EASTeight » Celia Barlow

Hunting for Houseplants

Celia Barlow — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:31:28 +0000

Houseplants

I wonder if anyone has noticed that I never mention houseplants in this column. The reason for their non-appearance is simple: I don’t have, indeed can’t have, any. The house in which I have lived half my adult life has, curiously, no window ledges – apart from one in a south-facing window above a ferociously hot radiator, which I guess to be totally unsuitable unless you like your bromeliads done to a crisp. And, until very recently, my work office had French windows that were shuttered at night and at weekends, which hardly lent themselves to horticulture.
However, I have just relocated and now find myself working in a building dating from the 1930s with two immensely tall, magnificent windows. And the window ledges are deep and French polished. I love their uncluttered simplicity: no double-glazing, no blinds – just light. But I have yet to mention the view. Ah. I am faced with a vast courtyard of Portland stone and hard lines in all directions. The occasional plastic bag or brown leaf eddies in the wind-currents generated by a high quadrangle – but there is a total absence of life, of a sinuous curve, of birds or green leaves. The view, in a word, is barren. With this outlook, my capacious window-ledges demand plants. But not, please, any plant! On entering the office for the first time I don’t know what was more daunting – the prospect of unpacking crates of books and office paraphernalia, or the plant that a colleague had thought to provide to soften the blow. For this plant was, quite frankly, hideous, with large, thick, dark leaves and a wayward, straggly habit. It sat on the elegant ledge, looking demented and out of place. Pleading my inability to keep indoor plants alive for more than thirty-five minutes, I was able to usher the triffid out of the door in the direction of ‘Reception’ – but the need for an alternative, natural, wavy squiggle to blur the rigidity of straight lines, finds me floundering in my own ignorance.
A handbook on houseplants advises me to “forget about green fingers; anyone can grown houseplants” and then goes on to list their requirements: fresh air, light, water, warmth, humidity, food, rest, holiday care, cleaning and polishing, pruning and training. I’m only surprised they don’t need teachers or chauffeurs and am beginning to think I’m unequal to the task before I even dare glance at a podocarpus or a parlour palm. Surely it would be simpler to have another baby than take on a scindapsus, with its special problems of yellow, falling, curled, shrivelled or limp leaves, let alone its rotting stems? At least a baby smiles at you sometimes. A scindapsus evidently looks you in the eye and accuses you of under-or over-watering, of under-misting, or ignoring its fungal attack. Whilst any room is undoubtedly enhanced by thriving plants (and in the work-space they should surely be especially uplifting), an ailing specimen has the opposite effect in immediately depressing the mood. The hunt, then, is on for durable, long-suffering, care-free, gently-waving fronds. Monsteras need not apply.

Open gardens

Celia Barlow — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:10 +0000

Other people’s gardens will once again be open for inspection, or for pottering amongst or marvelling at, when five London Fields gardens open to the public for the National Garden Scheme on Sunday 7th June. The gardens are all contrasting in design, and there are two wonderful new gardens this year.
On the corner of Malvern Road and Lavender Grove, a small sunken backyard has been transformed into an exotic haven. A raised wooden path leads through tree ferns and Japanese azaleas, whilst a canal of water lends tranquility, and mirrored panels suggest vistas beyond. At 84 Lavender Grove, a surprise awaits. Two gardens have been linked, and you can step from one, which bursts with packed borders, into the other, with its sheltered seating area adorned with pots.
The potager at Lavender Grove was a delight to many visitors last year, with its vision of an urban Eden. Step-over apple trees border beds of vegetables and flowers, alongside gravel paths and box hedges. Gloriously laden blackberries undulate over a hazel trellis, and sweet peas clamber above dahlias and a striking globe artichoke.
There is inspiration aplenty at 53 Mapledene Road with its considered colour combinations and gradations. Wander along the narrow paths and marvel at the clematis scrambling up obelisks, roses rambling over fences, and the amazing collection of plants that have all been grown from seed or cuttings.
Tea and cakes will be on offer, with rugs on the lawn at 15 Albion Drive. This is a family garden with pond, horse tyre swing, tree house and silver birch glade. And new for this year is a woven willow hedge, otherwise known as a ‘fedge’!
Come for a great afternoon out, and help raise money for the Macmillan Nurses too. The gardens are open from 2-5pm; adults £5 for all five gardens, children free.

