a lecture

Today was the Essex branch of Plant Heritage's big annual lecture, the Helen Robinson Memorial Lecture.  It was held at Writtle College, in a lecture theatre that wasn't there in my time.  I wasn't entirely sure whether to go, since Writtle is on the far side of Chelmsford and the A12 is a horrible road, too small to cope with the volume of traffic and with slip roads that are too short for joining traffic to merge safely with the flow.  The resulting litany of multi-vehicle collisions and long tailbacks is reported in the local papers with grim regularity.

If it had been a nicer day I'd have probably stayed at home and got on with the garden, while if it had been a nastier day I'd have decided not to bother with the drive.  But as it was a Goldilocks, not too dry but not too windy and wet sort of forecast, I decided to go.  The speaker was Keith Wiley, who was for many years head gardener at the wonderful Garden House on the fringes of Dartmoor. The Systems Administrator and I visited it more than a decade ago, during a storm-bound sojourn in Plymouth, and I thought it was one of the best gardens I'd seen.  After Keith Wiley left there he created his own garden out of four acres of field, which from all that I've read was quite something, but alas, we have missed our chance to visit.  Having opened it is now closed again to the public, as he and his wife reshape it into something they stand a chance of maintaining in their later years without, as he put it, killing themselves.

I have got two of his books, one on his ideas for taking aesthetic inspiration for gardens from the natural landscape, and one about shade gardening, and enjoyed them both, but didn't actually know the title of today's talk.  It turned out to be more about mining the landscape for garden ideas than any particular group of plants, shade loving or otherwise, though his suggestions on copying ideas from overseas were tempered with sensible advice on considering your respective growing conditions before copying blindly.  Agapanthus look great underneath olive trees in Italy where light levels are higher, whereas in England they probably wouldn't flower in that much shade.

There was a plant stall in the lobby outside the lecture theatre, which threw me at first with its professional printed labels, so different to the handwritten ones at the Suffolk Plant Heritage plant stall, before I worked out that it was Keith Wiley's nursery and not Essex Plant Heritage.  I scooped up an Origanum dictmnus with tiny, furry leaves that was crying out to be planted in the gravel by the railway.  Apart from the pin sharp drainage, the Clacton coastal strip has some of the highest light levels in the UK, according to our neighbouring lettuce farmer on Radio 4's Food Programme. The Origanum is clearly concerned about conserving moisture in the face of drought and scorching sun, since as well as felted leaves the plant smells distinctly of aromatic oils, and I should think it will probably like life in the gravel better than in a plastic pot on the fringes of Dartmoor with 60 inches of annual rainfall.  I eyed up a very small seedling of a white flowered Watsonia as well, but dithered too long and somebody else snapped it up.

Addendum  There were tea and biscuits after the talk, but I made some toast when I got home to plug the gap until supper, having gone out too early to feel like much in the way of lunch.  I now know that the smoke alarm in the hall is still working, because it began to shriek as one edge of the toast caught very slightly.  What I don't understand is why it is so sensitive to burnt toast, when failed attempts to light the woodburner that fill the entire ground floor with a light miasma of wood smoke produce no response whatsoever.  The house could be burning and it wouldn't care, but we won't be killed in a toast fire for lack of warning.