Food, nutrition and an early grave.

Along with lots of other people, I recently bought James Wong’s book, Grow for Flavour. I read it from cover to...  well about half way through.

One of the things that gets mentioned early on is the relationship between flavour and nutritional value, and there is a passage entitled “Is the nutritional value of our food declining?”, which cites research that showed declines in a range of minerals and vitamins in food produced today as compared to a number of decades ago.

Concerning maybe, but since he doesn’t go on to say anything about the consequences of deficiencies of these nutrients in our diets, I didn’t lose any sleep over it.

Then I watched a clip on YouTube of Dr Bruce Ames, Professor of Bochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and senior scientist at Children’s hospital Oakland Research Institute.  He has a great deal to say about vitamin and mineral inadequacies in diets and the mechanisms by which they accelerate aging. He seems to be talking about the same minerals and vitamins as James Wong.

Along the way he takes a pop at people’s obsession with carcinogens, pointing out that many compounds found in plants that we eat are carcinogenic. He also points out that the risks posed by agrochemicals are absolutely trivial compared to those posed by micronutrient deficiencies.

He flags up the possibility that obesity may be in part due to people craving food because they are nutrient deficient and their body tells them to eat because that should be how it gets those nutrients. A study group supplied with all the necessary nutrients found their appetites significantly reduced.

I’m not seeing these issues being raised anywhere. I’m not seeing much chance of the situation improving if the issues are not raised and addressed. It’s hard enough to get people to eat the right things, but if even the right things are not providing the nutrition we need, we have a situation that needs to be addressed.

For free.

When I worked on a nursery I didn't overly appreciate the customers who would regale me with stories of how they'd grown this from a pinched cutting, that from something someone had given them and so on. Not good for business, people growing things for themselves.

Of course, now I'm retired and my income somewhat curtailed, it's all very different. Why would I pay for what I can grow myself. And of course I have the knowledge to grow most of the things I want.

This post though is about the things that I have neither paid money for nor grown myself. It being Aquilegia season, my mind turned to the things that sow themselves around my garden and provide me with a show without my lifting a finger.

When I really looked, I was surprised by how much of the colour in my garden was provided by these volunteers. If I never planted another thing, I could have a packed garden just by doing nothing. There is a spectrum of desirability of course. A good display makes invasive tendencies more tolerable. And there is a point beyond which a plant is a weed, no matter how pretty it is. Celendines, dandelions, yellow archangel I have but don't want, and make every effort to control (= kill).

Welsh poppy is right on the dividing line. Beautiful for sure, clear yellow but somehow never really clashing with anything; and the leaves are attractive enough too. Just a thought, but why do slugs never go for those soft, juicy stems and leaves? I dig out a lot of them, but there are always some that manage to flower. I've had yellow ones for many years, this year a couple of orange ones have appeared. Their relative novelty means I shall probably cut them a bit of slack compared to their yellow cousins, and live to regret doing so. They have a nasty habit of seeding right in the middle of other plants where they are almost impossible to dislodge.

Welsh poppy, Meconopsis cambrica.

Aquilegia is a plant of childhood memory. I remember a range of colours, all somewhat subdued, the flowers not overly large, the leaves prone to mildew. The ones we have all over the garden have very respectable sized blooms, in an astonishing range of colours; well mostly an astonishing range of shades of blue/purple. They seed prodigiously and every year I am accused of weeding almost all of them out, which I probably do, so we're only left with a few hundred plants to do it all again.

Columbine, Aquilegia vulgaris.

I have a trio of volunteer Corydalis. For many years Corydalis ochroleuca never managed to do more than replace itself. I'd get excited because a new seedling had appeared, only for the parent plant to promptly die. In the last couple of years it has done rather better and I now have quite a drift under a yew, conditions I'm surprised it finds congenial. It's pretty much evergreen and flowers all summer. Corydalis cheilanthifolia flowers very early in the year and disappears. The fine ferny leaves look impossibly delicate yet shrug off the worst of weather. Yellow flowers are carried in spikes about 15-20cm tall.


Corydalis ochroleuca and C. cheilanthifolia.

The other Corydalis volunteered itself just once, but has bulked up considerably since. It is Corydalis solida, which just appeared one year. These days I am quite capable of buying and planting such a plant then completely forgetting I ever did; but I was younger then. I have no idea how it got there; not even in the flower garden, but amongst fruit trees and bushes. It is the epitome of ephemeral, emerging in March, flowering in April and gone, leaving not a trace by the end of May.

