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How much do you really know about the plants in your garden? Not just what species and variety they are, but where they were grown, what conditions they were grown in, how many hands they passed through before they came to you?
Just as more focus is now put on the provenance of our food and the miles it has travelled to get to our plates, so too can gardeners ask questions about the plants we buy from nurseries.
These questions are important when we’re talking about creating future-proof, resilient gardens. They can also dictate how plants will cope in our own gardens as weather patterns continue to change. We thought the future would require plants that could withstand drought: but it turns out, with 50 days of rain forecast in what is set to be the wettest summer in 100 years, that the truth may be far more nuanced.
“Resilient plants is where the biggest focus should be,” says Mark Straver, co-founder of the Hampshire-based plant nursery Hortus Loci. “I’ve been working outside for 42 years. The weather extremes in our lifetime are getting worse and worse. Long and cold winters seem to be going but on the other hand that can create more problems.”
In the UK we have just had the wettest 12 months in 150 years. “Then last year, for the first time in many years we had two week-long sessions of minus 10C that killed all those plants that weren’t hardy,” says Straver.
Eighty per cent of what Hortus Loci sells is grown by them on its 17-acre site, with the exception of trees and hedging which it buys in. History has taught the business that the only way to ensure creating strong and healthy plants is through a lot of trial and error. “You don’t want to plant huge plants,” says Straver, who, like most nurseries, only sells perennials in modest-sized 2 or 3-litre pots.
“We have testing beds at our sister nursery in Barcelona,” he says. “It’s run by super-keen plant youngsters who want to understand plants better, so they do huge tests. They plant in November, water them once, and leave for a year to see what works.”
Then there is the provenance question, which is intensified by concerns over pests and diseases, and the many miles that plants travel in what would otherwise be a very green industry. Many plants in our British nurseries start their lives in Europe. The nurseries then bring the plants on at their own sites, watering them and feeding them until they fill a bigger pot and can be sold for profit.
Not only is this an issue because the horticultural industry still hasn’t found a viable solution to plastic pots — but because these plants are completely mollycoddled, and given the exact conditions they need in order to persuade us to buy them.
As landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith puts it: “They are little couch potatoes living off doughnuts in front of the telly, whereas bare-root plants are honed-down athletes with masses of root in proportion to the top, so they will establish better.”
Bare-root plants are those sold without compost and plastic keeping them safe and secure. They can be grown in open ground at the nursery — where they have to work harder to find nutrients and put stabilising roots down — and therefore when they are planted in a new garden they have more tools to look after themselves.
Some nurseries are trialling growing plants in sand, where the loose substrate allows them to reach far and wide for the nutrients, water and stability that they need; therefore they’re bigger on bottom than top when sold. Which makes sense; the root system will dictate the long-term health of a plant once you’ve got it home, giving a better indication of its future life than you can get from looking at its foliage and flowers.
Stuart-Smith has recently opened a plant library at his home in Serge Hill, Hertfordshire. By watching the propagated plants from infancy, he and his team can learn how plants behave in different conditions. With a strong focus on capturing data, they hope to create a useful resource for the wider horticultural world and to identify how different plant species are coping with changing weather conditions.
John Little from the Grass Roof Company in Essex, a leading voice in UK horticulture thanks to his creative approach, remembers his grandad buying bags of bare-root bedding plants from the local market, wrapped in damp newspaper.
The lighter weight of the plants equates to a big difference in haulage terms too, says Little. “You could bike to the garden centre with a carrier bag, and take 50 bare-root plants home.”
So while finding locally grown and adaptable plants is a climate-friendly way of future-proofing gardens for a world of unpredictable weather, it’s not a new or complicated approach. As Straver says, “It just goes back to doing proper horticulture.”
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