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Of Ammonites and Nautiloids

Amy Michelle reminds me of a zombie lavatory. She’s a corpulent bladder of vile, a pot-bellied and squat little chamber-pot. She’s predatory, opportunistic and she’s strongly redolent of offal. I suspect she eats bat crap; I know for certain she eats cockroaches. She also breaks horticultural hearts.

Don’t worry readers, the heart is not mine. This is not that long anticipated post where I pathetically insult all my ex-girlfriends through a haze of gin and tears – stay tuned though. No, the lovelorn chap is a either a botanist or an ecologist, and therefore bespectacled, bearded, bumbling and huggable. God knows what that Amy did to him, but it must have been something pretty spectacular for the poor bugger to name this after her:

Amy Michelle

I give you Nepenthes ‘Amy Michelle’ a carnivorous tropical pitcher plant, thought to be a hybridized form of N. rafflesiana and N. thorelii. I could be wrong, the naming of this cultivar might not be a bitter parting shot aimed at a receding lover. It may be a thoughtful tribute to a longstanding partner, a nod to a dedicated mentor, or a gift for a cherished sister. If this is the case then it’s one of the worst abuses of plant nomenclature since The American Hemerocallis Society published their 2010 Daylily Reference Guide.

Now I like a daylily, they add a welcome Tropicana feel to even the shrubbiest border. So I admire and respect the work of the dedicated hemerocallis breeders. But the names, oh God the names! If I’d spent years pushing about pollen, watching, waiting, inseminating, recording, retracing and incubating, I think I’d give the progeny a more dignified handle than ‘Apricot Fairy Angel’.

The crocosmia breeders have got the right idea, they choose exiting inflammable titles like ‘Spitfire’  ‘Flamethrower’ and ‘Lucifer’ for their creations. They’ve even got a ‘Prometheus’ and a ‘Vulcan’. You wouldn’t catch one of them christening their new plant ‘A bauble for Bilbo’. I’ve only browsed the ‘A’ section of the Daylily Reference Guide, and it might get better as the alphabet progresses, but this segment reads like a Hollywood play date.

A Bauble for Bilbo

‘Abiding Joy’ Paltrow, ‘Absolute Zero’ Beckham. Blueergh! Other names aren’t much better ‘Algebra of Darkness’ sounds to me like Dan Brown fan fiction and ‘Alan-A-Dale’ nods to the limpest of Robin Hood’s merry men. There is simply no dignity in ‘Angels Whisper For You’ likewise ‘Amber Curls’ and ‘Ashes of Roses’.  Others are just tedious, there are over 35 different ‘Ann somebody-or-other’ cultivars, nearly 50 ‘Alices’ and even  20 different ‘Alberts’.

But tucked away in the list are some rare flashes of genius. I’m sorry ‘Albert Behnke’ and ‘Albert Riley’, I’m sure you’re are both fine plants, but next time I’m shopping for Albert themed Daylilies I’m buying ‘Albert Albertopolis Albertgator’ – crocodile king of all the Hemerocallis.  The brilliantly descriptive ‘Andy Warhol’s Hair’ is a fine name for a scruffy white flowered cultivar and ‘Ammonites and Nautiliods’ displays an irreverent love of fossils that has long been missing in commercial horticulture. The finest name of course belongs to ‘Armed Azerbaijanies’ – at once the scourge and fantasy of all good plant breeders.

With these dignified and proper names acting as a guide I have decided launch a plant naming contest – The annual appellation cup. The plant breeder who, over the next 12 months, I deem to have given the most imaginative, amusing or thought provoking name to a new cultivar will win a coveted mention on this blog, October 18^th 2012. I need not remind competitors that the London Olympics will have been finished a month when the results of this competition are announced, so the media will probably want to loose their starved and out of control hype machine on it – this could be the making of your nursery.

Extra points will be awarded for cultivars named ‘Ben Dark’. No Nepenthes.

