Tag Archives: Ventnor Botanic Garden

A bit of botanising #2

11 Sunday Sep 2011

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All that ranting about botanic gardens was by way of introduction: that last post started out meaning to be a tour of Ventnor Botanic Garden but got sidetracked before I’d finished the first sentence.

Ventnor has echoes of Tresco and those impossibly exotic-looking gardens off the west coast of Scotland
That’s because it’s hard to ignore the slow slide into decline, the fraying around the edges, the fuzzy lines and good-enoughs that have crept into this still wonderfully quixotic and fascinating collection of southern hemisphere plants.

Tetrapanax papyrifer here lives in the ground from one year to the next, revealing an alarming tendency to sucker madly when happy

Ventnor is one of those places which is much too nice for its own good. It’s never charged entrance, for example; and it relies heavily on its doughty army of volunteers, ever more so since the budget cuts hit. The result is a certain rather endearing amateurishness, disguising a quite astonishing plant collection for those who know to look closer.

Magnolia grandiflora bursting into massive flower
The garden has about £600,000 funding a year from the Isle of Wight County Council, of which £300,000 is returned through revenues like car parking tickets and plant sales. For its £300k the council gets a superb specialist staff.

Though ‘ordinary’ annuals are creeping in everywhere, they’re trying to use them with panache: I liked this fennel against the crocosmia
The team were galvanised some years back by the arrival of Chris Kidd, who among other innovations came up with the idea of converting the previously rather worthy greenhouse behind the plant sales into the greenHouse; we’ll forgive the idiosyncratic syntax as it’s a riot. You enter from behind a crashing, deafening waterfall into a Mad Max fantasy of rusting pipework, green and steaming pools, and a central tank where fish swim among the giant plates of the Amazonian waterlilies (Victoria amazonica). Sheer theatre.

The New Zealand gully: a little obscured but still dramatic

Outside, it’s less easy to find things to wax lyrical about. This has never been the best-kept of gardens: a legacy of its council funding. But it does have flashes of brilliance: the dramatic descent into the New Zealand gully, for example (though the tree ferns are perhaps a little too joyously happy here: a few years ago you could see down into the rocky canyon, but the view is now obscured).

And the new arid garden is fantastic: the best-kept (because newest) bit of the garden, it was full of treasures at best considered semi-hardy elsewhere, but in the Isle of Wight microclimate quite able to live outdoors all year round.

The Arid Garden: at the limits of climate change
This means some of the specimens in the garden are mind-boggling: a glimpse of what they can do if they put their minds to it. A loquat tree (Eriobotrya japonica) 20ft tall; massive, tree-scale palms; tender fuchsias towering above your head; sprawling cacti smothered in flowers and aloes you could curl up inside, if you didn’t mind the spikes.

Agave americana able to grow to the size it’s meant to be

Here, Melianthus major grows into spreading thickets, fountaining dark bronze flowers; Echium pininana sends huge spires into the sky; and you’re forever finding tender-ish plants you adore but never previously knew existed. Firmiana simplex, the Chinese parasol tree, was my discovery for this year’s visit: huge, foot-across dinnerplate leaves of an exquisite fresh green.

The dinner-plate leaves of Firmiana simplex
But there is bindweed taking hold among the shrubberies and the bedding is verging on the park-like to be inspiring. I spotted ragwort in the borders and most of the labels were broken or missing.

Annual bedding: quite nice, but in a garden like this, the cheaper option, and becoming all too prevalent

This is too special a place to allow to slip away. Former curator Simon Goodenough was driven away this year after 25 years to be almost immediately snapped up by the National Botanic Garden of Wales, and the remaining staff, with Chris Kidd at the helm, are fighting a brave but, I fear, losing battle against the combined forces of a council that wants to turn the place into a cheap’n’cheerful park, and a general ignorance of just how extraordinary the plants here are.

Ventnor deserves better: I just hope its fortunes improve before the slide becomes too steep for return.

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A bit of botanising #1

23 Tuesday Aug 2011

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Ventnor Botanic Garden, Isle of Wight

How many Botanic Gardens do you think there are in the UK?

And how many of those can you name?

The first question is a bit vexed: it depends, you see, if you count pinetums and arboreta, and gardens with botanical add-ons like herbaria. But let’s leave all those out and just concentrate on the gardens with ‘Botanic’ in the name. There are around 25 of them.

Now – how many of you can name all 25?

Well, most of you will have Kew on the list, and probably the Edinburgh Botanics (three gardens, really, though we’ll count them as one) and the National Botanic Garden of Wales. A few might have remembered Ness over in Liverpool; and the Oxford and Cambridge Botanic Gardens.

That’s six.

But give yourself a pat on the back if Paignton Botanic Gardens was in there; or the St Andrews Botanic Garden in Fife, or either of Manchester’s two Botanic Gardens, or Birmingham’s for that matter.

The fact is that the vast majority of our botanical treasures are kept in small, obscure collections. Many are attached to and funded by universities: we all know the precarious financial states many of our universities are in, but worse, the future of the study of botany at university is in doubt too. Only Bristol and Reading Universities offer an undergraduate degree in pure botany – even though it’s the one degree these days which all but guarantees you’ll get a job on graduation.

We’ve never needed botanists more, what with biofuels, food security and the loss of more medicinal plants than we will ever know existed. And if the student botanists go, so do the botanic gardens. The Firs Botanical Grounds – a series of experimental gardens and glasshouses bequeathed to the University of Manchester in 1922 – is already on its way; its gates closed, almost without comment, this summer.

