Malus × domestica and Taraxacum officinale (apple and dandelion) take to May's springy stage in this special on location recording that starts deep in the beach woods and bursts into the orchard.

https://ko-fi.com/bendark

Episode overview:

[00:00:16] Ben talks winter and spring weather and how it affects the growth of plants like apples and bird cherries, and why he decided to record the episode in the woods rather than at his desk. The ground is covered in beach kernels and dry leaves, making a crunching noise when stepped on.

[00:02:48] The winter aconites are blooming staggered, possibly for an advantage. The area will soon be deserted of pollinators, but was once covered in flowers. The author wishes they could experience the beauty forever. They walk past an understory U tree.

[00:05:12] Discussion of spring in the UK and Denmark, including the appearance of dandelions and their potential use in producing rubber for car tires. We also examines the anatomy and function of dandelions, including their papas and role in seed dispersal.

[00:13:59] Blowing dandelion seeds not all bad. Dandelions hard to grow, try not cutting lawn too short. Seed-eating beetles help reduce dandelions. Leave lawn longer for fewer dandelions.

[00:16:20] Apple blossom time is perfect when buds are half open and half closed. The king bud produces the best fruit. Apples need cold for proper formation of flowers and lack of cold causes poor pollination.

[00:24:01] Observations of diverse species in grassy understory with small apples on dwarfing stock, well-pruned for fruit. Seeing a variety of heritage apple trees with grafted and non-grafted roots. Also, discussion of a recent planting project and a classic rose ACA flowering.

[00:30:50] Bee landed in hair, hair wild, no time for vines, thanking supporters.

It's a terrible garden for weeds, this is. You know, sir, I am aware

of that tree. They used to keep a boy here in the old days.

Nothing to do all day but pull up weeds.

Hello and welcome to Dear Gardener with

me, Ben Dark. You join me sitting on a tree stump

in the woods, the best sort of place to be on a day like this.

It's hot out there a bright, bright blue sky.

We have no sign of any cloud, so the woods feel

like refuge for the first time this year,

just about opening the beach leaves, which means that the

apples that I'm going to go and see soon will

certainly be out. They're pretty closely tied, I think.

It's all due down to the temperature in the month before.

So it doesn't really matter how cold January is or December is.

What matters is how cold the end of March and April is. That's what

tells us when the beach is going to open, when the apple is going to

open, when the bird cherry opens. Those three are

good indicators all at the same time.

Anyway, I'm here because I had sat down at

my desk to record an episode with some

talk about teasing out napita

and watering pots. And then I looked outside and

it was all so beautiful and

so beckoning, so I thought, well, why not take the mobile

equipment and see what's going on

in the woods and beyond? So here I am. There's going to

be a bit of crunching as I stand up. We had a mast year last

year, huge production of beach kernels and

they are still flapping about

on the floor. Well, not really flapping about, they're spiky little things,

they make a good noise underfoot and I'll be walking on those.

And there's a lot of dry leaves now. A couple of days are dry

and what had seemed a flat centimeter

thick mat has fluffed up into

last year's old leaves, so they'll be crunching about in a second.

What about weed killer for the dandelion?

Would you like me to get some, sir? No, I prefer my own.

I've got the materials. I wouldn't put it down. This dry weather,

sir, tends to lie around, needs to soak in, you see.

Not the way I use it, Jay. Not the way I

use it.

The last winter aconite. Last winter

aconite just poking out there. They seem to have a slightly

staggered flowering. I don't know if it's a particular

population, flowers later, or if

these ones are going for a second flush. Suppose I could go and have a

little look.

I think it's probably their first flowering. They just gone for

a little bit, little bit of a later thing. Probably gives them some sort of

advantage to have a population that doesn't flower all at once.

It's a beautiful, beautiful, very long

antennaed moth or a beetle disappeared

into the woods and litter. Anyway, soon this place

will all be bare and deserted. There's only a few litter pollinators remaining.

Most of them have moved away into the

open fields and gardens. But a month and a half ago, this really

was where it was at in

terms of flowering carpets of

an enemies everywhere. It was one of those moments.

