16 ★ FTWeekend 2 November/3 November 2019House Home
T
he origins of this column go
back 485myears. That
may surprise even those of
you who know I have been
writing it for a very long
time. I am not an antediluvian, a relic
of the earth before the Flood. I have
been at it weekly for two months short
of 50 years, but in the timespan of its
subjects, plants, that is hardly a mini-
blip or a wave of a ferny stem.
Some 485myears ago, plants began
their conquest of dry land. Without it
there would be nothing for me to write
about. That scientific finding would
amaze the author behind the ook ofb
Genesis. He placed God’s creation of
grass, herbs and trees on the third day,
after the creation of light, air and dry
land. Cosmologists indeed now stress
the crucial role of plants in taking
chemicals from primeval gasses and
making animal life possible: without
plants, there would have been no
horses, humans or evenbadgers.
Unlike the author of Genesisscientists
do not believe for one moment that
plant life began with ready-made grass
and trees that bear fruit, let alone that
it preceded the existence of the sun.
I like the cosmologists’ new emphasis
that plants are essential precursors to
human life. Even so, many millions of
years had to pass before gardening
journalists came into existence o payt
them a weekly tribute. On a sunny
afternoon, I have been contemplating
this sobering timeline at Kew Gardens.
Evolution is the theme of a major new
addition to the site.
Down by the Jodrell Gate, beyond therock garden and the alpine house, the
old area of vegetable beds hasbeen
transformed. A donation of £500,000
by the retiring chair of Kew’s trustees,
Marcus Agius, and his wife Kate, has
enabled a bold rethinking and
replanting of thesite and a fund for its
maintenance by an enlarged team of
gardeners. It is already a triumph. Next
year the second stage of its planting
will be in place. The Agius Evolution
Garden will be unmissable, something
that all visitors to Kew shouldsee.
The theme is a brilliant choice.
Botanic gardens tread an uneasy line
between scientific research and the
gardening which interests paying
visitors. An evolution garden
addresses both constituencies. It takes
visitors on a chronological walk
through the evolving plant life of the
universe, beginning with beds of eerie
horsetail equisetum and progressing to
roses, peonies and asters across100m
years. Eight big sectionsin the garden
give a lovely sense of a floral journey
during which each new family comes in
to join its forebears. Science and
ornament combine.
Evolution seems such an obvious
theme to display in sequence, but I
know of no other botanic garden that
has fastened on it. Instead of boring me
with bossy notices on rubber plants,
explaining that they are the source of
tyres, Kew’s study boards tell a
fascinating story of emerging beauty.
Its evolution does not occur in the
sequence I would have predicted. Fossil
studies have established the main
timelines, but in the past25 years DNAstudies have transformed ideas of what
came with what on the branches of the
tree of life. The new garden reflects
new knowledge.
RichardWilford, Kew’s head of
Outdoor Design, met me in the autumn
sunshine to take me onwards from the
first primeval stirrings. DNA-based
taxonomists at Kew and elsewhere
have turned upside down the old grid
of “system beds” in botanic gardens.
They used to show plants in agreed
family groupings, crucifers, rosaceae
and so forth, with broad agreement on
what belonged where. DNA studies
have now grouped honeysuckles with
elders and roses near to nettles. Day
lilies turn out, amazingly, to belong
with saxifrages. It is as if I had just been
reclassified as akin to something as
primeval as Jacob Rees-Mogg.
We began our tour 185myears ago
with my sworn enemy, the ineradicable
horsetail whose green tubular stems
and wiry proto-leaves are resistant to
modern weedkilling. Itsstems used to
pump nutrientsthrough the plant’s
simple structure before anyone was
around to hoe them off. They are still
at large 185myears later, poking up
from the damp subsoil above which IAn evolution
revelation
A new garden at Kew takes visitors on a
chronological walk through the evolving plant life
of the universe, with some surprising associations
have been growing Himalayan
primulas. The only way to limit this
proto-plant is to pick off each thrusting
stem as it tries to dislodge the
primulas’ roots.
Ferns with spores, gymnosperms
and a simple sort of pine tree compete
with horsetail in the beds of the early
phase. Fast-forward a big flower bed or
two, and about50myears later we are
not stuck with dreary algae.
Wondrously, magnolias and their kin
have appeared on earth, pre-glacial
beautiesthat put a dinosaur to shame.
Wi lford has evoked this phase with
some of the magnolias which gardeners
love, pink-flowered Leonard Messel
and sieboldii set above clumps of bold-
leaved houttuynia, an original match in
a garden but one which is
prehistorically correct. In beds to one
side, a white-flowered sort of rhubarb
is a real revelation, Anemopsis
californica which gardeners have
forgotten in the march of so many
million years. It is a truly desirable
ground-covering plant which ought to
be widely on sale. Bay laurel, shrubby
calycanthus and much else make life in
155mBC seem far from drab.
The time around 140mBC was evenbetter. By then the magnolias had been
joined by tall plume poppies, or
macleaya, scented winter sarcococcas
and even delphiniums, pulsatillas,
anemones and annual eschscholzias.
Vines were around to take the hard
edge off prehistoric life. Wilford has
combined them with unexpected
eucomis, best known as the pineapple
flower, and even with some gunnera
and Californian tree poppies, their
prehistoric contemporaries. The
emergence of monocotyledons, plants
with one leaf only as seedlings, allows
him an even bolder range of
associations linked by this
characteristic. Then they diverge into
eudicots and other botanical branch
lines, enhancing what the new beds
show. He has arranged them in
interlinking swirls, like the fluid shapes
of a modern DNA map.
Some 125myears ago, at the time
when human ancestors begin, I think,
to be traceable there were asters andtheir relations. I like the idea of
Richard Dawkins’ orebear runningf
around among some divine
Michaelmas daisies. On either side of a
new rose pergola, Wilford’s planting of
the evolving universe becomesbolder
and more unexpected, until roses turn
up with sanguisorbas and the beds
become ever fuller with perennials we
know in other contexts. A bold and
brash display of yellow rudbeckias,
dahlias and blue asters is the eye-
catching climax to evolution in
autumn, combining impact with a
scientific lesson.
The theme of evolving history has
allowed the association of plantsthat
otherwise ardeners keep in separateg
compartments. Of course there is some
scientific compromise but I found the
beds increasingly fascinating as the
familiar kept appearing in unfamiliar
company. I also learnt so much with
pleasure. What a great addition to
Kew’s increasing interest for gardeners.
When gardening columnists finally
evolved, there was masses for them to
write about. Thanks to Kew’sinitiative
they can see it in yet another light,
future copy for me to cover in my next
little slice of 50 years.Kew’s Evolution Garden with Pennisetum, or fountain grass, the ancestor of which appeared around 150m years ago
Richard WilfordRobin Lane Fox
On gardens
Sectionsgive a sense of a
floral journey during which
each new family comes into join its forebears
NOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201930/ - 17:43 User:elizabeth.robinson Page Name:RES16, Part,Page,Edition:REU, 16, 1