trips to the Chatto gardens

I've been shopping a couple of times recently at the Beth Chatto nursery.  They are one of the few UK suppliers of a charming little drought resistant plant called Alyssum spinosum 'Roseum'.  It is a nice thing, with little grey leaves and pink flowers, and I had it in the garden years ago, grown from seed, but put it too close to one of the ivy hedges, and it was overwhelmed.  Since then I haven't seen seed offered again.  I saw a couple of plants growing at Rosemoor, the RHS garden in Devon, but they didn't have any seed, and anyway it would have been rather cheeky to take it, in case the RHS intended to harvest it themselves.  Instead I finally remembered to go and see whether the Chatto gardens actually had any for sale, and they had.  I bought three, which have now been planted out in the gravel, well away from anything large that could smother them.  I also picked up three Arenaria for the same spot, and some more large leafed saxifrages.

I am becoming intrigued by the possibilities of these shade tolerant plants.  I started with three London Pride tucked in next to the bole of the tree that isn't a swamp cypress, and was impressed by the inexorable spread of their evergreen, weed suppressing carpet in a dry and difficult corner.  When we were having our tea at Boxted Mill I heard the two ladies at the next table talking about gardening, and one was dismissive of London Pride, which she apparently had in the front garden and didn't like.  I don't know what her front garden was like, but do know that faced with a rooty, shaded spot under a tree, Saxifraga x urbium is a very useful plant, and I quite like its scalloped leaves and little clouds of flowers.  My original patch has spread as far as I want it to in some directions, and I have started experimenting taking off rooted pieces and starting them off around the bases of other shrubs.

Encouraged by the initial success of the London Pride, I bought three pots last year from Beth Chatto of something labelled Saxifraga 'Dentata', with longer, shinier, brighter green and more deeply toothed leaves.  I tried that in even deeper shade, and although it is only increasing slowly, it looks very healthy and is gradually spreading.  I have just seen that the RHS counts this as part of the London Pride Group.  It's a pleasant thing for a shady spot under shrubs where not a lot else will go, except for half hearted goose grass and elder seedlings, and worth trying, though there are only five suppliers listed in the country (but four of them do mail order).  I got a dark leafed evergreen variety called 'Hime' from the plant centre, where we were selling them as part of a bedding range for winter containers (they were singularly unpopular) and those have finally been planted at the base of the plinth for the head of the muse, where they should tone nicely with the dark grey terrazzo plinth (AKA inverted cylindrical flower pot), and make useful ground cover, if they take.  A couple more obscure varieties from Beth Chatto are now sitting in a box in the porch awaiting planting.  I visualise a whole saxifrage corner developing, and why not.

I went back today to have lunch with my parents (we were originally planning to go to the Henry Moore Foundation near Little Hadham, but the forecast was for rain) and before lunch picked up a white flowered skunk cabbage, Lysichiton camtschatcensis, to go in the damp seep by the new deck at the bottom of the garden.  I held off buying one last time, because there is a species with a yellow spathe from western North America, and one with a white spathe from northeastern Asia, and I knew that one was generally considered fragrant (in a good way) while the other justified the common name of skunk cabbage, and wasn't entirely sure which was which.  As you can guess (given that the Systems Administrator and I are not masochists and this thing is going by a seating area) the white is the sweet smelling one.  I noticed this morning, when I was checking something else, that Lysichiton is on the Plantlife list of invasive exotic species they don't want us to plant in our gardens, but since they say that most plants in the wild come from people dumping roots, and I am not planning to dump roots, and the RHS encyclopedia of perennials says that plants rarely set seed in this country, I'm not going to worry about that, even though Plantlife is an excellent charity, and I am a member.  I got an Osmunda regalis at the same time, a tall growing, deciduous fern that is happy sitting in boggy ground.

After lunch, and a walk round the gardens as by then it had almost stopped raining, I remembered that I'd meant to get some Glaucium flavum or horned poppy for the beach themed garden in the turning circle.  I've tried to germinate seed of this twice now, and never got even a single plant, so thought it was time to buy some plants, and maybe they'll seed themselves.  The Norfolk Wildlife Trust says that it has the largest seed pods of any British plant.  Its Wikipedia entry says that all parts of the plant are toxic and can produce a range of symptoms up to and including respiratory failure and death, although its main alkaloid component can also produce hallucinogenic visual effects.  I didn't know any of that when I bought it, but I wasn't planning to eat it anyway.  Then as I was there I added some Armeria juniperifolia for the gravel, a short leaved and short stemmed species of thrift I'd admired as we walked around the gardens, and have also tried to raise from bought seed in the past, with zero success.

Finally I added a peony Molly the Witch, for no good reason except that I once accidentally caught the incredibly brief flowering period of one at Wisley and was enchanted by it, and since I'm doing quite a lot of clearance in the back garden I'll manage to slot it in somewhere.  That is a bad basis on which to buy plants, and nowadays I do mostly start from the space I need to fill, and work backwards to find something that should work there.  One of the long-time staff was confused to see me going round the till for a second time, and I left before I could buy any more plants.

I spent the rest of the afternoon weeding the gravel in the turning circle.  It is a truth not universally acknowledged that Genista aetnensis, the Mount Etna Broom, drops an enormous quantity of thin twigs or leaves each winter (I'm not sure which they are, botanically speaking) and that if you have your broom growing in gravel you will spend a long time at some point in the year raking them up with your fingertips.  It should have been done earlier for tidiness sake, but I didn't have time.  Doing it now I can pull up the latest crop of creeping sorrel at the same time.  The Beth Chatto gravel garden has very little visible creeping sorrel, but I'm pretty sure that's because she has a supply of eager, supple young horticultural students to crawl about and pull it up for her.  If you ever read an article that says that gravel is weed suppressing and that gravel gardens are low maintenance then just skip the rest of it, once you get to that bit.  It isn't and they're not.