The Botanics: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

The Palm House at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Some gardens include such a wonderful array of horticultural delights that I can't help but envy those who are fortunate enough to live close by and able to visit often. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is one of these places. 

Feathery beauty

My first attempt to visit the Botanics, as the gardens are called, was in 2008 during my first trip to Edinburgh. It was late August and, due to the Festival, accommodations in Edinburgh were nearly impossible to come by. I found lodging at the University's Pollock Halls on the opposite side of the city. In the center of the city, work on the tram line had disrupted normal bus routes. Although employees at the Tourist Information Centre on Princes Street did their best to help me determine where to wait for a bus that would take me to the Botanics, somehow I ended up standing on the wrong side of the square and missed the designated bus. 

A dreary wet day such as that August Sunday morning does not portray a city at its best. I would not have guessed then that I would, in time, come to admire Scotland's capital. Nonetheless, as I waited for the next bus, I enjoyed looking at flowers cultivated in beds along the square. 

I did not make it to the Royal Botanic Gardens that day. A bus heading toward Roslyn Chapel (think of The DaVinci Code) stopped to pick up passengers and I hopped aboard.  The next day I took the train from Waverly Station to Inverness, having missed an opportunity to visit the Botanics.

White-berried rowan, a native of China

Close up of white-berried rowan

In September of 2010 while volunteering at the Inverewe Gardens Thistle Camp in the Highlands, a fellow volunteer, who lives near the Botanics in Edinburgh encouraged me to visit the gardens during my one day in the city. She assured me that a walk there from my hotel on Princes Street would be doable. I decided to go. There were other things I wanted to see that day as well as the gardens. By the time I arrived at the entrance to the Botanics, it was mid afternoon. I saw less of the gardens than I would have preferred and enough to know I wanted to return. 

I especially loved the herbaceous borders and kitchen garden areas situated between dense hedges, beyond a tall hedge that is more than twenty-three feet high and more than one hundred years old. 

Some of the notable trees growing on the grounds made me wish I had more space to nurture trees at home. One I admired: the monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucaria).

Visitors wander through the gardens on a cold Sunday in late April

I didn't return to Edinburgh again until April of this year.  Rain threatened on my first day in the city, a Friday. I was staying in a small hotel located in the house that Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows, lived during a brief period of his childhood. I spent all of Friday walking around Edinburgh, stopping in at places, such as the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Poetry Library, I'd not been to before. By late afternoon the sun had emerged from behind the clouds, but I was on the wrong side of the city and I needed to freshen up before meeting a friend for dinner. The next day I was heading into the Highlands for the weeklong Balmacara Thistle Camp. The visit to the Botanics would have to wait until I returned to Edinburgh at the end of the week.   

In a bed beyond the tall hedge

Also, beyond the hedge

Based on the frequently pleasant weather we had that week in the west of Scotland, I imagined this late April Sunday would be a lovely day in Edinburgh. It was not. Clouds pressed down. Temperatures dropped. In the morning I dawdled while shopping in House of Fraser department store and then, in order to explore parts of the city I'd not seen before, I took a longer than necessary walking route to the Botanics. 

In cold weather batteries exhaust quickly. Before I reached the Botanics, the batteries inside my camera had weakened to the point of uselessness. Inside the Botanics gift shop, as I inquired about the availability of batteries, the shopping bag I carried  slipped from my hand and landed on the hard floor. Crack! Fortunately only one of the eggcups I'd bought in House of Fraser broke. A gift shop employee offered to wrap the seven survivors more securely and I accepted her kindness. 
  

Before venturing back out into the cold, I ate a lunch of warm and delicious butternut squash and spinach gnocchi at the John Hope Gateway Restaurant. Sitting there, I watched people strolling through the gardens, stopping here and there to inspect a flower or read from an information panel.

Crocuses and other potted plants

After loading the fresh batteries into my camera, I headed outside where I spent at most twenty minutes browsing before the cold got to me and I returned to the warmth of my hotel room.

Perhaps on my next trip to Edinburgh I'll allow myself the luxury of an entire day at the Botanics so that I'll have plenty of time to see the interiors of the various glass houses and the Queen Mother's Memorial Garden and to revisit favorite areas and take the guided tour and.... 

A lovely place to sit for an hour

To learn more about the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, visit their website:

http://www.rbge.org.uk/

Of Moonflowers and Morning Glories

Moonflower on the Verge of Unfolding

This photograph I took in October of 2009 inspired me to write the poem "Moonflower" which can be found on the website of the Poetry Society of South Carolina: http://www.poetrysocietysc.org/po1112/moonflower.html.

