It has been a good spring for auriculas in my garden and cold greenhouse. Now the plants need time to rejuvenate after flowering so I will have time to read the National Auricula and Primula and Society’s excellent new members handbook and some of the following epistles.
The powder blue auricula is in a home made ‘tufa’ pot
The Auricula: History, Cultivation and Varieties Allan Guest
Every now and then I decide to focus on one species or plant group. For 2014/2015 it is going to be the Auriculas. I need to practice the techniques explained in various books and learn’ what is what’ with florists Auricula. With that in mind I have joined the National Auricula and Primrose Society northern section and so far it seems very good value for money.
On to the books I am looking out for:
Auriculas – Their Care and Cultivation B.Hyatt Cassell, London. Auriculas Through the Ages: Bear’s… by Patricia Cleveland-Peck Auriculas for Everyone: How to Grow and Show Perfect Plants by Mary A. Robinson Auriculas and Primroses by W.R. Hecker (22 Apr 1971)
Primroses and Auriculas Wisley Handbook by Peter Ward The Auricula: History, Cultivation and Varieties by Allan Guest
Auriculas: Their Care and Cultivation (Illustrated Monographs S) by Brenda Hyatt (22 Jun 1989) Auriculas by Roy Genders (1958) Auriculas by Gwen Baker and Peter Ward (5 May 1995) Alpine Auriculas. by Telford Derek (1993) Florists’ auriculas and gold-laced polyanthus by C.G Haysom (1957) The auricula its culture and history. yr. 1898 by George William Johnson (1 Jan 1847)
Auriculas: An Essential Guide (Crowood Essential Guides) by Paul Dorey
Primroses and polyanthus by Harold Charles Taylor (1954) The polyanthus for garden exhibition and market (Foyle’s Handbooks) by Roy Genders
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With my bookshelf groaning under the weight of unread review books, I have declared an emergency Reading Week. Reading Week at university is a bit like half term – the lecturers get a week off teaching, and the students are supposed to use it to catch up on their reading list. When I went back to uni to do my Masters I dreamed of spending a lot of time reading, with the wealth of the university library on hand. The reality was there was never any time to ready anything that wasn’t immediately essay-related, which was a shame.
I have been sent two very different books on healing plants to review this spring. The first is ‘The Herbal Apothecary’. It’s written by JJ Pursell, an American “board-certified naturopathic physician and licensed acupuncturist”, and published by Timber Press.
In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.
Did you get new books for Christmas? I did. I got two lovely new books, a coffee table book on Mars (it has maps!) and an unofficial history of NASA mission patches (which came with stickers…).
This spring has been a good one for my Auriculas. I have been please with a powder blue flower that I hope to propagate by division in July. First I will water well and add some dilute feed.
If gardeners are exceptional people then buy them a copy of this book for Christmas. It contains 20 stories and profiles about encounters with gardeners and a day in their life to provide reading matter for dark garden-free evenings.
I wish to pay tribute and offer thanks to all those who have contributed to the tips on this web site through their words and wisdom in numerous books and published works. It is the inspirational gardeners, plantsmen and horticulturalists that are celebrated by authors, publishers and photographers, that deserve the praise.
For something a bit different this book on botanic art covers some of the unusual colours from black flowers, plants and seaweed like strange green, blue and puce pink.
2018 has been a remarkable year for tree books and the publishing trade has done a good job listing new and older titles. There is now a forest of books to acquire and collect and I hope they have been printed on paper from sustainable sources.