End of month view: June

It's been a month of making progress, if slow: the mad rush of spring has calmed and I'm just planting out the last of my young plants (looking a bit the worse for wear, I have to say: this drought-ridden spring hasn't been kind to plants in pots).

But for now I can enjoy the garden burgeoning into colour, everything growing at the rate of knots, and my earlier work coming - sometimes - good.

It won't surprise anyone who knows me that the veg garden is seeing most of the action: so that's where I'm concentrating for my end-of-month stocktake this time.

There have been a few surprises as I'm trialling one or two veg varieties this year: first up is an amazing pea, due to make its debut in the Thompson & Morgan catalogue next year I believe. If you're not yet convinced that veg can be as beautiful as ornamentals, take a look at this:

The all-important taste test, of course, has yet to come: at the moment the pods are rather a muddy purple tinged green, not unattractive but not exactly wow-value either. We'll see: just love those flowers though.

Another splash of colour is the double row of marigolds I sowed on both sides of my onion bed:

I'm so doing this again: it makes me smile every time I see it. It's supposed to deter onion fly too: they get confused by the strong scent of the calendula. Well - there aren't any onion flies as far as I can see: so it seems to be working so far.

The spuds haven't been so lucky.

I've never had early blight on the new potatoes before. It's making my heart sink for my so-far hale and hearty maincrops. I should know, of course, that in damp and rainy Somerset the chances of escaping fungal disease of any kind are pretty close to zero: but such an early arrival has come as something of a surprise. The spuds themselves don't seem affected: these are 'Foremost', nice enough, but rather bland for my taste.

And finally: a visit to the engine room.

Packed with growbags this year: there are over 20 in there, at last count. It's not how I usually do it - I'm a big fan of growing in soil in the greenhouse borders as a rule, as plants look after themselves so much better. But this is the greenhouse I inherited (rather than the one I brought back from the allotment: that's still being planted up with cucumbers, melons and sweet peppers). So it's on a hard standing, and I didn't have much choice.

Fortunately I was after some experiments to do for t'other blog, so I've got all sorts of things going on in here: product reviews, trying out different supports, you name it. Oh, and those baskets in the back are my sweet potatoes: all of them T65 this year after they won my undying support by producing my best crop last season.

Elsewhere, the whole garden is getting decidedly woolly around the edges, and I am, frankly, dreading July: it's hedge-cutting month, and strim-the-undergrowth month, so I'm looking down the wrong end of a lot of hours strapped to either strimmer or hedge-trimmer. I have half a mile of hedge here: this is no small undertaking. Here's what we're looking at: the back slope gives some idea of the jungle-like undergrowth:


...and here's a typical hedge.

Luckily they're not all quite that tall, but since they're all hazel-dominated mixed hedges they're pretty much this overgrown. Wish me luck.

Thanks as always to Helen at The Patient Gardener for hosting the EOMV!

The strength of plants

Cutting back my hedge (still haven't finished) I discovered one of the hazel trees had eaten a rock.


It was so firmly wedged I couldn't shift it, even when I whacked it hard with a hammer, my standard fall-back position when all things more ladylike have been tried.

I've seen trees eat other trees, barbed wire, bits of string and rubber tree ties (that was a crabapple in my terrace garden last week) - but never a rock before.

Aren't plants amazing?

Hedging my bets #2

So having established that I have the wildlife habitat equivalent of the Mona Lisa around my garden and if I so much as touch it I shall have the wrath of a thousand hairy-bearded environmentalists raging about my head, I have had to work out how it is possible to garden alongside my hedge.

Just after a puny hedgetrimmer had been at it: not a shred of difference did it make (the tops were done with a flail: now that's more like it, but a little impractical inside the garden as the tractor wouldn't fit)

I have been weighing up a few options:

1. Rip the whole thing out and replace it with a wall.
Social suicide. I could never lift my head in polite society, and certainly not in the village, ever again. People have been sent to the Tower for less.

2. Rip the whole thing out and replace it with another hedge.
There is a precedent for this in the village: someone down the road from us has clearly ripped out their hedgerow and replaced it with a sort of cotoneaster sort of thing. It looks horrible: the essence of suburbia dropped like an alien into a rural idyll.

