Flight of the aspidistra

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to the Garden Log with me, Ben Dark.

We're in one of those transitional weeks.

The heat is breaking, thank goodness.

It broke for the first time at about 2:00 o'clock in the morning with a big downpour.

And because we are so unused to rain, the outside had become a place to store piles of washing, and newspapers, and books from the library.

So I sort of woke with a jolt at the sound of rain, and dashed, bed warm, into the downpour.

The most welcome soaking at 2:00 in the morning I've ever had.

Just a few nights earlier, I'd been lying at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning on one of the chairs in the garden just trying to cool the body temperature, and now weathergods have done it for us.

They've sent us low pressure.

It rained again today, and goodness we needed it.

Walking over one of my local parks, walking over Peckham Rye just at the beginning of this week, there were cracks large enough for me to stick my fist and wrist into.

Deep enough to just pull the innards of the earth out.

And there, it felt like going over the sea bed with all the water suddenly having disappeared.

All of the grass was gone, and the only things left growing were the forbs, the weedy flowering plants in between that were there stranded like flopping jellyfish.

I was noticing something I'd never seen before, which was the dandelions turned bright red.

That added to the sea floor effect as well.

They looked like seaweed.

They looked like something red from the depths.

And, uh, I say from red from the depths 'cause red seaweed is the, the one that, that goes deep down, photosynthesizes in low light, and these were that same seaweed red.

It's a red that was caused, in these plants, by, by anthocyanins.

A very, very different red to the red pigment that plants use to attract birds.

Bird bright red is so cheerful and alive.

This one looks like something internal.

It looks like organ meat almost.

Anthocyanins, the, the pigment, are soluble.

They have osmotic potential.

That is to say, if you have lots of them inside a cell, it is more likely to draw water in than it is to have water drawn out of it.

And I think that by pumping their cells through of this dissolved molecule, they are less likely to lose water in conditions of extreme, extremely low water potential.

Really, really interesting to see.

But just one of the interesting things.

The rest of the interesting things that I've seen this week are detailed in the podcast that follows.

I'm talking about taking cuttings from perennial plants.

I'm talking about two unusual small trees/large shrubs, one that I encountered at Brockwell Park in the Walled Garden, one found in the Garden of Ancient Wonder at the Natural History Museum.

And I'm talking about aspidistra, the, the symbol of Victorian and Edwardian propriety.

The parlor plant that ended with the parlor perhaps.

Who has a parlor anymore? Who has an aspidistra? I do.

As of this week, I have nine of them.

Let's find out how that happened, and many other things, as we listen to The Week in Gardening.