Our founder, Bruno, recently visited Mexico and was astonished by how many of the wild plants there were familiar favourites from garden design in the UK. It was also a rare chance to see popular house plants growing in their native, tropical environment, outdoors, including the Christmas favourite Poinsettia. He also saw sad signs of climate change dramatically affecting the natural ecosystems and landscape. He’ll cover all these topics in this series of articles, which also include some garden design tips for indoors and outdoors, wherever you live.

The Climate of Mexico and the UK

The purpose of my trip was to climb volcanoes in a small region about 5 hours drive east of Mexico City (black box on map), so I only experienced a tiny fraction of the incredibly diverse landscape and ecosystems. As you can see from these images, the climate of Mexico is hugely varied, from hot desert to Alpine tundra. While the UK map by contrast shows our uniform and famously ‘mild’ climate. Today, we’re used to having plants from all over the world in our homes and gardens, but in the days before globalisation the British plant palette was very restricted and, by today’s standards, quite bland. It’s thanks to places like Mexico, with its hugely diverse climate, that we can have flowers all year round in every corner of our gardens.

Popular Plants for UK Landscaping, in Their Natural Habitats

The wild plants that first caught my eye as familiar favourites from London landscaping were: Lupins, Nasella tenuissima (Mexican feathergrass), Salvia microphylla and its relatives in the Sage family. In the rest of this article, we will focus on Lupins, with the other plants to follow in subsequent chapters.

Lupins

Lupins are legumes, members of the bean (Fabaceae) family. The first thing to say about this hugely important group of plants is that they are nitrogen fixers. That means they naturally restore nitrogen to the soil, thanks to a symbiotic partnership with root bacteria. Because of that, various forms of beans and clovers are used in sustainable and regenerative farming or permaculture gardening practices such as crop rotation, green manures and intercropping, exemplified by the native American ‘Three Sisters’ approach which combines corn with beans and squash to establish a healthy ecosystem. If you want healthy soil, rich green foliage and natural defences against pests and disease, get some legumes into your garden!

It’s important to also mention climate change here. The production of synthetic nitrogen for use as a fertiliser (using the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia) accounts for 2 % of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). That fertiliser is essential for many of the crops we eat, but particularly for the crops that animals eat in order to provide us with meat and dairy products. These farming techniques often involve huge monocultures of corn or other grains that do nothing to support biodiversity (and are often drenched in pesticides and herbicides) and, in between harvest and fresh sowing, precious soil is lost to wind and rain, reducing the fertility of the fields and increasing flood risk. As we look for ways to reduce GHG and preserve the earth’s biodiversity, alternatives to industrial agriculture reliant on synthetic nitrogen - such as the farming techniques described above - are vital tools to keeping within our planetary limits.

The photo on the right shows the characteristic lilac blue of wild lupin flowers (probably Lupinus angustifolius), set into the stable woodland characterised primarily by pine and occasionally native oaks (possibly Quercus dumosa, although Mexico has more native oaks than any other country), and in the foreground are the leaves (with a flash of their red flowers too) of our next plant of interest: Salvia microphylla. I’ll discuss this remarkable aromatic ornamental and its equally fascinating family, the sages, in the next episode…