Make a display of these common garden charmers

Press, 3 December 1982, Page 8

Make a display of these common garden charmers

Ardeners ® DIARY

Derrick Rooney

Sometimes you can achieve a striking effect with the most ordinary, everyday plants. In my garden, for example. one of the most pleasing groups of foliage this week is made up of common herbs — Bowles mint, fennel, angelica, lovage, and tansy; plus a golden-leaved hazel which is not making quite the splash of yellow that it should be making, probably because the unscheduled vigorous growth of the herbs has put it rather too much in the shadows (it is a young plant). There is a fine balance of light and shade, dense and airy textures, and complementary colours in this group. One of the most important contributors to this is the fennel, which I have included in both its green and "bronze" foliage forms. Gardeners shy wary of fennel, because it is a weed

in many parts of the country. But if we excluded all the plants sometimes described as weeds our gardens would, be much the poorer. I believe fennel, as a foliage plant, is greatly underrated. Foehiculum vulgare. as it is known to botanists, is a native of the Mediterranean

region. It is a hardy peren-

i nial herb with yellow flowers i and feathery foliage, finer i but less ornamental in wild plants than in cultivated • ones; it colonises waste • ground vigorously by seed- ; ing, and is naturalised in i many countries, including , New' Zealand. Garden varieties are very handsome. The stems are : cylindrical, and their skin is so smooth it might have been polished. And the plant is not only handsome, but imposing — the leafy shoots grow as high as a man in good years, and the flowers, in large, showy umbels, tower over them’.’ ’ Wild plants usually have green leaves, but the most common form in cultivation is "bronze” (actually, it’s pur-plish-chocolate), and seeds true. It flowers freely, but I often cut my bronze' fennel down before flowering — partly to encourage fresh growth of the pretty, ferny

leaves and partly because if I allowed it to seed it would be all over the garden in no time. In a dry summer this leaves a gap, but in an average-to-wet year new foliage soon grows up. The power of recuperation is one of the things I like about fennel. I have clumps not only in the herb plot but in a border, where the ferny foliage is a nice balancer between heavy-leaved shrubs. I don’t know how long a fennel plant can live, but I imagine about six or seven years is its limit. My oldest plant, now five, is beginning to look geriatric, but it has suffered tons of trauma, having been regularly cut to the ground while flowering — where it is growing I want foliage, not flowers. The clumps in the herb plot, a year or two younger, are in fine fettle. I should remove all the seed-, heads from these, too, but the finches — green, gold, and chaff — which nest in our hedges have so fierce an appetite for the seeds. that we usually leave a few heads standing. Every year I have to dig out a few plants which grow from the seeds ; the birds miss, but that is not a high price to have to pay for having the finches in the garden. Though we grow fennel with culinary herbs, we don’t actually use the leaves and

seeds for anything. Many fish recipes call for fennel, but dill (out of the vegetable garden) is better. The strong aniseed flavour of fennel is not to our liking, and I don’t like fish, anyway. Obviously many people do eat fennel, because it is always on the herb-and-spice shelves of the supermarkets. Mediterranean recipes frequently include fennel in salads and soups, but this is the Florence fennel, a different species, which has large, swollen “bulbs" at the base of its stems. I grew a fine crop of this once, and we ate a few of the bulbs, grated in salads, but most of them ended up in the compost heap. Fennel is like most of the other so-called "connoisseur’s” or “rare” vegetables: the reason they are rare is that they don’t taste as good as the common ones. My wife has just made a decision to grub out the globe artichokes (also Mediterranean) from her vegetable garden. They are named varieties, reputedly good producers, but each plant takes up well over a square metre of growing space. As the edible bit is only the very base of the •flower bud the artichokes are providing less than one mealper square metre. The same amount of ground would grow nine cabbages — 18 meals!

This summer the artichoke buds are almost completely

without flavour. In a good season they can be exquisite, but the good years have been few.

I have noticed this flavour variability before in vegetables of Mediterranean origin. Sprouting broccoli is a habitual offender. My first crop of this, years ago. produced shoots with a wonderfully nutty flavour, while subsequent sowings, from the same packet of seed, had succulent but tasteless shoots.

I grew sprouting broccoli again a few times, but eventually gave it up because two plants in three had no flavour.

I have no explanation for this; nor do any of my scientific friends. The reason may be genetic, or climatic, or may be connected with minor variations in soil nutrients. I don’t care — it is now a matter of academic interest only, because although we can grow splendid cabbages on occasion we have not succeeded with broccoli or any other member of the cauliflower family in our present garden. We remain optimistic, though, and this season are trying a new variety of cauliflower guaranteed, according to the seed merchant, to thrive in hot, dry soils, The picking which will be the proof of this is still months away.

But I digress. Getting back to fennel: an interesting sidelight on this herb is that according to several herbals it has, when dried and powdered, the power to repel

fleas. A sprinkling of powdered fennel around kennels and stables is reputed to keep them free of fleas. I find maldison-based pet powder more effective. Angelica also has its dark side. As is well known, it is used for candying in France (I bought some imported candied angelica once, and it tasted like sugared cardboard); not so well known is its boozy connection.

An alcoholic distillate from angelica seeds is one ol the ingredients of some brands of vermouth, and it is said to have been used to add a muscatel flavour to some indifferent wines. The species used for this purpose is the giant biennial Angelica archangelica (my plant has reached a staggering two metres high and three metres across in the last month, after having been less than 50cm high early in October; heaven knows what it would do in good-soil). The glossy-leaved species, tentatively identified as Angelica pachycarpa and often sold as an ornamental plant, should not be used in culinary experiments.