Extreme gardening
The challenges of creating a garden by the sea are known to everyone in Guernsey: high winds, salt desiccation, drought and sunburn all have to be endured but, as our naturalist Tim Earl discovered on a recent cruise, the rewards can be breathtaking.
The challenges of creating a garden by the sea are known to everyone in Guernsey: high winds, salt desiccation, drought and sunburn all have to be endured but, as our naturalist Tim Earl discovered on a recent cruise, the rewards can be breathtaking...
VISITING four world-class gardens in a week was a challenge probably only a cruise can meet, but the result was a stunning experience.
Magnolias, rhododendrons, camellias, myrtles and spring flowers in profusion greeted us wherever we went and the set-piece architectural aspects added astounding angles to the gardens.
We started on home soil with a morning visit to La Seigneurie Gardens in Sark to encounter the challenges of seaside gardening first hand.
The wind was cold from the north and we needed the blankets offered on our horse-drawn carriage ride to the gardens. April in Sark can be delightful, but this wind was an example of the problems encountered by gardeners in exposed places.
Leaning trees, burnt foliage and bud-drop are only some of the consequences. This year the gardens were a month behind due to the cold experienced since January.
Walking into the gardens, however, the first sensation was of increased warmth as they are protected by high granite walls.
The gardeners, mostly part time but all great enthusiasts, had spent the winter preparing for the summer tourist season and the result was terrific.
Bulbs survive the extremes of winter encased in subterranean protection to emerge in spring in a blaze of colour.
A vast variety of tulips and daffodils were still in bloom (they would have been going over in a normal spring), honey spurge was scenting the borders and majestic magnolias (to be dwarfed later in the cruise) lorded it over the scene.
A magnificent Madeira cranesbill was a mass of purple flowers, its stems supported by leaf bracts that propped up the plant.
Several species of Aeonium were demonstrating their ability to survive desiccation with thick fleshy leaves that stored water and shrugged off salt blown in on gales. And having survived, they impressed further with shape and form in rosettes of leaves.
An architectural feature inside one of the greenhouses is a super sliding ladder from which grapes could be pruned, thinned and picked.
Sark has a gold post-box thanks to the efforts of Carl Hester in the Olympics and it was a special delight to pop my grandchildren's postcards in knowing that for once they would have a next-day delivery.
An attempt to land on Alderney was thwarted by the wind in the afternoon, but Island Sky, sister ship to my beloved Hebridean Spirit (now Caledonian Sky and also owned by Noble Caledonia who were running the cruise), anchored off the south coast.
We explored the Garden Rocks gannet colony in zodiacs, getting fantastic views of the birds as they went about their breeding activities.
I was able to tell passengers that a gannet I ringed when it was a chick recently washed up dead on a Dutch beach – 34 years after hatching on the rock!
Tresco Abbey Gardens on the Isles of Scilly was the best of our four gardens.
Of world-class quality for horticulturalists, it boasts some of the most exotic plants in Britain.
We were shown around by Dave Inch, a full-time gardener who specialises in propagating the plants he knows so well.
The sub-tropical gardens started in 1834 when Augustus Smith saw their potential. Tresco was a bare islet without a tree – not even a gorse bush – on which 160 pounds of salt are deposited per acre each year!
The first priority on this low-lying sandy island was shelter, so a belt of Monterey pines was planted. As the trees grew and shelter improved, the soil was helped by the addition of compost and seaweed.
Nearly 200 years on and the garden is a warm, exotic place where wonders from around the world can be studied. In some cases they are conserved, with Kew Gardens sending seeds and plants that prefer the milder conditions on Tresco.
Among my favourites were the Puya chilensis, which puts up an amazing flower head several feet high, the Proteas that are hosts to sugarbirds in their native South African habitats and the cabbage palms we know so well in Guernsey.
Ilnacullin in Bantry Bay, Southern Ireland, was a dark, brooding place surrounded by pines and largely in a bowl between ridges offering shelter.
It has a magnificent Italian garden in which a formal pond is surrounded by scented shrubs that drop their perfume into the area. It has structures at each end, one of which frames glorious views across the bay to Sugarloaf Mountain, a local landmark.
I enjoyed climbing to the top of a Martello tower, put in during the Napoleonic wars, from where we could see the ship and views across the gardens.
Magnolias, rhododendrons and azaleas were strongly represented and the scented varieties were particularly exciting.
My father, a keen gardener, once pointed out to me a prehistoric tree called swamp cypress (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), which had been discovered in China, and I was delighted to find a tall specimen among the collection of trees.
Our last call was in Falmouth, where the fantastic Trebah Gardens are an amazing feature.
Landscaped to fit into a ravine that runs down to the River Helford, they make use of the topography to obtain shelter from the winds.
The soil is acid and huge magnolia trees were flowering along with Chilean firebush and the by now expected rhododendrons and azaleas.
There is boggy area full of gunnera – the plant that looks like a giant rhubarb – and the ponds there have newts. The garden has a section in which many species of bamboo have been collected, but sorting them out is bamboozling!
Our final tour of the last garden ended on a small beach where an ice cream was enjoyed and we were able to contemplate the week's highlights.
