CHS NEWS NEXT PRESENTATION

Monday, 7 June 2021 at 20:00

LIFE OF BETH CHATTO Catherine Horwood Barwise is an English journalist, author and social historian who writes extensively on horticulture and garden design. She is also a member of Mediterranean Plants and Gardens (MPG) in the UK and gave this talk in July 2020.

[Source: https://www.bethchatto.co.uk/] The book, Beth Chatto: A Life in Plants, written by Catherine Horwood and published in September 2019, tells the story of the most influential British plants woman of the past hundred years. Beth Chatto was the inspiration behind the 'right plant, right place' ethos that lies at the heart of modern gardening. She also wrote some of the best-loved gardening books of the twentieth century, among them The Dry Garden The Damp Garden, and Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden.

Some years before her death in May 2018, aged 94, Beth authorised Catherine Horwood to write her biography, with exclusive access to her archive. It also includes extracts from Beth's notebooks and diaries, never previously published, bringing Beth's own distinctive and much-loved voice into the book. Most of the photographs from Beth's personal archives, have also never been seen in print before.

The link to this Zoom presentation will be sent to you prior to the presentation.

Plant Show and Tell: Please send in your photos, taken this month, with an explanation for each, by Saturday morning, 5 June.

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING You will have by now received the necessary documentation for this meeting, which must be held by the end of May. Your participation in this process would be appreciated as a ‘quorum’ of 25 members is required. Can we improve on last year’s number?

Do not delay and please take the time to place your vote in the respective boxes and return the form/e-mail to info@capehorticulturalsociety.co.za by the 31st. Your participation is important.

Thank you to those members who have already responded.

NEXT OUTING 17 June at 10:00: Visit the Constantia garden of Donovan Gillman, formerly of Room to Grow. He does warn, though, that there are spiny and poisonous plants in the garden and, with narrow paths, we enter at our own risk. Limited to 20 members.

RSVP to Glenda by no later than 14 June.

WELCOME … … to Zelda de Jongh who joined us recently. When we are able to hold meetings again, we hope to meet her and our other new members.

MAY 2021

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President

Michael Tuffin

Chairman

Errol Scarr

Hon Treasurer

Henry Diesveld

Secretary

Glenda Thorpe

Committee Members

Melanie Stewart Jenny Scarr Susan Armstrong Isabella Hayden

Honorary Members

Laurie Powis Marianne Alexander

Mary Smith Anne Bean Adam Harrower

Michael Tuffin Bill Elder

All the flowers of all the

tomorrows are in the

seeds of today. Indian Proverb

Tel: 021-531-5713

Fax: 086-514-0998

Post: 22 Rustenburg, Pinelands, 7405

info@capehorticulturalsociety.co.za

https://capehorticulturalsociety.co.za

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cape-Horticultural-Society/779615695489381

Instagram – capehortsoc

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SUBSCRIPTION RENEWAL The subs are trickling in slowly, but we hope the rest will flood in before the end of this month.

Please remember that you will be removed from the mailing list if your payment has not been received by the end of May. No more newsletters; no more video links; no more items of horticultural interest! Can you afford to give

that up?

Attached, once again, is a subs renewal form which must be completed; a payment must made by EFT (unless you can get cash to one of the committee members); and the form and proof of payment must be returned to Glenda, to avoid removal from our mailing list. Please do this as soon as possible as we really do value you as a member and your support of the CHS.

REPORTBACK Following Marianne’s presentation on the Betty’s Bay fire, which included photos of Mimetes, she found these taken at our weekend away in October 2009. Robbie Thomas, on the right in the first picture, was doing amazing grafting with Mimetes. Amida Johns, bottom right, was also on hand to add to an interesting and pleasant weekend.

Anyone remember this?

MEMBERS’ MAY PLANTS There were a few plants on show (they can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Fv8NMWhXlrE) but John said:

These March Lilies, Amaryllis belladonna (right), grow amongst other plants, including Jim Holmes’ “Cape Bells”, whose leaves are visible. Two of the 3 bulbs you see in the picture flowered this year. My pen gives an idea of the size of the bulbs which have multiplied. Big ones are clumped together.

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His questions:

• Will separating and replanting them improve flowering, or retard them from flowering next year? • Is now the right time to do it? • Or should I just leave them?

Replies:

Isabella: March lilies are notorious for not flowering regularly – a strategy to preserve their energy. They don’t flower ever year and seem to take it in turns to flower. They do resent being disturbed and flower better if constricted. Bulbs in very small pots flower profusely. Don’t disturb them now.

Jenny: We wanted to move a bulb that had two flowers and found it had a large bulb with a daughter bulb on the side, which we were able to separate. The roots at that stage (around mid-April), were probably about 3cm long and once we get the rains, the roots will obviously grow longer to feed the foliage which will follow on over winter and spring. So, if you are looking to move your bulbs, it is probably better to do it now before the roots get large enough to take the damage from being shifted.

