Of all the gardens I visited during the July 2024 Garden Fling in Washington State’s Puget Sound region, I was completely smitten by the Seattle garden of Daniel Sparler and his husband Jeff Schouten. Located in the city’s Seward Park neighbourhood, they call it their “garden of exuberant refuge”, but I would add some more “E” words, besides the ones in my title. Like “excellent”, as in horticultural excellence; “ebullient”, as in cheerful and colourful; and “exotic”, as in featuring plants from many of the far-off places where Daniel has worked or visited, including East Asia, South Asia, South Africa, all over Latin America and the Mediterranean. So let’s start our tour at the front of the house and this collection of pots planted with cordylines, cannas, bananas, agapanthus and other choice treasures.
Daniel is the expert gardener — and writes a column called ‘Horticulturally Yours’ for the Northwest Horticultural Society — while Jeff has built the garden’s many structures and hardscape elements, like the painted concrete posts below. Sculpture is featured throughout this garden and whimsical elements occupy each nook and cranny.
I love this curved, purple wall that acts as backdrop and shelf while separating the patio from the plantings behind it.
Throughout the Pacific northwest, I’m blown away by the magnificent lilies in almost every garden. I realize I almost never leave our lakeside cottage north of Toronto in the summer months, so a July garden tour means seeing a cornucopia of horticultural riches.
Having visited our youngest son and his wife in Tuscany in early June where perfumed star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) grows on every arch and stone wall (in fact, we gave them this vine as a housewarming gift), it is fun to see it here in full bloom against a trellised pergola.
On a bench inside, a mossy Buddha invites a moment of tranquility.
And though I’m sure the garden has no shortage of the real things, a menagerie of toy frogs and lizards surround the Buddha.
Metal woodpeckers climb the stem of the windmill palm.
A gravel path is edged with a long line of moss-covered, concrete columns, many topped by a bromeliad or succulent.
The fun of Daniel and Jeff’s garden is the effort they’ve made in creating so many artful delights for the eye, like this pile of beautiful slag grass in its rebar cage next to a column topped with glass art pieces.
Along the path, a lily offering sits before a Shiva
Whimsical bamboo vases on the trellis hold allium seedheads and a coiled visitor of the non-venomous variety.
A green ceramic ball partners with a beautiful houseleek (Aeonium arborescens).
On the north side of the 1952 brick house which Daniel and Jeff bought in 1992, a path winds past shade lovers arrayed around an interesting mask-decked iron screen.
As Daniel said in a video online about the garden: “My philosophy of gardening is pretty simple. A garden should be authentic. Which means it should reflect as accurately as possible the values, experiences and even the whims of the gardeners.”
Further along the path we see shade-lovers such as Tasmanian tree fern (Dicksonia antarctica), Chinese mayapple (Podophyllum pleianthum), astilbes, hostas and other shade and moisture lovers.
Isn’t this a beautiful vignette? That’s a shrubby St. Johnswort (Hypericum androsaemum) in the centre with the glossy Chinese mayapple.
In the back garden, dense plantings edge a flagstone patio.
A potted ponytail palm (Beaucarnea recurvata) mulched with polished glass stones tops a concrete post.
Daniel and Jeff built this viewing pavilion in 2007, the perfect place to contemplate the garden, martini in hand. We are fortunate to visit on the one day the white epiphyllum cactus is in bloom. Behind is an 80-foot tall blue eucalyptus (E. glaucescens), the sole survivor of the original 14 species acquired by Daniel in an early fit of “eucalypt fever”. As he wrote in an Oct. 2022 column called “Eucalpytus: Gumming up the Garden”, “Within a few years the tally had withered by two-thirds as several were either slain by sudden, brutal cold snaps (as in November 2010) or deliberately killed by Yours Truly once I awoke to the reality of their obstreperous nature.”
I find the owners of this fabulous 1/3-acre garden holding court in the back. Daniel Sparler, below, is a retired teacher of humanities and Spanish at Seattle’s Northwest School. Apart from his writing, he also teaches Botanical Latin for the Northwest Horticultural Society.
Dr. Jeff Schouten is a physician, associate professor at the University of Washington, and former director of HANC (HIV/AIDS Network Coordination Center) at Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center.
Back to the garden and its gorgeous plants: of course, there are hydrangeas here, as there are all over the Puget Sound gardens on our tour.
And a nicely-grown tiger flower (Tigridia pavonia).
In the gravel garden is a ghostly eryngium with a very distressed-looking gargoyle and a pair of blue Dustin Gimbel ceramic cacti.
A pot containing a ‘Snow Leopard’ mangave (Agave) sits in the gravel garden surrounded by blue glass art.
And in a place of honour on a table nearby sits the spiral cactus Cereus spiralis ‘Forbesii’.
Breadseed poppy (Papaver somniferum) seedheads form near an indigo-blue obelisk, part of the ‘blue garden’ vibe in this part of the property.
It’s my first time seeing double tiger lily (Lilium lancifolium ‘Flore Pleno’), just one of more than 4,600 taxa that Daniel has amassed in what has been described as a terminal case of “Compulsive Plant Collecting”!
Speaking of plant collecting, I stop to marvel at the shelves of cacti and succulents against the house wall…
…. and occupying a ledge and every step of the stairs, along with the resident dinosaurs.
Bordering the path in the sunny, south-facing side-yard is a pot containing Agapanthus Twister (‘AMBIC001’), my favourite agapanthus. It was selected in 2008 by Quinton Bean of De Wet Aloe Farm in South Africa, a single, bicoloured plant from a complex cross involving A. pracecox subsp. orientalis and A. campanulatus.
A beautiful solanum (S. crispum ‘Glasnevin’, I believe) is in full flower on this side.
Agaves and aloes enjoy the reflected heat from the house.
Jeff has adorned an octagonal concrete post with coloured tiles, creating a fancy perch for the winged griffin and an eye-catching background for the plants at its base, including a pot holding a restio AND a cordyline!
The pendant flowers of Fuchsia boliviana ‘Alba’ catch my eye here.
Daniel and Jeff are rightfully proud of the compost that nurtures their garden, so I stop to pay homage.
Circling back to the front (I think…. it’s a little confusing in a garden so densely planted), I come to the striking, above-ground, concrete pool. Constructed in 2002 to replace a large, naturalistic pond they had built in the 90s that had become too difficult to maintain, this, I think, is Jeff’s masterpiece. The fact that I’m crazy about chartreuse in the garden might be a factor! It’s adorned with its own crocodile….
….. and a flotilla of coloured glass balls.
I’m also a fan of purple accents in the garden, so I love this handsome bench.
A pot of tillandsia on a moss, tile-adorned post would have been impressive, but why not encircle it with a snake and add a lizard, too?
I think I’ve circled around the house again, because the blue glass agave on its painted post is part of that ‘blue garden’ theme.
As is the blue Hydrangea serrata.
Himalayan maidenhair fern (Adiantum venustum) cascades gracefully over a mossy rock.
Scent is important in this part of the garden and rubrum lily (L. speciosum var. rubrum) adds lots of perfume.
A bumble bee forages in a dahlia flower. Singles and semi-doubles like this variety are popular with pollinators, who cannot access the stamens and nectaries of the fluffy doubles that many gardeners like.
