AUGUSTA’S FLOWERS

Several years ago, I interviewed some of London’s grander florists for an book idea that didn’t see the light of day.  I wanted to find out what sort of flowers attracted them, their punters, and if taste in such things changed slowly, rapidly, or hardly at all.  Except for one business, still thriving, I’ve changed names.  It was a fascinating couple of days…

‘Marcus’s in the West End’, she said, swinging part of her mane of hair open so that she could see me.  ’He’s very busy just now….’  His website calls him, grandly, ‘florist to the stars’, amongst whom he lists…  well, think of some famous London residents.  When I first looked Marcus out, he was supposed to be based in that warren of streets tucked between London’s Regent and Bond streets. Cool stuff, but perhaps it hadn’t lasted.  The shop in which I was standing is modest enough, and in one of the less glamorous parts of Notting Hill (yes, there really is such a place).  With another swing of the mane she goes on ‘I’m the creative director’.  There doesn’t seem to be anyone else around, even though it’s a Saturday morning.  Still, the directorship shows: the shop’s pavement territory is marked with white painted urns filled with a very natty combination of greyish strelitzia leaves strutting out from generous armfuls of silver eucalyptus stems.  There are also trays of nertera plants, suitably red berried, of amber centred bromeliads, green-yellow cymbidiums, and white oncidiums, though it is not clear how long any of these can survive the sub-zero wind blowing down from the posher bits of town.

Inside, scarlet gingers, pale blue delphiniums, heliconias and bins of roses in various shades jostle with the season’s pots of hyacinths and daffodils, noses just showing about the compost.  I don’t quite see how it all works. She’s mopping some tatty mirror tables, one badly cracked.  ’See what they’ve done? I’m just trying to make the shop look nice again’. She means the Dutch wholesalers, who trawl Europe in pantechnicons filled with flowers and plants produced in Hollands huge acreage of glasshouses, and whose heating costs are (or were then) subsidised by the Dutch government. ‘He’ll be back soon’, but I don’t wait.

‘Oh, he’s around here quite a lot….’  Augusta, tall, impossibly elegant, and, in spite of the weather, showing no sign of being chilled to the bone, smiles.  It’s not clear whether she means he comes around to buy flowers, or perhaps something a little spikier, like seeing what the competition is up to.  She’s assembling a bouquet using half-opened spikes of pale blue hyacinth, sprigs of ivy in fruit, branchlets of rosemary, the top twelve inches or so of a couple of spikes of tuberose, some double white narcissi, and a few roses whose petals are parchment yellow darkening to a bronzy red at the margins.

It looks wonderful, yet mildly unnerving to see plants treated so thoroughly as ‘flowers’: chopped, bent, stripped of unnecessary leaves, buds and so on.

I ask how did she become a florist?  ’Oh, i’ve been here ten years.  My sister worked here first, and they were getting busy, so I came along.  I sort of fell in love with the job, and have worked here ever since.  ’  She shrugs, smiles, and looks pleased with life.  ’My sister moved on recently, and has her own place…’

She starts another bouquet on the order list.  Each flower stalk is turned to see how it balances, whilst she uses her outer three fingers to strip foliage or branchlets that are too far down the stem.  It gets added to the bunch, the bunch itself then turned around to see how its developing.  It too already begins looks wonderful.  When finished, it gets tied together with  raffia (she asks van boy to go and get some more).

The ‘Here’ she refers to is called the …  in the middle of an ill-defined rectangle of buildings in a very smart part of Notting Hill. Amongst other things, the building includes a small glassed in office, and a turquoise counter as its tail-end.  Nearby shops are strongly designer-led.  Various famous names adorn the fronts.

The business was started by a successful advertising executive.  Discovering that she had a knack for making striking flower arrangements for friends, she switched Saatchi & Saatchi for a florist’s shop.  Hugely energetic, in two years she had a new business of her own. She prospered, opened a more conventional shop for ancillary home wares, and soon had glitzy and influential commercial clients like Chanel, Paul Smith, Prada, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, and various passing film stars.

It’s all very far away from the Eliza Doolittle image of the flower seller.  Augusta says, ‘We do contracts from some of the private houses round here, do their parties and so on….  But we also do lots of ‘shoots’ (I imagined those of the gun kind, the kill decked with tulips and blood-red roses, but in fact she means photographers and models and gorgeous clothes).  ’Oh, and the BBC, and hotels and banquets…’  She leafs through the pile of fluttering yellow order forms. ‘We talk to them about what they want.  You get to be quite a psychologist.  There are sort of ‘key’ words you get to know.  Romantic  Modern  Masculine. Country…’

The bunch she’s doing is for the christening of a boy – hence the blue hyacinths and the ruff of angular ivy branches.  The next one…  ’Aren’t these just lovely?  Not seen them before…’  She’s bought at New Covent Garden market trails of the white everlasting pea (Lathyrus latifolia ‘alba’. and which must have been grown under glass, or in the southern hemisphere), each a yard or so long of floppy stem spattered with purest white flowers.  ’I love these…’ – she strokes the green tendrils at the end of each leaflet. ‘And what do you think of these?’  ’These’ are sensational.  Double green ranunculus, the petals leafy textured as they are in other double green relatives, like the enchanting double green celandine.

