Ernest Wilson and the Regal Lily

The first lilium regales are out in my garden! They haven't got their stamens unstuck yet, though.



When I look at them I always think how their ancestors came from the Min River Valley, a place I visited in the year 2000 when with my husband and my two daughters (aged 19 and 22), we travelled in South West China. Much to the surprise of some of the people we met in various backpacker hostels 'I've never seen a family travelling together.' We saw some wonderful and amazing things and endured some hideous discomforts, too.
Towards the end of the time, we went on a Chinese tour from Chengdu in Szechuan to Jiuzhaigou, one of the most beautiful places in the world. The route took us up this steep-sided valley into Tibetan Szechuan, and up to Songpan, nowadays a pony-trekking centre as well as the most important town in the area - the thing I remember best at Songpan was, though, the wonderful meat and vegetable pasties we bought from local women in the market-place, and on the return trip, when our guide, whose job it was to make us visit as many tourist-trap retail outlets as possible, hadn't thought about giving us lunch, we forced her to stop in Songpan.

This was good news for the local women, who had quite a few pasties they hadn't yet managed to shift, and good news for our Chinese fellow-travellers, who were just as ravenous as us, but too well-mannered to impose on the tour guide. I can still remember the expression of frustrated rage on the latter lady's face.

Anyway, the valley in which Songpan is located is very beautiful, and very Tibetan, as the photograph shows. Sometimes uncomfortably so; I remember local labourers shaking their fists at the Chinese tour minibus. But most people were very friendly, and lovely to meet.



I was thrilled to see plants that grow in gardens here growing wild there, like the clematis tangutica sprawling with its yellow Chinese-lantern flowers by the road side, like Traveller's Joy does here.




At Jiuzhaigou I saw (among others) several species of roses, recognisable by their leaves, and was delighted to see a paeony, not in flower, but growing there, wild.

What I didn't realise then was that the Lilium Regale, one of my favourite flowers - I had them in my wedding bouquet - came from a hillside above Songpan. We didn't see any, though.

They were collected by a young man called Ernest Wilson (the same name as my late father-in-law and my brother-in-law, but not from Northern Ireland.) If you ever go to Chipping Campden, there is a memorial garden to him there, planted with many of the many plants he collected. He saw the Lilium Regale on his third trip to China.
'In the Min Valley' he wrote 'the charming Lilium Regale luxuriates in rocky crevices, sun-baked throughout the greater part of the year…' He writes of 'the city of Sungpan, nestling in a narrow smiling valley, surrounded on all sides by fields of golden grain, with the infant Min, a clear, limpid stream, winding its way through in a series of graceful curves. In the fields the harvesters were busy, men, women and children, mostly tribesfok, in quaint costume, all pictures of rude health, laughing and singing at their work.' And he describes the Lilium Regale; 'Not in twos and threes, but in hundreds, in thousands, aye, in tense of thousands.' The lilies grew in among coarse grasses and scrub - meadow-flowers, which is an interesting thought. Maybe I should try naturalising them in my pocket-hankie meadow?




Wilson, of course, reduced the numbers of the lilies rather a lot, by collecting over 6,000 bulbs - and I do wonder how many are left now. Plant-hunting was an Imperialist project - conservation wasn't an issue for the men who did that work. But Wilson paid a price for his coup. He was caught in a landslip and his leg was broken in two places.
He was taken back, in a sedan chair, to Chengdu, and nursed by the Quaker missionaries there. Davidson, who set his leg, wasn't actually a qualified doctor, if I remember rightly - anyway, Wilson felt he did a superb job.
Other plants in my garden that Wilson collected include: clematis armandii, rosa moyesii, viburnum davidii and clematis montana rubens. But not, apparently, clematis tangutica, though he does list them in his A Naturalist in Western China.

On a different note: when I was doing medieval German literature as part of my course at Durham, we were told about the hermits whose knowledge of and consumption of roots showed their wisdom. Of course many rooted vegetables have poisonous relatives. But I - not at all hazardously - collected some baby carrots and our first new potatoes for dinner yesterday. I do love the feel of those pale egg-like tubers in my hand, and a bunch of newly-pulled carrots is a delight to the eye before it becomes a gastronomic delight.




