October flowers

Well I seem to be late for everything this month. And so it is with the unmissable Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens, which for some time now I have been using as a way of stepping back and looking, properly at the garden and where it is in the year (instead of just seeing the usual tick-list of jobs that became urgent last week).

I blame a certain lethargy brought on by the impending frosts. And the recent demise of Slide.com, which was my way of indulging in loads of photos without the guilt of having to inflict them on anyone unless they wanted to sit through them all.

So I'm afraid this month you'll have to look at all my photos, one by one: either that, or log off right now and go do something more improving instead.

Since it's undeniably autumn now - the swishing sound as I walk becoming less and less easy to ignore, or indeed wilfully deny - I'll start not with flowers but with berries, filling my garden gradually from the yellow buttons of Sorbus 'Joseph Rock' to hips and cotoneaster berries and the little jewel-like Tomato 'Hundreds and Thousands' tumbling over the tubs on my patio.





I'm not too keen on the cotoneaster, as it self-seeds everywhere, but at this time of year you can't help but like it.

There are always lots of wildlings in my garden - and several are having a second flush at the moment.



Some aren't strictly wildings but sort of naturalised garden plants: the Anemone x japonica 'Honorine Jobert' is going mad in the front garden and will have to be sorted out at some point. Not now though.

The hardy fuchsia is another one in its prime right now: hard to think I'm going to have to get rid of it this year (too big, too old, too shady).

In fact the fuchsias generally are looking pretty good right now.



Also in this part of the garden are - or rather were - the scented-leaf pelargoniums; though I spent part of today digging them up and tucking them away in the greenhouse ahead of the Big Freeze.

It's been a good year for the annuals: and a good thing too, as I'm still in my first season so stuck to seed-raised flowers to see me through while I waited to see what came up in my new garden.





The cosmos in particular have been fabulous: flowering madly since about the end of June and still going strong.



But there have been two annual stars which have really stolen the show. The first is my bronze fennel: a lovely foil for other plants while they have their summer spell in the spotlight, but now a fireworks display of golden yellow.

And equally tall and airy, the Nicotiana mutabilis are dancing through the border on their wiry stems of pink and white, charming, dainty and adorable.

So adorable have they been, in fact, that I'm going to follow some advice Chris Ireland-Jones gave me on my recent visit to Avon Bulbs and try to overwinter them in the greenhouse. He says if you can cut them back hard, pot them up and bring them in, they have a head start on the season next year. Twice this display will be quite, quite ravishing. Can't wait.

Not-quite-the-end of the month view: September

Well, heck, I'm only a week late for the End of Month View (hosted, some time ago now, by Helen, aka The Patient Gardener). And who can blame me for clinging onto September: it has been a remarkably warm and balmy one. And it's looking pretty dicey for October, so if it's all the same to you I'll linger for a while longer in the twilight zone between summer and autumn.


It's not, however, been an altogether sunny picture in my garden: particularly my front garden. You see we've had an amusing time this summer almost completely rebuilding our house.


A relatively straightforward project, to replace the blown cement render with lovely stone-house-friendly lime render, turned into something altogether more fundamental when we discovered that the cement render was actually holding the outer wall in place.

The whole process has involved large holes appearing here and there (and I mean large: we could stand up in the one in the end wall), the rebuilding of the entire end wall plus a chimney stack and the reinstatement of the top of the wall at the front, which turned out not to be there any more.

And most upsettingly for the garden, it also meant we've had scaffolding right round the house since around July. The builders were commendably sensitive and didn't plonk scaffolding poles onto prize plants: but there is lime on everything, and because I haven't been able to access the area the bit of progress I had been making has gone backwards.



So this winter's project (one of them: the fruit cage is also going in this winter, but that's another story) is to get this little lot back in order again.


First job is to remove the more rampant plants here. There's a self-sown cotoneaster bent on taking my stone wall down with it, and a large stump that needs to come out.


Also getting seriously out of control are some more welcome plants: a fine clump of small-flowered asters, a species I think though I haven't yet been able to identify them with any sort of confidence. There are masses of white Anemone japonica 'Honorine Jobert'; the snow-in-summer (Cerastium tomentosum) has galloped gaily over everything; and there's tons of self-seeded valerian in every nook and cranny, too.

Some of these I shall just move; the valerian will go (there's plenty elsewhere in the garden; I do love it, but not to the exclusion of everything else). And I'm afraid the Cerastium is just a bit too bedding for me; it's going.