I have a lovely memory of the beautiful beech hedge I planted around my old house: but again, such clipped refinement would sit oddly among the wildness, and besides, it took years to establish, during which time the cows who live next door would have a high old time skipping around among my cabbages.

The inside of my hedge. Now in the process of returning to its former occupation as the outside of my hedge.

3. Make it a bit smaller.
Ah: now you're talking more sense. The main point of conflict between me and my hedge is that it's taking up too much of the garden. This is especially the case in my very thin vegetable garden: when you've only got about 20ft to play with anyway, an 8ft hedge either side reduces the available growing space to a wide path.

When you look more closely at the actual structure of the hedge, it's quite obvious that it's escaped from its original boundaries. The hump of chalk bank which my hedges stand on is hidden behind a forest of suckers: mainly hazel, but an awful lot of bramble and some blackthorn, too. There's a good few years' growth there in fact, and I got to thinking if this were a shrub, I'd be pitying it for being so neglected and working out how to renovate it back to its original shape.

In fact if you start thinking like that, you remember (something I bang on about quite a lot) that hedges are still plants. They need feeding, watering and weeding just like your other garden plants: and in this case, they also require rejuvenating.

So that's what I've been doing: it is a herculean task, involving a lot of heavy action with the loppers and pruning saw, and a pile of green waste which has just passed my head height across about two car's lengths of garden.

But I am uncovering a better hedge: a well-behaved hedge, one which is a bit gappy at the moment (despite still being about 4ft across) but looks as if it will this season have enough light and room to regenerate with new wood and fresh growth.

Looking back down the garden at the bit I just did: the darker area marks the original footprint of the hedge. As you can see, it is transforming the space: and, though it looks a bit rough at the moment, I hope it will transform the health of the hedge as well.

I get four feet of extra space each side of the garden, and my grassy path of a veg plot is transformed into something that looks like you might be able to grow something in it.

I don't think my Grade I listed hedges will ever be low-maintenance; but all the best things take care and love and attention to keep them at their best. And besides, I like to garden my hedges. The nice thing is that now I can garden in between them, too.

Hedging my bets #1

I am feeling the heavy weight of responsibility on my shoulders.

You see, I have a proper hedgerow to look after. Actually, that's about the understatement of the year: I have about half a mile of hedgerow, as it forms the entire border of my very long and very thin garden.

Hedgerow is a proper recognised wildlife habitat: it's a priority habitat, in fact, protected under the Biodiversity Action Plan which describes them as 'particularly important for biodiversity conservation'. About 130 vulnerable species (so rabbits don't count) depend on them for their survival, including moths, birds, lichens and fungi.

Around here, there are miles and miles and miles of hedgerows. They are a wonderful, atmospheric feature of the landscape, turning lanes into green tunnels and patchworking the fields. They are, let's remember, essentially man-made: the farmers around here have formed them over centuries, with traditional management techniques which are still, essentially, unchanged (although these days they use tractors and flails, not billhooks). If farmers didn't manage hedgerows, they would disappear.

The OPAL project (it stands for Open Air Laboratories) is currently running a biodiversity survey which uses hedges to measure health of your local ecosystem. So I thought I'd put my own hedge to the test: you take a three-metre stretch of hedge and analyse the state of the hedge, its plant species, evidence of mammals living there, and any other creatures you find (mostly invertebrates like woodlice and snails).

I must admit mine was quite a cursory inspection: you're supposed to do these things in groups, and record it on a proper form, which I'd forgotten to print out. But in my randomly-chosen three-metre stretch here's what I found:


Plantlife:
Hart's-tongue fern (Asplenium scolopendrium)
Herb robert (Geranium robertianum)
Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota)
Brambles (Rubus fruticosus)


Ivy (Hedera helix)
Creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens)
Nettles (Urtica dioica)

and I also happen to know (because they're now starting to come up) there are also;
Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis)
Cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum)

Other things:
Lichens, most of which I can't identify
Mosses, ditto
Little yellow fungi, ditto
Bracket fungi on the rotten bits

Woody plants:
Elder (of which the above is the oldest example I've yet found in the hedge)(Sambucus nigra)
Hazel (lots) (Corylus avellana)
Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa)
Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)
Alder (Alnus glutinosa)

It's also a sign of the health of my hedgerows that there is a good mix of dead wood and live: the live provides the fruits, berries etc while the dead wood is colonised by tunnelling insects and the like.

