thebeginningofitall

We always think of sanctuary as somewhere to retreat to but in a way sanctuary could be somewhere we find ourselves then take that new self into the wider world in a happier more self expressed way. 

I ponder the idea that self-expression is freedom and if we have true freedom do we find sanctuary in many things rather than seeking the solace of just one place. I feel my garden has provided me with both; a particular place of safety in the first of what I call, dark times, in my adult life. I ponder that in fact, sanctuary is more of a feeling that a specific place exemplifies. We all have places of restoration, spots we know and love and resonate with. For me Ladle Hill, a Celtic hillfort I visit weekly, the bluebells in the woodland behind my parent’s house, the early purple orchids and the badgers that live there, the wild flower rich Lime Quarry in Old Burghclere or just a peaceful garden.  All of these places allow me to see the world in an uncompromised or as I say, an untouchable way, people can’t take any of those things away from me because they’re all about how I experience them. 

In today’s society many feel the need to conform to things or to look a certain way. These are things I never feel stifled or pressured by, but, maybe, the idea of not being like this and being different puts oneself in an isolated bracket on a journey to true happiness, surely to be found in said sanctuary.

Let me take a little interlude from these philosophical ramblings and introduce you to..

My garden, my sanctuary, my painter’s palette, my favourite place in the world.  Imagine having lots of clothes and never being allowed to wear them, or more to the point, imagine having lots of fancy clothes too bold or too special for the every day. That’s a bit how I felt with the plants I collected or even the plants I just admired and loved but the special moment came when I finally had my own house with a garden.

I think the idea of getting to know a plant is something people can often misconceive. I’ve always had a certain knack to remembering the names, the heights, flowering periods and colours of plants. These are all useful bits of information to compile schemes and planting lists, of course I speak as a professional garden designer here too. 

Getting to know a plant is like getting to know a person, what they’re like on a good day, what they’re like on a bad day, how they react when it’s hot, when it’s cold and also why you love them so but you can’t always explain it.  We can’t of course get to know all plants like this, the same as the people in the world we’ll never meet, but we can at least try and have the opportunity to experience their ‘characters’ in a more intimate way at home. Each and every one earning their keep for that special reason!

It would be all too easy to find oneself filling this piece of prose with myriad specific epithets, highlighting the genera that I find so beguiling but instead I choose to ponder why they found their place beyond their more foliar and botanical adornment.  

Woody plants were the first to capture my heart, one could suggest that as a young man on a, at the time unknown, journey to a lifelong obsession with plants, this was a more manly approach.  The acceptable love of ‘flowers’ coming later.  This however, I believe to be far from true, I always had a penchant for being different.  

Many of us were lucky enough to have been read Wind in the Willows, the idea that the wood behind my parent’s house was filled with woodland creatures one could see as friends, as characterful and intriguing as Moley, Ratty and Badger, even Toad too, I found most comforting.  As I grew older I realised they couldn’t chat away in the way I dreamed they did but as a grown man one thing is for sure, they are most definitely my friends.  I guess my point is one of two parts, comfort and adventure, two adjectives of juxtaposing description but I will endeavour to allude to the two of them to describe why woody plants were the first to capture my heart.  

When I was little I enjoyed making miniature gardens from moss, pebbles and picked flowers, some even had a water feature.  I find a parallel here with the nursery tree wires at Penwood.  Line upon line of trees, each with majestically shaped leaves, coexisting with each other in transitory happiness.  My first observations were of course spontaneous and uneducated but I do vividly remember my first walk down Penwood’s drive, a clear blue, almost autumn like late August/early September morning, the driplines on the tree wires were on and remember thinking, gosh, this feels like home.  Hillier’s Manual of Trees and Shrubs became my Wind in the Willows and as devout as I was to the cause I set about learning and applying every page.  I always found it very important to tell people a plant’s provenance, although to some degree this could be utilised to understand it’s further cultivation, I think at the time it was less high brow than that.  It was about adventure every day at work, plants from, almost, all over the world, the first representations of countries that at the time I’d only dreamed of visiting.  I remember my excitement when I started to realise how many plants on the nursery came from Mexico, from an oak on the wires, to alpines in the frames and a wall shrub or two in the greenhouse.  This was perhaps the start of my love of Latin America, I would go on to reacquaint myself with many of these plants throughout South America, most notably in Chile and Argentina, but I digress.  

