Plant Heritage – Weeds Roots & Leaves

Plant Heritage etc.

Spending an afternoon chatting to people about plants ranks amongst my favourite pastimes. So volunteering in Plant Heritage’s seed shop on the final day of the show was a great pleasure. I arrived a couple of hours ahead of my 1pm start time and took in those parts of the show I had admired a few days earlier, and a few more I’d missed the first time: see below.

In February I spent an enjoyable day at Stone Pine, Plant Heritage‘s office next to RHS Wisley in Surrey, where I joined a team sorting seed collected by members for sale at 2024 shows. One member of that team was June James who holds the National Collection of Clivia. Those exuberant orange or yellow flowered houseplants occupy a glasshouse in her Hampshire garden. I was thrilled to find that the indefatigable June was my fellow volunteer in the seed shop. In between customers she explained the finer points of Clivia propagation.

As it was the final day of the show, the packets of seeds were being offered in a special offer of five for a suggested donation of £10. It was fun recommending combinations of plants for the tricky sites which customers described. The range of seeds was impressive, from common or garden love-in-a-mist and pot marigolds to some very unusual Clematis cultivars.

The seed shop was one element of a very large stand occupying much of the far end of the show’s huge marquee, the official title of which was Floral Marquee and Plant Heritage, highlighting the importance of the charity’s work in conserving cultivated garden plants for future generations. Two of the National Collections represented in other sections of the Plant Heritage display area were mini Hostas and Rosa Persica. Another section of the display encouraged plant lovers to consider starting a National Plant Collection of one of the 15 environmentally friendly plant groups that are not currently part of a National Plant Collection. Before the show, when I read about the plants needing a home, I got very excited and imagined squeezing more Caryopteris shrubs into my garden alongside the one shrub I already have. Or devoting a corner to the different cultivars of Origanum. Of course good sense prevailed and I realised I haven’t the room for such a venture, but how special it would be to curate one of these living plant libraries.

Just before closing time exhibitors sell off plants in scenes reminiscent of the January sales. On our stand, I bought a dainty flowered Sanguisorba and was kindly given a hot water plant (Achimenes) and an unnamed Pelargonium with very attractive leaf markings. June also has also given me the fruits from two plants in her Clivia collection: a challenge now to propagate them successfully and look forward to flowers in about four years’ time!

Clivia miniata seeds already germinating in seed case. From June at Plant Heritage seed shop at Hampton Court FS 7 July 24

I’ve not been involved in the de-rig of a plant show before and it was an eye-opener to see how quickly the show is dismantled as soon as the last customer leaves the show ground. We all donned hi-viz and packed up the trays of seeds and other elements of the stand: pots, books and jugs of cut flowers (examples of the plants whose seeds were on offer). On the neighbouring display I watched as the plants were extracted from the ‘borders’ in which they were ‘planted’, revealing the ‘Chelsea planting’ method, where plants in pots are temporarily plunged into compost for the week or so of the show.

I mentioned that I arrived early that day. Here are some highlights.

The Lion King Community Garden designed by Juliet Sargent was awarded a gold medal by the RHS. Its warm colour scheme echoed the rising sun backdrop featured in the spectacular opening number of the stage show. The dry hedge shown here beside the yellow seats, is both a useful barrier in a garden and a wildlife habitat.

Scallop shell symbols point towards a garden inspired by the Camino de Santiago, one route of which passes through the forests of Galicia in Northern Spain. The statue represents a pilgrim (presumably the showers in the guest house were occupied and she’s opted for a skinny dip en route?) Not pictured is the clever route around the garden lined on either side with sweet scented star jasmine, through which tantalising glimpses of the pool were visible.

The Oregon Garden was the first of two USA themed gardens. Also featuring a central pool, its planting was evocative of the state’s rugged landscape with pollinator-supporting plants chosen to illustrate its biodiversity.

The elegance of the Antebellum South was the atmosphere evoked in the pocket garden replicated in the first section of the Explore Charleston Garden, morphing via a mulch of crushed shell into a beach representing the wild wetlands surrounding the city which I learnt are called the Lowcountry.

Look out for a future blog post about Denman’s Garden in West Sussex which I visited in late April. A corner of the garden (with garden designer John Brookes captured in a pool of light at work at his desk) was replicated to promote the RHS partner gardens along with Furzey Gardens in the New Forest in Hampshire. I visited the latter garden many years ago with a dear friend who lives nearby. She often took her children there when they were small and they loved to play in the range of treehouses. The Minstead Trust maintains the garden and supports people with learning difficulties to lead independent lives.

With time slipping by until my volunteering session was due to start, I briefly took in the several borders created by graduates of the London College of Garden Design, to celebrate the diversity of the daisy family. Here were an evocation of the planting beside a Wiltshire chalk stream, a display of healing remedies, a wildlife friendly border and a border of seed-bearing species, specifically designed to attract birds.