Plots and plans

Celia Barlow — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:10 +0000

If we can be categorized into thinkers and doers, then I’m*in the former camp (or was, until my brain cells began hurtling into the nearest abyss). Much of the last month has been spent prepping up on vegetable gardening, delving into the likes of Digging for Dummies, Crop Rotation Explained*and You and Your Compost; I’ve acquired a copy of the Organic Gardening Catalogue (www.OrganicCatalogue.com), now duly peppered with post-it notes on what to order in the way of cloches and netting, and sent off for a windowsill propagator, when I should, frankly, have been getting down to the nitty-gritty of seed sowing.
Yes, the more cynical amongst us may be murmuring ‘displacement’ and ‘activity’ in close proximity but, thankfully, such procrastination is condoned by what is fast becoming one of my favoured manuals on growing my own. Take the time to choose your site, it says, to decide what you want to eat and where to grow it, to think ahead about tools and equipment you need for the task, to prepare and improve the soil…
Choosing my site has been relatively simple, given that a traditional, rectangular patch is both too ambitious and at odds with my rather blowsy gardening style. Indeed, I’ve earmarked three very modest sites, in varying light conditions (wahey – lettuce likes shade!). I’m starting small so that I learn gradually, experimentally, rather than attempting to overreach myself and ending up crushed and disillusioned. But, of course, I can’t possibly begin digging anyway until*the self-sown celandine, bluebells and forget-me-nots have faded from my sites…

Vegetable guilt

Celia Barlow — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:10 +0000

Guilt? I just can’t get enough of the stuff. I don’t like to brag but I have so much guilt it could fill a pantechnicon. Protestant work ethic (resulting in guilt for not applying myself every minute of every day) coupled with Catholic guilt (I have left undone that which I ought to have done and I have done those things which I ought not to have done).*I wouldn’t take it so hard if I was of either faith, instead of being a bog-standard agnostic. And I’m greedy, too. Yes, for more guilt.*Pile it on, heap it high….
Well, the latest addition to my Guilt Mountain Range concerns the garden. Oh, it’s nothing new for me to feel a twinge here and there for neglecting plants, for shopping instead of chopping come Saturday, for not putting enough time and effort into hoeing, sowing and mowing, knowing it could be so much better. But things are getting worse. I have an enviably large garden by London standards and – the truth will out – I’ve yet to grow vegetables with any seriousness. The odd herb and tomatoes, yes (though they have usually been planted too late in the season and are about to ripen at the first sign of frost), and the year before last I grew some purple-sprouting broccoli that headed out of the flower-bed and over the grass as if to broadcast to the world that I hadn’t bothered to prepare a proper vegetable bed for it. And now that every colour-supplement and gardening programme is dominated by talk of chitted potatoes, successional planting and the acute shortage of allotments I feel I have no choice but to retreat to the shed, don a hessian shirt and roll in the compost heap.
Alternatively, I might just have to join the ranks of those virtuous vegetable bores, and actually read my books on vegetable growing that make it sound so seductively easy. Of course, I’m a sucker for a picture of a well-planted potager with avenues, frames and tepees loaded and laced with produce. And I’m entranced by the romantic notion of beds brimming over with fresh greens and of picking my dinner off its stalk. But I’m worried about the commitment of it all, and the timing, the brawn involved in soil conditioning and digging, let alone learning a whole new lexicon that takes in poly-tunnels and pelleted seed, intercropping and cloches. Do I choose raised beds or vegetables raised in the border, should I use grow-bags or containers (oh yes, if you have a balcony or window-box you, too, can feel guilty if it’s not yet planted with burgeoning brassicas). And what about the pests – nay, the blights, the mildews, rusts, rots, moths, spots, wilts – on top of the comparatively simple, even*homely, hazards of cats and snails and puppy-dog tails? I can’t help noticing that the*books I’d trust, as opposed to those with photos to drool over and die for, give as much space to troubles and disorders as they*do to instruction.
In short, growing veg is a veritable minefield. I’m going in (and I may be*some time).