Summer in the City

All proper tribes have a battle cry. My favourite belongs to the fearsome thirteenth century Almogàvers: ‘Desperta Ferro!’ (awake iron!) It’s best bellowed at at dawn while sparking sword from stone, but I’ve taken to yelling it whenever I pick up a spade.  Garden designers have their own distinctive whoop; ‘Rhythm, Unity, Movement!’.  It’s a pretty vacuous battle cry, better suited to a choreographer than a horticultural professional, but it seems to work for them.

This is because most garden designers were indoctrinated to The Principles Of Garden Design while in training. The Principles Of Garden Design is an aesthetic theory that breaks horticultural design into three essential and easily digested dogmas; a beautiful garden must have Balance (or order, proportion etc) Unity (harmony, oneness) and Movement (flow, rhythm, transition). Of course it’s all platitudinous rot and spread-too-broad nonsense, but that doesn’t stop it being influential.

I was thinking about the principles, particularly movement, as I cycled through the city last week.  After a month of rain the temperature had risen sharply and the air felt like broth. Away from ventilating tracheal roads, urban pockets lay torpid; parks, alley-ways, back gardens and playgrounds felt thick and still, stupefied under a haze.  Nowhere does lethargic like London in late July.

The omphalic centre of this inaction was the Regents Canal, its Victorian prime – horses, ice-barges and gunpowder tugs – long forgotten. The locks were closed and the water motionless. I watched three Canada geese, too idle for their ancestral life of migration, circle in a small opening in the duckweed. Eventually one ploughed out and the others followed in his slip stream. All along the banks the canal boats sat motionless.

You shouldn’t be able to get much more movement in a garden than in one built on the top of a boat. Don’t like your ‘borrowed landscape’? Cast off! Pitch up somewhere with a better view. Shaded by a protected tree? I’ll take my flowerbeds elsewhere. Yet in the fever of that afternoon I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more motionless set of gardens.

Most of the roofs supported vest-wearing tattooed river dwellers, crashed-out in the heat. They like to pose as vagabond adventurers, not tied down to neighbours, corner shops and residents association meetings. But I cycle down the Regents canal six times a week and their boats never ever move. I have seen lock-gates open just once. Barges with names like Geronimo (another famous war cry) hint of a life of wandering excitement and conceal the truth: the owners are just as tethered as the rest of us – we live in flats, they live in tiny floating bungalows.

They do like to garden though. Every boat has a roof filled with pansies, violas and tomatoes. The plants are naff, small and mismatched; they wilt and they don’t flutter, perfect for bungalows. There’s no rhythm and no sense of transition, but they work because they’re jolly.

The evening wore on, the temperature stayed high, I stopped cycling and opened a beer. Sitting on an overgrown bank, surrounded by mallow and hedge mustard while watching a low sun turn the duckweed golden I wondered: what’s so essential about movement?

Duckweed

Dear Channels One, Two, Three, Four and Five

This week I’ve been thinking unusually hard, and I’ve come to a rather controversial conclusion…

…gardening television, its not actually that bad! Yes it’s pretty dire and boring - but so is most television. No, I’ve worked out that the real problem with horticultural T.V is not it’s content, but its paucity. If we had ten times more bad gardening programs on our televisions I’m sure that we could all find something crap that still  perversely appealed to us, like with cookery shows, and even if we didn’t find anything exactly to our taste we would have all watched a different program on Friday night, so would be spared Saturday’s collective critical dismemberment of Gardeners World/Love Your Garden.

That’s why I’m dedicating this blog post to the five major television channels. I have developed concepts (copyright Ben Dark 2011) for five new television programs that I think will appeal to a wide audience. You guys can work out who gets what, but I’d like to see them in production by the autumn. Hopefully next spring you’ll have got them on the air and I can avoid another summer of listening to under stimulated gardeners moaning about Don and Titchmarsh being no Geoff Hamiltons.

1) Plant Perspectives

A gardening program filmed and narrated each week entirely from the perspective of one plant in our Midlands garden. Each week a different flower gives its unique take on the gardening season, from seed packet to compost heap!

