Easter activates gardeners, giving them four days to work in their gardens, notice the gaps and shop to fill them. It comes after a testing time. In most of Britain the weather of the previous six weeks has been generally dry and the nights very chilly. I hate this combination for new plantings, but there have been spectacular winners among established favourites, primroses, yellow celandine and flowery magnolias to the fore. A wet winter and nights without sharp frost have suited their respective needs.
The impulse this weekend is to head for a garden centre and satisfy ours. To anticipate you, I spent a morning in a beautifully sited one, the Batsford Garden Centre and its blossoming arboretum in the Cotswolds above Moreton-in-Marsh. As I checked out the plants there, I imagined an Easter visit by an urban couple, out to capitalise on the holiday weekend. Here is the result, my tale of two shoppers. I call them Adrian and Tanya, exponents of takeaway gardening.
I picture Adrian Dark-Poole in his late thirties, proficient in shadowy corners of financial trading and owner of a long narrow garden in London’s Queen’s Park. His bank balance has soared since he shorted the Japanese stock market a week before Trump’s “liberation” sent it into reverse. A few hundred pounds is not going to hurt him.
Adrian’s partner Tanya works in investor relations, a career that Adrian does not even rate. He likes to buy big, whereas she likes to think she shops shrewdly: she remembers her mother who gardened artfully round the family home near Dorking without paying more than £12 for a plant. Since 2020, Tanya notices how the cost of gardening has soared, vastly outpacing official inflation. Last week she was offered a hollyhock in a 2-litre pot for £14.50. Her mother died in 2018 and never bought a hollyhock for more than £2.
Friends wonder what keeps Adrian and Tanya together, but they also notice how Tanya tells stories of Adrian coming to her rescue, booking her first-class seats on overcrowded trains or hiring a chef when she flaps about hosting a Saturday dinner. Money, Adrian tells her, breeds money and buys time. Personally, Tanya hopes that it will breed children, but Adrian has yet to agree.
At Batsford, on a sunny Sunday, I sat and imagined them making transportable choices from plants that I found on sale. On entering, Adrian would surely trolley a wall plant whose branches were trained on a frame and whose leaves had a pretty flush of red. It was labelled Photinia fraseri Robusta Compacta, a denser variety, apparently, of Photinia Red Robin, a plant that Tanya remembered reading about in a column in FT Weekend. The price tag was £139.99, whereas a potted Red Robin, ready for training, could be had for £11.99. Why wait for one to mature, Adrian told her, especially as we may move house? Move, Tanya wondered with a pang? Would they be needing more bedrooms than their current two?
On to their trolley Adrian shoved a lavender trained as a single-stemmed standard and a purple Lavender stoechas in full flower, each for £24.99. Tanya expostulated, as she knows that Lavender stoechas died in London in winter 2022-23 and anyone can train a potted shrub into a semi-standard shape without paying five times more for a finished example. Instead she picked an Osmanthus burkwoodii, evergreen, about 4ft high in a 10L pot and covered with scented white flowers for £39.99. Good on Tanya: she knew this one too from the FT where it wins regular praise as an informal hedge, about 6ft high. This spring, it is flowering superbly.
On the rebound, Adrian found potted olive trees, bait for a moneyed Dark-Poole shopper, about 7ft high and £95.99 each in 15L pots. He trolleyed two and when Tanya complained that she did not want their garden to look like Provence, he added a big Wisteria sinensis Prolific, twined up a 7ft cane for £51.99. Tanya spotted a smaller one for £24.99, and added a macrobotrys too, the one with long racemes of lilac flower. She insisted that smaller plants would be less of a bother to water for the next three years. As a sop after the olive trees, Adrian gave in.
On a side bench she found a dark blue Ceanothus Concha. It was Adrian’s turn to remind her that ceanothuses died in 2022-23’s winter, but she answered, rightly, that they are very quick growing, that Concha is hardier than the Italian Skies they lost and that at £16.49 it was an evergreen buy.
Nearby, Adrian nearly bought half a dozen Japanese azaleas, but backed off when Tanya told him they were low-growing and too strident. When he moved towards a strong pink rhododendron labelled Germania, Tanya told him that its colour was frightful too, whereas she had found the excellent Cunningham’s White in a 7L pot for £33.99. Adrian, miffed, said he did not want the garden to look like Dorking, forgetting Tanya had grown up there. So he gave in.
Next, they found the potted David Austin roses, priced this spring at £32.99. Adrian did not care, but Tanya thought they were about 50 per cent more expensive than she remembered pre-pandemic. They agreed on four: pink Olivia Rose Austin, deep pink Gertrude Jekyll, single white Kew Gardens and yellow The Pilgrim as a climber. They agreed because they had copied an FT column that picked these four as top choices.
Border plants, lightly rooted in 3L pots, were on offer at around £10 each. Small ones in 9cm pots cost around £3. Is a year’s growth really worth £7 per plant? For Adrian it is, but it depends if the 3L ones are well rooted and instantly divisible into many more. Tanya opted instead for peonies at £19.99 each, pink-to-white Shirley Temple and scented pink Alexander Fleming. Bigger ones establish well and I do not wince at these prices for older plants.
By now Adrian was picking trees. For £540 he had found a big Cornus controversa variegata and reserved it before Tanya could shift him to one called Milky Way in a smaller size for £83.99. Sorbuses allowed her to triumph again, as she found good trees of Sorbus cashmiriana, a lovely smallish one for not-too-dry gardens, and an upright one, also for small spaces, Glendoick Spire. In 12L pots they cost £69.99 each.
By now Adrian had run up a bill of just over £1,100. Even Tanya had run up about £250 and at the till added 10 corms of a small gladiolus called Carine, white with red markings, for £3.50. Indeed a top Easter pick.
After packing up their Birnam Wood into the car, Adrian set the satnav for Queen’s Park and Tanya felt a rush of pride that they had bought so much. She felt a rush too when Adrian announced, “Let’s go for it before dinner.” Then she realised he meant planting.
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