2024’s horticultural highlights
Music videos, mycorrhiza and a whole load of molluscs – Gareth Richards reflects on the highs, lows, trends and talking points from a year in our gardens
The perfect time then for the RHS Wild About Gardens theme to launch, appropriately titled Making friends with molluscs. All these months later, I’m still not sure if it was a stroke of genius or an unfortunate coincidence. Predictably, newspaper writers had a field day with headlines shouting about how “Hug a slug wars prove to be the biggest pest for gardeners.” Meanwhile, a revealing horticultural division emerged as the old guard of gardeners went on the anti-mollusc offensive, while scientists and nature lovers pointed out how important these herbivorous horrors are for the rest of the food chain, from beetles and toads to song thrushes and hedgehogs.
Several of the less vigorous cultivars, such as Dahlia ‘Josie’, simply disappeared without a trace, but ‘David Howard’ grew into a monstrously lush flowering bush 1.5m high and 1m across. Lesson learned – next year I’ll grow the smaller dahlias in pots, where they’ll be much easier to protect from slugs and to cosset. Thinking back to when I planted them, those with the smaller, finger-like tubers also grew into the smaller, less vigorous plants. Simple. Still, fingers crossed next year’s spirit animal doesn’t have the same appetite for leafy greens.
But why? And more to the point, why now? I have a theory. This year marks the 21st anniversary of an article in The Guardian that changed the way we think about the value of human-altered sites. In it, Natural England officer Dr Chris Gibson described an abandoned oil refinery at Canvey Wick in the Thames Estuary as a “brownfield rainforest”. This industrial wasteland was discovered to be astonishingly biodiverse – per square metre, richer in rare
While wildness holds sway in some quarters (take RHS Shows for example – teasels stood proud in many gardens at RHS Flower Show Tatton Park, and
So why is one half of the gardening world looking to rewild itself while the other revels in the gaudy vibrancy and sheer flower power of artificial creations? Perhaps it’s a question of space and place. As the human race becomes ever more urban-based (in the UK a whopping 84 per cent of us now live in towns and cities), for most of us, gardens are becoming smaller and the lines between inside and outside are blurring. The April 2024 issue of The Garden, which won the British Society of Magazine Editors Cover of the Month, featured former RHS Garden Wisley Curator Matthew Pottage’s glorious inside-out garden, where houseplants blend seamlessly with those grown outdoors. The first RHS Urban Show, in the same month, was a resounding success, reaching new audiences in urban Manchester.
Cyber plants aren’t all villains though. In one unexpected news story this year, a Brazilian botanist called Glaucia Silva successfully used Taylor Swift music videos to encourage 14–16-year-old biology students to engage with plants, helping them to overcome their plant awareness disparity, otherwise known as plant blindness. Who knew that a computer-generated image of a moss-covered piano, overflowing with water in a lush forest, in Swift’s video for her song Cardigan, could be key to seeding comprehension of bryophytes and pteridophytes in young minds?
To ease this over-subscription, many local councils are splitting up the plots into smaller, more manageable spaces, which strikes me as sensible given how daunting tending a full-size allotment can be, especially if you’re balancing your home-growing efforts with a full-time job. When I took on my current allotment, some 11
years ago now, only 10 per cent of my fellow plot-holders were working. Today, it’s more like 60 per cent. In this context, splitting has to be a good thing.
I had first-hand experience of this when, in late spring, a vibrant rainbow of tulips erupted in a container planting scheme that should have been white-themed. And I shook my trowel with rage when, in September, my much-anticipated white nerine
As the year draws to a close, I’m taking encouragement from the fact that more and more people are standing up for the misunderstood and unappreciated, for the slugs, the bugs, bacteria and fungi that underpin the natural processes that, ultimately, keep us all alive. I hope that, as this eco-consciousness becomes ever more mainstream, it will bring new and old generations of gardeners with it too, for a healthy, happy and holistic year of horticulture ahead in 2025.