August flowers

Proof that we're about a month behind where we should be at this time of year: my garden has suddenly, spectacularly burst into flower. Even though it's August, when everything's usually looking a little saggy and tired and definitely more green and brown than colourful.

This is either what my borders should be looking like in midsummer, were I a properly organised gardener giving due consideration to year-round colour: or it's what my borders would have looked like in July, had it been a normal summer.

Oh hell, I don't care, I'm just enjoying it for what it is. For once I am spoiled for choice as to beautiful things to photograph for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted as always by Carol at May Dreams Gardens. And I couldn't be happier.
 

Pumpkin 'Atlantic Giant' in the tropical edibles border: its huge plate-like leaves are looking gorgeous snaking around the feet of some ruched near-black Cavolo Nero kale. I'm experimenting with edible planting with an exotic feel and this one is a real winner.

Malva moschata var alba

The brilliantly-coloured if rather thuggish daylilies are also a feature of the tropical edibles border: they don't have a variety as I inherited them (and have been digging out great clumps of them where they've invaded neighbouring territory ever since). I am forever weighing up the pros and cons of getting rid of them altogether: at the moment, when they're looking this lovely, they're for keeping I think. 

Garlic chives in full flower

Another thug with no name which I harden my heart against while it's just a big, ugly, strappy clump of leaves shouldering everything around it into oblivion: then it flowers and I lose the will to take action yet again. I love crocosmias but my goodness they're difficult to live with.

Nemesia which survived the winter in the chimney pots flanking my patio and are flowering their socks off once again

Geraniums: or should I say pelargoniums. I'm very rude to them every year and call them my old-lady plants but they just flower on regardless and defy all my attempts to ruin them with blatant neglect.

I rather like this one, though. Nicked as a cutting from a client's garden many years ago and still going strong.

Rosa 'Wildeve'

The two-tone flowers of Nicotiana mutabilis: I overwintered mine this year in a frost-free greenhouse on advice from Chris Ireland-Jones at Avon Bulbs and it's worked a treat.

Geranium pyrenaicum 'Bill Wallis' coming back for a second charming flowering: it's never really out of flower, actually, and is one of my desert-island plants I wouldn't be without

Cichorium intybus: otherwise known as chicory. I first saw chicory flowers on the Hooksgreen Herbs stand at one of the shows a few years ago and fell in love with it: now I've planted chicory all through my herb garden and it looks just lovely.

Tropaeolum majus 'Ladybird' forming a gorgeous frothy pile in the salad garden

Also in the salad garden the dill has flowered like big yellow fireworks in one corner: you're not supposed to let them do this, as it means you can't use the leaves any more, but they do look spectacular

And a little further along the same row there's another froth, this time of coriander which has run to seed rather spectacularly all along one side. It's very unruly and flops right across the path but it does look lovely: and I'll be saving the seed for use in cooking and also of course to sow next year.

Bagging my salad list

Gone are the days when we were satisfied with a limp lettuce leaf or two plonked on the plate.

Love them or loathe them, bagged supermarket salads have opened our eyes: we now know the delights of a salad full of colour and texture, with not only lettuces but also herbs, and a range of flavours from mild and sweet to spicy, peppery or bitter.

One of the many reasons I leapt at the chance to join VP's 52-week Salad Challenge is that I've never quite managed to organise things so that I have a good mix of salad ingredients to pick at any one time.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised I was looking for my perfect, home-grown supermarket bagged salad. Without the bags, without the chemicals, and without the carbon footprint.

But more than the environmental benefits, I want it to be more interesting than the actual ones you buy from the supermarket; more personalised than the salad seed mixes you can buy from the seed companies. One made just for me.

One problem: deciding what to grow. Well - where better to start compiling a shopping list than the ingredients list on that bag of supermarket salad currently languishing in the drawer at the bottom of the fridge.

At the moment, mine is a standard issue Florette Mixed (I like Florette as it’s one of the few brands which states where the ingredients are sourced – and that’s the UK, and Lincolnshire in particular, all year round, it seems. Why others are so coy about where their salads are from I've no idea. Could it be they're shipping it in from halfway around the world even though we can grow it here?)

Ingredients: Frisée lettuce (we know this as curly endive: it has a pleasantly bitter tang, and needs blanching), iceberg lettuce and radicchio which adds a splash of burgundy to the green. Right: that’s three on this list, although last time I tried to grow iceberg it refused to heart up.

Florette's Crispy adds lambs' lettuce to the list but omits the Iceberg. We buy both, can't remember which I prefer (maybe that should tell me something, though).

From the rest of their range I like the sound of 'Four Leaf Salad': that's Lettuce 'Can Can' (frilly, green, new one on me but widely available), lambs' lettuce, red butterhead (this one from T&M looks really good) and something they refer to as 'red multileaf' – I'm taking that to be a mix of red lettuce such as Lollo Rossa.

