Meetings with plants in winter: fennel

Bramble & Briar #85

January’s the absolute earliest I’ll even consider cutting down these standing silhouettes

I do like to nibble on something while I’m gardening. Nothing quite so unexpectedly delivers like a fennel seed, picked off the remains of a dried stem and bitten into, delivering an instant hit, a cooling, aniseed breeze that sweeps around the chambers of your skull before whooshing off towards the lungs. It would be alarming, if it wasn’t quite so fantastic. Legal highs for the gardener, the whole year through.

I grew fennel here some time ago, but managed carelessly to eradicate it from the borders in one of those weeding frenzies, as infrequent as they were ill-advised, that used to take a hold of me once or twice a year, with dire implications for the self-seeders among the garden community. Some peer-pressure shame-release-valve that finally blows in the mind of a habitually laissez-faire gardener; events which have also cut swathes through the populations of hellebores, honesty and Verbena bonariensis. Last year I brought bronze fennel back in, and merrily cast seeds of the bog standard variety about the place. Okay, it can put itself about a little too liberally but, as with all similarly eager plants, what are you doing that you don’t notice the seedlings before they reach six feet tall? Hoik them out if you don’t like them. Or bribe someone else to – isn’t this the kind of thing that people have children for?

This character has been around for a few years now. Easy to tidy up the gnarly remnants of old, woody stems, but I like to leave them in winter in case someone’s made a home there

Healthy, ferny, bright green foliage, and airy, acid yellow flowers. Height, and a wafty kind of volume – an absolute gift to the gardener, as well as the cook. A mature plant may have a prodigious tap root, but wiggle a fork about in the soil and it’s not hard to pull them out by the handful when they’re young. And I rather enjoy planting a scheme by subtraction, rather than addition – a process of editing out the superfluous and carving the light back in. Pruning at ground level, with implications for what happens at head height, or thereabouts. It’s easier to do when the plants are young, but not impossible when they’re older.

I spent a few hours last week freeing the borders of the Friday garden from the over-exuberances of fennel. Still left plenty, though. For the kitchen. And the gardener’s snacking.

Still plenty of snacking to be done here. I wonder if it’s too potent for the birds?