She screamed at me from across my own garden, “Restios are not grasses, they are their own unique family and you shouldn’t grow them like grasses either!” I felt so uncomfortable in my own skin and my own garden, I shall never, ever, forget it.
Pauline, in her time, had been well known and respected for her work with the monocotyledons of South Africa. Her knowledge, gained through hard work on the subject, remained second to none until she passed away just after Christmas last year. Through papers written in her youth and her sometimes abrasive, unswerving accuracy of instruction later in life, there are many horticulturists and botanists out there who, like me, are so much better at what we do because of her. Pauline shared her knowledge freely and only goodness would help you if you didn’t listen. That little bit of knowledge she shared that day helped me to better grow a family of plants I would otherwise have treated quite differently.
In my own day-to-day work, I suffer from a loss of that specific kind of knowledge. I spend a lot of time trawling through ancient back issues of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and scientific papers, looking for the answers to questions that I cannot answer otherwise. For some of the species of plants I grow, I really wish I had someone who I could phone to ask my burning questions. Some of the plants I grow have never been grown in cultivation before, but more often I find that they were cultivated successfully here in the UK at some point in the past. A gardener sometime, somewhere knew just what made them tick; they had that little snippet of information that made the difference between success and failure.
It’s not even always the rare species that I struggle with, either. In the 1800s the southern heaths were all the rage: one species, Epacris impressa, had more than 200 known cultivars. Nowadays there is only one species of Epacris in general cultivation here in the UK; they are considered tricky, tender and difficult to germinate. A plant once so common and easily cultivated has fallen out of favour and the knowledge of how to grow it is lost in the mists of time. What was it that changed? Had it been so common that the information on how to grow it was not deemed significant and so wasn’t passed on? I grow E. impressa, and through trial, error and searching, I am re-learning the skills needed for to make it grow.
In a world of paywalls and intellectual rights, accessing the more technical information can be expensive or impossible. Finding just a little hint that leads you on the right track can be difficult, and often a reference book, good article or an expert to speak to can be invaluable. When a search on the internet is the first thing we all do to find information, making real contact with other gardeners through horticultural societies, forums or social media can be far more instructive.
So I implore you as gardeners to share what you know - spread it around. Make the knowledge, be it about common bedding or the rarest of the rare, readily available to the world. Write it down somewhere and don’t ever let it be lost. It may be the little nugget of information that someone sometime in the future needs to change the world.
I miss you Pauline. I didn’t know you very well, but I miss you and the knowledge that left when you did.
