A floral passion Print E-mail
Written by Carolle Doyle, 2008   
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National collections of plants ensure their continuity and provide a basis for our understanding of their sometimes colourful history, says Carolle Doyle

Mark and Elaine Trenear like to call them the flowers of the gods. To you and me these are pinks, those pretty little flowers that fill the air with a warm, clove scent of a summer evening.

To the Trenears they are far more than that, for their Southview Nurseries holds one of the country's national collections of old pinks.

They, together with 449 other nurseries, institutions and private gardens, are responsible for 650 national plant collections in Britain under the aegis of the grandly named National Council for the Conservation of Plants.

Each one holds a comprehensive collection of a particular genus and through them you can trace the history of gardening itself.
 
From astrantias to zinnias they weave their way through our history and to lose a thread is to impoverish the very nature of our gardens. The Trenears' pinks have a long and colourful history that can be read not merely in books but in the plants themselves.

Their collection begins with wild species brought into cultivation by our ancestors including Dianthus caryophyllus, the clove pink, with its clear, shell-pink petals and one of the headiest scents in a family renowned for its perfume.

This is a recent acquisition. Mark learned that it was growing on the walls of Sherborne Castle ruins in Dorset where they have always been called 'Lady Betty's' pinks in memory of Sir Walter Raleigh's wife. The gardener undertook the tricky job of climbing the walls to gain seed, which are flowering and will be seen at Hampton Court Flower Show this year.

The Carthusian monks brought Dianthus carthusianorum 'Sweet Johns', whose dark green foliage is topped with clusters of purple flowers, when they journeyed from France in medieval times. From Shakespeare's gillyflowers, the genus Dianthus has always held a place in our hearts and in our gardens. With the rise of the florists' societies in the 17th and 18th centuries, laced pinks became one of the eight flowers bred to find a place on the show bench.

One such is D. 'Paisley Gem', which was raised in 1798 by John Mcree, a Paisley muslin worker. 'Paisley Gem's' double white petals have an almost black-maroon eye and good lacing of the same colour. John Mcree was so pleased with the plant that he presented one to King George III.

Tulip fascination

Naturally the tulip was among the florists' eight flowers for no other flower has created quite such adulation in its time. It came to us via the Dutch in the first wave of plant introductions from the Turkish Empire.

Among the crocus and lilies, fritillaries and erythroniums, it was the tulip that fascinated gardeners because of its ability to mutate into different colours and 'broken' patterns - although we now know that the latter was cause by a virus.

Cambridge University Botanic Garden holds the national collection of tulip species and primary hybrids. Here you will find species such as T. orphanidea and T. acuminata and the wonderful T. platystgma, a bright beauty feathered in yellow and red. Through them and through species such as T. Armena, which is wonderfully varied in the wild, you can begin to understand the rise of the tulip and its fascination for our ancestors.

In England Tulipomania never reached the giddy heights and depths of Dutch speculation, which crashed to an end in 1637 as "one Fool hatched another, the idle Rich lost their Wealth and the Wise lost their Senses."

In fact, English gardeners were taken up with quite another exciting discovery - the New World and the exciting flora it contained. For the next 100 years the colonisation of America would bring a great bounty of new plants to our shores. Many of these today have a place in our gardens, but in the 17th and 18th centuries they were greeted with excitement.

New World, new flora

It was the great landowners who led the interest in these new exotic plants, subscribing to box schemes, where they received boxes filled with plants and seeds from the New World at a cost of five guineas (£500 today).

Men like Charles Hamilton of Painshill near Cobham in Surrey - the son of the 6th Earl of Abercom, he created the romantic landscape of Painshill between 1738 and 1773. Hamilton was in the vanguard of the picturesque movement and his interest in gardens extended to everything that was new.

Hamilton's boxes, filled with seeds and plants from the eastern seaboard of America, were supplied by Peter Collinson, a North London draper and plantsman. Collinson, in turn, received the collections from John Bartram, a Pennsylvanian farmer and naturalist.

It is the contents of these boxes and indeed the boxes themselves that form the NCCP collection at Painshill. Uniquely this is a collection not of one species, but of plants from a specific time and place. The John Bartram Heritage Collection is based on the list of plants sent as seed to Hamilton, some of which, incidentally, can still be seen in the park.

Trees that now tower above the parklands, Swamp Cypresses and Robinias and the Pin Oak that flares scarlet in the autumn, travelled to Painshill as seed.

In 1830 the invention of the Wardian case transformed collecting expeditions. In effect a miniature greenhouse, specimens could be planted in earth and arrived, for the first time, in good condition. From the four corners of the earth plants came and took root here.

Rhododendrons from the Himalayas, fuchsias and dahlias from Mexico and camellias, chrysanthemums and peonies from China all came in those invaluable Wardian cases.

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