Harry Potter and the Glory of the Garden

The Royal Hospital Road in London. Two hundred yards from the Chelsea Embankment — past Christopher Wren's home for old soldiers — is an anonymous door in a high, bricked wall.

Beyond and within it lies the Chelsea Physic Garden, founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of the Apothecaries of London to teach apprentices the healing arts of growing plants which provided cures for the plagues and pestilences of the time.

On a cold and windy day in late autumn, there is something wildly romantic about the massed beds of seasonable unkempt shrubs and bushes.

But the Physic Garden still has a serious purpose It is a living and growing botanical encyclopaedia. In an upstairs room in the office building, Dr David Frodin examines a specimen that has been sent for his identification.

Dr Frodin — late of Kew Gardens — is Britain's leading taxonomist, which means that he knows more about the characteristics of 'flora' than anyone else in the country. He is the authority whom botanical gardens consult before they label their exotic exhibits and he represents the scholarly tradition of the Physic Garden.

Out in the garden itself, Elizabeth Royde-Smith is collecting seeds. She is a volunteer who, once each week, makes a parcel for dispatch to distant nurseries — working on a plan to ensure that, when a packet is labelled scabiosa columbaria, scabiosa columbaria is what it really contains.

Miss Royde-Smith describes herself as a refugee from life in a flat. When, on retirement, she gave up her own garden, 'found consolation' with the Society of Apothecaries with whom she has worked away each autumn for the past 15 years. Thanks to her, deserts bloom all over the world.

Chelsea Physic Garden has been exchanging plants with other botanic nurseries since 1683. But its heyday was in the early years of the 18th century, when Dr Hans Sloane — who gave his name to the London square and the silk head-scarved 'rangers' who are said to inhabit it — bought the manor of Chelsea.

President of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, Sloane granted the apothecaries a lease, in perpetuity, for £5 a year. The Physic Garden still pays its dues to Sloane's descendants, now the Cadogan Estate.

The 3.8-acre site is set out in celebration for the men who made the garden the envy of the botanical world. The beds of plants each bear the name of an ex-curator. But they are not dedicated to the memory of long-forgotten experts. They contain the plants which they brought back from exotic locations to add to the collection and, as befits the garden of a learned society, they are carefully labelled with the Latin names.

Warning

Last week, Friends of the Garden — who are allowed inside its high walls all year round — were shown the Taxus baccata — the English yew, to give its more colloquial name — and warned that its fruits are poisonous. More exotic tastes were satisfied with the Ehretia dicksonii — a native of China, whose brilliant yellow berries were first seen in Britain at the end of the 19th century.

Name a plant and it is likely to grow somewhere in the Chelsea Physic Garden. And the search continues. Rosie Atkins — the first woman to be appointed curator — has just returned from Marrakesh, bringing with her a specimen of the Rosa centifolia.

The garden is open to the public on certain days throughout the summer. Its entrance fee, like the Friends' subscriptions, helps to fund an institution which exists without assistance from the public purse — a charity which regards the education of the young as a crucial responsibility of those who love gardens.

Michael Holland — who runs the education and training programme — and Heloise Brooke — head of propagation — both began their association with the Physic Garden as volunteers. They regard it as their duty to explain to visiting groups of astonished school students that half of what they eat each day grows out of the good earth.

Sometimes, the media helps to educate the unbeliever. Thanks to Harry Potter, there is a great demand to see the mandrake plant (Mandragora officinarum).

Naturally, the interest of the young is concentrated upon the more unusual specimens — the Prumnopitys taxifolia, which plays dead when plant predators approach it, and the herbs which were once believed to combat, if not to cure, the Black Death.

But there is a practical side to the Physic Garden's educational work. This summer's newsletter advised on 'dealing with drought' and proposed such prosaic remedies as 'collecting rainwater in butts' and using 'plastic and ceramic pots rather than more porous and quick-to-dry terracotta'. The Physic Garden was, after all, created for the practical purpose of providing healthy remedies.

Real gardening has always been a practical business. It was Rudyard Kipling — the most English of poets — who insisted that 'England is a garden that is full of stately views', but he went on to remind us that 'half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees'.

The poem was called The Glory Of The Garden. The glory of Chelsea is not just the beauty of its appearance or even the extent of its collection. It is the fact that it is dedicated to the idea of gardens and gardening — the most English of preoccupations.