Grow your own jungle: easy exotic plants

As a botanist who grew up in tropical Singapore I have always been in love with exotic garden style, but not in the way you might expect. As a kid I was obsessed with creating an English country garden in sweltering rainforest conditions, begging my grandmother in Wales to mail me packets of sweetpea and nasturtium seeds so I could sow them in trays by air-conditioning vents and in chiller cabinets. To me these were impossibly exotic, otherworldly plants I only knew from storybooks.

Flash forward 30 years, however, and in the tiny Croydon patch I now have to play with I am forever experimenting with ornamental plants with massive jungly leaves and carnival-like flowers. You see, to me gardening is all about escapism, and playing with nature to create your very own fantasy world accessible from your front door.

Sadly, in the UK, tropical-effect gardening has become synonymous with huge expense and tricky to care for, often painfully slow-growing plants. Yet if you get your species choice right, you don’t have to splash out a small fortune on towering palms or tree ferns to get a flavour of faraway places. To prove it here are some of my favourite plants that provide massive impact in a single season from a modestly priced packet of seed or bulbs.

Eucalyptus are some of the fastest-growing trees on earth and can reach 6ft in a single season from a packet of seed. I love the frost-hardy cider gum (Eucalyptus gunnii) for its bright silver foliage, that can be kept at a manageable size by being cut right back to the base each spring, from where it produces its flushes of disc-shaped, powdery foliage.

For truly massive leaves, the foxglove tree (Paulownia tomentosa) can also be sown from seed and is extremely fast-growing. If whacked to the base each spring, it can throw out leaves the size of dustbin lids on branches 9ft high by the autumn. Other super quick, great impact foliage plants from seed include ricinus, echiums and solenostemon.

If it’s flowers you’re after, cannas, tree lilies and hedychiums will all put on a spectacular show year after year from an inexpensive packet of rhizomes – and from their very first summer, too. But to me the most quirky and cool of all the summer bulbs is the pineapple lily (Eucomis sp), a super easy to grow plant that in my experience can take all the cold and neglect you can give it. Eucomis bicolor has spectacular-sized cream and apple green flowers with a delicate purple lining, while Eucomis comosa ‘Sparkling Burgundy’, as the name suggests, kicks the shocking purple pigment into overdrive.

With plants like these, anyone can have a storybook jungle in their back yard for less than the price of a meal out.

Aberdeen council to fell hundreds of diseased trees

Hundreds of diseased or dead trees will be felled across Aberdeen this year, the council has announced.

The trees include a large number that have been infected with Dutch elm disease.

Aberdeen City Council said about 400 trees would be felled. They are mainly beside roads, but others are in parks, gardens and play areas.

The authority has about 100,000 trees and 400 hectares of woodland to look after in the city.

About 50 dead elm trees have been identified around Aberdeen with Kincorth, Summerhill, Rosehill, Cults, Culter, Stoneywood, and Bridge of Don particularly affected.

Tree epidemics

Aberdeen City Council's infrastructure convener, Neil Cooney, said: "We do not want to cut down trees but unfortunately we must, especially where there is Dutch elm disease to try and stop it from spreading.

"Our priority is to have safe and healthy trees for residents and visitors to enjoy in all parts of the city as part of our beautiful and vibrant green spaces.

"Removing dead or diseased trees means there is more room for the healthy trees to grow. Our arboricultural team will be undertaking this work over the next few months."

Dutch elm disease is one of the most serious tree diseases in the world. It has killed more than 60 million British elms in two epidemics and continues to spread.

It is caused by an aggressive fungus spread by elm bark beetles and infects all of Britain's elm species.

The elms die within three years of first signs of the disease, but may die within a season.

World’s highest plants discovered growing 6km above sea level

Plants have been found growing at a record-breaking height of 6150 metres above sea level for the first time.

Six species of cushion plants have been discovered clinging to a gravelly south-west-facing patch no bigger than a football pitch on Mount Shukule II in the Ladakh region of India.

This sets a record for vascular plants, although algae and mosses can grow even higher because they are more tolerant to drought and frost.

A team led by Jiri Dolezal, of the Institute of Botany at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Průhonice, endured nausea and extreme fatigue studying how plants respond to warming in a location five days’ journey away from the nearest road.

“We could manage only a couple of hours of work a day,” says Roey Angel, a team member from the University of Vienna in Austria.

But the plants they found were in much better shape, having features that enable them to counteract the long, bitter winters and lack of water. Each was no bigger than a coin, contained a high-sugar antifreeze, and had leaves arranged as rosettes that help them to enfold warmer air.

Their roots were tiny too, but Dolezal was able to make out 20 growth rings in a 1-millimetre root. This implied that one of the plants had been there for two decades, although the others had only been there for a few years.

Climate-driven ascent

Climate change is warming the Himalayas, and these plants are likely to have come from seeds that blew onto land from which a glacier had retreated.

Dolezal says that the average temperature in the short growing season at this spot has risen by around 6 °C in a decade – and he believes that plants will ascend even higher in future.

The crucial factor that limits plant altitude is that they need at least 40 days of frost-free soil each year in which to grow, something that is now probably happening on these and other peaks in the region.

