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Here comes the Sun & other things! |
| It’s
a statement of fact that the climate of the Southern Europe
is a lot warmer and drier than that of the United Kingdom so
I won’t harp on about it other than to say that the
climate of the United Kingdom is a lot cooler and wetter
than that of Southern Europe! This has little to do with my
particular subject to hand but to be frank, I just enjoy
saying it. Particularly in Spring time, whilst I’m strolling about my gardens in the Andalucian mountains of Southern Spain clad only in cut-off shorts and a pair of mountaineering boots with no toe
caps. |
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I remove them (I’m referring to my toe caps) to let that cool mountain air waft between my toes. See what I mean, once I start I can’t stop.
But not everything in the garden is rosy, especially for the
native wildlife that proliferates across the mountain ranges
and into the local gardens at this time of year. |
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I have my favourites amongst this wildlife. The many insects, reptiles and amphibious creatures that inhabit the gardens within which I work here in Southern Spain and there are of course, those I’d rather avoid. |
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Permaculture
Aussie Style |
| We sat on the pretty veranda and discussed the job. “Do whatever you can in the time you have available but cover all your exposed areas with factor 50, drink plenty of water and make sure you constantly make loud noises, particularly by stamping your feet or hammering with your gardening tools on the ground”. |
| And that was a brief introduction to a few days worth of landscape gardening in a homestead in the remote outback of South Australia. |
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Drinking plenty of water made lots of sense. It’s hot! Down-under in the Australian outback
during the month of February is similar to our August. The factor 50 turned out to be a sun cream laced with zinc that was the necessary means of protection from the intense ultra violet rays that now bombard the whole continent, deprived of protection from the sun with the depletion of the ozone layer. This is a truly serious problem for Australians these days with the incidence of
melanomas almost endemic. As to the ‘make plenty of noise’ suggestion….well, that simply is
intended to ward off the local snake population which includes the two most venomous species on the planet. The ‘Brown snake’ and the fearsome ‘Red Bellied Black’, bites from which are never less than lethal. |
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Plant
Identification |
| If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck there’s a good chance it’s a goose when it comes to gardening. In spite of everything I love about gardening I live in fear of incorrectly or failing completely to positively identify a plant on request. The more we garden the more we become the plant ‘expert,’ or so we’d like to think. The reality is very different. I’m seldom going to admit publically, and never if in the confines of somebody else’s garden, but the facts of the matter are that we’re all hovering around different degrees of hopelessness when it comes to plant
identification. |
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All of us, and that includes you and me, my Auntie Flo with her green wellies, the
scientific team at Kew Gardens and not infrequently, the staff at your local gardening centre. We’re all hopeless. Shocked by this disclosure? Don’t be. It’s perfectly excusable. |
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The problem lies within the various data of recorded plant species and types scientifically
acceptable. There are quite a few. For example, did you know there are 39,000 different types of
mushroom and that doesn’t include our politicians or people suffering from tone deafness who audition for X-Factor . This perhaps is simplest way of saying you’ll always know a mushroom if you hear one! |
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Two Bees are not Two Bees |
| So, is that the
question? I like bees. They give me a real buzz! And they
should you also if you care about your garden and the food
on your table. So, if you’re reading this which you are,
then bees probably give you a buzz too! Now repeat this
paragraph quickly ten times with a spoonful of honey in your
mouth and see if your teeth stay in because mine didn’t! |
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Colony Collapse Disorder or CCG as it’s more commonly remembered is a phenomena which is affecting our European honey bee colonies by drastically reducing the numbers of worker bees gainfully employed in maintaining the hives they’re engaged to by their Queen Bee to dutifully maintain. |
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Many insects carry out the process of pollination but the king of them all is the Bee with rates of pollination 20 to 30 times higher than other insect species. The importance of all this goes far beyond the price of jar of honey on your supermarket shelves or the apple crop in your orchard. Oh yes
indeedy! |
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Poinsettia’s are not just for Christmas! |
| You can’t move for
the damn things can you? They’re everywhere, all red and
green and Christmassy with a perfect appearance of health and
vigour as they stand proudly in their little plastic pots
singing ‘I wish you a merry Christmas’ at the top of their
little vegetative voices! |
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And why not? The
Poinsettia is as much about Xmas as a turkey, a spruce in a
bucket or a paper cracker by the side of one of your best
dinner plates. They’re great survivors too when you consider
the abuse they’re seasonally subjected to, be it a layer of
aerosol squirted artificial snow or a few strands of tinsel,
not to mention no water or a position by the side of the
fireplace or heater where it generally gets hotter than the
surface of the sun. They’ll take it all and keep smiling all
the way through to the middle of January……..and then the
leaves drop off and they die! |
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But it needn’t
be like that. We, like the plant itself, are fooled by the
glass house nurseries into believing that Poinsettia, or Euphorbia
pulcherrima to give the botanical name, are plants that
flower in winter at a precise time to coincide with the
Christmas period, but you couldn’t be further from the
truth. Poinsettia’s are summer plants which assume a popular
festive mantle of deep green and bright red colouring solely
courtesy of mankind’s hot house artificial climate controls.