Twelve Good Shrubs and True

Celia Barlow — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:10 +0000

If the shape of your garden is its figure, then shrubs are the corsetry that can define, accentuate, highlight or conceal and generally act as the clotheshorse – and the good news is that this is the time to plant ‘em! In March and April the ground is easier to work, just when you are full of the joys of spring and raring to get going in the great outdoors. Hmmm. So what to plant?
Firstly, the basic definition of a shrub: a perennial plant with several woody stems at ground level. After that, the sky’s the limit as shrubs can be deciduous or evergreen; under thirty or over six hundred centimetres high; of any shape – columnar, globular, weeping, conical; suited to acid or alkaline soil; remarkable for their foliage, flowers or scent, for climbing, screening, or spreading. Shrubs are indeed the Jacks-of-all-trades of the garden. They will act as ground cover, mask an unsightly shed or ‘soften’ a wall, or enact high drama in big tubs as specimen plants. In short, there’s a shrub for every occasion and aspect, for every season and every taste, and for every location. Aaargh…where on earth*to begin?
With good planting. It’s as well to get simple, sensible advice from an otherwise-dull textbook:*I really recommend the expert Expert series by Dr. D.G. Hessayon. Your shrubs will earn their living for years so it’s as well to put them to bed properly.
There are some glorious shrubs that I can consider to be small trees (magnolias, eucalyptus, sumach…) or cushioned fillers in the herbaceous border (santolina, lavender, periwinkle…) that would be welcome additions to any garden, but here’s my off-the-top-of-my-head all-time shrubby favourites. Each one is a bold statement (no hiding lights under bushels here) but are amenable to working with other plants.
OK, so my list is unashamedly subjective; I can only argue for the defence.
Twelve Good Shrubs and True? The jury’s out…

Roses and noses

Celia Barlow — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:10 +0000

Can it really be a year since I last railed against those parodies of roses on sale for St Valentine’s Day? A real rose, without beating about the bush, is surely the closest thing you can get to sex on a stalk. Sensuous, languid, dangerously-thorned and ever-so-slightly imperfect (any symmetry goes hang when those dark blood-red velvet petals unfurl), and above all, such soporific, heady scent. But the forced, hot-house travesties in florists in February have no scent at all, of course, unless you count cellophane.
Smell is so evocative of past experience and association, a particular or unexpected whiff can almost forcefully throw us back to a time and a place. Yet olfactory sensations defy description…and finding adequate approximations can send us veering towards wine-tasters’ jargon and those ‘overtones of chocolate and charcoal with a long, lingering liquorice finish’ that we ignoramuses love to mock. For a rose may smell ‘intoxicating’ and ‘heavenly’ but it cannot be usefully or accurately compared to anything else. Our sense of smell is readily confused: too many at once and we are repelled (who has not, metaphorically at least, held their nose and cried, ‘here goes’ before making the dash through John Lewis’s perfumery?). Yet tempt us with a single, overwhelming waft of mimosa and we are smitten (or of heat and spice and we are spending our Saturday morning queuing for brunch instead of the basics in Broadway Market).
There are books galore written about achieving a scented garden but to plant specifically for scent can seem like one consideration too many. We are already taking the colour, texture, habit and dimensions of a plant into account, let alone its suitability for that particular soil and aspect; surely we can leave scent to assail us almost accidentally and unexpectedly – indeed, much of the charm of any scent is its unpredictability. A chance brush of your boot against the rosemary bush may release the most pungent smell one evening and not another, depending on the warmth and dampness of the air; my unprepossessing, bog-standard honeysuckle is but a poor relation of my visually-stunning lonicera Americana, yet its greater fragrance startles me every time if only because I have such low expectations of it; and sometimes the sharp tang of dug earth can be as surprising as the most scented of night-scented stocks. But do consider planting at least some highly-fragranced flowers when tackling that dreary corner and pop some spreading herbs near the house or on a sill or balcony, for you will be so glad months hence, when the heat of a summer night releases their essential oils. As if to underscore the connection, many particularly perfumed plants are white-flowered and therefore especially suited to glimmering, ghost-like, at twilight. Whether you plunge your face into the midst of the blossom, crush the scented leaves of lemon balm or herbs in passing or simply catch the bouquet of tobacco flowers drifting on the evening air, scent can be amazingly rejuvenating and refreshing.
Everyone will have a different list of plants worth growing for scent because smell is as individual as taste, but my list, for what it’s worth, would definitely include Mexican orange-blossom (choisya ternata) and Philadelphus Belle Étoile if you have space for shrubs; wallflowers and native bluebells for the Spring; nicotiana, clumps of lily-of-the-valley, lavender and heliotrope, twining jasmine and old-fashioned sweet-peas. Oh, and roses and more roses (but don’t get me started…).

