Purple haze - an addiction to Michaelmas Daisies

I originally encountered the word ‘Michaelmas’ in my first term at (possibly) the worst grammar school in England. Stuck out in the middle of rural Worcestershire, Hanley Castle Grammar was a one-class-entry, rickety old former boarding

school, which taught very little grammar, as you will come to appreciate. Fans of Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell will know it through his novel Black Swan Green, by which time it had morphed into a comprehensive. When I arrived in September as a shining-faced 11-year-old (wearing a school cap), what I thought was going to be the ‘Autumn Term’ turned out to be the ‘Michaelmas Term’.

The feast of St Michael and All Angels takes place on September 29th, making Michaelmas the perfect name to attach to late flowering daisies which really come into their own from the beginning of September through October. As you can see from the attached picture (and my website header) I love them. Just ten miles from my old school is Old Court Nursery, Colwall, the centre of the Michaelmas Daisy universe, or at least in the UK.

Old Court has been going since 1906, both the enterprise and the outbuildings, and most recently has been run as a family business by Paul Picton, his wife Meriel and their flame-haired daughter Helen, who’s pushed them into the 21st century with a sparkling tweet feed on their website. Next door and attached to the nursery is the Picton Gardens, which has 400 varieties of Michaelmas daisies constituting the National Collection of Autumn Flowering Asters.

I had always thought of them as quintessentially English, a classic garden plant, immune from the trends of garden fashionistas thanks to the difficulty of timing them for Chelsea. And I really wasn’t sure what the difference was between an ‘aster’ and a ‘daisy’ – apart from the fact that a daisy didn’t go down with the Titanic.

A bit of research showed that I was wrong about the plants, but right about John Jacob Aster. They are all classified as Asters, part of the Asteraceae family, but instead of a vast swathe originating in the temperate climes of northern Europe, nearly all the popular Michaelmas Daisy cultivars come from North America. American botanists have classified them under the genera Symphyotrichum and Eurybia, while European botanists are sticking to Asteraceae.

Last Michaelmas, on a trip back to Malvern, I wandered into Old Court Nursery clutching a flower head from the light purple variety I’d inherited with my garden in Surbiton. The intention was to buy two or three plants of a deeper purple hue to add a nice contrast. An hour later and I was jamming 23 plants into suitable locations in the car and wondering how I could smuggle them into the back garden without my wife seeing how many I’d bought. Gambling, drugs and alcohol I can resist, but apparently not Michaelmas Daisies.

Most of this year has been spent keeping mildew off them. Despite buying varieties I thought were mildew resistant the plants have spent much of the year looking like they’ve had a gentle icing sugar frosting from Paul Hollywood and flopping about like teenagers (in need of a caning). Fungicides have been applied and more or less ignored. The leaves of the plants have generally looked terrible at times, but nevertheless they have struggled on regardless.

As for that essential Grump ineptness - I think I managed to achieve that by chopping them back in their pots in November and then forgetting which ones were the short varieties when I planted them out. Thus in the accompanying photo (left) you can see the variety ‘Purple Dome’ sitting at the back of the border, justifiably thinking to itself ‘what am I doing back here...?’

Ah well, there’s always next year.