School lessons

I mentioned some time ago that I'd taken over the school garden.

Well, in the way of these things, shortly after I took it on, they started building work which meant not only was everything on hold for more than a year, but also we lost half the garden before we'd even started.

You take these things on the chin, though, and in fact it's all worked out OK in the end since now the work has finished, I know where we are and we can go forward. I got all inspired by the Dorset Cereals Edible Playground garden that won Hampton Court this year, and between me and various teachers and parents who should really know better, we've come up with a big and rather exciting scheme for developing a new space for the kids to grow lots of food in.

So before we started I thought I'd record what state it's in at the moment - neglected in places, presentable-ish in others, but in need of a lot of work, hopefully from people large and small.

This is the wildlife pond - weedy, unkempt, and recently much larger. The bit on the other side of the picket fence is tarmac now, but it used to be garden. Never mind: there are plenty of bits left to have fun with, including a raised bed, a soon-to-be herb bed and a bog garden, as well as sundry weed-infested borders which once cleared will be open to inspiration.

This is the (somewhat neglected and overgrown) Millennium Garden - can you see why?

And these are the raised beds along the front of the school itself. Currently planted with a hotch-potch of different plants, and not in too bad a state, but one talented mum has now come up with a design involving box balls, a lot of alliums, some Geranium 'Rozeanne' and a few prostrate rosemaries, which will hopefully pull this lot together and make it look pretty good for most of the year. This is our first project - I'm going shopping next week if the PSA give me the green light.

Finally - the bit everyone's getting excited about. All the kids in the school, from 4-year-olds in reception to the big girls and boys in Year 6, are being given a design project in which they're going to be asked to come up with loads of imaginative designs, from which we'll select as much inspiration as we can cram in without making it too overcrowded. From this we'll create our Kitchen Garden. The hedge behind it (a mixed wildlife hedge around the pond) is coming down by about half, which is a huge job for November, but I'm trying not to think about that too much: instead looking forward to lots of colourful drawings and some seriously good ideas!

I've been got

I thought it couldn't be long - especially with the summer we've just had. Blight has made its first unwelcome appearance on the allotment.

The first you see is a few little harmless-looking brown spots like these.

The spots just get bigger and bigger...

... until they start destroying whole leaves, then the stems too.

Finally the poor potato plant ends up looking something like this - every leaf shrivelled, every stem brown and sick-looking. You shouldn't let things get to this stage: when you first see the leaf-spots, remove the foliage completely, as rain will wash the fungal spores down through the soil and onto your potatoes otherwise (and you've never smelled anything bad until you've smelled a blighty potato).

The above photos were all taken on the same morning, of the same patch of potatoes ('Desiree', in case you're interested) so it just goes to show that blight comes on in stages, and some bits can be worse affected than others.

Anyway - so now all those stems have been cut off at ground level, bagged up like toxic waste (never compost them - the spores overwinter) and thrown away. I haven't quite dared lift the potatoes just yet: partly because I haven't had the time, but also because I detest the slimy mess of a blight-infected potato slightly more than I detest cleaning my downstairs loo. So both tend to get left for a long time in the spirit of procrastination (which in both cases generally just makes the problem worse).

One last thing - these are my 'Sarpo Mira' blight-resistant potatoes, on the same morning, growing just eight feet away:

This has deepened my admiration for this spud variety even more. It's a good roasting spud, though people say it falls apart if you boil it so it's steaming only. Anyway, from now on I'm making them a regular on my seed spuds order - when potatoes grow this well when blight is rampant all around, it's daft not to.

Back to school

I started my new college course this week.

It's the Plants and Plant Design course, run by Capel Manor College - and I'm told they're the only ones in the country who do a course focussing solely on designing with plants (rather than general garden design, which in most colleges means a lot of stuff about paving slabs). It's one half of their full diploma course - the other half being their "Principles and Practice" garden design course, which at the moment anyway I don't think I shall take as I don't really want to be a garden designer. That's tantamount to heresy in some quarters, it seems, and I may yet see the error of my ways and change my mind, but right now I just want to learn about plants.

