Tag Archives: garden design

i’ve been shopping

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Just back from a garden centre trolley dash with my mother-in-law Sue, who is one of my gardening mentors. Sue’s garden has featured a couple of times on the blog, and when I get back from the school run I will fix the links to the relevant posts.

Although I am often clear about what I want to buy, I don’t enjoy shopping for plants on my own. I think it’s because part of the fun is in bouncing ideas around whilst gazing at acres and acres of plants. Sue is the perfect shopping partner for this sort of expedition: we have similar tastes in plants (probably because her garden has been such an influence on my gardening style), and she gives encouragement when I am faltering and thinking “do I need three or seven?”. The answer is seven, of course, though her presence does help rein me in when I start thinking “maybe eleven, then…” because it wouldn’t be fair to abandon a passenger in order to squeeze more plants into the car.

preparations

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As the start date for the work on the garden draws closer, so my shopping list for the garden gets longer. Today I added Ranunculus, inspired by this beautiful bunch, which were a gift from friends who came to stay for the first weekend of the Easter holidays.

They have three daughters which works brilliantly, and usually all six children disappear to their bedrooms the minute they see each other. But the arrival of these heavy oak sleepers, which will form the retaining walls for three terraces, proved far more exciting than Sylvanians, nail varnish and videos. Instead of the usual disappearing act, the girls spent most of the weekend digging in the mud with Sybil and building dens on and around this huge oak platform.

Work on the garden starts next Monday, so this weekend I will start lifting and dividing the few plants that survived both my autumn cull and the winter. The list is not that long: nepeta, sedums, geraniums, poppies and a huge clump of macleaya which has already started its annual bolt towards the heavens. I’m not sure how well they will take being moved as they’ve all gone from dormant to turbo-charged over night. The lilac is probably my biggest concern: I like it, and want to keep it if possible (the flowers are already bursting open and filling the garden with the most delicious perfume), but it’s in the wrong place and I have a horrible feeling that now, while it’s in bloom, is absolutely not the time to move it.

Whilst I put my head in the sand about its future, Dan Pearson’s Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City is proving to be the perfect distraction. His account of the development of his garden in Peckham is incredibly inspiring, not least for his candour regarding mistakes and failures. I am also re-reading Beth Chatto’s fabulous book about her dry, gravel garden. Although Bristol gets far more rain than the South East, I still feel there are lessons to be learned about selecting plants in order to minimise the need for watering. Certainly, in my front garden in London I tried to get by with as little watering as possible and my experiments provided me with a good list of plants that could cope with limited rations. I am hoping to replicate the planting which included Euphorbias, alliums, california poppies, nepeta, Verbena bonariensis, a wonderful agapanthus, Nigella, a couple of roses, and on the railings an Akebia quinata intertwined with a beautiful rust-coloured clematis, the name of which I’ve forgotten. Typical. Though I expect it’s probably a long dead cardinal or bishop.

wish list

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Along with avoiding New Year’s Eve, I’ve resolved to do away with resolutions. Instead, I will make a list of things I’ll aim to do this year and not get too hung up on whether or not I manage to tick them off. It will be positive rather than negative. I am a great list maker, so this suits me well. I am also, rather tragically, a great retrospective list maker too – if a list is failing to get smaller, I’ll add stuff that I have done (made a bed, bought some loo roll, nothing major) just to tick it off. Pathetic really.

So, the 2011 list. I have always had a bit of a blind spot when it comes to house plants. I love having flowers in the house, but beyond spring bulbs, and cut flowers through the summer, I never seem to get around to cultivating proper house plants – Spider plants, Begonias, Aspidistras and so on. Probably because I don’t really like them much, I find them a little bit triffid-like and creepy. But I do like the plant above, and below (not necessarily a house plant, but happy enough to be one), in fact I covet these particular plants, which grow on a friend’s mother’s window sill. I love the rosettes of glaucous leaves, and the peculiar flowers that look so much like sweets. This is on my list, I will grow one this year…

only I am not entirely sure what it is*. I assumed that it was some form of house leek (Sempervivum) but when I searched online I found that the flowers don’t really conform. Luckily, the RHS course starts again next week, and I am sure that someone at the Botanical gardens will be able to identify it for me. I will post details when I know.

Other items on the gardening section of my list include: taking out the hazel tree and finding a suitable replacement; drawing up a scale plan of the garden in order to plot the terracing, which I hope to have completed in time to start planting in April; remembering to find out about potato days, and actually getting to one; getting on track with my section of allotment. I will also write at least one post a week on the garden. I found out today that my blog has been accepted by Blotanical, a fantastic online community of garden bloggers. I am really, really pleased – especially as most of the last month’s posts have been entirely garden-free and I thought I might not make the grade.

Other things for my list include: make a quilt, learn to crochet, make at least one dress or skirt for myself, curtains for Matilda’s room and some cushions. I’d also like to have a go at screen printing and take a short photography course in order to get to grips with my very exciting new camera, a Lumix GF 1. The photos here were taken with the old camera, just after a terrible downpour and the whole thing steamed up – hence the soft focus glow.