Phormium ‘Jester’ pops up behind dark dahlia foliage.
It’s impossible to capture all the amazing plants and vignettes in our short visit, like this big schefflera.
There are bromeliads mixed in, including this Vriesea splendens.
A Rex begonia gets the star treatment with its circle of green slag glass — the honour, according to Daniel, owing to the fact that it miraculously survived the terrible January deep-freeze.
There’s an inner child in all of us and the Garden of Exuberant Refuge embraces that notion fully.
A broken clay pot in a sea of ferns becomes a vehicle for a waterfall of green slag glass.
As I head back to the bus to continue our tour of fine Seattle gardens, my final image in this garden of delights is a perfectly pink lily.
Thank you Daniel Sparler and Jeff Schouten. May your abundant, exuberant garden continue to be a place of beauty and refuge for years to come.
In the past decade, I’ve had the great joy of travelling in the United States — along with dozens of other garden writers and photographers from far and wide — to participate in an event called the Garden Fling. It’s allowed me to see the finest private and public gardens in Washington DC, Austin, Denver and Philadelphia. This year the Fling was centred in Washington State’s Puget Sound region, and was organized by Camille Paulsen, with help from a fine team of volunteers from Tacoma and Seattle and her own husband Dirk. So my first blog honours the gorgeous Paulsen garden in Puyallup, Washington overlooking the Orting Valley and lofty Mount Tahoma/Rainier. Let’s begin at the handsome entrance to the front door……
…… where you can already see Camille’s penchant for textural plant combinations, especially in shade.
The front garden also features a waterfall and tiny stream….
…. leading to a large, naturalistic pond stocked with koi. Dirk Paulsen, an airline captain, has done much of the hardscaping and woodworking in the garden.
Start walking the path through the side-yard to the right of the house and you come to a large, gnarled log that Camille found in her travels nearby and had delivered to the garden. (She uses driftwood, too.) In its hollow end is western maidenhair fern (Adiantum aleuticum).
Moss grows in nooks and crannies along the log and beneath it is are ferns, hostas and other plants – demonstrating Camille’s deft touch with texture.
I love this hollowed-out, hanging birch log planted with orchids and a staghorn fern.
Hardy impatiens (I. omeiana) is one of countless plants chosen for season-long foliage interest, even when out of flower.
I believe this is lovely Japanese maple is A. palmatum ‘Butterfly’.
Further along, keeping company with a rhododendron and ferns, is a variegated dove tree (Davidia involucrata ‘Lady Sunshine’).
Camille has shared online that her garden contains approximately one hundred Japanese maples and an equal number of conifers. That’s serious ‘collector’ level!
This basalt rock fountain is one of many water features in the Paulsen garden.
Rodgersia was bearing rosy-red seedheads.
Another gnarled stump offers a niche for ferns and succulents.
Camille had lots of pressure with two buses full of garden tourists, four days of carefully orchestrated scheduling and her own garden to prepare, but she handled it with aplomb – and a beautiful smile.
Tahoma or Mount Rainier is an active 14,411-foot (4,392 metre) stratovolcano and the highest peak in Washington State. The view from the Paulsen garden is spectacular – especially when Camille captures it on a clear day. (My so-so view was on a very hot day when there was haze above the snowy peak and the nearby Orting Valley). Though its last volcanic activity was in the 19th century, it has been called a “Decade Volcano”, one of 16 worldwide so named because of its potential destructive eruption capacity and its proximity to densely-populated regions. In fact, many of the surrounding communities are built atop old “lahars” from Rainier, i.e. volcanic mudflows triggered by melting of the mountain’s glacial ice. The most famous was the Osceola Mudflow some 5,000 years ago.
The closer view at this point, glimpsed through drifts of Mexican feathergrass and an iron sculpture, is a lower level swimming pool below the ferny, wine-red foliage of Albizia ‘Summer Chocolate’ .
Colourful dahlias in a raised bed light up the area behind the house.
Corten planters behind Camille’s greenhouse hold a mix of culinary herbs and flowers.
More pots feature tropicals and succulents.
It’s not surprising that in the land of renowned, Tacoma-born glass artist Dale Chihuly, colourful blown-glass ornaments play a role in many Puget Sound gardens, including these pendants hanging from a ‘Twisty Baby’ black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia).
Stone stairs lead to the swimming pool level – a journey past more maples, rhododendrons, ferns and shade plants.
I like the chunky bamboo railing leading to the lower level.
As I said, Camille’s garden is one of the finest examples I’ve seen of textural plant combinations, including white-flowered chameleon plant (Houttuynia cordata) and variegated Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum odoratum ‘Variegatum’) with ferns, hostas and tiny succulents.
One of my favourite vignettes features foliage of a variegated ginkgo (G. biloba ‘Variegata’).
The lower level features a naturalistic pond edged with mossy flagstones, overhung by trees with moss-covered branches. Bamboo makes interesting reflections in the water. (Sadly for the photographers but happily for everyone else, the sun shone bright in a blue sky for much of our Puget Sound visit).
Camille has collected delightful windchimes.
With so much water in the garden, engineering the journey over it is important, and this handsome stone slab does a beautiful job of moving people through.
Tucked into a garden on the swimming pool level are touches of blue and purple, including Clematis ‘Rooguchi’ and big-leaf hydrangea (H. macrophylla).
Azure-blue pots and hedging surround the swimming pool….
…. and the iron fence is cleverly disguised by a weeping blue Atlantic cedar (Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca Pendula’) trained along it.
Even the garden furniture fits a pretty colour palette.
Colocasia and canna bring the tropics poolside, along with a dark-leaved begonia.
Abyssinian banana (Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’) occupies another pot.
The pool fence has a raised planter shelf with pots of succulents.
On the other side of the house, geometric stone flags set into a corten-edged grit path create a sinuous walkway past still more shade-loving plants.
A luminous golden fullmoon maple (Acer shirasawanum ‘Aureum’) lights up the shadows here.
The stone flags give a Mondrian feeling to this path.
A stone face sculpture is nestled between a Fatsia japonica and a dark-leaved persicaria.
Coming back to the front garden, I sit and chat in a pergola with a friend from Maine, but my eye catches another of Camille’s sweet windchimes. It’s a garden I would dearly love to have spent many hours chronicling (without having to dodge a hundred fellow enthusiasts while shooting), but it has been a great delight to be here. Thank you, Camille and Dirk, for sharing it with us.
For a Canadian gardener in London in May to visit the Chelsea Garden Show (see my first and second blogs) and later the Chelsea Physic Garden and the Wildflower Moat at the Tower of London, it was a pleasure to climb out of our Uber on the far side of the Thames near the impressive gate of the Garden Museum. If it felt a little like attending a church service, that’s because the modern museum was constructed inside the deconsecrated Church of St. Mary at Lambeth. Although a church at the site was mentioned in William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book of 1086, it was erected in its present form in 1377, with the interior largely rebuilt in 1851. In 1638, when the famed plant hunter and gardener John Tradescant the Elder died, he was buried in the churchyard. In 1662, when his son John Tradescant the Younger died, his widow Hester arranged for an ornately-decorated tomb, which we’ll see later. Vice-Admiral William Bligh resided nearby on Lambeth Road; having lived through the 1789 mutiny on his ship HMS Bounty, he died in 1817 and his tomb is also here. Second World War bombs broke the 1888 altar donated by Sir Henry Doulton of Royal Doulton Ceramics fame and damaged the stained glass windows. Though an estimated 26,000 burials occupied the site, most were re-interred elsewhere when the dilapidated church was declared redundant in 1972, its riverside neighbourhood including historic Lambeth Palace, the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, then somewhat sad and derelict. Within 4 years, it was boarded-up and ready to be demolished.
