From pasque flowering to beech leafing

The long, cold winter has so held the gardens back, while the sudden warmth of early May sent everything charging forward, that there's a real sense of how 'the treasure of nature's germens tumble all together' (perhaps I misinterpret Macbeth, but the gist is right). I've delayed so long with the piece I wanted to write about three weeks in spring, and the changes seen over two visits to Kew, that now the purple wisteria, peonies and laburnum are out too. Initially, though, I wanted to observe the onset of easter according to the flowering of the pulsatilla or pasque flower. The rockery specimens above were out at Kew on 14 April, but my own windowbox subspecies finally flowered the following Sunday, and has only just stopped.

As for the crazy profusion of the Botanics, several rarities spotted on the first excursion of the year were over and gone by the next, on the second of three unnaturally perfect days at the start of May. Not surprisingly, many of the Alpine House inhabitants had paid their floral respects and moved on, among them this rare Iris sari manissadjanii from Turkey.

The carpet of Cretan Chinodoxa ('glory of the snow') near Kew Palace was also at its best one week, gone the next.

Mid-April leafing was slow. Only the Acer opalus or Italian maple was in anything like substantial leaf and flower

but various species of magnolia provided the flowering bridge between the April and May visits. Some had been nipped by the frosts, but not the later developers.You don't have to go far from the big gates in May to see a spectacular display.

Behind the pink magnolia, all furry buds several weeks earlier, is a wonder - cornus 'Ormonde' (a dogwood mixture between Cornus florida and Cornus nuttallii, if you really want to know).

There's another on the opposite side of the lake to the Palm House

and the nearby Gunnera are just beginning their monstrous annual adventure.

I headed up to the orchards between Temperate House and Pagoda

where apple tree marvels of all kinds were in full bloom and scent

and though the bluebell woods behind Queen Charlotte's Cottage were not yet in their prime, some patches were flourishing in plain sun.

Then I steered back round to the gate where I started alongside the Thames, via a Northern American red oak (Quercus rubra)

and a couple of magnificent beeches that turned out to be labelled not copper but purple (Fagus sylvatica purpurea - I think). 

Nature's profusion flourished under more sunshine on consecutive weekends. We spent a blissful afternoon in the garden of our friends Daisy, François and Garance on the Layer Marney estate in Essex, followed by a high-summery picnic on the beach by the Saxon church at Bradwell-juxta-Mare on Bank Holiday Monday. And last Sunday I was down at Glyndebourne to talk at the Ariadne Study Morning, a fine one while it lasted, before zipping back on the 12.20 train to London to spiel again between Denis Kozhukhin's epic afternoon journey through Prokofiev's Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Piano Sonatas for the Southbank's The Rest is Noise festival.

I mention these only because I'm afraid I'll never get time to write them up - more trips beckon, and I haven't even finished with Sicily yet - and I didn't want the atmosphere to pass unrecorded. Now it's grey, cold and damp, but I leave you with the Glyndebourne gardens on yet another perfect if shorter-lived May morning.

In mycological mood

I thought better of calling this post 'the fruits of hidden sex' (though no doubt some sad searcher may still be disappointed as a result of my still managing to slip the line in here). The mushroom itself is, forgive the mixed metaphor, the tip of the iceberg, like the wonderful if hallucinogenic (I'm told) fly agaric fungi posing picturesquely on the edge of the drive to our dear friends' residence of Chapelgill, Broughton, in the Scottish Borders. Very near them is the world's first cryptogamic sanctuary, established in the Heron Wood of Dawyck Botanic Gardens with beech


and Scots pine now seeming as much at home as the native oak and holly. My Collins dictionary leaves 'cryptogam' at 'any organism that does not produce seeds, including algae, fungi, mosses and ferns', but we're talking sex, the vast underground network of decay-speeding and new lifing of which the mushrooms are the brief visible manifestation.

And this was a deceptively early autumn flourish, at the very beginning of September, after which of course we returned to late-summer heat and dryness. Dawyck is the place for what it calls 'a dynamic community of native mosses, lichens and liverworts'



many of which flourish on the stonework around the garden.



But Heron Wood feels like a place apart. About a third of the garden's 1,055 species of fungi* are to be found here, and on our September visit we could well believe it.


I've since had it confirmed that this is the tasty Boletus edulis, certainly a bolete.


Yet even if my mycological studies were to continue, I'd never trust myself to distinguish the edible from the poisonous - remembering especially an incident on Samos last autumn when our Polish friend Lydia identified a rare, delicious specimen only to be told by a local Greek lady that it was deadly. She thought this might be to discourage furrin pickers, but we weren't going to take the risk.


Anyway all you'd get from Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, would be quite a trip. That too I'm not hazarding. But very pretty they looked too, flourishing under the beeches on the hillside in Broughton, ignoring the farmer's fencing.




After this I was keen to join the 'fungal foray' at Kew on 18 October, but it was booked out twice over. I can't praise Kew too highly, though, for responding so rapidly to my requests yesterday, when I decided to take an excursion in search of the yellowish coral fungus named there by George Massee in 1896. Clavaria kewensis is now Ramaria stricta, and the information lady put me straight in touch with mycologist Dr. Bryn Dettinger. While waiting the return of Martn Ainsworth, he confirmed my bolete and told me he'd seen a clump of Ramaria stricta on the east side of the Banks Building.

The trouble with that is that it's strictly private and punters can't get anywhere near the east side. Never mind; here's a Wiki shot of the fabulous beast to show what I missed.


That said, no visit to Kew is ever wasted. I didn't see a single fungus anywhere, and believe me, I looked. But I did come across one of the autumn glories, the Italian maple, Acer opalus, looking splendid both without


and from within.



The ubiquitous parrots along the Thames were flagrantly displaying themselves nearby; whatever the damage to treetops, who could resist that flash of green?


Sundry other maples were doing their stuff


and Aesculus flava, the sweet buckeye, provided more perspectives from within.


It was curious to walk around the woodland in the semi-darkness before closing time at 6pm. Geese, ducks and other woodland birds had truly taken over the gardens. But the fungi's above-ground flourishings all, it seems, were gone. Next time I need a reliable guide.

*Kew boasts around 2,750 including lichens. Its magazine article continues: 'To put the figures into context, there are around 2,100 native flowering plant and fern species in the UK, and around six to seven times as many fungi. It is this ration (developed by David Hawksworth) that underpins the now generally accepted figure of around 1.5 million fungal species estimated to live on Earth'.