I want to do more walking, and of course the arrival of Sybil in our household will mean that I will have no trouble at all in ticking that one off the list at the end of the year. Cue gratuitous shot of fluffy puppy…

Some of the things on the list fall into the slightly retrospective category in that they are things I would do this year anyway: make marmalade, make a simnel cake and so on. And knitting falls firmly into this category as this year I will certainly knit. So I think I’ll formalize my knitting plans by saying that I want to knit a jumper for each of the girls and also for Joe (the last is very dangerously close to being a retrospective addition in that I have only a sleeve to go, and Joe’s jumper will be complete). As well as a tea cosy, and more socks, I want to complete at least one Fair Isle or stranded colourwork project – maybe the tea cosy, or perhaps a hat inspired by simplicity and charm of this.

I want to read more – more Elizabeth Taylor especially. I have just finished The Soul of Kindness, which, like all her novels is wonderfully subtle and understated, and lives on in the mind long after reading. I should probably work out a list of books, but I prefer to not to plan ahead too much with my reading, I like to be guided by my mood at that moment. Besides, Joe has challenged me to read Master and Commander, so for the next week or so I will be on the high seas.

I think that’s it for the list, for now. Better start getting on with it.

* I do now, thanks to atomiclulu, who kindly identified it – Echeveria Glauca

inspiration and experimentation

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So, the usual bank holiday weather. Not quite summery enough to lure tired, fractious children away from the tv and endless bickering over whose legs should go where on the sofa. Bored with being ref. I’ve retreated into my room to indulge in a little armchair gardening. Above is just a random selection of the gardening books I have amassed. Like cookery books there has been a strong shift towards gardening as lifestyle over the years and I’m as big a sucker for that sort of thing as the next person. And I don’t mean that disparagingly – I really rate Alys Fowler’s Edible Garden and Monty Don’s The Complete Gardener.  But I enjoy the slightly bossy tone you detect in books such as Violet Biddle’s Small Gardens And How To Make The Most Of Them , which was first published in 1911 and reissued in 1998 by Pryor (I picked up my copy in the local Amnesty bookshop for a bargain 50p, which probably adds to the pleasure I get from it). I suspect that Violet Biddle’s idea of a small garden is something considerably larger than our garden but I cannot find any fault with her head girl’ish assertion that : 

“It is imperative that a small garden, such as one generally finds attached to suburban or small houses, should be made the very most of…. even the tiniest piece of land can be made pretty and even profitable, if due attention be given it.” 

So, I have paper and pen to hand. A list is being written and sketches made. I plan to fill the garden with as many plants as I can (both edible and simply ornamental), whilst leaving space for children and chickens. My plans are quite simple, but my middle daughter presented me with a sketch of her ideas for the garden which include a stream down one side and several pergolas. I hope the chickens will distract her from the disappointment of finding that there is no room for water features of any description – even the paddling pool may be enjoying its last summer. 

I will try to write short reviews of the books above. They are all useful and I find that I refer to the often, sometimes for inspiration and at other times to remind myself exactly how to go about doing something technical like pruning a rose (will I ever feel confident doing this?). 

And so to my experiment: I still haven’t got round to buying the netting for my mangetout, but they are racing off anyway and have hooked themselves around the cat nip (Nepeta Six Hills Giant, I think) in which their pot sits. So far the proximity of the cat nip has kept the birds away. As to whether it serves as a workable support system, only time will tell. 

 

my old plot

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My frustration at not being able to forge ahead with the garden is compounded by my discovery of some photographs of our old garden. Sadly not decent shots. The one above was taken at the end of the hose-pipe ban summer of 2006, just before we left London for Bristol. You can see  two of  my three vegetable beds looking bare and rather sorry for themselves – though they did provide a fair selection of vegetables throughout the summer months. The previous year I had grown runner beans (Scarlet Emperor), courgettes, beetroot, tomatoes (cherries, beefsteak and plums), lots and lots of cut and come again salad leaves, rocket, basil and potatoes.

But 2006 was really hard. I decided to try my hand at onions and garlic as well as broad beans and various climbing beans (these were grown in pots in order to leave more room in the beds for potatoes). However, the lack of water was a real problem. From April until September we were limited to using what water we could siphon from the bath and the water butt . The onions and garlic failed as did all the crops I was growing in pots. Pretty depressing but lots of lessons were learned. 

What I loved most about my garden was being able to walk out of the kitchen to pick what I needed when I needed it. And this is something I plan to do again, albeit on a rather smaller scale. And although this picture and the one below don’t show the garden at its best (none of those pics are digital), they do remind me that growing vegetables in an urban garden is easily done and that I will be doing it all again soon enough. And perhaps this delay is no bad thing as it gives me time to really plan what I want to squeeze into what is a much smaller space. This weekend we will measure up and I will draw up some designs.