Gardening: Green shoots of discovery: Mary Keen unearths three plant specialists addicted to ferns, bamboo and box

SPECIALISTS are not as other gardeners. They use their gardens as research stations, devoted to a single type of plant. A passion for auriculas or pinks is easy to share; but a commitment to green plants, which may rarely or imperceptibly flower, is harder to understand. Ferns, bamboos and box sound like doubtful starters for the nucleus of a garden and the focus of a life. But after meeting their respective champions, I began to see their appeal.

Martin and Hazel Rickard are mad about ferns. In their garden, a steep north-west facing slope on the borders of Wales and England, they grow more than 950 varieties. Both trained botanists, they are formidably scholarly. They like to discuss the use of the hyphen in plant nomenclature and their plants all come with a provenance. Their recreation is recording the site of wild ferns not seen for 100 years or more. Life in the Rickards' home centres on the plants: in winter they banish their car to the poly tunnel with the nursery stock of plants because the garage is needed for overwintering large specimens of potted tree fern. So devoted are they to the latter that each year they build a straw house, with a polythene and silver foil roof, to protect the specimens out of doors. Dicksonia antarctica is not hardy except in sheltered Cornish or Gulf Stream gardens, but it winters under wraps here in Herefordshire.

The scholarship may be formidable but the garden is easy to appreciate. Ferns are wonderful winter plants. 'Most of them are always recognisable,' says Martin, 'which is more than you can say of most plants out of season.' The Rickards don't like 'blowzy flowers', but a few refined ones like snowdrops and hellebores are allowed to grow in the winter garden. In August only green - in 40 different shades - appears. Even if we cannot all register the botanical difference between one cultivar and another like Martin and Hazel Rickard, ferns are fascinating plants. Having been out of fashion for so long they should be due for a revival in British gardens. 'Everyone thinks that ferns need damp and acid soil but there are plenty that will stand dry places and some that positively need lime,' Martin says.

I like the idea of growing ferns as green relief to flowers, in semi-shaded places. They seem to me much more tempting than that over-used foliage standby, the hosta. On cool clay soils ferns are obvious candidates, but in dry corners the Polypodiums (for which the Rickards hold the National Collection), the Hart's Tongue (Asplenium scolopendrium) and the Shield Fern, Polystichum setiferum, are all easy. Martin and Hazel Rickard have now taken their hobby a stage further and are propagating and selling to the uninitiated. This year they will be showing at Chelsea.

Down the road from the Rickards is another specialist. Michael Brisbane of Jungle Giants is totally preoccupied with bamboos. He offers this warning: 'Bamboos are seductive and addictive and can seriously affect your relationship with less interesting plants.' So seductive does he find them that he has persuaded his father, who lives 10 minutes away, to allow bamboos to take over a corner of his garden.

There they are stalking about in clumps in wet Wales, pretending to be near the Equator. But it is a popular misconception that bamboos need tropical climes. They are quite at home in an English January. Like ferns, they are green in winter, and in the wind they are beautiful. 'Bamboo bends in the wind but does not break and the leaves rustle but do not fall.' Bamboo, it seems, can make you lyrical too.

Michael Brisbane says it can do everything; it is the most ecological plant of all. Paper and chipboard can be made from the pulp, the shoots are edible, musicians want the reeds and also use bamboo for didgeridoos, and you can make furniture and fences from the canes. As a hedge it is better than leylandii, as a garden plant it is restful and encourages meditation.

Michael says scornfully that the variety in a modern garden is provocative, not evocative. He is right; gardens ought to be calming places. But not everyone will forgo sensation for the purist oriental approach. Nevertheless, I thought that some bamboos could easily blend into a western garden. I particularly liked Phyllostachys bissettii for hedging, and Arundinaria murielae. As a specimen plant, the black-stemmed bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra) is exciting too, if you want a 12-footer in your garden. Jungle Giants' card catalogue ( pounds 4.36 including postage and packing) provides a good guide to bamboos for beginners.

Many plant addicts end up running nurseries which they stock from their own gardens, but Elizabeth Brainbridge's nursery is her garden. I suspect that, unlike the Rickards and Michael Brisbane, she developed her great interest and knowledge as her business grew. She is now the acknowledged expert on box for hedging, topiary and ornamental planting.

Walking round the three-acre nursery with its ordered rows of billowy box bushes, each a different green, she behaves as other gardeners do at home. 'This is the country garden that I do not have,' she says. When she married a cardiac surgeon, Mrs Brainbridge wanted time to travel with her husband. So she gave up her career and looked for something that could be done between business trips. As an amateur gardener she had noticed that it was very difficult to buy box. She liked it and decided to grow the missing plant herself.

She found two acres of sandy soil on the Sussex-Hampshire border and applied herself to researching and observing box. Fifteen years ago few people in this country had heard of more than three sorts. But the United States has a boxwood society and in Virginia they positively treasure it. So from America came the bulk of her collection. She also grows box from China, Japan and Korea and is interested in finding more all over the world. Like ferns, box is an agreeable winter companion and, grown naturally, is a pretty evergreen. Less prickly than holly, less sombre than yew, less dank than laurel, unclipped box is the answer for every difficult corner. There are fat forms and flat forms; there is even a columnar box like an Irish yew called Greenpeace, which stands out as a cheerful winter beacon.

Apart from its beauty the best thing about box is that it will grow anywhere, for anyone. I came home with Buxus Faulkner, which grows into a dome all by itself, and I ordered Greenpeace and some large leathery leaved bushes of Rotundifolia, but I could have been much more imaginative. There is box in every size and shape, both topiarised and free, in Mrs Brainbridge's garden. If I had to stick to one plant out of doors for ever, this might be it.

Rickards Hardy Ferns, The Old Rectory, Leinthall Starks, Ludlow, Shropshire SY8 2HP, tel: 056886 282.

Jungle Giants, Plough Farm, Wigmore, Herefordshire HR6 9UW, tel: 056886 708.

Langley Boxwood Nursery, Langley Court, Liss, Hampshire GU33 7JL, tel: 0730 894467 or 071- 722 5218. All open by appointment.

(Photograph omitted)