Category Archives: Garden tour

Edimentals in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanical Gardens

On Monday 12th September 2016 I visited the botanical gardens in Edinburgh, and I wandered around the collections looking for edimentals (edible ornamentals), many of which are also forest garden plants, in preparation for my edimentals walk the following Saturday. See http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=6572. Conclusion: there’s a lot of food in spring in the gardens!

Milde garden tour 10th September 2016

I didn’t take many pictures on Sunday’s guided garden tour at the botanical garden in Bergen at Milde, but here are a few! I was very impressed in particular by the Andean vegetables including mauka and maca! Thanks to Heidi Lie Anderson, Bjørn Moe and, in particular, skilled Andean gardener in Bergen, Bodil Oma!
It was also great to have the chance to harvest and share the Gunnera (Nalca) leaf stalk….the verdict was that it was surprisingly good, sweetly acid flavour! Here’s an album of pictures I took of the amazing Nalca food forests of Chiloe Island in Chile (including being shown by a local how to eat it!): http://www.edimentals.com/pictures/index.php?/category/10

See also http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?page_id=677

Weekend garden pictures 3rd – 4th September 2016

 

 

Climate Festival garden tours!

Lovely bunch of people on the two tours of my garden today! Forgot to take any pictures during the first tour, so just a couple from the second during the only shower…it had threatened to be a very wet afternoon this morning!!

050916: Added some pictures taken during the first tour by Elin Anita Mosbakk. Thank you!

 

Edinburgh guided edimentals walk

It’s confirmed that I’ll be doing a guided edimentals (=edible ornamentals) walk at the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh’s Harvest Festival at 2 pm on Saturday 17th September (free)!! Hopefully, I’ll have a few books for sale too!
I actually first grew vegetables when I was a student in Edinburgh in the late 70s when I was a student, inspired by local bicycle campaigner Dave du Feu (Spokes) who I met (both with bikes) on a train on the way up to Edinburgh…I remember him telling me about the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA), the organic gardening association and how to grow vegetables intensively on raised beds by planting diagonally… Just look what he started!

See the Facebook event here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1053863641370121/

http://www.rbge.org.uk/whats-on/event-details/4356

Day 1 of Naturplanteskolen’s Malvik visit

Some pictures from Saturday 16th July in my garden and forage on the shoreline below the house!

 

 

Naturplanteskolen at Ringve Botanical Garden

On the final morning of the Naturplanteskolen visit to Norway, we visited the Ringve botaniske hage​ in Trondheim. We started with the Renaissance garden, comprising a collection of 123 useful plants mentioned in Norway’s first gardening book, Horticultura, from 1694! We then wandered through the arboretum where mainly coniferous trees are planted geographically around the central pond, representing the Arctic Ocean! We stopped at the pond to talk about one of the world’s most useful plants,known as Supermarket of the Swamps in North America, Bulrush, cattails or dunkjevle! We passed a glade of Mandchurian walnuts (no nuts to be seen this year), then on to a naturalistic planting of Hosta, marvelled at the collection of old perennials, had a quick look at some interesting useful plants in the systematic garden, before finally walking through the “Parken” to the music museum from where we said our goodbyes :(   See the picture galelry at the bottom of this page!

In 2002 I made a renaissance salad containing 80 of the plants in this garden at the opening ceremony. Here’s a document showing what was included, more information and the Middle Age recipe used:

Download (PDF, 329KB)

Finally, here’s a little video showing the bulrush / dunkjevle pollen!

 

Daina and Martina

My latest garden helper is Daina Binde from Latvia (recently: UK) and has impressed me by her plant knowledge! Like my last helper Lorna Marie O’Lynn, she was recommended to me by Mount Stewart’s (Northern Ireland) wonderful Mr Neil Porteous!! Anyone recommended by Neil can stay here :)
She was joined by Martina who discovered permaculture through working for 6 months on farms in New Zealand. The girls decorated tonight’s permadiversity salad!

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