Martin Newcombe: The origin of garden plants

The previously scheduled speaker had to pull out through ill health, and Martin stepped into the breach with just a few days’ notice, for which he was warmly thanked. Martin is an ecologist with a long career behind him, and continuing: he is currently engaged in a biodiversity survey at Sissinghurst. He lives in a house that was once occupied by Noel Coward’s gardener! 

For his talk to us, he presented an easily overlooked aspect of gardening: how did those familiar plants come to be in our gardens in the first place? Some have been developed from native species, some originate from far away; all are intriguing. His jumping-off point was honeysuckle. It was first known from Palestine about a thousand years ago, and now there are about 120 species of honeysuckle worldwide, ranging from large climbers that will overwhelm your house given the chance, to shrubs, including a variety that is widespread in Britain as a topiary or hedge plant but goes largely unrecognised: Wilson’s honeysuckle. We were urged to look it up to see if we have it without knowing we do. (I did: it looks like box, but produces small cream flowers and tiny purple berries which are toxic, neither of which box does. So that’s how you tell the difference.)

From there, Martin proceeded to list familiar and less familiar garden plants and the stories behind them. Some had been bred for their aesthetics, some for their food value, and some for medicinal purposes. Guelder rose, a.k.a. dogberry, is an example of all three: it produces a circular spray of flowers and bright red berries, and has been used as a cure for baldness and urinary incontinence. Raspberries are native to Britain, and elsewhere, and have been selectively bred for their food value. Foxgloves were originally cultivated as a medicinal plant: a country doctor in Staffordshire was treating a boy with heart disease. The leaves and seeds cause the pulse to accelerate (sometimes fatally) and the pupils to dilate, and the boy was apparently helped by this. In renaissance Italy it was even used as a sinister kind of trademark, planted outside the homes of hitmen. 

In Victorian times there were as many as 200 British plant collectors roaming the world, and the result was an influx of plants too numerous to list. A couple of examples will convey the sheer range of them and their uses. Vinca (periwinkle) is not just an attractive ground-coverer; it was used for medicinal purposes for centuries, e.g. to remove warts. It still is. A Mexican variety, similar to the one we know here, produces a latex which has been used not just for warts but as a treatment for cancer. Forget-me-not has its associated myths in many cultures. Many medicinal uses stemmed from the pre-scientific ‘doctrine of signatures’, whereby if a plant was thought to resemble a part of the body, it was used to treat disorders in that part. Aconites, for instance, were once used to treat mental illness: the flower head was thought to resemble a human head, and the leaves appear ‘depressed’. Hellebores were also used for this purpose. 

Onions have been eaten at least since the Romans, who also used them to cover household smells. They can be used to treat sore throats, even today: eat them raw, or simply place a small piece in your mouth. But don’t breathe on anyone. In fact, the Mediterranean region beyond Rome has been the source of a lot of strongly flavoured or scented plants, such as herbs: the dry, hot climate leads to a concentration of their essential oils, sometimes to make them unpalatable to animals. But, unfortunately for them, they are appealing to humans, for cooking and medicine, and have been bred to be more so. Lots of plant lore to do with this region came to us with the returning crusaders in medieval times. 

There was much more in this vein; Magnolias, for instance, have been traced in the fossil record back to the time of the dinosaurs. In fact, there is a whole encyclopaedia to be written on this topic, far more than can be contained in one talk. Martin left us with a strong flavour of this aspect of our gardens, which will lead us never to look at them in the same way again. But before he left, his wife, Gill, agreed to judge the displays in the small, informal daffodil show that the Society mounted. The results were: first, Liz Rath; second equal, Janet Giles and Gary Bradbury; fourth, Sue Marston. 

Ken Manktelow