Tales of horticultural sin and floral redemption featuring Salvia, Nepeta, Carl the Murderous Gardener, Gypsophila and Hemerocallis.

https://ko-fi.com/bendark

Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit https://www.hatchards.co.uk/book/orwells-roses/rebecca-solnit/9781783785520

Husbandry by Isabel Bannerman https://www.foyles.co.uk/book/husbandry/isabel-bannerman/9781914902949

The Grove by Ben Dark https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-grove-a-nature-odyssey-in-19-1-2-front-gardens-ben-dark/5044771?ean=9781784727413

Episode breakdown

[00:00:20] The episode discusses the popularity of the ornamental cherry tree, particularly the Kanzan cultivar, and its rise in popularity throughout the 20th century. Ben briefly mentions his recent writing on lawns and their place in the Gardening World.

[00:07:48] Heinous garden blunders include buying cheap plants from a supermarket. Reading about George Orwell's Woolworths roses.

[00:16:05] The author had trouble with overcrowded Gypsophila elegans seedlings and shares their experience with propagation. They also discuss the fraught etiquette of giving plants as gifts and their own propagation progress with London pride (Saxifraga x urbium and Nepeta 'Walkers Low.'

[00:22:33] Ben cuts back ivy for more light and space but the result is ugly, needs to go completely bare. Ivy on a wall needs constant cutting to maintain modern look, better to hide bulky stems in a small hedge.

[00:24:23] Archaeobotany and the use of box hedges in Roman Britain. Recommendations for reading on garden history and a call to support the podcast.

Now you've got a gardener you personally dislike. So what?

You don't have to like your gardener. As long as he does a good

job and your wife's happy, forget it's.

Hello and welcome to another episode of

Dear Gardener. I'm broadcasting to you from Copenhagen

in the week of Prunes Kansan. We are

at the high point of that quintessentially suburban

cherry trees, blossoming. I was out for a run

on Wednesday morning with a friend who is

not from our world, is from a world far

removed from that of horticulture, someone who cares more about defense policy

and serious things like that. And even he noticed

them and was able to ask, my goodness, what are those trees?

It's a penetrating kind of

plant, something that can enter the head of even

the most plant blind. And for that I love it.

I think that today this

podcast is going to be slightly bookish because I have

been reading as much as I have been gardening,

and for that reason I beg to be

slightly indulgent and begin with a reading in

honor of the Week of Prunes Kanzan from my

own book, in which I discuss this tree a bit of context.

I'm writing about London, and specifically about

the trees of London, and wondering why

on earth London plain is the emblematic tree

of the city, when actually, if you look at the tree surveys, if you look

at the work done by the great London authority,

the plain tree is nothing. The tree of the city is the

ornamental cherry, the pruners.

And it's quite a remarkable tale,

really, because ornamental cherries weren't much planted prior

to the 20th century. The big Edwardian and

Victorian tree. And when I say big,

I mean mid sized, too small. I e the tree of the

front garden, the tree of the proud suburban

homeowner was lilac and vo Burnham,

those very, very old fashioned things. And then from the Edwardian period onwards,

we get this ramping, ramping, ramping up of the cherry

tree until we reach the position we're in now, when whole streets

can be snowed with blossom

in particular weeks of the spring. You'll hear a little bit about that when I

start reading now. The rise of blossom

is the great untold story of the 20th century.

We have breeders and enthusiasts to thank, men and women in

Europe, America and Japan, the ornamental cherries homeland,

who formed societies, published bulletins and hunted lost

specimens in old gardens. When their experiments and rediscoveries

reached nurserymen, the market was flooded with new cultivars.

There were chrysanthemum, flowered, pinks, weeping forms,

upright columns and patio friendly dwarfs. By 1948,

the ornamental cherry was popular enough to earn a lashing from Vita Sackville

West, who described the cultivar Kanzan as gordy

and derided it as ubiquitous in the gardens of bungalows,

villas and suburbia. I agree with Vita.

Kanzan is gordy, but it is also a masterpiece.

