Peter Sinclair: Smell the roses

By Peter Sinclair

I was brought up in Christchurch when it was still the Garden City. Sometimes during holidays I was sent north to stay with friends of my mother at Farndon House, a lovely old mansion at Clive midway between Napier and Hastings, which in those days was being run as an upmarket flower-farm.

Picking camellias with the dew still on them, doves murmuring,the river flowing, I thought I wouldn't mind being a flower farmer myself when I grew up.

Sometimes I wish I'd had the sense to stick with that boyhood ambition.

But although I let myself be swept up into a line of work which didn't leave a lot of time for smelling the roses, like most New Zealanders I still love flowers, which is why I'll be joining the thousands at the Ellerslie Flower Show (www.auckland 2000.org.nz/events.cfm) this weekend.

Flower shows became popular in Victorian England, when major nurserymen sent "plant-hunters" into the jungles, mountains and deserts of the Empire to bring back exotic novelties - rhododendrons from the Himalayan foothills, tree-ferns from New Zealand ...

These fiercely competitive, ferociously whiskered plantsmen - part-botanists, part-explorers - searched out increasingly sensational and grotesque vegetation.

They dug up the gigantic Amorphophallus titanum (www.aroid.org), a sort of hellish arum lily found in the hot, dark places of the world, and carried it back to Kew (www.rbgkew.org.uk) where its fleshy appearance and corpse-like stench shocked London at the end of last century.

They were only defeated by the world's largest flower, the extraordinary Rafflesia arnoldii in South-east Asia (http://home.t-online.de/home/0603995251/xtrc.htm) - it has no roots, stem or leaves and survives parasitically, producing only a single monstrous bloom which doesn't smell too great either.

Generally their finds were exhibited at Chelsea, the mother of all flower-shows and an English institution. You'll find it online at the Royal Horticultural Society's Website (www.ahs.org).

There are wonderful shots of ladies in terrific hats grimly admiring the latest petunia while being drizzled to death, and don't miss the excellent Virtual Chelsea digital panoramas - 360 interactive movies you control with your mouse. My favourite: Sir Terence Conlan's gold-medal winning Chef's Roof Garden, which looks both beautiful and nutritious.

You won't find any Amorphophalli this year. The weirdest plant looks shocked rather than shocking - a pallid new carrot, Yellowstone, which resembles an ordinary carrot that has suddenly heard bad news.

Among other introductions is a white Peruvian lily, Alstroemeria Crusade, named to celebrate 900 years of the St John Ambulance, and Penny Orange Sunrise, a new viola named after somebody's wife.

At Chelsea each year, magnificent gardens spring up with every appearance of permanence, only to vanish overnight. My favourite flower-show, though, is timeless - the superb garden of the Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust in New Plymouth (www.pukeiti.org.nz), to which every New Zealander should make a pilgrimage at least once in his or her life.

This Taranaki Eden - "a Garden for all seasons and a Sanctuary for all time" - with its late-season rhodos, lilies and Meconopsis betonicifolia, the legendary blue poppy of Tibet (www.botany.com/meconopsis.html), where only the bees raise their voices and the air is filled with the drowsy scent of honey, always convinces me I made a poor career-choice all those years ago.

* Peter Sinclair's e-mail is petersinclair@email.com