Hooray for anthocyanin. Where would we be without it? It has long been my favourite water-soluble, vacuolar, glucosidic pigment, and I feel that this autumn has justified my preference. True, chlorophyll is more important until then, being essential for photosynthesis, so we should all be in dead trouble without it; and the carotenoids, carotene and
Is Christmas creeping up on you, unawares? Again? Have you found yourself, even at this late hour, facing a nil-all draw as far as presents bought, and presents asked for, is concerned? Never mind. When, finally, you can no longer ignore what is happening all around you, at least you can be comforted by the
We can all think of discoveries, which made little impact at their first introduction, but which changed the ways people worked or lived for ever, nevertheless. Charles Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’ of 1840 must be the most strikingly impressive example of this. But I think I may have spotted one in the gardening sphere as well,
Ursula Buchan on the new chief presenter of BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World Where do you stand on the most important issue of the day, namely, whether the BBC should have passed over Carol Klein, to be chief presenter of BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World after the retirement of Monty Don, in favour of Toby Buckland? The
The best enterprises look to the future but honour their past, which is why it was encouraging that the Royal Horticultural Society should last week have returned to the Inner Temple gardens to hold a show, almost a century after the last time it did so. The Great Spring Show was staged there from 1888
I have always been reticent about recommending gardening books for anyone short of something to read on holiday. After all, gardening books are often heavy and unwieldy, their appearance is not improved by contact with sand or sangria, and they make you terribly homesick for your own garden. But, since reading Keith Simpson’s suggested summer
If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment. If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern
You have probably forgotten about this year’s Chelsea Flower Show by now, it having segued into all the other Chelseas you have ever seen. I, however, am still, if not haunted, then certainly preoccupied by it. It wasn’t, strangely, the show gardens, nor yet the plants, so much as the people who have stayed with
In 1811, Jane Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra, in response, no doubt, to an anxious enquiry: ‘I will not say that your mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.’ I know something of how the Blessed Jane felt, for my advice about the health and welfare of mulberry trees
So a little light housework or gardening cuts your stress levels, does it? Well, I never. I long ago developed a ‘ten-minute gardening’ scheme for stress-busting, and I could not recommend it more highly. I keep a bucket near to hand, containing hand fork, kneeling pad and Atlas Nitrile gardening gloves. (These are like surgeon’s
In the 19th century, the painting of flowers was mainly the preserve of maiden ladies with too much time on their hands, whose watercolours would be framed by indulgent brothers, and hung on bedroom walls. Scientific botanical painting was left to talented, poorly paid artists, whose work was reproduced in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and other
Ursula Buchan does a spot of gardening If you are an assiduous buyer of plants, you will know that there are quite a number of foreign-bred plants for sale in our nurseries. This has become more obvious in recent years, since the nomenclature rules have changed. These days a plant should be sold under its original
I have waited several years for this moment — in fact, ever since the late 1990s upsurge in interest in gardening began to fade, the press stopped talking about it as the new sex, and the jeunesse d’orée turned their fickle gaze elsewhere. Now, as partygoers shade their hungover eyes from the glare of financial
Among the serially misused words of our time — celebrity, passion, caring, genius — we must surely count ‘plantsman’. Thirty years ago, it was a term given only to exceptionally knowledgeable, enthusiastic and botanically inclined amateur or professional gardeners, as well as to particularly experienced and thoughtful nurserymen. However, in recent years, ‘plantsman’ or ‘plantswoman’
As I spend much of my life in a flower bed, bottom up, I rarely consciously make the connection between the flowers that I grow in my garden and their more elevated associations, in particular their role in Christian art. Only when I visit art galleries or churches am I forcibly reminded that gardens and
The party is almost over. One of the best autumns for many years is coming to an end, the leaves finally seared off the trees by stormy weather. Even people who do not generally notice these things have been moved to comment on the richness and variety of the colours of trees and shrubs, in
It is more than 40 years since the foundation of the Garden History Society signalled that the study of the history of gardens and designed landscapes had become an important subject in its own right, instead of being simply an optional add-on to the study of historic buildings. Since then, our knowledge of the subject
Depending on whether you are a housewife, Lothario or a gardener, ‘bedding’ can mean a number of different things. Depending on whether you are a housewife, Lothario or a gardener, ‘bedding’ can mean a number of different things. As a horticultural term, it dates from the early decades of the 19th century, when adventurous Victorian
I thought it wouldn’t happen. I thought that because the natural world is free, and because gardening is principally about doing, rather than getting and spending, that gardeners would be hard to beguile. But I was wrong. Like the rest of the population, they have taken up shopping as a hobby. I thought it wouldn’t
Once, a long time ago, when I was a horticultural student at the RHS Gardens at Wisley, I helped to stage an exhibit of pelargoniums at the Chelsea Flower Show. That event has shone brightly in my memory ever since. Now, more than 30 years later, I am back exhibiting once more, this time helping