Kew Gardens

The blizzard of last week seemed like a dream only a few hours after it had startled us. Besides the really dreadful damage done to trees, it battered and bruised such herbaceous plants as were high enough to offer any resistance - flag irises, in particular, were snapped off to an extraordinary extent, and the leaves of tulips were torn and wilted. The dividing of plants goes on, and the ground feels quite warm by ten o’clock, so a new start will be quickly made. Great clumps of red-hot pokers have come up and have made many young plants. The thick, juicy crowns are astonishingly brittle, and one, as thick as my wrist, snapped clean off with a very gentle pull. The Gypsophila is another plant whose crown comes off with very slight violence, and as its root is long and tough it is a troublesome plant to move.

One of the most far-travelling of herbaceous plants is the Bocconia, or “plume poppy” (a very silly name, by the way!). Every year one has to rout it out from corners many feet away from its allotted plot. No one seeing it now, and unacquainted with its ways, could guess what a marvellous growth it makes in five months. I amused myself last year by dosing it with nitrate of soda, with the result that by August it had made a tropical growth of 15ft. The glorious glaucous leaves were as large as a good-sized rhubarb leaf, and the feathery, creamy spikes were from 18in. to 2ft. long. What are visible now are grey-green curled leaves close to the ground, covered with down, the size of a hepatica leaf.