Life of a Botanist ... is not only a bed of roses

Chelsea: an ocean of flowers It is my fifth time visiting the Chelsea Flower Show, the biggest annual event in horticultural Britain. Every year I am amazed by the sheer number and diversity of plants and flowers on display. I am particularly perplexed by some totally out of season. I would not expect to see autumn flowering Nerine in spring, and I have no idea how exhibitors manage to keep Narcissus ‘February Gold’ in flower for such a long time. It is late May after all. There are always the fabulous displays of spring and summer flowers, each grower displaying a single genus and displayed with great care and abundance. Particularly special are the peonies. How they manage to keep these fragile flowers in bloom for the whole week, I do not know, but the wall off pink, white, dark red and primrose yellow peonies displayed by Primrose Hall Nursery (“every garden deserves a peony”) was simply outstanding.  Potatoes in all colours and shapes Every year there are...

“Kosovo battlefield was strewn with heads and turbans, similar to a bed of tulips”, is what a Turkish chronicler wrote about the battle between the Serbs and Ottomans in the year 1389. The comparison to tulips and turbans is an ancient one, and this is where we westerners get the name for this lovely flower. A gentler story is that fashionable noblemen in Istanbul were wearing tulips on their turban and when a westerner asked about the flower, the translator may have confused the name for the headdress with the flower. In Turkish, they are called ‘lale’, which in Arab character is spelled with the same letters as ‘allah’, and thus tulips became the symbol for god and all he represents. Tulips became the representation of paradise on earth. Later the House of Osman took the tulip as their symbol, as the divine rulers of the empire, and this resulted in synonymy of tulips with Turkey. Sure, there are native tulips in Turkey, but the fashion for growing tulips and the complex hybrids...

Spring is early this year. It is only early April and most late daffodils are already over, tulips are in full swing and magnolias are dropping its petals. It has been a better spring than other years, a little cold weather in winter helped the spring bulbs along and killed some of the insects and slugs that otherwise would devour the fresh green leaves and opening flowers of daffodils. It always puzzles me how slugs and snails manage to find the daffodil flowers. The leaves of daffodils are poisonous, so slugs are not interested in it, but the flowers, towering (to a slug) over the leaves, some 40 cm above, are often devoured while they are emerging from their protective bract. The result is unsightly, half-eaten coronas, broken petals and a sad botanist. Waiting all winter for these gems to emerge and then finding that a slug ate them over night is sad, particularly because somehow slugs seem to have a particular preference for the rare and unusual kinds of daffodils. The ones y...