Tag Archives: garden

gardening in january part I

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I always find it hard to connect with the garden at this time of year. Exciting catalogues keep plopping onto the doormat, but it’s difficult to remember how the garden looked at the height of summer. The sight of the bare earth, the hideous temporary fix for the path, and the hazel tree that still, to my mind, needs to go, convinces me that it’s a hopeless case. I’m easily persuaded that there’s no point investing more money in what is obviously a lost cause. Autumn’s hangers on, whose presence I valued in late November and December, are now looking increasingly scraggly and give the garden an abandoned air. All in all it’s not very enticing.

But there are signs of life here and there: new shoots pushing valiantly through the mud, fresh buds on the shrubs and the early flowering clematis, so I am forcing myself to draw up plans and make lists. And trawling through the photographs I took last year shows me that even if my plans are pretty minimal, the garden will do what all gardens do, even half abandoned ones: it will grow, bulk up, fill out, knit together and at times look very lovely indeed. At least that’s what it did last year, as you’ll see from the photographs below, the first of which was taken at the end of April, and the last in mid-September.

I think it’s vital to keep a photographic record of a garden’s progress. If nothing else, the  photographs will give you the impetus to get out in the worst weather to tackle boring jobs such as cutting back the Buddleja, or securing dangling vine wires, before it’s too late. It is also satisfying to see how far you’ve come and how much the garden has changed. And, possibly more important than all of that, photographs serve as a valuable reminder that gardens are in a constant state of flux – they change with the seasons, appearing fresh and newly minted one day, jungly and abundant the next, and then suddenly, or so it can seem, it’s all gone to seed and the show is over for another year.

I can’t quite bring myself to post the photograph of the garden as it is today – too grim. But I will, when I write part II of this post – some time next week, I hope. For now I am going back to my catalogues and my rather long wanted list.

virginia’s moment

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Despite this sudden Indian Summer, there is no doubt about it, Autumn has begun.
In the park the trees cast long shadows and their leaves appear to be on fire. In front gardens, and all across the St Werburgh’s allotments, the last of the sunflowers and Cosmos, even when slightly bedraggled, look stunning back-lit by the sun. And everywhere Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) is doing her glorious
autumn thing – cloaking walls and fences with curtains of leaves which range from
palest apricot through to deep plummy red.

In certain lights, the leaves are almost neon.

Over the last week or so I have become slightly obsessed with the little patch of Virginia Creeper in my own garden. It comes from the garden behind us, and some twenty or thirty feet below. I do battle with this plant every year, cursing it in the spring and summer when I regularly release my plants from its clutches. Yet this year I’ve been completely seduced by this flash of scarlet beyond the purple haze of the Verbena.

back

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On our return from France yesterday afternoon I was hit by a delayed panic about the garden: had it survived without being watered for two weeks? I braced myself for a scene of devastation – beds filled with scorched, parched vegetation, bare earth etc.

Instead, my nasturtiums have formed a hedge and the verbena towers over our heads.

The nigella has flowered and the sedums are starting to take on their autumnal blush.

And last, but by no means least, my anemones are looking rather lovely, better than they’ve ever looked before in fact. Phew!

Then again, perhaps it’s been raining.

pick of the week

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Back in May, when I planted up the newly terraced beds, I was worried that I’d left it all too late for there to be any chance of the garden looking interesting this summer. But three months later, although in no way finished, the garden is full enough to provide me with a daily fix of flowers. Not massive bunches for huge vases, but small posies just large enough to fill a stem vase, little jug, jam jar or tin can. The bunch above, which includes roses, fennel flowers, sweet peas, sedum and achillea (I was guided by the colours on the golden syrup tin), was picked at the start of the week for a friend’s birthday.

The next morning I gathered the slightly garish little selection above for the bathroom windowsill. It’s not the most tasteful affair, but something about the clash of the nasturtiums and achillea with the soft mauve of the Verbena bonariensis, and the hazey blue of the catnip pleases me – it feels slightly 70s for some reason, like a jolly wallpaper design for the kitchen. Later the same day, rather obsessed with the nasturtiums, which seem to be taking over the garden (more in another post), I picked the flowers below.