Let's try Essential Waitrose mixed salad: green Batavia, Apollo lettuce, red oak leaf and Lollo Rossa. Red oak leaf and Lollo Rossa are old friends and I’ll be glad to give them house room again. Batavia turns out to be another frilly-leaf lettuce type; and I think Apollo is only grown for commercial use as I can’t find it offered to gardeners. It’s a Romaine lettuce – a type I like anyway, so I’ll just have to find a substitute.

So far... so everyday though. I'm not really looking to grow a wide range of lettuces. I'm after something a bit more interesting. I'm after some herbs in my salads. And maybe some peppery zing.

Waitrose baby leaf herb salad mix: very vague about the lettuce content, but adds baby spinach, rocket, flat-leaf parsley and chives (interestingly, the mix states the proportions of salad leaves to herbs: it’s 78% salad leaves to 22% herbs. So a handful of herbs to every four of lettuce-type leaves then).

Other interesting bits from the Waitrose range include their Tenderleaf Salad: lamb's lettuce, pea tops and chard.

I had a hunt through other ranges, most of which we've tried at some point: Sainsbury's Herb Salad is Lollo Rossa, Cos lettuce, rocket, coriander and parsley (again with that 80/20 ratio of lettuce to herbs).

Then there's Steve's Leaves: relatively new in town but with a good and improving environmental policy. Pea Shoots and Baby Leaves is a 40/60 mix of pea shoots, and baby spinach and chard. Other mixes in the range include wasabi (now that should be interesting), and watercress.

But you know what? I think we can do better than all that.

I want to try some heritage lettuces, with their quirky flavours and splashed or ruched leaves. I want to throw in some oriental leaves: mizuna, peppery red mustard, maybe chrysanthemum greens. And oddities like samphire and New Zealand spinach.

I shall report back via these pages. Should be an interesting year!

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...

End of month view: March

What a difference a couple of months makes.

Last time I did the rounds with the camera was the end of January: barely a leaf had burst its bud at that time, I hadn't even started the post-winter clearup, and everything was looking decidedly bleak and not a little scruffy around the edges.

I woke up, along with the garden, some time in mid-February. And in the six weeks or so since then, everything has changed.

First up (of course) is the veg garden: always my first priority at seed-sowing time. I've been ferrying eyewatering quantities of scaffold boards back on the roof of my poor groaning family estate to divide up the long, thin space into 4ft x 10ft beds. At first they were all re-covered with the black plastic which has been keeping my soil protected over winter: but now, gradually, it's all coming off.

January:

...and now:

The far end is well up and away: with the addition of a bit of bought-in soil improver (not yet quite confident about how good my soil might be), new potatoes, onions and shallots have joined the overwintering broad beans and autumn-sown onions.

Under those cloches are two varieties of pea; Feltham First (early and robust) and heritage variety Telephone, which reaches up to 5ft tall, so I'm told. Further down there are rows of leeks and carrots under fleece for protection against carrot fly.

Greenhouse no. 1 - unheated - is filling up: the other day I had to rig up the coldframe (in bits since the post-move chaos) in a hurry to get the first of the sweetpeas, chard and overwintered marigolds ready to go out.

But just look at Greenhouse no. 2 - the one that's frost-free. I have run out of room. There is no other way to put it. The windowsills in the house are groaning with seedlings too. What am I going to do!

Right, never mind the veg: what about the rest of it?

Here's the rock garden, or rather the herb garden to be. Nicely trimmed these days: and I've started placing a few pots of bits and bobs around the place ready to be planted.

January:

...and now:

In the blue pot is an olive tree, about six inches tall when I got it (it was a freebie which looked a lot better in the magazine than what actually arrived on my doorstep).

I nurtured it and nursed it, and now it's about 5ft high and a lovely healthy young tree. Then it got left outside in the snow and ice, and I resigned myself to losing it: but no. It didn't even lose its leaves.

So since it's survived that, I figure it'll breeze being planted outside. It's moved around this patch a few times now, trying to find the right spot for what I hope will one day be a fetchingly gnarled evocation of Italy on my doorstep, and a rather fine backdrop to all my Mediterranean herbs.

There's also plenty going on here quite independently of my own feeble efforts to spruce things up. Little pretties keep popping up all over the place. I keep stopping in my tracks on the way out of the house: the other day it was because I spotted a clump of pulsatilla. Pulsatilla! In my garden!

Aren't they lovely? Those palest grey fluffy feathers set off the dusty mauve of the flowers so perfectly.

And look at this: in the hollow between two sides of the old stone wall, partially collapsed, a little colony of windflowers has sprung up.

