Ventnor (Again?)

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Hi everyone,

 

Apologies to anyone who has alreeady received this posting, but since the last crash, I am not sure that the computer is still sending messages; they are certainly not winging their way back to me as they did before so I thought I would re-do the address and try again

 

I agree with everything Rowan says about the I o W, I took an American visitor there after doing a delivery to Osborne (Queen Victoria’s mausoleum-like country house) and we had a wonderful time in the “Mediterranean” garden at Ventnor. We then drove down to the beach, the heavens opened and my old van couldn’t compete with the torrent of water coming down the road from the top of the cliff so we stopped off for the night in a convenient hotel half way up.

 

On mint and the sun, we grow five varieties of M spicata derived from Moroccan and Egyptian varieties so presumably they are used to it. In fact the commercially popular M spicata “Nile Valley” was one of our introductions from Cairo and we have been asked in the past to send  M piperata “Mitcham Black” to Alexandria, Egypt. I always thought M arvensis would grow anywhere, but the best I have seen in thirty years is in our garden which has received scarcely any rain since May. M haplocalyx, the Chinese medicinal mint is another one that will flourish in dry gritty soil, I killed all ours last winter by keeping it excessively wet ie in the same conditions as all our other mints. The best flavoured ones are the spicatas “Tashkent” and one of the “Morocccans”

 

Anthony