Plants Available 2018 - 2019

Updated 20 December 2018
Hello All, and a Very Happy Winter Solstice to you!


The nursery is still in its infancy, and as I'm building stocks, we have only a few species available this year. Many of these are however in abundance, so I'm happy to supply large quantities for those who need lots of plants to get their ground cover established for the coming season.

This coming March / early April I will have the following plants available for bulk orders.

Plants are available for collection from the nursery in Mid-Devon, with no minimum or maximum donation asked for.

Plants to be sent out via post require significant handling and packaging so for those we're asking for a minimum order of 100GBP donation + Postage.

For those looking for a guide price, we'd give a suggested donation of £3 each for Ground Cover plants, £5 each for Shrubs, and £7 for tree species. This is very approximate, and we wish that you simply give whatever feels right in your Heart. Please remember all plants have been raised organically, with great care to rebuild the soil and create a thriving nursery habitat.

Many Thanks for looking and please email at symbiosisnursery@gmail.com to place orders or make enquiries.

Siberian Purslane - a fabulous groundcover backdrop

Ground Cover / Herbaceous Species:

Wild Strawberry
Oregano
Oca
Siberian Purslane
Russian Comfrey
Dwarf Comfrey
Sweet Violet
Babington's Leek (Bulbils)
Rosebay Willow Herb
Perennial Tree Cabbages and Kales
Ox-Eye Daisy
Sweet Cicely
Lemon Balm
Spear Mint
Black Peppermint
Chocolate Mint
Sedum Spectabile
Ground Ivy
Vietnamese Coriander
Pulmonaria
Bugle

Rubus Odaratus - Thimbleberry Blossom

Shrub Species

Black Currants - Ben Hope

Gooseberries - a mixture of varieties

Worcestor Berries - a must try, like a high yielding delicious gooseberry!

Thimbleberry (Rubus Odaratus) - this variety has beautiful pink blossom. Vigorous plants!

Gingko Biloba Fruits Hanging

Tree Species

Gingko Biloba - a very slow growing tree, hailed for its medicinal leaves and as a nut crop.

Decaisnea Fargesii - Blue Sausage Tree (see my earlier article on this tree from 2012)

Devonshire Plum - a local Devon variety growing on its own roots. Deliciously sweet and aromatic fruits. Highly recommended.

Creating Your Own Back Yard Eden

Designing the Ultra Low-Maintenance Mandala of Fruiting Trees and Shrubs for Eden

Over the past year, I've had the great pleasure of working with a wonderful family who live in the wild woods of Sussex.

It was a special connection we made right from the beginning when I met them through catering at Green Earth Awakening Festival in Somerset last September.

I was truly touched at how they invited me into their home and treated me like one of their family through the entire process of designing and planting their forest garden, and also since then, simply as a friend.

These are the kind of exchanges I love, as I look to forge new models of how we can work together meaningfully - where money is a tertiary priority to the mutual feeling of gratitude, generosity and kindness we generate between us, and of course to the benefit that we are providing for the Earth as a whole. Through creating such beautiful natural sanctuaries that not only inspire our Hearts but nourish our bodies with a constant supply of lush organic produce too...

Here is what they had to say about working together:

Having epilepsy I have wanted an easy ‘Eden’ to feed my vegan husband and four kids. I looked everywhere for the solution and one day ‘tripped’ over Charlie while he was feeding hundreds of people with plants I’d never heard of. For the rest of our time there we ate all of our meals with him and I dreamily sat and looked through pictures of his work.

It had to be Charlie and no one else! Such gentle energy made it easy to learn from him and that Autumn we planted our 132 tree Forest Garden, mandala shaped Eden.

Charlie’s knowledge gave support to each tree as he carefully planned their homes and neighbouring plants and though I have a secret dislike of gardening this was a pleasure, and a rare experience of ‘the now’ as I listened and learned and forgot myself all the time wondering if his experience and time spent with his plant family had made him the gentle and wild teacher he is.

Charlie, I’m sure is from somewhere else (!) and brings back with him such magic. Apart from being the individual and teacher we loved as a family to learn from, he did what he said he would do, though more and better, unexpectedly better something that doesn’t tend to happen so much anymore.

Charlie made it clear for me to remember what to do after he went and now we have a magical Forest Garden to bring up and enjoy for life.

Thank you Charlie Wild.

You are a truly gifted teacher with immense knowledge and none of us can wait for any excuse to have you back!

Thank you so much too, my Wild Family! May your garden thrive and feed your children's children and may this inspire many many more happy exchanges like this too...

 

Saving Rare Apple Varieties - across Europe

I'm on the search for rare and endangered fruit varieties - especially apples!

I'm currently hanging out in Latvia which I hope will be my new home.

The land here is so pristine, so wild and undisturbed, compared to 90% of the rest of Europe, that I feel ready to put down roots here.

Yet even in this unspoilt corner of Europe, rampant globalisation and exploitation of resources still threaten.

Foreign logging companies buy up large areas of forest or undervalued land to plant monoculture forestry plantations.

I'm horrified to here of the orchards that sometimes get bulldozed in the process for 'progress'.

The real wealth of resources is being forgotten and destroyed. Latvia has a great treasure trove of old fruit varieties, many of them probably not documented, and most of them would have never have been trialled elsewhere. Huge potential, diversity and cultural heritage are now at risk from extinction.

We must act now to save our old fruit varieties from disapearing forever. All over Europe the situation is similar. In the rush to modernise, nations have forgotten the jackpot they're already sitting on.

If you have an old fruit variety that you value and would like to see live on, I will work to try to help you preserve it.

