Liverpool botanic collection is entering Chelsea Flower Show

Mar 3 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Pinch meets the team taking care of one of Liverpool’s greatest secret treasures

WHEN Liverpool take on Chelsea, it’s always a nail-biting fixture. An eight-strong team of gardeners based at Greenhill nursery, in Garston, exhibiting at the Chelsea Flower Show for the first time in 40 years this summer, is looking forward to some similarly sleepless nights.

When you visit Greenhill nursery, which pre-1986 churned out bedding plants by the thousand, it seems a long way from the white stucco and Gucci suits of Chelsea.

The rows of rusting skeletons of abandoned greenhouses flanking the uneven road give the site a slightly forlorn air. Nature has taken over tracts of it, with rangy weeds poking through roofs, the silence disturbed only by the mellow coo of woodpigeons.

But, while the ground might be a touch tatty, the silverware in its trophy cabinet are the spoils of champions.

That’s because Greenhill nursery is the current home of Liverpool’s 250-year-old Botanic Collection, and plants from it will form the Chelsea exhibition from May 23. It contains one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of bromeliads – 200- plus last count – and rare orchids and palms.

The exhibit is being crafted in the warm and temperate west dock, maintained at a pleasant 70°F. Because it is the tallest greenhouse, it’s crammed with the tall palms and birds of paradise trees from the sub-tropics, and their fronds grazing the uppermost glass plates.

Their creation, in a 10 sq m “island”, is already taking shape. Feathery foliage plants border thick stripy bromeliads, sugar cane plants and delicate African medinilla.

The idea is that this is William Roscoe’s Myrtle Street garden, the former solicitor who started Liverpool’s botanical collection in 1802.

He collected plants from ships’ captains returning from far-flung corners of the world and wealthy city families.

In 1808, he listed 4,823 species. It became one of the best repositories for tropical plants in the country.

The Chelsea entry, which features the descendants of plants from 200 years ago, is dominated by a glasshouse frame.

The style they’ve plumped for is naturalistic, and it has some delightfully whimsical touches. A rainwater gutter runs down its height and ferns.

This is William Roscoe’s sanctuary, replete with a stack of gardening books, and if the judges – who take a dim view of over-liberality of props – allow it, a chair and jacket to seem as if he has been momentarily interrupted while studying the finer points of propagation.

The tale is to be set out in storyboards for new generations of children and adults who have grown up unaware of Liverpool’s botanical history. Originally displayed at Myrtle Street, off Mount Pleasant, in the mid-19th century, it moved to its second home in Edge Lane. From there, it was removed to Calderstones Park in 1964. It became dilapidated after labour disputes in the 80s and finally closed in 1984, when the plants were potted up and sent to Greenhill nursery. A third of it is now shown in Calderstones. The rest of the plants, for the past 20 years, have grown, bloomed and withered out of the public gaze.

Peter Morland, from Aintree, has worked with the collection since he started as a horticultural apprentice nearly 20 years ago. It has clearly been a source of some frustration to him that the plants he tends with such pride are for the most part hidden from view.

“People think that, because the glass houses were destroyed, the plants were dumped at the same time, but they weren’t. It’s good that finally people are going to start seeing the plants.”

“We want people to see we haven’t lost it,” adds Mike Brown, assistant curator of the botanical collection. “It’s frustrating growing them in pots rather than growing them naturally. That would be better for them, because some of them are hitting the roof. But it’s how they’ve got to be until we get a proper landscaped display to show them in.”