Exotic plants

Narrator:

The gardeners at Myddelton continue to follow in Bowles’s footsteps. The beds on the south side of the Irishman’s Shirt are used to experiment with the types of plants that can be grown here.

Let’s hear from Bryan Hewitt:

Bryan Hewitt:

Well, Bowles was very keen to see what he could get away with growing; what would come through the winter in the garden… A lot of tender stuff would be put in there and I think he was a bit like his friend Professor Balfour of the Edinburgh Botanical Garden, who … said that “I never believe that a plant is not hardy until I’ve killed it”. So I suspect he got through a lot of plants through testing them. …

We’ve got some bananas in there at the moment. … And we’ve got another plant called Albizia julibrissins  which is in the leguminous family which has lovely pincushion-like flowers. He also grew a banksias rose, which is slightly tender, on the Irishman’s Shirt. He wrote in his book My Garden in Summer … in 1914 that he had hoped that one day it would eventually encircle the ball on the top of the column in the corner ...

…I think Mr Bowles liked people to think they’d come to another country when they came to this garden, with the wonderful exotic things; in his day… it was a very, very famous garden. And some of these plants, which are common now, had not been seen before.

I would like to recreate, somehow, the magic that he had here by growing challenging plants and constantly pushing the boundaries.