The Plants That Came From Afar

Steven Desmond searches for beloved garden staples that originally came from foreign lands and suggests where you can see them in their old homes

- Steven Desmond

Imagine you woke up one morning and looked out of the window to discover that, as if in a tale by the Brothers Grimm, all the plants of foreign origin in the garden had mysteriously vanished overnight. An inevitable legacy of the nightmare might well be the realization that so many of our familiar friends come from quite unexpected places. How could that be and how did they get here?

It is a curiosity of our climate, oft remarked upon by visitors from overseas, that so many exotic plants are quietly prepared to grow in our gardens without looking as if they would rather be at home. That irritating combination of changeable weather, rain throughout the year, and the subtle influence of the Gulf Stream makes this a happy home for plants from climates as various as Argentina and Siberia, growing side by side in our gardens as if that were perfectly normal. We have, at least for now, a Goldilocks climate.

A cursory walk round my own garden to see what came from where was a sobering experience even for me. The group of small-leaved hebe species politely gathered round the front door, for instance, all come from New Zealand, the only home of that genus. My favorite is Hebe rakaiensis, introduced by earnest botanists in the late 19th century. If I wanted to see it in its native clime, an ideal place to do so would be the lovely botanic garden at Christchurch on the South Island (www.ccc.govt.nz). Reports of its utter destruction by the famous earthquakes are grossly exaggerated, thankfully.