Sinking morale

The Royal Horticultural Society is like the Church of England. It seems always to have been there, a fixed, reassuring point in a changing world. Even to those who do not belong to it, it seems a Good Thing and it is hard to imagine national life without it. Among those who know it, it inspires affection and exasperation in about equal measure and, like the C of E, it is troubled.

In early September, the director-general of the RHS, Inga Grimsey, suddenly resigned and will leave next January. The resulting media attention alerted the world to the fact...

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Quarter-century of words

This month sees the 25th anniversary of my first ‘Gardens’ column for The Spectator. This is an event more interesting to me than to you, dear reader; indeed, if asked, you might well have said 40, 20, or five years. It is, of course, only a number (as Clint Eastwood said about approaching 80) but this anniversary has encouraged me to reflect on what has happened in gardening in the past quarter-century. It has been eventful, to say the least.

In 1984, gardening was still dominated by the post-war ‘low-maintenance’ movement, which encouraged the planting of utilitarian ground cover, as...

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Wings of desire

I knew I was in for a treat when I drove up to the newly opened Butterfly World along Miriam Lane. An affectionate homage to Dame Miriam Lane (Rothschild), the great conservationist and butterfly enthusiast, was a good start, but so was the fact that the banks on the side of the road to the car park were carpeted with rainbow-coloured meadow annuals — blue cornflowers, yellow Californian poppies, pink corn cockle, scarlet poppies –— all flowering fit to bust.

Two thirds of the 27-acre site at Chiswell Green, near St Albans, is covered with these annuals, in varying combinations...

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Glass act

As usual after the end of Chelsea Flower Show, I felt as flat as champagne left out in the sun. I was glad that I had a holiday in Boston (Mass. rather than Lincs.) in prospect. And, as luck would have it, the trip provided me with an unexpected botanical box of delights, exactly where I was not looking for it. That place was the Museum of Natural History at Harvard, where the Ware Collection of Glass Flowers is housed. I don’t know why I had never heard of this — plainly very famous — collection before. But I have...

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Show stopper

You have probably idly wondered, as you stood in a queue for the loos at Chelsea Flower Show, why the Royal Horticultural Society stages its greatest flower show of the year in the week before the Whitsun Bank Holiday. Late May is good for irises, Oriental poppies, alliums, hardy geraniums, seed-raised verbascums, lilacs, wisteria and viburnums, but it is too late for tulips and too early for roses and most summer perennials. That is why so many of the plants seen at Chelsea have either been forced into premature growth or retarded.

It becomes clear if you know that...

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Back to basics

It’s spring, the gardening public has woken up and the plinky-plonky music calls us back for another series of BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World. We in England have no choice; it is all there is on gardening on terrestrial TV at the moment. This year, there is a new format and new venue, ‘Greenacre’, but is it worth staying in for an hour on a Friday night? Things certainly didn’t start very well.

When Monty Don left the programme last autumn, I, like many others, assumed that the new chief presenter would be Carol Klein, since she was both a...

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