A seedy sort of day

Poppy: not white, but full of seeds, more usefully than you'd think

It's funny, isn't it. There are days when one thing just keeps popping up, demanding your attention, in lots of different and usually unrelated places.

Today it's been seeds. First I was researching a seedy subject for an article I was writing: saving seed from your best plants (always a good idea: you save money, you ensure you've got stocks of your favourite variety for next year, and if you do it over a number of years you end up with a strain uniquely adapted to your own conditions: a sort of micro-local heritage variety. What's not to like?).

In this case I was looking into how much better polytunnels are for isolating veg like carrots or chard which would otherwise cross-pollinate all over the place. My friend once ended up with pumpkin-butternuts because her cucurbits got busy and re-seeded the resulting mongrels all over her veg patch: quite tasty but very odd.

I digress. Just as I was putting the finishing touches on the finer points of cross-breeding calabrese, my daughter - on holiday therefore terminally indolent - called me in to see something she was watching on the telly.

It was indeed, as she emphatically informed me, epic: Neil Buchanan, failed rock star, Scouser, and hyper-bouncy presenter of the CITV series Art Attack (which almost - almost - reaches the heady heights of Vision On, and from me that is high praise indeed) was creating an enormous and finely detailed snake, twice his own height, out of poppy seeds. By the wonder that is video on demand, you can see the whole thing here (from 7 minutes in). Poppy seeds as art material. Who knew.

And that reminded me of the thing I was reading last night in this month's copy of The Garden: it was an absorbing and rather wonderful visit to the private garden created by Sybille Kreutzberger and the late Pamela Schwerdt, erstwhile head gardeners at Sissinghurst Castle.

The bit that stuck in my mind was their painstaking pursuit of the cultivars they regarded as the best possible selections. They fell in love with a white form of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, they saw in a picture taken in Afghanistan: it wasn't available in the UK, so they wrote to a bakery which decorated its bread with poppy seeds sourced there. The white poppy is now growing in the White Garden at Sissinghurst. Now that's what I call dedication.

And then just to round it all off, I reminded myself to sign up for Carl Legge's seedy penpals scheme: thanks go to Zoe for the timely blog post. I think seed-swapping penpals is quite the loveliest idea I've come across for a long time. I always have a few spare seed packets kicking about the place and can't think of anything nicer than sharing the love with someone (and hopefully getting some interesting bits & bobs I've never tried before in return).

I urge you to join in, if you haven't already: we could all do with a few more seeds in our lives.

Dead plants

At this time of year it's a blessing that some plants continue to look good even after they've turned up their toes. You have to experiment - I find a lot of the plants supposed to hold on to their seedheads, like Rudbeckia, Echinops and many grasses, actually collapse sideways into a soggy heap around November, which hardly counts as winter these days. But when you find the ones that work, they really are worth their weight in gold (which is the colour many of them are on a frosty winter's day, too).

Spiky seedheads of Cynara cardunculus towering overhead against a December sky.

Verbena bonariensis is one of the best for looking good all winter - as long as the bluetits don't tear the seedheads to bits first.

Perovskia 'Blue Spire' puts up a forest of ghostly silver stems.

And of course poppy heads: many of these do collapse sideways but there are always a few left standing. I wonder what critter chomped its way through the side of this one looking for seeds?

Frosty morning

I know frost is meant to be the gardener's enemy. I, like no doubt many others in the vicinity, spent much of yesterday running around frantically squirrelling things away in my greenhouse as the weather forecast got gloomier and gloomier. This morning, I still found I had several casualties when I woke up to find it went down to minus 2 or so. But oh... it was so beautiful.


This was one of my casualties - the Nicandra physaloides, now reduced to a sodden mess in the corner. But didn't it look lovely as it died.

I thought this Goliath poppy was being a bit optimistic, producing flower heads this late in the season!

Verbena bonariensis is, I often think, at its best after a good frost.

The frost melted pretty quickly but even that sent me into rhapsodies - this is Melianthus major which holds onto the droplets like jewels. The little spider was up early, too.

Another one that's looking good as the frost melts off it - this is Eucalyptus gunnii, kept coppiced for that glaucous, rounded young foliage.

And even the nettles were pretty. It doesn't get much better than that.

Back from Chelsea

I've just spent a couple of weeks away from the garden - at the Chelsea Flower Show (fantastic!) where I have had the privilege of a press pass for the last couple of years now, and then on my hols in the Isle of Wight.

More of Chelsea later if I get a moment... but what is it about going away even for a short amount of time that makes your garden suddenly decide it's going to romp away and grow for England? Since I last looked at it, the Goliath poppies have burst into action, to say nothing of several self-seeded orientals - some are a beautiful clear orange, the first time that particular colour has turned up, and really unusual. My roses are blooming fit to bust (Dublin Bay - a scarlet climber - is particularly lovely), and several smaller shrubs have simply disappeared under the mass of vegetation that's suddenly burgeoning from every corner.

Not that I'm complaining: June in my garden is fabulous, and the peak of the whole show. It's so lovely to look out of your window and just stare, transfixed by something that's in your own back garden. What a privilege.