I think it was two weeks ago, I was out in a similar woodland,

looking at the most beautiful galaxy of

anemones from a bud. And it was a moment when

you wish I wish I knew less about plants. I wish I was

seeing this for the very, very first time and could

somehow convince myself that it would go on forever, that it

wouldn't be over in just ten days,

fading away for another year. That's why everyone

gets into mindfulness, isn't it? To make these moments

not extendable. Enjoyable. Enjoyable as we experience

them. There's a bit of crunching here as I make my

way out past a brilliant

understory U for you, who has never seen

the toporous trimmers.

Driving an old file into the ground. Drop one of the tiny packets

into each aperture. Do this in the case of each dandelion,

taking a separate dose to each.

And here we reach the woodland edge with some little

bits of grass.

And the first dandelion.

This is definitely dandelion week.

I was back in the UK a little bit

last week. Lovely living between two

countries like this,

because you experience spring

twice, almost. And if there's something you really, really enjoyed in

a bit of UK spring, you can hot foot it over to

Denmark, where starts are pretty similar,

and you can experience it again two weeks later. So that's

a tip for anyone that really

enjoyed a bit of this spring or really like something they're seeing now.

Book yourself. Train journey, car journey,

not a flight, because you'll ruin my podcast and come out

here and see it again. I suppose you do get

people who behave almost like the

groupies who follow a band around the country and go to every

single one of their shows. You could slowly walk

north with the wooden enemies singularly came out

at wooden enemy pace.

Anyway, coming around the corner now, past these rotted

old stumps, gnarled old trees.

Yes, with the UK. The UK was wet and warm.

We had a couple of days of absolutely torrential rain

and then those blissful evenings where

you get dry under dove

gray sky after a whole day of wet and everything is

glistening and suddenly the worhub is 200%

more alive. Every single hedgerow is

covered in those tiny glass like new

little snails. And little slugs,

so sweet little slugs that you could make a

Disney cartoon out of. They look so charming.

Lots of those eating the garlic mustard.

And in the UK, the main dandelion crop,

the main dandelion flush, had gone to seedhead,

which was a delight for my son, who is a

big dandelion puffing fan puffing.

It incredibly ostentatiously. Gets down to dandelion

level, squatting on his haunches and does that big

toddler blowing out a candle puff that incredibly

inefficient. All noise

and rasp and no actual air

until the seeds go away. So he really

enjoyed that. But here we have our dandelions out

and yellow.

They're really good flowers. I know that I'm not alone in

saying that the RHS this year is doing a big hero plant

campaign. These things are no longer weeds, they are

hero plants, and we should all be appreciating them

in our lawns. And we should. We really should.

I know there's lots of professional gardeners

who listen to this podcast, who tend to nowadays

be in the vanguard of the

embracing weeds and getting rid of all

of those nasty chemicals. Moving didn't used to be so, but now they are,

and more often than not, them trying to convince their clients to go

weed killer free. They can listen to this section of the podcast where I

just pick up a little dandelion and pluck it and marvel

at how amazing it is. I've got a little yellow one in my hand now,

full of ants. I wonder what the ants are doing.

I doubt they're harvesting the latex. You can

make rubber from dandelions,

not from our native dandelion, not from the Taraxicum

aficionale, but from one of its

Kyrgyzstani relatives. I think you're able to

harvest that white SAP that just came out when I plugged that there

and refine it in just the same way you do the

rubber tree. It's the same compound

at latex. Plants tend to use

the same compounds. When a plant is producing

anthrocyanins, it is not reinventing the wheel each time.

It's using the same sort of stuff. And this is the

right stuff to make tires out of. You could drive your car

on dandelion tires one day.

They know what those little creatures were doing. There's lots of

life that lives inside a dandelion flower

because it's such a rich

bit of nutrient there when

you're pumping the energy up to produce

those petals. But particularly when the fertilizers

have come and you

have this race to develop seeds and get them

away quickly before all of the little

field grubs and beaters and things can get in there and lay

little white worms at the bottom and start devouring them. Or you

sometimes tear open a dandelion and

you can see little black bits at the bottom. And that's where a

little weevil has been in there eating

and fallen out and pupating.

I'm just opening another one up now. This is a dandelion

that has been pollinated. The flowers are quite interesting.

It's asterisfier, so it's all sort of

disc and ray florets dandelion. The vast majority of them are

ray florets, those fused petals

in a tube that go out to create a great big pom pom.

Looking at now, you can see the anthers

rising in between the maturing from the

outside and then pushing them on later. Anyway,

the one that's pollinated is at the stage where it's developing

the great pappas, the umbrella

thing on the top, that will carry them away. I was reading

once the role of the pappas,

the papas. It's got a couple

of things that it obviously carries. It it obviously is the parachute,

but it's also a sort of protection.

