Jardinagem em Portugal

Visit information

• Admission: Free
• Dates: 29 April – 10 October 2010
• Location: West Lawn, Museum forecourt, British Museum, London
• Map: How to get there

About the Landscape

Kew’s South Africa Landscape at the British Museum celebrates the two institutions’ shared vision to strengthen cultural understanding and support biodiversity conservation across the world. Our Landscape makes connections between plants, people and objects on display in the Museum’s African galleries.

South Africa Landscape features African lily (Agapanthus africanus), fynbos heather, daisies such as the blue marguerite (Felicia amelloides) and the ‘Star of the Veldt‘ (Osteospermum hyoseroides), the South African geranium (Pelargonium sidoides) and the Lesotho red hot poker(Kniphofia caulescens), with its bright orange rocket-shaped flowers.

Visitors can walk through the Landscape and get a feeling of the desert and experience tumbled rocks and scree and sand, interspersed with strangely shaped quiver trees (Aloe dichotoma), swathes of spectacular plant colour and an understorey of desert annual and perennial plants.

Reproductions of famous examples of rock art which depict men and animals from well-documented sites in South Africa are incised on to a number of rocks in the Landscape. Find out more at the South Africa Landscape website.

Our first opportunity to go out and about in our own garden and the surrounding hills was a glorious reminder of the huge diversity of spring flowers – and orchids – which populate the wilder areas of the south of Portugal. Enjoy !

A recent visit to the Midlands area of the UK was a salutory lesson in winter gardening for someone like me who has been living in the south west of Europe for the last five years.  We had heard about the snow and ice on the roads but it was still a bit of a shock to see the starved looking grassland and totally bare hedgerows, even in early March.  Even so, it did prove the point that there are plants for every situation.

The unexpected pleasure of visiting the garden of friends which was open for charity made up for the bare landscape.  There was a profusion of snowdrops in full flower, crocus, aconites and glorious hellebores showing colour.  The Cyclamen coum had lovely dark pink flowers surrounded by large dark green leaves.

It was very pleasant to see the Iris unguicularis flowering, I have several clumps of these in the garden here and although the UK plants were not quite so floriferous, they certainly had some flowers despite the cold.  There is a deep

blue, a lilac and a white flowered form of this iris and all have golden accents on the falls of the flowers. If you pick some buds, by gently pulling them right at the base, they can be put into water and will then open indoors so that you get the lovely scent without braving whatever the weather is throwing around outside.

Frost on foliage made patterns I had forgotten about and the seedheads were still strongly upright – contributing to the feel of a garden asleep, but not completely forgotten.

Having visitors is a good thing – for a gardener.  Instead of staying at home and looking at your own garden it means you can go out and look at other peoples gardens.  The weather has been very wet here so the plants and trees are looking shiny and clean and the landscape is a lovely green colour.  This is a good time to go out and look at the almond blossom and enjoy the damp smelly earth. With a friend from Catalonia, I visited Monchique and the western Algarve this week and found some lovely things in the garden, and some good cake !

Cotoneaster lacteus

Hardenbergia

erecta

Iris in the rain

Brian & apple streudel

Very satisfying day yesterday when our new ‘old’ olive trees arrived and were planted in the garden.  These trees have come from the Alentejo area of southern Portugal. There are areas where the old trees are being grubbed up and removed in order to make way for new plantings at the spacing needed for mechanical harvesting.  The old trees cannot be harvested this way because their trunks are too rigid and the pruning method is different.  We have been able to have five trees of the Manzanilla variety – this is one of the best varieties for table olives and can also be good for oil. We have used the trees to fill gaps in an area of the garden where we have some trees and so now we have a lovely olive grove area.  Fortunately the trees are about the same age as ours and so they look immediately at home. Olives have an amazing ability to recover from this kind of treatment and can add instant maturity to gardens. This kind of planting is wonderful for creating a Mediterranean atmosphere.  We will have to water them for the first year or two to encourage the secondary root systems to develop but after that, watering can stop.  We hope to  be harvesting olives from these trees in about three to five years.