The need to keep the sweet peas producing prompted the picking of the next bunch, that and the desire to have the scent filling the kitchen. Incidentally, this vase is my best bargain ever – 25p in a charity shop. I don’t know anything about it, it has no mark, but I love its nipped in waist and the graphic grey, black and white stripes which are enlivened by little raised dots of orange and teal – odd and lovely in equal measure.

By midweek my inner Constance Spry had awoken fully, and I found myself tip-toeing through the flower beds in my pyjamas, scissors in hand. No plant was safe. Sedum in particular has been a regular target – fortunately I have a lot of it – and it has proved to be not only a very useful filler, propping floppier flowers up and bulking out the little bunches, but also a star in its own right. I like mixing it with knautia and fennel fronds -

and with verbena bonariensis, which I also have in abundance.

Yesterday I went all out and just cut a bit of anything I could reach without falling over: the last of the buddleja (Black Knight), more verbena, knautia and nepeta, sweet peas, again, some roses – Gertrude is in flower once more –  scabiosa and a lone anemone.

It’s not a great picture, but this little jug of flowers smells amazing – the combined scent of the musky, honeyed buddleja, the heady sweet peas and the fresh sweetness of Gertrude Jekyll is out of this world. The perfume curls up the stairwell from the kitchen so that every now and then you catch a little waft as you move around the house.

The jug, one of a pair, is a bit of junk shop treasure rather than a charity shop bargain, and it’s perfect for flowers. I’m planning to use it for the Nigella which is about to flower any day now.

the remains of the day

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I picked these flowers last night, just before some friends came over for supper. I took a photograph with a view to finally writing a post about how much the garden has come on in the last month – the table was nice and clean, there were candles, all very lovely. But due to entirely predictable seasonal difficulties (all of which involve children in combination with one or more items from a long list that includes dog, water, food, clothing, bed, tv, wii, door slamming, mud, lost stuff, squabbling, money, nits, and even gorillas) and the added stress of a complete iphoto meltdown, in which it appeared that an archive of some 11,000 photographs had not only become corrupted, but also ballooned to over 22,000, that post has not materialized.

In its place I give you the flowers as they were this morning. They look like this still, only the milk has finally been put back in the fridge and in its place there is a bottle of red wine and the remains of supper.

Garden update to follow soon.

henleaze garden shop

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Having waved two children off to camp on Monday morning I celebrated with a trip to Henleaze Garden Shop, an extraordinary garden centre stuffed into what appears to be a suburban back garden. I have to admit that it doesn’t look very interesting from the outside – riot of bedding plants probably sums it up, which is fine if bedding plants are your thing, but they aren’t really mine, or at least not in my tiny garden. Had it not been for a friend’s enthusiasm for the place, I would never have bothered with it. But I ventured over a few weeks ago and have returned at least five times since (in fact, as I write this, I’m thinking that perhaps I could squeeze in a quick visit before collecting a tired, and no doubt muddy, Matilda whose coach is due back in an hour).

My mission on Monday was to buy some winter savory and a few bamboo poles for the runner beans I’m putting in at the bottom of the garden. But shopping for plants doesn’t really work like that does it? I spotted the winter savory, found the bean poles, and was then distracted by a tray of the geum I bought last week in Wales. As I stood gazing at them, wondering if I could justify buying a few more, Julie, the friend responsible for my Henleaze Garden Shop habit, tapped me on the shoulder. She can’t keep away either. Having admitted to one another that we’d both come in for specific things and weren’t going to buy anything else, we swiftly gave each other permission to go off piste. So I came home with two globe artichokes and three geums as well as the other stuff.

I planted the artichokes in an old tin bath on the first level of the terracing to provide some height and a bit of drama. I thought they looked rather lovely, and was feeling very pleased with myself, but this morning they looked tragic and floppy. I think they need to be moved – I suspect they need deeper, freer draining soil.