However the hazel is undeniably taking over: there is less blackthorn than I would like (though my poor prickled fingers don't agree) and I could do with some more elder too.

Creatures:
I didn't find much to look at since it was winter and very cold when I looked at my hedgerow, and most sensible things were tucked up warm and weren't remotely interested in being surveyed.

However I did find this rather fine evidence of rabbits (as if I needed any proof: they scatter to right and left as you walk down the garden here). I have also, since I've been here, seen voles, mice, fox footprints and hundreds and hundreds of birds: wrens, sparrows, bluetits, wagtails, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, and that's not counting the ones I couldn't identify. And buzzards, and crows, and seagulls. though I don't think they rely too heavily on the hedgerows for day-to-day sustenance.

You see? What a responsibility. But though I like wildlife as much as the next person, and have a sense of tradition and history, and a great love of the countryside: I must also garden. And my hedges are undeniably taking over my garden, to the point where there is little garden left. They are 8ft wide in places, for goodness' sake.

My next step? What would you do?

Garden makeover #2: Boxing clever

I've been shopping :D

Never one to sit around for long when there's a garden makeover to be done, I was back at it this week following last week's (if I do say it myself) pretty good start to doing up my front garden.

It's getting towards the end of bare-root season, and since the design relies on about 21m of box hedging I thought I'd better get my skates on if I wanted to pay anything like a reasonable price.

So three big hefty bundles of box saplings arrived on my doorstep during the week, all around 10-15cm high which is a good size for getting a hedge started with. In fact as you can see from the picture, once it's bulked out a bit it won't take much clipping to make that small formal hedge a reality.

I put them in at around 15cm apart (that's 6" in my head - yes I do still have to convert - though handily both measurements come out at about a trowel's length). That was a bit closer than perhaps I should have done - estimates for the best spacing ranged from 7 per metre (that's the 6" spacing) to around 4 per metre (that's more like 10"). I thought 4 per metre sounded very sparse, so went for the tighter spacing - I can always thin them out a bit later if it looks like there are going to be problems.

I had a whole lot of soil improvement to do first - as you might expect, the soil on the ex-gravel drive bit was about as poor as it gets. Not only compacted, but grey with lack of nutrients. So anyway - I dug a good spit's depth of trench and half-filled it with soil improver before the little box plants got anywhere near it. They should be fine in that - and I'll mulch them next month too, just to keep the good work going. Here's what it all looked like once I'd finished:

Now it's just a matter of filling that big gap with lots of lovely plants. Could that mean.... shopping again? Woo hoo, I love the spring!

Last chance to see...

I was wandering through the woods walking the dog, grinning foolishly to myself while kicking the mounting piles of autumn leaves with every step (do you ever grow out of that, I wonder?). Then I happened to look up at the sky and saw that though it's not even mid-November yet, the branches are already bare against the blue.

It's been a fabulous autumn - something to do with the early frost and wet weather I believe - but all too short-lived. So I ran out with my camera as soon as I got back to take a few pics before it all disappears.

The view up through the mixed native trees that line the border of my garden: all that greenery just becomes goldery at this time of year.

The Prunus x subhirtella 'Autumnalis' outside my bedroom window is one I've raved about before - it's been spectacular this year, real fireworks every morning when I draw the curtains.

I planted this Hydrangea quercifolia a couple of years ago and it's becoming well-established now. I bought it for the shape of its leaves, but look at that brooding purple colour, too.

The beech hedge is joining in with waves of deep purple spreading through the green.

A couple of years ago an enterprising neighbour harangued the local council, who had just killed all the trees on our green by strimming them too enthusiastically, for some replacements. Being a professional tree man, the replacements he requested resembled a wish-list for an arboretum. We now have the best selection of trees for miles. This one is a fabulously vivid maple, one of several now giving us a fantastic display outside our front doors.

