Every Spring as far back as I can possibly remember I’ve always tried to propogate
young plants and sow seeds,this begins in early January and continues well into May and includes as many types of plants as you can shake a stick at…annuals,biennials,perennials,half hardy annuals,bulbs,corms,tubers,climbers,shrubs,bedding plants,wildflowers,rare plants-you name it I’ve grown it!
I started to get interested in plants due to copious reading of old dog-eared editions of well-known publications such as ‘Culpepper’s Herbal’ and Roy Genders’s ‘The Scented Wild Flowers of Britain’ which gave me hours of inspired romantic visions of an old England in which such antiquated things as ‘tussie mussies’(a kind of mini bouquet)and nosegays were all a part of a long forgotten tradition and indeed a nessecity in our daily guard against illness and disease.
Many of the oldest recorded plants have been used to aid us,wild plants that could be found in the countryside,such as ‘Dame’s Violet’ which you would expect by it’s name has a wonderful violet scent to it,grown many times by moi and which will bloom in my garden this summer from a sowing made last year,it’s beautiful purple or white flowers giving off a provocative perfume come the balmy evenings of July and August,can’t wait to experience it once again,a perpetual favourite in my garden and one that I’ll never tire of. Other favourite wild flowers include the intensly blue cornflower once a common sight,now almost gone from our cornfields…..