So if you are a snuffily sort

of creature who's wandering around looking for a snack, a little

ball of seeds presented to you on the long dandelions

stem would be very tempting indeed. But you don't

really want a mouthful of furry pappas

on there. And the third one,

they are incredibly good wicks,

so they take up ambient moisture and this doesn't

help them, particularly in flying, but what it does help is when they

land on the ground, the papas

can turn sideways and sort of suck moisture

up to the seed from the air,

which really helps that initial germination bit.

It's a marvel of a marvel of

evolution, really. The papas, the parachute, is dead cells.

It is an equivalent of our hair and things,

but they can open

and close, draw themselves in and open up again and

close up again, depending on whether it's a nice day for

flying. That all depends on that little pad

at the bottom, that little apical thing.

It's.

Hello, Martin. Hello. Martin armstrong

here. Look, I'm sorry about all this kerfuffle about the Velanoeth estate.

Why, why don't you pop over to Mayfield for

tea? We can chat about the whole thing informally and I'll

show you around the garden. I'm rather proud of it, actually.

When my son was doing all the blowing, we got all sorts of people saying,

oh, he's not going to be very popular, the dandelion seeds

flying off in the area, but they would have all come off anyway. And he

probably actually did them a favor because the way

he had to huff at them probably means they weren't

mature seeds he was sending out anyway. So he's probably

done some sterilization efforts for

those of the world who hate dandelions in their lawn.

If you do hate dandelions, if you do hate dandelions in your lawn,

my advice would be not to cut it. So, sure,

dandelion seedlings, well, their germination

rate is tiny and generally what happens is a lot

of them get eaten by seed eating beetles. There's a whole,

whole host of generative seed

eating species, but there's a particular one,

I can't remember what it is. It's amos, something like that.

Amethyst. The sun beetles.

Amora. Amora might be the sun

beetles, and some of them specialize in just

eating dandelion seeds.

So a couple of matchbox full of those and

then just don't cut your lawn so short because they're tap root species.

The dandelion wants to develop a really big root

system and that's what it really focuses on first so they're very vulnerable

to getting outgrown by surrounding

grasses, even by surrounding clothes in that very,

very early stage. So leave it a little bit longer and you have

far fewer.

As I was saying, my dear Martin, all would be fine if it wasn't for

these deuced weeds. Yes, measure about

a martyr to weeds. Now, my gardener was saying it's because we

are surrounded by fields here. My clients are adamant.

I see the majors left the tea thing. Sit you down. Sit you down.

One lump or two, please. I'm afraid I am a little and

you must have one of these buttered stones. Excuse my

fingers.

We're in an orchard right now. You probably heard the Gate

Creek open just walking up to

one of the apples here. It's perfect. Perfect apple

blossom time. You don't want to catch an apple blossom tree too late because

you lose the pink. The pink in an apple is concentrated on

the backside of the petal and strongest

when they are tightly, tightly furled. And you get a suggestion

of pink in the veining and a blush on

the back later on, but you see far less of it. So you

want to find a tree like the one I'm looking at now that has half

buds open and half buds closed. They're funny

little things, these apertures.

This one, the king bud, is just over. So I don't know if you've ever

looked at your aperture. Go and go and look at them. You'll find that

generally they are all clusters

of five or sometimes six flowers,

sometimes seven as well on each tip

bearing or spur bearing bit. And there'll be one bud,

the king bud, that opens before the others.

And that's the bud that apparently produces

the best fruit. It opens first, it'll be open on its own for a few

days and then these lateral buds start doing their business.

So if you are there for a day where you have the king buds open

and maybe one lateral bud and three lateral

buds still to come, one in pink tight furl, one in

just opening and the other in

almost ready to if you squeezed it,

it would be open stage. That's the best time, I think, to look at apple

trees. They are my favorite

blossom tree, I think. I don't like them.

Too heavy with blossom. You know, when you see a really heavily

blossomed ornamental crab apple species

and you can't see through it, I think that loses a little bit of the

magic and romance. You want to have a little bit of a

little bit of gap and green behind. The green also

helps because they do flower with the new leaves.

I think they work really well together. That pink and white and green and that

special, that special gray green,

that special velvet green that covers

the calyx and the flower stalk.