Corydalis solida.

A brace of Violas are always with us. Viola tricolor is a charming little plant that seeds freely about and produces a succession of blooms for months in spring. My partner dries flowers to make cards and they are eminently suitable, so I even have masses of them on my allotment. The other is Viola labradorica, for which I do not have a good word. It was gifted to us by a neighbour; deliberately not accidentally and if I'd have known then what I know now I would have made an excuse and run for the hills. Dull dirty purple foliage, meagre display of inconsequential flowers, fast spreading by runners and seeds, very hard to eradicate - don't get me started!

Viola tricolor and V. labradorica.

OK, I got myself started. There are a few that I try to keep on a very tight leash and would probably prefer to be without. Crocosmia 'Lucifer' is probably a magnificent plant. I say probably because what I have are seedlings many generations removed from the plant I bought. Magnificent they are not; the flowers last a week and that is generally spent lying in the dirt having collapsed under their own weight. And I can't get rid of it; there's always a few corms left behind.
Dicentra Formosa is the same. I have bought named forms only to have them swamped by their own inferior seedlings. They're nice enough but they are a bit too fond of life here and want to take over.
I've had a few Euphorbias that have become a nuisance. The current pest is a purple leaved thing I don't know the name of and have no particular desire to know. Euphorbia characias and E. mellifera are among the more welcome members of the genus though my mellifera is many years old and in rude health, so I don't let it seed because one is enough. It will one day die and I won't have a replacement. C'est la vie.
Libertia grandiflora or formosa or whatever it is, seeds prodigiously and the seedlings keep coming for years and years. I think I mainly got bored with it; it doesn't give me enough to justify its bullying nature. Incidentally, I used to have Libertia ixioides and currently have a self sown plant that looks like a hybrid between that species and the much taller L. grandiflora. Meritorious IMO; perhaps I'll make my fortune with it.


Crocosmia 'Lucifer', Dicentra Formosa, Euphorbia sp, Libertia.

What was Stipa arundinacea when I first got it, now Anemanthele, was also an overly enthusiastic seed producer. I think my main problem was that the seeds survived my compost heap and ended up everywhere. Years of persecuting it have almost succeeded in wiping it out and I'm ever so slightly missing its many good qualities. Two other grasses maintain a presence at about the right level by seeding about. They are Carex 'Silver Curls' and Stipa tenuissima and they are welcome here.

Carex 'Frosted Curls' and Stipa tenuissima.

I'll finish with another trio that were planted to fill a particular niche and have seen fit to move on and carve out their own. Californian poppy was sown years ago and comes back each year, never far from where it started, so it seemingly approved of its location. Lamium orvala has stuck to the shadier spots but spread far from where it started. It started as the usual red-purple form but has produced white flowered seedlings as well as very occasional intermediate forms. Finally there's Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost', which seeds about fairly freely and comes tantalisingly close to being as silvery as its parent, but never quite makes it. What the seedlings do better than the parent is flower. I get a rather meagre display from the original but was stopped in my tracks by the splash of blue one of its progeny was putting on. A day later, when I finally got to it with the camera, it was nowhere near as good. At least I'd seen it at its best, if I hadn't recorded it.

Escholtzia californica, Lamium orvala and Brunnera macrophylla.

I could add as many again, but perhaps another time. Suffice it to say that the garden elves are doing a good deal of gardening for me and I would like them to know that I appreciate it.



Ferns

Plant fashions come and go and ferns have had their ups and downs over the years. As far as I’m aware, though, they’ve never suffered a period of profound unpopularity in the way that conifers, the other big group of non-flowering garden plants, are currently enduring.

Many of us have shady gardens, or at least have shady places within the garden, and it is here that ferns come into their own. I had a corner that was getting dingier with every passing season as an Acer grew to maturity. Ferns came to the rescue and over a few years I acquired a couple of dozen sorts. Some were fully deciduous, others to varying degrees evergreen. All were given a close haircut in early spring as the first signs of new growth appeared. There’s something animal like in the way that ferns unfurl their new fronds, like a swan raising its head from feeding on the lake bottom. Their fresh foliage expands out and is as much a marker of a new season as trees coming into leaf.

