A mysterious scent in the greenhouse

Massonia echinata

For the past few days I've been struck by a sweet fragrance as I enter the greenhouse, but could not immediately identify it. There are a few flowers here and there, but most are obviously unscented - Impatiens, Fuchsia paniculata, a couple of nerines, and more or less solitary flowers on a few other odds and ends, none of which was an obvious candidate. Eventually I realised the scent was coming from a specimen of the South African bulb Massonia echinata, whose pincushion-like tuft of small white flowers emerges from between two prostrate leaves: not having grown this species before I was unaware that it possessed this attribute. The fragrance, close-up, is rather cloyingly sweet, deep and rich with a hint of spice, but not totally nice (think tart's boudoir), but it is impressive that it can scent a whole greenhouse and very welcome at a time when floral scent is at a premium. 

Francis Masson

The genus Massonia (Hyacinthaceae)commemorates Francis Masson (1741-1805), Kew's first plant collector, whose endeavours in South Africa resulted in the discovery and introduction to cultivation of many interesting plants. It is a genus of about a dozen species, all of which share the basic morphology of two broad leaves held prostrate to the ground, with a small cluster of flowers appearing at their centre. Some have interestingly warty or pustulate leaves - the epithet echinata ('armed with numerous rigid hairs or straight prickles,' from echinus, hedgehog or sea urchin) suggests that this species should do too, but the feature varies within species and this plant is a non-echinate clone. Not all members of the genus are attractively scented - some are distinctly musky in scent, and these are at least sometimes pollinated by rodents, which visit for the sake of the copious nectar produced by the flowers. Moths are the classic pollinators for scented, white-flowered plants, so it is possible that these do the deed in the wild for M. echinata.

Cutting back the border

Cutting-back in progress

With the snow gone and the air temperature positive - though with the soil still frozen - it is essential that we crack on and do as much as possible to prepare the garden at Colesbourne Park for the snowdrop season - not very far away now. One of the major jobs is to cut down the old growth in the herbaceous border, tidying it up and giving it a good mulch.





I am very well aware of the prevailing fashion for leaving herbaceous plants standing through the winter, both for the supposed beauty of the stems and seedheads, and for the refugia they provide for insects, etc. I have to say that the latter point does not trouble me unduly: for every ladybird there must be many more aphids. As for beauty, this is in the eye of the beholder, as usual. I am trying very hard to find positives, but I can't completely get over the fact that, to me, most dead herbaceous plants look horrible - a real witch's washing line - especially when lank and dank in the usual English winter (see right). True, they crisp up and look better in frost, and there are some that have real attraction and elegance. Last week's hoar frost showed these up beautifully, but there aren't very many plants that really carry it off well for very long into the winter - they lose their charm very quickly when they cease to be more or less vertical. 


Perennials in hoar frost in the cottage garden

It is obviously quite possible to plan a border full of plants that retain elegance in winter, but I think that if this is to be done it needs to be in a designated area, because, as I've found in the cottage garden, isolated clumps of standing stems just look daft, however nicely they blended in with less persistent companions when in growth.

In addition to disliking the general air of desuetude of dead perennials, I have two good reasons for clearing the borders now. Firstly, they are not planted only with late-flowering perennials. There is too much space in a border to waste on having only one display (however late into winter the remains of that are left), and there is no reason why it should not be of interest and beauty for most of the year. To be so, however, it is essential that old material is cleared away before the new growth starts to appear. With an early display of bulbs in the mix this means it must be done now to avoid their shoots being damaged. This may not be the case in all gardens, but there is also the issue of practicality - it cutting-back isn't done now, it must be done later, and why do a winter job when spring is advancing? Or who has time to?


Helenium 'Sahin's Early Flowerer'



The second reason is not unrelated to the first, but is perhaps more philosophical. I think that winter should be a time for looking forward to the rebirth that is spring, not for contemplating the disarticulating skeletons of last summer's feast. Even today, early in the winter, the promise of new growth is very apparent, whether in the red buds of peonies, the rosettes of herbaceous perennials, or in the vigorously pushing noses of the bulbs. Gardening is all about the future, not the past.



