JEARRARD'S HERBAL
12th November 2023
Aruncus 'Horatio'
Autumn is a season filled with bravado and staunchness. Autumn is a season for feeling robustly prepared for cold weather to come. Early nights and chilly mornings
glisten in the memory. Bright sunlight slips between the trees with stained glass wonder. Winter, when it arrives, will come with billowing breath and stamping feet.
The air will be thin and clear. There will be a moment, probably in January, when I will go into the garden and think "yes, this is winter". I live in Cornwall,
it doesn't last for very long.
Storm Ciaran blasted away the romance of autumn. The garden has been left smothered in uncertainty. It isn't autumnal but it certainly isn't wintery.
Plants are not dying back in the last glow of summer, they have simply slipped into heavy, wet decay. Winter, when it arrives, will lighten the atmosphere.
Aruncus 'Horatio' is a very good thing, it raised the status of the whole genus from herbaceous filler to suburban star in a single leap.
It was developing some very satisfactory autumn colour but rain has taken the glow. The plant has slumped into autumn colour like a carpet of fallen
crab apples rotting under a tree. It seems replete with a promise that it will not deliver.
12th November 2023
Camellia 'November Pink'
Over the last decade I have been adding to the autumn flowering camellias in the garden. Although C. sasanqua is a delightful and reliable
autumn flowering species, it was this strange form of C. x williamsii that first attracted my attention. It is one of the
hybrids raised at Caerhays Castle and reliably produces flowers in the last months of the year. It isn't the strongest growing plant
but I have always felt that the sacrifice of vigour was a price worth paying in return for early flowers.
Unfortunately, when I first started feeling that I had very little experience of the extent of its loss of vigour. My first young plant went
straight into the garden and died shortly after. My next young plant went into a pot in the greenhouse and died when I tried to move it into the garden.
This is my third attempt, grown in a greenhouse until it was a decent size and then planted in a well protected site in the garden. It has been there for ten years now
and has grown to about three feet of loose straggle. However, it flowers in November as the season wibbles with uncertainty. It says in a gruff pink voice
to the stout cousins around it, "pull yourselves together chaps, we're off!"
12th November 2023
Nerine pudica
I have yearned for a sense of boldness and purpose in the garden this week. Some sign that the garden is master of the season rather than victim.
I thought that even the Nerine house might let me down. The last of the N. sarniensis cultivars have flowered. I have snapped off their stems
and dropped them on the floor to dry out. They will be removed when the risk of spreading virus among the plants has shrivelled as well.
I don't have a big problem with nerine virus at present, and I don't want to.
The cultivars of N. x versicolor are coming into flower but they are still more promise than reality. Only N. pudica
is looking triumphant, the white flowers challenge the arrival of dark evenings and gloomy weather.
I have several plants in the collection claiming to be N. pudica. This one came from Tale Valley Nursery and is the real thing.
I have used it as a parent several times to give broader tepals to the "sarniensis" type seedlings that I am raising.
When I look at it in the greenhouse now, I wonder if I have been chasing the wrong objective. Perhaps I should be trying to introduce the colour of
N. sarniensis into a plant the looked like N. pudica.
12th November 2023
Liquidambar styraciflua 'Worplesdon'
I was in the gardens at Wisley during the week, where the bright sunshine was still keeping dankness at bay.
It is the peak season for their mature Liquidambar trees. There is a moment in the autumn when they look perfect. It is difficult to identify it
when it arrives, but it is very obvious when it has passed.
My tree of 'Worplesdon' was it its best in the day or two after storm Ciaran passed through. When the sun shone through it, the whole tree lit up
like an ornament. I looked at it, and thought that it would be better after a few days, when the ruffled leaves had settled slightly. I was wrong,
a few days later the leaves had started to fall and the display has become thinner and thinner.
As the weather turns inexorably towards winter, autumn shows its most distinctive character. It is the season that only reaches a peak in the memory.
By the time I recognise it, the moment has passed.