I've spent many thorny hours clearing the bank above where my tropical edibles patch will eventually be. It's not only painful, but also slightly unnerving as this bank is about 12ft high and much of my bramble removal was done while hanging precariously off a handy branch. Must invest in a ladder.

January:

...and now:

It's all looking a lot better now, so I guess the splinter-pocked fingers were worth it.

There's more pot placement here: you can make out the fig in the far corner, and just out of sight there's a Pawlonia tomentosa I was given - half-dead on arrival but now, rather excitingly, reviving.

And other things are popping up here, too: lupins and a carpet of some kind of small white comfrey. It's beautiful, the bees love it, but it is obviously a little invasive: I shall have to think carefully about where I move it to.

So on to the only other bit I've done anything to; the circular bed around our shady seating area.

January:

...and now:

I've recently been told by someone who's lived in the village a lot longer than me that this was once a pond. This is answering a lot of questions: why, for example, a hefty Rodgersia (usually a bog plant) can survive so well in a free-draining, chalky soil.

I have an uncomfortable feeling this circular bed may be hiding a pond liner of epic proportions. We're talking probably concrete; maybe not even split. We are talking bog garden.

This may rather alter my plans to turn this area into a scented garden full of daphnes and Christmas box and wintersweet.

For now however I have just cleared the winter debris and I'm about to launch into a huge weed-through, followed by my standard fall-back in situations where I have little time and large areas to fill: I'm planning to sow this lot with seed from Pictorial Meadows, already sitting in an inviting little packet on my desk as I type.

It isn't all weeds and bog plants though: tucked up on the bank, a little higher than the rest, there is a paeony already swelling into bud.

A paeony! In my garden! (another chalk-loving plant I have never been able to grow before. My cup brimmeth over: snowdrops, primroses, pulsatillas and now peonies. Can it get any better than this?)

And last but absolutely not least: I haven't touched this bit but I have been in love with it for a whole month now. I have, on the hill that rises at the back of my garden, a host of golden daffodils.

There are hundreds of them, across the width of the garden, and we have been giving them away to friends in big fat bunches as well as stuffing every vase in the house. Whoever planted them, many decades ago: I hope you are somewhere just as beautiful right now.

Thank you to Helen, aka Patient Gardener, for hosting the End of Month View: the perfect opportunity to take a step back and take the big view for a change.

The Grand Tour #2: The Sunny Bit

Now for the one bit of my garden that is undeniably Very Sunny Indeed. It is on the south-facing side, there are, for once, no trees shading it, no house in the way, no high banks blocking out the sun. It isn't even concreted over. For this reason it is, the garden plan in my head dictates:

The Tropical Garden

(you are allowed to laugh)
Turn your back to the house, look a little over to your right, and you will see to one side of the path (the sunny side, natch) a flat bit. This is remarkable in itself as it is the only flat bit in the whole garden (apart from a concreted-over bit behind it, just visible to the left of the picture, which is where my garden office is going to go so that I can look out over this bit of the garden whenever I tire of my computer screen, which will be often).

It measures around 25ft x 40ft: not enormous, but quite big enough to house a selection of exotic and exotic-looking plants. I have for a long time nursed a secret hankering for a tropical edibles garden and this is going to be it.

At the moment my tropical edibles collection includes a big (and splitting) pot of yacon and a fig tree. Not very impressive, really. I hope to add ginger (Zingiber, proper ginger, not Hedychium - although I have two of those too which will no doubt go in there somewhere), some taro roots (Colocasia esculenta to you botanical types), edible passion fruits, kiwi vines, some acocha and a few bananas just for fun. The idea is that it will eventually be the kind of jungly mass of shoots, leaves and, no doubt, eats to pluck romantically from the vine as you waft through its sunshiny shade.

But all that is in the future: here, unfortunately, is it in its current unadorned state.

There is - of course! this is my garden! - a bank. A particularly steep, in fact nearly vertical bank at that. However: ever one to pluck opportunity from the teeth of a bloody ridiculous situation, I am getting quietly quite excited about this particular bank. I see vertical planting a go-go: beans tumbling down from soil pockets near the top, dangling their purple pods among clambering vines of kiwi, passion fruit and acocha.... now all I have to figure out is how to a) support the ones I'm not actually going to plant into the bank, and b) get the bank's current occupants - mainly stinging nettles and harts-tongue ferns - under control.

The emergency pond lives here, right at the front bit where it curves round to the house. I call it the emergency pond as Mango, who you can just about see under those iris leaves, only just survived the house move: poor old Peanut floated to the top of the rather inadequate fishtank they were living in while we got around to digging holes for ponds (not, admittedly, top of our to-do list on the day after the removal men left). After that and with the anguished wailing of small children echoing in our ears, the fishpond was in within two hours. And very nice it looks: I'm hoping the taro will drape rather elegantly over the edge of it in times to come.