 2) Paradise Found

 A fly-on-the-wall series following the trials and tribulations of one upper class eccentric as he replants his garden to form a living and unabridged version of Milton’s classic blank verse poem Paradise Lost.  Do you like some narrative in your gardens? Are you desperate for gardening to be seen as highbrow art? Then rejoice as Anthony Gormanshall creates The Tartarus of Begonias!     

3) Garden Wars!

A game show in which two middle aged gardeners compete horticulturally  over the garden fence; the first driven to sell up loses! Expect rows, deliberately offensive bedding, malicious Tree Preservation Orders, ‘accidental’ herbicide drift, sun blocking, husband swapping and malicious gossip at the post office!  

4) What Went Wrong?

A group of all star garden pundits provide post season analysis on the nations gardens and interview gardeners as they head back to their huts. ‘At the end of the day it was a year of two halfs Alan, and we might not have created many opportunities for flowers, but at the end of the day we avoided overfeeding the lawn.’

5) Gardeners Question Time

Real gardeners answer questions from their irate clients. This week: ‘Am I paying you to sit in your van and smoke rollies?’, ‘Didn’t we agree you’d be here three hours ago?’ and ‘Why have you pulled up all my fox gloves?’  

I hope this helps guys. Let me know how you get on!

Anthony Gormanshall - a planting plan

Great Gardeners of History/Chelsea #4

Let us away from Chelsea, that foul and feckless temple to Mammon, away from esurient financiers and hoggish merchants, away from all corporate Champagne and amalgamated sponsorship. This week join me in simpler times; come and meet the next great gardener of history - founder of the first botanical garden, creator of the herbaria and the finest plant collector since Theophrastus. Let’s lose ourselves in his scholarly Eden, marvel at his Jerusalem artichokes and gasp as he conjures sunflowers before our under-stimulated European eyes. Let’s stick fingers in our ears and for these moments ignore the shadow of his patron, deep-pocketed and long-knifed Cosimo I die Medici – we know there’s no place for bankers in gardening.

In 1543 Luca Ghini created the world first botanical garden at the University of Pisa. After the Middle-Ages’ one and half millennia of horticultural stagnation, he removed plants from the pages of the illuminated manuscript and placed them where they belonged and have remained ever since, in the ground. Natural intellect, flair and Medici money combined to leave us a legacy that we all enjoy today.

Luca Ghini

Before Ghini started his garden, horticulture was in a sorry state. The ancient Greeks and Romans had undertaken intensive studies of their native flora, and recorded their findings in magnificent books, such as Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica. These pagan savants gifted their learning and illustrations to their Christian progeny, who spent 1500 years slavishly copying copies of copies (more to curtail monastic masturbation that for a love of learning) until all diagrams resembled either blobs with leaves or leaves with blobs.

Cosimo I dei Medici

But a good Renaissance will do wonders for a peoples’ self confidence, and by the 16^th century, Western Europe, having already challenged the ancients in sculpture, music and architecture, finally got around to the greatest art – gardening. Ghini was our standard bearer. Such was his confidence that shortly after founding the garden he wrote to a correspondent:

of horminum I have two species, cultivated and wild. I am sending you both plants dried and glued to cardboard. It does not matter that Dioscorides mentions only one because in many other cases he does not mention all the species that could be described. I think my dear sir, that you yourself have observed many more Tithymala, ranunculi, polygonata, and so on, than are enumerated by Dioscorides. In my own garden I have three species of hastula regia besides the one described by Dioscorides.

It does not matter what Dioscorides thought! Shocking yet brilliant - stuff Copernicus and his bloody sun – this is the real scientific revelation of the 1540’s. Ghini quickly gathered a circle of apprentices, wowed by his empirical approach and his insistence that plants should be viewed in their natural state. Soon these new creations, “botanical gardens”, spread to Pisa, Florence, Padua and Venice, and from there to the rest of the world.  Wikipedia tells me there are nearly 2000 registered today.

In the1540’s extravagant mercantile wealth and gardening came together to create something of self evident benefit to horticulture and to mankind. Without botanical gardens hundreds of thousands of people’s appreciation of the natural world, and even of life itself, would be hugely diminished – naysayers may scoff, but I’m sure in 500 years time they will say the same thing about pink flying gardens.

