Last summer I received a package in the mail from a friend who lives in Canada near the US border at Michigan. Her gardening conditions and needs are about the same as mine. She was kind enough to drop me a very complimentary e-mail about one of my gardening-cooking essays on another site. We got to chatting back and forth and the result was this package containing seeds and the British magazine. BBC Gardener’s World. The magazine has a web site at https://gardenersworld.beeb.com.
She enclosed some dark red hollyhock and Nigela (Love in a Mist) seeds. The hollyhocks took and will bloom in the summer of 2002, but I got nuthin from the other seeds except a few scraggly plants that never got as big as promised and gave me a only few blooms. Thankfully they went to seed at the end of the season and I’ll try again in a different spot with better soil.
The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) TV program puts out this magazine. It seems to me to be a bit like a cross between a seed catalog and a gardening magazine. The Contents page is a smorgasbord of choices with upwards of 50 entries and regular contributors who have their own specialties relating to viewers/readers/customers. It seems like the ultimate job of everyone concerned at this magazine is to sell, sell, sell! This is an example of a business going at full tilt.
You will find resources for everything you can think of from growing your own vegetables to decorative flowers and shrubs. Although this may be of limited use here in the States, one certainly gets good photographs of the blooms and great, useable ideas in the gardening articles. Above all, everything is labeled with both the Latin and the common English names so you can easily locate them wherever you are and plant them in your own gardens if applicable.
There are notices for public strolls through a Kew cornfield where part of the field has been plowed under and nature is taking its course with daisies, cornflowers and poppies. That reminded me of my friend’s attempt to establish a prairie meadow on their property; the prairie I’m not sure of, but they have a lovely meadow full of Purple Cone Flowers, Black Eyed Susan’s, Milkweed and Mullein stalks. It’s full of Wild Asters in the fall.
There is a Garden Visit booklet that comes with a plastic discount card that will get the bearer into more than 200 gardens in all parts of the UK. There is a blurb for Pashley Manor at Ticehurst in East Sussex that has been voted the Historic Houses Association/Christies Garden of the Year. This garden held a number of special events through the year, not unlike the Boerner Botanical Gardens here in Milwaukee.
For the gardener with a PC there is Gardening on the Web, with more sites to visit ( http://www.english-heritage.org.uk and https://nationaltrust.org.uk ), plus sites for the National Rose Society, The Royal Horticultural Society, West Dean Gardens and The National Trust for Scotland to name but a few.
Of course, this being the June Issue, the gardens are breaking into lush blooms according to James Wickham, who shows us pages and pages of photographs and information. This is where I got that garden catalog feeling, although it’s without all the hype we see when we open our catalogs in the midst of winter and settle into a chair by the fireplace to dream of planting time. Every page has pictures of luxuriant blooms, their cost and how to get them.
Here are perennials like a purple-black columbine called Aquilegia vulgaris, William Guiness, that self-seeds and a half dozen or more bearded iris with names like Light Cavalry, Kent Pride and White City. There are Butterfly Bush, Allium the size of footballs and candelabra primulas and magnificent oriental poppies.
On we go to Adam’s Action Diary where there are checklists for the flower and kitchen garden. Do you have problems with garden slugs? I do, and
I got a couple of English solutions that will work just fine in Wisconsin. Other topics covered are Companion Plantings and Fighting the Lily Beetle with insecticides. Again there is a sidebar with advice for the greenhouse and some general garden hints.
The features include the cover article, The Sky’s The Limit, which features tall spiky perennials like foxgloves, delphiniums, foxtail lilies and red-hot pokers rising skyward over brilliant plantings. Also included in the “tall” category are lupins, giant lilies, <Ligularia, or Skyrocket, Loosestrife and hollyhocks. Although I don’t have a “cottage garden, ”
An article by Nigel Colborn , a specialist on Radio 4’s Gardener’s Question program, Mr. C explains how, with a little planning, you can have a cut-flower border that will provide flowers for inside and outside viewing. Carol Klien, who is an award-winning garden designer and host of Real Gardens on Channel 4 (in the UK) tells about scented plants. There are six pages of Q&A with lots more of those close-up photographs.
Next up is Roy Lancaster who recommends six of his favorite brilliantly colored annuals for single-season garden viewing. Here’s where my Love-in-a-Mist seeds come in: Brilliant blue flowers growing on dill-like foliage. When the blooming season is over there are attractive seed pods and lots more seeds.
If I went through everything this would go on forever, so while I’m ahead I’ll call it quits except to say that the last page which usually has humor in the States, has a column by Alan Titchmarsh, who seems to be all over this magazine. The column is imaginatively called Tales From Titchmarsh and for the issue I am looking at, Mr. T. writes about some of the odder trends in gardening. He says, “New gardeners . . . need to be stimulated and it is here that fashion and current crazes play their part.” As Mr. T. said, “they get all arty-farty and make serious gardeners nervous.” But his premise is to get the uninterested hooked somehow and when that happens, their enthusiasm for gardening is boundless.
Oh well, bring on the hula-hoops and the home made paving stones and let the uninformed loose. It seems to me rather like what’s happened with all the crafters in the US of A. It’s too bad they can’t package good taste! You wouldn’t believe some of the un-creativity I see on television. Well, maybe this is a humor page after all. There’s a cartoon of someone covering his back fence with rose-strewn wallpaper. Kute huh?
This would be a good magazine to look at for anyone who plans to spend some time in Britain on vacation. As my Canadian friend said, “. . . The way they garden is actually possible to do at home, as opposed to some of the fancier garden magazines sold mostly for the photography. Of course the residents of the UK already know all this, but it doesn’t hurt to remind them of what’s available.”
Enough said! Go look for a copy or take a look at the web site.