I enjoy a quick foray into the National Plant Societies Marquee as there are always a wealth of unusual things on offer that aren't available from the large nurseries. This year the displays put on by all the plant societies of the North West are especially good, with a wide range of plants available, everything from Brugmansia, Agapanthus and succulents to carnivorous Sarracenia.
Where some shows have a small table devoted to each one, at Tatton they do things differently, grouping all the plants together to make displays of mixed plant types from all the different exhibitors. The effect is a great display which really relates to everyday gardens, and shows that anyone can be a national collection holder and still have an interesting and varied garden.
For me the best part of the marquee was the stall, manned by groups from across the north of England and featured a wonderful mixture of different perennials, vegetables and houseplants all grown by the members themselves. Each plant was lovingly grown and labelled, and sold with the helpful advice of the person that propagated it. The effect was like a giant garden fete and certainly offered something for everyone. I was in my element buying far too many plants. Oh well at least I'll be able to take some cuttings and bring some plants back for them to sell next year.
Another yellow flower
A beautiful water flower from a delicious water vegetable. Many names and many uses in Asian cuisine for this delicious vegetable growing maintenance free in water, sometimes in rice fields, often in lotus ponds after lotus season and often in lily ponds together with the blue water lily or blue lotus side by side.
Some other common names for the water morning glory are water spinach, Chinese spinach, swamp cabbage, water convolvulus, kangkong (kang kong).
Water morning glory grows as long runners on waters specially during the rainy season and has its blooming season by the end of the rainy season. Edible are the younger tips of the plant, i.e. the softer 20-40 cm of the youngest part of each runner. The older parts get tough - the younger parts of the plant are tender and tasty. Used often in any kind of mixed vegetables, soups, even as toping on vegetarian pizza. The blooming parts of the water morning glory usually are too old to eat. Choose young fresh branches. Water morning glory is a wild plant and abundant all over wet hot countries in South East Asia. Photo here from Cambodia. But the water morning glory also is very frequent in the Philippines - known as Kang Kong (kangkong).
Water morning glory flowers are in lilac as here shown on this picture or as plain white blossom.
In album Beautiful flowers
Info from:
Private Club
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