By Matt Collins, Head Gardener
With Garden Museum director Christopher Woodward currently swimming 63 miles of the Mediterranean Sea to raise money for the museum’s exciting project, Lambeth Green, this weekend’s ‘Plant of the Week’ instalment travels with him (in spirit, at least).
Central to Christopher’s route — which links together a chain of Peloponnese Islands including Hydra, Poros and Aegina — is the plant-life that occupies this windswept, salt-sprayed and predominantly arid pocket of Greece. Long-adapted to climatic extremes, species growing wild on these islands feature within landscape designer Dan Pearson’s intended planting scheme for Lambeth Green: plants, we hope, that might weather the volatility of our changing climate and a central London site that, positioned beside the Thames, contends with river winds and periods of drought.
On the island of Hydra: the weaver’s broom (Spartium junceum)
Bestowed with a Royal Horticultural Society ‘Award of Garden Merit’, the ‘weaver’s’ or ‘Spanish’ broom — a common plant of the Mediterranean’s sandy soils — bridges the gap between the wild and the cultivated. A constituent of Grecian scrubland, it can reach around two meters in height and breadth, evergreen in its mass of ‘broom’-like stems. Its summer flowers are borne along these slender stems, gorse-yellow and heavily honey-scented; on Hydra, blooming on the island’s northern shore, in the little bay at Mandraki. Most importantly for Lambeth Green, however, spartium’s supreme tolerance of drought conditions will lend well to the light, free-draining soil that occupies the site.
On the island of Poros: the strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo)
Although a common enough tree in British gardens, there is something startling in the appearance of a strawberry tree, particularly for those introduced to it for the first time. Something in the combination of its darkly coloured foliage, its rust-red bark and unusual scarlet fruit — seductively plump yet unexpectedly bland when tasted. Towards the east side of Poros, this medium sized, tough-wooded tree grows in thickets within a valley forested with pine; the red of its sturdy, often curiously-curved trunk no doubt illuminated at sunset.
As one of the trees selected by Dan Pearson, the strawberry tree forges an important historical link for the Garden Museum, and for the site of Lambeth Green. It was a tree once grown in the Lambeth garden of the Tradescants — father and son gardeners and globe-trotting plant collectors of the 17th century — whose tomb resides in the museum courtyard (Those well acquainted with the history of the Garden Museum will know that its story begins with the Tradescants; that the re-discovery of their tomb, and subsequent endeavour to preserve it, spurred the museum’s foundation).
The Tradescant garden in Lambeth was the first publicly-accessible plant collection of its kind in England, introducing visitors to the wonder of botanical curiosities from far away countries, and included a Mediterranean strawberry tree. A record held at the Lambeth borough archives tells of a visit made to the garden by members of the Royal Society in 1749, a century after the younger Tradescant’s death. Spotted thriving within the then overgrown, neglected garden (which, sadly, is now fully under concrete) was a magnificently large strawberry tree; larger, in fact, than any that the party had previously encountered: a resilient tree indeed. Returning a strawberry tree to a public garden in Lambeth forms a nice addendum to the narrative of the lost Tradescant garden.
On the island of Aegina: the chasteberry (Vitex agnus-castus)
Growing on the stony periphery of Aegina, the finishing point of Christopher’s swim, is the mounded scrub-shrub, Vitex agnus-castus. Known as the ‘chasteberry’, ancient medicine saw this woody herb applied as a treatment for inflammations and epilepsy; as an anaphrodisiac (of dubious potency), and, according to Elizabethan herbalist John Gerard, as a deterrent for venomous snakes. In the garden, however, its chief virtues are an elegant branching habit, a very pretty palmate leaf form, and slender flowers somewhat akin to buddleja or perovskia in shape, and lilac-blue or white in colour.
Among hardy, drought-resistant shrubs, vitex is a particular favourite of mine. We have it in the ‘dry’ garden here at the museum, close enough to brush beside as you walk the slim pathway. I’ve enjoyed it, too, in the centre of Sardinia, where it grows in the granular shingle of the island’s high streams. Crush a vitex leaf in your hand and you have the fragrance of the Mediterranean: the salt and sand and herb-strewn rock, distilled in a heady aroma of wormwood and mint. With luck — and no small measure of resilience — funds raised across this valiant 63-mile swim will bring Peloponnesian perfume to inner-city Lambeth.