Keep ‘em warm and in the shade whilst in the right
conditions of humidity and they’re fooled into believing
they’re entering mid-summer night’s dream for tropical
plants. And that’s actually what they are….a tropical
plant! |
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Agave
attenuata - “She was a Showgirl” |
| It was Barry Manilow
that wrote and recorded a song about Lola, a showgirl from Las
Vegas. The opening lyric was something like…"Her name
was Lola, she was a showgirl. |
| With yellow feathers
in her hair and a dress cut down to there." It certainly
paints a picture and the melody to ‘Copacabana’ was pretty
good too. It must have been, it sold millions. |
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Music
lover though I am I still believe his real inspiration was a
species of plant originating in Mexico which reached the
shores of Europe via Kew gardens and since has itself sold
in millions and remains in my mind the most curvaceous and
alluring showgirl of any garden when in flower. This
horticultural fun loving extrovert is not named Lola….it’s
Agave Attenuata sometimes known as the "lion's
tail", "swan's neck", or "foxtail"
for its development of a curved flowering stem, un-usual
among agaves. And what a mind-blowingly, staggering and
frankly, massive flower it is! |
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Everything coming up isn’t smelling of
roses! |
| I like gardens. They’re
peaceful and beautiful places where the rigours of everyday
life dissipate amidst nature’s splendour. The shapes and
colours. The smells and sounds. The perfect backdrop to reach
closer to nature. From the tall trees to the exquisite
bejewelled flowers and vines. A perfect home to the birds and
other wild-life that proliferate in a world that we share all
because we love gardens. And then all of a sudden you smell
something really funny! |
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Cats!
I thought at first. I love cats, but not in my garden….please.
With my love of all creatures great and small rapidly
diminishing I looked around the plant bed closest to me not
really wanting to find what I was convinced I was going
find. And I saw the strangest thing. There, poking up out of
the soil and dried dead leaves at the base of an Oleander
bush was a little bright red basket shaped thing which
looked like, well, a little bright red basket shaped thing.
And it smelt awful! |
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Spotted
Hooded Tongue |
Discovering a rare or previously unknown species of plant is every botanist’s dream.
Glimpsing from the corner of one’s eye a pale yellow and
brown striped and hooded flower head perching gyroscopically
on top of a slender leopard-spotted stem in the centre of a
well trimmed lawn of Benissa grass, located in a remote area
of scrubland half way up the side of an Andalucian
mountain, borders almost on the equivalent of a gardeners
lottery win. |
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Fragile yet perky,
slender but arrogant, this thing, this stuff that
horticultural dreams are made of swayed provocatively in the
warm wet breeze of a late Autumnal summer. Oh my goodness I
thought. Where’s my camera? Where’s my illustrated copy of
Charles Darwin’s encyclopaedia of Undiscovered plants for
Beginners? Calm down. Be rational and seek help but make sure
you keep its location secret otherwise hordes of gardening
enthusiasts, botanists and the worlds press will converge on
the lawn like a colony of ants around a sugar cube. |
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It's
astonishingly....beautiful! |
| I won’t waste everybody’s time describing this unique beauty. Firstly, I think you all know what it looks like and, secondly, its flowers are far too complex a structure for me to describe in horticultural terms. Only an engineering degree coupled with years of experience in structural fabrication and architectural design would give me the flow of geometric and mechanical language required! It suffices for me to say it’s astonishingly pretty. No, that’s the wrong word. It’s astonishingly…..beautiful! |
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The
flower of ‘Strelitzia reginae’ or Bird of
Paradise is arguably nature’s pinnacle in structured
elegance. Also known as The Crane plant for some reason
unknown to myself but I can probably guess, Strelitzia
reginae is a flowering plant which could more than hold
its own on the front cover of Vogue magazine. It even
manages to retain a degree of untidy elegance between
flowerings which generally take place from September through
to the following Easter period, so what a wonderful way to
glorify the garden during the winter months. Its long and
extremely tough slender leaf stalks of between 80cm up to
150cm in length are tipped with an elongated and equally
tough ovoid leaf not too dissimilar in shape to a canoe
paddle. A mature specimen can reach a height of up to 2
metres. |
