18-May The Lost Language of Flowers

Garden plants more typical of May itself and widely found in London’s front gardens are Aquilegia, Allium, Acanthus, Asphodel, Armeria, Calendula, Campanula, Centaurea, Cistus, Convallaria, Convolvulus, Corydalis, Dicentra, Erysimum, Echium, Euphorbia, Gentiana, Geranium, Gladiolus, Heuchera, Helianthemum, Ipheion, Iris, Lamium, Libertia, Matthiola, Mecanopsis, Nigella, Osteospernum, Oxalis, Paeonia, Phlox, Potentilla, Rosa, Scilla, Stachys, Tellima, Tiarella, Thalictrum, Trillium, Trollius, Tulipa, Papaver, Leucanthemum, Saxifraga, Symphytum, Lychnis, Leptospermum, Actinidia, Dianthus and Zantedeschia.

Some small familiarity with these genera would allow you to generally recognise most of the garden plants you are likely to encounter this month. In water gardens, irises and marsh marigolds are now joined by skunk cabbage, candelabra primroses and water lilies. For the more ambitious garden lover, rarer genera can be seen at Kew and Wisley e.g. Arisaema, Asarum, Dranunculus, Disporum, Clintonia, Helonias, Heloniopsis, Erythronium, Scopolia, Scoliopus, Silene, and Uvularia.

Irises are among the most familiar and widespread of garden flowers this month. In mythology, Iris was Juno’s messenger, conducting her errands along rainbows. The astonishing range of colour in irises reflects this myth. Only three Iris species are found wild in Britain. The most familiar is our native yellow iris, Iris pseudocorus. This was a stalwart of the mediaeval garden and still is today.

It is the Fleur de lis of France and the emblem of the crusaders. According to legend, Clavis, the king of the Franks, escaped capture from the Goths when he noticed a shallow part of a river being indicated by the presence of irises. Having waded through and escaped, he went on to adopt the flower as his insignia. It has been used for the same purpose ever since by many princes, including our own present Prince of Wales. The second wild iris is easily enough found in our woods. This is the gladdon lily Iris foetidissima or Roast beef plant. When its leaves are bruised they emit one of the strangest of all scents, that of warm roast beef. The last iris can only rarely be found in London gardens a little earlier in the year. This is the Snakeshead or Widow Iris Hermodactylis tuberosus, which is naturalised in the West Country

It has sinisterly-coloured green and yellow flowers, with velvety-black falls. It was cultivated by the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. Egyptian kings carried sceptres, which had the iris as a motif. Its three petals were thought to symbolise faith, wisdom and labour. Another well-known iris is the Florentine Iris Iris germanica ‘Florentina’ so called as it was commonly grown near Florence to produce orris root.

Orris roots smell rather unpleasant when they are first dug up, but after two years of drying they develop a deep penetrating violet odour. Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Pliny were all great fans; Pliny went as far as to say the best ones came from Dalmatia. For Romans, it was a staple ingredient of their unguents. Later it was used to cure “saucy face” or pimples and was also chewed to remove the smell of tobacco. In more recent times, it has been an ingredient in toothpaste and also pot pourris. There are over one hundred different species of iris, innumerable hybrids and endless varieties. Every colour of iris imaginable can be seen by just walking around London’s gardens. Reasonably good collections exist in West Ham Park and Myddleton House.

Peonies, so loved by the Chinese and cultivated by them for centuries, are a firm garden favourite. Some are said to live for over one hundred years if they are left undisturbed. They probably arrived with the Romans. The first was the male peony Paeonia mascula which was cultivated in monastery gardens. Then the female peony P. officinalis arrived from Crete in the sixteenth century. Its double forms are still with us today. Wild peonies were at one time found around the Thames estuary where they were said to be “as hardy as docks”. Tree peonies are rather less common in our gardens, although thirty-nine varieties have arrived since the tenth century.

Aquilegias have been known in London’s gardens since records began and were probably here before that. In medieval paintings, animals often lay in fields dotted with columbines, indicating they were resting in paradise. Before the mid-seventeenth century only the common columbine Aquilegia vulgaris was found here, although it did have a number of naturally occurring different colour forms i.e. white, mauve, red and even some which had two colours. Later came the long-spurred and striped varieties we see everywhere today. Bleeding hearts Dicentra spectabilis is another garden plant that also stands out now. Its old name of ‘lady in the bath’ is understandable if the flower is turned upside down. It was introduced by the great Scottish plant hunter Robert Fortune in 1816 from the island of Chusan.

Such was its immediate popularity, in just six years some gardens had clumps up to nine metres in diameter. It has to be said this was when horse manure which it thrives on was much more easily available. Robert Fortune (1812-1880) was responsible for over two hundred and fifty introduction many of which brought previously unknown colour to London’s gardens, especially in the winter. Ornamental onions Allum spp. are currently great favourites. In Elizabethan London they were known as ‘mollies’. Gerard was known to grow nine different mollies in his garden and Parkinson had fourteen. Frank Kingdom-Ward (1885-1958) was another schoolboy hero explorer for the likes of Shackleton and Scott. He looked for plants in Assam, Yunnan, Szechuan, Burma and discovered the mystical blue poppy of Tibet Meconopsis betonicifolia.

He collected a pound of its seed in the 1920s, from which most of our present plants are descended. As recently as 1927 they were such a sensation that they sold for ‘a guinea a piece’, with even Gertrude Jekyll buying them. Besides their extraordinary shade of blue, perversely unlike most other plants they open their flowers from the top downwards. This means they are best seen now, when there are no shrivelled flowers above the open ones.