Monthly Report

SNITTERFIELD GARDEN CLUB MARCH 2024 MEETING (also February below)

 

For our March meeting our speaker was Paul Williams.  Paul has been a writer, broadcaster, lecturer and gardener.  He has spent a lifetime in horticulture  and his specialities include container gardening, garden design and plantsmanship, as well as garden science and natural history which can't help but go hand in hand with gardening. 

 

His subject for the evening was “Digging Deeper” – a bit of soft science looking at what goes on inside plants, how they protect themselves from pests and diseases,   how soils behave, why plants are variegated and a lot of other ‘stuff’. Not as heavy as it might sound. His talk was punctured with humour and full of unusual facts.

 

He started by looking at the pests that plants have to contend with, slugs and snails being a top problem, but also aphids and fungal infections.  Slugs can live for up to 6 years, lay 20 to 100 eggs several times a year. Potentially one slug could produce 90,000 grandchildren! Luckily they have many predators.  

 

There are many ways that plants can defend themselves against pests and problems from producing their own cyanide or mustard flavours, having various toxins in leaves or just the tips and by releasing chemical signals into the atmosphere to put off predators.  Humans can also control these problems by using chemicals (unfortunately NOT eco friendly) or biological controls such as nematodes.

 

Another area Paul talked about was plant roots.  Amazingly some plants grow roots at tremendous rates – rye can put on 5 kilometers in one day! This includes all the tiny hair roots. Tree roots are often thought to be deeper than they are, trees have a dep tap root, however most of their roots will be in the top 60cm of soil but extending out to at least the same distance as the height of the tree.

 

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The tallest trees can grow to 120 to 150 metres tall, and from the roots the moisture has to be raised all this way. It takes trees the equivalent of 13 atmospheres of pressure to raise the water to the topmost branches and leaves (for comparison the average tyre pressure is 2 atmospheres). Then much of this moisture leaves the tree as transpiration, a mature maple can lose 200 litres an hour - billions of tonnes a year.

 

Another area Paul covered was why some plants are variegated.  There are a number of causes. One cause is by a genetic mutation, creating a plant that has two different chromosomal makeups within it; one that can produce chlorophyll and one that cannot, causing white or yellow shapes and splotches to mix with the green on the leaves and even stems. Another possible cause is virus infections producing patterning on the leaf surface.

 

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Even those Garden Club members who do not think they are  “into” science found this an interesting and informative evening.

 

Our next meeting is on Tuesday 5th March 7:30pm in Snitterfield Village Hall when Dan Winter will be speaking about “The Magnolias of Evenly Wood”.  Old friends and guests plus new members are always welcome. The full list of speakers and garden visits for 2023 -2024 is posted on our web site: www.snitterfieldgardenclub.org

 

Jean Harris

Chairman

 

SNITTERFIELD GARDEN CLUB FEBRUARY 2024 MEETING

 

On a very wet and windy February evening over 50 members met to hear our speaker Samantha  Hopes.

 

Samantha initially trained and worked as a Geologist working on research projects at The University of Birmingham. Her passion was Geological mapping, which soon found her distracted by the plants growing on and around the rocks, more than the rocks themselves!  Her topic for the evening was “Plants with a Story”, she shared 25 of the most interesting she has come across so far. 

 

Her talk started with HISTORY – we looked at some of the oldest surviving species we see today. Plants like Mares Tail which has been around for 400 million years, Ginko Biloba – around for 270 million years, and so tough some specimens even survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb. There is also Wollema nobis – (The Wollemi Pine) thought to be extinct, but found in a remote gorge in Australia in 1994. The location is such a well kept secret that even Sir David Attenborough has not been allowed to film there! Specimens have been grown by Botanic Gardens of Sydney and shipped from Australia to locations such as Kew Gardens and other botanic institutes around the world.

pastedGraphic.png 4 year old Wollemi pines grown from cuttings.

 

The next topic Samantha covered was PLANT HUNTERS. Early records show that the Romans first introduced many of our “common” garden plants – such as apple trees, roses, walnut trees and parsley. Other plant hunters included Reginald John Farrer (1880 to 1920) who travelled widely, in Europe and parts of Asia including China in search of plants, many of which he brought back to England and planted near his home village of Clapham, North Yorkshire.  Farrer was known as an eccentric and in one famous incident, loaded a shotgun with seeds collected on his foreign travels, and fired them into an inaccessible rock cliff and gorge near the family home in Yorkshire. However, they did not root.

 

In the times of the Victorian and Edwardian plant hunters there were no rules about what you could take and transport so thousands of bulbs could be dug up from their native locations. But, without these intrepid explorers we would not have so many of the plants we enjoy today.  

 

The next topic Samantha covered was RECORD BREAKERS – this included the tallest (Sequoia sempervivens – Giant Redwood), largest area covered (Posidonia australis – ribbon weed) one plant of which covers 77 square miles off the Australian coast and the largest blossoming plant (Wisteria sinensis) where one plant in California covers 4,000 square meters. 

 

Samatha’s talk continued with strange ways plants are POLLINATED or SEED then on to MOST EXPENSIVE plants including Tulipa semper augustus sold for 13,000 florins in the 1630s when the average wage was 150 florins a year! She then described a number of plants with interesting names then dangerous and deadly plants and finished with plants with GREAT ADAPTATIONS to survive.

pastedGraphic_1.png Prunus incisi Kojo-no-mai - a pretty flowering cherry whose Japanese name translates as”Flight of the butterfly”.

 

This was a fascinating talk and it will make me look differently at many of the plants in my garden – not as “ordinary” as I thought.

 

Our next meeting is on Tuesday 5th March in Snitterfield Village Hall when Paul Williams will be speaking about “Digging Deeper” – and this is NOT about digging holes in your garden!  Old friends and guests plus new members are welcome. The full list of speakers and garden visits for 2023 -2024 is posted on our web site: www.snitterfieldgardenclub.org

 

Jean Harris

Chairman