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Finca La Concepcion - The Botanical Garden |
| A
short bus ride from the centre of the city of Malaga in
Spain's Southern region of Andalucia lies the
historical garden of 'La Concepción'. Originally
created in 1855 the garden was the brainchild of newly
married couple, Jorge Loring Oyarzabal and the lovely
Amalia Heredia Livermore, granddaughter of the then British
Malaga Consul. |
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The entire estate
consisted of 49 hectares of forest and agricultural land
within which the 23 hectares surrounding their magnificent
stately home was set aside as for what is now regarded as one
of the finest collections of tropical plants in the whole of
Europe. |
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Red palm weevil
- The greater of two weevils |
| This is an
interesting story. But you won’t like it! The Red Palm
Weevil. A large reddish brown beetle 30mm’s in length,
equipped with large wings for extended flight and an
extended curved protrusion or rostrum on the front of its
head that it uses to force its way into the growing crown of
Phoenix dactylifera and P. canariensis, the
two major ornamental palm trees that abound in hotel and
resort garden areas of the Spanish Costa’s and other
Mediterranean coastal areas. |
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Each
female adult specimen lays up to 200 eggs in the base of the
new growth crown all of which rapidly pupate into large
white grubs nearly 50mm in size with a voracious appetite
for the soft fibrous heart of the palm tree itself. As early
detection of the pest can be almost impossible the
infestations rapidly destroy the palm itself from the inside
out causing both young or adult palm trees to literally
collapse and die. |
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Brian
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The
sad tale of the Gecko that loved fruitcake |
If you ever consider writing down for the perusal of others your innermost thoughts and gardening experiences then beware. Maintaining your reputation for sanity,
truthfulness and clarity of thought is everything. Wander just a little from the path of righteousness and understanding and you are, from the point of view of literary longevity, a dead duck! One error of judgement on this score is the equivalent of standing on a chair in a crowded pub and yelling at the top of your voice “Ladies and gentlemen. Could I have your attention please? I just wanted to let you all know that
I've recently been abducted by aliens”. |
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So, bearing all that in mind let me first say
I've never seen a UFO and I've never been abducted by aliens.
I've also never received an amorous midnight text message from Angelina Jolie and not
once have I seen a cheeseburger levitate from a cardboard plate whilst sat on my own in
McDonalds after smoking something funny. However, I have come across a gecko in a garden
that loved fruit cake and answered to the name of Brian. |
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Beautiful to gaze on –Deadly to graze
on |
| Nerium Oleander. From
spring into early summer the road sides, hillsides and dried river beds of
Mediterranean countries can often be seen adorned with the
mainly pink or occasionally white flowers of the Oleander
shrub. Even as an ornamental shrub planting within private or municipal gardens the massed flowerings of this common shrub draw attention and gasps of admiration from passers-by. |
| Both drought and frost resistant Oleander is a hardy species quite capable of
surviving in the wild without any form of attention and left uncontrolled can grow anything from 2 to 6 metres in height. Rest assured, once in flower you’ll spot it! |
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The
eye of the beholder |
| Now whether or not you’d be comfortable gently picking one up and admiring its home grown suit of body armour whilst it gazed up at you from the comfort of your hand is debatable. Personally I’m not, but over a period of time I’ve become quite relaxed about rubbing shoulders in the garden with this particular species of alien life-form that probably originated on Sirius Major ‘B’ but reached planet Earth after travelling 30,000 light years across the Universe in some amazing mother ship
before crash landing in the arid desert regions of New Mexico. Other people with less imagination would probably recognise him as possibly an Egyptian Grasshopper but I prefer my theory. |
| I like this guy. He’s a big 35mm in length, he looks reasonably scary, he doesn’t bite and my presence in his immediate vicinity doesn’t appear to bother him in the
slightest so all in all, we get along fine. He does appear to be a bit of a loner although his attraction to others outside of his own species is probably a mute point for
consideration though he probably thinks the same about us. |
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The
