Field Notes: Green-fingered growers deliver

Glenridding Common Manager Pete Barron salutes our talented and patient voluteer growers for a fantastic batch of seedlings ready for planting on the hill.

Our talented, green fingered Arctic Alpine growers have produced the goods this year. All the plants pictured here are either grown from seed or cuttings for the montane willow species.

One of the requirements for Alpine growing is patience, as for one thing sometimes things don’t go to plan and the seeds fail for whatever reason and it is not a resource that can be resupplied from the local garden centre. We have to wait another year, so patience is a virtue.

However, when it works I think that we all get the same sense of satisfaction that keeps up the enthusiasm. Some plants are ‘easy’ such as water avens, others like the Alpine cinquefoil and Alpine saw-wort are more challenging.

Apart from the involvement of local people growing plants for their own upland back yard spreading the growing helps the production, as sometimes my seeds will fail but another grower will be successful so the chances of success are increased.

There has been no better example of spreading the opportunity than that of growing of mountain avens seeds collected last year, which hasn’t been easy. As a safe guard, the Alpine section of Kew Gardens are enthusiastically assisting with the project, there can be no better backstop than that.

The plants shown in the photo at the top are water avens, Alpine cinquefoil, globeflower, Burnet saxifrage, tea leaved willow, downy willow, bitter vetch.

Photo by Pete Barron