ALAN POWER: Thanks for downloading this garden cutting
from the National Trust. I'm Alan Power Head Gardener at the
Stourhead estate in Wiltshire. In these shorter programs, I'm
focusing on a particular aspect of our work.
I'm in the walled garden and I'm about to go into the Pelargonium
House, which is a really important part of the walled
garden, but also a really important part of the history of
Stourhead. It tells the story of one of the great owners of the
property in the 19th century, Sir Richard Colt-Hoare.
Richard Colt-Hoare was an amazing man and without him,
Stourhead wouldn't be what it is today. He looked after his
grandfather's original creation, which is the wonderful landscape
garden at Stourhead.
There's nowhere better really to read how fascinated Richard
Colt-Hoare was with plants than in the Pelargonium House.
I started at Stourhead over 20 years ago and when I first
started here, this greenhouse wasn't standing. This collection
didn't exist. So I've watched its evolution over the time and
I've watched us learn from the different types of plants in the
collection. Now I'm off into the Pelargonium House to see Emily
Utgren. She's one of our gardeners at Stourhead.
Hi, how are you doing?
EMILY UTGREN: Yeah, good thanks. Good thanks. I'm just doing a
little bit of picking over of the Pelargoniums.
There's quite a lot of dried leaves that we like to take off
and make sure that we display the Pelargonium in the best
possible way. These are South African plants. So you can
imagine the conditions that they'll need almost a little bit
deserty, nice and dry but also quite cool.
I take off any flowers that are even on the way to going over to
finish flowering so that we get a continuous display of flowers,
which we do actually achieve somehow throughout the season
with the with the help of a little bit of feeding with
tomato food to keep them flowering. But also the picking
over and the controlling of any wee beasts is always vital.
ALAN POWER: And it's interesting, isn't it? We
constantly now refer to them as Pelargoniums and a lot of people
out there will know them as the Geraniums you grow in your
conservatory, you know, and particularly the zonal ones and
they're called zonal ones because of the patterns on their
leaves.
But even standing in front of the collection that we're
looking at and they're all completely different. Yeah,
we're looking at zonal ones, cut leafed ones. But the unique
thing I suppose about the collection that Richard
Colt-Hoare developed was that they were the predominantly the
scented leaf Pelargoniums.
EMILY UTGREN: Yeah, the chocolate, almost smelling ones,
but mint chocolate almost. And of course, some of them are even
used in cooking
ALAN POWER: And they used to lie the leaves in the bottom of the
sponge cake tin, didn't they? And then the flavour would,
would ooze up through the cake.
EMILY UTGREN: Ooze is a good word, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Can you imagine when that's cooking? And you in,
from, on a, on a cold day in October, you know-
ALAN POWER: And I've eaten a geranium cake flavoured with the
scent from the leaves up through it. And the lady who made the
cake topped it off with cream. This, it was a really nice cake
and then sprinkled over the top of rose petals. No way you can
eat the rose petals as well and it was just so nice. My dad
wouldn't eat it. He said I'm not eating roses, but it was really,
really lovely this collection of plants.
So I think as gardeners, you know, we, I know lots of people
say, but we genuinely never stop learning. I mean, we're looking
at a great variety of plants here and, you know, most
Pelargoniums are fairly easy to take cuttings from, you know,
you can strike cuttings fairly easily. You pick the right time
and you pick a very healthy growing tip. But actually some
of them have been a real, real challenge, for example.
EMILY UTGREN: Oh my goodness. Yeah. Triste a, is a species of
that we grow here and it's a proper desert dweller. So in the
summer it will disappear and look dead.
ALAN POWER: It's not the most attractive Pelargonium is it?
EMILY UTGREN: No. But when it gets going, when it's, you know,
when it knows that the, the South African summer's over, it
will spring to life. But you can't get cuttings off it. They
don't have that kind of stem. So you need to go for- for seed.
ALAN POWER: And over the years, you know, we've been, we've been
learning from that and they become more and more
challenging. Interestingly enough, some of them are
pollinated by bees and you know, the other insects that come
through, but Triste is a moth pollinated one. It's night
scented. So it's moth pollinated and we've learned all of these
things over the years.
So developing this collection over the last 20 years has been
fascinating.
1997 was a key point in the, in this collection, we discovered
that there was an appropriate Victorian greenhouse being
demolished in Sussex. So we were offered it, we brought it back,
restored it, painted it, rebuilt it and it's here today and it
feels as if it's always been here.
EMILY UTGREN: And It works better than most greenhouses I
know. They knew what they were doing. So the design itself in
terms of air circulation, ventilation, all of these
things, it works.
ALAN POWER: And all the winding gear works and-
EMILY UTGREN: It's, it's so cool.
ALAN POWER: There was kind of champions of greenhouses back
then and this is a Foster and Pearson and they were, you know,
they were up there with the great greenhouse engineers of
the time.
Thanks for downloading this garden cutting from the National
Trust. You can make sure that you never miss an episode by
subscribing on your player where you'll also find this month's
full length episode of the National Trust Gardens podcast.
See you next time.
BETTANY HUGHES: I'm Bettany Hughes. I've been visiting
National Trust Properties all my life. But in this series of
podcasts, I'm going beyond the delights of teas and topiary to
reveal the surprising European roots of some of the most
splendid sites in England.
You can subscribe to my series by searching for Bettany
Hughes's 10 places Europe and us on your podcast app.