The electric limeade acid test

IN early March, in the way of a stop-motion picture jump, the bleached deathliness of winter lanes are punctuated as if from nowhere with electric limeade alexanders plants.

- Isabel Bannerman

Smyrnium olusatrum is a salt-tolerant, coastal biennial, its colonies marking where the sea meets the land from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic. The urgency of these leafy lovelies lifts the spirits so much that, some years ago, I collected seed, spreading it around the non-garden, behind the hen house and compost. Foolish woman, mused the finger-waggers. They will invade.

The question of whether plants are too thuggish to be admitted is frequently a cause for friction in this garden. The balance between a good coloniser and an outright menace is a regular subject for much dispute. I am the more experimental, louche gardener, but much less engaged in the daily toil on the battlefront. When the head gardener on a job looked askance as I spread Foeniculum vulgare about, imagining seaweed plumes waving amid the herbaceous we were planting, he remarked laconically that had he found them growing like that in his borders he would have weeded them out, pronto.