Taut and stark

Celia Barlow — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:10 +0000

One of the drawbacks of winter, on a par with wrapping up warm for the walk to work and routinely boiling on the bus beneath the layers, is commuting in the dark. Working flexi-time, I do actually have daylight for the morning march but, as I spend most of it head-bent against the wind or rain, scrutinising the pavement for dog droppings posing as leaves, I still don’t get the chance to clock the gardens I pass.
And clocking the gardens is one of the private pleasures of my twenty-minute walk, seeing what’s in and what’s out, gleaning ideas for my own garden and making a mental note to check what that plant with serrated leaves is called…
I miss out, too, on being able to look up, which is where we have to look to find much of the drama of winter – the bare stems of deciduous trees revealed against the sky instead of being seen as a green smudge in their full-summer frocks. Vita Sackville-West claimed that there is “as much beauty in the steel-line engraving of winter as in the watercolours of spring or the oil paintings of summer” (always one to gild the lily and over-egg the pudding, I would have been unable to resist adding “the woodcuts of autumn” to complete the seasonal quartet instead of leaving well alone). (Hmm. Yes, less is often more – Ed.) And Vita, as ever, is right. In the winter the garden is pared down to its brittle bones, morning frosts transforming even plump evergreen bushes into fragile spectres and what is viewed in the summer as an impressionistic blur is suddenly revealed as stark structure and form. There’s no doubt that winter is when the formal garden comes into its own – the sheer geometry of manicured topiary, hard landscaping and ordered planting echoing the lines and shapes of leafless twigs and branches. Yet even my more random, blowsy, esoteric garden suddenly comes over all sculptural and angular…
Anthony Noel, garden designer extraordinaire who revels in the potential theatricality of the garden, advises that a garden ratio should be two-thirds deciduous to a third evergreen. The evergreens maintain the structure of the layout throughout the winter months but too many, useful though they are, will conversely dull or confuse the form of the garden throughout the rest of the year. Many evergreens are rather heavy in feel and nobody wants a lumpen, ponderous garden. One way to avoid this is to intersperse almost stubborn all-year-round greenery with variegated-leaved evergreens: splashes or outlines of gold or silver can lighten and lift the shape of the bush and our spirits with it. Varying the colours of your conifers can relieve any oppression, too – a dark yew could act as a dramatic backdrop, a glaucous blue-grey juniper could add levity and texture.
Winter can also surprise us with beautiful berries and barks to help us forget we have fewer flowers, and what about the convoluted twisting stems of Hamamelis mollis (witch-hazel) and the drooping branches of the weepers – pear, willow, birches – which seem to sigh as they bend to the damp earth, to add variety of line? That low winter sun accentuates the season’s subtle colour-scheme as well as adding ‘edge’ to the winter garden. For the garden, however ‘dormant’ at this time of year, is not relaxed: there’s a tautness and an expectancy as it hunkers down against the cold…