She puts green ranunculus with white everlasting pea,  ivy, tuberose, double white stocks. In spite of her painterly eye, she has no formal arts training.  Oh, and an average bunch is thirty pounds quid or so and there’s no top end to market…’  The white flowers go amongst silver eucalyptus, some other dark green leafage, and all of a sudden there’s something special.

The flowers she buys are all in interesting shades of things, with hardly a raw red or brash yellow in sight.  Neverthless, I ask about the green ranunculus.  After all, she has wonderful bronze ones, ones in morocco leather red.  ’Well, there won’t be too many buyers for it.  But…. ‘ she smiles, and one of her assistants smiles too, ‘it’s much easier to sell something that you like yourself….  I like these a lot, and it’s always fun to interest customers in something new…  I do most of the buying… Either from the Dutch (she means the vast trailers), or from New Covent Garden’.  That market starts at seven in the morning; the flower stall closes at seven in the evening.  It’s a long day.  She says, and completely looks, as if she enjoys every minute.  ’And anyway’ she says, ‘it’s a short day on Sunday.  We stop at four…’

‘And things do change… when I started at the first shop, the whole thing was filled with gerberas.  Very bright’.  No doubt even Notting Hill supermarkets still sell gerberas to those not yet prepared for green ranunculus.  ’People here,’ she goes on, ‘ like a much more ‘country’ look now, even wildflowers… and lots of foliage… Foliage is getting a lot more important – I’m always looking for new things…  ’  A few flakes of snow pass.  The girls all seem impervious to the cold. Banks of heaters glow, flexes snaking back to the glass box of the workroom/office, which none of the girls seems much to use.  I sidle up to a heater.  The assistant with tousled hair and and a dusting of glitter (cosmetic not climatic), is assembling a slightly psychedelic bunch of roses.  The other packs potfuls of dwarf narcissi into a 1930′s looking bowl.  Rachel, whose been with the company for two years, following warmer work in an art gallery, says  ’Oh, we do lots of these.  People like something that’s alive, even if they throw them away in a week or two.  The shop round the corner (she means the branch on … Street), has loads of pots and things to put them in.  We sell masses…’

I venture to move further from the heater. Augusta is surveying, in a rather wrapt way, a bunch of spinel red tulips.  She hold it this way, that way, removes a few flowers, puts one back, goes over to the bin of dark green ivy with its green and black berries, makes a ruff of ivy around the tulips, re-adjusts, ties with raffia just beneath the ruff, trims the stalks level. The tulips, already lovely, are actually transformed.  The darkness of the ivy intensifies the colour and the waxen bloom of the tulips.  Then, standing amongst a drift of discard leaves and petals, she crosses off one of the slips of yellow paper.

‘The market today was filled with a really nasty bright yellow tulip called … Somebody must be buying masses for a big ‘do”.  She won’t say whom she suspects, but goes on, ‘One of the big hotels quite commonly has arrangements which hold two thousand flowers of the same sort…’  She muses on.  ’Funny how people don’t go for simplicity. Someone here recently wanted some flowers for his girlfriend – a huge bunch of white roses.  But he wanted a single red one in the middle. So I explained that his girlfriend would probably find it much more romantic if they were all the same colour.  In the end,  he did agree…’

I asked about old fashioned flowers wondering if, as a reaction to some florists’ passion for flashy things like heliconias, ginger lilies, tropical orchids and so on, there would be a reaction.  But of course it is already here.  The British rose nurseryman and rose breeder, David Austin, has already been trying to interest the trade in both his properly ‘old’ roses (though that generally means from 1820 onwards), and some of his hybrids between the old and the new.  Augusta shook her head.  ’They were really really beautiful.  Lovely colours, lovely smell. But they wouldn’t last when cut.  People expect ten or twelve days for their flowers, even round here… The roses would only do four or five’.

A woman passes, sari glittering beneath capacious overcoat.  Her immaculately turned out husband, as silent as she is vivacious, pushes their child along in a fancily designed pushchair.  They linger over the plants, then move on.  Then return.  They leave with a huge bunch of glossy birch twigs, the tight brown catkins awaiting spring, mixed with fruiting ivy, and a large number of dark red anemones.  It looks wonderful.  They look delighted.  A goodly amount of money changes hands.

