Gardens have had a prolonged two-tier spring. Blue skies, dry weather and minimal frost led to exceptional quantities of flower, whether on magnolias or crab apple trees or even in late May on hawthorns and pyracanthas, smothered in off-white blossom. I never remember such profusion, one that roses are carrying beautifully forwards. Garden watchers have loved it, but ground-level gardeners have been struggling. I hate a dry spring, let alone one that lasts for so long that parallels have had to be sought as far back as the 1850s.
In such weather, I am behind the calendar, with much that was meant to be safely planted by mid-April. What went into borders dwindled in hard ground unless watered frequently, so I had to keep new plants in the pots in which they arrived. Mulching is less effective if laid on dry soil, so that job has waited too. As seeds fail to germinate in dry ground, I kept them in packets. I waited till late May to sow poppies, space fillers that are usually flowering in June. There is much to catch up on among the usual scramble of early June.
Plantings in pots or window boxes are another matter. They are mainstays of the gardening public and are fine so long as they are watered. Blue skies bring their owners out shopping, and at Chelsea Flower Show many nurseries reported a keener trade than in the dank May last year. Even I risked planting petunias, geraniums and half-hardy bedding in the week of May 20, 10 days earlier than my usual practice. The two staples are safely in, white flowered bacopa and golden flowered bidens, top buys as they spread so widely from small beginnings and then persist until October.
In mid-May, I began to worry about my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so I took a break from the hosepipe to see if they were coping. Last year, I described rediscovering them. They are plants, not people. They live in Munich’s fine Botanical Garden, where I planted their parents in 1965. Some of them are lilac-flowered ramondas, wedged in the rocks of the Pyrenean section of the huge, famous alpine garden. Others are white-flowered poppies of the dawn, or snow poppies, at home in and Japan but spreading at ground level in the shrubbery nearby. Perhaps you have survivors too from your earlier gardening or are laying them down this weekend. Ramondas and dawn poppies are rarely offered now by nurseries in Britain, but a rose or a tree may be your long survivor instead.
Posters outside Munich’s main station announced that German farmers of asparagus were surmounting the drought: indeed asparagus is best on dry sandy soil. Rain had been as scarce in Bavaria as in Britain, but the botanical garden was as full of interest as ever. The alpine house was at a peak of rare beauty, beautifully maintained by Jenny Wainwright-Klein and her assistant, whether tumbling yellow verbascums in tufa rock or rare dionysias in pans.
In the spring garden nearby, Deutzia gracilis was covered in white flowers, matching other members of the family which have been stupendously early and floriferous in England. Gracilis, from Japan, is a fine choice as it grows only three feet high and will flourish in semi-shaded places. I recommend it in any weather, wet or dry.
In Munich’s big, decorative courtyard, the spring bedding was about to be removed, but not before I admired the white-flowered bellis daisies that had been used in a criss-cross pattern to break up flat beds of tulips and multicoloured forget-me-nots. Patterning with bellis is another idea worth imitating. Bellis seeds germinate very easily in a seed tray and can be sown in the next fortnight. Seedlings are then grown on for planting out in autumn.
Past some free-flowering Judas trees, as floriferous as mine in Oxford, I walked to check the dawn poppies I planted 60 years ago: would the drought have ruined them? Under a fine Rhododendron Persil, white with a yellow streak, they were even more flowery than when I found them last year. They spread when suited and in May they flower at about a foot high for a week. Since my last visit I have acquired one from a Scottish nursery and already it is preparing to run over bare ground.
It made me think about transience and persistence. In Britain gardeners value plants that flower for long periods. In this dry spring the flowers on tulips and irises were magnificent but shrivelled within a week: are they worth it, owners wondered? In Japan, home of the dawn poppies, transience is an appreciated quality. I agree. Why reject a plant for gardens if it flowers for only a week? The memory of it may last a lifetime.
On the steep rocks of the Pyrenean group in Munich’s alpine garden I found the ramondas alive in dry weather, just as they live in my garden at home. They too flower briefly, but their lilac-blue flowers are unforgettable. In a drought they flower less freely but if planted to lie vertically, not flat, they will survive dry summers without burning. Munich’s great alpine garden is still in need of a head gardener, I learnt, a job that has been advertised for months. There is no finer opportunity, one that needs dedication, but the garden cannot be left to freewheel for long.
Regretting I am too old to fill the vacancy, I diverted from the ramondas, descendants of those I had to plant in 1965, and turned to the Chinese and Himalayan group. There I saw floral transience at its finest, on a peony covered in crinkled flowers. I never planted this Paeonia rockii but I grow it at home where it revels more than any other peony in dry, stony soil. Twenty years ago, this beautiful tree peony was very hard to find in commerce. However, plants related to the wild variety are now advertised on the internet. For a week the flowers are unsurpassed, white-petalled with a maroon blotch in their centres and a mass of yellow stamens, like gold fluff, on white filaments. They have an exquisite scent.
This year is the centenary of this exceptional beauty’s dispatch to gardens. Joseph Rock introduced it in 1925, and was not an imperialist-colonialist, as modern stereotyping sometimes mischaracterises all plant collectors. He was a brilliant linguistic scholar who wrote a major study of peoples he encountered. He was sent by the great Arnold Arboretum in Boston to collect seeds near Tibet. In Gansu a local ruler sent him to this peony in a Buddhist monastery’s garden. He sent seeds to 10 growers, including Berlin’s botanic garden. He did not destroy local ecology. Soon afterwards, the plants he saw were indeed destroyed, in a conflict between local Muslims and Buddhists.
He never saw this peony in the wild, but the great traveller Reginald Farrer found it in 1913 among brushwood on slopes in east Tibet. “For a long time,” he wrote, “I remained in worship” at these “snowy beauties”. In this dry spring, the flowers have been superb.
From Munich I returned to find 28 flowers on my plant at home. For six days, I too worshipped them, until they fell, living on in the mind. If only the drought of this spring had passed so quickly.
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