West Dean Gardeners spread their wings!

West Dean Estate consists of 6,000 acres of glorious West Sussex down land of which roughly two thirds is given over to agriculture and the remainder to commercial woodland. The farmland is divided into 12 farms which, like most farms, have a mix of historic and modern farm buildings. As is often the case many of the original buildings are no longer fit for purpose having been stranded on the beach of history by the rapidly changing currents of farming economics. Nestling in the bottom of the broad Lavant valley, Preston Farm is a good example of this cycle. The original range of attractive flint and brick farm buildings had long been outgrown and they had become general storage areas for various estate activities whilst time and the elements slowly ate away at their fabric. The decision was made to better utilise this attractive and valuable resource and the process of conversion from dereliction to a new life as a reception and conference centre is now nearly complete. As always the landscaping of a site is just about the last item to be completed and two of our garden team, Tim and Brian, are taking full advantage of this glorious spell of dry, sunny weather to distribute a huge pile of soil, stripped off of the site at the commencement of work, to various turf and planting areas. In wet weather this would have been a nightmarish scenario but under present conditions it is a relative dream. "Make hay (or landscaping) while the sunshine", as the previous occupants of the farm would no doubt have said.

Cane and table

Now the sap is definitely on the move n and the race is on to try and stay on top of the swelling wave of activity. The first step towards a smooth spring transit is to finish off all of those winter jobs that are still incomplete. Amongst these is Sarah's big cane clean up! Part of our ethos is attention to detail throughout the organisation and one of the reasons that the glasshouses and walled garden look as good as they do is because Sarah and her team spend a lot of energy in ensuring strict hygiene = sanitary conditions = happy, healthy plants, and the cane clean up is part of that endeavour. First the canes are sorted into size, broken ones cut down or rejected, washed and then soaked in an old cattle trough in a solution of Jet 5, a horticultural disinfectant, for 10 minutes. They are then dried in a polytunnel for a couple of days, bundled by size and put back into storage ready to be unscabbarded on demand. The photo shows a team of our excellent volunteers in the middle of the process whilst enjoying the winter sun. In the background two other volunteers are staining the garden furniture that was steam cleaned a few weeks ago (see earlier entry) before it is taken back out into the garden where, due to unseasonably sunny and warm weather, we have an adoring public baying for seating!

Green grow the mistletoe (hopefully!)

Mistletoe, Viscum album, is the bearer of some of the last of northern Europe's surviving remnants of plant magic. Everyone knows the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe even if they wouldn't have a hope in hell of recognising it in a tree instead of festooning the hallway door frame! However, its past contains a much more potent and darker strand and until fairly recently its use in church decoration was distinctly frowned upon, whilst its present is one of increasing scientific recognition of the empirical evidence confirming its place in the folk pharmacopoeia. Amongst other uses it has long been known that the plant produces a substance which has a relaxing effect on the nervous system, hence its use in controlling the involuntary muscle contractions characteristic of chorea, otherwise known as St Vitus' dance. Rave attendees take note!

A plant without roots or obvious food sources and that grew way above the life supporting earth, it no doubt seemed the supreme example of spontaneous generation and continuing life. However we now know it to be a semi-parasite, making some of its own nutrition, but taking minerals from its host plant, perhaps a modern confirmation of its magical ambivalence. Seeing an orb of mistletoe glowing in the low winter sun whilst all around, nature is bare and seemingly dead, it is easy to imagine how the plants unearthly vitality at the solstitial nadir of the year made it one of the most revered plants of the early herbalists and how it still casts a spell on even the most desiccated and deracinated modern mind.

Its stronghold in the UK is in the area surrounding the Severn estuary where the valleys are wet, warm and sheltered and where there is a long tradition of fruit growing. Here you can see ancient, majestic Perry pear trees whose distinctively ascendant branch structure makes a perfect candelabra to display its dusting of glowing mistletoe lights. But how does it get there? In the 18th century there was still a good deal of argument about how the plant was generated. Some described it as "an arboreous excrescence bred of a superfluous sap which the tree itself cannot assimilate" and Pliny had claimed that the seed would not germinate without having first been passed through a birds gut. However it was the eccentric antiquarian, William Stukeley, whose advocacy of "inoculating" trees with mistletoe proved the empirical point and soon gardeners were successfully propagating mistletoe by "incising" the seeds under the bark of host trees such as poplars and apples.

And that is exactly what the photo shows me doing! Using berries collected by a friend, Olwyn Bowey, from an orchard in the Weald, I have inoculated one tree in each of the quadrants in the fruit garden. Six berries have been slid into a slit in the various branches bark and a dozen berries have simply been extruded from their incredibly viscous berry and "stuck" into a convenient crotch or orifice, in exactly the same way the eponymous "mistle" thrush would do when trying to release an annoyingly sticky berry from its beak. The hope is that eventually our trees will sprout a forest of mistletoe to lighten our winter darkness with a frenzy of seasonal affection beneath their spreading embrace!

Finally on a slightly different note it is gratifying to see the burgeoning population of lichens that now encrusts the apple boughs. Historically we used to spray the trees with a tar oil winter wash which was an effective destroyer of over-wintering pests but also had the unwanted (or wanted, depending on your attitude to such excrescences) side effect of also killing any potential lichens. Since stopping these applications we are moving more towards a Tolkienesque enchanted forest look that is also a heartening indicator of good air quality as lichens are highly sensitive to air pollution. Health, character and atmosphere what more could an orchardist want!