After all, flowers have been used for decoration since we began.  There are even some rather disputed archaeological suggestions that the Neanderthals used flowers in their burial rites, and if so at death, perhaps also used them, as we still do, to decorate gods, altars, selves, homes, loved ones, dead, alive, newborn. The florist, or flower seller, has a long history, deeply entwined in most of our cultures.  But I can’t help wondering about what happens to the bulbs that produced many of Charlotte’s lovely flowers.  After all, the tulip flower stems seem to have on them most of the leaves that the bulb normally needs to ensure its progress into the next season.  The hyacinth trusses are wreathed in what looks like the entire bunch of the bulb’s leaves too, sliced off at the top of the bulb.  Do the bulbs get thrown away once harvested?  Is there enough nutrient left in them to produce a bulb for the following season? If they are thrown away, are they composted? Augusta doesn’t know either.  I think I should start a bulb hospital.

Florists come and go.  It’s a competitive trade, and very dependent upon client’s disposable income.  Lesser florists are, sadly, vanishing fast.  All is resilient at the top end of the market, where one of the best established and most stylish is to be found at www.wildatheart.com.  Fascinating.

Well, that’s four trees done.  The windfalls are mostly gathered and now fermenting in buckets as a prospective apple wine, or chutneyed, or used in this gorgeous Tuscan slightly soggy apple cake recipethat uses five or six apples a shot – great!

Fruit gathered from the branches is now bagged (four fruit in the bottom of a supermarket bag, then rolled into a sausage), boxed, and even labelled.  I always think I will remember which sort is which, always forget, and this time have a label in each bag.  Alas, though it would be fun to have the correct variety names, the two ancient apple trees remaining are long unlabelled, and the trees we planted as young’uns when we moved here seventeen years ago, lost their labels in transit from the previous garden.  Bad management, ok.  So, my printed labels are, as you can see, just ‘striped apple by wonky sundial’, or ‘pale yellow whopper by top pool’.  Indeed, I think we blame the fruit of this last one for the refusal of frogs to colonise the pool beneath; the splash of windfalls must be, to the pond’s inhabitants, rather as an earlier splash must have been to the dinosaurs.

Actually, there is one tree whose name we do recall – ‘Court Plat Pendu’, supposedly a Roman variety, but one which in our garden sulks, hardly grows and hardly fruits.  Perhaps its pining for Rome.  It’s due for the chop.

So, the pantry smells pleasantly of apples.  I check the bags every few weeks to see which sort is getting ready for the table.  The four harvested so far will only last until Christmas or so, though the three trees with apples still on the branches last in store well into next spring.

Down in the ruin, though, I’ve just noticed that some brown sticks in pots have some juicy buds.  One of the old trees (old apple with purple clematis) original to the garden is grafted on the ancient ‘Paradise’ apple stock.  Though the basic form of this is several hundred years old at least, there are various strains of it, our one giving a nice shortish tree above the graft, and suckering like mad below.  I’ve cut, deep down, some of the suckers off and replanted, aiming at trying to grow some new Paradise plants.  Why?  Well, I want to try out some grafting, particularly of other ancient trees in the village.  One, in a neighbour’s garden is said to taste something between pear and apple, and which I am almost desperate to have.  The brown sticks are Paradise, and so potential stocks for the next wave of apple planting.  And something to replace Court Plat Pendu!

On the old tree, incidentally now cleared of the clematis species that had almost swamped it, some of the attached suckers fruited, but their fruit, supposedly bland and unexciting, vanished amongst the general windfalls of autumn.  Ah well…

The apples shown above are three of the ones so far harvested.  Perhaps you know what they might be?

Oh, and the apple wine.  I’m not sure whether, not having been much at the cottage lately, the kitchen is too cold to encourage fermentation, or the buckets in which the various tree juices are were not rinsed strongly enough after I sterilised them.  I hover over them, listening for the bursting of bubbles.  But bubbles are few and soundless.  Oh dear.

A previous attempt at making the stuff, several seasons ago, was only a success in that we spent several sloshed evenings flavouring the stuff with various combos of herbs and spices – and indeed came up with some rather tasty vermouths.  We should be able to do things better this time – the garden has a bigger range of artemisias to try.  Who knows?  A whole new industry awaits.

Beneath the concrete, lovely flagstones (all of which were kept), and which we were delighted to have – more stone for what is almost a stone garden.  However, beneath the flags was an earlier floor of rough cobblestones supported on almost 60cm of rubble. Yes, the old cobbled flooring was interesting, but we needed fertile ground!

Skip after skip was filled. Spades broke, crowbars bent, buckets’ handles proved useless. Except where the 18^th century flagstones were in places where we planned the paths, everything got excavated. Endles cups of tea and coffee vanished into what looked like the entrances to mine shafts.

Then the rains started. The holes filled up.  It turned out that we’d excavated almost to the water table – so at least the veggies were going to have enough of that. We certainly had far more than enough!

Eventually the excavations were filled with compost mixed with soil from the midden out in the wood. Flagstones were relaid as paths. The wood store was put up, a seat constructed, and standing area for coalbin and the ugly recycling bins made.  A service path was made reusing some of the old cobbles.  Soil was raked and primed. The seat was sat upon, and the fantasy began.

