Gardens
One confusion after another
Ursula Buchan
Ido not know much about Harley Granville-Barker. If asked, all I can say is that he was an Edwardian actor, producer and playwright, the author of illuminating Prefaces to Shakespeare, that he had plans for a national theatre, and that he had no idea about the flowering time of certain South African liliaceous bulbs.
This I know as years ago I appeared in a school production of The Madras House; a play chosen more, I imagine, for the large number of female actresses required than for its outstanding dramatic merit, although I suspect we robbed it of any pace and style that it intrinsically possessed. My part as one of several spinsterish daughters was small, though friends were kind enough to say that I spoke the words 'Will you stay to dinner?' with a luminous clarity and distinction. There was another girl who had as little to say, her only memor- able line being, after a breathless dash from the conservatory through the rickety french windows, 'The agapanthus is out at last.' At this the audience never failed to roar with laughter, or perhaps they just tittered — memory plays such cruel tricks — for they, like me, obviously had not the faintest idea what an agapanthus was. The real joke, however, was that the action takes place in October and I do know now and can say with confidence that all the species of agapanthus grown in this country flower in July and August (or from June under glass). It may be that autumn began earlier in Edwardian times, although I was led to believe that cloudless summer days were almost endless in the years before the war changed everything, even the weather.
I must not be too hard on Mr G-B, who obviously had larger difficulties to contend with, and any publicity for the agapanthus, however misleading, is welcome for, far from being some exotic and difficult freak, its charm is only equalled by its ease of cultivation. The mention of South African origins should not put anybody off for our Ileadbourne hybrids' came through last winter unprotected and unscathed. Indeed last summer's baking ensured a tremendous flowering. They are commonly referred to as bulbs, but they are properly perennial herbs with fleshy roots. Their flowers, borne on more-or-less sturdy stems above a clump of green strap leaves, are in round umbels and the colour of bluebells. They look extremely well lean- ing slightly out of large terracotta pots, such as few of us can find and cannot afford when we do. De rigueur in country-house gardens open to the public these days.
The director of any revival of The Madras House would do well to substitute `colchicum' for `agapanthus' for that plant really is autumn-flowering. Sadly, how- ever, it too invites confusion. Popularly called 'autumn crocus', it is no more a crocus than a Jerusalem artichoke is an artichoke (or comes from the Holy Land for that matter).
This mis-naming is one of those persis- tent errors, as hard to root out as a mediaeval heresy, about which opinion is adamant, even aggressive, but the truth is that crocus and colchicum do not even belong to the same botanical family and though a great deal of the evil in the world can be, and is, laid by gardeners at the door of the botanist, it really is not his fault that colchicum has six stamens and crocus only three.
Colchicum autumnale has a pinky-mauve flower which is pure, delicate and perfect and the shape, before it opens, of those goblet glasses so popular with petrol com- panies and, they fondly imagine, the motorist. However, it also has a marked peculiarity which is rare amongst the real autumn crocuses, in that it produces its leaves in the spring after flowering. These are thick green tongues that sprawl over and suffocate any small plant nearby and compound their felony by providing deli- cious meals for slugs. Graceless in life, they die in a lingering and tasteless way, like the consumptive heroine of a Victorian melo- drama. I think the answer is to grow them in rough grass that has been thickly planted with late daffodils.
Still more muddle results from people referring to colchicums as 'meadow saf- fron', a name which properly belongs to Crocus sativus, which from the middle ages till the 18th century was grown in quantity in this country, especially around Saffron Walden, for the sake of its three scarlet stigmas, which when dried could be sold for high prices as a medicinal and culinary drug. Saffron must have been very pre- cious, for it requires nine stigmas to make a grain, and as someone once computed, 4,320 flowers to make an ounce. This crocus is rarely grown in Britain these days and hard to find in catalogues because the climate is too harsh for it to thrive perhaps the weather was better in mediaeval times? — and, apart from the fiddle of harvesting, the corms require careful nurturing. Though pretty it is a foolish crocus which, unlike its relations, has not the wit to close its flowers on sunless days and is easily spoiled in an autumn rainstorm.
Fussiness about names may seem to be just academic nit-picking but it is as well for those who want to cut the cost of their curries to understand that colchicums are highly poisonous. From them is extracted the alkaloid colchicine which, for all those interested in plant genetics (and who is not?) is used by breeders to double the number of chromosomes in egg and pollen cells and so produce larger and more vigorous plants in the next generation. I wonder if Harley Granville-Baker knew that.
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