There is a dilemma, in the shape of a large and stately hardy fuchsia in the middle of the whole thing. It's massive; it's in the wrong place; but it's a fine plant. I can't see I'll be able to move it without wrecking it wholesale; my preferred option at the moment is to take some cuttings and start again, with the statutory mourning period required for the sad but necessary passing of such beauties.

And replacing it all? Well: part of it is already assigned. I have my corner of scented geraniums, underplanted with blankets of Strawberry 'Baron von Solemacher'. I have an olive tree to replace the horrible cotoneaster in the corner, to arch gracefully and elegantly over the semi-oval of chamomile lawn which will replace the scraggy grass and even scraggier roses which inexplicably occupy the only flat bit. And the thyme collection dotted around another side is coming on nicely.


And once the other planting areas are cleared and as I want them, I have herbs dancing through my dreams: medicinal echinacea and stately angelica, prostrate rosemary dripping over the old stone wall and hummocks of sage ringed with dancing spheres of silvery-pink chive flowers.

I have a yen to grow mandragora root, liquorice and blood-red veined sorrel, fenugreek and cumin, capers and orach, mint (sunk in pots) of every shape, size and flavour, vervain for tea and sweet cicely for sweetening my rhubarb.

In fact I'm sure I'll run out of space long before I've run out of herbs I want to grow. At the moment, I'm just thinking how different what I see out my window looks in comparison to the vision I have in my head: but then gardens are the stuff that dreams are made on. And besides, the scaffolding came down this week. Time to get out the spade and turn those dreams into reality...

Of garden hoses and organisation

At the beginning of this year, I had the biggest rats-nest of garden hoses I have ever accumulated.

So enormous was it that the tap had disappeared beneath it. So ratty and nesty I couldn't figure out where the end of the hose I needed was, and even if I had been able to locate it, extracting it with any hope of actually watering something with it would have tied the knots still tighter.

This was partly an accident of history: our last garden required two hoses joined together, especially if we wanted to top up the pond at the other end (yes, I know, you're supposed to use rainwater: but this ignores the unavoidable fact that ponds only need topping up when water butts are empty).

And I also had an allotment: 70ft long, with another 70ft or so to go between the gate and the tap. This demanded the mother of all hoses: in fact so big was my allotment mega-hose it needed two hosereels to hold it all. Luckily, it being an allotment, a certain amount of shabby chic allowed, so I was able to leave it out most of the time.

Both ex garden hoses (disconnected from each other by now) plus the allotment hose were stacked hopefully by the garden tap behind the house on moving day. And that's where they stayed, completely baffling my attempts to organise them and as the record-breaking drought of April 2011 kicked in, reducing all my poor gasping patio plants to the occasional watering can full when I could spare them from dousing the greenhouse.

About the same time, an email dropped into my inbox from a nice man offering me a free hose reel to try out in the comfort of my own home, if I should be inclined to write about it in return.

Luckily, it didn't seem to put him off when I told him that if it didn't work, or isn't quite right, or I didn't like something, I reserved the right to say so. And within a week a very large package arrived on our doorstep: by this time it hadn't rained for about five weeks, so it wasn't a moment too soon.

The hosereel in question is the Hozelock Autoreel: a megalith of a hose reel if ever there was one, and I spent the tail end of that drought-ridden spring testing it to the limit. I tugged it from one end of the garden to the other, mercilessly dragging it to its 40m limit. I left it out for the puppies to chew; flapped the hinged wall bracket back and forth relentlessly; took it out and put it away again more times than I can remember.

I had a damn good try at breaking the autowind stop mechanism, too: this is like a spring catch which only works as you pull the hose out. So you pull the hose to a certain length, and when you let it go, it catches so the hose is held at (more or less) the length you've chosen. Pull it again, and the catch comes off, allowing the hose to spring back automatically to the start.

But though I verged on the irresponsible with the way I let the hose whack back to the catch, it hasn't broken yet. This is one tough customer: it needs to be, with the way I treat my garden gear, and I've been pleasantly surprised by what it will put up with. Besides, anything that puts itself away is a winner in my book.

Niggles: such a behemoth of a creature needs a Proper Bloke to fit it to the wall. I'm pretty handy with a drill and some screws when required, but even I had to come over all girly and get the hubster to do it.

He said something obscure about a template being needed to screw the back plate onto the wall straight: not entirely sure what he was on about, but then it probably means more to perfectionist carpenters than slapdash gardeners.