Being a sucker for glamorous seed packets, an order went in to the UK branch of the Italian company Franchi Seeds, surely the company with the most beautiful packaging of all. Who could resist those marvellous looking climbing beans, or the prettily coloured and jagged leaf endives? Who could resist palest jade green courgettes, or gorgeously mottled and ribbed squashes and pumpkins? Ticks went by the boxes of chards and lettuces, fennels, rockets, basils, radishes…

It was unrealistic, even in earliest spring. The entire kitchen garden is only 16m. square, which, calculation showed, only allowed half a dozen plants of each sort, and what use are six spinaches or six radishes?.  And what of the plants I knew certainly wouldn’t do outdoors in this bit of Scotland – the tomatoes, the peppers and so on… OK, the garden has 2m high stones walls that trap heat, and keep out wind. All would be well.  No, I was being daft. Daft.

Sowing began.  Fleece was anchored over the rows – using cobbles as weights.  It was all set for a glorious future.  Then, of course, we didn’t know that the summer would be the wettest since 1916, and one of the coolest too. Still, there we were, getting the Victorian cloche restored, set at the garden’s centrepiece, and with some lettuce seed carefully sown inside. The only realistic thing we did was to sort out a piece of ‘the wood’ that lies beyond the ruin with a raised pile of compost on which to plant the courgettes and relatives, though we did forget that the wood was windy – sensibly so for the original cottages, as it was once a sort of communal drying green.

And so here we are at season’s end. Some things did, some things definitely didn’t. My idea of growing beans stylishly, up bamboo obelisks rising from some Versailles tubs we had was in all senses a flop.  The French beans grew like mad, raced to the top of their canes, made a top heavy tangle, were only in flower by September, and refused to set more than a handful of beans.  They then toppled over in the wind. ‘Borlotto’ did a bit better grown against a wall, and are still to be harvested.  But we are just back from Italy, where I bought a large bag of nicely dried beans for almost nothing.

The pumpkins clambered over each other, up a hedge, down the other side, but fruit? Nah. Well, there are three on the shelf. The pale courgette was fine. Most of the glut is now picked in the pantry, though one I didn’t notice is a 70cm juggernaut I’m not quite sure what to do with.

On the other hand, ‘leaves’ did wonderfully. Lettuces, rockets, endives, chards, spinaches, all did us proud. For the first, we had to resort to Elizabeth David’s lovely ‘Summer Cooking’ to discover some delicious ways of cooking the lettuce glut. Chards were, and remain, wonderful. A big saute pan makes cooking them, with chunks of chorizo sausage, or bacon, or both, fried first to release their fats. I’ll probably pickle some of the remaining leaf stalks, but leave the plants that haven’t bolted in the ground, as they sprout once more early in spring for a much needed early season vegetable. All the first sowing of ruby chard bolted, but a second sowing of mid August is doing splendidly.

However, the star was really fennel. I gave up growing it years ago, thinking I could never get it to provide decent sized bulbs. But Scotland isn’t Italy, and this season I harvested plants as soon as the stems began to elongate. The flavour of the small scots bulbs was absolutely perfect, liquorice, anise, dill, and its own special taste all combined. They were so good that none got cooked, going into the salad bowl instead. I also didn’t realise until I looked closely at the packet, that they can be sown in succession, something to which I shall pay great attention next season. I’ve just been pickling part of the second sowing I made as soon as I put the seed packet down.

And for next season? Well, I’m going to be less snooty about northern crops, runner beans especially, though they suffered this season too. I’m going to build a proper raised bed for the pumpkins, probably with extensions like a micro four poster bed, so I can put fleece over early and late, and also remember to do some hand pollination. Though the jungly climber sorts are fun to see, I’ll find out what bush types there are if any. Incidentally, pumpkin and squash flowers, with their delicious smell, are far better for cooking than most marrow/courgette flowers, even if somewhat smaller.  They areworth using too, for, recently in Spoleto, I had a fine pasta dish with diced asparagus, pumpkin flowers and a scatter of prawns. Delicious.

Oh, and I promise I will be a better weeder.

The Kindle book Old Fashioned Flowers is finding a good few buyers.  It describes seventy odd  genera,  often lists some delightful sorts still available.  There are hundreds of pictures.  I’m afraid there will be a slight gap before a similar work appears dealing with kitchen garden crops.  However, Georgian Gardens, with a long section on 18th century kitchen gardens should be on Kindle in a week or two.

If you buy, and enjoy, O.F.F., it would be lovely if you reviewed it.

Hope you enjoy the new posts…

david

www.david-stuart.co.uk

the street sweeper's yard... he had another piece of ground down below, with a wonderful weird self-built barbeque. Oh, and a nice dog

The village in which we did live for the week had tiny scraps of ground amongst the lanes and alleys with no apparent connection to any particular property. It was, anyway, difficult enough to connect any ancient arch or doorway to any particular windows, such was the tangle of building and rebuilding over the last thousand years or more.