Enter Rosemary and John Nicholson who visited in the 1970s to see the Tradescant’s gravestone and were shocked to see the church’s condition and what was about to happen. They founded the Tradescant Trust to develop a Museum of Garden History, opened in 1977, and save both the tombstone and the church. Between 2008 and 2017, the Museum underwent two stages of renovations to erect a sleek, modern infrastructure and mezzanine within the stone walls of the old church; to add a new gallery and café; and to develop gardens around its exteriors. It was also renamed The Garden Museum. The front garden near the entrance was designed by former architect-turned-garden-designer Christopher Bradley-Hole, while Dan Pearson was commissioned to create a garden in a courtyard occupied by a formal 1980 knot garden designed by Tradescant enthusiast and then-President of the Museum of Garden History, Lady Mollie Salisbury. But I knew little of the history as I wandered along the gravel paths among the tombstones in the front garden, where Bradley-Hole created lovely combinations of pale yellow-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium striatum) and Turkish sage (Phlomis russeliana), silver curry plant (Helichrysum italicum) and pink Madeira Island geranium (G. palmatum).
Parts of the front garden look almost wild, like this pretty combination of Serbian bellflower (Campanula poscharskyana)and Mexican fleabane (Erigeron karvinskianus).
Foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) pop up here and there.
The churchyard provides an oasis of green in the neighbourhood, flanked by St. Mary’s Garden and a row of plane trees beyond the iron fence. More on that later.
Intriguing raised gardens hinted at the exhibition we would see in the museum.
I loved the way the ancient church architecture nestled seamlessly within the modern finishes.
This alabaster wall monument within the Pelham Chapel honours a young soldier – the fourth son of Francis Godolphin Pelham, Earl of Chichester and Rector of the parish 1884-94 – who died in France in the First World War.
Garden books for sale were displayed under wall monuments to 18th and 19th century clergymen. The gift displays featured painted lampshades and bases by ‘Bloomsbury Revisited’, artisans inspired by the work of the museum’s featured artists, including Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.
Another gift display in the museum.
Museum displays are found throughout the building, including this reproduction Wardian Case, invented in the mid 1800s by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward to create optimal conditions for the transport of plant collections on long ship voyages.
The permanent collection at the Garden Museum features artifacts related to all aspects of gardening, including this display of vintage seed packets.
“Gardeners at War” traces the history of government-mandated gardening initiatives through the Boer War, WWI and the “Dig for Victory” program of WWII.
I found the write-up on horticulturist Ellen Willmott, right, fascinating; it inspired me to look up her Wiki page which ended with: “Willmott’s prodigious spending during her lifetime caused financial difficulties in later life, forcing her to sell her French and Italian properties, and eventually her personal possessions. She became increasingly eccentric and paranoid: she booby-trapped her estate to deter thieves, and carried a revolver in her handbag.” Something to ponder the next time you gaze on that silvery giant sea holly, Eryngium giganteum ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’.
I adored this 1960 painting by the renowned society photographer/fashion designer Cecil Beaton titled “Cutting Garden Flowers”.
The first of these prints by prolific illustrator James Sowerby (1757-1822) looked so familiar – since I collect botanical prints of campanulas, including one from Sowerby’s Botany. He is buried nearby in Lambeth.
A spectacular juxtaposition of garden tools with a stained glass window.
Gertrude Jekyll’s c.1840 desk sits under her portrait.
Then it was into the temporary exhibit – a delightful collection of paintings, writings and artifacts titled “Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors”, featuring Lady Ottoline Morrell, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. As the museum stated: “Ottoline Morrell described Garsington Manor as a kind of ‘theatre’ for social gatherings, and during the First World War she offered her home as a farm that would provide employment for conscientious objectors and pacifists”. Artists and writers who visited Garsington including Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler and John Nash had work in this exhibit.
Vanessa Bell was Virginia Woolf’s sister. She and her lover, artist Duncan Grant, renovated a wild garden at a Sussex farmhouse called Charleston, which would become their outdoor studio. As the Charleston website says: “Charleston became the country home of the Bloomsbury group, with artists, writers and intellectuals making regular visits to the rural home in Sussex. Bell and Grant’s domestic and creative partnership would endure for 50 years, and, although Grant’s sexual relationships were generally with men, they had a child, Angelica, together in 1918. Despite their close partnership, Bell and Grant maintained creative and romantic connections with other people…”
Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard moved to Monk’s House, a 16th century cottage overlooking the Sussex Downs, after the First World War; she would remain here until her suicide in 1941. Near the garden they built, she had a writing lodge where, according to the exhibit signage: “she infused her prose with the sensory intensity and mysterious life of the natural life surrounding her, interwoven with gardens from her memory and imagination.” Monk’s House would be a place of retreat from the London world of Bloomsbury and solace for Virginia in her times of severe depression.
I was fortunate to visit Sissinghurst for the second time in 2023 and wrote a blog then about the garden and Vita Sackville-West called “Sissinghurst in Vita’s ‘Sweet June’”, so it was a pleasure to see in living colour the 1918 painting of her by William Strang. This part of the exhibit included photo albums and some of Vita’s journals including….
….. this one, noting changes she wanted made to her garden with its dark rosemary hedge which could be improved by removing the santolina and replacing with a foreground planting of orange roses, Iceland poppies and tiger lilies.
We were looking forward to going outdoors to the new garden but stopped to watch a little video. The segment with Ken Ralph of Canewdon, shown below, was particularly poignant – since Ken is a tradescantia breeder and he aimed to create a “Chelsea standard” tradescantia for the reopening of the Garden Museum, whose development began with a visit to the Tradescant family tomb and creation of the Tradescant Trust.
Then we went downstairs and out into the new courtyard garden with its funerary muse, the Tradescant chest tomb. An 1853 replacement of the 1773 replacement for Hester Tradescant’s original 1662 commission for her husband, botanist and plant collector John Tradescant the Younger (1608-62), it also commemorates his father, the great plant collector John Tradescant the Elder (1570-1638), his wife Jane, his daughter-in-law Hester and his grandson John. It is ornately carved with references to nature reflecting The Ark, their family museum, now recalled in a gallery of the same name in the Garden Museum. Wrote Owen Moore in a 2017 article in The Guardian: “In the Ark, the cabinet of curiosities that they created by their home in Lambeth, south London – and which became the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford – they brought together the natural, the artificial and the supernatural: carvings on cherry stones, seashells, the cradle of Henry VI, a stuffed crocodile, religious objects, talismans. This was more than whimsical mixology: it was a view of the world based on the connectedness of things.” There is much more information on the Tradescants and their 17th century museum nearby on this blog.
