holiday snaps…!!

It wasn’t all holiday – the first bit was what has to be said was really quite a swanky press trip. I had all of a week’s notice and then found myself rather unexpectedly on a plane to Grenada, in the Caribbean. As well as some other journalists and a PR lady, all of whom turned out to be quite delightfully good company, we had the equally lovely Suzanne Gaywood with us – she’s the lady who creates that vividly colourful exhibit of tropical flowers for Grenada every year at Chelsea, and the reason for my being there. About which – more later (a lot more).

Then I came back and spent a few days unpacking, washing and packing again in between trying to do some sensible work, then went to a different airport, this time with my family, and jetted off to Florida for a couple of weeks. Not so many gardens this time – there are some fabulous gardens in Florida but most of them were over the other side – but lots of wierd and wonderful plants in their native habitats, as I went to the Everglades. About which… you get the gist.

So I’ve turned all tropical just lately and my plant vocabulary has expanded by several dozen palms, a few exotic flower species and a swamp plant or three. I came back thinking two things: a) why do we bother with tropical plants – whatever we can persuade to grow is a shadow of what they’re really like, and
b) why have we concreted over our little island? This after returning from Grenada, which is a properly green and pleasant land. Ours is mostly grey these days, and all the leaves are small.

Don’t worry, I’ll get over it. I already have to some extent as I returned to a garden full of tulips and forget-me-nots, and who couldn’t fall in love all over again with such prettiness.

So that’s my carbon emissions sorted for the next six decades. Lucky for the future of the planet that these chances don’t come along very often – in fact these two flights have been the first time I’ve been on a plane at all in nearly 10 years. Last time, too – it’s holidays in Bognor all the way…

A taste of the tropics

14 Wednesday Feb 2007

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Maybe it’s because I’m fed up with the winter (and who isn’t) but I’m in the throes of planning the area around my pond at the moment, and I’m going for the tropical jungle look.

It’s partly inspired by the seed distribution list I’ve just received from the Friends Society of the Ventnor Botanic Garden. I love these horticultural groups – at the very least, you meet lots of other enthusiastic and knowledgeable gardeners, and often, if the group is attached to a botanic garden or similar, there’s the sheer delight of a seed distribution. I have a particular affection for Ventnor, too, and make a point of visiting it at least once a year to see its fabulous semi-tropical and mediterranean displays. It’s on the Isle of Wight, which is well worth a visit in any case as it has its own microclimate and they can grow some wonderful plants there which are borderline hardy in the rest of the country. The gardens there are wonderful.

Other seed distributions are pretty good – I did the RHS’s wonderful seed distribution this year, mainly for a client who wants to stock up her garden at minimal cost, and it was like being a kid in a sweet shop. But the Ventnor distribution list is something else – a horticultural odyssey through the wierd and wonderful, from every corner of the globe. You always find something you never knew existed but sounds utterly sumptuous. How about Myoporum sandwicense? Ever heard of it? Me neither – but it’s a gorgeous plant, tiny pink or white flowers and big leathery-looking leaves. Another one I might try is Sinocalycanthus chinensis – I read about this just recently in an article by Roy Lancaster and thought it sounded absolutely fabulous. And here it is for free… can’t believe my luck sometimes!