The first day was pretty much an orientation session - working out what we're going to do and when, where the library is, all that kind of stuff. We were initiated into the arcane science of plant idents - something I do day-to-day in my normal job, but not something which I've had to do formally before. This week it's Deschampsia cespitosa 'Goldtau', a couple of Persicarias, a Sedum and a rather floppy-looking Achillea ('Summerwine' if my memory serves me right). Plant names aren't usually a problem for me, but remembering all their various habits, sizes, tics and quirks is a bit more challenging - unfortunately the plants are chosen for you, or I'd use the opportunity to learn a whole load of plants I don't already know!

The course syllabus includes a visit to Great Dixter, another to Beth Chatto's, and a third to - get this - the Netherlands to visit some of the iconic gardens they have there (unfortunately not Piet Oudolf's, but fortunately Het Loo which is somewhere I've wanted to go for a very, very long time). Now this is my kind of school lesson!

Hasta la vista, ratties

This is a cob on my sweetcorn the day before I got my two feral cats to keep down the rats and mice:

Sweetcorn is an irresistible favourite of all things verminous, and I've never yet managed to get any to maturity, even though I still plant it (more in hope than expectation). It always, always ends up like this - scoffed by either rats or mice, or both, before it even gets ripe.

Now this is how the rest of my sweetcorn looks, a couple of weeks after the cats were let out of the shed:

Oh, my... I am too excited for words. I think I may be about to harvest my first-ever home-grown sweetcorn cob after four years of growing the stuff.

I think it can be said that the cat as mousetrap experiment has worked. Outstandingly well.

(the cats are having a great time too... :D)

It's a cabbage moth!

Remember those caterpillars I found on my client's pelargoniums?

Well - thank you to all who replied. Plant Mad Nige offered a tentative ID as an Angle Shades Moth - but here's the pic of their caterpillars from the RHS's advice sheet on the subject:

(image: Tim Sandall).

Not really very similar to my little critter:

But enter the RHS's Principal Entomologist (no less), A J Halstead, who suggests my little friend is a rather more humbly-named Cabbage Moth - aka Mamestra brassicae. I looked this up on UK Moths - and sure enough:

(picture (c) Dave Griffin)

I think we have our culprit. Sadly he is a culprit, too - the moth is described as a "notorious pest" on UK Moth's info page on the subject, scoffing not only all members of the brassica family but clearly pelargoniums too.

Still - I love solving a good mystery. Now I have to go murder a lot of rather pretty caterpillars...

Canna blues

I was so pleased with the big canna I bought at Chelsea for a fiver... but look what's happened to it.

It was a bewitching shade of purple and green back in May (you can see a leaf that's more like what it should look like in the background). And it was in a gold medal winning garden. Just goes to show that even RHS judges can be wrong sometimes.

Now I'm not a canna expert but I'd say this was a virus. I was talking to the nice man at Hart Cannas earlier this year for an article, and he tells me virus is rife in the canna industry - in fact it's got so bad that it's far more likely that a canna you buy will have a virus than not. Apparently it's all because a shipment of cannas to the UK from the Netherlands was riddled with it, and it's spread like wildfire ever since. At Hart Cannas they're actually starting again from scratch, breeding their own virus-free stock: they don't have a lot yet, but it's building up and I think may soon be the only refuge for those who like their cannas without horrible streaks, mottlings and leaf puckerings.

The only option for me with this one is to dig it up and burn it. Rats.

A lovely pair of melons!

Now boys, that's enough sniggering. I mean the horticultural kind, of course :D

I'm a melon virgin (oh stop it) - so I didn't really expect any results at all. So I was skipping all the way home when I found these in my allotment greenhouse:





One's a lot bigger than the other, and they're both on the small side at the moment, but hopefully they'll both reach a good enough size eventually (oh dear... what is it with double entendre and veg growing?). In the meantime, I've given them a bit of extra support (oh pleeeeease...) with a pair of old tights:



Being a bit of a babe, I only had black tights in the drawer so now I'm worrying they won't allow enough sunlight to get through for ripening. But we'll see.

