Steps in Time

There has been a lack of posts to this blog as I have had a long hard think about whether to continue. It follows an attack where a section of border was sprayed with weedkiller. However, mindless violence should not win, and onward and upward as Eric Robson would say.

So many things have happened in the garden it’s difficult to know where to start. Borders are growing into themselves and maturing. Trees are getting their roots down and starting to look like proper trees. The weeds are still in charge though.

The steps that were built a while back are looking particularly pleasing. Built from sandstone from a reclamation yard and tiles from around the garden, they are influenced, as is everything in the garden, by Great Dixter. The banks of soil either side have been planted up with whatever was hanging around looking for a home. Divided shasta daisies dominate at the moment. In spring it was the euphorbias.

Balance and colour is always at the back of the mind and the blue of the globe thistle echinops ritro on the left is balanced by the cupid’s dart (catanche) on the right. Eventually, I will whip all the plants out and put them back in a much more regimented order that is at the heart of all cottage gardens, no matter how haphazard they look.

Before that happens, Gareth has to remove the huge pussy willow stump at the bottom. I won’t hold my breath, and luckily the amelanchier that we have to replace it seems perfectly happy in its big pot in the back garden for the time being.

Sh*t stirring

The tulips have gone now, the white petals fluttering away in the windy weather. So I pulled out most of the swathes of forget-me-nots which had mostly gone over.

There is now a big patch of bare earth, full of forget-me-not seeds but I could feel the weeds moving in as I pulled out the plants. It needs filling up with something but before that can happen, it needs feeding. Luckily, I happen to have a very large pile of rotted horse manure to hand and I’m not afraid to use it.

There are four horses in the fields at the back of our house. Every Sunday morning that we are at home, we go round and get a couple of dozen trugfuls. That’s about all our backs can take. Then it gets dumped on the hard standing for easy access.

So that patch of bare ground is now covered with a thick layer of the best possible soil food. Those potatoes I put in the pink border now need earthing up – tip a trug of manure over them. The tulips have gone over but need feeding up for next year – each patch gets a trug of manure. We planted a couple of rhubarb plants (Timperley Early, rescued from the sale bench at Homebase – £1.49 each for big plants) and they got a generous helping.

I trimmed the lonicera nitida Baggensen’s Gold balls and promptly made up for it with a good hearty meal spread around their bases (making the golden topiary stand out even more). Every planting hole gets a shovelful, every newly cultivated bit of ground gets some dug in and a thick layer is added on the top if it’s not going to be planted straightaway.

It doesn’t give instant results, but next year we will reap the benefits. The hornbeam hedge at the front made steady progress but now that each plants gets a trugful dumped on it twice a year, it is racing along, with thickly clothed strong poles turning into a proper hedge rather than a row of baby trees.

People who keep a shovel and container in the car and leap out in country lanes to collect freshly dropped manure should not be mocked. It is worth its weight in Growmore.

Formality in Chaos

In the front garden the daffs have had their fading heads chopped off and it’s all about tulips and forget-me-nots now. Not exactly cutting edge, but soft and romantic and traditional.

With the front garden taking care of itself, it’s been all hands on deck in the back garden. This area has been very scrappy for a very long time but the blurry edges are being sharpened and it is all starting to come together.

There are sandstone and brick steps outside the back door instead of a 40cm drop into patchy grass. The ‘lawn’ has been cut into a precise (almost) semi-circle. The overgrown hard standing has been broken up and the dead earth is waiting to be turned into fertile soil.

A woodland area has been planted in front of next door’s leyland cypress hedge. The wild cherry put itself there and the strawberry tree, snowball tree and pittosporum (every single leaf brown and crisp from the winter, but greening up slowly) were existing, and between these holly, silver birch, hawthorn, mahonia, foxgloves, euphorbia, geraniums, Michaelmas daisies, alpine strawberries, hellebores and daffodils.

The straight line of the semi-circular lawn stretches from the back door steps to this woodland area and butts up to the brick patio. This patio has spent many years overgrown with all manner of grass and weeds and is as uneven as can be. It is a perfect companion to the lawn of weeds: both as scruffy as each other. So some crisp, new formality is to be introduced between them in the form of a clipped box hedge.

About February last year Homebase were selling packs of box, essentially rooted cuttings, 10 for £9.99. Potting them up I managed to get an extra plant out of them so I have been growing on 11 plants which are now the size and shape of my hand with the fingers outstretched. They are all happily in the ground in a straight line.

They are about 40cm apart and at the moment have been interplanted with Little Gem lettuce. It may be that the spacing is just a little too much, but cuttings have been taken and are safely tucked up in a propagator to infill in 18 months from now.

If these cuttings aren’t needed, then I can always have a go at recreating the topiary peacocks (except in box, not yew) at Great Dixter.

Cutting Edge

I got this hebe at a village fete a few years ago. It wasn’t labelled and it has never flowered. It is, however, one of those well behaved, dome shaped hebes that look good all year and give structure, especially in winter. And this garden needs structure in winter.