Backing up a little, we now see the Tradescant tomb at the edge of the courtyard garden created by Dan Pearson for the museum’s reopening in 2017. Surrounding it are new pavilions, their walls clad in bronze tiles, separated by a cloister. One pavilion hosts the garden’s lovely café, whose seating extends out into the garden.
In 2023, I visited Hillside, the Somerset garden Dan Pearson shares with his partner Huw Morgan and wrote a blog about that delightful day. Here at the Garden Museum, as he wrote in Nov. 2018 in his newsletter Dig Delve, he looked initially at abstracting Lady Salisbury’s knot garden, but decided instead with his usual brio to invoke the plant collectors’ memory: “With the exploits of the Tradescants as inspiration, it was a small step to imagine this courtyard as a giant Wardian case – an aquarium-like structure invented in the 19th century to transport exotic and delicate new plant discoveries long distances by sea in a protected environment. The glassy cloister, our metaphorical Wardian case, allowed us to present a garden of curiosities and treasures.”
In the centre of the courtyard garden is the 1817 tombstone of Vice-Admiral William Bligh, who lived at 100 Lambeth Road a few blocks from the church. Having survived the 1789 mutiny on his ship HMS Bounty in the South Pacific in which he and 19 loyal crew members were set adrift in the ship’s open launch, he sailed 3,500 nautical miles, with stops enroute in Tonga and Australia, to the Dutch colony of Timor where passage back to England was arranged. To the left of the tombstone is honey bush (Melianthus major), to the right is a schefflera from plant hunter Bleddyn Wynn-Jones at Crûg Farms Nursery and Nandina domestica with its red berries.
I liked this dramatic pairing of autumn fern (Dryopteris erythrosora) and Geranium macrorrhizum ‘White Ness’.
The big palmate leaves of rice paper plant (Tetrapanax papyrifer ‘Rex’) frame the stained glass window of the church.
Then it was time for lunch. We had no reservation (highly advised) but were seated quickly. The menu was varied but my choices were absolutely delicious: an asparagus-goat cheese tart and butter lettuce salad with rosemary focaccia and a glass of white.
As we left the Garden Museum, we stopped at some signs inside describing the current initiative to create a garden complex outside the churchyard. “We have restored the church and made a garden and now we want to make Lambeth Green again.”
Lambeth Green is the next step in this community revitalization.
Walking out of the museum, we strolled along the path of St. Mary’s Garden adjacent to the churchyard. This is a lovely, public community space. You can see the Lambeth Bridge over the Thames in the distance. When Lambeth Green goes ahead, it will incorporate and transform this space and a reconfigured traffic roundabout.
And we took a final glance back through the foxgloves and euphorbia at the old church, looking the same on the outside but wearing its shiny new museum clothes on the inside.
It was a showery May 26th morning as we crossed the Tower Bridge over the Thames while watching for the first competitors in the LondonRide bicycle race to charge across the finish line just beyond. The bridge opened on June 30, 1910 after sixteen years of construction — 800 years newer than the crenellated White Tower, seen through the bridge’s struts at left, which was built by William the Conqueror in 1078 and finished after his death around 1100. The oldest castle in England, it sits behind battlements at the centre of the Tower of London Fortress, along with the Waterloo Barracks containing the Crown Jewels and the old Mint. But we were crossing the bridge to visit the moat encircling the Tower and its spectacular show of wildflowers.
On the embankment of the Thames in front of the Tower, interpretive signage greets visitors, highlighting moments in English history. This portrait of Elizabeth I (1533-1603) is a reminder that royalty has always been a point of intrigue in Great Britain, though much more dramatic than in modern times. The daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife Anne Boleyn, she was just 2 years old when her mother was beheaded by the king, the first execution of a queen of England. She would assume the throne after the 1558 death of her half-sister, Mary Queen of Scots, daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife Catherine of Aragon, and rule England and Ireland for 44 years as “Good Queen Bess”.
The Yeoman Warders – the “Beefeaters” – who guard the Tower and have apartments within the complex are also featured on signage.
The closely-shorn lawn at the Tower’s southwest corner near Byward Tower is part of the original dry moat, but a much tamer version of the wildflower moat beyond. As the sign in the photo above said, it was once used as a bowling green by the Tower’s residents; its sunny aspect mean it was also used for growing vegetables. Note the cross-shaped “arrow slits” in the fortification walls.
The moat wasn’t always dry, of course. It was fed by the River Thames, below, and extended in 1285 by King Edward I to keep potential attackers at a distance. Fifty metres (164 feet) wide in places and very deep at high tide, it was also stocked with pike to be farmed for the fortress residents. In fact, wicker fish traps from the 15th or 16th century were found by archaeologists, complete with fish skeletons. But around 1843, a deadly, water-borne infection struck, believed to be caused by the “putrid animal and excrementitious matter” of the moat at low tide. So the Duke of Wellington ordered the moat drained and turned into a defensive dry ditch or “fosse”. Dry it would remain until January 7, 1928 when heavy rain caused the Thames to overflow its banks and flood the moat, allowing photographers to briefly capture how it looked when filled with water. During the Second World War, it was used as an allotment Victory Garden for the residents. By the way, that pointed skyscraper on the south side of the Thames is The Shard, the tallest building in the UK at 1,016 feet (309 m).
We watched as a Yeoman Guard began his guided tour of the Tower in the wildflowers of the moat. Unlike those tourists who headed inside the walls, I was content to spend my entire visit in the flowers.
The 2024 version of the “Moat in Bloom” I saw was two years after the Superbloom of 2022, part of the 4-month-long Platinum Jubilee celebrating the 70-year reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II, who acceded to the throne on February 6, 1952 upon the death of her father, King George VI. Here we see the artistry of both landscape architect Andrew Grant of Grant Associates and planting designer Nigel Dunnett, Professor of Planting Design and Urban Horticulture at the University of Sheffield and founder of the seed firm Pictorial Meadows in 2003, who collaborated under Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) to transform the moat into what Grant called “a joyous shout out for change; a marker in how we can move forward in the way we think about and manage our heritage for the benefit of future generations“. In the photo below taken from the public area near the ticket entrance above the moat, we see how Grant designed the willow-edged cutouts in the moat to mirror the arched windows in Mount Legge, the northwest tower in the outer fortification wall (all the towers have names and histories). We also see the descendants of the 20-million wildflower seeds of 48 species and 16 seed mixes sown originally for Superbloom.
Long before Superbloom, Nigel Dunnett had established his reputation with the 2012 planting at the London Olympic Park; the Buckingham Palace Diamond Garden for the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne; a 2013 redesign of The Barbican complex in London with drought-tolerant, perennial steppe species; a Gold-Medal-winning rooftop design for the 2013 Chelsea Flower Show; and his stunning ‘Grey to Green’ landscape work with the industrial city of Sheffield beginning in 2014 and continuing today, and many other projects to beautify the public realm. As for the moat, the scene below could be an Impressionist painter’s canvas! In fact, Nigel Dunnett was inspired by pointillism, especially the work of artist Georges Seurat, as he wrote on the original Superbloom design process in his Instagram account. “These brilliant and analytical explorations of colour relationships… were pivotal in the design development of the seed mixes and their spatial arrangement. The precise selection of individual colours, their proportions, densities and distributions give rise to the larger scale impression. It’s just a small leap to make the connection to meadows and naturalistic planting.” To accomplish this with technology, Dunnett used pixel diagrams as abstractions to create the colour balance and mix proportions with flower seeds.