Now, that's quite enough of that - I'm off to find something more sensible to talk about.

September flowers

Things are beginning to go over a little, but the roses are making a spectacular late-summer show and as always, I'm surprised how much there is to see.

Thanks once more to May Dreams for organising Garden Bloggers Bloom Day!

Mystery caterpillar

Can anyone identify this little chap?

One of my clients asked me to have a look at some bedding she had in her front garden, which she thought had been clobbered by slugs. The odd thing was, it was mostly pelargoniums, which in my experience aren't that tasty to slugs so generally don't suffer much damage.

It was pretty clear as soon as I looked at them that this wasn't slug damage - no slime marks, and the holes were large and in the centre of the leaf - not like slugs at all, which usually attack the edges of leaves first and then if they are going to eat the centre of the leaf, they kind of scrape away a thin layer to begin with rather than eat it straight through all at once.

Anyway - it was all screaming caterpillar to me, so I hunted around for a bit and sure enough this is what I came up with. Trouble is, I have no idea what it might be - I'm not exactly an entomologist and my garden experience with caterpillars is limited to gooseberry sawfly and cabbage white butterfly caterpillars, both of which I can identify at a hundred paces and despatch accordingly.

I'm a bit concerned though that this little chap might be something interesting. I had a look on the pragmatically-named What's This Caterpillar website but despite a happy hour browsing their gorgeously illustrated plates couldn't come up with a conclusive ident - the closest I got was the unfeasibly rare Orache Moth.

Thinking it rather unlikely that we've turned up the kind of thing you send to the Natural History Museum, I sent these pics in to Wisley's advice centre to see what their bug people can come up with. But if there's anyone out there who's looking at this and thinking to themselves, "Doesn't she realise that's a pelargonium leaf-stripper?" please don't hesitate to enlighten me! Until then, we're holding off the spraying/squashing/nematode treatments in the assumption that it's innocent until proven guilty.

Freebies

I didn't realise this when I started out gardening, but it's a great job for perks.

Take the garden I was doing earlier this week, for example. I was doing my usual weed round, dead-head and tidy up and one of the things I had to pull out was a spent Verbascum bombyciferum. It comes up all over the place in lots of the gardens I do - it likes chalky soils, generally speaking, which accounts for at least one of my clients' gardens, including this one. But in my own garden it's conspicuously absent - probably because my acid sandy soil isn't entirely to its taste. It's a source of sadness for me as I love this statuesque plant with its woolly, silvery leaves and huge spires of lemon-yellow flowers.

Never mind this right plant, right place baloney - I've convinced myself the reason it's not self-seeding might just be that there isn't any growing here in the first place. So I've been after a chance to get some to kick-start a colony for a while now. It's not one you can find easily in the garden centres (unless you fork out for an established plant, which I kind of resent doing for what's basically a weed). And I can't be bothered to mail-order some seeds.

So it was a bit of a gift to find this one I had to pull out was just bursting with ripe seeds. I snipped off a head or two and found a bowl in the car to put them in - and here we are. I'll pop them in a seed tray and see what happens. Here's to having to weed out lots of lovely mullein seedlings for years to come.

Meet my mousetraps

I don't know why it is that none of those worthy tomes about growing things on allotments ever talk about mice and rats - but in my experience, these twin scourges are second only to slugs in terms of what damage they do to crops. This year their tally includes my entire early pea crop, eaten to the ground when just seedlings, and now the first of my sweetcorn cobs to ripen.

I've tried everything: humane traps (they laughed scornfully and nicked the peanut butter while holding the door open with their tails); home-made not-very-humane traps (sweet jars sunk in the ground - they find their way in and then can't climb out. Trouble is, the rain gets in too and then they drown - I don't hate them that much); and not-at-all-humane traps (the conventional kind: once again, scornful laughter, no peanut butter and no dead mousies).