New shoots of Galanthus 'John Gray'



Unexpected verdancy

Ranunculus fluitans in the River Churn

Although the air temperature is now, at midday on a lovely, sunny day, all of 3^oC, which is the most noted foray into positive temperatures for a fortnight, the ground and its covering layer of snow and ice are still frozen hard. Fresh greenery is at a premium, but walking home from the garden I was struck by the exquisite bright green of the shoots of Ranunculus fluitans, catching the sun through the water of the River Churn. Spring-fed, this longest branch of the Upper Thames drainage never freezes.

This water-crowfoot is a characteristic species of swift-flowing alkaline steams and is important for nurturing invertebrates on which another familiar species of such waters, the Brown Trout, feeds. It never produces floating, normal leaves, as other species in the subgenus Batrachium do, just masses of very finely divided leaves on long wiry stems constantly pushed downstream by the current. The white flowers appear above the surface in early summer.

Hoar frost

Daphniphyllum macropodum

Trochodendron aralioides

Last night was the coldest of the winter, so far, with the thermometer reading -10C when I fed the poultry at 8.30 am. Everything is white, the ground covered in a thin layer of icy snow, and every prominent surface covered in beautiful hoar frost. Here are a few broad-leaved evergreens outlined in ice: one wonders what their fate will be. I shudder for the Schefflera, and may mourn the Mahonia; the Quercus rysophylla will probably defoliate, but should be fine, while the other two are unlikely to be damaged.

Schefflera rhododendrifolia

Mahonia eurybracteata 'Soft Caress'

Quercus rysophylla

The end of abundance

A Cotswold scene - charming, but biologically depauperate.

We take the excellent news magazine The Week, which summarizes interesting news and stories from the media around the world. In the current issue one of its selections of best British articles is a feature written for The Independent last week by its excellent Environment writer, Michael McCarthy. Entitled 'The end of abundance' it can be read online here. McCarthy's thesis is that, sad though it is that the British countryside has lost a number of interesting and attractive species in the past fifty years, the real loss has been in terms of abundance. Populations of so many once-abundant species, whether mammals (e.g. the Brown Hare), birds (e.g. Lapwing, Starling), insects (especially Lepidoptera) and plants have crashed dramatically through the impact of intensive agriculture. It is true that actual extinctions are rare at the national level, and that there are some success stories such as the reintroduction of raptors to their vacant niches, and some habitats, especially woodland, are less affected, but this should not be allowed to mask the fact that most species of the open countryside are now present at a fraction of their former abundance.

Roadside verges are often the only places in
the Cotswolds where wild plants can survive.

In this area, although it looks green and pleasant, there are vast tracts of land with minimal biodversity: tens of acres of wheat for example, with barely another living thing amongst it. Every available inch of former set-aside land is back under the plough. Pasture land is grazed by vast flocks of sheep on a tight rotation, and what they don't eat is fertilized until the only non-grasses left are thistles and nettles, which are then sprayed with broadleaf-specific herbicide.  Grassland wildflowers are confined to roadbanks and the steepest slopes. Without foodstuffs for their larvae to eat it is not surprising that insect abundance is low and thus that the numbers of Swallows and House Martins breeding are falling each year. It can be, and is, argued that intensive agriculture is needed to feed the world's absurdly large human population, and perhaps the British countryside is already so ecologically depauperate that its continued intensive exploitation can do comparatively little further damage.


Blue Wildebeest - a symbol of abundance, now under threat in the Serengeti ecosystem.