Simply send me enough graft wood / scion wood of your chosen variety to graft two trees. One of the resulting trees I will add to my sanctuary for further trialling. The other I will send back to you, to plant in your own garden or with friends, family or neighbours.

This way the variety will live on in at least two different locations, giving it a very good chance of long term survival. I would also hope to continue propagating from successful stock to multiply them further to be planted across wider areas of Europe.

If this sounds like a good deal to you, please get in touch and I will do my best to help.

Just mail symbiosisnursery@gmail with the story of your chosen cultivar and I will send back instructions on how best to get the scion wood to me.

Thank you. Let us act now to preserve the wealth of diversity that our children's children deserve to inherit.

Let us keep them in our mind and heart, and our Earth will surely prevail in supporting a healthy environment for the next generations to enjoy...

Another unidentified early Latvian garden variety. Very sweet, and these were ready from mid - July, just two months after blossoming!!

Hybridisation - the birth of fused possibility...

For a long time I've been curious about the nature of hybridisation - the phenomenon of two distinct varieties or species crossing with each other to form an entirely new and unique offspring.

Much myth and misunderstanding surrounds hybridisation - at school I wonder if children are still taught the wildly inaccurate assertion that a defining characteristic of a hybrid is its inability to produce its own offspring...

That is certainly not true in most cases in the plant world. Even F1 hybrids produce fertile seed, despite the popular misconception that they are sterile. Their seed merely produce very varied and unpredictable offspring (with which a plant breeder may treat as a challenge to produce something new and interesting...).

But in this case, what I'm most interested in is the possibilities of hybridisation in Forest Garden Plants - edible and medicinal perennial species. There seems to me startlingly little research in this department considering the vast possibilities involved, and the fascinating success stories from parts of the world where people have delved into such experiments...

The Shipova Pear: Whitebeam's love affair with a Pear!

Examples that are most widely known are those from the breeding programmes of Eastern Europe - especially Russia, Crimea, and ex-Yugoslavia. These have produced such delights as the 'Shipova Pear' - a cross between a Whitebeam (Sorbus Aria) and the European Pear (Pyrus Communis). The resulting fruit is certainly very easy on the eye, and though mine hasn't started cropping yet (they can take a while!), the fruits are said to be delicious, similar in taste to a Nashi (or Asian) Pear.

Sorbus species don't seem to mind who they pear with - even hybridising with members of the Malus, Craetaegus and Amelanchier genera too. The potential for further useful and interesting crosses are surely vast...

Another interesting cross is in a genus that's attracting lots of interest in temperate forest gardening - the Diospyrus tribe. Although the Kaki or Sharon Fruit (D.Kaki) is the better known member of the genus, it's fruits can only be grown successfully in Zone 7 or milder climates, which have reasonably hot summers. In the UK that confines decent cropping mainly to the South-East, and then probably only in good summers. Yet other members of the genus - D.Virginiana and D.Lotus are much more cold hardy, and able to crop in less favourable conditions.

The cross between D.Kaki and D.Virginiana has produced some very interesting cultivars, including: Nikita's Gift, Russian Beauty and Mount Goverla. These bear fruits similar in size to the true Kaki (which are 10x the size of D.Virginiana fruits), yet can survive the cold Ukranian winters where they are bred and can apparently crop even in the cooler summers that we have in south west England. I can see them catching on pretty quickly!

D.'Nikita's Gift' was one of the first Persimmon Hybrids which are now becoming more common

There is also an interest from the point of view of pollination. In small gardens, one may not wish to plant a second member of one species merely for the purpose of pollination. Members of the walnut (Juglans) family for example can take up a lot of space in the garden - yet the different species (J.Cinerea x J.Ailantifolia for example) have been known to hybridise. Does this mean it would be possible to just have one specimin of each tree and still get adequate pollination? Surely more research needs to be done on this, and it is my hope that articles like this might stimulate some further discussion on this curious topic.

Other genera I'd very interested to learn about cross-pollination and hybridisation in include Hippophae, Actinidia, Amelanchier, Citrus / Poncirus and Gaultheria.

If you have any experience or knowledge of such experiments or naturally occuring hybridisation, I'd be delighted to hear back from you!

Please do write in to symbiosisnursery@gmail.com or leave a comment here to share your own anecdotes. Thank you...

The Devon Whitebeam or 'Devon Sorb Apple' is a naturally occuring hybrid between Whitebeam and Wild Service Tree. Its resulting fruits may be more useful than either of its parents, and have even been sold commercially in the past. New Sorbus Hybrids are still arising today!

Teaching Forest Gardening and Meditative Foraging...

Over the past few years I've been invited to teach in various ways to share my knowledge and experience in Forest Gardening, and also in Foraging - helping others discover the joys of connecting with Nature and learning directly from Her - the best ways we can manage our gardens in a holistic, ecological way, or to simply enjoy the bounty that She provides for us in the wilds too.

Meditative Foraging, at Sagara Vajara's East Devon Forest Garden

 It feels like a wonderful gift to be able to share this connection, and I feel privileged by anyone who should invite me to do so.

So much so that, as with my design and consultancy work, I now work on a donation basis, leaving students the freedom to give or not give, however much they feel moved to, via cash, a thank you or just a hug or a smile. (Suggested Donations are available if that idea makes you panic!!)

All is very valuable currency, and I hope that the currency of my teaching will be inspirational for all those who can attend. Our connection with nature really is our greatest happiness, our true salvation, and it's my humble aspiration to help others to find and strengthen theirs.

If you'd like to book me for a teaching session in Meditative Foraging - exploring edible landscapes with all of our senses, or a talk on Forest Gardening, ways to grow crops in harmony with Nature, please just email - symbiosisnursery@gmail.com

Thanks,

Charlie