And you need two people to lock the hose in place if you don't want to use the catch mechanism described above. There is a locking switch on the main casing (see picture left), but you'd need someone to stand by the lock to turn it when you get to the point you want the hose to stay: if you let go the hose to run back and fix it with the lock, it gaily sprints along by your side, racing you back to the start as that auto-wind kicks in. Maybe I was missing something, but this was one of the few design features I couldn't see the point of.

I'm not too keen on the bright green thing it's got going on, either: why on earth does Hozelock have to choose such utterly garden-unfriendly, plasticky colours for its brand livery? Nobody, I can assure you, would choose the garden hose as a focal point, however wonderful it might be to use. Fortunately mine's tucked away nicely out of sight behind the house so that doesn't matter.

But these are small complaints: my shiny new hose has entirely revolutionised my watering life. I love that it's on a hinge, so you can pull it two ways: ideal for me, when the same hose has to be threaded along both directions of a narrow passageway.

The hose itself is as tough and beefy as the casing. It's satisfyingly heavy, so it doesn't kink and lies where you put it unlike most hoses, which have an annoying habit of flipping across your prize dahlias as you're watering.

Nor does it disappear back into the casing: a sturdy business-like ball (see second picture) strapped to the hosepipe just behind the end takes care of that. This reel is full of sensible, practical design ideas like this: it's the tidiest, most well-organised thing in my garden.

My poor chaotic old green, red and yellow hoses - all three of them - have been made entirely redundant and have been put out to grass in the garage while I decide what to do with them. If anyone out there fancies a few hours unknotting hosepipes, they're yours.

Avon calling

One of the slightly more unexpected side-effects of my move to Somerset last year has been that I find myself at the heart of what seems to be an area with a gravitational pull for outstanding nurseries.


Bulb beds carved from a field but full of treasure
Desert to Jungle, Kelways in the Somerset Levels, the walled gardens of heritage vegmeisters Pennard Plants and Hewitt-Coopers of carnivorous plant fame are all within half an hour's drive. Jekka McVicar is a bit further up the M5, and Joy Michaud and her chillies are a short hop down towards the Dorset coast.


The dahlia bed: every possible variety (and that dark-petalled one)
Any of these would be a pilgrimage for me. But the one I was most thrilled to find as a near neighbour is Avon Bulbs.

I make a beeline for Avon every time I arrive in a floral marquee. I don't think I've ever come away from their stand without discovering a new treasure to squirrel away in my list of plants I must grow one day: they have unwavering and exquisitely good taste in plants.


Mathiasella bupleuroides 'Green Dream'
So last weekend they became the first of my pilgrimages, largely because they generously opened their doors for a rare open day in aid of Friends of African Nursing (a small but tirelessly energetic charity doing marvellous work training African nurses in better hygiene practices: look them up, and help them if you can).


Knee high Kniphofia 'Light of the World'
Owner Chris Ireland-Jones and his family started Avon in 1990, in a middlingly derelict 7-acre former dairy farm in South Petherton (a stone's throw from Margery Fish's garden at East Lambrook Manor - told you I was in a good gardening area).


Dahlia coccinea var palmeri
They're exclusively mail order (apart from voracious visitors like our group last weekend) and make 2/3 of their annual income between early September and mid November. I was tempted to ask Chris why he wasn't in a shed somewhere feverishly packing bulbs instead of wasting time with us lot, but I suspect he was quite happy to have a break.

Chelsea is the lodestone for the whole of the nursery's year. They have three chilling sheds with which they time the bulbs to flower in that last week in May. His description of the routine for tulips - lift in March, bring in to 2-3°C to stop them growing, when the weather forecast says cold, you move them outside to keep them green, as soon as the temperature rises you bring them in again... well, it had me tired just thinking about it.


Nerine x bowdenii 'Zeal Giant'
The stock beds are long, thin strips cut out of a field, punctuated with high wall-like hedges to absorb the wind. It kept reminding me of my old allotment; except here the crops are bulbs, bulking up in great blocks of foliage and flower.


Actaea simplex 'Brunette'
Most of course were getting ready to die back for the winter (if they hadn't already); but there were some wonderful late summer bulbs still in glorious bloom. Eucomis, dahlia, camassias, kniphofia and some sultry Actaea simplex ‘Brunette’: a lesson for anyone who thinks bulbs are just for spring.


