folklore and ancient usage 1 - walnuts

I've just been working on an article for the Sunday Times about the four nuts that the UK can just about do - filberts/cobs, walnuts, chestnuts and almonds. I thought you might like to read the section on walnuts from my book 'The Kitchen Garden'. Here it is:

Walnut
Juglans regia LINNAEU
Origin: central Asia
Not really a plant of the kitchen garden proper, as it is an imposing tree, and one which does not take kindly to pruning. However, because of the value of both its fruit and its timber, it was widely planted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,and because its deep roots do not take much nourishment fromthe upper layers of the soil, it was commonly to be found in the shelter belts that surrounded the better planned kitchen# garden.

The species normally grown (there are many edible species of Juglans, a few known in Britain since 1629) is native to the area between the Carpathians and northern India. The Greeks found it in Persia, and from their gardens Vitellius took it to Italy during the reign of Tiberius. It was certainly in England by 1562, but it is difficult to imagine that a plant so important to Roman medicine was not introduced during their occupation. It was already quite common by Gerard's time, so if it was not brought in by the Romans, it may have been introduced during the fifteenth century. Certainly its beautiful timber became popular for furniture and wainscot only in the seventeenth century (the wood is wormproof), by which time ancient trees must have been sufficiently plentiful to supply the market.

As usual, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century usage followed Roman ideas. The nuts were used at the beginning of meals as a vermifuge (walnuts were originally pickled so that worms could be expelled throughout the year) and as a counter-poison (Gerard believed them effective). They were also used to suppress onion-scented belches, and by I714 walnuts were being used as a sauce for fish, as well as cold meats.

Because the kernel of the nut looks so much like a brain, it is not surprising that nuts or bits of the root were hung around the neck to cure epilepsy, frenzy,'Passions of the Brain' and other mental disorders. Powdered walnut root also 'provoketh Urine, and purgeth the liver and the kidneys. Being boiled in wine and drunk, it purgeth the Blood, and is good for women in child-bed, to purge their Seconds and Termes ... it helpeth the grippings of the Belly, helpeth the Cholick, cleaneth the Guts ... defendeth against the Strangury, the biting of Serpents, and the spleen; and having Castoreum boiled with it, it helpeth the palsie and the stone.

The leaves, too, were useful. Macerated, they were often part of various insecticides and were commonly used to kill off worms in bowling-greens and lawns - the worms were then suitable for use by anglers - as well as ringworm on human scalps (though, mixed with boar fat, they were also a useful hair-restorer).

Decoctions of the leaf were used to dry up running ulcers and sores, while dried leaves were placed among clothes in the press to stop the depredations of moths. Extracts from the green nut shells were used to stop toothache, and from the ripe shells to give a deep yellow dye. For reasons which I cannot discover, the green nuts were preserved, keeping the purity of their colour by storing in the pressings of crab apple after their verjuice had been pressed out.

The oil from ripe nuts was of enormous importance, as a frying#and cooking oil (marvellous, too, if you can find it), as a base for paints and varnishes, and in oil lamps. The wood, however worm-proof, was too fragile for structural timbers and so was used for the finest items of furniture and panelling and for the bodies and wheels of coaches.

To have a kitchen garden ringed by walnuts was not, however, without its dangers; it was not thought safe to sit beneath them without a hat, as the trees' effluvia were hurtful. Perhaps, though, the hat was necessary as an ancient mark of respect for a tree sacred to Jupiter. Even so, as late as the nineteenth century, walnuts were not planted near houses or near strawberry beds.

There, how can you not grow them? Read all about it in the Sunday Times, Feb 22. When the article is out, i'll put a link on my web index page.

Alec's london garden

And here's the London garden, designed and maintained by Alec, slowly being lightened by the removal of some of the side conifers... great fun, even though animals anonymous have chewed the cable to the fountain! I whinge on the sidelines... and I'm afraid do rather little else. Still, Alec does the same in the Border's one, which is mostly my responsibility. Spent most of the day picking apples, taking cuttings and stuff like that.

the lincolnshire garden

This is part of the Lincolnshire garden as of yesterday - was there doing a big clean up of nettles, nettles, nettles, and to be photographed for a forthcoming article. The tall skinny plants at the back, the leaves just reddening, are of Aralia elata

Dirt Divas Gardening: Design and the Paralysis of Choice

Dirt Divas Gardening: Design and the Paralysis of Choice

Wonderful Winter Garden

Oh dear, rain, rain, rain. And so no gardening here today. Apart from an occasional dash for more coal for the stoves, the garden stays beyond the glass. Still, things there are moving fast. Already the the first daffs are out - a variety appositely called February Gold, not too showy a yellow, but very welcome. Closer to the glass, a row of pots of deep violet anemones are doing their theatrical stuff, further away the first of the hepaticas are a lot more modest, but lots more thrilling. The violet blue of the forms of H. transsilvanica are just gorgeous, as are forms like the large pale 'Ballardii', and the anemone-flowered 'Ada Scott' (I'm busy saving up for some of the new Japanese wonders.)

