Thanks for downloading this garden cutting from the National Trust. I'm Alan Power Head Gardener at the Stourhead estate in Wiltshire. In these shorter programs, I'm focusing on a particular aspect of our work. I'm in the walled garden and I'm about to go into the Pelargonium House, which is a really important part of the walled garden, but also a really important part of the history of
Stourhead. It tells the story of one of the great owners of the property in the 19th century, Sir Richard Colt-Hoare. Richard Colt-Hoare was an amazing man and without him, Stourhead wouldn't be what it is today. He looked after his grandfather's original creation, which is the wonderful landscape garden at Stourhead. There's nowhere better really to read how fascinated Richard Colt-Hoare was with plants than in the Pelargonium House. I started at Stourhead over 20 years ago and when I first
started here, this greenhouse wasn't standing. This collection didn't exist. So I've watched its evolution over the time and I've watched us learn from the different types of plants in the collection. Now I'm off into the Pelargonium House to see Emily Utgren. She's one of our gardeners at Stourhead. Hi, how are you doing?
Yeah, good thanks. Good thanks. I'm just doing a little bit of picking over of the Pelargoniums. There's quite a lot of dried leaves that we like to take off and make sure that we display the Pelargonium in the best possible way. These are South African plants. So you can imagine the conditions that they'll need almost a little bit deserty, nice and dry but also quite cool.
I take off any flowers that are even on the way to going over to finish flowering so that we get a continuous display of flowers, which we do actually achieve somehow throughout the season with the with the help of a little bit of feeding with tomato food to keep them flowering. But also the picking over and the controlling of any wee beasts is always vital.
And it's interesting, isn't it? We constantly now refer to them as Pelargoniums and a lot of people out there will know them as the Geraniums you grow in your conservatory, you know, and particularly the zonal ones and they're called zonal ones because of the patterns on their leaves. But even standing in front of the collection that we're looking at and they're all completely different. Yeah,
we're looking at zonal ones, cut leafed ones. But the unique thing I suppose about the collection that Richard Colt-Hoare developed was that they were the predominantly the scented leaf Pelargoniums.
Yeah, the chocolate, almost smelling ones, but mint chocolate almost. And of course, some of them are even used in cooking
And they used to lie the leaves in the bottom of the sponge cake tin, didn't they? And then the flavour would, would ooze up through the cake.
Ooze is a good word, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine when that's cooking? And you in, from, on a, on a cold day in October, you know-
And I've eaten a geranium cake flavoured with the scent from the leaves up through it. And the lady who made the cake topped it off with cream. This, it was a really nice cake and then sprinkled over the top of rose petals. No way you can eat the rose petals as well and it was just so nice. My dad wouldn't eat it. He said I'm not eating roses, but it was really, really lovely this collection of plants. So I think as gardeners, you know, we, I know lots of people
say, but we genuinely never stop learning. I mean, we're looking at a great variety of plants here and, you know, most Pelargoniums are fairly easy to take cuttings from, you know, you can strike cuttings fairly easily. You pick the right time and you pick a very healthy growing tip. But actually some of them have been a real, real challenge, for example.
Oh my goodness. Yeah. Triste a, is a species of that we grow here and it's a proper desert dweller. So in the summer it will disappear and look dead.
It's not the most attractive Pelargonium is it?
No. But when it gets going, when it's, you know, when it knows that the, the South African summer's over, it will spring to life. But you can't get cuttings off it. They don't have that kind of stem. So you need to go for- for seed.
And over the years, you know, we've been, we've been learning from that and they become more and more challenging. Interestingly enough, some of them are pollinated by bees and you know, the other insects that come through, but Triste is a moth pollinated one. It's night scented. So it's moth pollinated and we've learned all of these things over the years. So developing this collection over the last 20 years has been fascinating.
1997 was a key point in the, in this collection, we discovered that there was an appropriate Victorian greenhouse being demolished in Sussex. So we were offered it, we brought it back, restored it, painted it, rebuilt it and it's here today and it feels as if it's always been here.
And It works better than most greenhouses I know. They knew what they were doing. So the design itself in terms of air circulation, ventilation, all of these things, it works.
And all the winding gear works and-
It's, it's so cool.
There was kind of champions of greenhouses back then and this is a Foster and Pearson and they were, you know, they were up there with the great greenhouse engineers of the time. Thanks for downloading this garden cutting from the National Trust. You can make sure that you never miss an episode by subscribing on your player where you'll also find this month's full length episode of the National Trust Gardens podcast. See you next time.
I'm Bettany Hughes. I've been visiting National Trust Properties all my life. But in this series of podcasts, I'm going beyond the delights of teas and topiary to reveal the surprising European roots of some of the most splendid sites in England. You can subscribe to my series by searching for Bettany Hughes's 10 places Europe and us on your podcast app.