Some of the scraps of land were abandoned, or used as log stores, or dog runs, or even somewhere for a goat and some chickens. Some had a gnarled pomegranate or quince tree above the scrubby grass, wild fennel, and intensely aromatic shrubby thymes and marjorams. But some, often hedges with lavender or some of the innumerable variants of rosemary, were rather richer.

One had a collection of succulent echeverias that even there can’t surely have been hardy. Another, under a vine canopy, had drifts of four-o-clock (or belle-de-nuit) with cerise flowers splashed with yellow and white – Mirabilis jalapa.  We found a pure white one at a half ruined fortified village (Capello Alto) on its hilltop near Spoleto and bagged some seed – beside a seriously handsome medieval ruin not yet restored .  The ones I tested had a stronger perfume than I remember from ones I’ve grown under glass in the North, though I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise.  Another garden had daturas, the pale violet upright flowered D. meteloides, with its sensational perfume and dangerous poisons, and the double white and pendant Brugmansia suaveolens, again gorgeously perfumed  and equally dangerous.

In Norcia - oh for a loggia like this to garden! Away with those damned geraniums!

But most folk in the hill villages gardened in pots.  Pots on balconies and windowsill, pots on steps, occasional corners, in rows on patios, propped dangerously on wall heads.

A metre high and more, whilst zinnias won't even grow in northern Europe.

They contained endless amounts of a red ivy leafed geranium familiar from every tourist brochure, lots of red and purple petunias, even (the envy almost slew us) tall gangly zinnias, which just never do in any of our gardens.  It’s terrible not to have access to those marvellous tawny reds and pinks, though some coreopsis can run them close in colour but not in sheer bravura of flower form and size.Oh, and verbenas, including ones very similar to the one we once grew as ‘Sissinghurst’,  a scarlet one that we knew as ‘Huntsman’, but that was about it.  When we thought of all the (for us) half-hardy beauties that would ‘do’ here, but that no-one seemed to use and, horrors, we even found one gorgeous lane in a gorgeous village entirely kitted out with plastic plants in plastic pots.

So, to garden fantasists like Alex and I, it was all a bit disappointing.  When we go next, as we must, we must also research proper plant nurseries to see what really is available.  Perhaps, though, that might be counter-productive, in that we get so overwhelmed by the possibilities, that we simply have to buy a garden to go with them…

However, we did see one charming idea.  The whole area is only a few hours’ drive from Rome, so lots of the higgledypiggledy houses in the hill villages and small towns are weekend or holiday homes – rather like the Scottish village in which I write this.  OK, weekends only, yet in those sweltering summers, who waters the pots and window boxes? Full time residents there, as well as here, can be few are far between.  so what is the answer?  Well, in Italy, the plants’ fond owners put out a couple of plastic soft drinks bottles, but filled with water…  Thus, all of those endless geraniums and verbenas, petunias, all that colour and some of that pefume depend, like Blanche in A Streetcar named Desire, on the kindness of strangers.

And of course, the colchicums.  If like me, you love them, do have a look at ‘Coaxing Colchicums along’.

The Kindle book ‘Old Fashioned Flowers’ is finding buyers.  Amongst seventy odd other genera, there’s plenty more info on colchicums.  No reviews so far.  Can you help?

Hope you enjoy the new posts…

david

www.david-stuart.co.uk

Colchicums are not especially easy plants to integrate into the garden.  In the wild, most grow in coarse meadow or light scrub.  The surrounding vegetation gives the long flower tube enough support to keep the flowers vertical.  Colchicums growing in tidy gardens, with plenty bare earth, have no support, and the flowers fall messily over – especially true of gorgeous doubles like ‘Waterlily’.

There are problems again in the spring, when the corms produce their foliage.  This is glossy, lovely, but very abundant.  Given the chance it flops outwards, cheerfully suppressing whatever is nearby.  Here, the colchicums are mostly amongst low growing geranium species, lamiums, hellebores, periwinkles and so on, so the aggression doesn’t matter.  If we grew only ‘treasures’, it would.

Having fallen madly for our first white colchicums, we then tried many others.  The chequered petal sorts sound wonderful, have been grown for centuries, but aren’t exactly show-stoppers in the garden.  The refined species are great if you have a rock-garden or  an alpine house, even better if you have a proper meadow.  We have had none of those, and the relevant species have never prospered under our haphazard garden management.

Of the doubles, we only manage to keep the easy ‘Waterlily’ flourishing.  It’s a brilliant thing, giving the gardener all sorts of happenstance colour schemes like ‘Waterlily’ flowering through fallen leaves of Rhus typhina and Acer rubrum, though sometimes it flowers too early, and then looks wonderful amongst a tangle of asters like the bluish-white Aster (or whatever it is now), divaricata.