It is big, pink and double flowered and is only everywhere

because it is fun. There is a majestic specimen growing from the hedge

at number 53 Grove Park. It has been perfectly pruned

over the years, gently shaped to the space with none of the brutal mid limb

amputations that so often blight the cultivar. Canzan is

perhaps the most hacked at tree in London. It grows neatly

upwards when young and will flower at three years old while still in

its showroom pot. Thus it inveigles its way

into spaces that are too small for its spreading stout

trunked old age and is everywhere crudely butchered.

As a child, Christopher Lloyd adored its deep rose blossom

and copper tinged young foliage. But in 1994, at the

age of 73, he admitted he had outgrown it.

This calling affections was not something he wished to impose on

other gardeners. Rather, he hoped they would feel its

thrill, as he once had, and ignore the killjoys who point out that

Kanzan is considered vulgar in some circles.

Those who seek to impose their standards on others are missionaries,

he suggested, and missionaries are sometimes turned against

and murdered for being busy bodies. There we go.

Missionaries turned against and murdered for being busy bodies.

I don't know if you'd write that in a newspaper column today.

There's lots of missionaries at the moment in

the gardening world. I don't

think that I'm one of them. But I have been writing about lawns. It's no

mo. May as well I've been writing about lawns for the RHS,

given the brief too bright the

history of lawns, which could be quite a dull affair. But I

think I turned it into a pretty good

article. There's some atomic

chemical warfare, there's some Francis

Bacon, Albertus Magnus, who is something

of a household saint here Albertus Magnus, the medieval writer

who wrote treaties on gardens, and he hangs as a sort of

house genie, a portrait of him. Above the entrance

to this house, above the door, there a little portrait

we found in a secondhand bookshop in Carterhena, of all

places. So it was nice to slip

him between the pages of the RHS journal.

Anyway, I didn't advise that all lawns should be

spared the lawn mower forever, but trod my

normal line of do what

feels best, a sort of fence sitting

coached in aesthetic terms. But there

we go. I have to say that I've kind of been driven away

from Twitter of late, by the way, that the

gardening is a series of

little campaigns now run by

people wanting to find fault.

And I think that that's not really the spirit of

horticulture, because there is fault to be found in this world, all sorts of fault.

We live in fields of fault, but most of them aren't in

back gardens. Most of them are in car parks and car culture

and the horrible concrete spread

of modern life. And that is what we should rail against and rail

together, rather than the setting three

versus setting five versus setting the lawnmower

on fire. Settings of the lawnmower.

Carl, I suppose you need a job now. I need

a garden. Well, I have one. Not like

this, of course. My name is Mrs. John Bennett.

I live at Via Tintillo. I'll talk it over with my husband.

Why don't you come by tomorrow, about noon? Thank you.

My gardening this week has been rather shameful,

I'm afraid to admit. I've made a series of horrible

blunders and committed some

horticultural sins. Sins against the world

of horticulture and sins against my own garden, I'm terribly sorry

to say. Firstly, I went to

the little local supermarket and

bought a load of herbaceous perennials from that stack

of Dutch trolleys that they just get dumped in their foyer to

slowly dry out and die. And I know I should be supporting

independent nurseries and I know that this is not

the way to buy plants. I was buying

Salvia nimrosa, the little

woodland sage that grows best in full of sun.

Is it a woodland sage, then? Well, it's in the name, the woodland sage

nimrosa of the woodlands. And he

found these plants remarkably, remarkably cheap,

which is obviously the seduction, but they were

at least labeled Nimarota, not just salvia, as sometimes you find, but they

were labeled with their cultivar as mixed and

a big picture of some purple and some white

salvias in flour. Now, I only want the classic purple,

so I had to do a rather shameful unstacking

and repacking there in the supermarket.

I was looking for the red tinge on

the internodes, guessing that those with the darker internodes

have more of the pigments that will be on the final flower spike. So I

think I managed to get all purple salvias at

a very low price, but I'm sure at a

cost. It's not something unique to me.

I've been reading a very good book this week, Husbandry,

by Isabelle Bannerman, which I do recommend.

If anyone is looking for a good horticultural book, I like it because it's

very, very lightly written,

by which I don't mean fluffy or glib

or dumbed down. It feels like it has come from

a brain rather than from a

series of little sound bites. How can I make this clever?

