It’s too early to start sowing seeds, though it is just the right time for planting trees. Today I have been sowing seeds and a couple of weeks ago I planted some trees. I’ll talk about the trees first.

They arrived on December 11th and I planted them over the next few days. I bought them from Martin Crawford who runs The Agroforestry Research Trust in Devon. I have visited his forest garden twice now. He planted it about twenty years ago and it is a wonderful place. All the plants have a reason to be there, whether to provide food or to fix nitrogen, and provide the right conditions for the plants around them. It is a self-sufficient forest which provides year round food. I plan to plant a forest garden soon, but until I do I am forestifying my allotment. The trees that arrived on 11th December were mostly fairly regular fruit trees – six different apples varieties, a sour cherry, a gage and a pear tree. A cooking pear ordered at the same time is due next week. I also added some more unusual allotment candidates: Elaeanus multiflora Sweet Scarlet, Asphodeline lutea, Matteuccia struthiopteris, Glycyrrhiza uraliensis and Toona sinensis. [I want to say something here about Latin plant names. I really like Latin plant names, I like saying them, writing them, and learning new ones. So where possible I will always use Latin names. I will sometimes offer some further information, but the Latin name is more accurate, and it also contains extra details that can easily be extracted – Glycyrriza from the Urals, Toona from China, for example.]

The elaeagnus does have a common name – Goumi or cherry elaeagnus. The cultivar Sweet Scarlet bears numerous cherry sized fruits in July. It also fixes nitrogen from the air, and will provide a windbreak on the north-west corner of the plot. If it is successful I will propagate more from this plant. The elaeagnus I know from my ornamental gardening days is Elaeagnus pungens maculata, another great Latin name, and a useful plant for flower arrangers, especially in winter. When I worked at Polesden Lacey a favourite job was collecting the foliage for the flower arrangers in the house. This elaeagnus has variegated leaves, but it also has rather elegant backs to the leaves, silvery, with speckles. The flower arrangers always wanted more, but I was under strict instructions from the head gardener to give them less, or preferably, none. It is a very slow growing plant. In those days this is more or less all I knew about the genus. Although I did know the tiny flowers were scented – pungens in the name hints at the possibility – I did not know it was a nitrogen fixer and had edible fruits.

This blog is turning into something else. It set out to be about sowing seeds too early, but it has turned into something about loving plants and plant names. I don’t know who reads this blog so I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing for my readers, but it is a very good thing for me. I love plants as individuals out there in the garden or on the allotment growing. I love all the many virtues they have, both practical, as food and medicine and guardians of the soil, and ornamental, their beauty of flower or form, the colours and shapes of their leaves, their delicate or boisterous scent, each aspect engendering delight. I also love their names and their histories, and the stories they embellish.

I found myself ordering a new translation of The Odyssey to help write about Asphodel, and I realised that this blog needs more time, so I dividing it into parts. Part 2 follows soon.