Then it was time to take the curving path through this magical moat meadow, its exuberance held at bay by low willow wattle fencing produced by Wonderwood Willow in Cambridgeshire. Wrote Nigel Dunnett: “The 2022 Superbloom was a catalyst, a tipping point for this permanent transition of the moat, which must be Central London’s largest and most prominent ‘wilding’ project. It was great to see people down in the moat as part of the everyday visitor experience to the Tower – before 2022 these were inaccessible monotonous mown lawns.”
In certain places, perennials such as yellow-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium striatum), lambs’ ears (Stachys byzantina) and magenta Knautia macedonica flower alongside the annuals.
The white form of biennial rose campion (Lychnis coronaria ‘Alba‘) added its silvery foliage while lilac Scabiosa columbaria was attracting loads of bumble bees.
This is Bombus terrestris, the common buff-tailed bumble bee sharing a scabious bloom with a hover fly.
A number of benches are placed at intervals throughout the moat.
My three menfolk, husband Douglas, London-based son Doug and his partner Tommy were blown away by the beauty of the moat in bloom. And of course we needed a selfie!
Readers who know my interest – and the name of this blog – know I love to focus on colour. But meadows are also a great passion with me, tracing back to my childhood on Canada’s mild west coast. I talked about this at the beginning of my 2017 two-part blog on Piet Oudolf’s design for the entry garden at the Toronto Botanical Garden: “Piet Oudolf: Meadow Maker“. More than anything else, this is my favourite style of garden, its wildness as vital as its colour associations. Nigel Dunnett also felt this attraction as a child: “From as long as I can remember, I have been inspired by the wild; by the experience of nature. It’s an emotional response. Some of my earliest memories are of being in beautiful flowering meadows, or woodlands in the spring full of wildflowers, and it’s these more intimate or human-scale associations that perhaps made a stronger impression than big dramatic wide landscapes and scenery. That emotional response was, and is, strongly positive: provoking hugely uplifting and joyful feelings.” Below we see various colours of California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) along with blue cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus).
I was fortunate to be in the moat when the poppies and cornflowers, below, were at their very best.
Here we see annual yellow corn marigolds (Glebionis segetum formerly Chrysanthemum) with the California poppies and cornflowers.
We were all competing to see who could get the best photo of…..
…. bumble bees on pollen-rich corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas).
Mauve and white corncockle (Agrostemma githago) is one of my favourite annuals. In fact, I grew it from seed in a big pot this year, along with corn poppies.
In places, the path was marked by drilled bamboo posts threaded through with rope.
A profusion of scentless Mayweed or chamomile (Matricaria inodora) along with oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) created drifts of starry white throughout the moat. White bishop’s flower (Ammi majus) had not yet started to bloom here, but I saw that beautiful umbel as the star of another Pictorial Meadows seed mix garden at the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh in late August 2022, next photo.
I think this meadow was my favourite part of our visit to RBG Edinburgh. It is the Classic mix in the Pictorial Meadows brochure.
Back to the moat. Circling the northwest Mount Legge fortification tower built in the 13th century, it’s interesting to contrast it with The Shard, built eight centuries later. The blue flowers at right are blue thimble-flower (Gilia capitata). In the original Superbloom seed mix, Nigel Dunnett used washes of blue flowers to recall the water of the original moat fed by the River Thames.
Here is another view of this combination.
Is it possible I love Gilia capitata?
A little further down this path, some grasses have made their presence felt, creating a softening of the wildflower scene. Although most of the original Superbloom annuals have reseeded in the subsequent two years, additional reseeding and top-ups are now managed by the Tower of London garden team.
Gilia capitata from California is very attractive to the European buff-tailed bumble bee, Bombus terrestris. For me, this is yet more evidence of a scenario I’ve found in my photographic journey over the past three decades: bees need protein and carbohydrates, they don’t check the native provenance of plants when they’re foraging for food. Protein is protein; sugar is sugar. Obviously, a large population of native plants will appeal to the pollinators that co-evolved in the ecosystem. But if the ecosystem is degraded, i.e. if urban development has scattered native plant communities, bees will secure food from whatever plants are available.
Historic Royal Palaces is keen on messaging about pollinators in the moat. This year’s flowering is still the “ghost of Superbloom”, but as Nigel Dunnett notes the plan is “for the final transformation into a biodiverse habitat landscape based on native plant communities to happen in 2025.”
Oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) attracts short-tongued pollinators, including various types of hoverflies.
I was delighted to see plantain (Plantago major) in the moat, because even as an invasive weed at the edge of my meadows in Canada, it attracts lots of bees seeking pollen.
Corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) are a mainstay in the moat – as they are in fields of Europe, and as they were in the battlefields in John McCrae’s famous World War One poem. “In Flanders fields, the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row,/That mark our place.“
Though the initial soil for Superbloom was engineered for the site and free of weed seeds, two years on the odd adventitious weed species has found a home here, like the yellow sow-thistle (Sonchus arvensis), which was also attracting its share of pollinators.
Corncockle (Agrostemma githago) and corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) make fine companions.
Biennial blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta ‘My Joy’) was just coming into bloom.
Here and there, violet larkspur (Consolida ajacis) towered over the wildflower tapestry.
Though they have no nectar, poppies offer abundant pollen, like this California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) feeding a marmalade hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus).
Shirley poppies are a special seed strain of corn poppy, Papaver rhoeas featuring different colours, like white, pink (below), lilac and bicolour, some with semi-double petals and no black blotch near the stamens. They were selected originally by Reverent William Wilks, vicar of the parish of Shirley, England, who spent several years beginning in 1880 hybridizing the wild poppies in the fields near his garden to obtain the strain of poppies bearing his name.
Interpretative signage keeps visitors informed of Historic Royal Palaces’ plan for the moat.
Small scabious (Scabiosa columbaria) is a big draw for pollinators.
The buff-tailed bumble bee (Bombus terrestris) is Europe’s most common bumble bee.
Meadow sage (Salvia pratensis) is a clump-forming perennial that prefers well-drained soil in full sun.
Nigel Dunnett specified the biennial viper’s bugloss, Echium vulgare – another bee favourite. Here it grows with corncockle (Agrostemma githago).
The Tower of London is famous for its six raven guardians, an institution believed to have started with Charles II who insisted the birds be protected and thought the crown and Tower would fall if they flew away. But this magpie does not have any official duties and has staked out its own priority seating in the north moat.
Look at the lovely flower of corncockle (Agrostemma githago), so pretty despite being very poisonous. In the 19th century it was a common annual weed of roadsides, railway lines and wheat fields and it likely made its way throughout the world as part of exported European wheat.
Although cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) was mostly finished in England when we were there in late May, a few plants popped up in the moat, right.
Annual corn flower (Centaurea cyanus) also comes in mixes that contain blue, white, pink and purple flowers – all are foraged by bees.
