Garden Centre

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Plants For A Future and from the past

Plants For A Future is a wonderful database which I use a lot when I’m choosing new plants for the garden, as it gives me fascinating information about the culinary, medicinal and wildlife value of my purchases. Who knew, for example, that the beautiful Amaranth Caudatus, commonly called Love-Lies-Bleeding, is actually used as a grain crop when it provides great levels of protein, or that the red varieties of the plant can be used to produce a red food colouring?

But today I’m not so much thinking about plants for a future as plants from the past. This common or garden hardy fuchsia was grown from a cutting in my tiny London garden where its parent plant put on a brave show every summer, fighting off the dust and poor soil of a city terraced street to please me and all my neighbours. That parent plant was itself grown from a cutting taken from my grandmother’s garden in Torquay, Devon, in the days when she was a hale and active woman, who in her eighties still got up on a ladder and painted the guttering around her bungalow!

Today she’s in her late nineties and while she’s still active she’s no longer hale. She lives in a residential home, because she has senile dementia, and while she is a happy person, she doesn’t know most of her family any more. So the plant has bittersweet memories for me, and this year—when it seems to be blooming more wonderfully than for many years—it’s particularly lovely to think that I can take cuttings from it, for my currently teenage son to grow when he gets his own home and that this plant from our past will become a plant for his future too.

Labels: amaranth caudatus, hardy fuchsia

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:15 AM

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