Waterloo Region Record

Keep calm and carry on planting

David Hobson

I’ve always said you must laugh if you garden, otherwise you’d cry. I try to remain on an even keel as I’ve learned to accept that for every success there can be failures. Pests, diseases or inclement weather can strike at any time. I try to see the loss of a plant as an opportunity to grow something different. There are so many choices it makes no sense to spend time trying to grow something that simply won’t rise to the challenge of surviving in my garden.

But then some gardeners like to specialize with huge collections, hostas or day lilies for instance with their thousands of varieties. The danger is when a specific group of plants is threatened, then all could be lost, and then there’d be real crying.

This is exactly what happened to Carrie Thomas of Wales, who held two national collections of columbines. National plant collections are a conservation scheme whereby dedicated individuals, amateurs and professionals, and organizations undertake to preserve and document a specific group of plants in trust for the future. Name a plant and there’ll be a collection somewhere, on a large estate, in a botanical garden, a backyard, or on an allotment (community garden).

Carrie Tomas, a keen plants-person with a degree in botany, ran a nursery in Wales called Touchwood, producing unusual plants and seeds. Visit the website now and you’ll see a stark banner as of 2018 stating: “Touchwood is no longer trading. The Aquilegia collections are dead from the killer disease Aquilegia downy mildew.” Though no longer operating the nursery, Carrie continues to lecture throughout the UK on an extensive range of plant and garden topics.

But what of those poor Aquilegias, or columbines as we know them? The disease, similar to the one that affected impatiens here, was first noted as early as 2012 and identified by the Royal Horticultural Society. It appeared in the Touchwood nursery in 2014, and within a year it had wiped out the two national collections held there, 3,000 plants in all.

Since then, the disease has spread throughout the country, a botanical version of COVID-19. It hasn’t destroyed everyone’s columbines there. If isolated from other gardens and infected plants aren’t introduced, they live on. Like the impatiens strain, no one is certain where the disease originated, possibly from outside the country or a cross between two other forms of downy mildew. As far as I can determine, there have been no cases of the disease in Canada or the USA, but it’s worthwhile being aware. The first symptoms are yellowy, angular patches on some leaves.

I only have a couple of columbines in my garden and one did catch a virus — oh, dear, that word. This was a mosaic virus, which appears on columbines as wriggly patterns on the leaf. It doesn’t kill the plant and the problem can’t be seen from a couple of strides away, or at all if I remove the bifocals — my response to many plant issues. Plus, most attention is usually on the showy, spurred flowers as they have one of the most distinctive forms of any plant, backed up by delicate fernlike leaves.

There are dozens of species and countless hybrids. We even have our own native, Aquilegia canadensis, or Canada columbine. You might have spotted the wild columbine in local woodlands with their lovely red and yellow flowers. It hybridizes readily with other species of the Aquilegia genus, and as such it’s been used in the creation of many cultivars, so its genes would have made it into many of the plants of Carrie Thomas.

Losing one plant is sad but losing a whole collection must have been heartbreaking for her. I have my own plant collection — one of everything. That way there’s more laughter than tears around here.

To chat with local gardeners, and share tips and pics, see Grand Gardeners on Facebook at www.facebook.com/groups/Grandgardeners. David Hobson can be reached at garden@gto.net

ARTS & LIFE

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2021-06-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://waterloorecord.pressreader.com/article/282140704322827

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