Further away, the hamamelis is fading above dozens of hellebore variants, punctuated by the startling white of the snowdrops, the yellow eranthis (greeny yellow in the rare double form). Further way still, and almost most lovely of all, the shrubby honeysuckle, Lonicera fragrantissima.

This is a fine thing, even though the flowers aren't spectacular - pale yellow, in pairs at the end of branchlets. What makes it very special is the delicious perfume that get me and the bees going on warm afternoons. Here, in the Scottish borders, there's a good plant, two metres high, and as much across, against the wall of the ruined cottage at the end of the garden. But I've just seen it looking far more magnificent, and used in a completely different way.

That day there was no rain, but mist and the last of a thinnish layer of snow. I wasn't at all keen to go garden visiting, but would have missed something special. Hodsock Priory, near Blyth, in Derbyshire, England, only opens its gardens at this time of year. Odder still, it opens on the strength of a single species (well, perhaps two or three). The snowdrops.

Beyond the medieval gatehouse, and beyond the frozen late, the splendid woodland garden does indeed have million upon million of snowdrops in flower. And if you get half-frozen wandering through them, there is also, at the end of the walk, a generous log fire to warm you up. But it was the garden inside the ancient moats, dry except for a stream, that enchanted us most. It's planted as a full-on winter garden, and is absolutely splendid.

Though the moats and the frozen lake give the garden its deepest structure, two shrubs are used to make some really splendid hedges that give it the rest. The first hedge that caught us up, envious and delighted, was made, of course, of the Lonicera. Many of its leaves are lost here by February, and so it makes an open, rather lax, winter hedge. At Hodsock, it must be roughly clipped just after flowering, so that there's plenty of time for new branchlets to grow. The flowers make a light veil over the entire hedge surface, and scent the surrounding air.



Incidentally, as with more conventional hedging loniceras, cuttings root with abandon. Even the sprigs you cut for the vase throw out roots in a few weeks, though transplant with care as the roots are brittle. Once you have one plant, you are only a few years away from having a whole hedge. Here, I think about something similar along the lane that runs down to the fields behind one of the high walls that screens my garden. It would add much more to the village than the dull cotoneasters and brambles currently there.

Alas, the other hedge at Hodsock I can't duplicate. A good freeze in the Scottish borders kills the plant that makes it to the ground, after which the plant regenerates with great caution. Sarcococcas are lovely things to have at this time of year. As with the lonicera, the flowers are not much to look at. Best, use a lens to see quite what is going on. It's the males that give what show there is, and not with the petals (reduced to pinkish scales), but the prominent anthers. These are four per flower, with long white fleshy filaments, curving outwards in graceful arcs. Close inspection reveals a few tiny vase-shaped female flowers, each with a pair of graceful recurved horns.

Each bunch of flowers, pinkish before the anthers are fully expanded, show excellently against the narrow glossy green foliage (the common name for the genus is 'Sweet Box'), each leaf with a pinkish central vein.

I only discovered the perfume by accident; a bought plant languished for rather a while in its pot, and one winter I brought it indoors to see how it was doing. The few flowers suddenly filled the garden room with delight, the smell somewhere between the common honey smell of early spring (like that of snowdrops), and the sharper whiff of heliotrope and vanilla. Very nice, and, unlike the winter flowering viburnums, less liable to choke you with sweet rankness.

My one was Sarcocca hookeriana 'Digyna', and though it gets to a metre high in the London garden of my pal, here it barely reaches 30cm between hard winters. That's a major disadvantage of the high hills. If you want something more fragrant still, look for Sarcocca ruscifolia (though that doesn't seem to be quite so easily found as the other). If you want something really small, perhaps as a neat border shrub for a winter parterre, then try S. confusa, which remains at about a foot high, and really needs planting by at least the half dozen to make much impact.



And of the others amongst Hodsock's delights, more later. Though perhaps you can help us? Hodsock boast a small grove of the tree in picture three. We didn't know what it was - an acer probably, rather than a big cornus. Any ideas? We have to have it!!