Eucomis pallida en masse
We had an absorbing and hugely enjoyable day, made all the more so by Chris’s affable and knowledgeable company. I’m afraid I disgraced myself by failing dismally to stay with the group and do as I was told; well, who in their right mind would walk past a bed brimming with dahlias, including a glimpse of one spidery dark one which was ravishingly lovely, and not stop?

So: without further ado, here’s the list of plants which caught my eye and tempted me off the beaten track.

Nerine x bowdenii ‘Zeal Giant’: the most in-yer-face nerine I’ve ever seen. Lipstick pink and huge.

Dahlia coccinea var palmeri: towering tall but airy and graceful, dancing with clear orange flowers.

Eucomis pallida: thick, upright spires of cream over strappy green leaves, tall and imposing

Eucomis villosa: shorter, at 2ft, and scented: the pale flower has a button-like darker centre

Kniphofia ‘Light of the World’: the tiniest, daintiest red-hot poker, little more than a foot high

Mathiasella bupleuroides ‘Green Dream’: no flowers now, but worth it just for the handsome foliage

Dahlia ‘Dark Desire’: jumped out at me from the dahlia bed: slim near-black petals and a buttery eye

Actaea simplex ‘Brunette’: spires of dreamy white over deeply-toothed leaves of deepest purple.

September flowers

There are some bad things about September. The light, for one thing: after a summer of shutting in the chickens just before I go to bed (so that's 10pm ish), we're now down to just-after-supper (around 7.30 or so). That's the end of evening gardening, then.

But there are good things about September, too. I adore autumn; it's my favourite season after spring. I love the anticipation as the trees begin turning ahead of next month's pyrotechnic display. And even the slight nip in the air is refreshing without - yet - carrying a tang of anxiety about frost.

But most of all I love that my garden comes back to life after the exhaustion of August. So much is in second bloom, and even the soldiers who have been marching on in stalwart fashion right through since June seem to perk up a bit and put an extra spring in their step.

So for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted as ever by Carol at May Dreams Gardens, here are some of the many, many flowers putting a smile on my face whenever I go in the garden at the moment.

A bit of botanising #2

All that ranting about botanic gardens was by way of introduction: that last post started out meaning to be a tour of Ventnor Botanic Garden but got sidetracked before I’d finished the first sentence.



Ventnor has echoes of Tresco and those impossibly exotic-looking gardens off the west coast of Scotland
That’s because it’s hard to ignore the slow slide into decline, the fraying around the edges, the fuzzy lines and good-enoughs that have crept into this still wonderfully quixotic and fascinating collection of southern hemisphere plants.

Tetrapanax papyrifer here lives in the ground from one year to the next, revealing an alarming tendency to sucker madly when happy

Ventnor is one of those places which is much too nice for its own good. It’s never charged entrance, for example; and it relies heavily on its doughty army of volunteers, ever more so since the budget cuts hit. The result is a certain rather endearing amateurishness, disguising a quite astonishing plant collection for those who know to look closer.



Magnolia grandiflora bursting into massive flower
The garden has about £600,000 funding a year from the Isle of Wight County Council, of which £300,000 is returned through revenues like car parking tickets and plant sales. For its £300k the council gets a superb specialist staff.



Though 'ordinary' annuals are creeping in everywhere, they're trying to use them with panache: I liked this fennel against the crocosmia
The team were galvanised some years back by the arrival of Chris Kidd, who among other innovations came up with the idea of converting the previously rather worthy greenhouse behind the plant sales into the greenHouse; we’ll forgive the idiosyncratic syntax as it’s a riot. You enter from behind a crashing, deafening waterfall into a Mad Max fantasy of rusting pipework, green and steaming pools, and a central tank where fish swim among the giant plates of the Amazonian waterlilies (Victoria amazonica). Sheer theatre.

The New Zealand gully: a little obscured but still dramatic

Outside, it's less easy to find things to wax lyrical about. This has never been the best-kept of gardens: a legacy of its council funding. But it does have flashes of brilliance: the dramatic descent into the New Zealand gully, for example (though the tree ferns are perhaps a little too joyously happy here: a few years ago you could see down into the rocky canyon, but the view is now obscured).

And the new arid garden is fantastic: the best-kept (because newest) bit of the garden, it was full of treasures at best considered semi-hardy elsewhere, but in the Isle of Wight microclimate quite able to live outdoors all year round.



