Daily Flower Candy: Melinis repens
Reading time 2 minutes
Chinese factories are not renowned for their landscaping – a few scrubby trees and sickly pot plants are likely to be the most natural […]
Beautiful Strangers
Plant Portraits: Osmanthus fragrans (Guìhuā (桂花) or Sweet Olive)
Reading time 6 minutes
It is customary in Hong Kong for 5 star hotels to have a house fragrance, pumped into lobbies in heady clouds and sold at […]
Daily Flower Candy: Veratrum album
Reading time 1 minute
One of my favourite sculptural plants, Veratrum album, is also a pretty nasty poison, with a long history of accidental and deliberate death. Alexander […]
The Savill Garden, Windsor Great Park.
Reading time 8 minutes
Lysichiton camtschatcensis, The Western Skunk Cabbage. Last weekend the sun came out. For those of you who are not British, sunny weather, even when […]
Daily Flower Candy: Lathraea clandestina
Reading time 1 minute
Clandestina by name, clandestine by nature, Lathraea clandestina is partial to the roots of alders, willows and hazels. This furtive perennial parasite isn’t native […]
Flowers of Bhutan – Arisaema nepenthoides
Reading time 1 minute
Bhutan’s forests may bear a passing similarity to the great gardens of Cornwall, but you know you’re somewhere exotic when the forest floor is […]
Flowers of Bhutan – Curcuma aromatica
Reading time 1 minute
This curious little fella is Curcuma aromatica, or wild turmeric. We discovered it today, growing amongst the pine needles at the side of the […]
Fried Fiddleheads and Asparagus
Reading time 1 minute
Yes, you’ve got it, these are young fern fronds, otherwise known as fiddleheads or, here in Bhutan, as ‘Nakey‘. They are either fried as […]
Strange Fruit
Reading time 4 minutes
After 3 weeks of part self, part snow-induced exile, I returned to the seaside last night during an icy gale that would’ve had an […]
A Tale of Two Trees
Reading time 5 minutes
Our only major loss in the six years we’ve been gardening by the coast was a particularly tragic one. The original planting focussed on […]
Pilfering Parakeets
Reading time 4 minutes
No, I have not been gallivanting around the world again. This “glamorous oriental stranger”, to employ a description used by the great David Attenborough, […]
Under the Acacias
Reading time 7 minutes
Mingalaba! (That’s Hello! In Burmese) The first week of our trip to Burma has been non stop, so despite being in one of the […]