Saturday Snapshot, May 15
Saturday Snapshot, May 1
The planting and weeding continue! Azaleas have mostly faded away and are being pruned. I bought some interesting tomato seedling from a local community garden’s plant sale, which I look forward to trying!
Saturday Snapshot, April 17
The latest on my vegetable garden, April 2021. Peas are growing, obelisks are in place for planting runner beans, mustard greens are planted.
This was scheduled to post last weekend but it didn’t! So this photo is for April 17-18.
Saturday Snippet: The Plant Hunters
Having enjoyed several visits in recent years to Kew, I recently bought a book called “The Plant Hunters”, by Musgrave, Gardner and Musgrave. (There are several books with that title). It is the story of several of the most legendary botanical explorers, who brought back exotic plants previously unknown in Europe and England, including many that I saw this summer in The Lost Gardens of Heligan. Fascinating!
Hundreds of thousands of us enjoy gardening and visiting famous parks and gardens. Yet few of us, as we admire the beautiful and diverse range of plants around us, stop to wonder where they come from, and fewer still think about how these plants came to be here in the first place.
How many of us, for example, know that the explorer who found over 300 rhododendron species was one of two survivors of a party attacked in a rebellious uprising and had an escape worthy of a member of the Special Forces; that the man responsible for establishing the tea industry in India single-handedly fought a gun battle with pirates while running a high fever; that the plant hunter who introduced many conifers to our landscape was gored to death by a bull; or that the discovery of the Himalayan rhododendrons resulted in a kingdom being annexed into the British Empire?
Saturday Tipple, Not Snippet!
While I was in the UK with my family, I tried for the first time the most divine drink: Fentimans Rose Lemonade. It is delicious on its own — it really smells like roses and tastes the way roses smell! And it’s pink! Just lovely.
When we got home, I found a local store that carries it. Hurray! Bought two large bottles and promptly started to think, what else can I do with this yummy beverage? Aha — a summer cocktail! So I made one up. I am posting the recipe on my “Old Herbaceous” blog because Fentimans refers to its Rose Lemonade as “botanically brewed” and describes its composition as “fermented botanical lemon drink with herbal extracts”; and because the cocktail is based on Hendrick’s Gin, a small-batch Scottish gin infused with rose and cucumber extracts, plus other botanicals: “Hendrick’s wondrous botanical signature consists of flowers, roots, fruits, and seeds from the world over. They function to complement and set the stage for our delicious duet of infusions: rose petal and cucumber.”
So here is the recipe for what my daughter calls “Rosie the Riveter”, although I’m trying to think of a more romantic, ladylike name to match the pale pink color with light green accents; and there is already a different cocktail named Rosie the Riveter, which I only discovered after I came up with mine and Googled the name. Maybe I’ll call it “Scepter’d Isle”, after Shakespeare and the gorgeous David Austin English Rose of that name, inspired by Susan Rushton’s beautiful photographs! What do you think?
Old Herbaceous’ Rosie the Riveter Cocktail (or Scepter’d Isle):
Fill a tall glass halfway with ice (cubes or crushed).
Add one jigger of Hendrick’s Gin.
Fill the rest of the glass with Fentimans Rose Lemonade.
Add five drops of rose water, 1-3 thin slices of cucumber, one sprig of fresh mint leaves.
Enjoy!
Next stop: the bar “Fragrances” at the Ritz-Carlton, Berlin, which serves cocktails inspired by legendary perfumes. I’ve never been there, have you?
Saturday Snippet: The Lost Gardens of Heligan
I haven’t posted here in a while because I have been traveling in the UK with my family. We visited many beautiful gardens, but one of my favorites was The Lost Gardens of Heligan.
Heligan is an old estate that once had hundreds of acres of formal, informal and tropical gardens, maintained by a staff of twenty-two. After World War I, when many of the workers did not return from the war, the estate slowly declined. The gardens were abandoned by the 1970s, while the main house was sold and divided into private apartments.