It's something that you probably don't even notice when you

see an apple tree. But I think it does. I think that tone, that gray

green is such a good offsetter,

as anyone who has painted their door in

that color recently will no doubt know.

It almost tends towards powdery mildew color.

I suppose that's beautiful in a way as well.

Anyway, yes, those things that block Prunes Canzan, which I

was talking about last week, is a key example of that, that completely block

the sky are lovely, but they haven't got the joy

of the blue or the gray or whatever

else is going on in the environment behind them. I've been

reading a lot of Priest recently,

as I like to do, and I'm

a great proust advocate. And don't worry about being

regarded as pretentious because you'll end up enjoying it and you can't be pretentious

if you actually do enjoy it. I'm reading

Sodom and Gamora or The Cities of the Plain, which had his fourth

book in that Remembrances of

Things Past series. And there's a wonderful bit

just after the period of

horrible self indulgent mourning for

his grandmother when

he realizes how horrible he was all

the time and he snapped out of it, the narrator by the

apple trees in blossom and

the sight of the blue sky between them. There's a great passage

and he's talking about seeing them with this blue behind it

as if they had been painted by the best sort of amateur painter.

And then suddenly the sky turns and it grays and turns

to slashing rain and it's after these

two solid pages of proper bruce and

text where you don't get a paragraph break, you suddenly get

a little semicolon. It was a day in

spring. I think about that a lot this spring. It was a day

in spring when I'm missing my wooden enemies

and mourning that they're gone for another year. It was a

day in the spring. Anyway, those are the apples.

Those are my thoughts on them. They're good plants for Denmark. They do

well here, the apples. Apples need cold.

It's essential to their flowering

and producing. They start all the flower buds,

flowers and plants and trees, they start working well in advance of what we

think. All of these buds that I'm looking at now and getting such

great pleasure from probably started developing around harvest

time last year. But they

kind of develop as just do anything.

Like, here's a bud, we'll decide what to do with it later. And then

it's the temperatures which trigger the chemical symbols and the hormonal

symbols that let's put this one into a branch, let's put

this one into a flower. And not having cold winters, messes that

all up. And also messes up the

late winter, early spring, messes up the

actual formation of the individual flowers. Just letting these

bunch of Hollywood makers go off to wherever they're

going. Messes up the formation of

the flowers. So the late January,

February, March time is when all of those cells are

differentiating themselves inside the buds I'm looking at now,

when they say I'll be an ovary, you be a pistol,

you be an anthro and you be a bit of pollen. And it's pollen

is always the last one to come. So if you don't get any cold

in late spring, you get plants without pestiles and without pollen,

which are useless for producing any apples.

So next time, if you find yourself cursing, as I

frequently did in this very, very long

lingering winter, you find yourself cursing that.

Think of the apples, think of the cider,

think of the blossom that you will see in the spring.

It's all going to be worth it.

My father in law is a chemist and he had some of them analyzed.

If you look here, you'll see a small hole has been punched in

the bottom of some of them and then covered over. Yes, I see. And these

ones contained arsenic. Yes. Well, it's a ticklish business,

gentleman. I'll see what I can do.

I'll need the urine sample and these chocolates for analysis by

our people. In the meantime, Mr martin don't

accept any more tea invitations from the Major. That's just the trouble.

He keeps on inviting. Mr Martin, whatever you do, don't go.

Very nice. There's lots of understory

things. You really can see the difference that leaving grass

makes. The mowing here is obviously

done by machine. You can see that because they have quite

large turning circle around the tree where

they can't get close enough. If you had a pedestrian mower, you'd be able to

get closer and they haven't left it long deliberately,

but they're not able to reach under each tree. And the

diversity of species under the trees is fantastic.

I guess partially it's because these are small apples on

dwarfing stock, well pruned for fruit, which means well pruned

to get light through, which means they're never casting a dense shade, but they

are able to provide a little bit of shelter

and protection. They're not baking like

you get in a large flat lawn. Under this one,

we've got little speed wells looking absolutely gorgeous

there. Lovely little plant,

just two anthers. And then

you've got great collection of daisies. You've got

the fading remnants of something ornamental,

something from a lily family.

And you've got celendine over

here. We've got a dock. Over here.

We've got cancer mum growing underneath

this one, which is very exciting to see this

cardamom protensus, which is the cuckoo

flower. Now this seems right, seeing this on

a sunny day. It always seems to me to be

a plant that you should be seeing in the wet.