Cloud-pruning hedges

One of my clients has an accidentally cloud-pruned hedge. This arcane art from Japan is all the rage at the moment, but when I informed her she was cutting edge (literally and metaphorically), she'd never heard of it. The hedge, she told me, had just grown like that: she and her husband had been pruning it with shears since they moved in about 50 years ago and they just followed the contours of the hedge without bothering too much about straight lines and sharp edges.

It's a lovely thing: all curves and sensual, billowing waves. It takes me eight hours to prune it with hand shears each year, which is a real labour of love, but it's worth it. You can see bits of it swelling and retreating as the years go by: holes appear and disappear, and bulges are smoothed out and then turn up somewhere else. I've never been so aware that a hedge is made up of living, breathing plants: beats a boring old box square any day.

Hedging your bets

The year rolls on... now it's time to dust off the hedgetrimmers and get to work. A week or so ago it was a client's privet hedge, now it's the beech hedge round our front garden and the wildlife hedge at the back.

I'm more than a bit proud of our beech hedge. We planted it ourselves, about 4 years ago after we'd grubbed up a horrid leylandii hedge. Being me, I didn't do things by halves: I dug a big trench, poured barrowloads of manure in to improve the soil, then planted my staggered rows of beech saplings 18" apart and back-filled. Then I watered them in very, very well and mulched deeply with well-rotted stable manure.

So far, so what most people do. But ever since, I've taken care of the hedge in just the same way as my perennials: I think perhaps this is where people go wrong, in that they forget that hedges are groups of plants, not just inanimate walls, and have the same needs. So I watered the hedge in the droughts, mulched it every spring, and kept it free of weeds.

Result: a four-year-old hedge which looks like it's been there 10 years. Beech hedges are notoriously slow to establish, and the books say you shouldn't expect a dense hedge until at least 5 years. Ours took three: and I'm convinced it's because I took good care of the plants, and am continuing to do so. We're reaping the rewards now: all that hard work has really paid off, and my little beech trees are thanking me in the only way they know how!

Roses in hedges

It's rose-pruning season: I've been pruning roses nearly every day for a week or so, from shrubs to climbers to ramblers. My secateurs (Felco no 9's, in case you're an anorak) are fair worn out.

In one of the bigger gardens I look after, there's a rather neglected hedge of Rosa Hansa - a rugosa hybrid that's covered in surprisingly soft downy bristles and which, as I discovered to my cost, suckers like crazy. I spent much of my three-hour session there on my hands and knees in the mud (and rain) heaving at inch-thick stems that had burst from the ground up to a metre away. Such are the delights of a gardener's life...!

Rose hedges don't require a lot of work for the pleasure they provide. A quick once-over to tame them in winter (suckers allowing - better to keep on top of these year-round rather than let them get out of control like my Hansa hedge), and that's it for the rest of the year - for which care they reward you with (in the case of Hansa) deep pinkish-crimson flowers with a heavenly scent, followed by fat luscious hips.

The daunting and supremely Victorian rose expert, Gertrude Jekyll, had quite a bit to say about rose hedges in her classic Roses for Gardens (1909). She recommends tipping young shoots to promote bushy growth and prevent the legginess that invariably afflicts roses left to do their own thing:

"If in July [strong young shoots from the base] are shortened about a third, instead of continuing their growth in length, their energy goes to strengthening the shortened piece that is left," she says. "This will then, the following season, be thickly set with flowering laterals that will clothe the lower part of the hedge."

And just as a post-script: in this same chapter she takes the trouble to urge gardeners to learn from doing, not reading about it:

"It is more helpful to show one simple thing that is easily understood, and that awakens interest and enthusiasm... than it is to prompt the learner at every step, fussing like an anxious nurse, and doing for him, what, if his enthusiasm is true and deep and not mere idle froth, will give him more pleasure in the doing, and more profit in the learning, than if it were all done for him," she writes.

"For the very essence of good gardening is the taking of thought and trouble. No-one can do good decorative work who does it merely from a written recipe."

You have been told!