The Moonflower Saga

2009 was the first year that I had success growing moonflowers. Two or three years earlier I had purchased a packet of seeds at a country hardware store and planted them where I wanted them to grow, beside the trellises that support my carport. Those few that germinated failed to thrive, but that didn't stop me from trying again and again. Did I know then to soak the seed in water overnight and/or to score them? I'm not sure. It must have been in 2008 that I plopped a couple of leftover seeds in a Tuscan planter that sits against the workshop wall at the back of the carport. Much to my surprise the seeds germinated and the resulting plants produced one or two blossoms each. 

Ipomoea alba

In 2009 I planted only moonflower seeds in the Tuscan planter and had (for me) great success. I added a trellis to the planter so that the vines had somewhere to climb. Night after night in July I enjoyed the treat of a single blossom. I photographed the buds before they opened. I photographed newly opened flowers in late afternoon or just before dusk. I rose after midnight and used my camera's flash to take more photographs. In the morning I photographed the blossoms at various stages as they crumpled and drew into themselves. 

Later that summer and autumn I sometimes had the treat of two blossoms in a single night. Returning home late one evening, I saw a hummingbird moth dart away as the beams of my headlights illuminated the moonflowers. I thought I had seen a hummingbird, but a friend, who lives an hour further south and has great success with moonflowers, explained to me that I'd actually seen a giant moth.

Petticoat

Why do I love moonflowers? It's the combination of the heavenly fragrance, the beauty of the large flowers, and the rare opportunity to watch them unfurl.

You see, my 2009 moonflowers opened suddenly. Often I missed the unfurling, but when I witnessed a flower spring open, it was like magic. 

Now I harvest the seeds each year to plant the next, but I also buy new packets of seeds to increase the likelihood of thriving plants. In spite of these precautions, in 2010 and 2011 there were many nights when flowers opened, but they didn't always open completely and I saw none unfold suddenly. The openings I witnessed were gradual. Last summer a few of the buds didn't open at all. Some insect pest sealed the buds shut.

Moonflower Seedpods

This year in my ongoing attempt to cultivate moonflowers in varying locations I finally had a small - very small - triumph. One of the seeds I planted under a huge live oak germinated and the vines climbed up the arms of a small tree and produced two flowers. 

Dried Moonflower Seedpods and Seeds

This summer I have had less success than usual growing moonflowers in the planter under the carport. The reason? Last year it seemed like a good idea to grow moonflowers and morning glories together. The only morning glory that sprouted remained puny. This year the morning glories claimed victory. Although I spotted several moonflower seedlings early on, most seem not to have survived being without water during the three weeks I was away in June. Morning glories took over and thrived. One moonflower vine has managed to stay alive and has produced three or four blossoms over the course of the summer - in fact, two this week.

The Morning After

Morning Glories

For years I had only moderate success in growing morning glories. At best the vines would grow a couple of feet and I'd see a handful of blooms. Then two years ago I purchased a packet that contained a variety of morning glory seeds. I love blue flowers of all kinds and so hoped the blue morning glories shown on the package would proliferate. A single plant with blue blossoms did grow, but what really took off is one with flowers that, in appearance, remind me of petunia blossoms. I harvested what seemed like a bazillion seeds, but with this variety being so invasive, I've planted them sparingly. In the area where the first ones grew, volunteers flourish. The only reason I don't uproot these is that twice I've seen a hummingbird feed from them in late morning. 

Invasive Morning Glories

All the pictures included in this post are photographs I've taken of my own plants. Occasionally I spot someone else's prolific blue morning glories climbing a wall or porch railing. One of those sightings on the Charleston peninsula was what inspired me to plant morning glory seeds in the first place.

Please Post Your Comments
Some of you have tremendous success with moonflowers, achieving thirty or forty blossoms per night during the growing season. Will you kindly share your growing secrets in the comment area below?

A Week in Inverewe Gardens

One of the exotics growing in Inverewe Gardens

When you think of plant life in Scotland’s Western Highlands, you might visualize thistle blossoms, heather covered hillsides, or Caledonian pine forests. Unless you’ve spent time in that part of the world, you likely won’t expect to see palm trees, but palms do grow there in locales such as Plockton and Ullapool.

You’ll also find palms trees at Inverewe Gardens, near Poolewe, along with a variety of tropical and other exotic plants Osgood Mackenzie imported from locations around the world for inclusion in the garden he created 150 years ago. In spite of Inverewe’s latitude of 57.8 (for reference, Moscow’s is 55.75), the relatively warm air borne by the North Atlantic Drift makes the survival of such plant life possible. And to help shelter his plant specimens from the wind, Mackenzie established a grove of pines and had a wall erected.

After Mackenzie’s death, his daughter Mairi Sawyer continued work on the garden. In 1952 she gifted Inverewe Estate, which includes the gardens, to the National Trust for Scotland (NTS).

Two years ago I had the opportunity to spend a week living in Inverewe House while serving as a NTS Thistle Camp volunteer. I wrote about that experience in a July guest blog for the National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA. (Scroll down for link.)