Margaret Fox (IBSA): Graham Duncan says that Amaryllis belladonna thrives on benign neglect! But in his ‘Grow Bulbs’ book he says that flowering will be improved by dividing the bulbs every 5 years, and trimming away overhead tree branches etc. He doesn’t say when to do the dividing, but it could be either spring of autumn. So I’m not being very helpful, because most people say it’s better that they stay undisturbed. Anyway, the advice will always be varied.

Steph: What transfers the seeds around the garden to come up in different places? Squirrels, birds? Seeds always seem to disappear.

Isabella: Perhaps squirrels are eating the flesh off the seed and depositing it somewhere else.

Yvonne: I was watching yesterday's presentation [May Plant Show and Tell] and just a couple of comments regarding the March lilies. Ours were beautiful this year, but I couldn't understand why so many had come up in different parts of the garden. Peter then confessed that he had been throwing the seeds in different places! We did discover that the lily borer caterpillar is partial to the seed heads, since the crinums were finished and the horrid caterpillars cleared from their remains. We first found them on March lily heads in a friend’s garden in Somerset West.

MORE ABOUT BULBS With thanks to John van der Linde who shared IBSA’s January 2021 edition of “Bulbchat”.

A REMARKABLE NEW MORAEA DISCOVERED: John Manning Although new species of plants are still regularly discovered in the Cape Floral Region, it is exceptional that the new species are as exquisite as this one. On 27 October 2020, Ismail Ebrahim from the Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers (CREW) Programme came across a small population of an odd-looking moraea on the slopes of the mountains above Botha near Wolseley in the upper Breede River Valley. Ismail sent a picture to me from the site, and it was immediately clear that he had found something really special. The following day we returned to the site to make a proper type collection. This discovery illustrates the importance of field botany and continuing monitoring of plants. The new moraea resembles Moraea insolens in its bowl-shaped flowers with a dark eye but the flowers are much larger, with different floral details. The fruits are unusually large and suggest a possible relationship with M. gigandra from near Porterville. No less than three new species of irid have been collected this spring, just months after the publication of our Iridaceae in southern Africa. All of the new species are highly local endemics, the others being a Geissorhiza from near Porterville and a second new moraea, this one from the Swartberg near Calitzdorp. Their discovery and identification is a tribute to increased collection by amateur and professional botanists, and the

Moraea new species

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high level of taxonomic knowledge in this beautiful family. The addition of these three new species brings the total number of Iridaceae recognised in southern Africa to 1 213 species.

GLADIOLUS UYSIAE: Alisdair Aird I grew some of the Gladiolus uysiae, from Jim and Jenny Archibald, seed that had been collected in the West Karoo. I sowed it in 2006 and grew them originally under glass here in Sussex. Eventually I planted most of them out in southern Greece, in our steep coastal garden which is hot and dry – rather too hot for them, but as you can see from this March 2017 picture they did look very much at home; they're in a spot which does collect quite a bit of winter water. And yes, what a wonderful and very specific scent.

CROCOSMIA AUREA: Margaret Fox

This member of the Iridaceae is summer growing and flowers in January, also here in Ceres. It originates from the Eastern regions – Eastern Cape to Mpumalanga and is a well-known garden flower.

ZANTEDESCHIA PENTLANDII: Margaret Fox Seed collected from a yellow summer-flowering Zantedeschia proved most rewarding. I obtained tubers originally in 2011 as a handout from the Hadeco Company at our IBSA Symposium. Plants flower in November – December. They die down in the winter months and can withstand the wet conditions in Ceres. This finding is rather surprising, but the plants have survived the wetness, proving just how resilient plants can sometimes be when put to the test. It is not usually recommended that you leave the plants in the soil where the tubers can rot.

In autumn I picked a seedhead and kept it indoors, but it never dried out. In late October I sowed the wilted seeds and to my surprise and delight they germinated a few weeks later.

The Red Data List lists the species as Vulnerable, although it is quite widely cultivated in gardens. It is found in Limpopo and I have always wanted to see plants in the wild, growing between and amongst the boulders.

Gladiolus uysiae

Crocosmia aurea

Zantedeschia pentlandii flowering in the garden Pot with the seedlings

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LAB GIRL IS BACK! Extract from Lab Girl by Hope Jahren [Fleet Publishers] – submitted by Gill Knight

Chapter 11 – Roots and Leaves

It’s rare, but a single tree can be in two places at once. Two such trees can exist up to one mile apart and yet still be the same organism. These trees are more similar than identical twins. In fact, they are identical without qualification right down to each ingle gene. If you cut both trees down and count the rings you will see that one of them is much younger than the other. When you sequence their DNA, however, you will find no differences. This is because they used to be parts of the same tree.