So to the woody plants that adorn my sanctuary, the comfort they provide on a bad day, the joy on a good day and the constant reminder of adventure just around the corner.  The heir to the throne reportedly talks to his plants, I understand the sentiment and I too have a deep and meaningful relationship with mine that I retreat to and seek refuge in until darkness falls on most clement and some most inclement evenings too.  

There’s not much room for woody subjects in my small victorian terrace garden, the inherited Bramley apple tree is a magnificent thing with handsome bark.  Rightfully so this is a nod to an early custodian of the garden, I’d imagine harking back to when the terrace was first built at the turn of the 19th century, the enriched organic soil I discovered beneath a shameful ‘lawn’ was another clue of previous care and enrichment.   

There are, at least at my time of writing this, four categories into which I put plants that find a place in one’s own botanical ark.  Firstly, there’s those you simply cannot bare to be without, not just on botanical merit but in some way they seem to define you and therefore must come with.  Then there’s the ones that got away, whether it be space, timing or memory they’ve always been on your ‘hit-list’ but somehow have evaded capture.  Thirdly, and this is the real troublesome one, the unknown, gathered from the depths of temperate pick n mix ‘rainforest’ (I believe locating them is a little trickier than this).  These botanical odysseys wave their little planty heads above the nursery beds as if they already had a presage for one’s taste. We of course all snap them up with great promises of hardiness and not a care in the world that they’ve cost an arm and a leg and we’ve nowhere to put them.  Finally there’s the mistakes, my favourite and last flower justification category, these are left overs, from jobs, or previous gardens/pot collections and they end up being the signatures or those that tie it all together as if you always intended.  However, I ponder more recently and as a natural sub-analyser, perhaps they’re not mistakes but intuitive forethought we made far before we new or didn’t know we were so clever.  

I feel if my relation to sanctuary has not in some way been conveyed in this piece then one great triumph will at least be amusing to those planty folk that know me, I’ve written this and not mentioned a single botanical name.  Why?  Well I rather hoped people that don’t share a love for my subject could read this and at least relate the importance and escapism of immersion in a passion.  Having a candle of passion that always burns in ones mind and keeps the darkest of dogs from the door is the most empowering freedom and hope one can have.  Make sanctuary transitory and carry it with you everywhere.  

Jez Stamp       

Fortuitously, Tuesday morning’s per chance photograph captured a fleeting moment; that of the glistening, delectable new shoots of Boehmeria.  The subsequent frost that followed deemed Wednesday morning’s display decidedly more on the brown, crispy side.

For now, I’ll consider ‘shoots’ in a more colloquial vernacular splitting those that appear at Jubilee Road into three non-botanical, slightly more evocative, categories; ferny ones, strappy ones and bobbly ones, I’ve saved the best until last.  Do not get me wrong I have always had a penchant for botanical nomenclature, my brain seems somehow adeptly tuned for the order and the categorisation of the subjects.  Scientific names just seem to stay with me and their appearance rarely leaves my mind, I never forget a face, occasionally I forget a plant.  I think all of this is about observation, some people don’t look hard enough and some people never see at all.  We learn a prescribed description in order to ‘agree’ across the board on plant morphology; pedunculate, pinnate and sessile all refer to leaves but I shall set all of this aside and have fun describing to you the treasures in my garden in my own descriptive way.

There is a point and I can’t pin point its exact juncture but it is a regular occurrence year on year.  For me this epiphany or eureka moment happened this year around a week ago.  I’m not talking about those precious, diminutive winter flowers or the signs of the first showier garden cherries, it’s the moment where you stop and realise everything is GROWING.  I ponder whether this moment is defined by excitement, this would be true but what truly fascinates me and I hope many can relate, is there’s actually a slight underlying element of surprise, as if despite all your efforts you thought it might not happen this year.  I find this moment particularly prevalent in my own garden.