One ecosystem that is largely intact is the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania - an area almost synonymous with wilderness and vast abundance, whose spectacular wildlife is brought to our screens on a regular basis. Yet even here, abundance is under direct threat from the proposed construction of a major highway that would cut directly through the most sensitive areas of the park, bringing a major trucking route through the wildebeest migration route. This scheme appears to be the personal project of the President, Jakaya Kikwete, although it is at variance with his previously expressed views on the importance of conservation, and against the ethos of a country that has more than a quarter of its land area designated for conservation and that benefits very greatly from tourists visiting its wildlife areas. A much less damaging route could be found to the south of the Serengeti, and this would serve a very much larger human population, but this does not seem to have been considered, nor does the implication for tourist revenue. As a result of the influence of the Big Man, the National Parks Authority has been effectively muzzled, and the campaign to save the Serengeti has passed into the hands of conservation bodies, scientific and public opinion. There are several organizations, such as Serengeti Watch, and an active Facebook group Stop the Serengeti Highway, where one's voice can be registered. A letter to the Tanzanian High Commissioner or Ambassador would not go amiss either.

Thomson's Gazelle

It seems to me that if we are ever to draw a line on the loss of biodiversity and abundance on this planet the boundary of the Serengeti National Park is a frontier that must remain sacrosanct.

An African Begonia and a tragedy in Cambridge

This is Begonia wollastonii (syn. B. keniensis), a species with quite a wide range in the montane forests of East Africa, growing in damp places near streams, although I've never seen it in the wild personally. This plant came from Cally Gardens, and originated in the Ruwenzori mountains of western Uganda. It needs no special care, growing in normal compost in a pot and going more or less dormant in winter - usually (this is a belated bloom that caught my eye in the greenhouse today). It produces bulbils from nodes on the stems so is easily multiplied. It may not be the most striking of begonias, but the epithet wollastonii conveys a lot of interest.

Alexander (Sandy) Wollaston (1875-1930) trained as a surgeon, but he was seriously afflicted by wanderlust, with a passion for natural history. His first major expedition was in 1905, as a member of the British Museum Expedition to Ruwenzori, fulfilling the roles of doctor, botanist and entomologist. It was on this trip that he collected the type specimen of this Begonia, but he is better known in the Ruwenzori for Lobelia wollastonii, one of the East African giant species and often seen looming large through the mist in pictures from Ruwenzori - also known as the Mountains of the Moon.

Between 1910-1913 he took part in two natural history expeditions to New Guinea and again added greatly to our knowledge of that island's biodiversity: he is commemorated there by Rhododendron wollastonii and Gentiana wollastonii. The First World War took him back to East Africa, where he served in what is now Tanzania, but was then Deutsch Ost-Afrika, in the long hard campaign against von Lettow-Vorbeck and his Schutztruppe. When life returned to normal he was off again, this time on the first British reconnaissance expedition to Mt Everest, led by General Bruce and with George Mallory as one of the climbers. His discoveries in the Himalaya may be epitomized by Primula wollastonii, whose wonderfully fragrant bluish-purple bells I remember very well from short turf in the Khumbu Valley above Namche Bazar in Nepal. In total fifty plants were named in his honour and bear the epithet wollastonii, though some may since have been reduced to synonymy.

In 1920 he was elected to a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, aparently at the instigation of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was College Bursar. He had minimal qualifications, but he said that  'they wanted someone used to dealing with savages' - which endeared him to the undergraduates, by whom he was regarded as someone they could confide in. This Cambridge post gave him a secure and comfortable niche in the world, enabling to put down roots, get married and start a family.

After surviving the trials of serious expeditions in Africa, New Guinea and Tibet, not to mention the war, his end was to come, violently, in his own study at Kings. An unbalanced undergraduate, one Potts, who was wanted by the police for various misdemeanours, met him in the street by chance, and they went to Wollaston's rooms to talk. While doing so a policeman arrived with an arrest warrant, but during the caution Potts pulled out a concealed gun. He shot and fatally injured the policeman but killed Wollaston outright; then turned the gun on himself.

This story is told in a charming, but desperately sad little memoir, My Father Sandy, by his son Nicholas Wollaston (Short Books, 2003), who was four at the time, and whose last memory of his father was of him eating quince jam with bread and butter.

Colesbourne Park Snowdrop Availability 2011

Galanthus 'George Elwes'

The list of Colesbourne snowdrops available in 2011 was posted on the sales page of our website  last night. Please note that we do not supply by mail order, but we accept reservations for collection in snowdrop season.