Seed

The days are long gone when sowing wild oats was even remotely on the agenda for yours truly. Sowing seed of wild-collected species peonies gets my heart racing about as fast as its safe to push the old ticker these days. November through to January are the months when seed catalogues arrive on the doorstep or via email and I can rarely resist ordering at least a handful of packets. If I know that some poor schmuck has slogged up a mountain in Tibet to collect the thing, I am particularly prone to buying it.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of planting all these seeds is the opportunity for vicarious travel it affords. In the photograph below there are seeds that were collected in Kazakhstan, Nepal, Japan and the USA. One minute you are at the source of the Irrawaddy, trousering a rare Arisaema, the next stooped over a propagating bench in Illinois, hand pollinating Amaryllis. Most of these seeds were collected in the 'wild', with considerable effort and virtually no hope of adequate financial compensation, by a handful of nutters who are, to put it politely, doing it for love. Others were sent to me by friends who collected the seed in their gardens or nurseries, from plants they think are particularly worth growing.

Some of these seeds will never germinate, either because they are dead-on-arrival or because I treat them in the wrong way, in my ignorance. Of those that germinate, however, some will be brand new to cultivation in the UK, never having been grown here in the past. Few sights give me more pleasure than a pot of seeds, collected in some distant land, germinating like cress in the spring. And who needs exercise when you can get all the cardiac stimulation you need in a packet.

More thrills than than a treadmill

Crocus pocus

People who raise rare breeds of pigeons are called 'fanciers'. If ponies light your fire, your so-called friends probably describe you as 'horsey'. Stamp-collectors are 'philatelists' which, for reasons that no doubt say much more about me than convicted sex offenders, reminds me of the (true but apparently exaggerated) story of a group of women in Southampton, who chased a local paediatrician down the street under the misapprehension that he or she was a child molester (see here).

I have already written on this blog about galanthophilia, a harmless but dangerously addictive way of whiling away the winter months gazing at snowdrops but now I would like to introduce you to another species of lunatic, the croconut. This excellent term was coined by John Grimshaw (see his blog here) to describe anyone fascinated by the genus Crocus.

Lunacy and me go together like celery and a Bloody Mary and so it will not surprise you to read that I am a trainee croconut. Being a novice, I find it extraordinarily difficult to identify these small, variable, frequently interfertile plants. There are of course keys, the best of which is in Brian Mathews' wonderful book, accurately but arguably unimaginatively titled 'Crocus'. Even I, however, balk at the prospect of dissecting a crocus to determine whether cataphylls, bracts and prophylls are present and so I rely on a friend who is vastly more expert than me at identifying these things to point me in the right direction.

On my travels in the Balkans, I have collected a few Crocus corms in quite a number of different places and they are now starting to flower, some for the first time. I do not know for sure what species any of the following should be ascribed to but they are all fascinating. Perhaps it will eventually become clear that many Crocus 'species' are blurred at the margins but I just haven't studied them closely enough in the wild to have an opinion. Anyway, there are some photos below of plants flowering now and tentative identifications suggested by my friend D. Suggestions on a postcard.

This first one was collected near Trebinje, In Bosnia-Hercegovina, at an altitude of about 275m. It has virtually no scent, to my nose. The leaves, as you can see, are narrow, with a prominent white stripe. The perinath tube is white. I have no idea what the corm looks like.

No yellow throat but still C. dalmaticus?

The golden wash on the outer tepals suggests C. dalmaticus

The next two were collected just a few miles away from the plants above but are clearly different. Are they C. vernus or C. tommasinianus? The perianth tube is white, suggesting the latter, but the shape of the flower is more reminiscent of the former.

Finally, two photographs of a Crocus species collected on Mount Orjen in Montenegro, at about 600m altitude. Again, the perianth tube is white. Unlike either of the plants above, this one has a delicious scent. Is it a hybrid between C. vernus and C. tommasinianus?

In my greenhouse

June. From the bleak vantage point of the winter solstice, summer seems like an implausible, evanescent dream. It is a fairly safe bet that the earth will once again tilt on its axis, winter will release its grip and life will return to the land but it isn't hard to understand why our ancestors felt it expedient to sacrifice a few virgins to the relevant god, just to be on the safe side. Since virgins are apparently now rarer than hen's teeth (see here), perhaps it's no bad thing we live in an age of reason and enlightenment (see here).

