“The gardens at Howick are deliberately aimed at garden lovers with the extensive grounds offering a wide variety of plants throughout the year and are open from early February until mid November.
The season starts in early February with the ‘Snowdrop Festival’. In late March/April there are spectacular drifts of daffodils to be seen throughout the grounds. In April/May the Woodland Garden is particularly lovely with rhododendrons, camellias and magnolias, and the tulips also appear in the wild flower meadows in May. The formal gardens, including the herbaceous borders and terraces in front of the Hall, come into their own from June onwards. The Bog Garden lasts from June to September and is mostly planted with unusual herbaceous material grown from seed collected in the wild, which will be of particular interest to dedicated plantsmen. The late season brings brilliant autumn colour in late September through to mid November.
Howick Hall Gardens has been rated by the BBC Gardener’s World Magazine as one of the top 5 coastal gardens in the country and rated the Independent Magazine as ‘one of the Best 10 Gardens to visit this spring'”
Source: Howick Hall website
broad beans germinate in warm bag of bark
‘The bags of freshly chipped bark that are waiting to be spread on the paths in the garden have provided an unexpected benefit. When I noticed how quickly the bark was heating up, it occurred to me that I could use them as giant propagators. The broad beans that had shown no sign of germinating in the greenhouse started to shoot after 3 days in their cosy new quarters. Very satisfying. There is an extraordinary amount of bacterial and fungal activity in the chippings, so much so that I’m taking the precaution of wearing a face mask when spreading it to avoid inhaling the smoke-like clouds of dust. For the photo I moved one of the seedboxes to one side to reveal the network of fungus that has formed.’
Botany gets a bit more complicated when we meet bryophytes and cryptogams Something to start with could be: bryophytes are all cryptogams, but not vice-versa, some cryptogams are not bryophytes. Yet beware not to mess them all with cryptograms, although it seems that science may find some cryptograms (secret code) in genetic material of mosses, giving promise to new drugs development. Anyway,I was astonished seeing all those water pearls on our concrete wall moss looking as simple plain green carpet from far, but turning into a fine needlepoint when one comes close enough.It attracted me enough to spend some time observing tiny green hair.I can totally understand those guys from british bryological society !
“Muscinae” from Ernst Haeckel‘s Kunstformen der Natur, 1904
The spore-bearing sporophytes(i.e. the diploid multicellular generation) are short-lived and dependent on the gametophyte for water supply and nutrition. ,mosses and other bryophytes have only a single set of…
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Nigel Boldero aka 'Old School Gardener'
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