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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

Sometimes, years seem to find themselves a mascot. Take 1976: the year of the ladybird, as millions of the brick-red beetles swarmed British beaches, inspiring mass hysteria and its own beetle-mania. More recently, 2022 was the year of the beaver, as these long-lost rodents staged a comeback out in the countryside, while a garden mimicking a West Country beaver dam was named Best in Show at RHS Chelsea Flower Show. What, then, was 2024’s totemic animal? Unfortunately, undeniably... it was the slug.

A good year for gardening?

An especially wet first six months of the year caused a 300 per cent rise in slug-related enquiries to the RHS Gardening Advice service
Oh yes. Guzzling gastropods slithered firmly into the spotlight after the mild, wet winter and our warmest (and also possibly dullest) May on record. Many areas of the UK received a third more spring rainfall than the long-term average, turning gardens into mollusc nirvanas. Slug-related enquiries to the RHS Gardening Advice service went through the roof with a 300 per cent increase in the first six months of the year compared to 2023.

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.

Guzzling gastropods slithered firmly into the spotlight after the mild, wet winter and our warmest May on record

Gareth Richards, Associate Editor for The Garden
As my dahlias and veg seedlings were repeatedly mown down, I in turn was tempted to reach for the slug pellets and found myself pushed almost into breaking what I consider to be one of the cardinal rules of eco-friendly, modern gardening: let your allies come to you. In other words, be patient and accept that things won’t always be perfect. Eventually, the warmth, wetness and lengthening days meant that the vegetable outran the animal and I’ve had one of my best dahlia years ever, though it was a salutary lesson in another of those cardinal rules of gardening: right plant, right place.

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.

Make gardens great again

As in so many other areas of our society, culture and politics, gardening too has become heavily polarised. In one camp there’s an ever-deepening appreciation for nature and an obsession with the processes that underpin its functioning; and in the other, there’s a strong desire for artifice, for colour and for very human-oriented outdoor spaces.

You can demonstrate just how deep the sentiment of the former camp runs with one word: rubble. It really is an uncompromising planting medium, yet it’s cropping up everywhere. In 2023, it even appeared in Tom Massey’s The Royal Entomological Society Garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, and this year designer Amanda Grimes welcomed visitors to the RHS Urban Show in Manchester with her concrete-and-brick-strewn Punk Rockery garden installation.

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 invertebrate life than any nature reserve in the UK. Suddenly, nature wasn’t out there, only found in pristine woodlands or distant dunes – if it could thrive in such a site, it could thrive anywhere we let it. The news sent decades of shockwaves through our environmental consciousness, ending all these years later in a ripple of rubble on the showgrounds of both the Royal Hospital and Depot Mayfield, not to mention on the hallowed former croquet lawn at rewilding hot-spot Knepp Castle Estate in West Sussex.
Did you know?

21 years since the term “brownfield rainforest” was coined, yet in 2024 rubble finally entered the mainstream as a substrate

Another surprising manifestation of this biophilia – this profound adoration and engagement with nature – found fertile ground at The Beth Chatto Symposium this year. An annual meeting of minds of the horticulture world’s thought-leaders and boundary-pushers, its title theme Beneath the surface focused on the largely invisible interactions between plants and life in the soil. If this sounds jaw-achingly dull to you, I can assure you it wasn’t. We heard that perennial ryegrass can have a probiotic effect on soils; how plants put around 40 per cent of what they make from photosynthesis into the soil for microorganisms to feed on; and that fungi were around for a billion years before plants. Who knew! Speakers included Merlin Sheldrake, author of bestselling ode to all things fungal Entangled Life; scientist and teacher Eddie Bailey, founder of RhizoPhyllia; and Dr Ellen Fry from the University of Manchester.

I can’t imagine this event happening even just five years ago, such is the groundswell of interest in the earth beneath our feet. Fungi are big news. A tarragon oyster mushroom made the shortlist for RHS Chelsea Plant of the Year and you can now explore fungus trails at RHS Garden Wisley. As Merlin put it: “We’re walking on the surface of an ocean of land,” and only just getting to know it.

Nature versus nurture

Cyclamen ‘Illusia’ won the HTA New Plant Awards 2024, totemic of the trend for boldness over subtlety
As lights flicker on for our awareness of fungi and soil fauna, they’re blinking out steadily for peat use. Regardless of when the government actually brings in the long-awaited ban on its use in horticulture, research shows that even in plug plants (long a sticking point for peat-free production) 90 per cent of growers will be peat-free within the next five years. I suspect fungi will help us out with peat-free composts, too. Although Merlin Sheldrake memorably likened the use of off-the-shelf mycorrhizal products to going into a garden centre and buying a packet labelled simply ‘seeds’, I wonder if in future we might find mycorrhizal mixes as the missing ingredient for success in peat-free growing. After all, I was reminded recently that peat-free composts are far more alive than their bog-robbing predecessors and that gardeners shouldn’t worry about any small mushrooms appearing from it. It seems slightly ironic that fungi are already adapting to our new potting habits at least as quickly as plants are.

