In 1597 John Gerard published his 'HERBALL OR GENERAL HISTORIE OF PLANTS'.In it he described all the plants he knew or grew.

Four centuries later a curious coincidence of names, and an ego the size of a small (or perhaps medium sized) whale, has inspired me to have a shot at it as well. A short site to catalogue my major plant interests at present (over the decades my interests have waxed and waned).

In general terms, I dislike coded information and self-important little symbols that huff and puff their way senselessly across the page like the shrapnel from a pomposity bomb.
As a consequence I probably repeat myself more often than an elegant or organised person would. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

This site is a work in perpetual progress, and I have just re-arranged everything alphabetically to impose some sort of order, but I am a chaotic grower, and this is not a perfect solution. Every now and then I change the way I have things organised in order to make the page easier to navigate and more efficient. Naturally, the major consequence of this is endless chaos. Sorry !

The main families I grow are listed here. Unfortunately, I am not very confortable with tidy limits , and tend to grow anything that catches my attention, so the real world is nowhere near as tidy as a simple list might imply.
While I am on the subject , I should add that I have obtained plants from a multitude of sources over the years, and occasionally these have turned out to be wrongly named. I would like to make it clear that I do not mean to imply any criticism of the supplier. I am quite confident that where errors have been made they are the result of accidents or genuine confusion around the name. There is enough nomenclatural confusion around without getting uptight about it.
I doubt my own naming of things is perfect ! If you have comments to add, please feel free to e-mail me.

I am working on the principle that a picture tells a thousand words, and including pictures as fast as I can , even when I have little intelligent text to add.
To be fair, a thousand words from me would bludgeon even quite a large pig into coma.

Click here if you want to e-mail me.
If the magic e-mail link doesn't work (as is sometimes the way with magic) then you can send it manually to incompetentjohn@johnjearrard.co.uk and entrust your message to the electron fairies.