Of course, most colchicums are expensive, and my treasured pile of corms was treasure indeed.  However, they are not difficult from seed.  Sow in pots in autumn, and leave outdoors.  Watch for insect pests on seedlings.  We forget to pot the seedlings on, and so whole potfuls get planted out as a single clump.  Easiest is the straightforward sort of Colchicum speciosum, good strong flowers, chalice shaped, petals white as they fuse into the flower tube, but with a handsome purple area around each petal top.  In flower as I write, they are rather fetchingly being pollinated by some nattily striped hover flies.  Seed pods will appear at the centre of next summers foliage.

It’s worth remembering that all parts of a colchicum are seriously poisonous.

Well, in fact, absinthe isn’t quite that terrible, quite that addictive, though it has aroused some remarkably strong passions. It does indeed pack quite a chemical punch, most of them derived from the genus Artemisia. Artemis, you will recall, was the Greek goddess of forests and hills, child birth, virginity, fertility, the hunt, and often was depicted as a huntress carrying a bow and arrows, though it is not clear quite why such a ‘grande dame’ was associated with plants more commonly called ‘wormwoods’. They were, and are, so called because intestinal parasites hated the stuff and left as soon as it was consumed.

Wormwood has been listed amongst materia medica since ancient times. It is mentioned in the Ebers papyrus as a vermifuge in 1550 BC. Dioscorides suggested it and because he did, doctors were using it into the 20th century.

More generally, the Greeks also used it as a remedy for jaundice, as a moth-killer and mouse-killer amongst stored clothing.

Surprisingly, considering its extreme bitterness, they also used it as a digestive and a flavouring for wine. It was a popular summertime drink in the regions of Propontis and Thracia.

At least by the 16th century, it had become clear that the wormwoods consist of a number of species. All are pungent leafed shrubs or herbaceous perennials, with an annual or two thrown in for good measure.

Many are still in the garden. Some, like the silver leafed Artemisia pontica (called Old Warrior, or Roman Wormwood), the shrubby and grey green A. abrotanum (Southernwood, sometimes Lad’s Love on account of its supposed aphrodisiac powers), A. lactiflora, A. absinthium, and of course the familiar A. Dracunuculus (dragons, or tarragon), are still in use for their original purposes.

As domestic and culinary cleanliness improved, the neeed for vermifuges lessened. Many found dramatic new uses for themselves. They often moved on to other organs. Culpeper’s ‘English Physician and Complete Herbal’ of 1651, says of the virtues of Artemisia: ‘… to expel worms in children, or people of ripe age. … (the leaves) made into a light infusion, strengthen digestion, correct acidities, and supply the place of gall, where, as in many constitutions, that is deficient.’ Gerard says pretty much the same: it “…voideth away the wormes of the gut… strengthen and comforteth the stomacke… yeeldeth strength to the liver also cureth the yellow jaundice.”

If the worms couldn’t cope with the sesquiterpenes that give the leaves their sour, pungent smell, the same sesquiterpenes and flavonoids also have a stimulating effect on the some of the specialised cells of the lower part of the stomach called the antrum, increasing their secretion of gastric juices. Digestion really is thereby improved. They also stimulate the gall bladder to squeeze its bile into the gut, aiding later stages of digestion too.

Following the ‘bon vivants’ of Propontis and Thracia, Artemisia absinthium and others became used, when combined with wine, as a digestive. The combination was often taken before a meal, or even throughout the day.

Dr. John Hill recommended in 1772 the closely related Common Wormwood (Artemisia vulgaris) in many forms. He says: ‘The Leaves have been commonly used, but the flowery tops are the right part….. One ounce of the Flowers and Buds should be put into an earthen vessel, and a pint and a half of boiling water poured on them, and thus to stand all night. In the morning the clear liquor with two spoonfuls of wine should be taken at three draughts, an hour and a half distance from one another. Whoever will do this regularly for a week, will have no sickness after meals, will feel none of that fulness so frequent from indigestion, and wind will be no more troublesome; if afterwards, he will take but a fourth part of this each day, the benefit will be lasting.’

This recipe is a water extraction, leaving all the essential oils still in the plant. These need alcohol to dissolve them. Hill was aware of this, and goes on… ‘ if an ounce of these flowers be put into a pint of brandy and let to stand six weeks, the resultant tincture will in a great measure prevent the increase of gravel – and give great relief in gout. … The celebrated Baron Haller has found vast benefit by this; and myself have very happily followed his example.’ He also notes that the common wormwood is the ‘most delicate, but of least strength. The Wormwood wine, so famous with the Germans, is made with Roman Wormwood, put into the juice and work’d with it; it is a strong and an excellent wine, not unpleasant, yet of such efficacy to give an appetite that the Germans drink a glass with every other mouthful, and that way eat for hours together, without sickness or indigestion.’  These German infusions were called ‘vermuts’. Or vermouths.