When I was at the Chelsea Physic Garden the day before visiting the Tower of London (here’s my blog), they had used annual lacy phacelia or purple tansy (Phacelia tanacetifolia), below, in a mass planting as bee forage for their hives. Despite being a native of California, it is a strong polllinator lure.
Here a buff-tailed bumble-bee enjoys foraging on the unusual caterpillar-like inflorescences of Phacelia tanacetifolia.
Signage helps visitors understand the possibilities of the moat, beyond its origin as fortification.
A lovely combination of pink California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) and meadow sage (Salvia pratensis).
Marmalade hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus) on pink California poppy.
The north side of the moat offers a good view of the 20 Fenchurch Building, nicknamed the “Walkie-Talkie” for its shape. This is the building which, as it was under construction in 2013, reflected the sun in such a way as to melt the metal of a Jaguar car parked beneath it, forcing the developers to erect a permanent sunshade of horizontal aluminum fins. The north part of the Tower complex behind the battlements is the site of the Waterloo Block and the Jewel House containing the well-protected Crown Jewels. For Superbloom, the north moat was fitted with speakers to create a sensory experience beyond the floral show. Musician Erland Cooper was commissioned to create a soundtrack, which he called “Music for Growing Flowers”.
Along with the corn poppies and California poppies, the moat seed mix contained seeds of Viscaria oculata, the small, lilac-purple flowers at bottom right.
Some plants I photographed don’t appear on the original seed lists but were happily luring insects, like what I believe is a yellow sow-thistle (Sonchus spp.) below. The purple cranesbill in the background is Geranium pyrenaicus.
Circling around to the eastern moat, at the corner we pass through The Nest, an organic willow sculpture by Spencer Jenkins that frames the view of the Tower Bridge.
Yellow buttercups (Ranunculus acris) and purple knapweed (Centaurea nigra) can be seen in the wildflower mix here.
The hardworking willow wattle fencing – nearly one kilometre in length by Wonderwood Willow – keeps the meadow from subsuming the grit path here. According to Andrew Grant in an article in Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute: “We were after a palette that would complement the stonework: colours, textures and form found around the Tower, yet were low in energy in terms of construction, were low carbon and (where possible) were from a renewable resource. As a principle, the use of concrete was banned across the project.”
Wrote Nigel Dunnett of the east moat: “Here the Grant Associates masterplan introduced areas that were more intimate and playful, with smaller paths bringing people into more intimate contact with the flowers. The use of natural materials and the rustic forms of the woven willow structures created a wonderful foil for the flowers.”
On the plantings in the east moat, Nigel Dunnett wrote: “The plants here were placed at low density around the path edges, and then the seed mixes were sown around them – it’s a technique I’ve used a lot to give some definite structure of deliberately-placed plants amongst the more spontaneous nature of the seed mixes. I used plants with a sensual character here – plants with tactile textures or aromatic plants. One of the most effective was Purple Fennel – the dark-leaved clumps were really effective early in the summer as the seeded plants grew up around them.” The swirling composite-wood pathway takes visitors towards the dragonfly sculpture by Quist.
Signage in the east moat recalls the allotment gardens of the past.
Even in my own meadows on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto, Canada (see my blog here on “Gardening Wild”), plantain (Plantago major), below, in the east moat, is a superb bumble bee plant in spring.
Brass and copper dragonflies fly over the moat, but the future plan is to bring real dragonflies into the moat with water features, as you see in the next photo.
This sign appears at the exit, presumably to greet visitors who might enter from the castle. But it promises a future for the moat: “We aspire to recycle rainwater to support flowering marshes, ponds, areas of food-related flowers and much more.” Fortunately a London-based son means we can and will revisit the Tower to see the development of this magical place. But I’m so delighted I experienced this late spring wildflower chapter in 2024.
The day after my rain-soaked visit to the 2024 Chelsea Flower Show (see my recent Show Gardens blog and Great Pavilion blog), it was a pleasure to walk through the entrance door in the brick wall at 66 Royal Hospital Road into the quiet, quaint and decidedly eclectic Chelsea Physic Garden. Occupying 4 acres on the north shore of the River Thames, a stone’s throw from the Flower Show’s grounds in the fashionable Chelsea district, the garden celebrated its 350th anniversary last year, but only opened to the public in 1987, four years after registering as a charity. It is the second-oldest botanic garden in the UK, after Oxford Botanic Garden (1621).
Chelsea Physic Garden started further west on the Thames in 1673 at Sir John Danvers’ estate (adjacent to the 16th century home of Sir Thomas More) as a leased outdoor classroom in which to grow the plants used to train apprentices for the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, still ongoing today as an association of physicians. When the Danvers house was demolished in 1696, the Society lost its garden. In 1712 Sir Hans Sloane, the Anglo-Irish President of the College of Physicians, collector, botanist and Royal Society president (succeeding Isaac Newton) purchased the 166-acre Manor of Chelsea from William Cheyne; it had once been owned by Henry VIII and occupied by his wives Catherine Parr and later Anne of Cleves, among other famous residents. In 1722, Sloane leased the garden’s 4-acre site to the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries for the sum of £5 per year in perpetuity, plus 50 herbarium specimens to be prepared for the Royal Society, of which he was president. If you had visited in 1753, the map below was your guide, “An Accurate Survey of the Botanic Gardens at Chelsea with the Elevation and Ichnography of the Green House and Stoves, and an Explanation of the Several Parts of the Garden, shewing where the most conspicuous Trees and Plants are Disposed, the Whole Carefully Survey’d and Delineated by John Haynes.” The Thames is shown at the bottom.
Today’s map is a little more straightforward, but not quite as charming. (See the full .pdf here.) The Thames is shown at the top. Visitors can find some 5,000 taxa of plants, especially edible, useful and medicinal plants from around the world, that help tell the story of humanity’s relationship with plants.
An original statue of Hans Sloane – whose name is also commemorated in Sloane Square, part of the original Chelsea estate – was once in the garden but now stands in the British Museum. I photographed the 2014 Portland stone replacement commissioned by Sloane’s descendant Lord Cadogan on an early spring visit to the garden in 2016. (A few days after my 2024 visit to Chelsea Physic Garden, I would visit the beautiful Cadogan Gallery at London’s Natural History Museum, which became the recipient of much of the collection of Sir Hans Sloane.) As with many public institutions in the 21st century (see my blog on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello), the garden has acknowledged the history of its original benefactor, which ties in to slavery. “Like many figures of wealth and high social standing, Sloane benefited from the transatlantic slave trade in multiple ways. Enslavement was legal and accepted in England at this time. Sloane wrote detailed accounts of his time in Jamaica. These records show that enslaved Africans and indigenous people provided Sloane with knowledge to advance both his botanical research and understanding of the human body. As a young doctor, Sloane treated enslaved people and his own records show that he did not always treat them with compassion. His wife Elizabeth Langley Rose, inherited sugar plantations in Jamaica which profited from the labour of enslaved people. This provided great wealth for their family.”