Fortunately all my other Henleaze Garden Shop purchases are thriving. Above is the daylily, Hemerocallis “Margaret Perry”, one of several Hemerocallis available at HGS. And this what I like about the place – for such a small garden centre there is an astonishing amount of choice. Not just one cultivar of daylily, but three or four, and the same goes for all manner of herbaceous perennials. Last time I visited I watched as one member of staff potted up a rose for a customer who had bought it as a present. How many garden centres do that, I wonder?

Looking at my garden today, I’ve decided that I need more of the scabious I bought a few weeks ago, and no doubt I’ll have more before the day is over. And that is the downside of having a nice, well-stocked garden centre within such easy reach: I can make a snap decision like that and then act on it all too easily. No need to reflect on it. No time to reflect on it.

But two things before I head out … as you can see from the first photograph, the walls and windows have been painted (though scaffolding remains). And hooray! this is one of those Friday posts highlighting local shop, person or thing, that I promised would be weekly and then failed to deliver. I’ve taken an executive decision to move my own goal posts and decided that this sort of post will be… sporadic.

liriodendron tulipifera

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Until last week, I’d never seen a Liriodendron tulipifera in flower before. I’d seen photographs of the Tulip tree’s curious flowers in various gardening books of course, but it’s not quite the same as seeing them in the flesh. And I can’t say I was especially excited by what I’d seen in my books: the flowers are not charming like the Amelanchier’s, or beautiful in the way that some apple and cherry blossom is. But I have to admit that I did a double-take worthy of You’ve Been Framed as I strolled under the vast branches of the 175-year-old Tulip tree at Glendurgan Garden.

I’d approached the tree from the shadier side, which gives an amazing view of its immense gnarled trunk and lower branches, but no hint of the flowers nestling amongst the foliage on the sunnier side. But once you pass under that great limb in the photograph above, the branches beyond are filled with green and apricot tulip-shaped flowers.

The petals are quite rigid and fleshy, and with the bracts* at their base opened out they reminded me of tiny plastic tea cups – the sort of thing I used to trip over all the time in the girls’ bedroom once the lights were out.

Having seen this magnificent tree at Glendurgan, I was curious to see how the one at the Bristol Botanic Gardens was doing. I had planned to photograph it yesterday, but when the sun came out at lunchtime I found myself sitting by the lake admiring the medlar instead – next week perhaps.

Although people come from all over the world to see the garden’s camellias and rhododendrons, the maze below is another big draw, for adults and children alike. As we walked further into the garden, below the Tulip tree, the valley was filled with shrieks of delight as children leapt out at one another from behind bends in the maze. Parents stood at various vantage points around the maze and shouted directions to their lost offspring, whose bobbing heads could be seen moving with increasing urgency up and down, back and round between the neatly clipped hedges. A couple of children, my own included, ended up simply vaulting over at various points as they raced  each other to the little thatched hut in the centre.

As you can see, despite the gorgeous weather, there really weren’t many people about, and at times we found ourselves completely alone. However the beach at the bottom of the garden was packed, not with people sunbathing or swimming, but with paddling garden enthusiasts – no one had thought to bring their swimming things.

* I’m assuming they are bracts, they may not be but I can’t seem to find anything detailed enough to confirm one way or another, though an article on Wikipedia does note that the petals are actually tepals.

rain check

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I never thought I’d be quite so delighted to wake up to rain in late May, especially as I live in Bristol where it rains, and rains, and rains. Or at least that’s how it feels. But this morning, the sound of heavy rain on the skylight at the top of the house washed away the guilt I’d been feeling about my neglectful ways down at the allotment.

As one child is slightly under the weather, and at 8.30 was deep in hibernation mode, I was relieved of the school run and so spent the next half an hour inspecting the garden instead. I love the way fat rain drops sit in the pleats of poppy petals and fill tightly packed rosebuds. On the leaves of Alchemilla and Nasturtium, rain drops look like beads of mercury, but as neither of those two plants are really in their stride at the moment, I wasn’t granted that particular treat this morning.  The top two photographs are William Lobb; and the bottom one is the Iceland poppy, Papaver nudicaule ’Party Fun’, which pops up as pure white, fiery orange, electric yellow or this rather pretty, pearly pink.

