A week ago, on the school run, I spotted these violas growing on the pavement.
It would be hard to think of a more inhospitable place for a plant to put down roots: solid concrete with a light sprinkling of grit, heavy shade from parked cars one minute and baking sun the next, not to mention the ever-present threat of dog pee or a heavy foot.
I felt sure they wouldn’t last long. But I was wrong, they are still there today, a sweet surprise for anyone who happens to spot them.
The first week of school is over and we are all shattered: the children already look slightly grey and, after just five days, I am completely sick of the school run. A quick poll of fellow parents at the school gates on Friday proved that I am not alone. Not that this helps much, but it does go some way towards making me feel less inadequate.
Over the weekend we tried to get a grip on the things that regularly conspire to bugger up the week: lost uniform; nits; lost homework; nits; ill-fitting daps (that’s Bristolian for plimsolls, which are in turn quite distinct from trainers); lunch boxes filled with half-eaten yoghurt; nits; letters and forms from teachers relating to all sorts of events which will, if ignored, come back to haunt me and a child will cry. The riot act was read several times, the volume ranged from cold hiss to very loud. Only the garden behaved itself and provided these flowers for my parents, who came to stay on Sunday night.
I think that perhaps the first week back at school is a little like the first bicker-filled weekend of the holidays. It’s a hellish stand-off during which you have to make it clear, again (how long will it take them to learn this particular, and to my mind, rather simple lesson?), that you don’t enjoy being treated like a skivvy and that please and thank you are non-negotiable. By Sunday evening all the attitude, tears and general moaning seemed to have blown over. Yesterday I bundled them off to school with almost cheery faces – mine being the cheeriest of all, of course. My mum and I then went on a fantastic tour of Bristol’s garden centres in search of plants to fill those late summer gaps. Anemones were at the top of both our lists.
Back in London my mother gardens two plots. One is her own garden in which she has to work around a design she inherited from the previous owner and which is, quite literally, set in stone. It is a paved courtyard and all attempts to increase the size of the beds only result in the excavation of vast amounts of rubble and concrete. The second garden has been created from scratch on a plot of land which belongs to a neighbour and sits to the side of her house. When she took it on it was nothing more than slightly scrubby grass, but now, three years on, it is a really beautiful communal garden. Annoyingly I don’t have any photographs, but my mum has kept a record and I will write about it at some point as it’s a brilliant demonstration of what can be done on a tiny budget.
And talking of budgets, Henleaze Garden Shop came up trumps with one of the widest selections of anemones at the best prices (£1.75, £3.99 and £5.99 depending on pot size). In the end I came home empty handed having found it impossible to choose between Anemone hupehensis ‘Splendens’, Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’, ’Queen Charlotte’, ‘September Charm’ and ‘Whirlwind’. I wanted them all, but space is getting tight in some parts of the garden, and elsewhere beds will be completely re-worked in the spring. But of course now is the perfect time to buy these plants as they are in flower, and will look glorious for another month, maybe more. I will certainly return to HGS in the next week or so, but only once I have really considered these options and worked out where the plants will go. An anemone update will no doubt follow.
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.
I spotted this cat on a windowsill as we drove back from the allotment, its bright yellow eyes having caught my attention. It was a second or two before I noticed its companion.
Just round the corner from the cats, this local landmark, the two-headed goose, looked particularly peculiar and wonderful against Sunday’s clear blue sky.
And finally, though this may not be the best bit of graffiti on Stokes Croft (in fact I can assure you that it isn’t), I think you’ll agree that it has a certain charm. And it’s certainly one up on the usual so-and-so loves so-and-so 4ever.
P.S. The last episode of Botany: A Blooming History is on tonight, BBC 4, and the first two episodes are only available for another week on i-player. If you are remotely interested in plants do watch them. I was so touched by the idea that early botanists believed that plants ate soil in order to grow; stunned by the extraordinary names that plants were burdened with before Linnaeus streamlined the system; and this morning my first thought on waking was about tomatoes tasting sweeter when grown in a factory’s waste carbon dioxide. That all sounds rather nerdy, I know, but trust me, the series is brilliant and Timothy Walker’s enthusiasm will carry you along.
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.
Here are a few of the plant combinations that I’ve been photographing recently. Some are pairings that I noticed this time last year, failed to capture then but went out and bagged them this time. Others are new to me, but I’ve been a little more on the ball and snapped them straight away having learned how quickly things change, disappear or die. The first photograph is from my favourite part of the Botanic Gardens – a woodland area that changes week to week and that I’ve recorded several times on this blog. The next two photographs are from a trip to Wells a couple of weeks ago. The first is of part of the Cathedral complex, and although I don’t normally go for yellow tulips I loved these against the acid froth of the euphorbias in the background.
The lilac and clematis (a montana I think) were tumbling over the railings in one of the gardens around the Cathedral green. The light wasn’t great, so it was hard to capture the full effect, but I like the way clematis can be grown through so many other shrubs. Below is another montana with shrub, this time a vast tamarisk round the corner from our house. Tamarisk is a shrub that seems to do remarkably well around here, I don’t remember coming across it at all in London.
