By John Warrington
Last week I mentioned the wisteria growing on the wall of my house in England. On Mother’s Day I saw a friend who told me she had got a plant of wisteria growing here at home in Guyana. A long way from its native China and Japan. Growing, but not yet flowering. We gardeners are great optimists.
I suspect that she might have more success in the cooler highlands of Guyana like Region Eight, rather than on the coastal strip. This might also apply to my small holly tree which is growing very slowly and I think will never bear berries. A few weeks ago I started sowing seed of the Passion flower which is found growing all over Guyana. It’s a fine plant for scrambling over a fence or trellis and produces edible fruit as well as the most delightful flowers with biblical connotations.
I think that rather than smoke tobacco I much prefer to plant its ornamental cousins.
When you think about it, there is nothing sillier than sticking a handful of leaves into your mouth and setting fire to them. Almost as silly in my view is the habit of filling one’s nostrils with tobacco dust in order to sneeze, or mixing ground-up tobacco leaves with molasses and chewing them.
Although cigarettes, snuff, and chewing tobacco were delights long known to the native peoples of South America the main culprit for the introduction of tobacco to Europe was Sir Walter Raleigh, aided and abetted by Queen Elizabeth 1.
Nicotiana tabacum belongs to the large natural order of plants called the Solanaceae, but the good news is that it also contains other plants which are important from an economic point of view. Those economically important include the potato (Solanum tuberosum), the tomato (Lycopersicum esculentum), sweet and hot peppers (Capsicum annuum and C. frutescens) and the egg plant or boulanger (Solanum melongena).
Important ornamental plants include Brugmansia (Angel’s Trumpets), Datura, Cestrum, Brunfelsia, Petunia, Solandra, Schizanthus, Streptosolen, and the Salpiglossis many of which you already know and all of which are worth a place in anyone’s garden. The popularity of the ornamental members of the Solanaceae is due in no small part to the fact that they have the most alluring scents in the late evening and during the night, especially the ornamental tobacco of the nicotiana varieties and shrubs like Lady of the Night (Cestrum nocturnum).
Some of the members of the Solanaceae yield medicinal alkaloids as well as the highly addictive tobacco. The pre-war and post-war gardeners also relied on the tobacco plant for the most powerful insecticides then known to man. Liquid nicotine was once used to impregnate specially shredded paper which used to be placed in heaps throughout glasshouse ranges in Europe and North America. These heaps were then set on fire and the fumes killed every living thing. It was a highly dangerous operation and it is still a far more dangerous chemical operation than today’s organo-phosphorous insecticides such as Malathion, which has itself been superseded for the moment by a range of less toxic insecticides based on the pyrethrum plant. Evolution being what it is, I have little doubt that these new chemicals will prove to be ineffective in controlling pests and diseases which will develop resistance to them. I expect that scientists will have to try and change the genetic make-up of plants or of the pests and diseases which cause so much trouble. Meanwhile I do hope that they will start with the malaria carrying mosquito.
For those of us with small gardens I believe that the best control will always be by using the thumb and fingers to kill small infestations and the secateurs to remove badly infected material.
Don’t worry too much about all these problems, and may your God go with you.