Pink flying garden

Taking back the Suburbs

In an entertaining piece of midweek filler the Evening Standard’s ‘Voice of Youth’, Rosamund Urwin, recently outed certain of her friends as having matured faster than others. Apparently over recent dinners Rosamund and her young, sparkly, drunken girls of summer  have stared in bewilderment at their dour, prematurely middle-aged acquaintances and wondered ‘how these fun sponges morphed into our parents and predict that they’ll soon be no-shows if the meal clashes with Gardeners’ Question Time.’

Oh the indignation! Gardening as by word for past-it! Well brace yourself Rosamund, I’m afraid that as newly minted Dalstonite, and an avid spectator of people and flowers, I can tell you that gardens are now considered cool. Pop-up-gardens are even cooler. Permaculture gardens are practically the coolest, beaten only by pop-up-roof-top-permaculture gardens, which are impossibly tautologically cool. All us unemployable bloggers Out East know dirt is where it’s at. The only people who think gardening is still stuck in the 1970’s are Laurie Taylor from Thinking Allowed  (see last week’s program) and the rest of the country; and they’re wrong – it’s actually stuck in the 1820’s.*

I suspect that the whiff of the naff that Rosamund detects lingering around gardening comes not from the superannuated, but from the suburban. My dear, bearded, tattooed and pieced twin brother, fresh from life in the squat as he is, will happily spend hours talking about growing pak choi or coppicing hazel, yet accuses his housemates of being ‘bourgeoisie provincials’ if they even mention spreading lawn seed or putting the sprinklers on.

As a jobbing gardener this revulsion to suburban gardens has a particular impact on me. The nature of my game means a large portion of my time is spent in the suburbs – for there be gardens. Yet on arriving at a garden for the first time client will often say to me “I don’t want it looking suburban”. So I find myself stood in an 8m x 25m rectangular garden, shed in one corner, three sides in larch panel fencing, with neighbouring houses just removed enough to qualify as detached peering from the sidelines, wondering how on earth to use a planting budget of £200 to disguise it as a penthouse roof garden.

That’s why I have decided to break with tradition and give some gardening tips. This week 5 hints on Urbanising the Suburbs.

1)      Community gardens are big in the city right now. Give your garden the community feel by converting the entire space to raised beds. For extra authenticity after the first summer make sure you never carry out any maintenance ever again.

2)      Pots, pots, pots, pots, pots. It’s all about container growing, and don’t think that means putting a few pansies around the bottom of your Cordeline australis. In the last few months I have seen a semi-mature holm oak and a grove of silver birch growing on balconies, think big!

3)      Nothing says suburban like a barbeque. Why not build a tandoori oven? For extra points get local members of the long-term unemployed to do the actual construction work as an ‘empowerment exercise’.

4)      If you must use a sprinkler ditch the plastic Hoselock and go for a Conmoto outdoor shower. The lawn will love it and friends who drop by unannounced will assume it’s part of your extra-room-for-natural-living-masterplan.

Urban Living

5)      Pop-up is in. Pop-up bars and restaurants have been sweeping the capital lately. Short term venues that do the biz for a few months and then disappear. This season I will be making pop-up borders, areas of the garden that burst into vibrant life for a season and then disappear leaving no trace of their existence. Rosamund’s dour friends and the terminally suburban will probably refer to them as bedding, but remember, it’s a pop-up horticultural event.

I hope this helps.

*I know gardening is stuck in the 1820’s because this week I have been reading a 200 year old edition of The Literary Gazette, and Journal of the Belles Lettres in search of the Garden Report and Kalender columns . Years ago in a smoky pub in Hampshire a wizened old gardener told me the secret of charming moles by the light of a full moon, and I was hoping unearth more semi-mythical garden lore.  Unfortunately what I found could have been printed in any of last weekend’s broadsheet gardening columns. “Soil preparation is key, watering is to be undertaken whole heartedly or not at all”. Though interestingly it seems even then gardeners were paid “less by three or four shillings a week than what is paid to common Labourers.”’