It was rather windy when I took this, so difficult to get exactly what I wanted, but I think this gives a sense of what, to me, is a rather wonderful combination. It is growing on the side of an old annex at the old Fairfield school, and has not been tended for several years.
This time last week I spotted my neighbour’s lawn looking magical, scattered with daisies and little white violets. I decided to photograph it once I’d walked the dog, made a cake, vacuumed a few rooms etc etc… But clearly my neighbour was also working through a domestic to do list, and by the time I reached ‘photograph daisies’ on mine, he’d already ticked off ‘mow lawn’ on his. But today they were all up again and this time I got to them before Mick did!
Forsythia has been in bloom for a month now, and shows no sign of stopping. It’s everywhere I go, and I don’t suppose there’s a street in Bristol, or Britain for that matter, without one or two in bloom at this very moment. Wonderful for all those Forsythia fans, no doubt, but I’m afraid I’ve never liked this particular shrub and I am beginning to feel that enough is enough. It grows like a giant weed, sprouting in shouty fashion over garden walls and poking through fences. Surely it’s time to give it a rest.
But I must be alone, for I have seen more Forsythias this year than ever before – I counted over thirty of various shapes and sizes as I walked the girls to school on Friday. So, given its ubiquity, I feel I ought to write something about Forsythia and, having paid close attention to the plants I’ve been counting, I have to concede that in certain circumstances it can look really rather lovely. I have also noticed what I expect Forsythia lovers already know: of the different varieties the one with a relaxed, open, arching habit, is the most attractive (Forsythia suspensa?).
For me, the biggest problem with Forsythia is the way it is planted, which is often with no regard for the shrub’s natural propensity to billow out and arch upwards and with little consideration for its shrill colour. I have lost count of the number of plants I have seen dotted about in front gardens like random exclamation marks, constrained by lack of space and brutal pruning. It makes one wonder why they were planted in the first place. And I think the answer is that Forsythia is cheap, widely available and victim of horticultural marketing which insists on presenting it as the plant for cheering up the garden during February and March. But on a dull rainy day Forsythia looks unbelievably wretched, its cheery yellow flowers like someone smiling valiantly through grave disappointment. In bright sunshine, however, the sight of a large Forsythia filled with yellow flowers fizzing against a clear blue sky is fantastic.
It looks pretty bleak in our garden at 8 o’clock in the morning. But dramatic skies make up for the distinct lack of drama on the ground, where the snow, ice, frost and rain have turned the sloping lawn into a mudslide. A great mound of top soil, displaced by the first section of the terracing, which was completed last summer, sits under flapping layers of tarpaulin – a rather hopeless attempt to keep the local cats (including our own, I am sorry to say) from establishing it as a neighbourhood lavatory. I won’t give you the full and awful details of the problems that this heap of earth has caused, except to say that Sybil, our puppy, is far too interested in it. So, you get the general picture – all is not rosy on our plot. But this morning I noticed that one plant is valiantly doing its bit to provide at least a little loveliness.
I am not sure which Euphorbia this is, and will probably have to wait until it produces its acid green flowers to make an accurate identification. It was here when we moved in and has self seeded quite happily ever since. I love Euphorbias for so many reasons: their bulk within a border, where they prop up other reedier plants; their crazy acid green flower heads and glaucous leaves both of which are the perfect foil for the blues and purples of the plants I like (Nepeta Six Hills Giant, Verbena Bonariensis, salvias and geraniums).
I know lots of people are concerned about the milky sap that is produced when you cut their stems, but I really have never had any problems. When cutting back Euphorbias I avoid doing it in the middle of the day as I’ve read that skin which has been exposed to the sap can become irritated in direct sunlight. I don’t always wear gloves, which is probably foolhardy, but I do prune from the bottom up, that way I avoid the risk of sap dripping onto me as I work.
I had planned to post this photograph about a month ago, but other stuff got in the way and I hadn’t had a chance to get names and details. And I am afraid I still haven’t. I am very, very bad at noting down plant names and this blog is an attempt to get a bit more organised on that front.
First up I have to admit that I have never really been a fan of Bergenias. I find their leathery leaves a bit too … well, leathery, I suppose. But I have always had a soft spot for Chaenomeles (flowering quince, Japonica), although I have never owned one. Here, outside a friend’s garden, the simple combination of Chaenomeles and Bergenia has made me reconsider my view of the latter. I love the way the two plants mirror one another so beautifully. I often find that my personal plant snobberies (and they are legion) are challenged by clever planting combinations. It doesn’t always result in a total reversal of my opinion, but my eyes are at least opened to a plant’s previously unseen potential. Anna Pavord’s excellent book Plant Partners is filled with wonderful planting combinations and is full of unusual varieties of plants that you might normally pass over as being to commonplace or dull.
I absolutely love the architectural nature of plants such as Chaenomeles – those stark, thorny branches, softened only by a few well placed, un-showy flowers. No surprise really that they feature in so many Japanese prints and Kimono designs.
Writing this has made me think about plants I’ve had a change of heart over and perhaps plant snobbery is worth a post of its own. I’ll have to think about this weekend.
