propagation tales: the strange story of the cavendish banana.

Vegetative propagation. Along with sowing seeds, one of the cornerstones of gardening. When you propagate a plant in this way, you take a cutting or part of the parent plant and grow it on. These plants are genetically identical to their parents, rather than a plant grown from seed, which combines the genes of both it's parents into it's own genetic code.

Remember a few years ago, when a fungus started attacking the worlds banana plantations and we envisioned a future without bananas as we know them? (more info here ...)

This turn of events takes us on a strange journey back in time, back to the year 1834, to an unexpected place, the greenhouse at Chatsworth House.... Derbyshire.

     a modern banana plantation.

Derbyshire is not normally a place you'd associate with banana farming, yet one hundred and eighty years ago it was the place that spread the Cavendish banana, familiar from supermarkets all over the western world, to the far corners of the tropics. This mass monoculture (when a crop of just one kind is grown in huge swathes) is what has caused this impending banana crisis of doom.

Imagine, if you will, a world where to get a banana, a huge sea voyage, lasting months if not years, had to be undertaken. In Britain, bananas were a delicacy so scarce, so difficult to get hold of, only a handful of people had ever tried one.

At the same time, the stately homes of Britain strived to outdo each other with fabulous gardens, flourishing kitchen gardens and elaborate greehouses, growing tropical oddities and luscious fruits of all kinds. Employing teams of gardeners, they filled their greenhouses with exotic plants, hunted from all corners of the empire and beyond. And the head gardener at Chatsworth, Joseph Paxton, had managed to get hold of a banana plant, smuggled back from China. He dutifully propagated it and in 1839 sent a case of baby plants to Samoa with a missionary, John Williams.
The great glasshouse at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, sadly since destroyed.

The poor little banana plants sat in their heavily shuttered wooden wardian case, withstanding lashings of salt spray (very poisonous to most plants) and starved of light, in fact only one of the plants survived the journey.

the last known original wardian case from the 1830s 

 It was planted when John Williams arrived, and did significantly better than him, as he was killed and eaten by the locals. This banana plant thrived and was the grandaddy of the bananas plants that flourish across the south pacific today.
 Cuttings from the Derbyshire plant ended up getting sent across the world, and today every standard supermarket banana is genetically identical to that original plant. That is why disease is such a problem for the Cavendish banana plantations; no genetic variation means no variation in disease resistance so one fungus can take hold and wipe out the whole lot.

Could it be curtains for the banana as we know it? The one that was included in the last meal of the King of Rock n Roll, Elvis Presley?

Who knows, but luckily there's a host of non-cavendish varieties that we could be growing, so bananas will be on the menu for a while yet.

Pop-Up Parklets

A kind of urban intervention, 'parklets' have been popping up in cities around the world, including Sao Paulo, Vancouver, Copenhagen, San Francisco and Dublin. Taking over parking spaces normally reserved for cars, these temporary, pedestrian friendly little patches of garden make a point about the amount of green space disappearing under tarmac.

The weird world of Walt Disney's epcot greenhouses.

Disney World doesn't just do rides with little dolls singing an annoyingly catchy tune and people dressed in slightly sinister animal costumes,  it's also got a greenhouse at it's Epcot park which aims to show people the future of food production. It's clean, white, lab-like environment harbours the monstrous 'Tomato Tree' 

as well as torture devices to force pumpkins to grow into Disney's trademark mouse ears

A little car takes people round this strange soil-free place, a sci-fi glimpse into growing food in the sanitised, Disney way:

It's a crazy robo-veg-patch. How do I build me one at home?

wild formal rockery (if that makes any sense)

some nice contrasts between natural and formal in this space:

Like their take on the rockery, and beehives too.
by Polyform architects.
reblogged from Serafin Outsights

Gardening and conflict

Some fantastic reportage on gardens created in conflict zones by photographer/journalist Lalage Snow here

Ruined palace of peace, Kabul, Afghanistan.

You can read the article she wrote for The Garden magazine here, or see her talk about the project at the Garden Museum in London on the 15th October 2014 (link here)

Another meaningful garden created in a conflict zone is this one:

A garden of tiny, jewel-like flowers sprouting from the waste products of destruction. Started by Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma's mother, after he was killed by a teargas grenade. For the last 8 years, local villagers have protested every Friday about the Israeli settlements taking over their land. The planters are empty teargas grenade cases, thrown at demonstrators by Israeli soldiers.

More info here

These gardens are shows of resilience and creativity under the harshest of conditions.

wabi kusa, kokedama, kusamono, ikebana.

Everyone knows about bonsai (especially if you've watched the karate kid film) but I wanted to look at these other approaches to greenery that originated in Japan.
Firstly: Kusamono. This translates as 'grass thing' and is an arrangement of growing plants replicating a little slice of nature.

When I saw pictures of Rosetta Sarah Elkin's 'Tiny Taxonomies' they reminded me of this. She created little fragments of landscape in the tops of steel tubes, reflecting the local surroundings. Each one is like a little garden. She recreates it in different locations, using plants from the surroundings. For example her London version used plants and materials from Highgate Cemetery. 

Next is Kokedama or string gardens:

Wabi kusa is a more random arrangement, where plants are wrapped onto balls of earth, sat in water and left to sprout. It reminds me a bit of the heads you made out of tights as a kid with grass sprouting out of them for hair.

And lastly there's the art of flower arranging, Japanese style: Ikebana.

minimal & elegant.

Aquascapes

Fancy your own underwater garden in the living room? Planted aquarium enthusiasts have created some rather amazing watery worlds, with an emphasis on the plants and hard landscaping rather than the fish and other creatures that inhabit them. Takashi Amano popularised the 'Aquascape' or 'Nature Aquarium'. Here are some that he created:

And here are some aquariums landscaped and planted up by other aquascapers:

Using carbon dioxide injection, liquid fertilisation and hidden filtration these high maintenance tanks are things of beauty. I'll be posing images of my own low-tech not quite so breathtaking version later.