As you can see, the rain brings out the Iceland poppy’s other fans as well…

We tend to think of snails as slow creatures don’t we? Well this particular poppy was gone in an instant. There wasn’t much point stopping the carnage, instead I watched transfixed as the snail gobbled up the petals, one by one. Then I plucked him off and threw him on the ground where the birds would see him. I’m a bit hopeless about actually crushing snails myself, but happy enough to put them in the path of certain doom. I’m not sure what that says about me.

Tomorrow I’ll be writing what I hope will become a weekly post in which I review or profile a local shop, designer or artist. I have taken a two year break from journalism, and although I haven’t missed it much, I do miss writing about people whose work I really admire, and would like to share with others. Tomorrow’s profile will also involve a really lovely giveaway, so come back and follow the link.

not exactly chelsea

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Although all the celebrity chit-chat drives me mad, I follow the coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show in the same way that others watch Wimbledon. Each year I am amazed by the seemingly mature gardens that are conjured up, lush and lovely, within a month (I’m talking planting here, not the planning, obviously), each one looking as though it had been there forever. I sit, pen and paper in hand, furiously jotting things down as the names whizz on and then off the screen faster than you can blink, making lists for the next trip to the garden centre. Inspired and fired up by the things I have seen, I head out into my own garden and find myself back in the real world…

Oh dear. The first stage of planting is finished and the garden now looks rather odd, and certainly at odds with the vision I have in my head. Whatever one may see at Chelsea, a real garden, three days after planting, does not look lush and full, it looks startled and empty with far too much bare earth. The temptation is to pack more plants in, and quickly. But I am restraining myself because I know I’ve probably taken a few liberties with spacing already. But if I’ve been impatient, and a little greedy, I know that room can be found elsewhere, further down the garden where progress has ground to a halt, and probably won’t resume until the autumn.

The photographs above and below were taken last week, whilst I was laying the membrane which lies under the slate. The path looks very wide at the moment, and a little harsh, but I hope that the creeping habits of both Alchemilla mollis and Stachys byzantina will change all that. The beds either side of the path are filled with drifts of Salvia ‘Blue Queen’, Achillea (label mislaid, so we’ll have to wait and see exactly what it is), knautia (another label gone astray – bad habits die hard) and Perovskia ‘Blue Spire’. Elsewhere I’ve used Nepeta ”Six Hills Giant” as a speedy filler and to get the garden looking a little less anaemic by mid-summer. I was hoping to plant several Euphorbia characias wulfenii, but have not been able to find a single plant in any of the four big nurseries that serve Bristol. But I’m prepared to wait, it can always be added later – it’s not as though a garden is ever finished, is it?

I’ve planted lots of sedum, some of which were plants I managed to save and then divided, and others Sue kindly donated from the allotment. Verbena bonariensis crops up all over the garden, first as a ‘hedge’ of sorts on the top terrace where I’ve put it in metal containers, then it lines the path on the next level down, and finally I’ve dotted it here and there in the beds above. It will provide height, which is rather lacking at the moment. There are also four roses, with more to come, and a couple of really lovely climbers, neither of which I’ve grown before and can’t name either because the labels are still on the plants – so not lost, but not accessible right now. Splashes of hot pink, to break up the dusty blues, will come from Geranium psilostemon and Cistus purpureus. How long all this will take to knit together is anyone’s guess, but I hope it will feel fuller next summer.

I’ve also scattered seeds of Nigella damascena (Love-in-a-mist) and the beautiful Californian poppy, Eschscholzia, along the edges of paths and into the beds, and the girls have poked nasturtium seeds wherever they wanted. Up on the top terrace I’ve filled old wine boxes with mint and tarragon, neither of which I grew from seed I’m sorry to say, to add to my pots of chives and marjoram. The wine boxes came from Majestic who were happy to hand them over in exchange for a small donation to charity – though I guess they’d let you have them for nothing if you were also buying the contents. I have one more to do, and in this I will sow some of these…

