Planting Grapes Hill Community Garden

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Planting up Grapes Hill Community Garden

Planting Grapes Hill Community Garden, April 2011.

At the end of 2010, six of us formed a planting sub-committee to decide what to plant in Grapes Hill Community Garden in Norwich.

We selected our favourite plants and Lara Hall, the Landscape Architect who designed the garden’s hard landscaping made some suggestions too, some of which we adopted. I borrowed Fran Ellington’s notes from a visit her and her husband Pete made to the Agroforestry Research Trust in Totnes in Devon and I used some of my gardening books, as well as my own experience of growing edible and ornamental plants for around forty years in a number of gardens.

Plants in the garden were chosen for a variety of reasons.

Edibility – plants as human food.

Garlic Chives

Garlic Chives

We mixed well known and obscure varieties of edible plants, so that people could start with something familiar and then explore something entirely new.

In the first year we grew everyday vegetables like Swiss Chard and Courgettes along with heritage and unusual vegetable varieties like Achocha, Crimson-flowered Broad Beans and Tree Spinach.

We took a similar approach with fruit. The six apple trees were chosen to be a mix of nationally well known varieties, such as “Bramley”, and less well known local varieties like “Norfolk Royal Russet”. As well as Apples, Pears, Cherries and Plums we chose less well known fruits like Medlar, Blue Honeysuckle and Japanese Wineberry.

Japanese Wineberry

Japanese Wineberry

I chose as many plants with edible flowers or leaves as I could. Many of us ate Day Lily (Hemerocallis) flowers for the first time and sampled the flowers from many different herbs. We ate the leaves and flowers of Garlic Chives and the fishy-tasting red, cream and green leaves of Houttuynia cordata (used as a leaf vegetable in Vietnam and a root vegetable in south-west China).

Jekka McVicar’s book “Good Enough To Eat” helped me choose plants with edible flowers and her “Complete Herb Book” was a great source of advice on herb growing.

Attractiveness to wildlife

Plants were chosen for their attractiveness to beneficial insects such as bumblebees, butterflies and hoverflies. In particular we planted nectar rich plants to flower throughout a long season. When there was a choice of varieties we rejected fancy double flowers in favour of open pollinated varieties, which are more attractive to insects.

Within days or even hours of planting, local bees found our flowers and now that the garden is more established, birds are using the garden as a source of food.

Educational value

Part of the garden’s remit is to teach people about edible plants, growing food and wildlife gardening. We are providing an example of a low input garden managed on organic gardening prin-ciples, with no peat, herbicides or pesticides.

The raised beds provide the chance for people to grow their own vegetables, often for the first time.

Attractiveness and interest to human visitors

The garden has to be attractive to visitors from the local community and further afield.
We have scored highly in the Anglia In Bloom competition and have helped Mancroft Ward and Norwich do well in both Anglia In Bloom and Britain In Bloom, so I think this has been achieved!

Right Plant, Right Place

The four ash trees are very thirsty and we have had to use drought-tolerant and shade-tolerant plants next to them. In spite of this, we have lost plants in summer droughts but overall the garden manages to recover every year and stay green.

Salvia microphylla

Salvia microphylla

Beside the business units, spring woodland flowers such as Dog Violets, Primroses, Woodruff and Wood Anemones thrive beneath the ash trees by flowering before the trees come into leaf. Further up the garden, Wild Strawberries and Sweet Cicely are almost bulletproof and simply shrug off shade, drought and competition from the ash roots.

We did lose some plants: the Alpine Strawberries hated the drought, the slugs and snails ate the lovely Plume Thistles (Cirsium rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’) in the winter of 2012 – 2013, just months after they were planted. The Thymes rotted over the first two winters in the damp and the cold, dry winds of spring 2013 did our lovely pyramidal Bay Trees no good at all.

But other plants, like the Golden Hops, Teasels, Honeysuckles, Babington’s Leeks and Blackcurrant Sage (Salvia microphylla) have thrived and most visitors to the garden probably don’t notice the plants that have gone.

Low Maintenance

The garden has been designed to be low maintenance, with lots of hardy perennials, bulbs and shrubs that need little attention. (The hardy perennials need to be divided every few years to maintain their vigour.)

The fruit trees and bushes need attention just once a year and the borders are cut back in spring, after they’ve provided shelter for overwintering insect life. Other than regular weeding, the garden is very simple to look after.

This blog piece is adapted from an article in Grapes Hill Community Garden Group Newsletter No. 10, February 2014.

White Bryony, Bryonia dioica

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White Bryony

White Bryony, Bryonia dioica, is Britain’s only native member of the cucumber family, the Cucurbitaceae. Like Black Bryony, Tamus communis, which I wrote about a couple of years ago, it is a climbing perennial plant that adorns English hedgerows (see map). But Black Bryony is not a close relative – it is Britain’s only member of the mainly tropical Yam family, the Dioscoreaceae.

As the specific name dioica suggests, White Bryony is a dioecious plant – the male and female flowers with their five greenish-white petals occur on separate plants. Male flowers are 12 to18mm across, with green veins, two pairs of stamens with united filaments and a third stamen is on its own. The anthers are yellow. Female flowers are 10 to12mm across, with three forked stigmas.

My photograph (taken near Hoveton in Norfolk) shows the plant in mid July, with the green berries ripening through orange to a dull red. In winter the plant dies back but the old stems remain for a while with the berries attached. In spring the shoots rapidly climb and attach themselves to supports with coiled tendrils. The leaves are palmate with three to five lobes.