So it's time for the nuclear option. Meet my new mouse traps.

Mousetrap No. 1: aka Sweep. And...



Mousetrap No. 2: aka Sooty. This is about all I've seen of her so far - she hides under the soil sieve in the corner nearly all the time - and Sweep, though more courageous in that she'll come out if you've got a tin of cat food in your hand, isn't exactly trusting.

These are feral cats - I got them from the Cats Protection League after reading that they were very short of homes for these basically wild animals. They aren't pets, which is of course what most people are looking for when they want to rescue a cat - so they need people with outhouses, barns, stables or in this case sheds on allotments who can look after them but don't expect them to be very domesticated.

As far as I'm concerned, they're working animals with a job to do. Doesn't stop me being a bit soppy about them - they're very cute as they're only about 6 months old and have that kittenish look still - but I don't try to stroke them. I let them out for the first time this weekend - until now I've been keeping them in the shed so they know where home is - and am now keeping my fingers crossed that a) they'll come back and b) they'll massacre the mousies. And I hope rats, and possibly even bunnies too. Oh, I may be an animal-lover, but where my veggies are concerned it's war.....

Ducking and diving

This stuff is causing me a right headache at the moment.

I've never owned a pond that hasn't suffered with duckweed - quite a pretty weed, as weeds go, but nonetheless a weed. It is utterly prolific: I fished out every last dot a week ago, until we had clear water, and just look at it again.

The trouble is they get caught in just about everything, from waterlilies to bits of liner, and so there's no way you can hope to get them all out. Just one or two left in a little cranny somewhere, and you're condemned to another fishing expedition a week later.

The silver lining is that because it virtually covers the water's surface in our rather under-planted little pond, we never have problems with green water or algae as it simply out-competes it. I still wish we had more plants and less duckweed though...

Plant of the month - September

Nicandra physaloides
Shoo-fly plant



I have a hazy memory of sowing a few seeds of this several years ago - but I haven't done since, yet it pops up in some corner of my garden every year.

These lovely sky-blue flowers remind me of auriculas in the way they have those perfect white circles in the centre. They couldn't be more different in habit though - Nicandra is a big, beefy, fast-growing plant to about 4ft high with lush, almost tropical foliage. It's supposed to repel flies - hence the common name - and some use it as a companion plant to get rid of cabbage whitefly and the like.

The charms of these pretty blooms are fleeting - they last just a few days, and even then they won't open if it's not sunny. But the spectacular seedpods are worth all that coquettish reticence: they're delicate papery lanterns some two inches across that start vivid green and turn nut-brown with age. They last for ages (if the kids don't pop them all first) and shed their seeds generously: weed out all but one in only the places you really want them, or there won't be room for anything else.

Garden makeover: Shedding about #2

Guess what I spent my weekend doing...

After my little bit of inspiration over the twin evils of a shed in the wrong place and a nasty little problem spot, there was no point hanging around really so I got out the tools and got to work.

First job - dig the whole area out to a spade's depth (getting rid of all that borage in the process) and put down a nice clean layer of weed suppressing membrane. Lo - the problem area is no more.

Next, after those nice people at Wickes delivered a load of building materials, it was barrowing a couple of inches of hardcore (actually the same stuff road builders use so it can't be bad).



That was the (relatively) easy bit done - then I had another couple of inches of sand on top of that:



...and the tricky bit was getting the horribly heavy paving slabs down. These were recycled from the paving slabs that were alongside the shed already, which seemed like a good idea until I realised how damned heavy they were. They were the kind you use for pavements - great for settling down and not moving anywhere without a small bomb beneath them, awful if you do actually want to move them somewhere. I did my best - it wasn't quite patio standard, but it was OK for a shed base, and looked pretty good by the time I'd finished.



Then the fun bit - ta-da! One minute the shed was over there - the next, it was over here!



The tarp is because we managed to tear the (already gently rotting) roofing felt while we were moving it, but no matter, we have another roll in the shed which we'll finish it off with next week.