“In the arid Himalayas – mostly Tibet – there are many mountains with vast unglaciated areas available,” says Dolezal. And with longer frost-free periods, this means plenty of new habitat to conquer.

“I’m surprised at the elevation – it’s very high,” says Jan Salick, senior curator at Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis. But she is encouraged that plants may be able to move to higher altitudes than previously thought, and keep up with climate change.

As part of the GLORIA-Himalaya project, she has found alpine plants in Tibetan China moving upwards at 0.06 metres a year, while the temperature band they usually occupy is outpacing them by ascending at 6 metres a year. The fear is that the temperature increase is encouraging the tree line to ascend too, squeezing the alpine plants out.

This discovery by Dolezal’s team confirms that it’s possible for plants to move upwards more quickly, says Salick.

Could FLOWERS help stop burglars? Cleveland Police think so

If you are wanting to protect your home from burglars, then a state-of-the-art alarm is a must,

But Cleveland Police say there is a new weapon in the fight against home invasions - flowers.

Roses, pyracantha and berberis could all be used to stop bandits breaking-in, according to the force, who say the prickly thorns could make burglars think twice.

And with Christmas around the corner, the force claim a festive of holly could even be used to stop intruders snatching presents from under the tree.

“Prickly plants, or defensive planting, is your first line of defence against crime in and around your garden,” says Cleveland Police’s Gerry McBride in a force blog.

“The term ‘defensive planting’ is used to describe the way you can use certain prickly plants, bushes and shrubs to deter burglars.

“Think about using defensive planting around vulnerable areas such as windows, fences, boundary walls and drainpipes.”

Latest figures show that over 2,400 homes were burgled on Teesside last year - an average of over six per day.

But the force say the latest leafy security measure won’t just help keep your home safe - it will also give it a splash of colour in the process.

However it adds: “Defensive planting isn’t meant to replace other security measures such as lighting, locks and alarms, but is intended to complement it.”

Discover plants from around the world in your own garden

British gardens are stuffed with plants collected from far-flung places, so it’s quite possible to have plants from South Africa, China, the US, Australia and Asia all in one border. As such, having a world map on the wall of the garden shed, or in the kitchen, along with some panel pins, is a fun exercise for your grandchildren.

My grandson James, aged eight, was touching my pots of agapanthus the other day when he remarked on the thickness of the petals and the rubbery stems. I explained that agapanthus comes from South Africa, which clocks far more sunshine hours than we do. I explained that thin petals would shrivel up under such strong sunshine, so some South African plants have evolved to have rubbery petals packed with lots of pigment. Never shy away from complex vocabulary. Children’s minds and memories are razor-sharp and I faced the fact long ago that my four may well be brighter than I am!

Kniphofias, crocosmias, nerines, dieramas and gladioli also come from the South African Cape, and many of these enjoy summer rainfall. Some kniphofias are pollinated by hummingbirds in the wild and, if you brush against them, nectar showers over you. I had a few sparrows on mine.

China is another great source of garden plants as it has 30,000 species, about an eighth of the world's known flora. Many magnolias, witch hazels, hydrangeas, azaleas, peonies, camellias and chrysanthemums were collected from China at the beginning of the 20th century. They tend to be primitive because certain areas of China escaped glaciation. Magnolia flowers, for instance, are beetle-pollinated because bees hadn’t yet appeared.

The strange thing is many Chinese plants have North American relatives because, before the continents drifted apart, the two were one land mass – a nice detail to inspire children. The Chinese versions are more showier than the American species in almost every case, but when the Asian and American relatives find themselves planted in the same place they produce fabulous hybrids.

One Chinese plant found in almost every British garden is Buddleja davidii, sometimes called the butterfly bush. It can attract 22 species of British butterfly and produces honey-scented nectar in August, when most larger butterflies are about. Peacocks, red admirals and small tortoiseshells adore it, but you might see painted ladies, too, and these migrants will have arrived on a warm wind from the Continent.

In autumn you’re almost bound to have Michaelmas daisies and these plants have a huge range stretching through North America, through Europe, into Asia with some coming from South Africa. If you’re unsure which is which, look up the plant on the internet, adding “native to” in the search wording.

Asters are daisies, corruptions of “day’s eye”, so they need a bright position. September-flowering New England asters, now called Symphyotrichum novae-angliae after a botanical shuffle, come from North America. They are very easy to grow, and their mainly pink and purple flowers, borne on tall, woody stems, are also highly attractive to butterflies. Other North American plants include echinaceas, heleniums, border phloxes, heliopsis and goldenrod.

Plants from South America play a huge role as summer fades because they’ve evolved in parts of South America close to the equator, where days and nights are evenly balanced in length. However temperatures vary greatly there and nights are far colder than days. Many salvias, all dahlias, many penstemons, alstroemerias, fuchsias, heliotrope, morning glory and cosmos all hail from that part of the world and come into their own later in the year.

If you can, also teach your grandchildren colourful stories about the brave, young plant hunters who went into the unknown to collect all these plants. Most died young – the unfortunate David Douglas (1799 -1834) was gored to death by a bull in Hawaii, and Reginald Farrer (1880-1920) died of pneumonia on the Burmese/Chinese frontier. There were tiger attacks and murders, too.