Apparently it strikes very easily

from leaf cuttings. Watching a video, I can't

remember who put it on the internet of how to strike that from

leaf cuttings. It's quite good. Pink is a bit pinker than

the so it's not pinker. It's a bit more mauve

than the apple blossom above. Got a bit more of that

brassica Ethernet. It's got a classic brassica

shaped the flower very cruciform.

Anyway, in terms of my gardening, this has

been a fairly shy old week with

a trip back to the UK and a lot of looking after.

The young boy, I haven't done so much. I did do some

planting with him at his nursery on Grandparents

Day. I pretended to be the youngest grandparent there because he doesn't have

grandparents in this country. Grandparents Day is a big thing going

and plant plants. We put in some of my seedlings,

which I've grown myself, which is pleasant, and some of

that supermarket salvia, and hopefully

there'll be the best plants there, beat all the other grandparents

and I can be the youngest and the best garden out of all

the grandparents. That would be very satisfying. Now, this is a proper tree,

I think, that here they're growing

a huge variety of apples and they're almost doing it as

a demonstration of different heritage varieties.

But they're all grafts, all grafted onto

extremely dwarfing root stock, so they never get particularly

big. And all grafted at the same height,

at sort of well above

hip height, between sort of hip and nipple height,

they branch out. And so you don't get the wonderful forms that apples grown

on their own root stock do, nor the wonderful size.

And here we see an ancient for apple trips which

aren't particularly long lived species, an ancient apple that is obviously on its

own rootstock. So branches, low branches at

knee height and splits off into three

directions, twisting each one like a leg,

like the symbol for the Isle of man.

And it's glorious to see and it's big and it

looks noble as a tree.

I was reading that even extremely vigorous

root stock will never grow a bigger plant than a plant on its own

root stock, as it were.

This one, I think, is definitely I can't see any sign of historic

grafting, so it's on its own root stock. And there's a little egg here.

Can't see any nest up there. Maybe someone robbed that

from a nest deeper in the forest and put it there.

There's a great deal of bees looking up

into the canopy of this tree. You can see some bumblebees and some honeybees fluffing

around in there. Apple trees have a good

combination. A classic. This is such a classic flower.

Classic. I'll do a bit of looking pretty with pink and white and I'll do

a bit of smelling nice with a few

benzene compounds in linear smelling it now actually,

these are the ones I can't smell. Maybe that's maybe

I've been by damaged by the various

illnesses that have swept through the global population.

But you can here we go. This one's just got king Bud.

Just open this one king. But yes, there we go. And that's that sort of

cleany, fresh heat, benzoid alcohol kind of

fragrance. So the bees are going for that and they're going for the looks.

And it's just a good bit of classic rose

ACA flowering. I love to see it.

Anyway, probably time to head back to my

bicycle now. I got to get back to the nursery and

pick up the boy. I might take a bottle of water with me

and water my plant, because I bet

none of the other grandparents would do that. Bet they'll all forget.

Then. I'm guaranteed to win.

Just going to pass this little hoppy blackbird out

onto the gravel path and down through an avenue

of malice. Proper ornamental

crab apple here, doing exactly what I said it shouldn't.

Creating a dense wall of blossom.

Yes, come across and have a cup of tea. I've got some cakes

and things in. Kettles boiling. What about it?

I don't know if you heard that bee landed in my hair.

My hair looking quite wild at the moment. Maybe it thought that it was

a good place to find a hole to nest

in. Maybe some of the curls looked

like old wounds on a tree trunk.

Anyway, I had a little buzz around in my hair and it was gone.

Now I'm

not going to go. I'm not going to go down there. I don't have time

to go and look at the vines. We'll have to do it another time.

Anyway, thank you very much for joining me on this little walk

through the woods and out into

the orchard. Before I go, I must say a

very quick thank you to Martha, who supported the podcast on

COFI after last week's episode. It really does

help me to do this and to not have to

put Adverts through the middle of it and all that sort of

stuff. So thank you very much to you and thank you

to everyone else for listening to this.

See you again very soon. Thank you and bye bye.

Times are getting tough and the folks are cutting down. They even decide

to do their own gardening. They're all gardening.

Take my advice and knock off for a while. The Happiness Boys are on

a rampage. Fred has helped