A disturbing and distressing story caught my eye in this fortnight’s Horticulture Week.
Aster laevis 'Calliope'
Brussels Bureaucrats, apparently, are about to smack us about the head
with a particularly ill-judged and potentially damaging piece of looney-toons legislation. Believe me, this one makes the outlawing of curved
bananas look sane and reasonable.
As part of proposed EU
legislation to regulate ‘plant reproductive material,’ Brussels wants all plant varieties to be listed on an
official register. To implement
that, they want every variety to carry an officially
recognized description which could run to two pages. Such descriptions would give details of
such life-threatening features as the length of the hairs on a plant’s stems.
This would be part of a plan to force nurseries and individuals to sell only registered plants.
Registration, because of the exhaustive information required, multiplied
up by all the red tape necessary to keep the maximum number of EU civil
servants employed, will cost a great deal of money to implement. And presumably, each registration will have to be approved by the Eurocrats.
It could therefore become illegal for anyone to sell
non-registered plants. This system
already applies to vegetable and agricultural crops, greatly reducing
diversity.
We do NOT want this to
happen to ornamentals – preferably not anywhere but absolutely NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES in Britain.
British gardens are among the world's most diversely planted. How many of these modest plants might be lost, if registration becomes necessary? Would registration condemn them?
If this legislation is forced through, it will kill small, independent
nurseries – the lifeblood of British horticulture and the main reason for our
unique horticultural diversity.
How many other nations can boast more than 70,000 cultivars and species
commercially available?
Holland? I don’t think so!
Dotty legislation like this could also clobber plant breeders. The big guys may be able to carry the
cost burden, not to mention the mind-numbing paperwork, but the little
chaps? No chance!
Professional and semi-professional breeders have given us so much in the
past. I’m talking about people who
tinker with specialist plant groups, often in back garden nurseries. They have bequeathed British – and
therefore world – horticulture some wonderful varieties. You may remember Woodfield Brothers’
spectacular lupin exhibits at Chelsea year after year, back in the, er, 1990s.
Many of us still grow the late Hector Harrison’s fascinating diascias. And what about Elizabeth Strangman’s pioneering
work on hellebores? Think of
amateur and semi-professional dahlia breeders, too, not to mention iris nuts,
saxifrage enthusiasts, fuchsia breeders – the list is long and diverse.
Fuchsia 'Rose Fantasia' Fuchsia enthusiasts have raised thousands of cultivars. If each has to be registered, most could be lost to cultivation.
So what happens if those unelected Brussels Sprouts have their way? What will that mean for the
diversity of planting in good gardens?
Do we really want our planting schemes limited to what is approved for
registration by those self-perpetuating grey scrubbers?
Currently, anyone can offer plants that they've bred - either to give away or to sell. Many are also happy to let their progeny go into cultivation without protecting their intellectual property, ie, without breeders' rights of any kind. I love that kind of freedom. It is part of our gardening heritage, just as it is also reasonable that professional breeders should have the right to protect or copyright their commercial progeny.
Let’s say, for example, that a perennial enthusiast has developed a gorgeous late
flowering aster, with bright, rosy-purple flowers and elegant, darkly marbled
foliage which is never disfigured with so much as a speck of mildew? Most British gardeners might give it
little more than a cursory glance. So if big horticultural marketeers fail to see any potential, that plant is overlooked, no one registers it, so good-bye!
But if you happen to be an aster nut, and have a nicely planted autumn
border, that variety could become an object of intense, insatiable desire. So imagine how you – or that person – would feel, if all the breeder can say is, ‘Sorry, love, I’d give you a root or two,
but I’m forbidden. I'd be breaking the law.’
The Begonia 'Sherbet Bon Bon' – a highly commerical plant.
Great, but I want esoteric, wispy things in my garden as well as big brassy jobs like this.
So what will British growers, breeders, gardeners and in particular, plantsmen
do? Will we fight such insane
legislation, if it looks like becoming law? Will we march in the streets, waving placards? Will we distract our MPs from worrying about their emoluments and get them help us out of our miserable situation?
And what will the Royal Horticultural Society do? Let's hope they're going to raise an almighty stink about this. If they don't, they dam' well should, and now and without ceasing until the nonsense is nipped in the bud.
We know that
DEFRA will probably be supine and continue to snooze gently while the
legislation goes through.
And probably, as gardeners, we’ll just moan a bit more, and then carry
on muddling through, somehow.
And in time, the less mainstream plants will quietly disappear. Or, they’ll be flogged, one at a time, at
garden fêtes or from Women’s Institute stalls, or exchanged among garden clubs until,
like Gardeners Delight tomatoes, they’ll become denatured, variable, of dubious provenance and no
longer so desirable.
In time, we could see our gardens – both public and private – lose their uniquely
rich diversity and become drearily uniform. And this won't happen just from Penzance to Inverness, but also from Britain to
Bulgaria.
How bloody awful, to have
one of our richest treasuries – our wonderful plant heritage – watered down to
a few hundred crappy cultivars which look OK in garden centres but have limited
garden value and are exactly the same, anyway, as what grows in every garden in the street and in every park as well. What a terrible thought! I hope I'll be digging in God's little acre, by the time that happens!
Anemone nemorosa 'Parlez-Vous' - a cultivar of quiet beauty, probably only of interest to a few gardeners. But I wouldn't be without it, or without a dozen other wood anemone cultivars.
I'm listening to Benjamin Britten's extraordinarily bouncy-rhythmed festival cantata
Rejoice in the Lamb.
This week's film, in honour of the recent date was
Battle of Britain. When released in 1969, this film was unkindly received. But it has lasted well and is a reasonably accurate telling of Britain's invasion crisis, in September 1940, averted by our gaining air supremacy over the Luftwaffe. Olivier's portrayal of Dowding was, for once, under-played and utterly convincing.
Hang onto your fancy plants - the grey men are coming to get them!