At the end of the century, a new patent medicine appeared in Switzerland. Its origin is often attributed to a man called Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, and to the year 1792. Used as a cure-all, it was speedily nicknamed “La Fee Verte”.  It combined most of the Artemisia species during some stage of its preparation. It also included melissa (Melissa officinalis, or sweet balm), angelica (Angelica archangelica), hyssop (Hyssopus officinalis), and large quantities of anise and fennel. The artemisias were distilled in alcohol, in an attempt to leave the worst of their bitterness behind. The distillate was then further flavoured with Roman wormwood (A. pontica) and the other herbs to give its final taste and colour. It ended up being intensely flavoured, immensely alcoholic, and, in the bottle, a glittering light peridot green. Diluted with water in the glass, it turned opalescent as the dissolved oils came out of solution. The medicine slowly caught on.

The recipe was brought to France in the early 1800′s by a Major Dubied, who purchased it from the sisters Henriod. It is uncertain how it became the sisters’ property. However, Dubied’s son-in-law, Henri-Louis Pernod set up a factory for its production at Pontarlier, France, in 1805. The major seems to have ensured that the cure-all was sold to the army. It was used by French troops fighting in Algeria from 1844-1847. They needed something to protect them against fever and fatigue. Many soldiers developed a taste for it, and wanted to keep it near to hand when they returned to France.

Better still, the word had spread that it was an aphrodisiac (perhaps from its use of southernwood). There were also whispers that it was a mild hallucinogen. There were vaguer whispers still that it was addictive. In other words, it was dangerous.

If so, then avante garde artists and their hangers on, the racier parts of high society and their hangers on too, all wanted to try it. The absinthe market grew like wild fire. It was expensive at first, so other distilleries set up to make cheaper versions. There were substitutions in the plants used. More dangerous ones crept in. In the mid -1870s, phylloxera attacked the vineyards and destroyed the vines. Wine and brandy prices rose drastically. Absinthe manufacturers turned from using now expensive brandy to grain alcohol. This was abundant and still cheap. Suddenly, absinthe was available to everyone. Competing brands fuelled public interest with advertisements suggesting that it was merely a healthy, herbal tonic

No cheap one admitted that its product was no longer coloured with fresh herbs, but with poisonous copper salts. Some of the posters, even of the deadliest concoctions, were exceptionally elegant. Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Pablo Picasso, Artur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Alistair Crowley, and Charles Baudelaire all sat and drank it, watching the inhabitants of passing carriages or the drivers of cars.. Van Gogh may have sliced off his ear under its influence. Toulouse-Lautrec made a special concoction called ‘atremblement de terre’, or ‘earthquake’, which combined absinthe and cognac. Some lesser folk combined absinthe with red or white wine instead of water. Purists drank it neat.

In 1874, France consumed 700,000 litres of absinthe. By 1910, the French drank 36,000,000 litres. It was becoming a social threat. It became associated with epileptic seizures, with orgiastic behaviour and sexual diseases, with corrupted artists and with criminals. Sensational murders were supposedly committed under its influence. It was soon banned in Holland, Belgium, and Brazil.

It had also taken root in America. Horrified by both alcohol and license, United States health officials imposed a ban on the drink in 1912, even though it continued to be available if the devotee knew what sort of hair tonic to buy.

France finally banned it too in 1915. French aperitif makers, including Pernod, were creative. They designed new aperitifs that did not include any of the supposedly dangerous wormwood, but had far more anise and just as much alcohol.

The chemical usually blamed for absinthe’s exotic reputation is alpha-thujone. It is widespread in the plant world, and is particularly to be found in other herbs like sage (Salvia officinalis), though there are some very strange salvias, and tansy (Tanacetum officinalis). Fennel and anise have plenty too.

The new vermouths and types of pastis ended up containing almost as much alpha-thujone as the strongest absinthes. Alpha-thujone, administered in large enough doses, can indeed cause epileptic fits, at least in laboratory rats. The rats also exhibit a host of other odd symptoms. The rat dosages, though, were the equivalent to a human drinker with thousands of glasses of absinthe. Perhaps the sexual arousal, the hallucinations, the deep mysteries of absinthe were more in the drinkers’ minds than in the glass…

[This is a slightly modified extract from my book DANGEROUS GARDEN, published by Frances Lincoln Ltd and Harvard University Press in 2004]

I’d been washing a load of lettuce leave for one of those wonderful recipes that start ‘take a pound of lettuce leaves…’  The lettuces here had been part of a cut-and-come-again patch under the Victorian cloche, had survived its removal, and made an abundant and handsome stand of frilly, yellow-green, leaves (the variety is ‘Gentilina’ from Seeds of Italy ….).

The caterpillar, an inch long, was grass green at one end, lettuce green at t’other.   It also had a handsome buttercup yellow stripe along each side.  Very pretty.  What would you have done?  I found it a piece of discarded lettuce stem, scooped it off the side of the sink, and took it into the garden.  At first it seemed surprised, then relaxed, and began to speed around the edge of it saviour support.  I confess that rather than return it to the lettuce patch, I put it in the bin of weeds, rhubarb and chard leaves due for the compost heap.  I thought it needed variety.

