Pretty posies

Further to the previous, one bit of Dan Pearson's book which piqued my interest was his description of his friend Geraldine's habit of picking a posy of flowers from her garden every day of the year to pop in a jamjar on the kitchen table.

The flowers were gathered at random: just eight, or maybe ten, of the first flowers that came to hand. No thought to colour, form, or all those angst-ridden artistic things which I'm no good at - I'm a dab hand at appreciating artistic things when other people do them, but absolutely rubbish at coming up with the ideas myself.

So this is the non-flower-arranger's school of flower arrangement. Right up my street. And there's a useful sort of gardening point to it all, too.

Dan says he takes inspiration from throwing together flowers like this: colour combinations you might never consider normally, and a close appreciation of the way flowers behave. And the posies change according to the seasons. It all adds up to a real insight into how plants work together in the garden.

So, I got to thinking: let's try this at home.

I couldn't quite manage a posy every day: actually I don't own enough vases to hold them anyway and can't quite harden my heart enough to throw away a perfectly good bunch of flowers. So for the last week I've been picking a posy maybe every couple of days.

The rules I followed: pick the first flowers you see, only one of each type in each posy, and no more than 10 in a bunch. Here's the result.

Friday: Philadelphus coronarius 'Aurea', Geranium pratense, Sorbus aucuparia, Queen Anne's lace, Euphorbia griffithii, red valerian, comfrey, Alchemilla mollis, flowering mizuna and Astrantia major.

I learned: orange and lime yellow look fabulous together: tree blossom looks lovely in a vase; and dusty pink and burnt orange work surprisingly well. And bolting vegetables are beautiful!


Sunday: Stachys byzantina, Euphorbia amygdaloides purpurea (I think), bluebell, red valerian, Cotinus coggygria 'Royal Purple', Queen Anne's lace, Aquilegia vulgaris, Cerastium tomentosum, chives, Spiraea arguta

I learned: you can overdo white (and purple); white against deep purple is a combination to die for; if you've got a group of small-leaved and/or small-flowered plants, you need something big or something brightly coloured to stop it being too 'bitty'.


Today: Paeonia lactiflora, Meconopsis cambrica, pink lupin, chive, red campion, Aquilegia vulgaris, comfrey, red valerian, Geranium pratense

I learned: You can overdo the big splashy flowers - with both paeony and lupin in here neither shone as it should; the yellow splash of Welsh poppy worked surprisingly well and lifted the whole thing; wild flowers like campion hold their own among even very cultivated plants.

I've got a bit of a taste for this. My house also looks rather lovely bedecked in flower 'arrangements' which are artless, unplanned, yet all the more beautiful for that. Plus it's a great excuse to get out in the garden and really look, closely, at what's out there, and celebrate just how beautiful it all is.

If anyone should feel like joining in, be my guest: pop out for five minutes and snip yourself a posy, then take a pic and show us all. And don't forget to post here and tell me too :D

Garden words: The May review

Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City
Dan Pearson
You know, I do sometimes wonder why Dan Pearson ever became a garden designer.

The thing is (and I sincerely hope he doesn't mind me saying this) he doesn't really seem to be that interested in it. This, his latest book, is a moving and poetic love song from a gardener to his London garden. And - rather refreshingly, if I'm honest - it barely gives a mention to the day job.

Dan is Kew and Edinburgh trained: he's a botanist and a gardener to the veins of his mud-grimed fingers, and it is his love of the physical act of gardening that shines out from these pages.

He talks of 'utter absorption', the rhythms of the seasons, rhapsodises about Felco no.2's in the way only a dedicated gardener can. You've got to like a man who can write, 'I have four pairs because I feel lost without them and ill-equipped if I can't feel them in my back pocket'. Is there any gardener who doesn't derive deep comfort from the weight of a pair of Felcos in the back pocket, I wonder?

But on the design of the garden - the structure, the hard landscaping bones - he is so brief as to be almost dismissive. There is a passing mention of cantilevered steps which hints at something more styled; but to be honest, he shows more enthusiasm for the rubber builders' buckets he uses.

Mind you, he likes his dark limestone slab benches - though I suspect that's because he uses one of them to house his species pelargoniums. And he's also lyrical about the 'shards of tumbled limestone' which make up his path: 'The pacing in the garden is interesting underfoot,' he says. 'I like the way you move from wood to solid stone to the clatter of broken limestone, then wood and clatter again as you move through the garden'. But that's by way of taking you to his willow tree and his agonies over removing it.

This is a book to speak to the heart of any muddy-fingered, welly-clad gardener. Anyone who has ever railed at the ever-growing list of things to keep them from the garden will sigh when he says, 'I spend as much time as possible living outside because the garden draws me there; it is the first place I go after getting out of bed and the last at the end of the day.'