There’s another layer of botanic garden which is funded largely by local councils. It’s a bit of an anomaly in this day and age to have gardens kept mainly for the study of plants and paid for from the public purse, and it’s about to become a thing of the past, too, as botanic gardens are – perhaps rightly – seen as an extravagance at a time of five-figure budget cuts. They tend to get mixed up with parks, even though there’s a world of difference between the two and botanic gardens are far more expensive due to actually having plants in them (and usually ones requiring costly specialists to tend them). So they’re a soft target.

St Andrews Botanic Garden, Fife, Wavertree Botanic Park and Gardens in Liverpool and Southport Botanic Gardens on Merseyside, the Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden in Manchester, and my favourite Botanic Gardens of all, the Ventnor Botanic Gardens on the Isle of Wight. All council funded; and more than one, as a result, now fighting for their increasingly unlikely futures.

You could be callous about whether we actually need 25 botanic gardens, I suppose; it is quite a lot for one small and rather overcrowded island off the coast of Europe, after all. As gardeners, we tend not to like botanic gardens that much: too much science, not enough prettiness.

But as gardeners we also adore plants. And whatever you think of them as gardens, botanic gardens hold some of the most extraordinary plants you can imagine.

There are botanically important collections: Ventnor Botanic Gardens has the country’s leading collections of southern hemisphere plants. And historically important individuals: there’s a Chusan palm planted by Queen Victoria at Ventnor, and what, I wonder, has happened to the 80-year-old cactus in residence at the Firs Botanic Grounds?

In the headlong rush to save money it’s sometimes forgotten that botanic gardens are also living museums: the plants they contain are woven into our gardening history. We’ll all be the poorer if they’re consigned to the ‘surplus to requirements’ box in Town Hall treasuries.

OOTS: Bowed, battered, and very nearly beaten

02 Tuesday Aug 2011

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This is, or rather was, one of the more dramatic publicly-maintained council-funded plantings I know: the Victorian cascades at the foot of the hill in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight.

(The other one is the rock garden at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, but I keep forgetting my camera on trips to the beach so you’ll have to wait for that one).

I expect my timing is all out, but I wanted to take a snap of this one as a contribution to Out on the Streets (OOTS), the regular slot on public planting hosted by Veg Plotting, and since I’ve just come back from my hols on the Isle of Wight and wanted to go on about it a bit, it couldn’t wait.

Anyway: the Isle of Wight, of course, enjoys a mild microclimate which makes it very nearly subtropical in terms of plant life. Echiums, aeoniums and even cacti thrive outdoors here; public planting displays are as likely to include agaves and aloes as ageratum and antirrhinums.

However, the IoW County Council has also been taking a hatchet to its budget: £32 million saved over four years, out of a total budget which was only about £200m in the first place. Around £15 million in cuts have already been identified; libraries, regional theatres, tourist information centres, sports facilities and public toilets are toppling like ninepins.

Parks departments are soft targets in such slash-and-burn strategies: £450,000 is coming out of the parks budget on the Island between now and 2013. Quite apart from Ventnor Botanic Garden, which has had its entire funding removed (of which more later) the holes are beginning to show in the Island’s previously perfectly-manicured parks, once the pride of an area which depends heavily on tourism to keep itself solvent.

Unfortunately the budget cuts also coincided with the one of the worst winters in living memory. Even the Island, usually pretty much frost-free, had the deepest snowfall for decades. Not ideal for subtropical planting, and as you can see from the picture much of it was lost.

There’s no money to replace it with either more exotics, or even run-of-the-mill bedding: so we’re left looking at bare soil, right into July and peak tourist season.

I’ve been going to the Island every year for over a decade, and I’ve always looked forward to visiting this bit of Ventnor. I remember the area simply dazzling with colour: vivid orange marigolds and scarlet salvias jostling up against alyssum and magenta aubretia tumbling over the rocks. It wasn’t tasteful, but my goodness, it was jolly, and never failed to put a smile on my face.

It’s so sad to see it like this: still trying, just, but such a pale imitation of what it once was. So is this what we’ve got to look forward to, then? Scraggy bare bits interspersed with brave little patches of yellow daisies or pink geraniums?

Quite apart from cringing to think what the tourists will make of it – so much for Britain plc, then – this is not a country I want to live in. It’s depressing, poor, uninspiring, defeated. You can blame whoever you like for the current crisis: but this can’t, possibly, be the right way to take us forward.

Parks departments may be viewed as the poor relation as far as many local councils are concerned, but you underestimate the work they do at your peril. They’re responsible for the public face we turn to the world: reduce them to a starved, beaten down skeleton, and you do it to all of us, too.

You learn something new every day

18 Sunday Mar 2007

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It’s amazing – no matter how long you’ve been gardening, there’s always something new to try.

I’ve been sowing seeds for my cutting garden (a new development this year), herbaceous garden and of course the tropical bit around the pond courtesy of Ventnor Botanic Gardens.

The tropical seeds were the ones I thought would be trickiest, but in fact they’ve turned out to be pretty straightforward and in many cases don’t even need a propagator. It’s good old lupin seeds that have got me trying something new.

I’ve always heard about sanding seeds and often wondered “what’s all that about then?”. Certainly I’ve never bothered with it – sweet peas, the usual candidates, always germinate fine for me without any special treatment at all. But for once I read the seed packet on my Lupin “Morello Red” seeds for the cutting garden, and was a bit surprised to find they needed sanding and soaking before you sow them. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never had much success germinating lupins before – I always thought it was the slugs…

Anyway, so I’ve taken an old emery board and gently sanded one end of each seed (ooh so fiddly… ) and they’re now soaking in tepid water for a couple of hours before I sow them. Let’s see if it makes a difference.

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!