Katy's Garden

The seeds of hollyhocks and of "Pam's Choice" foxgloves are already germinating. That makes it less than a week from sowing, busy little fellows.

Once one overcomes the shyness of growing things from seed (it does take some optimistic inclination, especially at the beginning) this becomes addictive. It's a serious warning.
One should have a greenhouse for this, not because a greenhouse is especially necessary for the seeds but because else your own house will inevitably become bestrewn with pots and pans of "empty" ground much to the chagrin of those members of the family that are NOT into gardening. Failing a green house you can only try to keep your seed pots neat and orderly, and point out that it is the cheapest way to grow rare plants. This simple (and true, if you can get the things to grow at all) statement works miracles on rueful husbands.

I think my first deliberate seed sowing must have been nasturtiums. They are so lovely and so easy that they cannot possibly disappoint, even the very beginner. They germinate, they grow, they bloom and they will happily take over the whole garden if they get a chance. It was a discovery, an illumination. Seeds work!

I still sow nasturtiums every year. They come in very nice colours, but not always true. Like love-in-a-mist, marigolds (Calendula) and californian poppies, nasturtiums can be sown directly outside and never fail to do their job. All other things I sow in pots and pans and transplant. Sparrows and snails are way to greedy, and weeds are too much concurrence for tiny plantlets. I love to transplant and pot on. If done with care you never need to lose a seedling.

The seeds of papaya, Tetrapanax papyrifera and Musa nagensium are the result of the "tropical virus" that I got from reading "Exotic plantings for adventurous gardeneners" by Christopher Lloyd. What a voluptous and cheerful source of inspiration! It woke - perhaps in conjuction with my moving into a freezing and windswept, wintry german garden - a burning lust for sun, bold colours and vast, waving, dew spattered tropical leaves.
I ordered the seeds from Chiltern Seeds. It is very curious that the tropics may come to us in an envelope from the damp and misty Cumbria (at least, I can't help imagining Cumbria as a damp and misty place, but I may be wrong). You can travel the world on very green imaginary roads leafing through Chiltern's catalogue. I am fascinated by this activity - the distribution of seeds. I harbour a sentimental, perhaps, but real affection for these precise and meticulous Britons, nimbly sorting millions and millions of frail suspended lives in minuscle paper bags, dispatching them with unthinkable (for an Italian) punctuality and celerity to the addresses of complete strangers, allowing the recipients to achieve their dreams of tropical jungles, tasty vegetables, pastel coloured borders, white lilies, green columbines, brown foxgloves, meadows and rockeries. "He who sows a garden sows happiness", states the old chinese proverb (there is always an old chinese proverb), and certainly Mr Chiltern (not to mention Mr Thompson and Morgan and Mr Sutton) must have handled a lot of labeled happiness over the decades (and also many disappointments... nothing is sure in gardening, except snails and naturtiums).

Sowing has two obvious main advantages: it allows a gardener to grow unusual plants without difficult and expensive trips to out of the way nurseries, and it, with some practice and organization, allows one to grow large numbers of plants with little expense, and you get real plants, not the dwarfish flower blobs sold in garden centers as bedding material.

Seeds must not necessarily arrive by airmail from the other side of the world. Collecting seeds by ones own garden is a source of great satisfaction, expectations and surprises. Columbines hybridize easily among themselves ("their morals leave something to be desired") and it is always a bit of a mystery what will come of their seeds. Alessandra Orsi of the lovely omonymous nursery told me the Aquilegia viridiflora fathers the loveliest, most sophisticated hybrids. The first generation of "after viridiflora" columbines of my garden is just sprouting up now... we shall see.