In the dreich mid-winter…

Celia Barlow — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:10 +0000

I make no pretence at being anything other than a fair-weather gardener and the temperature doesn’t have to fall much below fifteen degrees to deter me from pulling on my wellies. So it is unsurprising that December sees me delighted to reverse the arrangement and make the garden come to me for a change with the imminent arrival indoors of the Christmas tree and branches of glossy holly, with pots of orange-berried solanum and deceptively-delicate cyclamen on the window sills, and the scarlet gash of a poinsettia or two. “When”, wrote Mirabel Osler, who clearly wasn’t living in E8 at the time, “the ice of winter holds the house in its rigid grip, when curtains are drawn against the vast frozen waste of landscape…I relish the security of being withdrawn from all that summer ferment that is long since past. Then is the time for reappraisal: to spread out, limp and receptive, and let garden thoughts rise to the surface. They emerge from some deep source of stillness which the very fact of winter has released.” She may have been writing in Vladivostok but Mirabel had a point. Were it not for all the razzamatazz leading up to Christmas, what better month could there be for abandoning the garden proper to the elements and doing the next best thing: reflecting on and reading about gardens?
I have a large library of books on many aspects of gardening, embarrassingly so considering my knowledge is based largely on hearsay and often poor experiences and is more random and haphazard than erudite – indeed, had I absorbed a fraction of the information stored on several groaning shelves, I could now be bossing people around at Kew. The truth is that I am all too easily seduced by gardening books of all persuasions, and particularly those about other people’s gardens (always so much more interesting than your own) and about garden and plant history. This is a useful time of year in which to take stock of your own plot by finding inspiration in those beautifully produced coffee-table productions with pictures to die for – the kind that make even a wormery look desirable. They release the imagination, which is such an important part of creating a garden. But it is also the best time in which to get thoroughly stuck into a good read about gardening, to lose yourself in someone else’s words that conjure their own pictures. Some of my favourite books that I return to time and again for their sheer readability and infectious enthusiasm have been written by garden columnists who stress the intuitive aspect of gardening, and bring their own individuality, warmth, wit and wisdom to the picnic. Amongst the many, I would highlight Anne Scott-James, Henry Hobhouse, Felicity Bryan, Jenny Uglow, Christopher Lloyd, and Vita Sackville-West, as well as the aforementioned Mirabel Osler (who actually gardens in leafy Shropshire rather than Sovetsk). They are all of an uncommon breed that has true talent in both the crafts of gardening (practicalities, successes, mistakes, surprises, disappointments and all) and wordsmithing, and who can inspire and transport us from the sofa on a dreich winter’s day to the endless possibilities of what could be climbing, tumbling, burgeoning and thriving in our gardens come next summer…
The Broadway Bookshop at 6 Broadway Market has a selection of interesting titles and would be pleased to advise you or order a book for collection within a day or two.

Moving on…

Celia Barlow — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:14:58 +0000

Well, it’s certainly been a season of mellow fruitfulness following a singularly unspectacular summer, with the late nasturtiums finally trumpeting to the top of the wigwam, the vine leaves splashed with explosions of magenta, and the marigolds and verbenas valiantly soldiering on… Ever the reluctant pruner, it seems even more like desecration to me to wilfully chop and cut back during these last glorious autumn days when everything looks at its peak. Keats didn’t think to mention the sheer butchery going on just now (it probably didn’t scan) but butcher we must, in the nicest possible way, if we are to put our plants properly to bed. I am hoping that a good mulch of home-made or bought compost around the base of each shrub will act as a placatory and post-secateur salve, and that each and every one will spring up, revitalised, come 2009.
Fortunately for us, in sunny E8, most of the plants we are ever likely to lose will be as a result of our own neglect or the ravages of a particular mite (or very occasionally, as in the case of a magnificent flowering currant featured in columns past, through murder by machete) rather than as a result of a devastating winter. We are possibly in line for greater casualties due to climate change (and the bugs that inevitably follow) and erratic weather. But in a weird twenty-first century version of the morbid, Victorian cult of death, there is now a huge body of people out there who are positively traumatised by the demise of a plant for whatever reason – so many, in fact, that the RHS has set up a helpline and counselling service for those experiencing plant bereavement. Programmes like ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ have forever answered, scientifically or good-humouredly, the perennial question of what could have withered a favourite plant – but plant bereavement, running the gamut from initial shock, grief and denial, through to anger and guilt and so towards eventual acceptance and closure? Is it only a matter of time before we attend a victim support group for wilting wisteria?
I appreciate that there can be a personal involvement with a plant that may have been given by or planted in memory of a special someone and which therefore carries emotional attachment – indeed, baggage – but a degree of pragmatism must surely prevail! I would rather kick myself silly for my carelessness or botanical ignorance and make a determined resolution to read-up or mend my ways than mourn in self-indulgent grief. For all the deaths in my garden (and, shockingly, there have been many) there have been extraordinary and unexpected births to compensate – a sudden influx of the most splendid blood-red wild poppies one year, a virtual army of pale foxgloves another, an evening primrose that chanced by and multiplied…
I have held hasty, lump-in-the-throat and tear-sodden garden burials enough for various goldfish, hamsters and cats (‘United in Death’), even for a gecko and a toad, but a plant must be relegated, Buddhist style, to the compost to provide sustenance to those that follow. Yes, I regret a plant’s premature passing, and its loss rankles, but I shan’t be buying flowers.

