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Ken Thompson: plant hitchhikers that just refuse to be left behind

'Brazen Hussy' celandine - www.alamy.com
'Brazen Hussy' celandine - www.alamy.com

A while ago I very much enjoyed an article by Helen Dillon in which she mused on the challenges and opportunities presented by downsizing from her much-admired Dublin garden, and home of 44 years, to a smaller property.

Much of her article was concerned with the plants she intends to take with her and, even more interestingly, those she plans to leave behind. Among the plants she’s had enough of is the purple-leaved lesser celandine, Ficaria verna ‘Brazen Hussy’, although she admits that it will probably hitch a lift on some plant or other and turn up in the new garden, whether she likes it or not.

I sympathise; during my recent move from one end of the country to the other, I brought a few plants with me. Not very many, mainly because I knew that in the short term there was nowhere to put them, but even so I was impressed by how many unintended hitchhikers I had also brought with me. These include foxgloves, forget-me-nots, opium and Welsh poppies, dog violets and assorted aquilegias.

Corsican Mint (Mentha requienii) - Credit: James Jenkins - Natural History Photography/Alamy 
Corsican mint (Mentha requienii) Credit: James Jenkins - Natural History Photography/Alamy

These can be fairly described as the usual suspects: plants that produce abundant seeds, and often form a substantial part of the garden soil seed bank – at least, that part of it that doesn’t consist of weeds. It’s hard to say whether my plants travelled as seeds and germinated on arrival, or as young seedlings; probably a bit of both.

Another of my hitchhikers deserves a special mention, but first a small digression is required. Long ago, Steve Furness and I shared a lab while doing our PhDs at Sheffield University. Steve now runs a rather splendid alpine garden and nursery in the village of Calver, a few miles from Sheffield. If you ever visit the Peak District (as you certainly should), I strongly recommend you pay a visit.

While returning from a walk in the national park, I would occasionally drop in at Steve’s nursery to say hello. On one of these occasions, Steve scraped some green stuff off a lump of tufa and said ‘Here, have some of this’. ‘This’ turned out to be Mentha requienii, by far the smallest and also most charming of the mints; a native of Italy, Sardinia and Corsica, it’s usually known as Corsican mint. Barely 1 cm tall, it bears a superficial resemblance to mind-your-own-business (Soleirolia soleirolii), but is a superior plant in every way, with tiny mauve flowers and a pungent mint smell.

I forget where I put this gift when I got home, but it hardly matters; Corsican mint is one of the great colonists, both by fragments of plant and numerous tiny seeds. It soon colonised my entire garden, popping up in gravel, paving and even the veg plot. It’s also moved on to my son’s garden, and we can both guess where he got it from. So no real surprise that it’s accompanied me to my new home in Devon, where I’m sure it will be even happier (if that’s possible) than it was in Sheffield.

The final thing to say about all these plants is that they are very welcome. They’re old friends, and like all old friends, I’m glad they decided to come along.

Ken Thompson is a plant biologist with a keen interest in the science of gardening. He writes and lectures extensively and has written five gardening books, including The Sceptical Gardener, a collection of his columns for the Telegraph. Visit books.telegraph.co.uk