I began my visit in the glasshouses near the entrance. The first stove-heated glasshouse was installed at the Garden in 1723 to grow plants from tropical climates, e.g. pineapples. In 1902, a new range of glasshouses fashioned from Burmese teak was installed to house a global collection of plants. In 2022, the glass panes leaking and the wood rotting, they were rebuilt and opened in September 2023 in time for the 350th anniversary. I started in the Pelargonium House, with its collection originally from S. Africa, Australia and Turkey. In 1724, head gardener Philip Miller recorded some 50 species of Geraniaceae plants.
This is Pelargonium caffrum ‘Diana’, a selection of a South African species introduced by Hazel Key in 1990 named for her Wisley Garden botanist friend Diana Miller.
The narrow Tropical Corridor Greenhouse is sited along the garden’s south-facing brick wall and kept above 15C (59F) year-round. It features a collection of important food, medicinal and useful plants from the equatorial regions, including coffee, cocoa, mango and banana plants and orchids.
It also has beautiful specimens of staghorn fern, including this Platycerium superbum.
The Atlantic Islands Glasshouse features many rare plants from the Canary Islands, Madeira and the Azores. It also tells the story of habitats threatened by pests (including humans) and invasive species that compete with native plants for nutrients and space.
This is Aichryson bollei, a suculent endemic to La Palma,Canary Islands.
The Cool Fernery, dating from the 19th century, lies along the west wall and was also recently renovated. It was the passion of Thomas Moore, curator of the Garden from 1848-87. He authored many books on ferns and their allies, including The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland (1855), helping to popularize ferns in the Victorian era.
The cool, humid Fernery includes aquatic species like floating fern, Salvinia natans.
In the centre of the garden near the Sloane statue is an unusual sculpture-cum-plant support, presumably commissioned for the 350th anniversary engraved with the names of personalities involved with Chelsea Physic Garden from its inception. In the background is a white party tent that was being dismantled – the garden hosts weddings and other functions to bring in revenue.
But the main focus of the garden is plants, including rare plants like Viburnum congestum from China, just beginning to flower.
The Pond Rockery, the oldest manmade rockery in the world, was established in 1773 by botanist and explorer Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820). Like Sloane, he was president of the Royal Society for 41 years, advising King George III on the development of RHS Kew for which he commissioned plant collections world-wide. His own voyages included Newfoundland and Labrador on HMS Niger in 1766; Madeira, Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, Bora Bora, New Zealand, Australia and Java on HMS Endeavour with Daniel Solander under Captain James Cook in 1768-71 (I wrote blogs in 2018 about three gardens on New Zealand’s “Banks Peninsula” named for him); and Iceland on the brig Saint Lawrence in 1772. The plants collected by Banks and Solander on the Endeavor voyage alone led to the description of 110 new genera and 1300 new species, which increased the known flora of the world by 25 per cent. (Wiki) Artifacts from these voyages are displayed at Chelsea Physic Garden, including a pair of clamshells from Tahiti, below.
A bust of Banks nestles in a planting of bigroot geranium (G. macrorrhizum).
The Pond Rockery is intensively planted and surrounds a pond planted with Nymphaea and marginal aquatics. The bronze sculpture by Guy Du Toit is titled Hare and Now II.
Banks included some interesting artifacts in the rockery, including dark volcanic basalt rock brought back as ship ballast from his Iceland voyage and carved masonry pieces from the Tower of London, front left.
Rather than the typical kinds of alpine plants seen in most public rock gardens, the Pond Rockery features plants that thrive in a Mediterranean climate, such as corn poppies and various silver-leaved plants.
Path circling the Pond Rockery.
I had first seen lacy, white Athamanta turbith in Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan’s garden Hillside, which I blogged about in 2023. It is native to northeast Italy, the Balkans and Romania.
Spiny spurge (Euphorbia spinosa) was a new one for me; it’s native to rocky places throughout the Mediterranean.
And I had never come across green lavender (Lavandula viridis) before. It hails from southern Portugal and southwest Spain.
Lovely Tulipa sprengeri from the Pontic coast of Turkey and the last tulip to flower in spring, was keeping company with Digitalis thapsi from the Iberian Peninsula.
Nearby, the Garden of World Medicine with its various themed beds brings visitors to the essence of the Chelsea Physic Garden – many of the plants would be familiar to the Worshipful Apothecaries of the 17th century. In the European bed, we see hops (Humulus lupulus) growing on the obelisk trellis; we know it as a beer ingredient, but it might have been used by the apothecaries as a tea plant for its sedative properties. Other plants in this bed with a history in folk medicine include yellow loosestrife (Lysimachia vulgaris), heal-all (Prunella vulgaris) and chicory (Cichorium intybus).
Asian wild yam (Dioscorea batatas) contains steroidal saponins which a sign in the garden indicates are artificially converted to human steroids for the long-term management of pulmonary fibrosis. That genus name honours the first-century Greek pharmacologist, physician and botanist Dioscorides (c 40-90AD) who authored the first book of medicinal plants, some of which grow in this bed.
Some plants used for medicine are also toxic in the wrong hands, like Digitalis purpurea, common foxglove, below, whose leaves yield the cardiac glycoside digitoxin once used to treat heart failure.
And some are best avoided completely, like hemlock water dropwort (Oenanthe crocata), considered the most poisonous plant in the UK. It likes marshy ground and riverbanks and flowers happily at Chelsea Physic Garden. In fact, Agatha Christie took courses with the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, and lived quite near the garden in the 1920s and 30s, perhaps doing research for the 14 poisons her characters used in various mystery novels
The Garden of Edible Plants, created in 2012, features a diverse collection of fruits, vegetables and herbs. At one time, a market garden existed on the site so this garden has its genesis in local history, even with its modern connections. Plants in the centre are organized according to their vitamin content while surrounding beds feature a variety of unusual and tender herbs and spices as well as plants used to make edible oils and alcohol. As the garden says, “Did you know that of the more than 20,000 different edible plants on earth, only around 20 are in common production? Find out more about some of the more unusual species in the Garden!”
Nearest the Thames and its treed bank is the Edible Forest Garden containing food plants that can thrive “as part of a multi-canopy shaded garden”. Here we see terracotta rhubarb cloches, recalling the year 1817 when a Chelsea Physic Garden horticulturist accidentally dropped a bucket over a rhubarb plant. Weeks later, he lifted the bucket and discovered the plant had responded to the darkness by growing quickly while sending up straight, bright-pink stalks. In time, growers learned that the dark-grown rhubarb was also sweeter and the stalks more tender. The accidental discovery led to an entire Yorkshire UK ‘rhubarb-forcing industry’ using darkened barns and sheds that exists to this day, though not the popular craze it was in the 19th century. (As an aside, I have a gardening friend who travels faithfully each spring to the one Ontario farm that continues this tradition so he can buy tender rhubarb to freeze.)
Each time I’ve visited the Chelsea Physic Garden, I’ve been carefully observed by an English robin. I love these little birds, so much more delicate than our big, raucous American robins.