Inverewe House

Our major task as volunteers was invasive species eradication. More specifically, we did “rhody bashing,” removal of the non-native Rhododendron ponticum that had spread into the wild. We used mattocks and handsaws to remove rhododendrons that had invaded nearby woodlands and then we burned the resulting debris in bonfires.

During my stay at Inverewe House, I came upon two huge volumes of a limited edition book dated, as I recall, 1917. The volumes were filled with art plates illustrating numerous varieties of rhododendron. While turning the pages, I wondered what Osgood Mackenzie would think of the runaway rhododendrons and our efforts to try to control them. Would he approve of our work? Would he regret his decision to include this plant species in his garden?

In my own garden, I am prone to plant non-natives, as well as natives such as beautyberry. Just today I purchased a Persian Shield (Strobilanthes dyerianus), native to Myanmar, from a local garden center, not stopping to think at the time about whether this plant has the potential to become invasive here in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Already my garden includes nandina heavenly bamboo, which I planted more than twenty years ago soon after I bought this house. According to the University of Florida’s website, the State of Florida has placed nandina on their invasive species list. My garden also includes nandina volunteers, but only three or four. Although I don’t find nandina on my own state’s list, I am reminded that we gardeners need to balance our love for plants with foreign origins with the well-being of our native species.

Not all our time at Inverewe Gardens was spent battling invasive species. In the middle of the week we had a day off from volunteer activities and I spent the morning of that day wandering around the property, photographing flowers and other plants. Eventually the last of my camera batteries fizzled out. Not to be deterred, I switched to my iPhone and continued to take pictures. I’m sorry to report that I did not note the names of the various plants I observed, but I can tell you that among my favorites were the tall spiky red cannas and a gorgeous lace-cap hydrangea.

One can’t help but envy the residents of Poolewe. How fortunate they are to live near Inverewe Gardens. With its more than fifty acres and its numerous plant species, both the familiar and the exotic, this is a place a gardening enthusiast could stroll through every day of the year and never be bored. 

Loch view from the dining room

For more information about Inverewe Gardens visit the National Trust for Scotland website:

http://www.nts.org.uk/Property/Inverewe-Garden-Estate/About/

To learn more about Thistle Camp at Inverewe Gardens read my blog post on the National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA website:
http://www.ntsusa.org/blog/guest-post-inverewe-thistle-camp/

Loch Ewe, a natural beauty

For the Love of Moss

My romance with moss began last year. Just weeks after the horrifying earthquake overwhelmed parts of Japan, my daughter and I visited serene Tenryū-ji, a Zen temple in Kyoto’s Arashiyama district where, along with throngs of Japanese visitors, we viewed Sakura in bloom. At Tenryū-ji’s open-air gift shop I came across a book about Zen gardens. Later, back home in the Lowcountry, I allowed my eyes to linger on each photograph in the book, Samadhi on Zen Gardens, and that is how I became aware of Tofuku-ji’s checkerboard of moss and stone.

Tofuku-ji's famous moss garden

Gazing at the photograph, I thought perhaps I’d found a solution for my front lawn with its bald places. I sought to borrow the idea from Buddhist monks and transform the shady expanse beneath my live oak with something similar. I started by pulling a patch of chartreuse-colored moss off the front steps where it grew freely as a volunteer. I moved the tiny patch to a bald area and watered it when I remembered. During times when it received sufficient water, the patch grew, but it never adhered to the soil. Often it didn’t get enough water – from me or from the sky.

This isn't where I want the moss to grow!

Next I purchased a carton of moss milkshake from a company I found on-line. The sellers are not to be blamed for my lack of success with their product because neither the clouds nor I the provided enough sustained moisture to bring to life the intentionally dehydrated mosses the seller sent.  And let’s face it, the climate here is vastly different from where those specific moss varieties thrive.

In the county library I located Schenk’s excellent book Moss Gardening and after reading his words realized that perhaps I should just encourage what grows here naturally. I began noticing places where moss grew, hidden or in plain sight.  When I carried carafes of rainwater from the barrel, where I’d captured it, to gardenias and hydrangeas I’d recently planted, I made sure to allow water to drip on the volunteer moss. And the moss is even now expanding – not as rapidly as I would like, but increasing its territory nonetheless.

Moss Gardening has a chapter entitled “In the Gardens of Japan.” It begins “Mosses invited themselves to the gardens of Japan and thereby invented moss gardening.”

Late last year I returned to Japan for another visit with my family. When my daughter asked which place I most wanted to visit, I said, “Tofuku-ji, to see the moss checkerboard.” We traveled there by train and, before locating the checkerboard, were dazzled by the brilliant red leaves of Tokufu-ji’s valley of maple trees.

