Certified gold at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, a beau- tiful and purposeful botanical garden is about to be welcomed onto the College’s grounds. Designed by Helen Olney, the garden was the brainchild of Old Alleynian Pro- fessor Chris Griffiths OBE and Dr Su Lwin, joint founders of the Burma Skincare Initiative (BSI). The hope is that it will help to raise awareness of the charity, which provides resources, research and education in the field of dermato- logical health in the Southeast Asian nation of Burma (also known as Myanmar). The garden includes native Burmese plants such as the Athryium fern, the waterlily known as ‘kya’ in Burma, the intricately textured snakebark maple and the Himalayan birch. The many plants within the garden have been chosen to pay respect to those people, with often treatable skin conditions, whom the charity strives to help. Non-botanical flourishes in the seven by twelve-metre plot include a ‘stupa’ (a traditional Burmese site of worship and meditation); seating inspired by a Bur- mese letter meaning ‘coming together’; and, above the lily pond, a house on stilts. All of the plants in the garden grow in both Burma and the UK – and they include dill, Dulwich’s namesake herb, reminding us of the habitat which would have surrounded us had we lived here around a millennium ago. We have come full circle, with the BSI’s dill and the cornflower providing tangible living links to Saxon age Dulwich and to Edward Alleyn himself, with their very roots in the Col- lege’s soil. ◉
was coming into full force, and with the simultaneous sowing of annuals, perennials and biennials, the balance of flowers has taken on a different timbre every year as different species bloom in sequence. Even within grass- es, Paul has sought out old-fashioned varieties such as crested dogstail or sweet fennel, resisting monoculture in favour of plants which are more soil-suitable and – in the case of the latter – good for pollinators, especially hoverflies. The flowers themselves appear in waves, the first ones to arrive being poppies, corncockles and cornflowers, with their papery, pastel-blue petals. Paul reminded me that the cornflower is the College’s emblem: it was Edward Alleyn’s favourite flower, and on the very first Founder’s Day in June 1620 (a year after the College’s founding) he started a tradition – carried on up to the present day – of wearing them to the event. The cornflower also appears in the work of Raymond Chandler OA. It seems only fitting that a plant so steeped in Alleynian history itself should now, thanks to Paul and his team, proliferate on our grounds. You can find moths, bees, damselflies and even the Darter dragonfly, as well as edible plants such as hedge garlic, now appearing on the grounds. This shows the diverse impacts which even small changes can have, and which can be seen throughout the ecosystem, such as birds finding food in seedheads left un-mowed. But Paul’s plans do not stop here: he hopes to add a ‘but- terfly section’ to the ‘herbaceous walkway’ which is already providing human benefits. It really is a lesson in ‘rethinking and re-educating ourselves’, as Paul puts it, and he and his team are – figuratively as well as literally – path-finders.
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