Gardening Scotland Blog

VETERAN actor Michael Caine has been giving interviews to newspapers and magazines to coincide with the release of his new movie, Harry Brown.
In one published in The Herald magazine he told of how his mother came to visit him in Hollywood and was very taken by “the hysteria growing up every wall.”
I know how she felt. How often have you grappled for a plant name only to miss it by a few letters or a syllable?
This week I found myself stuck for the Latin name of the Smokebush. Was it Cotinus coggygria or not? In fact it is, but once I started to doubt myself I found my brain running through everything from Garrya elliptica to Greyvillia without being sure of the answer.
Fortunately I have Jim Jermyn, Show Manager of Gardening Scotland to keep me right.
Every time we are in a garden Jim challenges me to name all sorts of odd and unusual plants and I have a dread of getting the answers wrong because he wouldn’t let me forget about it.
It doesn’t help that the names themselves keep changing. I still find myself referring to the Corsican Hellebore as Helleborus corsicus, even though it has been known as Helleborus argutifolius for quite a long time now.
There are good reasons for changing plant names of course. As scientists and botanists find out more about individual plants they reclassify them, giving them Latin names that more accurately describe the plant families to which they belong.
Keeping up with all these changes is hard work for growers and garden centres and it is even more confusing for those of us who are not experts.
Some plants however seem destined to be misnamed, no matter how established their nomenclature. For instance, how many times have you heard someone refer to Rhododendrums? And of course, while all Pelargoniums are Geraniums, not all Geraniums are Pelargoniums.
Confused? I rest my case.
Agnes Stevenson

{ 0 comments }

NUMEROUS studies now have suggested that regular gardening is good for the health.
Not only does the activity keep you fit, but the reward for toiling in the soil and caring for plants is, apparently, a significantly reduced stress level.
While I’m sure that gardening does have many benefits, it is those periods of not gardening because of bad weather or conflicting commitments that I’m concerned with.
Am I the only gardener who gets frustrated by the many obstacles that stand in the way of pursuing my favourite hobby?
Heavy rain at the weekend; deadlines that keep me stuck in front of the computer when it is dry and mild or finding myself standing in the supermarket queue when I’ve got a sack of tulip bulbs ready to be planted, can leave me fuming.
Maybe I need to learn the same level of patience and perspective shown by a gardener from Lancaster who I met recently when I was asked to write about her garden for one of the glossy magazines.
Over the last 14 years she has created a unique garden around her home. It has a woodland area that for part of the year is studded with many thousands of spring blooms and a walled garden that contains an intricate parterre, as well as a beautiful conservatory filled with rare orchids.
This is not a low-maintenance garden. The owner works in it for at least six hours a day and she takes very few holidays.
What is really incredible about it, however, is that she didn’t begin work on it until she had retired.
Before that it was simply an acre of lawns and conifers but in her mind she knew that, once she had time, nothing was going to prevent her from transforming it.
Agnes Stevenson

{ 2 comments }

I don’t like to gloat, but I’ve just returned from Spain where, for an entire two and a half weeks, the temperature was a perfect 27C and the evening air was thick with the smell of jasmine.
Not only were the gardens a joy to behold, with hibiscus blossoms the size of saucers and bougainvillea scrambling across every wall, but the oranges hanging from the trees were showing the first signs of ripening and my staple diet of tomato salad, nectarines and pineapples made the fruits sold in this country taste like balsa wood.
As I have a five month old son I am, as you might imagine, an early riser and in the mornings I would push the buggy down to my favourite café with a view over the marina, leaving baby’s dad to enjoy a long lie.
Many of the houses here are owned by families from Madrid, who only came down to the coast at weekends, so I had a perfect opportunity to dally by gateways and stand on tiptoe and peek over walls in order to get a better look at the gardens.
This area, which lies an hour south of Alicante, is known as the market garden of Spain and has a rich agricultural tradition, and I’m convinced that the soil is so fertile that if you dropped a wooden clothes peg it would sprout into a tree.
I’m sure that Gardening Scotland visitors would have appreciated the rich variety of flowers, shrubs and trees and there were times I convinced myself that I really was in the Garden of Eden.
Paradise had its serpent, however, and so did we in the shape of a Montpelier snake, or Culebra Bastarda, to give it its Spanish name, which was trapped in the conservatory overnight.
When it was discovered I did the only sensible thing and fled to the café with the baby, leaving my partner to deal with the intruder.
It took two and a half hours of sparring before he managed to trap it in the washing machine, at which point the only option was to disconnect the machine, wheel it down the drive and unscrew the top to allow it to escape.
As a severe snake phobic, tackling the laundry for the rest of the holiday left me with a very queasy feeling.
Agnes Stevenson

{ 0 comments }