As restrictions lift, I have been shopping. Plant nurseries have enjoyed excellent trade in the past year. Last April my first thought was that most of them would go bust as they had to lock down in the prime spring season for sales. Quite the opposite. Many of the best were quick to go online. As customers could not dine out, they scanned the internet and planted out instead. Distanced attendance at plant centres was then allowed. A flood of new gardeners descended on whatever was available.
The invaluable companion to unlocked shopping is the RHS Plant Finder, the catalogue-book of more than 80,000 different plants listed at nurseries in the UK (published by RHS Media; the 2020 edition, the current one, costs £11.29 on Amazon in paperback). It even has maps and acronyms of where to find them all.
For London and the surrounding area, look under the letter L near the back of the book and flick through the addresses and brief descriptions on offer, from Aylett Nurseries, marked “LAyl”, near St Albans, to Spring Reach Nurseries, “LSRN”, at Ockham, near Guildford.
Both are excellent destinations, Aylett being a major garden centre with very good stock and Spring Reach being a first-class source in Surrey of anything from shrubs to soft fruit, with an awareness of the importance of finding deer-proof and rabbit-proof plants.
Online at rhs.org.uk you can track down suppliers of any listed plant in the book, but I find the serial clicking around to be slower and less helpful than using the actual book. I have just bought Stachyurus praecox, a yellow-flowering shrub for early spring that I recommend if you have space for it. It grows slowly but steadily to about 7ft in height and a bit more in width. I needed a new one to replace one stripped of its lower bark and killed by rabbits.
On the website, two clicks take you to 36 suppliers of this plant, arranged alphabetically, and to pictures, necessarily small, of the shrub in flower, which give no idea of its scale or likely impact. Before long you are told in big print to join the RHS with an annual subscription.
I find it far quicker to look a plant up on the page of the printed Plant Finder, choose the topographic acronym nearest to my home (W is usually the one) and set straight off for it with the book in the car to stop me getting lost more often than twice. A flick into the Plant Finder then wings me on to the next nearby destination for a random visit, sometimes interestingly eccentric.
What have I been buying? On impulse I grabbed what promises to be a godsend, the newish lower-growing form of that rampant favourite Lavatera Barnsley, a tree mallow that grows up to 6ft high and as much across. The well-known Barnsley has pinkish flowers with a red eye and has long been a favourite despite its size. If you have a blank new garden or gaps between a widely spaced new planting of shrubs or trees, interplant them with Barnsley plants and you will have a mass of flower all summer.
For smaller gardens they are too coarse. Hence the excitement of Barnsley Dwarf, a newish find that stops at about 3ft. Like its bigger relation it will not live for ages, about five years being the usual maximum, but it is extremely easy to root from summer cuttings, even from cuttings stuck for part of their length into a glass of water.
Barnsley Dwarf is recommended as a shrub for big pots and so forth, exactly what I want. I cannot go on using lilies only for pots by the house all summer. Utterly lovely when in flower, they are a mess afterwards. I will move them offstage in their pots and retain Barnsley Dwarf mallows all summer as an alternative. In most winters they are hardy.
At a lower level, my double-flowered deep magenta red lychnis hated the winter rains. The single-flowered varieties of Lychnis coronaria have been around for years and self-seed freely, to the point of being a nuisance, but the double one is a winner. It was first noticed by Geoff Hamilton on one of his away days while filming for TV’s Gardeners’ World.
Lychnis coronaria Gardeners’ World is not only a reminder there was life before the presenter Monty Don. It has much more impact and much better manners than the single-flowered forms. The flowers are a strong deep colour on grey stems up to 2ft high and as they are double they last far longer. It is excellent in any sunny small garden even though the double form will not attract bees: much else will.
The one problem is that the Gardeners’ World one tends to die out in wet winters. I split off side bits in late summer and pot them on to keep a supply going. If not, I buy them on my springtime sally: hence my recent reacquisition.
Spring would not be spring without a shopping trip for small hardy plants too. Yearly I go to WHoo in the Plant Finder, Hoo House Nursery in Tewkesbury, run by Julie Ritchie, who grows everything herself in non-peat compost. Her well-potted alpines are the real things, but mostly easy ones to grow, slugs permitting.
On impulse I have just stocked up with some cushion-forming thrifts, armerias with flowers of pink and red. I have recently turned a bit of a slope into a plant-compatible bank by barrowing mixed compost and green waste on to it and smoothing it into a tidy gradient.
The thrifts can go into it with some lime-tolerant late-summer gentians, septemfida being the easy one, and a pale pink relation of wild cranesbill, Erodium Caroline. Last year the slope was a mess. This year I hope it will not be a botanical graveyard.
We all have bits of garden that can be made into something better: they keep us active and engaged with the future. Mine will now be punctuated with the pretty rosettes of a silvery saxifrage, Saxifraga Southside Seedling, which sends up great sprays of white flowers spotted with red in May.
Over the years I have sent several Southside Seedlings to the great garden in the sky, but not until I have had good seasons of flower from them all. WHoo provides plants for the next generation.
Plant-finding is a dream of a day out. The hedges of blackthorn have never had more flower. The dandelions look seductive and the grass has been edibly green. All I still need is a plant of a campanula that I once multiplied into 50, Campanula carpatica Blue Moonlight, a little edging plant with unique greyish-blue flowers.
Slugs bagged it all one winter and now, the true plant is hard to find. The specialists in campanulas, Bellflower Nursery, or EACa in the Plant Finder, are away near Bury St Edmunds and are not currently open to the public. If you know you have a bit of the real thing send it over in a padded envelope. Give me the moonlight and I will respond with something nearly as good.
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