A moss garden at Tofuku-ji's Abbot's Hall

The Abbot’s Hall, or Hojo, at Tokufu-ji is home to four gardens, including the particular one I longed to see. The Hojo brochure, provided with paid admission, is printed in kanji for the most part, but includes a paragraph in English.  According to the brochure, the Hojo gardens were designed by landscape sculptor Shigemori Mirei in 1939. In one garden, moss covered mounds represent five sacred mountains. The coveted diminishing checkerboard lies in the Northern Garden and there the moss stood taller than I had imagined. Feeling content, I didn’t want to leave.

Before last year, I was mostly oblivious to moss, but since then, I’ve noticed it not only in temple gardens and along wild streams in Japan, but on hillsides in Scotland, and growing unfettered between sidewalk and street near the corner of East Bay and Chapel in Charleston.

The volunteer moss continues to spread

I realize I probably won’t ever have my own moss and stone checkerboard, at least, not in my current locale, but I haven’t given up the idea of cultivating more moss.  For now, I’m encouraging moss growth one drop of rainwater at a time.

Reading List

• Moss Gardening – George Schenk (Timber Press, Portland, 1997)
• Gathering Moss – Robin Wall Klimmerer (Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2003)
• Samadhi on Zen Gardens: Dynamism and Tranquility – Mizuno Katsuhiko and Tom Wright (Suiko Books, Kyoto, 2010)

Tofuku-ji’s Website

http://www.tofukuji.jp/english.html

My Grandmother's Canna Lilies

“Weeds are simply not allowed to grow [in her garden],” a newspaper article, circa 1950, said of my grandmother, Chessie Pearce. The article went on to report that she “has been most generous in giving cuttings and plants to her neighbors.”    

My grandmother loved to garden. In spite of living on a small family farm on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina, she managed to amass an interesting collection of flowering plants. Her cannas were among my favorites. She grew two varieties: one bearing spiky red blossoms above chocolate-tinged foliage, and the other, green-leaved, boasting bright yellow petals with orange speckles.

My red canna: a hummingbird favorite

When I was a child my grandmother’s canna lilies grew so prolifically that even extras she disposed of in a swampy area beside a wide ditch grew tall and produced flowers. Cannas hanker for rich, moist soil and she provided it.

My yellow canna

After my grandmother died, her cannas lived on.  My mother planted some beneath our living room windows. While waiting for the school bus during the autumn mornings of my teen years, I watched hummingbirds drink nectar from the red flowers.

Flash forward many years. After I bought the house where I now live, my mother dug up rhizomes from my grandmother’s cannas and gave them to me to plant. I didn’t have much success at first. The plants survived, but didn’t thrive. Some years no blooms appeared. One year, leaf-curlers attacked the canna lilies. The next year I dug up the rhizomes and moved them from my sunbaked backyard to a circular bed shaded by the live oak out front. In the new location, leaves rose from the ground; while yellow flowers rarely appeared, the red ones never did.

Over the years I gave canna rhizomes to friends. The resulting plants performed well, blooming beautifully. Clearly, my friends have less sandy soil than I do.

Two summers ago I created a new flowerbed in the backyard and transplanted several of the cannas into it. Much to my delight, both the red and the yellow cannas gained height and bloomed. Soon a hummingbird noticed the spiky red flowers.

On Rokko Island, Kobe, Japan 

What I’ve failed to mention, up until this point, is that for years and years I searched for, but did not find, cannas that looked like the ones my grandmother grew. I’m not sure why I felt the need to find their counterparts, but I did. My quest to find the red and the yellow cannas continued as I scoured plant nurseries and public or private gardens. Every summer I scrutinized cannas growing in the town where I live, and in places where I traveled, but any red cannas I saw had solid green leaves or the flowers weren’t spiky. Many of the cannas growing in public places had orange or salmon colored blossoms.

Inverewe Gardens: Tropical foliage in the Scottish Highlands

Then, in July of 2010 while visiting family on Japan’s Rokko Island, I discovered the familiar yellow canna in front of a multi-family residence. Two months later I came across the spiky red canna with the chocolate tinged leaves at Inverewe Gardens in the Scottish Highlands.

The yellow canna cultivated by a gardener
on Japan's Rokko Island

The red cannas at Inverewe Gardens, 
a National Trust for Scotland property 

Now I have in my garden a third variety of canna lily. Last year during the Charleston Horticultural Society's annual plant sale, known as Plantasia, I bought an orange flowered canna with variegated, striped leaves. My Internet research indicates this variety is called Bengal Tiger.

How I wish I could have shared the Bengal Tiger with my grandmother. She would have adored its gorgeous tropical foliage.

The foliage behind this orange canna flower belongs to the variety with the spiky red flowers.

And this gorgeous leaf belongs to the orange flowered canna shown in the above photograph.