The Arid Garden: at the limits of climate change
This means some of the specimens in the garden are mind-boggling: a glimpse of what they can do if they put their minds to it. A loquat tree (Eriobotrya japonica) 20ft tall; massive, tree-scale palms; tender fuchsias towering above your head; sprawling cacti smothered in flowers and aloes you could curl up inside, if you didn’t mind the spikes.

Agave americana able to grow to the size it's meant to be

Here, Melianthus major grows into spreading thickets, fountaining dark bronze flowers; Echium pininana sends huge spires into the sky; and you’re forever finding tender-ish plants you adore but never previously knew existed. Firmiana simplex, the Chinese parasol tree, was my discovery for this year's visit: huge, foot-across dinnerplate leaves of an exquisite fresh green.



The dinner-plate leaves of Firmiana simplex
But there is bindweed taking hold among the shrubberies and the bedding is verging on the park-like to be inspiring. I spotted ragwort in the borders and most of the labels were broken or missing.

Annual bedding: quite nice, but in a garden like this, the cheaper option, and becoming all too prevalent

This is too special a place to allow to slip away. Former curator Simon Goodenough was driven away this year after 25 years to be almost immediately snapped up by the National Botanic Garden of Wales, and the remaining staff, with Chris Kidd at the helm, are fighting a brave but, I fear, losing battle against the combined forces of a council that wants to turn the place into a cheap’n’cheerful park, and a general ignorance of just how extraordinary the plants here are.

Ventnor deserves better: I just hope its fortunes improve before the slide becomes too steep for return.

Wordless Wednesday

Aloe polyphylla

A bit of botanising #1

Ventnor Botanic Garden, Isle of Wight

How many Botanic Gardens do you think there are in the UK?

And how many of those can you name?

The first question is a bit vexed: it depends, you see, if you count pinetums and arboreta, and gardens with botanical add-ons like herbaria. But let's leave all those out and just concentrate on the gardens with 'Botanic' in the name. There are around 25 of them.

Now - how many of you can name all 25?

Well, most of you will have Kew on the list, and probably the Edinburgh Botanics (three gardens, really, though we'll count them as one) and the National Botanic Garden of Wales. A few might have remembered Ness over in Liverpool; and the Oxford and Cambridge Botanic Gardens.

That’s six.

But give yourself a pat on the back if Paignton Botanic Gardens was in there; or the St Andrews Botanic Garden in Fife, or either of Manchester's two Botanic Gardens, or Birmingham's for that matter.

The fact is that the vast majority of our botanical treasures are kept in small, obscure collections. Many are attached to and funded by universities: we all know the precarious financial states many of our universities are in, but worse, the future of the study of botany at university is in doubt too. Only Bristol and Reading Universities offer an undergraduate degree in pure botany – even though it’s the one degree these days which all but guarantees you’ll get a job on graduation.

We’ve never needed botanists more, what with biofuels, food security and the loss of more medicinal plants than we will ever know existed. And if the student botanists go, so do the botanic gardens. The Firs Botanical Grounds – a series of experimental gardens and glasshouses bequeathed to the University of Manchester in 1922 - is already on its way; its gates closed, almost without comment, this summer.

There’s another layer of botanic garden which is funded largely by local councils. It’s a bit of an anomaly in this day and age to have gardens kept mainly for the study of plants and paid for from the public purse, and it’s about to become a thing of the past, too, as botanic gardens are – perhaps rightly – seen as an extravagance at a time of five-figure budget cuts. They tend to get mixed up with parks, even though there’s a world of difference between the two and botanic gardens are far more expensive due to actually having plants in them (and usually ones requiring costly specialists to tend them). So they’re a soft target.

St Andrews Botanic Garden, Fife, Wavertree Botanic Park and Gardens in Liverpool and Southport Botanic Gardens on Merseyside, the Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden in Manchester, and my favourite Botanic Gardens of all, the Ventnor Botanic Gardens on the Isle of Wight. All council funded; and more than one, as a result, now fighting for their increasingly unlikely futures.

You could be callous about whether we actually need 25 botanic gardens, I suppose; it is quite a lot for one small and rather overcrowded island off the coast of Europe, after all. As gardeners, we tend not to like botanic gardens that much: too much science, not enough prettiness.

But as gardeners we also adore plants. And whatever you think of them as gardens, botanic gardens hold some of the most extraordinary plants you can imagine.

There are botanically important collections: Ventnor Botanic Gardens has the country's leading collections of southern hemisphere plants. And historically important individuals: there's a Chusan palm planted by Queen Victoria at Ventnor, and what, I wonder, has happened to the 80-year-old cactus in residence at the Firs Botanic Grounds?