good the bad and the prickly |
| Have you enjoyed
any of the great classic movies of the last 50 years such as
Cleopatra; Lawrence of Arabia; Mad Max;
Indiana Jones; Conan the Barbarian; A
Fistful of Dollars; Guns of the Magnificent Seven and
last but by no means least, The Good, The Bad & The
Ugly? It’s more than likely the answer is yes. |
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Now ask yourself what have all those particular movies got in common with each other? Apart, that is, from lots of action, a gorgeous leading lady, a stubbly-chinned handsome leading man and a hot, dirty, dusty backdrop to lots of the film locations. And therein lays the clue to the reason I even bother to mention them. The hot, dirty and dusty locations used for many of the films happen to be the same. It’s the Almeria region of Andalucia, Spain. A rocky, desertfied region of Southern Europe where gardening techniques, gardening problems and the plants themselves, are a world away from the pristine and colourful gardens of the UK. Where garden pests frequently take the form of such species from scorpions and black widow spiders to venomous snakes, centipedes and even toxic caterpillars. |
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The
Broken Butterfly |
| Just a tiny flash of colour caught my eye, flitting haphazardly like a thinly sliced flake of something exotic that a summer breeze had swept up and couldn’t decide when or where to let go. No form, no shape, just a tiny spot of deep rich colour strobing like an escaped blink of nature’s eyelid. |
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And then it was gone. But so had my attention I should have been giving to the task to hand. Gardening duties were temporarily suspended whilst I attempted to satisfy my curiosity and then suddenly there it was again. Much higher this time but much more recognisable for what it was. It was just a butterfly. Its frantic beating of wings harmonised into a pulsing whirl of ivory coloured wrapping paper tinged with a myriad of different bright colours as it fought its way through the screaming sun and indecisive garden breezes. |
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Fashion
to Flora |
| From the
Carnaby Street fashion revolution of the late 60’s
emerged some of the legendary names of the UK’s
elite lady’s fashion house designers who between
them hoisted Britain onto the very roof of the world
in contemporary clothing design. |
| The legacy of that
exciting design period is still very much with us and
not just in the cut and design of the clothing we wear
today. |
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A bright
young thing of those heady days whose talents rapidly
became apparent during her time at the London College
of Fashion in London’s Oxford Street was recognised
by a leading fashion house as a potential asset.
Consequently she was offered employment as an
assistant lady’s fashion designer and within just
two years her flair and talent rocketed her to the
position of chief designer. The business established a
fashion company which took Britain’s fashion exports
to the heart of Europe and across to America. With the
passing of time Denise Marks with her husband Ramon,
eventually took a commercial backseat by retiring to
the beautiful UNESCO protected bio-sphere of the
Sierra de las Nieves Mountains of Southern Spain. |
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Going
Native |
| I remember some years back watching with utter amazement as an elderly Spanish gardener teetered and stooped around a sparsely planted flower bed inside a local residential urbanisation picking up little stones from the surface of the hardened clay soil. Not being naturally multi-lingual I furrowed my eyebrows at him and uttered
“Qué?” |
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In perfect English he informed me with a sad smile that the President and duly elected urbanisation committee had passed him an instruction to walk around the gardens and pick up all the unsightly stones that littered the flower beds. “But” I replied. “But, but” I repeated. “Si
Sénor, I know” he said and continued to bend his frail body into an upturned U- shape and drop little stones into his ever-heavier plastic bucket. |
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An
Englishman's Garden in Spain |
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Clinging to the
sides of the mountainous region surrounding the tiny white
village of Monda in Southern Spain nestled an old olive
grove, forgotten and forsaken as a profitable way to make
money many years before the turmoil of the Spanish civil
war. What better an idea with the property boom of the new
millennium than to split the grove into individual plots of
land accessed by a narrow unmade road and build a few remote
homes or "fincas" as small rural properties are
known as in the beautiful Andalucia region of Europe’s
most southerly point.
