As winter gives way to spring, the changes show most clearly in gardens at ground level. Persistent wet weather has induced another superb display from Britain’s snowdrops. Crocuses began well but their flowers have been hit by repeated storms. Now it is the turn of small irises, scillas and narcissi, and those mountain plants which are starting their fine season of flower. In March small is beautiful.
In nature, mountain plants from the Alps to the Himalayas are struggling as their climate changes. They are important indicators of the alpine world’s continuing warming. At high altitudes snow falls later and melts ever sooner, denying alpine plants the winter blanket they appreciate. In British gardens they have to cope with day after day of heavy rain in winter and grey sunless skies. They hate damp, especially when they are not growing.
Since early December I have been checking my fine alpines twice weekly. I scatter handfuls of garden grit round their necks where they make contact with the soil. Sharp drainage is crucial for beautiful blue moltkias, pink androsaces, yellow verbascums and many others. Is the struggle for their survival still worth it?
To remind myself why it is, I have just made an excellent call. I went to the early spring show of the Alpine Garden Society, an occasion that corrects anyone who thinks that growth and productivity are dying in every area of British life. Among dedicated growers of alpines, from Devon to Scotland, Carmarthen to Norfolk, they are not.
The AGS shows bring skill, success and beauty out into the open. In the classrooms of Pershore High School in Worcestershire, this year’s early spring exhibitors delighted crowds of visitors with hundreds of pots already in bright flower and others on sale for future potential. They fall into two categories, those on sale from visiting specialist nurseries and those brought by amateur exhibitors, aspiring to awards without financial gain.
I came home with new challenges, the replacements for casualties of this wet winter. I also returned with mental images, ones of superb exhibits flowering in clay pots. They revive hope and set new standards for everyone who admires them. Yearly, they multiply the range of plants which can be seen in first-class shape in Britain.
In the exhibitors’ hall, big pans of pink and deep rose cyclamen lit up the tables, bringing the easy and hardy Cyclamen coum to the fore. We can all grow that one in semi-shade outdoors. The nursery growers’ tables and the amateur exhibitors’ hall also showed dozens of pots of selected snowdrops, those magnets for keen collectors, some of whom pay £30 or more for a rare variety. As a foil for their white presence, pale cream daffodils from Spain and golden crocuses from Turkey glowed after weeks in cold frames and unheated glasshouses. Exhibitors keep them away from the rain and wind that disfigure them outdoors.
In gardens, it has been a superb season for yellow-flowered winter aconites but indoors, in clay pots, they are outclassed by the brightest and best of the family, Eranthis tubergenii Guinea Gold. Exhibitors showed this easily grown aconite in clay pots, unmarked by winter’s rain. It is an excellent choice for a pot or pan on an unheated balcony from which it can be brought indoors for close appreciation when the big flowers open. Beside it, exhibitors’ early primulas reproached me for failing with them in recent winters outdoors. Under cover, primulas with tiny rose-pink flowers have escaped slugs, the lethal enemies of my plants.
Among them, a rare Iris vicaria from Uzbekistan had been raised from seed and grown on to flower, adding to gardeners’ knowledge of wild irises in central Asia. Nearby stood a pot of a hyper-rare yellow fritillary from Pakistan, Fritillaria chitralensis, raised by David Carver in Devon. It was a sight for winter-weary eyes but along an entire wall it was trumped by stunningly beautiful flowers on hepaticas in intensified shades of white, blue and rose-pink.
John Massey of Ashwood Nurseries, near Kidderminster in Worcestershire, is the top grower of hepaticas under cover in Britain and remains famous for his gold medal exhibit in 2016, when spring shows were still held in the Royal Horticultural Society’s London Halls. In pots, with winter protection in a frame or cold house, Japanese hepaticas will thrive in Britain, as Massey’s superb exhibit at Pershore restaged for us. Breeders have deepened their rose-red colour to a rich magenta-crimson and intensified the blues and bi-colours. Big plants of a hybrid hepatica, schlyteri The Bride, combine beautiful leaves and clear white flowers.
As at the London shows, Massey blended his hepaticas with a small white-flowered prunus, Kojo-no-mai, an ideal match. Hepaticas have been slow to flower in this dull winter and even this white single-flowered prunus has needed encouragement. It received it indoors in Massey’s bath with the cold shower turned on to encourage it to open its buds. Such is the ingenuity of master exhibitors.
Ashwood Nurseries offer mature plants of hepaticas to in-person visitors and young plants to shoppers online, adding expert instructions about their cultivation. They will succeed in courtyards or on balconies with shade, standing outside in summer and going under cover, unheated, in winter. Outdoors, all year round, two European hepaticas, nobilis and transsilvanica, are the best bets. The rewards are memorable. At Pershore, flowers of the Japanese varieties were shown floating like miniature water lilies in bowls of water. The open season for buying plants from Ashwood runs on into April.
Hepaticas fall within keen gardeners’ competence. Red-flowered Daubenya aurea from South Africa is way beyond my ability, but not beyond the exhibitor from Cardiff whose plant of this rare bulb was judged first class. Low-growing alpines from faraway rocks are even more difficult. They make tight cushions of hairy leaves and test even an expert’s skill.
The tightest cushions are those of the dionysias, plants from dry locations, especially in Iran and Afghanistan. Yellow-flowered varieties are best known, but I have now learnt that dionysias have acquired new levels of beauty. Amateur exhibitors showed perfect pans of a white-flowered dionysia with dark centres, a yellow one with lilac-rose margins and some amazing lilac-blues, so thick with flowers that the leaves were hardly visible.
Afghan dionysias have been crossed to produce them, receiving names of lengthy complexity. Labels even explained that some of those on show had been raised from seed sown in 2019. While I have been watching my financial investments shrivel, experts have been lifting dionysias to new heights of beauty.
Membership of the AGS costs £40 yearly, including four excellent bulletins, notice of tours abroad and use of an invaluable seed list. Top suppliers of growable alpines include Pottertons in Lincolnshire and Aberconwy Nursery in Wales, which brings plants to AGS shows and supplies visitors to their site at Colwyn Bay, but does not supply by post.
I had set off for the show remembering all that I had killed. I returned revitalised, looking forward to replacing it. In small gardens, grow small plants. In bigger ones, grow even more of them.
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