Inspiration from history

Celia Barlow — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:29:12 +0000

There’s no time now, but I must seek out my copy of a book about Loddiges’ nursery of ‘Hackney, near London’ which, during the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries was the most famous nursery in Europe, and in 1831 housed the largest hothouse in the world. My inspiration? A jaunt (when I should have been in my own back yard clearing some of the detritus of a summer that never quite happened) to London’s oldest botanical garden, the Chelsea Physic Garden. It’s a microcosm of the things I love most about Kew, admittedly minus the vistas or the sheer scale of the glasshouses, but on a literally more human level, with sections devoted to the plants introduced by garden Curators since 1673 and the succession of notable botanic explorers connected with the Garden over the centuries. But there is nothing stuffy and everything delightful about the present place despite its long and erudite history. It is very much a real working garden, with plants allowed to sprawl and wilt after flowering for seed collection, rather than being cut back to within an inch of their neat and tidy lives.
There are fascinating Pharmaceutical Beds featuring medicinal plants and herbs for every ailment, including those in the Doctrine of Signatures (discredited by 1650), a “fanciful theory that some plants were ‘signed’ – marked by God – to resemble disease symptoms or parts of the body which could be cured by treatment with the plant”. There are vegetable patches, pointing out our reliance on a very small number of familiar vegetables nowadays, a much greater variety having been grown in the past. There are willow wigwams thickly twined in climbers, each topped with a tilted flowerpot finial, tender lettuces secretly growing beneath terracotta domes, filmy fronds of asparagus, box balls…then rows of dyers’ plants with names to conjure with, often defined by the appellation ‘tinctoria’. There is a relaxed informality within the formality of the walkways – and plenty of well-placed benches. But my most significant moment was coming across a large, simple wood and glass plant carrier with the inscription beneath OHMS, ‘Live plants. On Upper Deck Under Awning’.
To return to Loddiges, it’s hard to imagine that over the road from present-day Hackney Town Hall stretched a vast nursery where wisteria was first grown in Europe and where the rhododendron was introduced to Britain, where Wardian cases of plants arrived from Chile and China. The twelfth edition of Loddiges’ catalogue in 1820 carried 54 pages listing stove and greenhouse plants, hardy perennials, trees and shrubs followed by this afterword: “In an establishment of this nature, there of course must exist an ardent and continual desire of extending as well as diffusing the collection. Persons in Foreign Countries, who are animated by a similar passion, are respectfully invited to a Correspondence, which can hardly fail to become mutually advantageous. A liberal price is at all times ready to be given for fresh seeds or living plants, if new or rare, from whatever quarter of the globe they may be brought.”
There is the fascination of romance and derring-do in those worldwide quests for specimens and knowledge. And much of it is captured and lingers in the Chelsea Physic Garden. Particularly for anyone without a garden of their own, I would strongly recommend becoming a Friend and making this your bolt-hole, your sanctuary, your own adventure and seat of learning in London.