I spent today learning about lilies under the auspices of Plant Heritage, at the garden at Fullers Mill. Since being scooped up by a pair of determined ladies from the Suffolk Plant Heritage group I've been to several of their events, and they have all been very good. Today was no exception. It was my second visit to Fullers Mill, and I was as enchanted as I was the first time. I'd go oftener if it wasn't such a long drive, the other side of Bury St Edmunds.
Apparently the Suffolk group put on a plant study day every year, but this was the first one I'd been on. Last year was about woody plants with my former employer, which both he and I would have found odd, and I'm not sure it even went ahead. I gather that take up from Plant Heritage members was not very high, but most people don't have room for that many trees in their garden, and by the time they reach an age to be supporting Plant Heritage activities they have probably planted most of those they are going to. On the other hand practically everybody could squeeze a couple of lilies in somewhere. They are such vertical plants, they can hover over other inhabitants of the border, or you can grow them in pots.
I don't know much about them, which was a very good reason to grow on the study day. I've had a few in pots over the years, and one orange flowered variety flourished in the small borders of our old house, but that's about it. The potted ones gradually dwindled, but I did not look after them very well, and anyway as Noel Kingsbury wrote the other day in the Telegraph, they tend to be ephemeral. Viruses and wet winters can see them off. I find the displays of lilies at Chelsea wonderful, in an overpowering way, while suspecting that the growing conditions in our garden would not generally be to their liking. And I am aware that the pollen is acutely toxic to cats. True, lots of things in the garden are poisonous to cats, and people too, but lily pollen is very sticky and if it gets on the cats' fur they will ingest it when they wash, which they have to do, whereas I trust them not to go about randomly chewing the leaves of Aconitum.
By the end of the day we'd covered growing conditions, pot culture, pests and diseases and propagation, instructed by the Fullers Mill gardeners and the chairman of the RHS lily group, been given fistfuls of handouts, consumed coffee and biscuits on arrival, sandwiches and fresh fruit at lunchtime, and tea and cake before being sent on our way with several packets of seed and a rooted scale in a pot. And a guided tour of the upper parts of the garden at Fullers Mill with the gardeners and Bernard Tickner, whose life's work it is. All this for fifteen quid. Gardens Illustrated and Garden Museum study days, eat your hearts out. Spaces on the course were limited to twenty, and I thought it was pretty mean that five people had not shown up on the day, and not let the organisers know so that they could fill the places. I think that next year they'll at least be charging up front instead of trustingly letting us pay on arrival.
One piece of bad news from my point of view is that many of the species I particularly liked do better on alkaline soil. The gardeners said encouragingly that I could always grow them in pots or go for the oriental hybrids, but I noticed they didn't grow many in pots themselves, and I didn't want plants with brightly coloured flowers the size of a plate. I have a lot of pots to look after already, and what I really fancied was lilies mid way back in the borders, where the cats wouldn't rub up against them, with wild looking flowers that would blend in with the general vibe of the garden. Or classically lily shaped trumpets, but they turned out to require alkaline soil.
Being realistic about it the borders are too full already, but I could grow lilies in the end of the wood, if I thought I had time to keep on top of the nettles and push the edge of the cultivated garden back slightly. And martagon lilies, which have dainty nodding flowers with swept back tips, like soil on the acid side, and unlike many lilies are said to be long lived, once they get established. And seed themselves, though they take six or seven years to reach flowering size. Seed, apparently, is the only way of propagating them, unlike other lilies which will grow new little bulbs from their individual bulb scales if you detach them, and that is why martagon lilies are so expensive. Which they are, and is one reason why I haven't made a serious attempt to grow them. Knowing that if I do plant some they should see me out instead of disappearing in a year or two makes me more inclined to try.
Looking at the garden at Fullers Mill helped crystallise some of my thoughts about my own. It is a superb garden, very relaxed and natural, but each plant is given space to the point of being grown in isolation, surrounded by a neat mulch of gravel or shredded bark, and one visitor said how nice it was to be able to see each plant properly. We are not going to do that. I like the jungly look, and for the ground to be covered so that annual weeds find it harder to get a toe hold and I can't see the horsetail. But stretches of our borders have got too crowded and heavy. I've been thinking that since early summer, as several of the roses toppled their iron supports and slumped out over the lawn. Next to them a herbaceous clematis has disappeared beneath a heap of roses and angelica seedlings, while a patch of Acanthus spinosus is running across the bed and sweeping all before it, including some oriental poppies 'Patty's Plum' that I haven't seen at all this year.
I asked the gardener how she kept their Acanthus to such modest, manageable clumps, and she said they were ruthless with a spade in the autumn, following it up with glyphosate if necessary. So there you have it, the relaxed and natural garden is a carefully managed illusion, kept in check and balance by determined intervention. I can see that I need to do a serious amount of pruning among the shrub roses this autumn, and take the pick axe to Acanthus spinosus.
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