The stunning landscape installation by Kate Cullity at the Cranbourne Botanic Garden, Melbourne, evokes the Australian Outback |
Still mulling over my
recent but brief trip to Australia. We'd spent most of our time 'down
under' in New Zealand, followed by a week in Tasmania before a week
in Melbourne at the biennial Australian Landscape Conference. This
was a fantastic event, organised by Warwick Forge, a retired
publisher and entrepreneur. I am sure the fact that Warwick is not a
professional 'landscape person' has been one of the reasons for the
success of the conference; an ability to see beyond immediate
professional concerns and trends. It also probably helps explain why
the conference was a real coming together of professionals, and some
amateurs, from the world of horticulture as well as landscape.
Gardeners and landscape folk meet together on equal terms all too
rarely.
Warwick first
approached me about speaking at the conference nearly two years ago.
He does his homework well. Being a retired chap of independent means
he is able to spend time traveling around meeting people and checking
them out to ensure that the resulting two day conference and
workshops really delivers passion, stimulation and knowledge. I
remember we agreed to meet in Oxford and spent an afternoon wandering
about the Botanical Garden, discussing what I did and what I knew of
what my colleagues did. I remember Warwick asking me “if I invited
you to speak, who else would you like to speak?”. I'm a ferocious
networker so I was able to make plenty of suggestions. Cassian
Schmidt was my first choice, the director of the Hermannshof Garden
in the Rhine valley and increasingly a leading teacher of planting
design through a post at Geisenheim University. Thinking of parched
Australian landscapes however, I had to admit that what we had to say
might be only rather partially relevant.
Shortly before I met
Warwick, I had been in Spain and met Miguel Urquijo, whose
ground-breaking approach to garden design in Spain and deep
thoughtfulness about what he did, had really impressed me. So I told
Warwick about him. A few weeks later I learnt that Warwick had more
or less straight away flown to Madrid to meet Miguel. I had also
insisted to him that if he invite Cassian he ask his wife Bettina
Jaugstetter too, as she is emerging as a very interesting planting
designer in her own right. She was asked to run two workshops, but of
course she worried that “no-one has heard of me, so no-one will
come”; apparently though, hers filled up before anyone else's – a
strong indication that the reputation of contemporary German planting
design has great pulling power. I wonder whether she would have got such a good audience in Britain? I fear perhaps not.
A real feature of the
ALCs over the years has been the pre-conference speakers' tours
whereby the speakers are crammed into a mini-bus to tour gardens and
landscapes in the state of Victoria. The day we went to the stunning
new botanical gardens at Cranbourne, and then Kuranga Nursery was a
memorable one. For me it was a meeting with old friends.
Banksia marginata |
A zillion years ago,
in the late eighties and early nineties, I had a small nursery
business near Bristol. Mostly growing perennials. Which, for the
youngsters amongst the blog-readers, were not particularly widely
grown at the time - astonishing though this might seem to you. But, I
grew a rather zany range of half-hardy stuff as well, with a
particular focus on Australian plants. The reason for this rather
eccentric choice was that there was a sudden fashion for
conservatories but hardly anyone growing plants for them. Most of the
new conservatories popping up featured little more than a
dehydrated Ficus benjamina and a few spider plants. Looking at the
prevailing conditions and doing a bit of research into what the
Victorians grew in conservatories, an obvious choice seemed to plants
from southern Australia. Important was the ability to cope with
occasional high temperatures and lows to near, or just below
freezing.