I wonder why it is that a group of primitive plants should have chosen to outdo most of the flowering plants in the complexity of its leaves. Not in every case, either way about, but in general they have divisions, subdivisions, sub-subdivisions to their leaves that create a lacy intricacy that sets them apart. Their geometric symmetry keeps the intricacy from becoming untidy and the result is very pleasing to the eye.

The most delicate looking of the ferns that I grow is Adiantum venustum. It looks identical to the indoor Maidenhair ferns yet is one of the toughest plants I know. It is happiest in moist soil and moderate shade, but will tolerate deep shade and dry conditions. By the end of the winter its foliage is pretty jaded, but if you shear it off you need to do so before the almost invisibly fine new shoots emerge. When I was buying young plants to grow on at the nursery it was never a species offered in liner supplier lists and we propagated it ourselves by division. It doesn’t like disturbance much so reasonable sized chunks taken as growth started in the spring seemed to give us the best results, though never without some losses.

Adiantum venustum

With the finest of foliage, but otherwise looking somewhat like miniaturised bracken, is Paesia scaberula. This has proved less hardy than some and in cold winters it pays to have a backup plant under cover somewhere. It is also relatively intolerant of being too wet or too dry. Get the conditions right and it is capable of quite rapid spread by means of fine surface rhizomes. Mine gets 20-30cm tall.

Paesia scaberula

The Japanese painted fern, Athyrium nipponicum, has a number of forms with pink, grey and cream markings on the leaves. I have ‘Burgundy Lace’ doing very well and ‘Ursula’s Red’ right next to it doing very poorly. I would advise against drawing the obvious conclusion from that but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Another Athyrium I would not be without is A. otophorum ‘Okanum’, a taller, more subtly coloured fern that seems very accommodating.

Athyrium nipponicum 'Burgundy Lace'

Polystichum setiferum is the native soft shield fern and a number of cultivars of it are widely available. One that I picked up at Binny Plants many years ago was ‘Ray Smith’. It has very long narrow fronds which in some years produce plantlets from which it may be propagated. Polystichum setiferum Plumosomultilobum Group is not going to win friends for its name but makes up for it with its densely mossy foliage. Again its delicate appearance belies a robust constitution.

Polystichum setiferum 'Ray Smith'

I don’t think I could ever grow something just because I liked the name, unless someone were to name a plant after me perhaps. Polystichum polyblepharum is quite good though, and Architectural Plants used to have it in their catalogue with the common name Polly-Polly, which sticks in my mind many years later. It produces tidy rosettes of glossy dark green fronds and has produced a couple of self-sown plants in my garden in twenty years, so well behaved and giving, but not too giving.

Polystichum polyblepharum

Which is probably a fair description of almost all the ferns I grow. They have been trouble free, long lived and rewarding. Would that one could say the same for a lot of other garden plants.

A lovely drop of rain

Well, there's a surprise. They got it wrong on the weather forecast. It was supposed to rain most of the night and stop around 9am. So off I went on my gardening job. It rained almost continually and mostly heavily until I gave up at noon and came home again.

And yet I'm quite pleased. We had a very dry April and when everything in the garden was wanting to make that big spring burst of growth, the water wasn't there to fuel it. The ground had become bone dry to at least a spades depth and it doesn't get wet again to that sort of depth without nice steady rain over an extended period. Which we've now had, so it could stop now and that would be good too.

I'm on a water meter so I have one of those recycled orange juice drums, 1500 litres I think, fed from a diverter on the downspout from the gutter. Only trouble is that it only collects water from about one sixth of the roof and I wanted to fill it before the rain gave out. So I have another diverter on another downpipe, feeding into a bucket which I go out and transfer to the main tank, in the pouring rain, at about 30 minute intervals.

I need to rejig the guttering so all the water from the back of the house fees into the tank, but there's a lean-to greenhouse in the way. It's small wonder most people don't bother to collect rainwater. It's either a complex DIY job or an expensive paid for job and you're not going to recoup the cost in a hurry. Perhaps the government should consider subsidising water harvesting in the way it does for solar panels and roof insulation.

In the meantime, for at least the last hour I could have driven a mile south and been in sunshine; but the weather is coming from the west and that way is thick cloud as far as I can see. So the rain goes on.