It's got a slightly repetitious feeling. You go over the

same plants again and again, but that's how we experience

our gardens. Our gardens aren't about well on this

day. I looked at this plant, on this day, I looked at that plant.

Our gardens are constant returns to the same plants

that we like in this, like that we worry about. And that happens in the

book. She goes back and back over the same plants and the same

fundamental dislikes or passions,

mainly passions, which I think is I think is a good sign in the book

approach from different angles, which is how life works,

is how we all think. Anyway, one of the things in the

book is that their best lavender hedges

in the new garden, which is the subject of

the piece, are from BnQ. They drive around

desperately try to find all of the

lavender plants delivered to the BNCs across Somerset, which is

something that I've done and is what I was doing in that shop in the

same way. Very good as well. Very good advice

in there, very good pictures for giving instant

establishment to what is a very new garden by spending basically all

the budget on vast whacking great lumps of topry

of toppoury, rather and letting all the froth and frill and cheap

little annuals do their work beside it. Which I think is very good

for general approaches, particularly if we're going

towards more wilderness gardens more wild

and woolly and unknown gardens. You do need those beehives.

You do need something to say. Time is here, it exists

within this garden. But if someone as brilliant as

her and her and her husband garden makers of much renown,

are scouring the discount aisles, then I think,

so can I. The shame in it isn't

in my garden. It's not about the worry that people will

come around and say, my goodness, I recognize that plant, that's a co op,

three, six, five, salvia. It's that it damages

the industry somewhat. And we shouldn't be encouraging people who

are not putting proper cultivar names on their plants

and who are growing them all in computer cold, controlled warehouses and

bussing them out to us in this floppy, sappy state. But the trouble is that

all happens so far from

my shopping trip, so far from our gaze.

It's a constant dilemma. I've been reading another book, actually,

this week. I've read Rebecca Solnit's

brilliant book, orwell's Roses.

It's a wonderful biography, a bit like

Ruth Skurz biography of Napoleon with the gardens

as the gimmick. It's George Oil tied to the roses

he planted in 1936 from a

local woolworth shop. Essentially, she's making the

argument that she takes from that fantastic

phrase of the suffrage movement over in America.

She's making the argument that they did which was all

must have bread and roses too. Or is it

bread for all and roses too? That's the more poetic way. Bread for

all and roses too and all wells.

Life and writing is often seen as the bread, as the meat, as the political

fight, as the anti totalitarianism.

But actually, she points out that in his writing and in

his life, there is all of this roses stuff,

there is the conservatism with the small sea which led

to the love of the countryside and et cetera,

et cetera. But anyway, it's great, great book focused in all

of these things. But part of it, it takes place in Colombia

on the Bogota savannah and all of those great big

rose growing warehouses. And it's a very

obvious example of when we

buy cheap from supermarket forecourts.

We encourage we

encourage is unfair on us. But it's true.

We contribute towards these incredibly precarious,

degraded workers who have horrible conditions,

miserable pay, thorny thumb spiked lives

out there in those plastic polytunnels.

And I don't think that these plants will have done damage in

that sense, but they do come from a

world of horticulture, a world of Dutch mass

propagation that probably, if I thought about it consciously,

I don't support. But, yeah, there they are. There they are,

growing in my garden. We're not growing yet. Not quite growing yet,

because I haven't planted them out yet. They are so lush

and so obviously climate controlled that

I'm doing the little in out dance. They're going to spend a

night or two coming in a night or two?

A day or two, rather, sitting out there in ever

increasing bits of sunlight. I'm going to inch them

out until they can take a little bit of full sun and then whack them

into the borders. Sorry, I shouldn't have said that. Whack them into the

borders.

Isn't it fantastic, Rosa? He's only been here a few

short weeks and already everything's changing. Things need to be growing everywhere.

Yes, ma'am. He has the power. Well, I'd say he has a green thumb.

Have you ever heard that expression, Rosa? Oh, yes,

senora. But I don't mean that. It's just

not natural, the way everything is growing so fast.

Well, maybe he's a magician.

My other great failure this week has been

in the pricking out of a load of gypsophila elegance

that I sewed far too thick. I sewed them after

I'd had a few bad germinations that I

talked about in the episode last week.

And they all

germinated, germinated crest, thick, thicker than cress.