I'm dead proud that we got it all done - but don't be deceived by the "before and after" pics above: this was a long, sweaty, difficult job, especially the moving-the-shed bit which involved a lot of swearing and entailed dismantling the entire building and reconstructing it over a period of several hours. However - it's also a job well done: we discovered a rat's nest underneath where the shed used to be, since they hadn't gone to all this trouble and had just put the shed on fence posts laid on the ground. Ain't no rats can get through this lot, I guarantee...!

Garden makeover: Shedding about

This is my shed.

Yeah, yeah, I know, well we can't all have quirky interesting sheds. I've actually got another shed too, up at the allotment, which is both quirky and interesting so maybe it'll find its way onto these pages before long just to prove this is Not My Style (honest).

Anyway. I inherited the shed with the garden, and as I was wittering on about recently, there were a lot of eccentric design decisions made by my predecessor in this garden - one of them being to place this shed plumb in the middle of the main view from the house. So when you look out of my kitchen window you see my lovely plants set against a gorgeous background of poo-brown shiplap.

Next bit. This is my Problem Area.

It's actually right opposite the shed, a little further down, and all I can do with it is hack it back periodically as nothing will grow there. It's under the deep shade of an overhanging cobnut tree (one of the more lovely aspects of my garden) and is a jungle of nettles, next door's self-seeded pink buddleia and rampant borage. You quite often see this deceptively pretty plant sold both as plants and seed in garden centres, at which I invariably laugh hollowly and totter out weakly since I've been waging a running battle with it for nearly 7 years - mind you I'm winning... mwah ha ha ha....

Mmm. Well. Anyway. I have for quite a long time been eyeing the shed... then eyeing the Problem Spot... then eyeing the shed again... It's an obvious solution. So today I started digging. You can just about see the fork (about to root out those bloody borage roots again) and the stakes marking out the spot in the picture above. It's going to be a horrible job (the pic of the shed very wisely doesn't include one of its contents - I don't think I've seen the back wall since we moved in) but the results will be Step One in the great garden makeover. Wish me luck.

Summer-pruning roses

About this time I find all my roses, and everyone else's too, are getting a bit wayward.

They've mostly finished flowering, bar a few late flushes, and they suddenly start shooting great thick stems skywards in a bid to take over the world. This is a Good Thing on the whole, as it means they're very healthy and well-established, and you should be able to look forward to a nice handsome display next year.

However - if they're anything like the 'Perpetually Yours' climbers on the fence between me and my neighbour, they can become a serious hazard. This summer while my back was turned they shot up several massive stems above the fence, a good 6ft long, which began waving about spectacularly in the recent gales threatening to whip off the heads of sundry children and household pets passing by.

'Perpetually Yours', incidentally, is a lovely rose covered in froths of pretty frou-frou noisette flowers in palest yellow. I have two, which took a while to establish in my sandy acid soil, but which are now spectacular each summer. Their only real shortcoming is that they don't stand up to weather very well, dissolving into soggy brown soup in heavy rain, like many roses I've found - a problem strangely unmentioned in the brochures. Mind you, the tried-and-tested favourites - 'New Dawn' and 'Dublin Bay' in my garden - seem to escape this problem.

But I digress. The point is, everyone talks about pruning roses in late spring (or late winter, if you're me) but nobody mentions that they need summer pruning, too. This time of year I end up picking thorns out of my fingers yet again, tying in wayward stems and cutting out any heading in the wrong direction.

I also cut back those long flowered stems by about a third - some of this has been done already in deadheading (which I'm intolerably bad at getting around to, though it doesn't seem to make much difference to the number of flowers I get) but there are always some which still flap about. This summer pruning will to some degree restrict growth, as all summer pruning does - but it's sometimes no bad thing to give roses a rap on the knuckles when they're getting too full of the joys of summer. Just don't do it any later in the season, as new growth will get knocked back by frost if it hasn't had the chance to harden off in time.

Knowing your onions

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to brag a bit.

