It’s amazing what you can end up talking about with volunteers at the Botanic Garden. This week saw the second of our Family Friendly Easter activities. I was fortunate to have a very able team of volunteers who gave their time to come and help me enthuse and recruit the next generation of gardeners. We have been busy sowing seeds with families take away and nurture at home. One session concentrated on flowers and the other vegetables. Check out our other family friendly events at www.botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk This is when the subject of Icelandic bananas came up. It also ties in with a favourite sight of most school children that visit the Palm House, the fruiting of the pink banana. The pink banana is properly known as musa velutina. The fruits are quite small, no bigger than a very chubby finger, but it’s the colour that really makes them stand out – bright fuchsia shining down from the canopy. The banana skins are velvety to the touch and peel back automatically when the fruits are ripe. Being an ornamental banana its fruits are jam packed with large, solid seeds which makes eating a pink banana rather tricky. However Lili from the glasshouse team thinks they may make an excellent seeds for pupils to take back to school and grow themselves. So we will endeavour to collect them from the ripe fruits this year.

I mentioned some of the changes that were happening last time in the outside collection. The new veg beds have received several sowings, and peas and beans are just starting to show their heads – now we just need to keep the pigeons off until they are established. The peas are protected by a thicket of hazel twigs up which the peas will eventually scramble.

Have you heard of National Bean Pole Week? (April 25th – May 3rd 2009) No, neither had I until I read my copy of the Ecologist! Before you run out to buy some imported Chinese bamboo canes for your runner beans, see if you can source some local poles that are helping to maintain coppiced woodlands. Check out their web site www.beanpoles.org.uk Or pop along to the Arboretum at Nuneham Courtenay where we just so happen to sell them! Anyhow, you can see how lovely they look in our veg beds if you’re not quite convinced.

Lastly Tom has been off to Great Dixter again to get more inspiration for the new mixed border that will grace the Lower Garden in the future. The designer’s idea is to insert a path that goes across the Lower Garden almost diagonally so that we open up the views of Christ Church Meadow and Merton Tower. Should be great, all Tom needs to do now is plan what’s going to be in it! Fergus Garrett, head gardener at Great Dixter has already been giving the Hardy team here a masterclass on getting the most from your borders, including something called ‘pocket planting’ which I ‘m sure is not what I envisage – gardeners with bulging trouser pockets of earth and perennials….