In 1990, a man named Tim Smit (who later created the Eden Project) was shown the property by one of its owners, a descendant of the Tremayne family that had owned Heligan for 400 years. The property was held in a trust for him and his sister. They hacked their way through brambles and old hedges to find the remaining original garden structures and landscaping. The work they did over decades to restore the gardens, install sculptures and make Heligan a unique destination for visitors is described in Tim Smit’s book, The Lost Gardens of Heligan. This week’s Saturday Snippet is taken from that book:
We had cut our way through dense clumps of invasive bamboo, drawn towards a perfectly formed palm that stood sentinel at the entrance to what was obviously a walled garden. John Nelson and I were on another of our explorations, venturing deeper into the gardens each time. Today we were excited; somehow we knew it was going to be a special day. You can feel these things.
Once inside, we paused for a moment. There was a sense that we were trespassing, that we had come upon a secret shrine. In the gloaming we could see dozens of trees growing thickly together, woven into a solid mass by an extremely vigorous climbing plant that covered everything like a furry blanket. We had never seen anything like this before. Under the trees we could make out shapes at once familiar and other-worldly. This was clearly the area of the garden where the real work had taken place.
Saturday Snippet: Garden Travel
I don’t own the book pictured but I plan to engage in a lot of “garden tourism” soon. We will be traveling to Devon, Cornwall and Ireland this summer! I am so excited to see these beautiful parts of the world for the first time. We will actually start in Glastonbury then work our way down the coast counterclockwise, ending up near Torquay for a family wedding. What gardens in the Southwest of England are not to be missed, in your opinion?
After the wedding, we will go to Northern Ireland and Dublin for a few days. I am excited to see the Giants’ Causeway and Trinity College, which my grandmother attended briefly many years ago. I know there will be many beautiful gardens to see in Ireland — which would you recommend? Thanks!
A Different Muguet Marathon
I spent the whole month of May posting about lily of the valley-based fragrances on my other blog, Serenity Now, in a series I called “May Muguet Marathon.” While I was doing that and reading a lot online about lilies of the valley, I came across a variety I have long wanted to try in my own garden, Convallaria majalis “Bordeaux.” It was on sale, so of course I bought 40 pips! My teenaged son helped me create a new planting bed for them by spreading many cubic feet of mushroom compost on top of the clayish soil between several old azaleas and the base of our house’s front terrace, a partly shaded area that is well-watered by our in-ground sprinkler system. He turned it in for me; I hope this will provide a suitable habitat! Lilies of the valley do not become invasive here in the South as they do further north; in fact, sometimes they struggle. Fingers crossed that “Bordeaux” finds a happy home here!
I also bought some pips of Convallaria majalis “Prolificans”, which many sellers describe as “double-flowered”, but it is not a true double flower, as can be seen in this photo:
Rather, it has clusters of tiny, single flowers that dangle together from the main stalk, creating the look of double flowers. The true double-flowered lily of the valley is “Flore Pleno”:
I hope my new lilies of the valley find themselves happy in their new home and spread profusely! I would welcome what plant-hunter Reginald Farrer described as “the worst of all delicious weeds when it thrives.”
Saturday Snippet: Daffodils in American Gardens
Last weekend, I fulfilled my ambition of visiting Gibbs Gardens during daffodil season, when almost 30 million daffodils come into bloom on its hillsides. It was, as hoped, spectacular! And now I am the happy owner of a lovely book by Sara L. Van Beck, called Daffodils in American Gardens, 1733-1940. So today’s Saturday Snippet is taken from that book, quoting a nursery catalog and letter to customers from the now-gone Hastings Nursery:
We just wish you could see these Giants growing on the Hastings Plantation. We are growing hundreds of thousands and experimenting with about 100 different varieties. They bloom every spring and do fine in pots, boxes and bowls of water in the house during the winter and outdoors for the early spring beds, borders and lawn or garden plots. They make beautiful cut flowers. Daffodils just naturally do well in the South, whether you care for them attentively or whether you only set them out in the lawn. They are graceful and beautiful, rich in color and delightful for all flower purposes. Many friends plant our Daffodils by the thousands and come back for more and other varieties to add to the charm of their permanent home collections.
Old Herbaceous 