Val Bourne on ways of coping with December’s low sun
Gardeners aren’t bothered about how many shopping days there are to Christmas: they’re just counting down to the shortest day which falls on Sunday, December 21, this year.
That’s the day when the North Pole is tilted furthest away from the sun, at an angle of 23.5 degrees apparently. The official time for Oxford is 11.03pm GMT and I can hardly wait, for after that day we begin to get longer days once again.
I am reminded of a lady gardener down at Porlock Weir who has a garden that’s virtually sunless in winter due to being in a north-facing valley. Greencombe, an organically run garden, has been run by Joan Loraine since 1966. The 3.5-acre strip was already full of rare and beautiful plants when she arrived, planted by Horace Stroud in 1946, and she has added treasure after treasure year upon year. It boasts four National Collections — erythronium (small mountain lilies), polystichum (the thumbs-up fern), vaccinium (wortleberries) and gaultheria (berries for Bears), and if you are down in Devon this is a magical place to visit — (www.greencombe.wordpress.com/01643 862363).
As the days lengthen and the sun gets higher Joan Loraine waits for the sun to slant in over the hill once again. She celebrates its return with a glass of sherry poured from a bottle placed on the doorstep. She used to keep the bottle indoors, but by the time she got back outside again the sun had retreated, the first interlude lasting only a couple of minutes at best. Hence the doorstop tipple. I must try it!
I have been reduced to window gardening due to the shorter days, because I write from 8.30am until 4pm and then stop. I know that by mid-January I will have an opportunity to garden after work once again but for now I’m limited to looking at a vase of faded hydrangea heads and the ostrich-like plumes of Stipa barbata, tangled together in a small vase. These remnants cheer me up no end, but it’s not real gardening.
Gardening vicariously takes many forms and The Botanic Garden’s Winter Lecture series, put together by Rebecca Mather, Maura Allen and Harriet Bretherton, could also keep my spirits up. It begins on January 29 with landscape architect Kim Wilkie. He will talk about every site having its own personality and identity shaped by the land and the people who have been there. He will look particularly at water and food, covering the Natural History Museum and the V&A gardens in London, the Oxford Botanic Garden master plan and the broader treatment of water in wet meadows around Winchester and at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania.
John Grimshaw, director of the Yorkshire Arboretum at Castle Howard, delivers the second lecture Seeing Both the the Wood and the Trees on Thursday, February 12. His theme is putting the right tree in the right place, bearing in mind tree diseases and the uncertainties of climate change.
On February 26, Kathy Willis, Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, looks at the long-term effects of ecosystems on environmental change. Just recently Kathy, an Oxford resident, could be heard on Radio 4 presenting Rags to Riches, so this will be far more accessible than it sounds. The fourth lecture, on Thursday, March 12, by Kathy Raggett, a Reader in Gardens and Designed Landscapes at Writtle College in Essex, features Japanese gardens and their history.
She collaborates with the Japanese Garden Society (UK) to research, record and promote the value of historic Japanese-style gardens in the British Isles and she has travelled to Japan and China to study garden there.
Finally, on Thursday, March 26, is Ursula Buchan’s Did We Really Dig for Victory? It’s all about gardening in the Second World War which she covered in her latest book, A Green and Pleasant Land: How England’s Gardeners Fought the Second World War. This was very well received and many will know her work.
How to book:
All lectures begin at 8pm, followed by a free glass of wine and a chance to meet the speaker.
They are held at the Said Business School (adjacent to the railway station) and each lecture costs £12, or you can buy the series for £54.
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