The Independent 1990

Anna Pavord

Full of nostalgia for the rampageous plants of the tropics where I recently spent some time, I went this week to visit Angus White, proprietor of an extraordinary new nursery, Architectural Plants. I found him hosing down a magnificent collection of spiky exotica arranged in front of a tin-roofed, wooden verandahed office, the whole scene straight out of the Caribbean. In leafy Nuthurst, not far from Horsham in West Sussex, this is a clever trick to pull off.

The first thing that needs to be said about Angus White is that he grows superb plants. His nursery is state of the art and his propagator, Peter Tindley, ran the Temperate Nursery at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for 15 years.

When you buy your plants, you will be told, whether you like it or not, exactly how they were grown; when and where the plant lives in the wild and what conditions it demands in this country. Sometimes, if it is on public view, you will be told where the parent plant is growing, so that you can go and check what your progeny will look like when fully grown.

His Magnolia delavayi for instance, were grown from the fine trees in the walled garden at Borde Hill, Sussex. In an age dominated by garden centres, where the only thing you will be told about your plant with certainty is the price, this is a miraculous achievement.

Mr White's ambition is modest: to own the best run and most interesting nursery in the history of the universe. He is worldly and slightly raffish. There are enough episodes in his past to make him prefer not to discuss his misspent youth. "Just another long haired nut," he says dismissively, leaving half finished threads of his life dangling in California, Hawaii and the back streets of Brighton, where he was engaged in making imitation antique furniture.

Gardening crept up on him relatively late but with a vengeance - not gardening in general but certain plants in particular. One day he sat down to make a list of them. They were all evergreen and exotic, plants whose shape and overall presence were more important than any fleeting diversion such as flowers. These were the same plants that later provided the nucleus of his nursery stock, and are the ones marked in his present catalogue as essential.

"If you want the extraordinary exotic effects that can be created with our plants," he writes in the foreward to his trendy long, thin catalogue, "you need to be ruthlessly uncompromising in your selection. To this end, the plants described as essential are essential."

The new exoticists, as Mr White terms the adventurous and slightly reckless gardeners most likely to understand what he is doing, must therefore have certain key plants in their collection. Podocarpus salignus is the standard bearer for the movement; luxuriant, evergreen, tropical in effect, "utterly beautiful" in Mr White's eyes, the tree will eventually reach 35ft, with drooping branches and long, narrow, bright grey-green leaves.

New exoticists, of course, cannot live in the chillier, more exposed parts of Britain. Appropriately, sybaritic locations in the South and West, protected town gardens or frost-free conservatories are the places where Mr White's plants will thrive and he is scrupulously honest about this in his catalogue. "Greenhouse effect?" he says, "Lead me to it."

All his plants are sorted into three categories. Red labels signify the most tender: wonderful Mexican agaves, tropical daturas, spikey puyas from the Andes, velvety-leaved tibouchinas from Brazil. Although they may spend their summers in pots outside, they need protection during the winter.

Most of Mr White's shrubs are labelled green or orange. Sensibly sited, he says - a phrase that begs a multitude of questions - the orange range should be hardy throughout southern England. Many have been propagated from parent plants that have survived harsh winters.

This category includes Corokia x virgata, a New Zealand evergreen shrub with white felted leaves and yellow flowers followed by brilliant orange fruit, and the fabulous Weinmannia trichosperma, "one of the top five" says Mr White, a small Chilean tree with immensely complicated pinnate leaves, as lacy as a fern....

The nursery was born out of enthusiasm rather than horticultural training. "If you've half a brain, you will find out what you need to know," he says. "People always surround their craft with mystique, alienating everyone from outside. When they talk about plants they start putting on silly voices, using impossible words."...

I was immensely cheered by all this. It indicated a nursery where people are in close contact with plants and where individual quirks are quickly picked up and catered for. I was also excited by the possibilities that these handsome plants conjured up, although my credentials for belonging to any movement calling itself the new exoticists are shaky.

I like the idea of creating a small courtyard garden, theatrical in the extreme, with a huge-leaved Tetrapanax, one of the most dramatic of Mr White's plants, looming out of one corner and the scalloped leaves of the Japanese cartwheel tree, Trochodendron araloides, whirling around in another. I would grow agaves and yuccas and succulent aeoniums, hopelessly frost-prone, but at least in pots they could be whisked under cover in winter. On Angus White's reckoning the rest would survive.

I like even better the idea of building a conservatory (I am always going on about this), not one of those glassed-in sitting rooms that designers call conservatories, but a real palace for plants. I would fill it dangerously to the brim with Mr White's red-label specials. That would see me through the grey winter days drunk on dreams of the tropics.