You see, I've been spending this week digging up the onion crop up at the allotment - the tops had gone over so it was clearly time they were out of the ground.

What you have to understand is that I've never - and I mean never, in about 8 years of veg-growing, had any luck with onions. They always turn out mingy little buttons, better for pickling than for eating. I've tried everything - different varieties, different spacings - but no joy.

Until now. Just look at these whoppers. The largest ones are around 6" across. They look like proper onions - you know, the ones you buy in the shops. The above picture shows just half the harvest - there was another 11ft-long bed full to go (you see, I overcompensate for the shallot-size onions by planting loads of them). My entire greenhouse is now stuffed to the gunwhales with drying onions and I've run out of racks. I'm even thinking of entering some for the village autumn horticultural show, I'm that chuffed.

Mind you, I have to confess to a sneaking suspicion that this is not actually anything to do with me. It's been a wierd year all round - early summer crops (peas, broad beans, French beans) which I'm normally dead good at have failed utterly this year. And cabbages, which I fail with quite as spectacularly as onions as a rule, have turned into kings - my 8-year-old picked one of my red cabbages up the other day and disappeared behind it.

If this is climate change, we're going to be eating a lot of cabbage from here on in...

August flowers

This month's boost to the gardening ego for the wonderful Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day at May Dreams. I love doing this - it reminds me that however scruffy my garden is, there's always something flowering somewhere.

Garden makeover #1

There's only one problem with my garden - I don't like it very much.

I don't mean the plants (I lurve them) but the layout. I inherited it from the previous owner, who was a special needs teacher with many, many special needs of his own - totally barmy and it's entirely reflected in the lunatic way he's laid out the garden. I got rid of most of the crazy plants he put in as soon as we moved in (I mean, who plants Rhododendron ponticum in their garden?!). Mustn't be too scathing though as he did pass on my much-beloved Lonicera xylosteum.

However - though it's easy enough to rip out plants and replace them, doing the same thing with the basic layout is one of those huge tasks that makes you want to just go back to sleep.

Well, now that I'm emerging, blinking, into the light having spent eight years in Very Small Child Country, I'm feeling just about strong enough to take on the challenge of a makeover. What's more, I brought a client back to my house the other day and she didn't believe it was mine because it was so unkempt... well that was embarrassing. So I really, really have to do something about it now.

When I say makeover, of course, I'm not talking Ground Force. More like a slow, meandering, several-years-long process of improvements, at the end of which I hope I shall have a garden which better reflects what I think a garden ought to be.

Gorgeous greenhouses

I'm a bit of a sucker for garden visiting - you know, when you get the chance to nose around someone else's garden under the guise of Supporting the National Gardens Scheme. Some are real gems - others less so, but there's usually something you can find to get enthusiastic about.

So while I was on holiday recently in the Isle of Wight I dragged my poor family off again to see someone's back garden (they've even stopped protesting now, having opted for resigned tolerance instead). The one that was open while we were there was Pitt House, near Bembridge, promisingly advertised as being four acres with statues, ponds and a waterfall, plus sea views.

Well - it was nice enough, and the waterfall was lovely as were the sea views, but I couldn't help thinking they could have achieved a bit more with all that space (four acres - and they have two gardeners, too, so no excuses). There was, however, one true gem in amongst the ordinariness: a Victorian greenhouse, entirely original (even had those cast-iron bracket thingies to raise the vents) and utterly gorgeous.

Oooh I want one...

...and look at these grapes. They were cutting bunches for people to taste - absolutely yum.

Best not to eat this one - poisonous. But enormous.

I thought this was a natty idea - invented by the Victorians, of course. It was just a shallow pool of water sunk into the floor of the greenhouse, under a bench. It evaporates over a hot day, keeping humidity levels high without any need for spraying floors or doing anything, really, except topping it up from time to time. It was a bit green and scummy - but you could probably improve things by... oh... planting a tropical waterlily in there or something...

Isn't this sweet? I discovered it tucked away in a corner under the benches. No idea what it was doing there.