It is easy to become besotted with a willow. The Rapunzel of the plant world, this tree appears as a graceful princess bowed down by her lush tresses, waiting on the riverbank for someone just like you to come along and keep her company. Don’t be fooled into thinking that your fairy-tale willow is special, however. Chances are that she is not. If you walk upstream, it is likely that you will find another willow tree. It is also likely that this tree will be precisely the same willow as your dear willow, standing in a different pose, with a different height and girth, and having perhaps seduced dozens of other princes over the years.

A willow tree is far more like Cinderella than it is like Rapunzel in that her lot in life involves working harder than her sisters. There’s a famous study in which scientists compared the growth rates of a group of trees for a year. The hickory and buckeye were fast out of the gate, but then stopped growing after just a few weeks. The poplar made a good show and grew for four full months. But it was the willow that quietly outpaced all the others, continuing to grow for a full six months through the shortening days of autumn and right up to winter’s iron gates. The willow trees in the study grew an average of four feet by the end – almost double the growth of their nearest competitor.

Light equals life for a plant. As a tree grows, its lower branches become obsolete, too shaded by the newer ones above to be of any further use. A willow tree loads these used branches with reserves, fattens and strengthens them and then dehydrates their base such that they snap off cleanly and fall into the river. Carried away on the water, one out of millions of these sticks will wah up onto a bank and replant itself, and before long that very same tree is now growing elsewhere. What was once a twig sill be forced to function as a trunk, stranded under conditions it had never considered. Every willow tree features more than ten thousand such snap-off points; it sheds 10 percent of its branches in this way every single year. Over the decades one – maybe two – of these will successfully take root downriver and grow into a genetically identical doppelgänger.

The oldest surviving family of plants on Earth is the Equiseteum – the horsetail. The fifteen or so species that persist today have known 395 million years of Earth’s history. They saw the first trees scale the heavens; they saw the dinosaurs come and go; they saw the first flowers bloom and then swiftly overtake the Earth. There is a sterile hybrid horsetail known as ferrissii that cannot reproduce but can only spread like a willow via parts breaking off and establishing elsewhere. Although ancient and impotent, ferrissii can be found growing from California to Georgia. Did it cross the country like a newly minted Ph.D. moving to a sprawling technical university and find magnolia trees and sweet tea and black humid nights loaded with fireflies and uncertainty? No. Equisetum ferrissii crossed the country like the living thing that it is, and found itself elsewhere, and then did the best that it could.

WALLS AND FENCES Gay Search’s The Little Book of Quick Fixes for the Impatient Gardener gives good – and slightly outrageous – ideas for brightening up your boundary.

“Colour me beautiful

When it comes to choosing colour to paint your garden walls, consider the style of your garden carefully. Soft pastels – blues, greens, lavenders – are best in a traditional garden, while crisp neutrals – greys, stone, taupe – work well in a formal setting. Stronger shades such as ochre, terracotta and plum are best in contemporary gardens. White is a good choice for a southern climate but in the north it’s too harsh, especially during the grey winter months. Here, cream, soft yellow or beige are warmer choices.

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Remember that colour affects people’s mood and will also affect the way you perceive the garden. ‘Hot’ colours such as red and orange are stimulating and energising and will make a garden look smaller. ‘Cool’ colours – blues and mauves – are relaxing and will make the space look bigger.

You need to think, too, about the colour as a backdrop for plants. Soft blues and greens work well with everything, while stronger tones look dramatic with a ‘hot’ planting scheme.

Five instant tricks to liven up a dull wall.

Use panels of trellis to break up a plain surface. They will give a 3-D effect and create attractive patterns of light and shade.

Parallel wooden battens of different lengths fixed to the wall also create interesting patterns and shadows. Paint them the same colour as the wall for a subtle effect, or in a contrasting colour for more drama.

Use stout galvanized wire to create geometric patterns – diamond shapes, zig-zags or fan shapes – on a plain surface. They add immediate interest and, in the longer term, you can grow small-leaved ivy along the wires, keeping it neatly clipped to keep the shapes sharp.

Screw cut-out decorative MDF panels to the wall. They come in a range of designs such as orange trees, cypresses – even Moorish windows with ornate grilles and a view beyond of minarets. To link illusion and reality, stand a palm or an orange tree in a pot in front of the panel.

Paint a dull brick wall with blue-green masonry paint and hang a collection of galvanized metal wall planters and watering cans on it.”

TAKE NOTE Streptocarpus formosus: Cherise Viljoen has been working tirelessly to complete her Masters and she is proud

to announce that her research has been accepted for publication. You can read all about it on https://www.mdpi.com/2311-7524/7/6/120

Marmalade time: Yvonne Reynolds says her Seville orange trees have lots of fruit this year. If are interested in

making marmalade, you are welcome to contact her on yvonneksu@gmail.com. She will bring the oranges to a

central point in Cape Town for people to collect.

Photos: M Alexander, J van der Linde and various IBSA members, Google