‘When blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
    Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!’

And I find myself fatter and more jocund this morning than on any March 1^st of recent history, for I have found the Secret of Winter Gardening.

In previous years I followed the advice on winter gardening that squats unchanging on the RHS website:

1)    Clean Pots

2)    Read seed catalogues

3)    Feed the birds

But always found that even in this most improvident of cities people are unwilling to spend £15 per hour on sparrow feeding, and no matter how many times I showed clients the RHS webpage I was always dismissed by mid December.

So I’m going to write the post that I wish had existed when I first started out and give the reader a sure-fire method for surviving winter as a maintenance gardener.

RHS aside, there are two traditional schools of thought on the matter. The first I like to call stockpiling and is advocated by well-equipped men on landscaping forums. The idea is to spend nine months putting aside jobs that can be done numb-fingered in the gelid depths of winter. The stockpilers  point out that fencing repairs, resurfacing paths, and odd bits of painting and decorating can all be done when the sap is down, thus providing the gardener with a year round revenue stream. They are right, but if you follow their advice you will have to spend the winter repairing fences and painting ceilings. Unacceptable.

The second school, the hibernators, advise putting aside money throughout the year to cover a possible period of winter dormancy. This approach tends to be championed by parents, accountants and grown-up friends. Using this method essentially boils down to saying ‘yes dear friend, I would love to join you at the beer garden, for truly this hazy summer evening was gifted to us for conversation and carousal, but alas I must save money for January’s baked potatoes’. Dismiss this approach.

 No I have discovered a third way of survival, perfect for the profligate and the feckless, truly way of the dissolute – become a sham frozen-out gardener.

Henry Mayhew in his magisterial survey of the Victorian proletariat London Labour and the London Poor was my inspiration. He identified certain subspecies of professional beggars known as Unemployed Agriculturalists and Sham Frozen Out Gardeners who:

 … are seen during a frost in gangs of from six to twenty.  Two gangs generally “work” together, that is, while one gang begs at one end of the street, a second gang begs at the other.  Their mode of procedure, their “programme”, is very simple.  Upon the spades which they are carrying, is chalked “frozen-out!” or “starving!”  They enhance the effect of this slum or fakement by shouting out sturdily: “Frozen out!”  “We are all frozen-out!

The gardeners differ from the agriculturalists, or “navvies”, in their costume.  They affect aprons and old straw hats, their manner is less demonstrative, and their tone is less rusty, and unmelodious.  The “navvies” roar; the gardeners squeak.  The navvies’ petition is made loud and lustily, as by men used to work in clay and rock; the gardeners’ voice is meek and mild, as of a gentle nature trained to tend on fruit and flowers.  The young, bulky, sinewy beggar plays the navvy; the shrivelled, gravelly, elderly cadger performs the gardener.

Frozen out Gardeners

Nowadays spades are hard to chalk, being made of stainless steel, but do not lose heart, a beggar can still let people know they are pretending to be a gardener by tying vegetables to a stick and parading them up and down the street while looking as pathetic as possible (Garden designers take note: this is still a far more effective way of advertising than twitter).

Playing the destitute horticulturalist in return for cash has proved a highly effective way of keeping my rent paid and my belly full this winter. Thanks mum! But in business you have to grow to survive, so this autumn I shall be holding open auditions for shrivelled, gravelly, elderly cadgers – I have a few confirmed readers of this blog in mind who would be just perfect.

(P.S I do actually have a full time job and have paid my rent all by myself this winter)

(P.P.S Mum if your reading this, I’m so cold and hungry…)    

We're Frozen Out!

A few weeks ago I was sitting in an East End conference centre with about 45 estate agents. We had all been summoned by a large and well respected firm of Japanese knotweed eradicators. As we sipped our free coffee and waited for the seminar to start, a palpable tension saturated both the air and the conversation:

“Have you ever seen a knotweed?” asked one agent.

“No,” said another, “but one of my business partners had a knotweed. He’s not been the same since.”

Nerves in the room did not ease when the organizers of the conference strode in, holding a clear plastic bag at arm’s length, that contained a sealed box itself completely wrapped in yellow hazard tape. Once placed securely on the table the box was opened and the jittery estate agents were allowed to line up and fondle a piece of old knotweed stem; provided they donned latex gloves of course.

Believe it or not, this is not the most blatant piece of knotweed scaremongering I have ever experienced. Once upon a time while wandering aimlessly in a summer garden I spotted a copse that teemed with men in full white chemical suits. Turns out t’was not radio-active waste within, but knotweed. As I sidled up one of the contractors screamed that I should not get any closer:

“You’ll spread the spores!”

Being a horticulture student at the time, and equipped with knowledge botanic, I ventured to point out that knotweed was an angiosperm and thus seed producing, and that it didn’t really matter anyway as all British knotweed is sterile. Naturally I was told to sling it.

So back to my by now hysterical estate agents. The talk we were submitted to was split into three parts. The first was a vaguely scientific description of knotweed; comes from Mars, drinks blood, humanity powerless but for one brave extermination firm – that sort of thing. This was followed by a breakdown of the company’s political efforts to save us all: lobbying Defra, schmoozing Baroness Gardener’s parliamentary pals, taking MP’s to the Chelsea Flower Show and hosting lunches.

The end result is that Japanese knotweed is and ever shall remain a ‘controlled waste’ under the Environmental Protection Act (Duty of Care) Regulations. Meaning that it or any soil that it comes into contact with can only be disposedf offsite in a licensed landfill hole, one which probably only accepts deliveries from big eighteen-wheeler lorries.

The third part of our talk was a selection of horror photos showing the awesome power of Fallopia japonica;  here we saw knotweed lifting floorboards in suburban houses, knotweed destroying tower-blocks, knotweed besieging medieval citadels and knotweed bringing down Berlin Walls.

The spiel ended with, “needless to say this dossier is on the desk of every CEO of every money lending bank in the land, and a copy is with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors” [dramatic pause]  “so if you have even a rumour of knotweed on your property you can kiss goodbye to ever selling another house.  And by the way don’t forget it’s illegal to do anything about it yourself.  Consultations start from £5000.”

As I left the conference, shaky looking estate agents were queuing up to tell our hosts that they had seen something green, that they think it’s knotweed, and could someone come and have a look?

So remember gardeners, whatever size your business, it’s never too early to start deploying heavy-handed scare tactics and cultivating  political favor. I’m off to tell the Daily Mail that scruffy gardens cause cancer, then I’ll ask my local MP fancies going to the cinema.    

Japanese Knotweed

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.

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

…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

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

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.

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/