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And so in 2008
finca Nandu, balanced on a ledge on the mountain side was
completed and I was invited to look at the prospect of
making some sort of usable and attractive garden within the
near perpendicular 5000 sq.metres that represented its
private land. "Do you think you could submit some sort
of design?" I was asked. "No" I replied,
"gravity and the forbidden use of high explosive is
against the principal of submitting any sort of
pre-conceived design. The steepness of the land, the
crumbling olive grove terraces and the thickness of the
bedrock will dictate any attempt to turn it into a
garden." |
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Waving
the Spanish Flag |
| Once upon a time I sat down with pen and paper and wrote down a hit-list of certain aspects of one single plant species that would make it my ideal to use within the plethora of different garden types I work within. I wanted a plant that could be grown either as hedging or as ground cover. Maybe as a trailing plant in a hanging basket or perhaps a shaped shrub in a tub. I wanted a high profile specimen bush for use in the centre of a display and occasionally as a border plant for its vivid colour. |
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Unleashing further my demands like a trade union in a management meeting I wanted a plant that under certain conditions could flower all year round and would require next to no attention inclusive of being resistant to drought. I wanted it to possess exquisite long-lasting flowers and in the interests of restrictive gardening budgets be cheap to buy and be perennial so I’d only have to buy it the one time. And wouldn’t it be a bonus if it was easy to propagate and self-seeding. My imagination really left the launch pad now as I added to the list its ability to occasionally display flowers of differing colours on the same stem and of course be tougher than a rhinoceros’s rucksack with resistance to most common pests and diseases. Then I thought it might be nice if it attracted wildlife to the garden so it now had to be capable of attracting butterflies, especially swallow-tails! That was about it really until I suddenly thought wouldn’t it be wonderful if was capable of telling me the winning numbers for the following months lottery draw and then I could hire the services of Imperial College London to research the whole issue whilst I nipped out for a beer and paid a visit to a new car showroom! |
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The
Punk Garden |
| I was sitting in a garden on an upturned bucket the other day eating a rapidly melting chocolate covered biscuit whilst contemplating whether or not to mix a bit more concrete to secure the slightly unstable rockery I’d almost finished. I suddenly felt good reason to glance upwards. There, staring down at me with attitude written all over its demeanour was a variegated Yucca of not inconsiderable size. “You staring at me mate?” it seemed to be saying as its rigid and slightly threatening leaves
projected outwards like some sort of punk rocker’s excessively gelled hair-do. “No, not me” I replied trying desperately to appear inconsequential. |
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And that’s the precise moment, when after years of torment with garden design and resultant landscaping that I realised exactly what the ubiquitous Yucca’s purpose in life is. It’s not exactly pretty and it’s not exactly colourful but damn me if it isn’t just so very useful in any garden layout for adding balance, profile and order to the scene. The Yucca is the horticultural worlds very own punk rocker. It’s the sentinel, the bringer of order, the bouncer on the door, of every balanced garden I think I’ve ever seen. It’s a loner when needs must but it’s more domineering and resultantly persuasive when it’s planted out with its mates. |
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Meet
Tamara: The Giant Agave |
| She’s big, she’s beautiful and she could live to be a hundred years old and then pass away peacefully whilst giving birth to several hundred ‘little ones’. I call her Tamara after an infamous but slightly biologically confused Ukrainian shot putter who, along with her equally well proportioned sister
Irina, dominated female field event athletics at both the Rome and Tokyo Olympics during the early 60’s. But, you may well ask, what has all this to do with gardening? Well, if you should happen to wander through the countryside or ‘Campo’ regions of the Southern Mediterranean you may quickly find the answer. ‘Tamara’ is a colossus example of Agave Americana or the ‘Century Plant’ as she is affectionately known by those with an affiliation towards nick-names. |
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She is so referred
to because of the awfully long time it takes her to flower as
she spends her years body-building her incredible physique and
storing sufficient nourishment inside to gestate her
off-spring and perpetuate her amazing species. Mind you, in
all honesty gardeners like fishermen always have a tendency to
exaggerate and you’ll probably find she’s more than likely
to pop her cork within 20 to 30 years. |
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As a founder member of the world wide Agave family she does tend to dominate a garden party but her curvaceous form and sheer animal personality have softened the heart of many a gardening enthusiast. And, she has her uses! The ingenious populations of South America discovered centuries ago that her incredibly fast growing flower stem could be tapped prior to flower formation to provide a sweet liquid they appropriately called honey water. Left to ferment this became a rather toxic alcoholic drink known as
Pulque, not dissimilar to Tequila! Historically speaking this could be the reason the species became so popular with the sun-worshippers of ancient Mexican civilisations. The immensely strong fibres which make up its wickedly sharp serrated edged leaves also came in handy for the weaving of both cloth and rope whilst the needle pointed tip probably had its uses which I’d rather not explore! |
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