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Much is being said about who holds the cards in this or that conflict. Throughout April I was sustained by the illusion that I hold cards in gardening’s underlying tussle. I hold none. Mother Nature, the other protagonist, is not playing a game. In the prolonged dry weather I held back sowing or planting, consoling myself that she might blink first in a horticultural round of poker. She paid no attention. Gardeners cannot negotiate. They have to adjust to whatever Nature plays from her unpredictable pack.
As a result I am pining before prepping. In cruel April, there was no rain in most of Britain for the first 19 days. After three dry weeks in March the ground became cracked and weeds were hard to excavate. No seeds germinated despite a slight dew on a few mornings. After a day’s rain sunny drought resumed relentlessly. Newly planted items hated it, doubling the burden on us planters who have had to water them frequently. Newly laid turf is even more demanding, especially as modern turf is supplied with a wafer-thin layer of soil on its underside. When I was asked in to assess varying results, I saw two opposites. If the turf had been watered it was still green and likely to take root. If other obligations had distracted its owner, it had gone brown and was largely dead. “Turf in May and go away” is a ground rule to avoid.
I enter this month with mixed feelings. An essential accompaniment to May Day is Robert Herrick’s excellent poem “Corinna’s Going A-Maying”, first published in 1648. In it Herrick urges Corinna, his girl, to get up and no longer to be a “sweet slug-a-bed”. She must come and see how each field is looking like a street and each street like a “parke /Made green, and trimm’d with trees”. Each porch, each door, he tells her, is decorated with “white-thorn neatly interwove”. Meanwhile, “a thousand virgins on this day / Spring sooner than the lark to fetch in May”.
I wish our streets and houses were still dressed with green on May Day like those Herrick enjoyed. Nonetheless there are several problems in his call to May-goers. Try telling a drowsy bedmate that she is “slug-a-bed” and she will be as unco-operative as a real slug in a flowerbed. The most famous celebrations of May morning are those held around the tower of Magdalen College in Oxford, but no troupe of a thousand virgins is mustered to fetch them in. As for As for the interwoven whitethorn, it was in flower this year by mid-April and had faded as May dawned.
In its place we have had superb magnolias, camellias, cherry blossom and rhododendrons. They were not among the shades of green that Corinna was being summoned to enjoy: none of them was known in 17th-century gardens. Their fine showing this year makes me uneasy. So much in our gardens is out of its former timeframe. Wisteria has been flowering on walls a month early. In London climbing roses are already open: the sight of them in April used to be a treat for visitors to the south of France. At the start of “The Waste Land”, TS Eliot seemed botanically off target, but poetically memorable, when he called April the month which breeds lilacs out of the dead land. They only flowered in mid- to late May. This year, even in the chilly Cotswolds, they have been opening their buds before Easter. I have never seen them so early before.
Why feel uneasy, why pine? This season on fast forward is yet another reminder that the climate is changing and that other human crises will not make it change direction. Gardening needs to be artful and thoughtful to take these changes into account. As for pining, these early displays of beauty in Britain make me wish for even more. If the climate really is warming I wish that in April our cities could have blue-flowered jacarandas.
The flowers on jacaranda trees in Mexico City or southern California are what the flowers on magnolias have become to urban Britain. In open spaces jacarandas are spectacular, those trees with finely cut leaves and flowers of exquisite beauty. In the wild, Jacaranda mimosifolia is mainly at home in Bolivia, parts of Brazil and Argentina. In Mexico City it was never endemic. It was introduced by a thoughtful Japanese expert in landscape gardening at the beginning of the last century. It is a lovely sight in parts of Lisbon. It flowers memorably in parts of Australia. In South Africa, Pretoria became known as jacaranda city but the tree has been declared an invasive species and blacklisted because it competed for scarce supplies of water.
Jacarandas to brighten Wolverhampton? It is a lovely thought, but in Britain, jacarandas are non-starters, even in a spring like this one. They cannot resist frost at night, so I have to pine and enjoy them at second hand. I am grateful for FT readers’ photos of them, sent globally from cities elsewhere.
Meanwhile I am Maying and prepping at ground level. I am sowing seeds of two essential vegetables that crop in distinctive colours. French bean Mistik from Thompson and Morgan is a compact variety about a foot and a half high which bears purple bean pods on purple stems. Adoration, also from Thompson and Morgan, is a clever match for it as it is the same height and bears pencil-thin pale yellow beans. These beans should be sown now in pots in a greenhouse or the like and will germinate easily if kept warm. They can then be transplanted when the risk of frost is past. They can also be sown outdoors in late May, ideal vegetables for containers, buckets or old dustbins in small gardens.
I am also prepping hardy flower seeds for direct sowing, a rewarding job when you are Maying outdoors. I have a packet of seeds of Linum Bright Eyes from Johnsons, an elegant annual flax whose white flowers have circular red centres on thin stems about 18 inches high which can fit into gaps in any sunny bed. Poppy Ladybird, the nickname of Papaver commutatum, is another easy sow, essential for its deep scarlet flowers at a similar height, each marked with black at the base. I have also scuffled some pre-watered soil to prep a trial of the love-in-a-mist which the sharp eye of Sarah Raven calls “the most glamorous of all nigellas”. Nigella African Bride has white, not blue, flowers with prominent dark purple red anthers and “equally dramatic and beautiful crimson crown seed pods”.
I will also be prepping nasturtiums, the easiest of sow-and-go projects. Just poke a round hole about two inches deep into light soil which you have watered and allowed to drain. Into each hole goes the big round seed of a nasturtium, to be covered over with soil. Wait and water for up to three weeks and young leaves will appear, growing into trailing plants. Their flowers are not jacaranda blue but Herrick told his Corinna to put on her “foliage, and be seen /To come forth like the springtime, — fresh and green”. If she had known nasturtiums she could have been garlanded in red and orange flowers, her adornment later for summer.
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