The closely related Bryonia alba grows in mainland Europe and Iran but not in Britain. It is monecious, with separate male and female flowers on the same plant. It is equally poisonous and has also been introduced into the United States, where it is a noxious weed in Washington, Idaho and Montana. The related Bryonia cretica subsp. dioica is an invasive species in New Zealand.

Like Black Bryony, White Bryony is a poisonous plant. Eating a few of the berries can result in vomiting, diarrhoea (with blood), dizziness and breathing difficulties.The roots are very poisonous to cattle and horses. Eating parts of the plant has been known to kill ducklings and poultry as well. Not much is known about the toxins in White Bryony, though they include a glycoside called bryonin and an alkaloid, bryonicine (Marion R. Cooper & Anthony W. Johnson, “Poisonous Plants & Fungi – An illustrated guide”, HMSO, 1988).  Tetracyclic terpenes (cucurbitacins) may also be involved.

The website A Modern Herbal lists the medicinal properties of White Bryony, as well as several alternative names for the plant, including English Mandrake, Wild Vine, Wild Nep, Ladies’ Seal and Tetterbury. French name for White Bryony include Navet du diable (Devil’s Turnip) and Rave de serpent (Snake Root).

The American WebMD website warns that:

“Bryonia is UNSAFE for anyone to use. At fairly low doses, it can cause many side effects including dizziness, vomiting, convulsions, colic, bloody diarrhea, abortion, nervous excitement, and kidney damage. Larger doses may cause fatal poisoning in adults and children. Just touching fresh bryonia can cause skin irritation. Eating the berries can cause death.”

The whole plant has an unpleasant and acrid smell when cut and the berries are apparently bitter, which must have prevented some potential Bryony tasters.

Historically, White Bryony roots were sometimes used as a cheap substitute for the Mediterranean plant Mandrake (Mandragora officinarum). Mandrake roots often grow to resemble the human form and were therefore considered (under the Doctrine of Signatures) to be useful for enhancing sexual potency. But as Mandrake doesn’t grow in Britain’s cooler climate, it was cheaper and more convenient to carve White Bryony roots to look like like Mandrake roots or even to grow them in special moulds to form the expected shape.

“Jugglers and fortune-tellers make wonderful monsters of this root, which, they have hid in sand for some days, they dig up for Mandrakes; and by this imposture these knaves impose on our common people.” – John Pechey.

The above quote by John Pechey comes from Robert Bevan-Jones’ excellent book, “Poisonous Plants: A Cultural and Social History”, Windgather Press 2009.

You can read more about Mandrake and White Bryony on The Poison Garden website here (July 2011) and here (February 2012).

King’s American Dispensatory gives some interesting information on the uses of Bryonia species, originally printed in 1898 but now online as part of the Henriette’s Herbal Homepage website.

Checking for Chalara Ash Dieback

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A couple of days ago I visited a friend in Norwich who has an Ash tree in his garden. He was concerned that it might have Chalara Ash Dieback disease. Fortunately, after we’d had a look, we realised his fears were unfounded.

When I wrote about Ash trees in July 2012 Ash Dieback disease (caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea) had already been found in Britain in a tree nursery in Buckinghamshire, but it wasn’t until October 2012 that the first cases were confirmed in East Anglia (reference). It was a shock to hear that the disease had been discovered not far from Norwich in Ashwellthorpe Lower Wood, a lovely Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserve that I have visited on several occasions.

I have looked at  number of Ash trees in Norwich, for example in Earlham Cemetery, but I still haven’t seen the symptoms of the disease first hand. But a lot of information is available on the internet. I started with the Woodland Trust’s page “How to identify ash dieback“.

The page led me to some Forestry Commission videos, which are clear and easy to follow. They are on YouTube and I have embedded them below. (The first two are also embedded in the Woodland Trust’s web page.)

How to identify Chalara ash dieback in the field:

Chalara ash dieback – identifying symptoms in the winter:

Chalara dieback of ash – Spring symptoms:

Chalara Ash Dieback has now been found in many parts of the UK (see map).

If you discover an outbreak of the disease, you can use the Forestry Commision’s tree alert form to report it. Photographs are very useful and priority is given to reports which include pictures. There is also a Tree Alert App, which you can use if you have a smartphone.

Chalara fraxinea has caused the loss of ash trees in a number of European countries, including between 60 and 90 per cent of Denmark’s ash trees. The worry is that the effect will be devastating in Britain too. Hopefully the genetic diversity of our ash trees may mean that there are naturally resistant trees already growing in our countryside.

In Britain, there appear to be two sources of infection. In East Anglia and along the east coast wind-borne fungal spores have brought the disease to Britain from continental Europe. Further west, trees have been planted with infected stock imported from continental Europe (reference). Regulations were introduced to control the import of infected trees in late October 2012 (reference), but only once many infected newly-planted trees had already been discovered.

The Forestry Commission have issued advice to forest visitors, which should be followed to limit the spread of the disease. However, they advise that the risk of visitors spreading the disease is very small and they have not suggested that woods or forests should be closed to visitors.

Chalara Ash Dieback affects other species of ash as well, including Fraxinus angustifolia, F. ornus, F. nigra, F. pennsylvanica, F. americana and F. mandschurica. The least susceptible species are reported to be F. americana and F. mandschurica (reference).