Anway, the recipe.  Well, pretty delicious, and derived from Elizabeth David’s ‘Summer Cooking’, page 66, for something she calls ~(well, called), surprisingly, Eggs with Lettuce.  ED, if you haven’t heard of her, was a grand, difficult, lady with a huge talent for good writing, good food, high cholesterol levels, and slight overelaboration.  Basically, for two folk, you need half a pound of lettuce, a little butter, a dash of olive oil, a dessert spoon of cornflour, a biggish dollop of cream (howevermuch you are happy with), a couple of spoonfuls of chopped parsley (I added a few sprigs of French tarragon), and six hard boiled eggs sliced lengthwise into quarters. Oh, and breadcrumbs.  No cheese.

Braise the lettuce in the butter for ten minutes – long enough to soften the stems – sprinkle over the flour, stir in immediately, then add the cream, or milk for the er… faint hearted.  Season and add chopped herbs.  Tranfer to a nice gratin dish, push the egg quarters into the sauce, then cover with a goodly layer of bread crumbs.  Bake for twenty minutes or so…. long enough to cook some fresh dug potatoes, over which steam some very young courgettes cut lengthwise in half.

Simple.  Good.  And there will be less lettuce to dispose of next time you are down in the vegetable patch amongst the caterpillars.

The recipe came, purportedly, from Persia. The rose we used didn’t. Though there are Persian roses in the garden here, we used the most strongly scented one we’ve ever come across.  She came, not from Persia, but from the Paris of 1881: Mme. Isaac Pereire.

She’s normally grown as a rather lax bush, and all the books say that that is what she is. No way. She’s as greedy as her namesake’s husband. We planted her by an apple tree that probably been in the garden since the late 18th century. Not wanting obscurity, she’s turned herself into a climber, and now pours flowers from even the apple’s uppermost branches.

She was a banker’s wife. Quite a banker, too – though swindler might be a better description. But, once widowed, she turned out to be quite a lady. The Pereires had arrived in Paris from Portugal in 1741. The first Pereire was a mathematician, and an inventor of a sign language for the deaf and dumb. His son prospered, and his grandsons could dabble in banking For a while they rivalled even the Rothschilds in wealth, and could, with them, finance the equally vast speculation in railway development. The boom was unsustainable. Banks began to fold. Between 1846 to 1848 alone, 829 banks folded. The Pereires had to start all over again. They looked for new fish to catch, especially in the the huge property speculation set off by the redevelopment of Paris set in train by Napoleon III in 1850′s. They invented a company called the ‘Credit Mobilier’, which tapped the money hidden under the beds of the middle classes, many of whom were terrified of the social upheavals that wracked the teeming capital. The Pereires were back in the swim. Isaac married. They soon had hands in yet more railways, more steamboats, more property, and, it must be said, more hospitals and more charities. The New York Times of Wednesday, July 13, 1880, reported Isaac’s death. His young widow cannot have had too much consolation from the naming of rose after her in the following year.

She retired to the Chateau d’Armainvilliers, but had by no means ‘retired’. She became interested in flying machines, and financed the development of the extraordinary ‘L’Eole’, with bat-like wings, but a propellor for propulsion. Designed by Clement Ader, it’s first (and possibly only) flight was in the grounds of her estate. The strange machine managed to be airborne for fifty five yards.

Quite a woman. Quite a rose.

And it’s quite a liqueur – but it fills us with curiosity. After all, it’s a Persian recipe, so what about trying it with ‘Rose de Resht, or ‘Ispahan’, or other ancient Middle Eastern rose. What about Rosa officinalis, more ancient still? What about modern tea roses, with those delicious high notes of perfume. Or drowsily scented Japanese ‘rugosa’ roses – ‘Roseraie de L’Hay’ especially. Then, what about colour? Our liqueur is a tawny red, so what about using white roses – ‘Mme Hardy’, say, or ‘Alba Maxima’? So, the garden needs yet more roses. And very much less rain.

Meanwhile, here’s the recipe, from what is now called Zahedan: Pick a dozen or two highly scented roses. Pick them early in the morning, before the sun has drawn out the perfume. Don’t pick them the day after a rain. Separate the petals and remove the white and yellow parts from the ends, the stamen region [I used kitchen scissors to do this to whole flowers]. Be sure the petals are dry, then put them into a glass half-gallon or gallon jar and pour a quart of neutral spirits over them. Cover well and put in a dark place. Stir once or twice a week for about four weeks.

Then take another dozen scented roses and remove the white and yellow parts from the petals. Dissolve 3 cups sugar in 2 cups water in an enamel pot with a well-fitting cover, and put the rose petals into the liquid. Cover the pot, and bring to a boil, then let simmer gently for an hour. Strain both the rose-petal brandy and the rose-petal syrup into a uitable jar, so that the two blend. Cover lightly for about 12 hours, then bottle. Cork well.’

Well, I used cheap gin. Next time, though, I will use Bombay Sapphire as the base… should give an even better taste.