Also

“Slovenly gardeners leave their Dahlias, Marvel of Perus, Nasturtiums, and the like, for days and weeks after they are frost bitten. The gardener pleads want of time, doing something else… These are slovenly excuses, quite inadmissible… Slovenliness is the unpardonable sin of gardening: a sloven among gardeners ranks with an coward among soldiers and sailors.” – take note permacultural gardeners, we all know what happens to cowardly soldiers.

Behold the Monstrous Face of Garden Design 2012

Gardens 2012

I was going to write a ‘Ben’s gardening trends to watch out for 2011’ post. However – ‘there will be a trend towards stuff growing in march, maybe earlier, sprinklers will be big in July and everything will fall over in December’ is even more limp and pathetic than the regular media’s forecasts. So instead I have decided to skip a year and start building momentum for my 2012 horticultural campaign.

2012 is the year of the London Olympics, probable apocalypse, Alan Turing and of The Campaign for Sublime Gardens (CSG).

We at the CSG believe that the modern horticultural industry has lost sight of the sublime in its quest for beauty. A beautiful garden should remind the viewer of his capacity for love,  a sublime garden should remind him of his pitiful and insignificant place in the universe and his own inescapable mortality, in a pleasurable way. Beauty is much easier to sell.

The simplest way to inspire a sense of the sublime is through scale –  think of the world’s largest garden gnome, Giambologna’s Appennino in the Medici garden, or of the land art in The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. But just using size is cheating, everything is impressive when its big, and besides much as I love ha-has I don’t really think we need another gardening trend that is only available to the wealthy.

Giambologna's Sublime Gnome

So, I was musing on how to bring a dash of existential pain to the small urban spaces Bensgarden looks after (maintenance slots still available by the way) and I stumbled across the artist who opened this post, Jason de Caires Taylor. He makes life sized casts of people and drops them to the bottom of the ocean to slowly crumble or become buried under tons of coral. Ozymandias meets Luca Brasi – no better nod to man’s transience and mortality.

Man on Fire

The Garden of Hope

 

To adapt this look for gardens lacking in coral forming organisms is surprisingly easy. Buy a statue, drill a load of holes in it, shove some soil in and you have a humanoid tufa wall for growing alpines. All good, but still a little bit novelty ornamentation; remember the sublime is the terrifying rendered every-day. To really nail the look I suggest  you contact your local bargain ‘antiques barn’ and try to strike a deal for a truck-load of those chipped concrete statues they mass produced in the 70’s.  Dump your figurines in a pile somewhere in the garden, preferably in half shade. Arrange to form a human stumpery, limbs and faces should protrude in places. Spoon top-soil liberally into nooks, crannies and cavities and plant up – the look you should be aiming for is a Jake and Dinos Chapman diorama crossed with a hanging basket.

There we go, my first post in 18months of blogging that contains actual ‘hints and tips for gardeners’ many more to follow as we build towards the 2012 apocalypse.

http://www.underwatersculpture.com/

Winter Cheer

January is a tough time for gardeners. Too much mud, no razzle-dazzle and only bloody snowdrops on the way. So, to buck you all up, here are some of my favourite plants for winter cheer (as seen by Victorian botanist Mr Edward Lear).

Manypeeplia upsidownia

Piggiawiggia pyramidalis

Nastiscreechia Krorluppia

Pied Beauty

As a gardener I know there is more to horticulture than flowers. But, if I’m brutally honest, grasses, foliage and ferns are just so many kinds of exotic foreplay, flowers will always be the money shot.

But why? Why flowers? Why do they hold such an appeal, be they in the garden, on the windowsill or clasped between the teeth? In essence why am I devoting my life to colourful films of water and carbon?

Where to begin.  A mainstay of academic aesthetics over the last century has been the theory of cultural conditioning.  We like flowers because  Shakespeare writes about them, because Wordsworth writes about them, because Blake, Burns and Dickinson write about them; because people have painted them, printed them and pressed them. According to this view, accrued meanings and cognitive habits gave rise to the flowers’ power and, we all go along with it because, like teenage girls at a Twilight premier, we are programmed to fit in.