Xanthorrhoea australis - the Grass Tree, at Cranbourne |
My choice in growing the range of plants I did had been bolstered by researching (in the RHS library) what early 19th century gardeners grew. Early glasshouses and conservatories had pretty primitive heating systems, which produced dry air and often failed. The technology coincided with the botanical exploration of South Africa and Australia, and gardening journals of the time are full of beautiful hand-coloured prints of Cape Heaths (Erica species), Australian Banksias and Melaleucas. So it was these that I focussed on growing. Seed was easily come by and they germinated easily enough. Well, I grew the ones that were easy to germinate – there is a whole tranche of Australian flora that is notoriously difficult from seed - I never bothered with them. Species of Banksia and Dryandra from Western Australia were particular favourites, both with myself and the public at the RHS shows. With tough, slightly silvery leaves, often looking as if they had been cut with scissors, and extraordinary flowers that looked and felt like plastic, they seemed like plants from another planet. Tending to be small and compact, they were ideal as container plants. Perfect 'talking point' plants. However the Australian literature on them at the time stressed how difficult they were to grow. As it turned out, this was a reflection of the fact that species from the Mediterranean climate of Southwest Australia did not adapt very well to the humid summers of the southeasterly states of Victoria and New South Wales where the majority of the gardening population live. Adapted to soils of extreme infertility they did not like conditions in 'ordinary' soil either.
Banksia blechnifolia - the flowers mimic hair curlers -its officially a shrub by the way |
Growing many of my
'Australians' in a mix of three-quarters sharp grit and one quarter
peat, I found Banksia and Dryandra thrived, flowering in three years.
Doing better in a richer compost were various species and cultivars
of Callistemon, Melaleuca and Correa. Although I failed to displace
the sad-looking Ficus benjamina and spider plants from the
conservatories of England, something else happened. People started
buying the these plants and sticking them outside in sheltered
places. Many did very well in coastal Cornwall and Devon, or even
inner London. The 1990s saw milder winters, increasing importation of
southern hemisphere species and a taste for 'architectural' plants,
bringing about radical changes in what we grew.
Back to the ALC
speakers' outing. At Kuranga Nursery we saw the largest range of
Australian native species commercially available. For me it was
thrilling, never having been here before, to see so many of these
plants growing to full size. I have not grown any of these for years,
but seeing them brought back a rush of memories. And reading names on
labels, particularly where I had read about genera that were
'impossible' to grow from seed, and seeing the plants for the first
time, was a real thrill.
Others on the tour
were perplexed. It was particularly funny watching Cassian and
Bettina, who, being from Germany, are unable to grow any of this
outside, had no familiarity with anything they saw. They appeared to
be completely disorientated, truly suffering the shock of 'arriving
on another botanical planet'. The fact that so much had a superficial
similarity with the familiar, added to the disorientation. Plants
from dry environments have a strong tendency to look the same, but
then surprise by producing exotically different flowers to their
northern hemisphere look-alikes. At one point Bettina came up to me
waving a plant in a pot, “it looks so much like a cistus” she exclaimed,
“but it isn't, the name means nothing to me”; she looked genuinely upset. Cassian was
complaining about families he had never heard of. Densely-packed
sales benches offered novelty, thrill and disorientation in equal
measure.
I'll leave with two
little snippets. One was the thrill of seeing Epacris for the first
time. A genus of heather-like plants (all Epacridaceae have now been
disgorged into Ericaceae by the way) these appeared to have been very
popular throughout the 19th century. Winter-flowering,
they must have been easy to propagate from cuttings as they must have
been widely sold as flowering pot plants, and given what can be read
about their cultivation in Victorian gardening journals, often kept
from year to year. There were around twenty or so named cultivars.
And then they vanished. When I had the nursery I was never able to
source seed. I never even saw one at Kew Gardens. Seeing them on this
trip was the first time I had ever set eyes on them. Roger Elliott,
the leading writer on Australian natives who accompanied us on this
trip did explain that there is a great deal of variation in flower
colour, which was probably one reason for their popularity.
Epacris impressa |
Finally, Dryandra.
When I grew these at the nursery, I was struck by the extraordinary
scent of their flowers. Sweet, exotic, quite unlike anything else. No
mention in any of the literature about them. Leafing through a couple
of more recently-published books on the well-stocked Kuranga Nursery
shelves, only the most minimal mention. Perhaps they are only
fragrant abroad.
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