And they are so tightly woven together as terrified of disentangling

them. So I tried to prick them out almost too early. The second

pair of leaves, the first true leaves, weren't really emerged,

they were just poking up, which meant that they were incredibly

fragile. But already the roots were terribly,

terribly entwined.

Seeds, unfortunately, when they send

up stalk above and root below, don't do it in

a perfectly straight line, as if the seed were

a slowly disappearing bead on

a on a string pulled taut. What they do

is send out the stem

with a little hook in it and the root the same,

so that they can twist and turn

around each other and tangle terribly. So trying to tease apart

these minute things led to all sorts

of root ripping and damage and cursing.

I eventually print them out into little individual trays

and they look so terribly,

terribly sad and small there,

it's heartbreaking. They're like hedgehogs in a sanctuary,

little tiny baby hedgehogs being kept alive by tubes.

And you think, they shouldn't be here, they should be doing something

more natural out there. If I'd known they

were going to germinate so easily, I think I'd have just broadcast them

over the beds, which is what I'll do for the rest of the

packet. I've also been chopping up some saxophraga.

Gus Herbium, London Pride. You are spared reading from the

London Pride chapter of my book,

no, I Wait,

which is multiplying

like bacteria under my hand.

I'm chopping it in half every year because it takes well

to being chopped in half with a very, very sharp spade.

Last year there were two, there are now four sliced straight

down the middle. And they're happy, they are growing away.

They're at the stage where there is a little pink nub

of proto buds at the center of each

fresh rosette. Soon that will be thrust up

and tinkling so light and fairy like above

the plants. And I probably do the same again next year.

And mathematicians among you can work out

how many years until the world is entirely

covered in my little divided saxophage

plants. Propagation is a slow, weight garden,

but a mighty rewarding one.

I want to get to the stage with this garden where there is enough

of it to give for giving. A little bit of

plant, I think is the most stylish way to turn up

to a house, a little bit of

something delightful to put in. Their garden only works

with people who have very large

gardens that they can lose anything unwanted

in. Otherwise it's a bit presumptuous. It's like with cut flowers.

They are perfect because they are temporary.

You can give them as a gift and whoever

receives them knows they're going to die. So if they're not their color, they're a

plant, they can't possibly abide. Well, it's only a week and then I can

chuck them out. But give someone a phleanopsis that they hate,

a house plant, they did a test, they have to keep it forever. That's why

we don't give permanent gifts. You don't turn up at a house and say,

oh, I got you a saucepan. Firstly, because they might not

want your crummy saucepan, where are they going to store it? And secondly, because there's,

I suppose, a little bit of an implication. I saw you couldn't afford a saucepan,

so I bought you a saucepan, old bean. And if someone

has a very, very tiny garden and you bring them a whacking great division

of hemorrhacalus, then they've got

it forever and it's taken up a quarter of their growing space.

Though if they have acres, then you can give them as much hemorrhacalus

as they want and they'll say, okay, great, I'll put

that in a lovely bed I've just prepared behind

the mower shed next to that nettle and

everyone is happy. So I'm going to get to the stage where there

are bits of London Pride flying around the world.

Little bits of napita. I've been propagating

some napita walkers low a garden center purchase

bought at this time of year, when they are so flooded with

orcsins and hormones they are teenage

and bursting with potential for

growth. So you can just whip off the stems, strip off the

lower leaves, stick them in some good, well drained compost

and let them go. I chopped these off two weeks ago,

and exactly two weeks later,

Sunday to Sunday, I was able to see roots

emerging from the bottom of the two liter pot in which I put all

the cuttings. I think I'll leave it another week for them to get down and

then divide them and suddenly have eight new plants.

So if you know me and invite me

to anything good in the coming months,

then pretend to be surprised.

Pretend to be surprised at your gift.

I think we better call a doctor. He was all right yesterday. I saw him

working in the garden. Carl, what's wrong? No, it's Ralph.

He's coughing blood. Oh, dear. Get Dr. Lombard.

Propagation aside, I've been doing a little bit of cutting back,

cut back some ivy to give

a bit more light to a bed. I checked, obviously,

for my nesting birds prior to that and realized

this was the time to do it, because the berries have finally all gone,

been consumed. The flowers are a long way off. Its nature

value is at its lowest. So I went

in there and got hacking and cracking.