I wanted more and as I have no idea what it’s called, the only way was to make my own. Hebes are dead easy from cuttings and you have to do something seriously wrong not to get a high success rate. Late summer last year I took five 50mm cuttings, stripped the lower leaves off and poked them into a 9cm clay pot filled with half multipurpose and half sharp sand. I put the pot in the cold frame.

Today was warm and sunny so I took the pot out and could see bits of root coming out the bottom of the pot. I cut them apart with a knife, teasing the roots away from each other, and put each one into its own clay pot in peat-free multipurpose. After watering them, I left them in the sun to enjoy the warmth and the breeze and popped them back in the cold frame when the sun disappeared behind the house.

The plan is to grow them on for a year and plant them out in a row with the parent plant. This will give a bit of formality which is always welcome in an overly wild cottage garden, plus that winter structure.

I am toying with the idea of planting rhubarb in between them. I known that hebes and rhubarb have almost diametrically opposite growing requirements but I think it could work. As the hebe isn’t a flowering version, the manuring that the rhubarb requires won’t affect the flowering and the little plants might catch up with the parent quicker.

This is the plan today. Tomorrow is a new day.

Spring Loaded

Morning sunshine casts long shadows over the blue and white border

The shadows are still very long but there is at least sunshine. The blue and white border is bursting with daffs and tulips pushing their way through the thick layer of horse manure.

Last year I got Gareth to dig out all the white tulips as they weren’t as I expected them to be from the picture in the catalogue. I think they were some kind of Fosteriana and opened fully to reveal black and yellow marks. They are all now in my friend’s garden. Well, I say all, because it looks like we didn’t get all the old ones, despite removing them while there was still a little bit of foliage as a marker.

Not only that, but the new ones (Maureen, white cup, May flowering) have been planted been planted right next to the old ones. Some feat when we dug up the old ones in June and planted the new ones in November. I can only hope that they don’t flower at the same time. If my memory serves correctly, the old ones are earlier than the new ones.

To go with this feast of white tulips, the forget-me-nots are everywhere, just waiting to burst forth with their blueness. They will take over from the hellebores (some white but mainly pink – they’re allowed in the blue border as there is precious little else). This is all going on in the west half, to the right.

In the east half, to the left, there are a few little blue anemone blanda just poking their heads above their thick mulch blanket. I planted more muscari last year so the plan is that this side of the border will be covered in anemones and grape hyacinths until geranium Johnson’s Blue gets going.

The lawn is getting nice and shaggy, ready for its first cut. The knife sharpening men knocked at the door this morning so the lawn mower and two pairs of shears are all set to go. When the tulips and forget-me-nots are out and the shape of the bed has been sharpened by a nicely mown and edged lawn, I doubt if I shall get any work done.

The Shape of Things to Come

The last dull, grey day in February

So a lot has happened since last August, both in life and in the garden. I work from home and no longer have to think wistfully about what may be happening in the garden as my office overlooks it. Well, the front garden and a bit of the veggie garden anyway.

The above picture is the view from my office and I will take a picture from the same angle every week to see how it changes. There will of course be updates from the rest of the garden, including the newly planted woodland garden, the integration of the orchard garden into the veggie garden and the long awaited start on the overgrown pond garden.

Fatsias’ Chance

I dug up all our fatsia japonicas today. They looked horrid in the borders, with their tatty, blackened leaves left over from the winter. They didn’t suit the garden anyway, looking a bit tropical in a cottage garden. They say they tolerate shade, but they barely do that. Far from providing a lush paradise, they sulk and produce about two leaves a year. They really need sun, but I have so many more deserving plants for the sunny bits.

So these false castor oil plants have been hoiked out and planted up in big plastic pots with John Inness No2 and are destined for a good home. My friend Fani has what can barely be called a front garden. It’s a piece of gravelled ground just big enough to take these three plants in their pots. It is outside a weatherboarded terrace cottage, surrounded by a picket fence and facing on to an A road that cuts through the picturesque market town that she lives in the centre of.

Transferred to half barrels in the west-facing ‘garden’, they should flourish. The single variety planting will look stylish, hopefully they won’t mind the pollution too much and they will bush out and give Fani a bit of noise protection and privacy. Fingers crossed no one nicks ‘em.

Right on Cue

Was it worth the time, money and effort? The cucumber seed cost £2.39. Of the 12 seeds, ten germinated in their 9cm pots in a heated propagator. Once they were up, they came out of the propagator and stayed by the big window in the studio. As the days got warmer, they came out during the day then back in at night. I understood that the roots were very delicate and resented transplanting, so just at the point where the white roots were just showing at the edge of the compost I potted them on into 1.5 litre pots so there was minimal disturbance. Two, however, curled up and died.

When the risk of hard frost had passed, they went into the cold frame. Every morning I opened the glass lid and every evening I closed it. Then there was a couple of weeks of the lid being left ajar at night before they were left exposed all the time. Over the course of this, the plant count went down to four: either they just curled up and died or the slugs got them.