Programmed to fit in

Cultural conditioning cannot easily be dismissed, after all I remember the early 90’s when we were conditioned to find centre partings and sportswear sexy. But it won’t wash with flowers. Every culture, no matter how historically or geographically diverse, has found flowers attractive. Ancient gods are celebrated with flowers, some of the earliest art is floral and pollen from ornamental flowers have been found (in statistically meaningful amounts) in graves dating from around 10,000 BC. Nearly every insulated tribe discovered by westerners in the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries is recorded as having used flowers as ornamentation, you can bet that none of them had ever listened to Wordsworth’s Ode to a Daffodil or Seal’s Kiss from a Rose.

So is the human attraction to flowers evolutionary, and if so, why? Nicholas Humphrey, in his 1973 essay on the biology of aesthetics, The Illusion of Beauty, argues that the beauty of flowers lies in their huge variety on a limited plane. Most flowers are similar in size, height and location, and they are all easily recognizable as flowers, yet there are almost unlimited variations among them.  As such they invite classification; people like to distinguish, say, an Aconite from a Delphinium or 132 named cultivars of geranium from each other. Humphrey argues that this is not high end horticultural geekery, but a fundamental  evolved human pleasure, as powerful as the drive for food and sex.

 Without the ability to classify the world, eg dangerous tribe, friendly tribe, humans would not have managed to reach its sophisticated social heights – to appreciate flowers is to assert what it is to be human (this also explains the appeal of music, or classifying sounds and rhythms as I like to call it)

O.K, sounds slightly farfetched, but it would explain why horticulturalists never want to stop learning, and why they never have a ‘favorite flower’ for more than a few months. There are a plethora of other evolutionary flower theories out there. Flowers represent genitals – think baboons. Flowers are tasty – think Nasturtiums. Flowers signify a land of fertility and plenty – think any Edenic vision. My personal favorite is that any hunter gather who can spend his time foraging around for flowers has obviously got his shit together and is definitely shag-worthy.

Others ignore evolutionary theory and focus on symmetry and scale. The old ‘Golden Ratio’ theory crops up again and again in forms of nature we find attractive. That flower in your garden is not just a pretty collection of petals, it’s the Acropolis, The Parthenon, Vitruvian Man, and Le Corbusier – all rendered in carbon, water and pretty shades of pastel.

Man in full bloom

 The young Gerald Manly Hopkins discussed the nature of symmetry and asymmetry in nature in his essays, diaries and poems. In an early undergraduate essay he forms a platonic dialogue between an undergraduate and a professor. They sit in a college garden debating whether a six or seven fanned chestnut leaf is the more beautiful, a scene I wish I could recognize from my undergraduate life. Eventually they decide the 7 lobed leaf is the more pleasing, because the leaf is ostensibly asymmetrical yet its internal structure shows an almost perfect symmetry.

This speaks to me. Most of my favorite flowers have an uneven number of petals, yet all contain symmetry in the petals, sepals, carpals and stamen. Later in life Hopkins, now a respected poet,  writes: ‘I have particular periods of admiration for particular things in Nature; for a certain time I am astonished at the beauty of a tree, shape, effect, etc. Then when the passion, so to speak, has subsided, it is consigned to my treasury of explored beauty, and acknowledged with admiration and interest ever after.’ If this isn’t Nicholas Humphrey’s biological aesthetics writ poetically large then god knows what is.

Young Gerard

So if it ever comes down to the crunch, and I am forced at knife point to confess just exactly why I like flowers, and why I have chosen them over more conventional goals, such as one day being able to afford a house, I will say with confidence “because I am a poet, because (1 +√5) ÷ 2 is finest ratio going, but most of all BECAUSE I AM A MAN.

Garden Museum Blog

I have starting blogging for The Garden Museum. This is the address. Bensgardenblog shall remain c0mpleatly unaffected, so have no fear sporadically-updated-cod-historical-garden-blog-fans. The new site is slightly better grounded in reality, and I shall be using to it do prosaically garden blog things, like talk about plants.

Anyone who thinks the tedium of me writing about plants might be too much to bare - read my friends comics blog instead.