There is a nod at planting: a slightly dislocated herb garden of mint, lavender, rosemary and sage all looking very healthy, if a little without context.

And a splash of colour from bedding. Flowering! In November!

The real splash of colour at the moment, though, is from this viburnum: I'm thinking x bodnantense 'Dawn' as it has the most incredible burnished bronze-purple autumn foliage.

And last but not least: some absolutely giant sunflowers. They must be (and I am not boasting here as I had nothing to do with growing them) 12ft tall. It bodes well for the fertility of the soil that they can pull this off in supposedly thin chalk: in fact I think sunflowers, being edible in both seed and seedling stages, definitely qualify for the tropical look.

Don't Panic!

One of my clients has a small but much-loved bay bush as the central focal point in a rather pretty little raised herb bed made of sleepers sideways on in a diamond pattern.

She rang me the other day in a right panic, insisting it was dying. It's always suffered mildly from vine weevil, which we've been keeping under control with a drench - but she was now convinced the little beggars had got it. So I promised to go and have a look.

The trouble with diagnosing plant problems is that it can be a bit like looking at those medical dictionaries which convince you that every time you have a headache you're about to die of a brain tumour. I realised as soon as I saw our little bay tree that it was a long way from dying - but then I started double-checking, just to make sure, and came up with a whole hypochondriac's litany of ailments, any one of which could turn out to be fatal.

Yes, there were plenty of glossy green leaves on it, and if you looked in the centre of the bush it was a deep, healthy green with lots of dense young growth. My client had panicked over some patches of yellowing leaves, which were rather undeniably a nutrient deficiency, and more specifically nitrogen deficiency. Remedy: a dose of liquid feed once a week until it's perked up a bit. Nothing more serious than that.

But look... some of the yellowing leaves have dark brown edges... and a curious dotting all over them. Hmm... I wasn't aware that bay could get rust, though that's exactly what it looked like. I decided I'd better look it up, just to be on the safe side.

Big mistake. Much like picking up that medical dictionary, I now have half-a-dozen horrible fates to consider for this poor little tree. It might have bay sucker - a mite that causes the edges of leaves to blacken and curl over. No curling on the leaves of my bay tree, mind, but then it might be early days... Now I discover that there's a new pest of bays, called bay rust mite, which only arrived on our shores last year after migrating from its usual home in the Med. As I read about black necrotic spots on the leaf surfaces I got really quite excited - rare diseases are almost as much of a buzz to discover as rare plants. Unfortunately (or fortunately, for my client) I discovered a picture of them on the Central Science Laboratory's plant newsletter - and it looks nothing like my bay leaves at all.

So for the moment I'm keeping my fingers crossed and betting on the odds-on probability that all we have here is a hungry bay tree with a mild vine weevil problem. I'll dose it with vine weevil killer again and give it a nice slosh of seaweed pick-me-up and see if it turns the corner. If not, I'm afraid it may be terminal.

Flowers for cutting

I thought I'd say a bit about my cutting garden, as it's this year's project and very much at the front of my mind just now.

I've carved out a more-or-less square plot, about 19ft x 19ft, on the far side of my greenhouse where it's pretty sunny most of the day. It's overshadowed by a large goat willow, but not too badly, and I'm in the process of raising the willow's crown so it doesn't cast too much shadow.

The design is quite simple: a 2ft bed around three sides of the square (the fourth is for my greenhouse and coldframe), with two 4'6" wide beds across the middle. It'll all be enclosed in 1" x 4" pressure-treated timber to define the beds and make maintenance easier. There are also 30" paths around the beds for access.

The area was previously a herb garden (a bit ott since I had it in mind once upon a time to set up a herb nursery - then realised how much work was involved). Result is I need to dig out large amounts of lemon balm, chives and lovage before I can plant. The good news there, though, is that the soil is in good heart as it's already been dug over and improved once.

So far I've got lavender and Rosa gallica officinalis, also known as Apothecary's Rose, along one long side, for drying as pot pourri; the short side will be for perennials for cutting - so far a clump of asters dug up from the main herbaceous border, but I'll be adding bulbs (daffs and tulips), a statice (great for drying) and whatever else I can find. I've added a Chimonanthes praecox (wintersweet) in the corner - again rescued from imminent suffocation in the big herbaceous border - thinking I'll cut branches if ever it gets around to flowering (they're notoriously slow to settle). Along the front edge will be dahlias, chrysanths and any other late-season perennials I can think of.

In the centre beds, so far there are only sweetpeas climbing up rustic hazel poles: but my antirrhinums are chomping at the bit in the coldframe waiting to be planted out, and I've got plenty more coming on to join them there. It just needs me to keep up with them by digging out a home, and we'll be raring to go!