Looks and sounds mad, I know, but I saw Alys Fowler do this on her wonderful series last year, and she had a harvest of pea shoots all summer long. She used exactly the same brand, the sort that you would usually boil for a million hours to make mushy peas, and had great success. They are incredibly cheap too – this packet was just 69p. I will keep you posted on the progress of what is now known as “project pea shoot”.

a new plot

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There is so little left of our old garden that it’s difficult to know where to start with this post. I’ve been trying to photograph the garden in its current state for a couple of days now, but it’s hard to capture anything meaningful when all we have is bare earth. So I thought I’d begin with a few photographs of the plants I managed to retain. Above is the fabulous poppy that I put in a couple of years ago, just after I’d completed the first round of culling the plants I didn’t want (namely lots and lots of Fuchsias – too many for a garden this size). It sits in a corner with some Anemones, a Perovskia and the surviving clump of Macleaya. Below is my neighbour’s rose, which forms part of the ‘borrowed’ view along the right hand side of our garden. I have plans to complement this with a rambler on my side, a little further along – possibly Veilchenblau.

This year the unknown rose has flowered more profusely than in previous years, and earlier too, I think, which has revealed a relationship with the Viburnum opulus ‘Roseum’ at the end of our garden that I had neither planned nor noticed before. Or perhaps it’s the Viburnum that’s out earlier than it should be. Either way I adore the strange pom-poms this Viburnum produces. They start off pale green, becoming whiter as they puff up until they look like unseasonal snowballs. On the downside, they are a magnet for aphids which appear in their thousands, turning the stems black with their tiny bodies. I squish them and flush them off with a fine spray of water and watch as the ants, who like to harvest their sweet excretions (urgh!), look bewildered at the aphids’ sudden disappearance. They scuttle up and down the stems, stopping every now and then to have astonished conferences with each other, their little antennae twitching in surprise. Ha!

The Viburnum is a young plant, and I’m not convinced that it’s in the right place, and I know I’ve made all the usual mistakes – too close to the fence, lopped off the wrong branches etc etc. But, the way the pom-poms echo the roses, both of which look particularly magical at dusk, really is lovely, so if I move it later this year, it won’t be going very far. And I will certainly wait until it is dormant having learned from my mistake with the Lilac which, sad to say, did not survive the move.

Below is the garden as it is today, waiting for me to whittle down my ridiculously long list of plants to a more reasonable (and affordable) length.

I also have to get lots of bags of rubbish off to the dump, lay the membrane for the path and dig in a little more organic matter. I hope to start planting by the end of next week. The bottom of the garden needs a total over-haul, but Joe and I will tackle that in the Autumn when I know whether or not the tree can go. The next photographs show how the garden was two and three years’ ago. What they don’t really show is how steep the slope was, and the degree to which this foreshortened the space. Although the garden is not a thing of beauty at the moment, I do think that it’s an improvement on the green slope we started with (somewhere I have an ariel shot taken from the roof by the surveyor, I’ll post it when I can find it). The plan is to have deep beds either side of the path that I’ve marked out with old sacks. I won’t get much height this year, but by next I hope that the bottom section will be screened by some of the planting. I want to create more of a sense of moving from one space to another, which in turn should make the garden feel longer. It already feels wider.

In this photograph you can just see the edge of what has now become the first level of the terracing. In the photograph below, the girls are sitting on the top of four vast concrete steps that dominated the first third of the garden. There was very little we could do about them apart from build out and over them. Doing this not only improved the garden but also increased the sense of space in our kitchen. It also brought home to me how much space I was losing to the slope of the garden, and what I could reclaim with terracing.

So, I think I’ll leave it there. Funny how exposing this feels. Having blathered on about plants and gardening, and what I’d like to do to the garden, for the last year, finally having to share the work in progress is almost as daunting as the work itself. But that’s the thing about gardening: it isn’t instant, no matter what those makeover shows may say.

Three last things:

i) Eagle-eyed readers should just be able to spot the Macleaya, the poppy and the lilac (now deceased), to the right of this pic.

ii) Thank you so much for all your lovely comments regarding my ridiculous accident – all were greatly appreciated and a couple made me laugh out loud.

iii) I passed the first lot of my exams! Hurrah!