And this was the pièce de resistance: backed on to that sumptuous main greenhouse was a sunken one. Just look at those tiles. It was entirely wasted on a load of ropey old fuchsias, but it got my imagination firing on all cylinders. Melons... pineapples... mmm......

Worrying about my veg

Until now I've had a separate blog for my allotment, but pleading severe lack of time to do just about anything, I've decided that my veg are going to invade the otherwise ornamental portals of this blog (so I've got rid of the other one).

It was kind of inevitable anyway, as I discovered a previously unsuspected vocation as a vegetable garden designer this spring (about five enterprising people were brave enough to let me experiment on their gardens and we got some pretty good results) and this has since mushroomed into a) a garden design course so I can at least pretend I know what I'm talking about, and b) a cunning plan to incorporate as many edible plants as possible into my back garden. So for some time now my veg-growing - previously banished to the allotment - has been shacking up with my more decorative plant-related enterprises and the two are now pretty much indistinguishable.

Only thing is - I've been pulled up short by the current concerns over contaminated manure. Since I'm mainly organic, not being able to be sure of my sh** is a real setback. I'm currently debating the options: buy the manure, but compost it for a year? (and if so, where?!) Spent mushroom compost (hard to get hold of, and besides wasn't that manure to begin with anyway...)? Super-expensive sterilised soil improver from t' garden centre? Or just take the risk?

They say nobody's going to take any notice of this until the market growers are affected. And I'm not sure how much of a crisis it is anyway: someone said to me the other day they thought it was only a problem in the London area (which almost means me, but since I'm just outside the M25 I usually exempt myself).

Will no doubt continue dithering until someone more sensible says something. Could be a while, then...

Colour, colour and more colour

Just got back from a week's holiday in the Isle of Wight - lovely, thanks, and more of which later, but in the meantime I had a few pics from the Thompson & Morgan open day in Suffolk which I went to just before I left.

Now this is something of a fixture in most garden journalists' calendars but it was the first time I've actually made it along. Bedding isn't really my thing so I hadn't really made it a priority before. How wrong can you be.

Now I'd better declare a blatant attempt at bribery on the part of the T&M people, armed as they were with oodles of freebies and a slap-up lunch. But - honest guv - I didn't really need all the buttering up. This was an amazing display of gorgeous flowers which just bowled me over.


Not that there wasn't any good old-fashioned traditional bedding: in fact there were buckets of it, including many in those awful gaudy candy-pink shades that old ladies love so much. However - stay with me here: in among the god-awful colour clashes there were some superb plants: ones which caught my eye included Begonia boliviensis 'Bonfire', in sizzling, sultry red, and much more subtle greeny-yellow Petunia 'Susanna' - as cool and reserved as the begonia was in-yer-face.


And here's a close-up of the sexiest fuchsia ever - Fuchsia denticulata. I love species fuchsias. Must collect some more.


Bedding outside - they don't bother with subtle colour combinations, do they? But don't you love that millet (Pennisetum Purple Majesty)?


And here's a close-up of the Nicotiana - it's N. suaveolens and planted en masse like this creates an ethereal, airy effect like dancing fairies.


I liked this nasturtium, too - a sultry red with purple-tinged leaves called 'Cobra'. They gave us a packet of seeds in with the freebies so I'll look forward to growing it next year.


These sunflowers ('Irish Eyes') made me smile, too. They were a bit small for my liking - about thigh-height - but looked great in a big massed planting like this.


My only complaint was that we didn't get to see more of this - the trials field, where T&M develop their new varieties, so you get a sneak preview of varieties in development. Quite apart from anything else, the whole (highly commercial) process of breeding new variations that might become tomorrow's stalwarts is fascinating.

Still - maybe next year! I haven't even mentioned the fruit & veg, either - lots of great ideas (standard-trained fig, anyone?) The trials are open to the public too - T&M's open day has been and gone, but all the major seed companies do it so get along to one if you possibly can (even if you are a bit sniffy about bedding!)