Most of my June evenings this year, once the children were safely in bed, featured rubber gloves, a disposable mask and a roll of extra absorbent kitchen paper. As every galanthophile will immediately recognise, these items are essential tools of the trade for twin scalers. Twin scaling is the black art of propagating certain amenable genera of plants by slicing their dormant bulbs into transparently thin slivers of tissue, each attached to a fragment of basal plate, and incubating the slices in moist vermiculite until they produce bulbils, clones of the parent bulb. I use the technique mainly to bulk up rare snowdrop and daffodil cultivars more quickly than conventional cultivation allows. If you've seen the sublime garlic slicing scene in Goodfellas (if not, watch it here), you'll have a good idea of what's involved. Paulie, more of an expert on human than Allium anatomy I'd guess, is cutting transverse slices through the bulb, whereas they would have to be longitudinal to work. His razor blade control is impressive though.

The technique relies on the fact that some bulbs are adapted to regenerate from small pieces of meristematic tissue left behind when the plant has been attacked by disease or predators. Twin scaling is essentially the deliberate wounding of bulbs - we gardeners are merciless - to stimulate this response. The tissue slivers are vulnerable to disease for the two or three months it takes bulbils to form and operating theatre standards of hygiene are essential, hence the mask, gloves and surgical spirit.

By early September the results of my misspent June evenings were visible as rice-grain sized proto-bulbs, forming at the base of the cleft between each pair of scales. I potted these up, doused them with two different fungicides and put them under the greenhouse benches. Over the last two or three weeks the first of the twin scales have started to produce shoots. So far as I can tell, emergence date is a function of both the natural emergence time of bulbs of the relevant cultivar and the date on which the scales were potted up. This year the first to appear were 'Early to Rize' and 'Farringdon Double', adult bulbs of which are also flowering in another part of the garden.

Emerging twin scales

I think that I derive more satisfaction from this moment of triumph than any other event in the gardening cycle. Of course it will take another two or three years of careful cultivation before the first of the current crop of twin scales flower but already, in my imagination, I can see vast clumps of Farringdon Double - discovered in an Oxfordshire graveyard, according to The Bible - blowing the socks off visitors just before Christmas 2014.

In my greenhouse

In April this year I spent a week on the island of Crete, in the eastern Mediterranean. My fellow travelers were Tony Avent, the inspired and irreverent proprietor of one of the world's finest nurseries (www.plantdelights.com) and Alan Galloway, who is the world's preeminent student of Amorphophallus, the genus that took botanical nomenclature to new heights of anatomically correct etymology (it's Greek for 'mishappen penis'). He has also been known to swoon over other Aroids but I can vouch for the fact that he hates Eryngium.

The ability to make jaws drop and traffic stop is as rare in plants as in human beings. A talent for making grown men dribble is very unusual indeed, in both kingdoms. Either you have it or you don't. In Crete, at altitudes from sea level to well over a thousand metres, from the Rhodopou peninsula in the north-west to the mountains south of Sitia in the east, we saw thousands of plants of Dracunculus vulgaris, erupting like an alien plague from a landscape topiarised by vast, feral herds of goats. Most individuals had not yet flowered but Alan led us to a population in the centre of the island that was in perfect, spectacular bloom. Did I mention that the inflorescence of Dracunculus emits an odor of rotten meat, an adaptation that helps attract the flies that pollinate it? Glorious!

A rare cream-coloured form of Dracunculus vulgaris in central Crete.

Like many 'bulbs' from Mediterranean climates, D. vulgaris emerges into growth in winter or early spring, flowers in late spring and then goes dormant. Just now they are emerging in my greenhouse. Life at its weirdest and most wonderful.

The thrill of the perverse.

