DIARY
DAVID WELCH Iwalked through Hyde Park the other morning and passed the big, spreading, pendulous beech tree there. It is only 20 feet high but 50 feet across and its branches reach down and sweep the ground. As time goes by it may get higher if a new stem ever manages to hoist itself up and take the lead, but, imperceptibly, it will certainly spread further. It has taken 60 years to reach this stage, but in another 30 or so it will enter into a long decline, start to feel rheumatic and react against cold winds in the spring and droughts in the summer, both of which are troublesome to old trees. The current buzz among management con- sultants is succession planning. Without an adequate flow of words like these the pro- fession would die and rob the world of a valued source of irony, but it is an old prac- tice in gardening. New trees should be in place before the old ones have started to fade, because they take so long to grow and punch their weight in the landscape. This beech is so big, it forms a cavern made of glossy leaves and strong, thick stems. Inside is a pool of darkness, cut off, contained; a private place in a busy public world. As I passed, children were popping in and out between the branches, running round its perimeter and then, with shouts and laugh- ter, disappearing inside again. It was a very satisfactory playground. By the evening it had changed, its patrons had jumped a gen- eration and were engaged in succession planning themselves. The tree had become a busy pre-antenatal facility. Courting cou- ples are better than police at maintaining law and order in the space around them, and on a mild summer evening in Hyde Park there are many, many more of them.
The same morning I met an acquain- tance admiring a plant. He asked me its name. I unthinkingly said it was syringa. I could just as easily have said mock orange, and I did when incomprehension glazed his eyes. The trouble with the everyday names for plants is the confusion they cause. Syringa is the botanical name for lilac, though it doubles as the common name for the mock orange too. Other plants have more than one English name. Bishop weed in Scotland is ground elder in England, furze and gorse are the same plant and so are whin and broom, rowan and mountain ash, bluebell and harebell, ling and heather. The names can also create a false impres- sion. With the exception of Lily Langtry, the Guernsey lily originated in the Cape Province of South Africa and in nature is found nowhere else. French marigolds are natives of Mexico. Virginia stock is a south European. Candytuft is not a reference to the white clumps formed by the flowers in bloom but refers to Candia, the ancient name for Crete, where it came from. Lon- don pride was introduced here from the Pyrenees by a firm headed by a Mr Lon- don, soon, no doubt, to be the name of an elected official. But botanists are incon- stant nomenclaturists and every now and then they knock a few old, familiar, hard- learnt names on the head. That humble denizen of the cottage garden, the mar- guerite, is now Argyranthemum frutescens, having once been a chrysanthemum; cheer- ful, familiar, humdrum Senecio greyi has become Brachyglottis greyi; Orchis elata is now a Dactylorhiza. In verbal contrivance, botanists beat management consultants hands down.
Areporter from a garden journal tele- phoned wanting me to comment on what he felt was a brand-new horticultural idea called veganic gardening. Being a horticul- tural fuddy-duddy, I had no idea what veg- anic gardening meant, so I gently probed for clues, not daring to show ignorance on an evidently important aspect of my calling. Loosely interpreted, I can now say it means that one should not use any dung, nor for that matter anything else from an animal, although organic fertilisers are the gentlest of all to use, and the hardest to make a botch with. I am old-fashioned enough to esteem farmyard and horse manure for use in gardens, and doing without them on principle seems very odd. The dust-bowls in America in the Thirties rang an alarm and brought back the idea that the soil should be fed, rather than just the plant. If land is exploited and bulky manure is not put back to keep it healthy, the particles break up, turn to dust, and blow or wash away. Most 'I won't let all this government money change my lifestyle.' gardens have to rely on compost. But manure is an all-rounder and as a bonus it brings with it the robust, earthy scent of the farmyard; if you ever get the chance, you should grab some with both hands.
We are allowing more space in the Parks to change from mown lawn to mead- ow. This gives a sharp contrast with nearby areas that are still cut every few days, and will bring an extra source of interest because, as time goes by, a lot of wild flow- ers will reappear. The change has not been made for reasons of economy; meadows don't keep themselves, especially in the middle of a city. Litter needs clearing from them just as it does from lawns. They need cutting in the autumn, the hay must then be carted off, and they need to be mown again in the spring. Without this they turn into spinneys and then, after a titanic struggle between warring species, into woodland, which is the destiny of all plantations in our climate. Mowing grass for the sake of neat- ness has something of fanaticism about it, but conservationists are wrong when they say that lawns are green deserts. They are green carpets on which people can play and picnic and sit and sunbathe and they are the most durable living surface for the pur- pose. But where there is space both mead- ow and lawn can co-exist and each brings its own particular beauty to a park or gar- den.
Leaving the grass long in the hope that a good range of broad-leaved flowering plants will return and fill the space is vain, unless persisted with over the course of a century or two, so they have to be encour- aged or deliberately reintroduced. In Kens- ington Gardens last year we established a couple of hundred acres of meadow and, although this is only its second year, field geraniums, harebells and some other plants are already shyly making an appearance, and the grasses, especially when they flow- er, can look lovely too. Not every park user has gained an advantage. spotted a Pekinese yesterday, chasing a squirrel through the long grass; they each popped into view now and then as they impelled themselves above the surrounding vegeta- tion. They looked like two toys on a spring. The squirrel soon found a tree and shot up it fast enough to have earned applause from Messrs Otis. The dog continued to bounce long afterwards. Santayana in The Life of Reason said, 'Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have for- gotten your aim.'
The author is the chief executive of the Royal Parks.
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