Tag Archives: Nepeta Six Hills Giant

the garden one year on

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The light is terrible today so it was difficult to take decent photographs, but I wanted to catch the garden as it is now, roughly a year on from when I first planted it – the photograph below was taken on the 8th May 2011.

As you can see the paving at the bottom of the garden, which looks so pristine in the second photo, really needs some attention – we laid it ourselves, very badly and in great haste, but I have just finalised a plan for that section of the garden and so it will be done properly when work starts in September.

In the meantime there is quite a bit of editing, re-thinking and general tinkering to be done. I love this aspect of gardening. Above, the Stipa arundinacea, Sisyrinchium striatum and Geranium pratense ‘Mrs Kendall Clark’  were my solution for the bed beneath the four Amelanchier I planted earlier in the year. Although now, having recently been introduced to Libertia, I am thinking that perhaps this would have worked better. I’ll see how I feel about it at the end of the summer when the bed has knitted together.

You can see the Mrs Kendall Clark in flower alongside Alchemilla mollis above, and below, alongside a billowing bank of nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’ – both are combinations which I think work well, and I am hoping that the Alchemilla will self-seed.

At the moment the main problem is lack of height in the righthand bed on the second level down. I think a small shrub or tree is what I need, and whilst I am tempted by exciting and beautiful plants at various nurseries (most recently a Cercis ‘Forest Pansy’), I’m managing to be uncharacteristically restrained. I want to think it through properly. This morning I settled upon a wigwam of runner beans as a good temporary fix.

It should look lovely once the beans, White Lady, are in flower, and I have another wigwam further down on the left hand side which will mean it doesn’t look too lonely.

Vegetables came to the rescue last year when I felt the left hand bed was lacking architectural interest – the artichokes I planted are doing incredibly well, so well in fact that I can’t quite make myself pick them. Although as my sister-in-law is staying tonight we might cut a few heads in her honour.

ferdinand & gertrude again

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The first ‘proper’ bunch of flowers from the garden. Ferdinand Pichard is looking magical, filled with buds and fresh green leaves. But there is also quite a lot of powdery mildew, despite my efforts to control it. I am also concerned that the spot I’ve chosen for Ferdinand is less than ideal – the reach of the hazel is such that the rose sits in shade for a large part of the day. I think the loppers will be out this weekend.

Gertrude Jekyll is producing beautiful fat flowers on a daily basis, despite being less that 2ft tall, though she is already beginning to creep up the wall.

I cut some nepeta, the first peachy-pink Iceland poppy, and a sprig of tarragon for height, and packed them all in an old marmalade pot along with the roses.

This is how they looked this morning. For those who are interested in these things, Ferdinand outperforms Gertrude on the perfume-front, which is impressive as Gertrude Jeykll is a renowned for its fragrance. And my mother, who has a Rosa Mundi (which looks similar to Ferdinand Pichard, but is a good 2-300 years older), says that Ferdinand Pichard has the upper hand there as well.

NB: Both Roses came from David Austin.

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”.