Me and my garden: ‘I get very emotional about plants’

As a boy, I’d go off into the moors just above my home in Bolton. I’d find interesting birds, and wander farther and farther afield each time. I was returning from a bird walk one day when I passed an allotment. I looked over the fence and this very different plant was growing in a patch of potatoes. I was moved to climb the fence and pick a bit – it was very sticky. I became known as the boy who found the Mexican tobacco, Nicotiana rustica: it was only the second recorded occurrence of this plant wild in the British Isles. I thought, if it’s that easy, what might I find if I really try?

When I was curator at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, I saw it as my big garden. Once I left the arboretum, I wanted my own collection; a garden under my nose. That way, if I was writing about plants I was growing and I needed to check – did it have a hairy leaf? Were the flowers really dark pink in bud? – I could just go outside and look.

I grew a rare Chinese magnolia, M. cylindrica, from seed sent to me from a friend I’d made in 1979 at the Shanghai Botanic Garden. He was a wonderful, shy, unpretentious gardener who was banished by the communists to some wilderness far from his home and had just been allowed back. The tree is in pride of place in my garden, where I can look down on it from my bedroom window. I had it for 15 years, and it still hadn’t flowered. I thought, if it doesn’t flower this spring, I’m going to give it away. It didn’t, so I rang a local arboretum to come and dig it up. The following spring it flowered for the first time. I thought, yes, I am going to keep you. At its peak in April, it produces several hundred blooms, and I still have it to remember my Chinese friend by.

I get very emotional about plants. Sometimes people ask where my energy comes from. Well, it should be obvious: my energy is green energy; it comes from plants, and plants get their energy from the sun. I am in my 80th year now. There’s no way I can pass away yet: there are too many plants that want to show me what they can do.

Cannabis plants found in Hednesford Road, Cannock

A MAN has been arrested after cannabis plants were discovered in Cannock.

The arrest of a motorist in Cannock resulted in the seizure of cannabis with an estimated street value of £60,000 in Pelsall on Wednesday, March 22 after plants were originally found in Hednesford Road.

Chief Inspector Geoff Knight, commander of Cannock Local Policing Team (LPT), said: "This is an excellent example of the proactive police work that continually takes place across the district.

"I hope this sends out a stark warning that if you come with the intention of selling drugs we will catch you. Illegal drugs and drugs activity in our district will not be tolerated."

Officers on routine patrol stopped a vehicle at 3.45pm on Wednesday (March 22) in Hednesford Road after noticing the driver was using a mobile phone.

When the vehicle stopped officers became suspicious due to the smell of cannabis and carried out a search. A quantity of cannabis was discovered.

The 38-year-old male driver was arrested on suspicion of possession of cannabis with intent to supply and taken into custody.

A subsequent search of an address in Lothians Road, Pelsall, resulted in the recovery of 51 cannabis plants, together with a large quantity of harvested cannabis with an estimated street value of £60,000.

A joint operation with the West Midlands cannabis destruction team resulted in the safe removal of the cannabis factory from the address.

The man arrested has since been bailed, pending further inquiries, to a date in July.

If you suspect drugs in your community report it to police on 101.

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.