Hodsock Priory Gardens - www.snowdrops.co.uk

©david stuart 2007

turning the garden around

Gosh, two perfect late January days. The gift of a pruning saw has made the tangle quake. Sawdust flew, and suddenly there was room to move, and, at last light. Some good bonfires too. And all of a sudden, the garden seemed to need a new direction. The apple crop last season was so good, and I had such fun with them, I'm determined to do what I've not done for nearly twenty years - go kitchen garden mad. I'm clearing out a shade border at the far end of the garden, where the shade is cast by a high stone wall. I've dumped some big clumps of Helleborus orientalis seedlings into a tiny strip of ground called 'the wood' (beautiful H. orientalis variants are seriously lovely, but dingy ones are seriously dingy), and burnt, root by root, a Carex that's run amok. Saved are the clumps of double snowdrops. More bonfires for the ivy that i've begun to strip from the stone. Well, some of it will become cuttings - it's a splendid variety with big green and scarcely lobed leaves called, I think, Bowle's Heart.

So what will grow (and fruit) in fairly permanent shade? Well, I plan to plant six blackcurrant bushes. They won't crop quite as well as they could, but enough to give plenty jams and liqueurs. Yum. Also, the wall should easily support some sort of netting to keep the birds away. And underneath the currants. Well, I'm rescuing some pink-flowered hepaticas now engulfed by a thuggish epimedium, and they should do well down there.

But I've also some seedlings raised from a few plants elsewhere here of a white fruited alpine strawberry, which would give a fruiting understory, flower prettily once the hepaticas are over, and flummox the birds....

www.david-stuart.co.uk

Caribbean Gardens

However, splendid things do come out of the blue. One January evening, I got back here very late, and thought I'd have one last look at my emails. Unusually, I even had a quick look through the junk stuff. One of those read 'An offer you can't refuse'. Huh. And from a grand US university... Just about to press the delete button, I realised it was addressed to me. My email programme was wrong! And the offer? Well, a trip to the Caribbean, aboard an extraordinary sailing ship, and going to look at Caribbean gardens. Surely there must be a catch... Even so, I didn't get much sleep.

And it all turned out to be real. Starting off at Barbados, finishing up at Antigua, with Martinique, Dominica, and more in between. Downside? Doing some lectures. Do I know anything about Caribbean botany? No. Caribbean gardens. Ditto. Panic. I thought I'd have to refuse, then I began to think of that marvellous botanist/pirate William Dampier... Or of the medicinal plants that have come from Central America... and so on. So, indeed, I didn't refuse.


I've never seen a jungle before, never been to the tropics. Even Barbados itself was a revelation. The first garden we visited was the Andromeda garden, a real beauty (see pic), filled with ideas that would translate to a temperate or cool garden as well - well, that's if you have fabulous topography too. But more about that later...

to be continued!

epiphyllums

Well, some of them are in flower! That's after three years or so from seed. They're hybrids I made between a marvellous amber and white 'epi' I was given by a school pal (Dudley Minor) 45 years ago, and a very floriferous and small flowered pink one from a neighbour in the village a couple of summers ago. The point of the cross was that the white has huge flowers, almost 30cm across, opens for a couple of nights, and has a heart-stopping perfume. The pink usually flowers much earlier in the season, often with flowers from almost every areole. However, the flowers have no smell, but stay open all day, and last well.

What I wanted was a perfumed flower, day opening, and lots of them. What have I got? Well, the seedlings are all pretty uniform. Quite floriferous, outer tepals amber turning pink, inner ones from strawberry pink to palest blush. Size is intermediate between the parents. One plant has, in the evenings, THAT smell. Mmmmm....

www.david-stuart.co.uk


However, plant breeding theory means that it is the children of these hybrids that might give me more excitement. Oh dear.... another wait. So, I rush around with clusters of anthers playing the role of whatever animal fertilises them in nature. The next generation should be sown next spring!

Meanwhile I can't resist crossing them into whatever else is in flower... at the moment, this is what I think must be a Rhipsalis of some sort, tiny phyllodes cascading down, and with small symmetrical pink flowers, lots of petals, and bright yellow anthers... now... if i I could get that with a perfume!

By the way, do please add to all this... and when you are on the main website, please to click on some adds. That would at least pay for my ISP bills! LOL.

Update May 06: well, a few seedlings are ready for pricking out, and dark red fruit are ready for harvesting. All I need now is another five years or so!! Meanwhile, quite a few pink flowered epis are due for the compost heap. RIP