Nearby, the Garden of Useful Plants features over 200 species used both historically and today, including dye plants, housing materials and bee forage, popular with honey bees from the garden’s hives. In bloom when I visited was the California native lacy phacelia (P. californica), below, which was attracting its share of bumble bees as well. Interestingly, the garden’s longest-serving Head Gardener, Philip Miller, would be the first person to write about bee pollination leading to fertilization and seeds in 1721, the year before he began his 48-year career at Chelsea Physic Garden. Watching bees lighting on tulips in his garden, he wrote: “I saw them come out with their Legs and Belly loaded with Dust and one of them flew into a Tulip I had castrated: Upon which I took my Microscope, and examining the Tulip he flew into, found he had left Dust enough to impregnate the Tulip…. (for they bore good ripe seeds which afterwards grew).” (Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants)
I saw bees throughout the garden, including on pink rock-rose (Cistus creticus) in the history beds.
Near the Cool Fernery is the Community Kitchen Garden which hosts a program that brings together people recovering from physical and mental health issues. Here they learn about nature, basic gardening techniques, the healing power of plants and herbal remedies and art.
The Historical Walk in this part of the garden includes a tribute to the Scots-born Quaker Philip Miller (1691-1771), a Pimlico market gardener and nurseryman whom Sir Hans Sloane appointed as Praefectorius (Curator) or Head Gardener, a position he held from 1722 to 1770. In that half-century, he spread the garden’s renown worldwide through his communications and seed exchanges with plant collectors (especially the Philadelphia plant collector John Bartram, who sent the southern Magnolia grandiflora seen in so many English gardens today) and fellow gardeners, including botanists at the Netherland’s University of Leiden and the distinguished 20-member Society of Gardeners, set up in 1725 with Miller as clerk to attempt to eliminate the confusion in plant names. He also authored The Gardener’s and Florists Dictionary or a Complete System of Horticulture (1724), which would have eight editions, and The Gardener’s Dictionary containing the Methods of Cultivating and Improving the Kitchen Fruit and Flower Garden (1731). So perhaps it was no surprise that despite the fact that the 29-year-old Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus made a visit to the garden in 1736, Miller initially refused to accept the young Swede’s binomial system for naming plants, Systema Naturae, first published as a short tract in 1735, published in full in 1753 and ultimately becoming the gold standard for nomenclature. In 1733, Miller sent seeds of the first long-strand cotton developed in the Garden to the new British Colony of Georgia, launching that state’s cotton industry. This big abutilon or flowering maple, below, is Abutilon x milleri – but how and why it was named in his honour is something I’ve not been able to find in my research, or in signage in the garden.
A closeup of the lovely flowers of “Miller’s abutilon”.
The World Woodland Garden – or, as the Garden states “Humanity’s Survival in a Nutshell” – displays 150 taxa of “useful, edible and medicinal forest plants” from three world regions: North America, Europe and East Asia. This is the tall, deciduous shrub common filbert (Corylus maxima), with its edible nuts.
The California native bay laurel or ‘headache tree’, Umbellularia californica grows here too – its widespread use by native North American tribes as a medicinal plant making it an important addition to the woodland garden.
Growing in the shadows here was Chinese mayapple Podophyllum versipelle ‘Spotty Dotty’.
Fortune’s Tank with its aquatic plants and tadpoles was created by the Scots-born plant explorer Robert Fortune (1812-80), who was Curator of the Garden for two years in 1846-48, making many improvements during his short time there. Until, that is, he became “the Great Victorian Tea Thief”, leaving the garden to travel in China, often in Mandarin disguise, to secretly acquire seedlings of Camellia sinensis so Britain could establish its own tea industry in northern India, rather than be dependent on Chinese imports. His 1858 book Journey to the Tea Countries of China made him a household name amongst tea-drinkers.
But it’s the neat, rectangular Dicotyledon Systematic Order Beds that occupy a large swath of the garden where the formal story of botany is told, plant family by plant family, in 800 plants. Laid out in 1902, the beds are organized according to the George Bentham-Joseph Dalton Hooker classification system of 1862-83. This system and more modern systems based on plant characteristics have, of course, been eclipsed by classification based on the DNA and evolutionary trees of plants as formulated by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG).
In the Lamiaceae or Mint Family bed below, we see lavender, stachys and various sages.
In the Rosaceae bed, appropriately, there are roses, including a David Austin climber and significantly, the native American Virginia rose whose Latin name is Rosa virginiana Mill. That last bit, the author, indicates that this plant was named originally by Philip Miller in 1768; it also appears in the 8th and final folio edition of his Gardener’s Dictionary (1768) as “the Virginia rose”. As a former nurseryman, Miller was very familiar with and seemingly fond of all the species and hybrid roses available in London in the mid-18th century.
In the Caryophyllaceae bed were clove-scented pinks or Dianthus species of several kinds, (though I think a few of the labels were incorrect.)
Circling around to the northeast corner of the garden and the South American section, I walked past the cinnamon-hued trunk of the Chilean myrtle tree (Luma apiculata).
And I came upon a pretty, little Chilean sub-shrub called violet teacup flower (Jovellana violacea).
Given all the historic and rare plants at Chelsea Physic Garden, the plant sighting I treasured most, as a long-time garden writer and photographer, was an unassuming little thing that most visitors would miss completely. I would have missed it too, had I not come upon a tour being given by the Chelsea’s former head gardener Nell Jones in which she was pointing to a small weedy plant in a sunken terracotta pot. In many ways tiny thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), a cosmopolitan member of the Brassicaceae family, is the most famous plant on earth given that on December 13, 2000 – a four year effort by the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (AGI) consisting of scientists from the U.S., Europe and Japan culminated in the full sequencing of its genome – the first time any plant’s full DNA had been sequenced. As the press release said on that day: “For the once-humble Arabidopsis, simplicity is truly a virtue. Its entire genome consists of a relatively small set of genes that dictate when the weed will bud, bloom, sleep or seed. Those functional genes have their counterparts in plants with much larger genomes, such as wheat, corn, rice, cotton and soybean. Unlike the human genome, Arabidopsis has few ‘junk’ DNA sequences that contain no genes. The plant is practical for scientists because it matures quickly, is small and reproduces abundantly. All these physical and genetic traits add up to an especially useful organism whose genome is now catalogued for the public’s benefit. ‘The Arabidopsis genome is entirely in the public domain, so the research results being announced today are immediately available to scientists across the world,’ said Daphne Preuss, an advisor to the AGI and a faculty member in the University of Chicago’s Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology. ‘Because its implications for farming, nutrition and medicine are potentially vast, this plant has gradually become quite indispensable to us’.”
I looked longingly at the Plant Sale stand but as a Canadian, it was just window-shopping for me.
However, the Chelsea Physic Garden gave me a serendipitous gift in that I was able to have a brief, lovely meeting there with the English Facebook friend I met online long ago. Along with a group of nurserymen and plant geeks, Alan Elsbury started the Plant Idents Facebook page 14 years ago and, for my sins, I became one of the administrators of the page with its 7,700 members more than a decade ago. He was on his way to the Chelsea Flower Show and we had a fun chat.
I finished my visit with a lovely lunch of smoked salmon & salad in the Physic Garden Café and, honouring that long ago gardener who accidentally discovered rhubarb-forcing at the Chelsea Physic Garden, a glass of Cawston Press Sparkling Rhubarb & Apple Juice. The perfect end to a perfect visit.
*****
The Chelsea Physic Garden is open from 11 am to 4 pm every day except Saturday, when it is closed.