In my greenhouse

My greenhouse

In a turbulent world, everyone needs a sanctuary. My greenhouse is my sanctuary. The structure is a thing of beauty, designed and built for me by Hartley Botanic. The long axis is oriented east-west, to take full advantage of our anaemic northern light. Both north and south elevations are lined with brick cold frames, where I germinate my most precious or vulnerable seeds. Inside the only noise is the hum of the fans that run continuously, gently circulating the air and discouraging pests and diseases. The benches are provided with heating mats, although they are turned off for most of the year. The irrigation system hums into life according to a program that I vary through the seasons. There are overhead lights, which supplement natural daylight during the winter months and encourage winter-growing bulbs to prosper. Underneath the benches are deep sand beds where dormant plants enjoy a constant, cool environment. It is a marvellous luxury, for me and the plants that I love to grow.

Although large by most standards, space in the greenhouse is always at a premium and I constantly juggle the plants that I accommodate in these five star conditions. I am currently indulging a growing infatuation with the genus Arum and about a third of the longest bench is given over to pots of a dozen or so species. November is perhaps the nadir of the flowering calendar and it is satisfying to go into the greenhouse and be reminded that green is the dominant and most soothing colour in the plant kingdom.

I collected the plant below in south east Slovenia. It is a particularly attractive form of Arum italicum, which has not flowered yet for me. Who cares? The mottled foliage is reason enough to grow it.

Arum italicum - collected SE Slovenia

When I have figured out how to insert a gizmo in the right hand column of this blog, I intend to post a new picture of what's happening in the greenhouse as frequently as I can. Keep watching.

Snowdrops

Snowdrops are the quintessential spring flower. Perhaps it is the long winter months of anticipation that makes galanthophilia such a tempting perversion. Every February, bored journalists write articles, marvelling at the thrall in which these small plants hold their devotees and expressing mock horror at the prices that the latest discoveries command (these are often the same journalists who would spend £500 on a handbag without blinking). Tedious and irrelevant comparisons are made with the Dutch tulip bubble. Some genuinely fine gardeners and plantsmen, who ought to know better, affect to be above such nonsense and claim to be able to distinguish only a handful of the hundreds of selections and cultivars now available.

One of the great joys of spring, for me, is walking around a really fine snowdrop garden in the company of an expert galanthophile. To do so is to witness not just a breathtaking display of flowers but also a tour-de-force of observational prowess. Although too many similar snowdrops have been named by enthusiasts, they are all subtly different and, once you learn to recognise the distinctions, beautiful in their own way. A real aficionado can not only tell them apart but tell you why they are different, without recourse to a text book. Look closely and you will see that they are right. I know of no better way, and certainly no more harmlessly pleasurable one, of enhancing ones powers of observation than succumbing to galanthophilia.

Galanthus nivalis in Montenegro

 Many genera of bulbs that flower mainly in early spring, also include a handful of species that sneak in a brief blooming period just before the onset of winter. Familiar examples include Crocus, Muscari and Scilla. In evolutionary terms, it is easy to see how plants that flower at a time when both insect pollinators and other flowers are scarce – early spring – might be pre-adapted to exploit the handful of pollinators still flying in late autumn. In some environments, mutant individuals of spring-flowering species that happen to flower in autumn might prosper or even enjoy a competitive advantage over their spring-flowering relatives. In these circumstances, barring accidents, natural selection would result in their persistence and spread.

Among snowdrops, there are at least three species that have autumn flowering populations. Two of these, Galanthus reginae-olgae and G. peshmenii are closely related to the familiar G. nivalis. The third is G. elwesii.

Wandering around my polytunnels and greenhouse today I was struck by how very few of the thousands of species I have growing there were flowering. A few Nerine cultivars still have flowers; some deliciously scented, early Iris unguicularis are putting on a show; but most of the landscape is green or brown. I was thrilled, therefore, to come across a neglected tray of pots containing bulbs of G. reginae-olgae subsp. reginae-olgae ‘Cambridge’, my favourite selection of this species, in full flower. This is a plant that contrives to look healthy and happy in the most inclement weather and (although the photograph below was taken last year), so it was today.

Galanthus reginae-olgae subsp. reginae-olgae 'Cambridge'

Bulbs that flower in November should be given a medal for alleviating human suffering. G. reginae-olgae ‘Cambridge’ is my nominee for the George Cross.