Product Description

Hardy gingers are in high demand again as gardeners have rediscovered their intricately constructed flowers, beautiful perfumes and lush foliage. This remarkable new book demonstrates that although most gingers are tropical plants, a substantial number are perfectly suitable in the English garden. Along with reviewing the stunning number of hardy gingers now widely available, the author highlights the decorative potential of these plants. They make dramatic focal points in tropical-style plantings but can look equally impressive in traditional herbaceous borders, woodland settings, rock gardens, water gardens and containers. This book brims with new finds that will tempt newcomers, delight enthusiasts and ensure hardy gingers a place in every garden.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #156010 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 268 pages

From the Inside Flap
This long overdue book is both comprehensive in content and exceptionally well researched. The text has both depth and breadth. It is scholarly, erudite, educational, and anecdotal.
Tony Schilling, V.M.H.

About the Author
T. M. E. Branney is co-owner of The Europa Nursery specializing in rare, temperate-woodland plants. Branney also designs gardens for private clients and has had articles and photographs published in plant journals all over the world. Mr. Branney lives in Devon, England.

Excerpted from Hardy Gingers: Including Hedychium, Roscoea and Zingiber by T.M.E. Branney. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Mention the word "ginger" to most Western non-gardeners, and even a number who do regularly cultivate their plots, and the familiar culinary root ginger, Zingiber officinale, is immediately summoned up as the one and only representative of the family. Yet the Zingiberaceae and the closely related Costaceae, which together comprise the gingers, are one of the largest groups of flowering plants in the world, with approximately 1400 species, and counting.

The word "ginger" is an Anglicised version of the Latin, "zinziber", although that name itself has a disputed origin. Some believe it to be derived from the Sanskrit "shrngavera", meaning "horn-body", a reference to the horn-like appearance of the rhizomes of the culinary ginger, Zingiber officinale, whilst others see it as deriving from the Malayalam word "inchi-ver", inchi meaning root. In either case, the origins of the name and its associations go deep into human history. There are an astounding 118 different words for Z. officinale, in languages as diverse as Icelandic, Hebrew, Swahili and Malay, a testament to the cultural importance of the plant the world over.

Indeed, as a group the gingers have a powerful and long-standing relationship with man. Zingiber officinale has been cultivated for at least 2000 years, and is included in Roman texts on cookery and farming from the 2nd Century BC. It has long been a prized spice. A ginger with an even longer history of use as a spice is Turmeric, derived from the rhizomes of Curcuma longa, and with recorded use dating back nearly 4000 years, to the Indian Vedic culture. But these two species are merely the best known of a truly vast array of medicinal, herbal, folkloric and edible uses to which the family has been put. These uses would (and hopefully one day will) constitute a book in themselves.

In this present volume our primary concern lies elsewhere. For gingers are also an exceedingly ornamental group of plants, ranging from the small, ground-hugging Kaempferia, with their often gorgeously patterned foliage, to the alpine Roscoea, the richly evocative Hedychium, the towering Alpinia and the tropical Etlingera. Many have flamboyant, intricately constructed and sometimes beautifully perfumed flowers that come in a comprehensive rainbow of colours, aside from true blue. Some even follow these with startling seedpods of scarlet and tangerine, and many can be appreciated for their lush foliage.

Most gingers originate in the tropics and thus are strictly the domain of the hot-house gardener, but a significant number come from temperate zones or high altitudes in the Himalayas and China. Still others have a natural habit that can be adapted to allow them to be cultivated in temperate gardens. It is these hardy or adaptable plants that form the subject of this book.

Gingers were once the very height of gardening fashion, and no respectable Victorian glasshouse would have been without at least a modest collection. Their fall from grace was both swift and ignominious, as the increasing cost of heating spelled the end of most tropical plant collections. Gingers were shunted out of many of those glasshouses that remained in favour of smaller, more constantly floriferous (I would be temped to say less aristocratic) subjects. The recent rise in interest in "tropical" style planting in both Europe and the USA has brought the hardy gingers into the full glare of horticultural fashion as never before. Many nurseries have sprung up to cater for this demand offering an exciting range of beautiful plants.

But fashions in horticulture, as in other walks of life, are notoriously fickle masters, and I fervently hope that, having grabbed the stage, the gingers are now here to stay.
The key to their long-term horticultural future surely lies in their diversity. Certainly, many gingers do make fantastic accents in tropical style plantings, but others can look equally impressive, and be equally successful in traditional English borders, and still others in woodland gardens, or rock gardens, or amongst shrubs, or beneath trees or even in water gardens.

In writing this book I have become hugely aware that the story of gingers is also the story of people. The story begins with the plants’ earliest uses as spices and in ceremonial and medicinal contexts, and goes through to the founding of the family Scitamineae by Carl Linneus in 1764, from which was born the Zingiberaceae courtesy of John Lindley in 1835, to the dedication of William Roscoe who was responsible for classifying and introducing many species in the 1800’s; many species in the 1800’s. Today the story continues with the introductions and enthusiasm of Tony Schilling in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and the modern day hybridization programmes of Tom Wood, together with the passion of nurserymen like Tim Chapman who seek to introduce thrilling new species and push the boundaries of what is growable, and the research of W. John Kress and others who seek to reveal the relationships between the gingers. Every plant in this book has it’s own story to tell, but those stories!
can only be learned because of the people associated with them.