Rewilding is not gardening; gardening is not rewilding. Nor are they the two sides of the same coin.
Yet … they have one thing in common. Plants. Yes, wild flowers – our familiar, blue-blooded, botanical treasure, rooted in remote valleys and uplands, motorway embankments and less manicured churchyards (more of these, please), in shade or part sun, in damp soil or dry.
Two supreme examples top a long list: primroses and bluebells. I grew both in a north-facing London window box more than 50 years ago. One primrose plant, three bluebell bulbs – an umbilical tie to the family garden I had recently vacated.
I’ve grown them ever since, in great swathes, for 40 years; less prolifically (but equally devotedly) now in a town garden.
To the late Geoffrey Grigson, the primrose (Primula vulgaris) was the favourite of favourites: ‘The symbol of spring … wild and in the garden; the flower of banks and hedges and sheltered cliffs, where it blossoms down to the edge of the sea.’
Its name, says poet Grigson in his The Englishman’s Flora (1955), comes from the medieval prima rosa, the first flowering plant of the year (which it isn’t, but no matter). Its popularity can be measured by its umpteen common/ regional/ vernacular names: butter rose, golden stars, Lent rose, early rose, Easter rose…
It blooms almost throughout the year ‘in sheltered Cornish hedgebanks and Sussex copses’, said England’s foremost nature writer, Richard Mabey. He added that the primrose’s ‘pure yellow flowers and tufted habit – arranged naturally into the form of a posy – have made it a universal token of spring’.
In his Flora Britannica (1996), Mabey quotes a Gloucestershire woman telling him that ‘A 90-year-old friend … remembers her mother’s spring wedding, when wild primroses and cowslips were strewn all along the church path for the bride to walk on.’
To prosper, they ask for no more than moist soil and some shade. They’re evergreen perennials (recurring annually), which, left to their own devices, will seed around modestly.
The primrose is unmistakable. But when it comes to bluebells, ambiguity steps in. Here we insist on ‘English’ bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta), not the paler, stouter Spanish bluebell (H hispanica) – a regrettable intruder.
‘Our’ bluebell’s Atlantic and Oceanic distribution pins it to Europe’s western fringe, denying it (according to Grigson) any history or ‘warrant from Greece or Rome’. It inhabits all of the UK, from Cumbria to Cornwall, from Conwy to Carmarthen, throughout Ireland and Scotland.
But cross the border from England, and to the Scots the bluebell becomes a different plant altogether. There, the name refers to the harebell, the beautiful, delicate Campanula rotundifolia, one of the ‘most catholic [wild flowers] in its choice of habitats’ (Mabey), flowering in late summer and into autumn.
True bluebells flourish in open woodland and in gardens tucked into shrubberies and beneath deciduous hedges. Green shoots rise from gobstopper-size bulbs early in the new year and hold their spectacular flowering until late April or May. The few in my London window box quickly and pleasingly multiplied, allowing me to pot up a few for chums with more generous spaces.
Writing recently about bluebells, botanist John Akeroyd called them a ‘national treasure … one of the great spectacles of Nature’. Who’d disagree?
Don’t dig up wild plants for your own garden. Instead, buy seeds, bulbs or young plants from trusted suppliers. Thankfully, they’re not the only wildlings to find sanctuary in cultivation. Think, too, violets, pasque flowers (pulsatillas), species roses and hundreds more.
We gardeners are thoroughly blessed.
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
