All for the Love of Salad!

The late spring weather brings a transformation of the hue of the gardens at Betley Court. Our bluebells Hyacythoides non-scripta are just going over, and in their place red campion Silene dioica, ‘Jack’o’the hedge’ Anthriscus sylvetris and cow parsley Alliaria petiolata appear.

The path to the greenhouse, skirted by bluebells

Red campion

Another plant that is doing well in May is the wild garlic or ramsons Allium ursinum that spreads from the bridge that crosses Tanhouse Brook down to Fern Island. It’s Latin binomial – meaning ‘bear onion’ in English points to the fondness bears have to this spring bulb. It is popular with humans too, a milder version of its culinary cousin, garlic Allium sativum. Along with Jack’o’the hedge (also known as garlic mustard) and cow parsley (mildly spicy, like chervil), it is one of the many edible leaves coveted by foragers, that grows in the gardens of Betley Court.

Ramsons, or wild garlic, in flower

Foraging for food has seen an upturn in popularity in recent years, often as a result of TV chefs extoling the virtues of unusual ingredients. We were lucky enough to be joined by a group of foragers last week; the aptly named SCoF (Sustainable Conversations on Food). They enjoyed a late afternoon ramble around the gardens, picking out various leaves and flowers to create a taster salad. The best thing of all was how they treated the gardens; not a leaf looked disturbed when they left, the mark of exemplary foragers!

Fern Island. Many ramsons grow along Tanhouse Brook

The flowering ramsons also prompted a tale from another visitor to the gardens. We were walking around the dingle, and looking down towards Tanhouse Brook, where ramsons blanket the banks by the stream. “You know, they’re what started all the trouble for Rapunzel. Well, her parents, anyway.”, she said. It seems, if you go back to the earlier versions of the fairy tale of Rapunzel, her mother developed pregnancy cravings for ramsons (or depending on your version rampion bellflower Campanula rapunculus, a root vegetable and leaf salad, or Valerianella locusta, lambs lettuce). She and her husband lived next door to a walled garden, owned by a sorceress, and within this garden grew the leaf Rapunzel’s mother craved. Out of love for his wife, he climbed into the garden and stole some for her, much to her delight. He returned a second time, only to be caught by the sorceress, who exacted a very severe punishment on them. When Rapunzel was born, the sorceress took the baby from the hapless couple, to raise as her own. She imprisoned Rapunzel in a tower, when the girl turned twelve, and the rest of the story is, if not history, a fairy tale involving a lot of hair and a prince. It is quite a price to pay for satisfying a craving for salad!

The Rebuild

The roofscape, every changing, a sign of progress

The new roof is coming along nicely. Week by week, more of the roof is clad in new tiles. There’s also been a couple of new additions. We lost one of the chimneys during the fire. It was the one situated centrally in the house, an addition in the mid-18^th century that heated the drawing room Nash’s room). When it cracked and crashed, it fell right though the house, dragging the fire from the attic into the cellar. The chimney has been beautifully rebuilt by one of Midland Conservation Limited’s apprentices (under expert supervision). His labours were even filmed for the regional news programme, Midlands Today.

The two buff chimney pots, replacements for those that were destroyed in the fire

As the roof frame gets its cladding of wood, it’s been time to the chimney stack finished. Two buff chimneypots were installed recently to complete the job. When the temporary roof is removed, the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that the two new chimney pots don’t quite match the others. Since the week after the fire, we have been looking in vain for a pair of buff Edwardian ‘faucet’ chimneypot. In the end, and with approval from various conservation people, we have made the substitution of two old-style, but newly manufactured pots. Ironically, the ‘original’ chimney pots, weren’t actually ‘original’ anyway. They were relatively modern additions from the Edwardian era. It just goes to show that with the passage of time, all of these new additions become part of the historic fabric of old buildings. The new materials will age and weather, and bed-in, and become part of Betley Court’s story, and one day it will seem to those that pass by to have always ‘looked like that’.

All best wishes

Ladybird Su

Dates

Tickets aren’t out yet, but the dates for the next open events at Betley Court are on the following weekends:

16^th/17^th July – open gardens, with some bookable tours with a guide

20^th/21^st Aug – the last weekend of our tours of the scaffolding

8^th/9^th Oct – open gardens