Ferny ones; as if delicately snipped with scissors, chewed on by a passing (frequently in my case) puppy or more brutishly chowed (yes chowed) on by a passing flail.  I have a few treasures that fall into ferny but a couple stand out for their emergent terrestrial display, that is after all the focus of this article, I’m known for tangents.  I grow the Baltic parsley, Cenolophium denudatum here it subtends a moor grass, it’s shoots in comparison barely two or three inches high.  Cenolophium’s rusty red emergent foliage soon changes to glossy green making for a subtle contrast as it catches the light.  Self-seeders can be nuisance, particularly when they’re weeds, however the coveted pinnacle for me is when plants you have introduced start to choose their own positions.  When Foeniculum vulgare starts to do this one does not warrant a pat on the back but it is welcome and joyous all the same.  Foeniculum vulgare is more humbly referred to as Fennel, it is the freshest light green, ferniest of the ferny and thankfully one of the first perennials in my garden to show signs of the new growing season.

I’m rather pleased with my autumn planting of strappy leaved Eryngium pandanifolum ‘Physic Purple’, it has grown well over the winter here and adds to my matrixed theme of South American representatives of this Genus threading through the garden, I note seeing three species in the countryside near the dreamy town of Colonia in Uruguay, one as a lithophyte right on the beach.  Note to self to trial more of the Old World selections, I rarely use them although often admire their intensity.  Strappy leaves are rather dominant here; foxtail lilies, day lilies, african lilies, Astelia, Allium and let us not get started on the grasses.

I will however mention one.  Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ for its upright form is undoubtable key in the latter part of the summer but here it is its two foot high fresh green growth that provides such wonderful movement amongst the lower more static flowers, at this time of the year that is to be celebrated.

One could be forgiven for thinking ‘bobbly ones’ was an easy way to classify everything else.  Truth be told, this adjective couldn’t be more apt for describing one particular genus, and that’s why I chose it.  Podophyllum’s new shoots are so appealing as much as you just want to marvel at the intricacy of these fleshy umbrellas pushing through the earth, you also feel the need to poke and squeeze them.  As a child I was obsessed with peeling apart Sedum leaves, it’s a similar impulse.  The leaves of these rhizomatous perennial May apples as they are commonly known are some of the most sumptuous of all perennial plants.  ‘Spotty Dotty’ thrives amongst the myriad foliar foil beneath the ‘Bramley’, it’s well on its way now. Slower to emerge and admittedly with a little impatient delving and tinkering from me is Podophyllum mairei, I’m excited about this one, its new and subtler appearance more to my taste.

The first early signs of bees in the garden is something I find particularly joyful and something to which all gardening folk can relate.  If one wasn’t so inclined to notice such things, Poppy, my sixteen-week-old puppy’s marauding tendencies highlight each little flighty pollinator as it flits from flower to flower, each unduly trampled as she snaps in their general direction.  ‘Poppy NO’

Our native wood spurge is certainly a favourite for them this morning.  The cyathiums like a delectable saucer as the nectar glands glisten in this early bright light.  Here at Jubilee Road I grow a selection of the native species, Euphorbia amygdaloides var. robbiae.  Its flowers may well be stealing the show this late March morning but their glossy leaves are a must in the rather complex palette of plants I have chosen to establish under the ‘Bramley’ apple tree.  In time it will need taming to ensure its neighbours aren’t muscled out from their part of the show but this is the beauty of your own garden (I prefer and shall use ‘creation’ from now on); a watchful eye means these dynamics are predicted and delicately interfered with.  After all, as gardeners, that’s what we are, artistic interferers.

No piece of writing would be complete without a photograph.  Therefore, if my ramblings are nothing but whimsical self-indulgence and if you’ve got this far the picture should be some respite.  When we bought the house in June 2017 the garden comprised a weedy lawn, a lot of concrete, bindweed and one or two rather unchoice plant species.

Unaware of my humble horticultural heritage the new neighbours looked on seemingly appalled as on first arrival, keys in hand, I hacked and filled the green bin with an unsuspecting Euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald n Gold’.  However, the house built around 1900, surely must at one time or another have had a loved garden.  Obvious signs were the handsome ‘Bramley’ that is now a feature tree and the enriched black sandy soil hidden beneath the wildlife friendly ‘lawn’.  More hidden evidence came in the emergence of various geophytes in Spring 2018 amongst new plantings in the by then tilled and mulched soil.  In the picture the preserved Snakes-head Fritillaries mingles with the aforementioned Euphorbia, aka Mrs Robb’s bonnet.