Our columnist has a suggestion for enjoying January, albeit just one that doesn’t require keeping set in England.
It’s deepest wintertime and beastly chilly — January is a depressing month. All one’s initiatives are concentrated on survival. There is practically nothing to be gained from a ‘good winter season walk’ apart from pneumonia and bronchitis. And building a jolly bonfire will set you in issues with the anti-air pollution law enforcement.
The only appropriate activity is to re-study your previous gardening textbooks and plan for the potential. That indicates staying indoors and dreaming of spring. Hearty journalists bat on about coloured stems and outdated cotoneaster berries, but the two are improved noticed from inside of the residence. Which is the vantage issue from which to admire winter jasmine and the 1st yellow aconites, way too, despite the fact that they are never ever more than enough to satisfy the accurate plant-lover’s thirst for flowers.
Some of our friends get as a result of the worst of winter season by gadding off to South Africa or the Caribbean. Properly, good luck to them say I — they tend to be the sort who devote much more time lolling on the beach front than hunting at plants and gardens.
A near-up of a shiny orange aloe flower head.
My possess views run substantially closer to household, for this is the time of the calendar year when the charms of the Mediterranean reach their peak. Summertime is the dormant time there, when their plants swap off and consider to endure warmth and drought, but the autumn rains convey on the flowers and midwinter offers straightforward pleasures, these types of as blue ipomoeas and orange nasturtiums on each patch of wasteland. They are no much more than yard escapees, but there is a whole lot much more to love correct now in Mediterranean gardens and amid the wild plants of the countryside. And visitors are number of.
January, without a doubt, is the month when aloes get to the peak of their opulence — mind you, most flower for at least 3 months — and mimosa is everywhere to be witnessed. Wintertime-flowering buddlejas, this kind of as orange-flowered B. madagascariensis and elegant, sweet- scented B. asiatica, are a delight unidentified in this article. Our ancestors — the wealthy ones — who used their winters on the Riviera filled their lungs with the intoxicating fragrance of tea roses, a 19th-century race of elegant, but tender roses rarely seen now in England.
Buddleja madagascariensis.
When my uncle lived in Spain, he admired the freesias that flouished in other people’s gardens and believed it would be alternatively jolly to plant some on his own rocky hillside. He located a nurseryman in the Netherlands who offered freesia corms by body weight — and he purchased 1 kilogram’s worthy of. Or thought he did. Since, when the package arrived, he found that he experienced requested not corms, but a person kilo of seed. When he had recovered from the shock of the price, he duly scattered the seed in excess of large places and forgot about them. But not for extended, simply because freesias flower from seed within just a year and his garden future wintertime was an explosion of scent and color from January to March.
But it is the wild vegetation of the Mediterranean that are the best draw for English gardeners. Swarms of irises, crocus and orchids cover the limestone hillsides of Andalusia. Paperwhite narcissi fill the meadows. Temperatures are in the higher teenagers and lunch outside is the purest of pleasures on a sunny, windless day. Nor are there wasps and hornets in January to share your great fortune.
Fiery nasturtiums.
One calendar year, we used New Yr with Spanish friends around Carmona. Some of their fields had been deserted olive groves and I pointed out that the olive trees have been a haven from which each and every conceivable pest and illness could assault their present day, cultivated olive plantations. In amongst the outdated olives was a wealth of Iris alata, a wintertime-flowering species that flowers all through Andalusia (and Sardinia and Sicily, way too) from December to March, according to altitude. The flowers are infinitely variable in their markings — I picked a dozen flowers to show to our friends, but they are not botanists and were as puzzled as you would be if a browsing Spaniard picked a handful of dandelions to display you how distinct they were being from just about every other.
Now is the time to see those people irises and narcissi once again — to revel in the potent sunlight and the extreme greens of the landscapes. Winter season in Andalusia is as energising as summertime is exhausting. There is absolutely nothing to drop. We are only ready for the Beast from the East to trip off the lips of our climate forecasters ahead of we leap into the automobile and make for Brittany Ferries — once authorized by latest limits, at any fee. We’ll return laden with bottles of wine and olive oil, and the odor of chorizo and jamón ibérico will linger in the car for weeks to arrive. And we shall be fighting match to take pleasure in the pleasures of February and March at household.
