Transatlantic Plantsman

The wrong daffodils

I bashed on about this issue last year - here I go again!

As Head Gardeners at Vita Sackville-West’s garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, Pam Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutsberger had a powerful influence on gardening styles in Britain. They are still most insistent that plants must be suited to their surroundings and one of their special hates is the planting of large-flowered, hybrid, trumpet daffodils in hedgerows and in wild places in attempt to “add a bit of colour”. They just look so out of place.

Country villages are especially prone to plant drifts of yellow daffs along roadsides as you enter the village and even villages in areas where wild daffodils are growing naturally nearby plant blowsy hybrids. The example in the picture is from a hedgerow outside a village in Northamptonshire. They may be colourful, but they just don’t fit.

It’s easy enough to buy bulbs of the wild species, Narcissus pseudonarcissus,  these days – bulbs that have been propagated on nurseries and not dug up from the wild – and there are even vigorous hybrid daffodils in a more demure, naturalistic style.

So, please… why not dig up the heavy-headed hybrids and move them in a garden or park in the village? You can do it as soon as they’ve finished flowering, they won’t mind. Then, in the autumn, plant something wild daffodils or varieties that fit into the natural scene harmoniously.

English and Spanish bluebells

First, I apologise for the recent “break in transmission”. I’ve been away for a long weekend at a family wedding where I stayed in what must be the only decent hotel in England with absolutely no internet access of any kind (except for the front desk)! Then a day dashing about, flight back the US, my wife judy’s birthday… Anyway, normal service is now resumed.

Just before leaving our English home for the wedding I visited what may well be England’s finest bluebell wood, Short Wood in Northamptonshire. Voted England’s most popular wildflower in poll a couple of years ago, the bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, spreads to form wide rolling oceans of colour in many deciduous woods and even along hedges and roadsides. Over half world’s population grows in Britain, and I understand that nowhere else do they spread so prolifically. The bulbs were once used to make glue for book binding.

Hideous daffodils

Driving around England this last week, I’ve found the daffodils especially infuriating. Everywhere, even in relatively remote areas far from towns and villages, the roadsides are planted with daffodils. The trouble is that these daffodils, planted I’m sure by well-meaning local people, are so often large-flowered hybrids like ‘Dutch Master’. They just look so gross and out of place in these more or less natural situations.

If they’re going to plant daffodils, why not plant something less garish, something - dare I say it – like Britain’s native daffodils species, Narcissus pseudonarcissus? Seeing them in the grass at the Harcourt Arboretum a few miles outside Oxford, in the picture,reminds me how appropriate they look.

Pam Schwerdt and Sybil Kreutzberger, formerly Head Gardeners at the spectacular garden at Sissinghurst and my colleagues on the Royal Horticultural Society’s Herbaceous Plant Committee, have long complained about this habit of planting large flowered hybrid daffodils in more or less wild situations – they just look so unnatural! But their protests seem not to have yet sunk in.

So let me add my own encouragement: Please don’t plant large-flowered hybrid daffodils on roadsides, by farm gates, along hedgerows, and in other places populated by genuine wild flowers. If you want to plant daffodils, plant our own native wild species.

Snowdrops escaping from gardens – in the UK and USA

A friend in England has sent me this lovely picture of some snowdrops which she came across – let’s just say somewhere in eastern England. For while most snowdrop enthusiasts have impeccable ethics, such is the lure of the snowdrop these days that there are one or two fanatics who, if I gave the location, would be down there with a trowel in no time.

This mossy ditch is on a rather run down country estate where the huge house is falling into disrepair. Snowdrops have, at some point over the last few hundred years, been discarded from the garden – that is to say, thrown over the fence – and have settled down comfortably alongside the road and hybridised with each other to create a fascinating range of types: tall and short, early and late, large-flowered and small and with a wide variation of foliage and flower shapes.

Snowdrop (Galanthus) book review

Snowdrops: A Monograph of the Cultivated Galanthus

This is a spectacular book. Over 350 pages of rich and detailed information on every aspect of wild and cultivated snowdrops are illustrated with hundreds of excellent pictures of snowdrops both in the wild and in gardens with many close-up studio shots.

Some gardeners might be surprised that a book of this size and substance is needed to deal with snowdrops… how many are there, after all? They all have white flowers, there’s single and double, some have broad leaves, some have narrow… Not so fast. Apart from the nineteen species, the book lovingly describes over 500 different cultivars (not all with white flowers…). 500! When I visited the painter, wood engraver and snowdrop fanatic John Morley, who provided the lovely endpapers for the book, he had over 300 different cultivars in his Norfolk garden alone. So there’s more to snowdrops than first appears.

This labor of love from three of the most devoted and knowledgeable snowdrop enthusiasts, Matt Bishop, Aaron Davis and John Grimshaw, is a veritable treasure trove of descriptions, histories and every sort of esoteric background information as well as sound and detailed cultivation and propagation advice.

The problem is that it costs, by the time it gets to your door, over £40 in the UK, $108 in the US! It may be a wonderful book but that’s a lot of money. It's available in the UK and USA direct from the publishers, Griffin Press.

For some years I’ve been trying to get other publishers interested in a more modest book on snowdrops, at a more accessible price and concentrating on those that are widely available. A book for gardeners who love snowdrops but for whom £40 or $108 is just too much. But the publishers all say that while there’s this book, and the out-of-print botanical monograph The Genus Galanthus by Aaron Davis (available on amazon.com at $169.34, as I write, and available on amazon.co.uk at £69.99), there’s no room for another snowdrop book. Not even at £20? I think they’re wrong, but unless they commission the book there is no book.

So, this is the ultimate snowdrop book. There’s so much good information and so many good pictures that it’s worth every cent or every penny. But that’s still a lot of dollars or pounds.