Notes from an urban gardener: May is a gift from heaven

Admiring my garden is the surest way to my heart, better even than complimenting my outfit or a piece of my prose. My usual response to admiration is to plunge into anecdotes about how, when and where I acquired my plants — just as I do with my outfits. “Oh, I found that twenty years ago on a stall in Deptford Market,” might apply equally well to a geranium or a sea-blue frock with a pattern of swimmers.

The plants have many provenances. Some were actually bought in garden centres. Tesco’s and Morrison’s have supplied quite a few, and obscure hardware stores even more.  Friends have been badgered into providing me with cuttings, some of which have blossomed into cherished mementoes of their givers. And a fair number were self-seeded, or brought by the wind or the pigeons.

The garden has its home on a first-floor back-addition roof, a short flight of stairs down from our flat. Surrounded by other buildings, it harbours a protective micro-climate, and rarely gets any frost.  On the other hand, after 3.00 in the afternoon at the latest it doesn’t get any sun either. All of my plants are in pots, and while many have died over the years a fair number have managed to survive.

One of the great advantages of being so overlooked is that neighbours sometimes lean out of their windows and commend my efforts. Nobody EVER says, “God, your garden’s a mess!” 

Plants can be very forgiving as well. I was poorly in April and by the beginning of May my plot resembled a weed-strewn desert. But more respectable bits of greenery were popping up too, and I managed to put in two days of hard labour with trowel and secateurs. The psychological rewards were enormous.

If April is the cruellest month, May is a gift from heaven. The speed with which plants resurrect themselves is amazing. In the foreground of this picture are two purply-black specimens which I love — on the right a succulent that goes by the name of Aeonium Schwarzkopf, and on the left a Canna lily, possibly a Durban. I got both of them from a professional greenhouse-grower in Devon about six years ago (carrying plants home on the train is a pain, and I’m constantly vowing to give it up.) The Schwarzkopf doesn’t like heavy rain or winter very much, but will see it through as long as it doesn’t snow. The Canna dies back completely in December, but makes a big comeback in May. Later it might produce a yellow flower or two, but I don’t mind if it doesn’t, because its leaves are its finest part.

The common foxglove (centre, below) is biennial. Mine are all descended from two surplus seedlings which my partner gave me a few years ago; in this photo one of them is sharing the limelight with a flowering Acanthus, on the left.

The scientific name for foxglove is Digitalis purpurea (derived from the Latin for finger, digitus). This was coined in 1542 by the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs, who based it on the popular German term for the plant, Fingerhut, meaning literally “finger hat”, but actually meaning “thimble”. In Britain the name “fox’s glove” is found in Old English, which gave rise to the myth that foxes wore the flowers on their paws to soften the sound of their approach. Like the fox, the foxglove can be deadly: its flowers, leaves and roots are poisonous.

For me the Acanthus is a special plant. In Mediterranean countries it must qualify as a weed, because it spreads everywhere; the slopes of the Palatine Hill in Rome, for example, are covered in it. The one in the picture above is my original Acanthus, and it feels as though I’ve had it for ever. It has produced two offspring, one of which is enormous — presumably because the seeds fell into a very large pot which was partially empty. But it killed off a hydrangea in the process.

Acanthus leaves appear in the decoration of Corinthian columns, so in the Med you see a lot of stone versions as well as the real things. The story is that it was invented in 430 BCE by a Greek sculptor Callimachus, who did a sketch of an offering basket he saw on a tomb with Acanthus leaves growing up around it, and then transformed his drawing into a new kind of column capital. The Greeks themselves didn’t use the Corinthian “order” very much, preferring the simplicity of Doric or Ionic; but the Romans, never averse to a bit of bling, used it a lot. You can see many examples in London as well. One supports the figure of Nelson in Trafalgar Square: Acanthus really does get everywhere.

The Mexican daisy or fleabane was a plant much loved by Gertrude Jekyll, the doyen of Edwardian gardeners who championed the herbaceous border. It arrived in my garden from who-knows-where and has spread all over the place, flowering from April to late October. Occasionally I root it out of a pot to give the other occupants a chance; but basically I’m delighted it came, and hope it will never leave.

Since most of my working life has been spent sitting in libraries and making notes, I was keen when I started gardening to read as little as possible. A complete change was what I was after. As a result my knowledge of plants is limited, and I’m not intending to offer much in the way of advice in this column. But I’ll conclude with an observation: a rooftop garden with a lot of greenery does, I’m afraid, need a good deal of watering, especially in our current climate. From May to late September I generally go out every day if it hasn’t rained. So for me a hose is an essential, and if there were a ban on them I’d probably think about giving up.

Or perhaps I could focus on succulents, like the Schwarzkopfs, which aren’t fond of getting wet — plus the odd geranium or pelargonium. The example above was bought three years ago from a stall outside the Brunswick Centre, and it’s the most prolific geranium I’ve ever owned. It doesn’t seem to get remotely stressed when I forget to water it. Geraniums are unfashionable, I know, but they’re tolerant, persistent and cheerful. So bless their blowsy little hearts, I say.

Sue Blundell is a playwright and lecturer in Classical Studies. sueblundell.com

Please support The Fitzrovia News. Consider helping us cover our costs by visiting our secure payment page.