One which is pretty rare to come by nowadays. You can get bunches of carrots in supermarkets and also, of course, in farmer's markets, but they can't match the flavour of something that comes almost straight from the earth to the pot. Oh, the feel of those waxy new potatoes against my tongue, and the scent of new carrots… and the sweetness of spring cabbage, which you only get with fresh-picked..

quaking grass and dog daisies

I have a lot of quaking grass growing in parts of the back garden - the original plant was given me by a friend after I'd tried and failed to grow it from seed. Why this was so, I can't understand, since it has subsequently self-set itself all over the place, and - since I brought a couple of clumps to the front early this spring - it will probably now spread all over the front. I don't mind, I love to see its seedheads quivering in the slightest breath of wind. It was my turn to do the flowers at Quaker Meeting on Sunday, so I brought a bunch of quaking grass, sweet peas, love-in-a-mist heads, and what I call dog daisy, being a northern lass originally, but down here they seem to call it oxe-eye daisy. I think the dog-daisy name is apt, and you can see from the picture that the dog likes sitting among the flowers. They grow in my pocket-handkerchief of meadow, underneath the biggest apple tree, and make a nice contrast to the little apples at present.



The apples got really red early on this spring because of all the warm sunshine in April, and I hope this will mean they have a spectacular colour. I do prefer to grow fruit trees, rather than sterile flowering cherries; you get the wonderful blossom but then afterwards you get the fruit which is beautiful for a long time before you get to eat it.



Back to quaking grass - of course, taking it to Meeting for Worship was a pun, and an apt one, because we got our name - applied as a term of derision - when George Fox told a judge to 'Tremble at the name of the Lord.' The quaking grass does that rather a lot. One new attender got up and ministered about the grass, which she thought was catkins, and she talked about how nervous she felt giving ministry, because she thought she hadn't been coming long enough, and how she felt shaky - just like the grasses. But she spoke about the beauty of the seedheads, very eloquently, and I found myself seeing them in a different way. Afterwards I told her it was quaking grass - which caused amusement among several Quakers, and I am on to supply seedlings in the autumn, when we have our next plant-swap. I only hope none of them will turn out to be couch.. shouldn't do, though, because the leaves - or blades, should it be? are quite broad.

I have been picking red-currants inside the fruit cage, while the dog roams and lurks around outside like the biblical Satan, wishing she could be in there devouring them. Or maybe like the 'hosts of Midian' in the hymn. Gardening is fruitful of many reflections like that. But the red-currants are maybe the most beautiful fruit, like little globes of scarlet glass.

After the Rain

There has to be something about the structure of my garden that both reflects and feeds into the structure of my writing. And the moods of the garden surely affect the way I work. A garden is like a novel, really, you have a plan, but it modifies as you go along and encounter the realities of the plot (unintentional pun, but it works!) I told a friend recently that the garden's like a piece of music, always moving, always changing - but that applies to fiction, too. It has its own rhythm and pace, its moments of splashy excitement, then the quiet sections that build up to new intense action.



The garden also feeds me and my husband in a real, corporeal way. And the slugs feed, too, though so far only one of my lovely Salad Bowl lettuces, with their yellow wavy-edged leaves, has been munched. They're pull and come again lettuces, and keep going for six weeks or so if I keep picking, giving us generous salads several days a week. They have a faint bitterness that intensifies as they get older, but never too much, and make a wonderful salad just on their own, with oil and vinegar dressing.



and today there are redcurrants ripe, two bushes in the fruit cage, one outside. Like strict Islamic women, the one that's gone outside is veiled, though you can see its berries, so maybe not so strictly veiled after all. It's the birds who have to be kept at bay, though, not the male sex. I guess the black netting is rather sexy veiling, actually, like the little hat with a black net veil that my grandmother used to have, and that I used for dressing-up when I was little.



After the rain, most of the flowers are sated with wetness, drugged with it, hanging their heads. But the bearded irises are alert, bright and cheerful, odd for flowers that flourish in dry conditions.



The garden is a thing of viewpoint. I tend to plan it to be seen from the house, but it opens up vistas, as I walk round it, that I never expected, and because the viewpoint is new, it's more attractive to me. I like it that not all of its sights are visible from the house. Going inside the corkscrew willow isn't just a way to get a fine shower-bath, but is another way of seeing the garden.

I think this also has something to do with the novel - writing first drafts I always have to stop myself just pushing the plot forward '- and then this happened, and then that happened -' Bah! but to change authorial position and look at the narrative differently.

My rain-tubs filled up again last night, for which much thanks. Oh, the blissful sound of water gurgling into them, after I'd almost emptied them. I have five rain-tubs, with a combined storage capacity of about 1400 litres, but it's amazing how they empty in dry summers.

I was glad, though, to have the one that drains the shed roof empty, as the water smelt of old cabbage leaves, and when I got down to the bottom it was full of worms. How they got in, I have no idea; all my rain-tubs are covered, and worms don't live on shed roofs, surely? Or in the gutter round the shed? The Germans do call them Regenwürmer, which means 'rain-worms' so maybe the clouds are full of worm-eggs.

I cleaned that one out with liquid soap and now, hopefully, it will smell nice till the next lot of worms come out of the sky.