Gardening
Jacarandas
Denis Wood
When I went with members of the Garden History Society to Spain in the early part of June we spent a day looking at gardens near Marbella before going on to the traditional Arab gardens at Seville, Cordoba and Granada.
Within a few minutes of setting out in the air-conditioned bus, through a landscape of prickly pears, I saw my first jacaranda. It comes from Brazil and as might be expected is one of the tropical and sub-tropical trees from South America frequently seen in these parts of Spain. Friends who have houses in the south of France have told me about this tree but I had never before seen it for myself. As the tour proceeded we saw jacarandas in many gardens; there is a beautiful and dramatic avenue of them at Jerez — when I was there? a few fallen petals were lying on blue tiles underneath. The colour of the rather drooping flowers in erect panicles is a mauve-blue of notable coldness as if lightly overlaid with grey, alien and strange. It is one of the few trees with blue flowers; paulownia is another, and in districts where it produces flowers these occur earlier in the year and I doubt if it is possible to compare their blue with that of the jacaranda but I should say that the latter colour is the colder. Paulownia comes from China and is seen and flourishes in Europe, further north than jacaranda. The tree itself IS
even hardy in the south of England but the immature flowers formed in October are too often killed during the winter.
On this our first day we were welcomed and entertained with extraordinary kindness by the owners of the gardens, both English residents and Spanish. One Spanish lady gave us lunch, all forty-four of us, not a picnic but at tables laid in the shade of catalpas. Cooling gazpacho in wooden bowls, paella from a dish so enor mous that we were all invited to look at it before it was broken into, strawberries, and delicious sangria to drink. We had been tired when we arrived here because after a night flight from England we had not got into bed before 4 or 5 a.m. that morning, but we left restored and refreshed for the next round of gardens.
, In this part of Spain gardens are like many seen on the Riviera but rather more so. The latitude of Marbella is 36.45 degrees north of the Equator, a little south even of Algiers and nearly 15 degrees further south than London, and the average winter temperature more than 66 degrees Fahrenheit, so it is no surprise to see growing out of doors many plants which can only be grown in greenhouses here. Datura, also known as brugmansia, is an example: the large white funnel-shaped flowers hang down wards, with a scent so strong as to be overpowering. In Mexico where It came from, they say that to sleep under it will either drive you mad or kill you; it is a striking if rather sinister plant to grow in a tub here, provided it can be trundled into a temperature of not less than 60 degrees for the winter. Another plant which I saw for the first time was solandra, again from Mexico, seen against walls almost as a climber, with peachapricot trumpet-shaped flowers; and strehtzias with huge bananalike leaves and fantastic bird heads six feet or more high. Many of the gardens and much of the roadside also is too much given to bougainvilleas, climbing, dan where there is room to climb, dan gling. in curtains down banks, their narsh magenta unpleasing to our northern eyes, but they are not, as it were, in our blood and neither we nor our ancestors have grown up With them. I have similar feelings about oleanders, which you see here lining streets as dusty standard trees whereas they are so much more acceptable when planted as hedges flowering to ground level. One enchanting garden, an olct mixed orchard of figs and olives, provided a restful canopy of green shade, although even here the lower parts of some of the trunks of these noble old trees were wreathed around with pink-magenta ivy-leaf geraniums. What is at first surprising in this very hot climate is the prodigal use
Of water, the roads and pathways tare hosed down every day and pere seems to be a limitless supply or all the plants in the garden. 20trie of it comes frombore holes, P!at most from the mountains be co' through irrigation channels c,.ntrolled by the iefe — chief — who TrOln his-Olympian height opens
and shuts sluices to give fair supplies to gardens and holdings within his sphere of influence.
Even the grass is green, but this is chiefly because of the special type which they use, St Augustine grass, Stenotaphrum secundatum, a creeping tropical grass, which makes an uncannily soft lawn, like walking on loofah.
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