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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: Ventnor

A bit of botanising #2

11 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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Ventnor, Ventnor Botanic Garden

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.

OOTS: Bowed, battered, and very nearly beaten

02 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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budget cuts, Isle of Wight, OOTS, parks departments, summer bedding, Ventnor, Ventnor Botanic Garden


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.

A taste of the tropics

14 Wednesday Feb 2007

Posted by sallynex in seeds

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Isle of Wight, Myoporum sandwicense, Roy Lancaster, seed distribution, Sinocalycanthus chinensis, tropical, Ventnor, Ventnor Botanic Garden

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!

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