It's a pretty poor

end result. It looks very ugly because it's just a load of

bare ivy stems on a fence. Now, I want to get it to

that shimmering green wool stage, but prior

to that, it needs to go completely bare. Ivy on

a fence or a wall is a tricky beast. It needs

to be clipped an awful lot to keep it crisp and

modern looking. And there's

always a danger as well that you ruin

the line. You ruin this wonderful

decorative modernist block by

having a great lumpy, bulging stem coming

out of the bottom. And stems are

lovely things, but if you're going for that aesthetic,

then I think it's better to hide it somehow in a

little hedge, little evergreen hedge, a little bit of box,

a fine ivy wool behind it,

and you're good to go.

I'd like to recommend the garden as a tour for the hospital plan.

Oh, didn't I tell you, Gladys? Actually, ralph didn't do this.

Ellen has a new gardener.

Carl's hedge

of box reminds me, I've been delving

back into one of my favorite subjects this week, which is archaeobotany.

It's the archaeologists take on what people

grew and gardened with. And I love it because I

do love archaeologists and their ways of thinking, talking and writing.

And I obviously love botany and gardens.

And they're talking about box in Roman Britain

and how it might have been used. And it's all

we believe that it was planted

in dense plantings with

a strictly delineational aspect,

a dividing line,

a separation of the limited public space of

the street from the private, the sanctuary within. And of course,

what they mean to say is hedges, romans use it as hedges,

but they have all this wonderful archaeological language

surrounding it. I mean, it's a bit of a joke, isn't it? It's a bit

of a joke that everything had a sacred purpose.

Roman gardens are always discussed as places of health

and cleanliness and almost of purging

rather than places, do you think? Well, what if they like things that looked

nice? Although undoubtedly, I suppose health does play a

big part in the writings about it. There's a great

letter from Plierney the Younger. I can't remember which of

the letters it is. I think it's one of the there's two very, very famous

villa letters where he describes his villa, which are probably some of

the foundational texts in garden history.

And he's talking about how the countryside

and gardens particularly, are so good

for health. And the evidence of this is that when I move my slaves to

work for me out here in the countryside, none of them seem to die.

A sentence that tells a horrible truth about their

life back in the capital city

and their status more generally. But anyway, yes, go and read

your plenty's letters, foundational stuff, and also go and

read your Husbandry by Isabel Bannerman and

go and read your Orwell's Roses by Rebecca

Solnit. I realized that, stumbling upon it as I did, I probably didn't do

it justice. She is the most brilliant writer.

She is so engaged and thoughtful

without being lecturing.

And she also has the confidence

to repeat herself, which I think is sometimes a sign of a

very good writer. What I was talking

about in the Isabel Bannerman book but here is more explicit,

more obvious. She starts each section of the book with a

variant on the line. In 1936, george Orwell

planted roses. In 1936, a young writer planted roses.

In 1936, a man in in wallington planted roses,

et cetera, et cetera, which is a really fun and

quite subtle way of showing yes, this is one of those collections

of discursive thoughts from one starting point. But I'm

not going to hide that. I'm going to make it clear, I'm going to make

it absolutely explicit. As someone who has written

a similar book of discursions from the same point,

but with probably less well, certainly considerably

less aplomb, I appreciate seeing that

kind of thing. Yes, again, going to pick up a copy of that

and otherwise have a wonderful week

gardening and reading and whatever else you're doing. Try to

remember, bread for all and roses,

too. I hope the bread part of your week is not too

onerous and there's plenty of time for the rosy

bits. I am off now to look at someone plant

a tree in honor of the

king, so let's hope they do it right.

Please do go and support the

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rating and review on wherever you listen to this,

they're really easy to do, takes a second. Be really effusive.

Remember that. It really has changed your life.

You spent 30 minutes listening to it. That's a change. You could have done

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And also go and support it, if you can,

by going to Cofi.com

Bendark and buying me a coffee. I will

put a link to that underneath this podcast as

well. Thank you very much and goodbye.

Can we get you a drink? Oh, no, thanks. I'll just be a minute.

I wanted to ask you, have you ever hired a gardener named Carl?