In the headlong rush to save money it’s sometimes forgotten that botanic gardens are also living museums: the plants they contain are woven into our gardening history. We’ll all be the poorer if they’re consigned to the ‘surplus to requirements’ box in Town Hall treasuries.

August flowers

Just as an interlude my witterings about the Isle of Wight (for yes, dear reader: there is more to come): a little pictorial heaven from my back garden (and the side one, and the veggie one too).

I usually feel really grumpy about the garden in August. It's such an in-between time: so not-quite-summer and not-quite-autumn. You're expecting billowing borders of beauty and bounty: what you get is a rag-tag slump of tired flowers and tireder foliage.

The rudbeckia you forgot to stake are lurching over the path, and the paeonies are a bilious shade of blotchy purple as the leaves die back in that ugly way they have (and half of them have been bludgeoned into the ground by over-enthusiastic dogs anyway). The bindweed is making its presence felt; none of the trees are flowering or doing interesting things with their leaves and you can't see the bark yet so you can't even enjoy that. And it's raining.

It's not the best time. Yet - as so often - when you're forced to go out there and look, not for the faults but for the nice bits, you are surprised and not a little delighted to find there's more than you thought there was to gladden the eye and lighten the heart. For once I managed to plant some dahlias this year; the rudbeckia are fabulously rugged in smouldering bronze, when you overlook their drunken posture; and the cosmos are flowering on, and on, and on.

Here's my little selection of previously unremarked treasures for this month: and I shall try to be less late-summer gloomy in future.

Thanks as always to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day!

OOTS: Bowed, battered, and very nearly beaten

This is, or rather was, one of the more dramatic publicly-maintained council-funded plantings I know: the Victorian cascades at the foot of the hill in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight.

(The other one is the rock garden at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, but I keep forgetting my camera on trips to the beach so you'll have to wait for that one).

I expect my timing is all out, but I wanted to take a snap of this one as a contribution to Out on the Streets (OOTS), the regular slot on public planting hosted by Veg Plotting, and since I've just come back from my hols on the Isle of Wight and wanted to go on about it a bit, it couldn't wait.

Anyway: the Isle of Wight, of course, enjoys a mild microclimate which makes it very nearly subtropical in terms of plant life. Echiums, aeoniums and even cacti thrive outdoors here; public planting displays are as likely to include agaves and aloes as ageratum and antirrhinums.

However, the IoW County Council has also been taking a hatchet to its budget: £32 million saved over four years, out of a total budget which was only about £200m in the first place. Around £15 million in cuts have already been identified; libraries, regional theatres, tourist information centres, sports facilities and public toilets are toppling like ninepins.

Parks departments are soft targets in such slash-and-burn strategies: £450,000 is coming out of the parks budget on the Island between now and 2013. Quite apart from Ventnor Botanic Garden, which has had its entire funding removed (of which more later) the holes are beginning to show in the Island's previously perfectly-manicured parks, once the pride of an area which depends heavily on tourism to keep itself solvent.

Unfortunately the budget cuts also coincided with the one of the worst winters in living memory. Even the Island, usually pretty much frost-free, had the deepest snowfall for decades. Not ideal for subtropical planting, and as you can see from the picture much of it was lost.

There's no money to replace it with either more exotics, or even run-of-the-mill bedding: so we're left looking at bare soil, right into July and peak tourist season.

I've been going to the Island every year for over a decade, and I've always looked forward to visiting this bit of Ventnor. I remember the area simply dazzling with colour: vivid orange marigolds and scarlet salvias jostling up against alyssum and magenta aubretia tumbling over the rocks. It wasn't tasteful, but my goodness, it was jolly, and never failed to put a smile on my face.

It's so sad to see it like this: still trying, just, but such a pale imitation of what it once was. So is this what we've got to look forward to, then? Scraggy bare bits interspersed with brave little patches of yellow daisies or pink geraniums?

Quite apart from cringing to think what the tourists will make of it - so much for Britain plc, then - this is not a country I want to live in. It's depressing, poor, uninspiring, defeated. You can blame whoever you like for the current crisis: but this can't, possibly, be the right way to take us forward.

Parks departments may be viewed as the poor relation as far as many local councils are concerned, but you underestimate the work they do at your peril. They're responsible for the public face we turn to the world: reduce them to a starved, beaten down skeleton, and you do it to all of us, too.