JEARRARD'S HERBAL
15th December 2024
Dahlia purpusii .
The week has sat heavily on the garden. Dank days and dark nights have emphasised the weight of winter. There is a feeling of doom laden inevitability, as though no relief will ever come.
Back in the reckless years of my youth when I still cooked for pleasure and before the world of gastronomy could be summed up in the ping of the microwave, I made a rice pudding.
Unfortunately I forgot to include the sugar. I was left with a heavy, pallid, intimidating blob of mushy rice and there was nothing that could be done. Adding sugar after the event provided no relief.
The week in the garden has felt like that rice pudding, downtrodden and irredeemable.
Storm Darragh demonstrated that things aren't as bleakly inevitable as they seem. Last week I had a pine tree, then I had a fallen pine tree and now (thanks to a friend) I have a mountain of pine logs
and a view of the bright horizon. Things change and as often as not they change for the better.
Dahlia purpusii survived Darragh's ravages, at least on one side. The north wind shrivelled half of the bush and left the other half intact. At any moment we could get a frost
that will destroy a lot of the bright colours in the garden but the time is right. Dahlias in December are a dog-eared remembrance of the summer. By January they will be faintly ridiculous,
a pointless relic of pleasure, like the small change in your pocket after a foreign holiday.
15th December 2024
Acanthus sennii .
We haven't had a frost yet this season (and I don't care if we don't get one) but the garden will sigh with relief when it comes. Layer upon layer of speculative growth have piled up
in an increasingly unstable pile. The tottering weight of instability will be relieved by the first icy morning.
Beside the house, Acanthus sennii has three or four flower heads still spurting occasional scarlet blooms though the outrageous richness of colour has been washed out
with winter apology. It is protected by the house but it is not safe from the frost. The first icy morning will blacken all the growth and kill the stems to ground level.
I haven't yet found the perfect place for it in the garden. In the Agave house it is protected from the worst of the frost and grows long, straggling perennial stems
that flower weakly. In the wider garden it is cut to the ground and recovers only feebly the following year. On the south wall of the house it gets enough summer heat
to reach flowering size every year but it is never quite show-stopping.
Cold weather will not be welcome, but it will release the garden from these ghosts of autumn and open up the view to spring.
15th December 2024
Canarina canariensis .
Down in the greenhouse, Canarina canariensis has produced a single flower. I have no doubt that it is more generous when scrambling through the cloud forests of the Canary Isles
but I am happy with a flower. There is no sign of any further buds at present but perhaps in the new year. A lot depends on the weather. The greenhouse will hold off a couple of degrees of frost,
the Canarina stems will falter but not fail. A little more cold and the fragile stems will be destroyed for the year.
Canarina grows from a fleshy storage root, much like a dahlia. It comes into growth as the nerine flowers appear, in late August or September, and grows until cold weather ends the season.
In habitat it will grow right through the winter and only become dormant when the summer drought starts to threaten. In the UK, the season is much shorter.
In a normal year I worry that it won't have long enough in growth to nourish the tubers.
If we get a cold year, the greenhouse will not be enough to protect it. The tubers are sensitive to frost and this is my third plant, its predecessors succumbing to the cold in bad years.
15th December 2024
Camellia 'Show Girl' .
Camellia 'Show Girl' has provided the light for the week. It feels like the first pink touch of spring in the garden. It is a difficult case to assert because there have already been early
C. japonica flowers but they have been accidents, odd explosions of premature enthusiasm from sleeping plants. 'Show Girl' is different. She has started to flower
in the last days of December as she always does. She will continue into March getting better all the time, if only to demonstrate that this is no autumn camellia gone AWOL.
It is a strange thing to watch 'Show Girl' flowering in the same week that the pine tree fell. In a curious way both events have brought some brightness into the garden
but that it not the strange thing. The last large conifer that fell in the garden landed on top of 'Show Girl'. It has taken several years for her to recover.
She is taller now than she was before thanks to the extra light when the conifer fell. There will be a similar benefit where the pine tree once was.
At least there will be once I have cleared the cut logs out of the way.