Members and guests attending the Caldbeck and District Gardening Club’s meeting on March 8 were enthralled by the talk presented by Doug Stewart.
Doug is a professional horticulturist, whose career includes being professional associate tutor with the RHS, a BBC radio presenter, and formerly head of horticulture at Bishop Burton College in Beverley, East Riding.
His talk was entitled The Drunken Gardener. We are assured that this is not a self-description but a way for the gardeners, who like a tipple, to consider a re-design their gardens or allotments.
He suggested we harvest the young shoots of nettles before they flower and don’t sting, to make nettle beer.
He suggested that we take a fresh look at our flower borders and think of them more as “cocktail” borders.
Plant juniper, coriander, bay, lemon bush, in the conservatory, roses, cucumber and so on as botanicals, for a little home-distilled gin.
Try cultivating a Cinchona tree – why? In the mid-1600s a noblewoman, living in Peru is said to have fallen ill with a fever and was advised to drink a concoction of the bark of the Cinchona tree to alleviate the fever. It is a natural source of quinine and was known as the fever tree – an excellent tonic for your gin!
Doug also suggested that our re-designed gardens and allotments could be turned over to producing Agave, native of Mexico.
The fermented sap of the Agave has been used as an alcoholic drink, known as pulque, for over 2,000 years and increasingly so since the Spanish invaded the Aztec Empire in the 1500s. A specific cultivar has the Latin name Agave tequilana – sound familiar?
Many other possibilities were mentioned by Doug, including apples (cider, Calvados, perhaps?) and pears (perry) fermented as an alcoholic drink since the Romans.
His final suggestion, and perhaps the least favourite of the evening, was the seed pods of the Monkey Puzzle Tree, said to be the oldest plant to be used to make an alcoholic beverage. A particularly unpleasant past production method has been suggested as chewing the pods and spitting out the residue!
A word of warning, however, the seeds are a virulent laxative. No home-made muesli there, then.
Doug’s talk went down exceptionally well, so we confidently felt there was little risk of hangovers, simply pleasant memories of a fun evening.