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 native Digitalis purpurea featured in more than half the big gardens at RHS Chelsea), head to the garden centre and plant trade shows and it’s a different story. You needed only to have looked to the awards stands, where new plants were more multicoloured, frilled, variegated and artificial-looking than ever before. Some of the names sound more like racehorses at the Grand National than plants (Zinnia elegans ‘Zinderella Peach’, anyone? What about Gazania rigens ‘Zany Sunny-Side Up’?). Perhaps the best example of this is Cyclamen ‘Illusia’, winner of the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) New Plant Awards.

New plants were more multicoloured, frilled, variegated and artificial - looking than ever before

Gone are the traditional upswept, gently curved petals – this one has flowers that look more like a primula (interestingly they’re in the same family, Primulaceae) with flattened blooms of lurid baby-pink and raspberry-stained centres. The breeder claims that while developing it: “We focused on preserving the special characteristics offered by nature,” but I think it looks about as natural as a neon bouncy castle. It flowers abundantly, and the blooms look unapologetically man-made. A plant for our times, perhaps.

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.

My theory is that, as the houseplant boom matures and shows no signs of abating, a whole generation of new gardeners are finding themselves with outside space for the first time. Only, these plant-loving Gen Z-ers didn’t start off as toddlers sowing radish seed from Woolworths in the veg patch with their granny like I did; they got going in their twenties with trendy alocasias and fiddle-leaf figs. It’s a bolder aesthetic, which works well in small spaces, in towns and cities, and perhaps it explains why, for many gardeners today, looking natural probably isn’t a concept that’s particularly appealing.

Swindlers and Swifties

Taylor Swift’s Cardigan music video, featuring a moss-covered piano, is now used to teach botany to teenagers
Artificial intelligence is making inroads into gardening, helped no doubt by the trendiness of many real but slightly artificial-looking plants. Look online and you might see an advert offering you the chance to buy seeds of a ‘Cat’s eye dazzle’ plant – an AI-generated piece of fakery that received tens of thousands of likes and shares across social media. Other hoaxes include an incredible swirly blue and white dahlia. But gardeners beware: if 2024 taught us anything about new cultivars, it’s if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

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?

The plot thickens

Back on solid ground, the picture for our nation’s allotments is a lot less rosy. If you can get anywhere near one, that is. Statistics show that there’s been a three-fold increase since 2019 in the number of local authorities with more than 1,000 people on the waiting list for an allotment, although numbers do appear to be stabilising. This year more than ever before, we’ve seen that there’s a real hunger out there for people wanting to grow their own fruit and veg, yet there’s arguably never been a greater gulf between supply and demand of plots.

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.

This year, there was a hunger out there for people wanting to grow their own fruit and veg

Well, mostly... Dare I mention the B-word? While Brexit has undoubtedly given us the opportunity to increase our biosecurity, problems with inspections at the new Border Control Points have made plants more expensive and difficult to import. We’ll have to grin and bear it as the new regime becomes established. But it’s worth remembering what that biosecurity really means – if we’d had better checks in the past, there would be no box moth, no lily beetle and no glasshouse whitefly in Britain. Imagine! In the meantime, pressure on prices remains high, and it seems that reliability has taken a bit of a hit, especially for bulbs, with many gardeners complaining of poor quality or mislabeled imported bulbs.

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 bulbs bloomed in deepest pink. However, every cloud has a silver lining, as they say, and in this case our current import woes do present the opportunity for UK growers to fill the gaps, provided they get the government support they need to compete commercially against producers overseas.

People power

If UK gardeners adopted butterfly-friendly gardening practices, there could be a 93 per cent boost to the recovery of catastrophically declining butterfly numbers
It’s a time to reflect and to celebrate, to take the hints that 2024 has given us on how to deal with the challenges that 2025 will surely bring. If there’s one message I’m taking from 2024, it’s that it’s up to us to meet them.

If there’s one message I’m taking from 2024, it’s that it’s up to us

The statistics around the state of our wildlife have been sobering, to put it mildly. The Big Butterfly Count by Butterfly Conservation, for example, reported the lowest numbers of butterflies on record, yet in the same year they released research showing how, by making some simple changes to our gardening practices, we can boost their numbers by 93 per cent. Our nation’s wildlife is in peril, but gardeners are rising to the challenge – coming together, sharing knowledge in increasingly inventive ways, both in person and online, in apps, newsletters, podcasts... the list goes on. Climate change may be rewriting the rulebook, but we gardeners are responding, and writing new guides, based on more local knowledge – a new communality that will serve to build resilience in our rapidly changing world.

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.

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