As well as being a passionate gardener, Dan is an inspired and poetic garden writer. His use of language is simply delicious: you revel in it, bask in it, hold it like jewels in your fingers. He talks of holly never being oppressive because the leaves 'shine like a thousand tiny mirrors'; Magnolia 'Porcelain Dove' smells of 'churches, incense and musk', while the blooms of a Paeonia delavayi, nicked as a seedling while he weeded beds at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, is 'dark as dried blood and satiny as an Elizabethan damask'.

There are useful tips too: a planting combination he recommends shades the tricky Erythronium californicum 'White Beauty' to just the right degree with filigree Dicentra 'Langtrees', which after it has died back in summer is replaced by the willow gentian Gentiana asclepiadea. A real plantsman and gardener's combination - and one for the notebook.

And I was deeply reassured to find that even such a god as Dan Pearson has his 'corner of shame': that bit of the garden where odd cuttings, surplus seedlings, impulse buys and sentimental saplings moulder miserably for months, forgotten. Of course Dan's corner is a cut above: it includes such treasures as balsam poplars and Euonymus planipes sown as seed from the Netherlands. But nonetheless - you can feel he gardens just like you do.

And I haven't even mentioned Howard Sooley's sumptuous photography: lingering, atmospheric, perfectly capturing the earthy and natural feel of the book itself. Dan has now burst the constraints of his city walls and I can claim him as an almost-neighbour, since he has moved to a smallholding not many miles from me in Somerset these days. I can't help thinking he will be happier in the country.

Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City by Dan Pearson, is published by Conran Octopus http://www.octopusbooks.co.uk/

Garden words: The January review

I have many books about garden design on my bookshelf. The likes of Robin Williams, John Brookes, Tim Newbury, Piet Oudolf and Roy Strong snuggle together amicably there: they have, over the years, instructed me purposefully, generously and reliably. I have shamelessly nicked designs from all of them and shoehorned them into gardens with a non-designer's lack of discrimination. Heck, I once built a brick wall on instructions from a well-thumbed copy of John Brookes's 'The Small Garden'.

But there are only so many times you can be told how to triangulate things. Sometimes all you require is a lot of lovely pictures of, say, pergolas so you can figure out what you like and - more importantly - what you want for whichever garden you happen to be building at the time.

And that, mostly, is what you get with The Essential Garden Book, from the unlikely pairing of uber-chic interior designer Terence Conran and thoughtful, sensitive garden designer Dan Pearson: published in 1998 but still current and a late New Year present from my other half, who knows the agonies I am in at the moment over how to design a fruit cage that doesn't look like a fruit cage.

I have my doubts about Terence Conran's forays into garden design, though I must admit his design template for a compost bin (was it really his, though, do you think?) remains a staple in my repertoire. He's rather good at houses, of course: in fact this book was designed to follow his The Essential House Book.

But stick to what you know is my motto, and such sequels are often less than successful. Luckily whoever was advising him clearly knew his stuff, as he managed to collar a relatively recently-established Dan Pearson to do it (there are also - surprisingly ill-acknowledged - contributions from Isabelle van Groeningen and Andrew Wilson). The book was first published a scant decade after Pearson arrived at Home Farm, so we were only just beginning to see what he was capable of.

I'm afraid I quickly gave up on the words and just basked in all the lovely, lovely pictures. You see this is a sourcebook extraordinaire: the size of a baking tray, it is heavy and rich with ideas. There are steps, sprayed with mud and grass, growing green and hairy; wonderful dry-stone moongates; a trellis so cloaked in ivy it looks like a living sculpture; and fences made of multicoloured bottles strung on wires.

The pictures are this book's strength, but it does get bogged down in the words. I do question how digestible and relevant an essay on void versus mass - however intelligently put - is to the ordinary backyard reader. And most non backyard readers will probably know about it already anyway. Dan Pearson is, of course, a fine writer: but this is quite obviously a book designed to be looked at, not read.

But worse: in the end it tries to be all things to all readers. How can you possibly even attempt to cover the cornucopia of perennials, bulbs and ferns in just six pages (including pictures)? I'll tell you - woefully inadequately, and by avoiding cultivar names wherever possible, which makes it a bit of a pointless exercise. And vegetables, herbs and fruit are given just four measly pages, including exotica like kiwis, peaches and apricots. A breakneck gallop through every aspect of gardening is achieved in just 12 of the book's 272 pages - relegated to the back, of course. It's hard not to avoid getting cross at the priorities here.

I came away with the impression that this was a book without the confidence to be what it very nearly is: an outstanding sourcebook full of inspiration, ideas and horizon-widening examples to send you away into your garden full of renewed determination and optimism. If I'd been the editor, I would have lopped off the bits about plants and gardening and let it flourish as the design book it was meant to be.