When the soil in the rectangle bed was nice and warm, manured and worked in, I put a piece of trellis in the middle so they would have something to climb up. I dug big holes and put in the four cucumber plants, carefully backfilling and then puddling them in for least root disturbance. One promptly died.

The others sat there and sulked. In the middle of June the temperature dropped. Another died and the remaining two continued to sulk. Beans (cannelini, borlotti and dwarf French) and peas (for shoots) were planted in a rectangle around them, came up and romped away. Suddenly, when they were good and ready, the cucumbers took off. Ignoring the trellis, they scrambled over the ground. Big yellow flowers appeared, followed by tiny bumpy cucumbers the size of my little finger. It was very exciting.

Last week I decided that it must be time to harvest the first. A search around the in the leafy plants revealed that yes, there was indeed a cucumber ready to eat. And where was it growing? It had curled itself around the trellis. Cut from the plant and unscrewed from its support, I took inside, peeled the rough bumpy skin off, sliced a chunk off and ate it.

So was it worth it? Oh yes. The fresh, crisp crunch and taste that is so, well, cucumbery. We ate it all there and then, in big chunks. Even the cucumbers from the farm shop are bland and flaccid in comparison, and as for the supermarket offerings, they are a world away. Even if I get 20 cucumbers off these two plants, I will still be well up financially. As for all the care and attention, that has been repaid in the taste and texture that is impossible to buy. Worth every minute.

Willow’s a Wisp

So where was I before I was so rudely interrupted by the announcement that Gareth was going to start a publishing business and I was going to have to help him run it? Ah yes, the garden. The poor neglected garden.

Actually it hasn’t been neglected. It’s just been weeded regularly and the newly-planted plants left to get on with growing. There has, however, been no progress in creating new parts of the garden, just looking after the existing ones. I have spent a fair amount of time lying in the hammock, strung between the apple and the willow, contemplating and plotting.

It was during one of these musing sessions that I was gazing happily through the bountiful weeping willow foliage, marvelling at how much it had grown. How much it had grown through the overhead electricity wires, the ones that the birds had stripped bare in places, gathering nest material. The realisation that I was technically attached to the National Grid is one of the few things to get me out of that hammock without reluctance. I couldn’t move fast enough.

A couple of days later, a tree surgeon left a leaflet, so Theodore was duly summoned and agreed that the situation wasn’t ideal. He also pointed out that the tree was growing mainly in two directions only, forming a sail, meaning the tree was at risk of coming down in high winds. He made his recommendations and I suppose he did warn us that it may look a bit drastic at first. It didn’t really prepare me for the bareness when I arrived home, but it was much easier to reverse down the drive.

This time next year, it will look just like a weeping willow, just smaller. And in the meantime, all the plants that have been in dappled shade are going to have a whale of a time. Make the most of it guys – you’ve got about six months of sunshine.

Circle Line

It’s been quite an exciting time, what with Icelandic volcanoes erupting and airplanes being grounded and all. And then there’s our vegetable patch. We’ve got a rectangle bed and a triangle bed, but the third bed was turning out to be no particular shape. As I looked at this way and that and tried to work out how the paths were going to work, I was starting to despair.

I could not decide whether to put the paths in the obvious and natural place and make the bed a haphazard shape, or to try to contrive a geometric shape as best I could. Eventually I decided to be bold and do neither. I grabbed some bamboo canes and marked out a rough circle. It worked. Gareth had a look and pointed out that it sloped. Of course it sloped. The whole garden slopes in some way and some direction.

I had another think. ‘Do they still do clay drainage pipes?’ I figured that we could use them to edge the bed and at the same time level the ground. And we could put alpine strawberries in them. We walked away from the bamboo canes and went about the business of earning money that we could in turn pour into our dilapidated house and garden. In Gareth’s case, this meant flying to Austria.

On the day that he was due back, on our wedding anniversary, the planes stopped flying due to the dust cloud. He and Vince, the PR guy who had taken him to Austria were stranded. They got a train from Strasbourg to Munich, then the overnight, non-sleeper train to Paris, then a train to Lille where they shared a cab to Calais with two men travelling back from Moscow. But the ferries were full and that’s as far as they could get. I booked the Eurotunnel and drove to Cite Europe and arrived only a little later than they did. The only problem was that all the return trains were full so we had to wait till 9 o’clock in the evening.

This meant killing time in Calais’ equivalent to Bluewater with two very tired men. As we trudged round Carrefour I saw terracotta wine racks, comprising three thick clay hexagonals for two euros fifty. We put four in the trolly. Back in Blighty we laid them out and they are perfect. Absolutely perfect. We need another 20. I got on the interweb to find… nothing. The only place these seem to exist is in Carrefour at Cite Europe. More elaborate and more expensive versions are available. One metre long drainage pipes are available. But the ones I want, the perfect ones, they are not available.

The race is on to find the time to go back to Carrefour before my passport expires in three weeks.