Identity parade #3

You got all the answers last week, so very well done to all who guessed right. We've been at a wholesale nursery, Rochfords, this week looking through their winter stock (generally a fine place, and I was particularly impressed that they do fruit bushes and trees as well as the usual suspects): so our plant idents came from container-grown plants waiting for sale.

Here goes:

1.

(it's only about 2ft high and has a lot in common with the answers to (2) and (3))

2.

3. (it's not the obvious cultivar - look closely at the stem colour)

4. (this shrub was inside the polytunnels and those flower buds open yellow)

5. You should be able to take a stab at nos 2 and 5 without any help from me. Enjoy!

Little rays of sunshine

Amid all the misery of slush and cold, and now torrential rain and flooding, this is what's keeping me going.

I was given these lovely things at the Garden Press Day in London last week by those nice people at Taylor's Bulbs. They started opening the very next day and are now flooding my dining room with perfume. The variety is 'Jack the Lad' - and they're cheering me up no end.

Wrestling wisteria

Look what I took on this week...

Actually I shouldn't have taken it on at all, being as I'm hopelessly overloaded with work already, but when you're offered the chance to garden at a 16th-century house which happens to contain the village museum, and it's got a wisteria on the front that's at least 60 years old, probably older, then I ask you - how can you possibly resist?

The owner told me she hadn't been able to see out of her bedroom windows for a while, and I'll admit to being a little nervous.

Four hours later... this is how it looked. In the end it wasn't too difficult, just time-consuming: I worked my way along all those main branches and took back every side shoot to about 2-3 buds, though I went easy on those which were obviously about to flower so the owner would have a little bit to look forward to this spring. As I said to her, once I've given it its summer pruning too, it'll be back under control, and with luck and a following wind, it'll be smothered in flowers next year. And she'll be able to see out of her windows, too!

Identity parade #2

Well you could have been a little bit braver last week. Just one of you had a go at (correctly) guessing just one of the plants. Well done Anna. Here, for the rest of you, are the answers:


1. Hedera helix 'Congesta': upright form of ivy that grows like a shrub, to about 60cm high. Forms a very neat bush of dark green arrowhead-shaped leaves - but it's quite hard to get hold of.









2. Hedera helix 'Parsley Crested', which used to be called H. h. 'Cristata', just to be annoying (that's the name I knew it by). Lovely crinkly-edged margins to the leaves, and grows to about 2m.





3. Hedera colchica 'Sulphur Heart', which again went by another name once upon a time: this was H. c. 'Paddy's Pride'. This is a young shoot: the mature leaves are about 8" long plus and big, floppy, ungainly things.









4. As Anna correctly guessed, this is Chimonanthus praecox - aka wintersweet.









5. And the last ivy: Hedera helix 'Oro di Bogliasco', an eye-catching if not eye-boggling combination of red stem, and yellow-and-green leaves. It's got a neat habit but it's a bit ... erm... bright.





On to this week's, and we got away from the twigs-on-desktops vibe and actually got outside for once. They aren't quite so difficult this time, either, so I'm not giving you a clue apart from the last one which I hadn't even heard of before, let alone grown. As a general clue: just remember all these plants are flowering now.

1. 2.

3.

4.

5. (clue: it's evergreen, it has those little yellow flowers all winter, and it's a neat little shrub about 2ft tall. )

Enjoy :D

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow....

It's no good - I can't resist. Gotta show you my snow pictures.

Wisley up the road recorded 12" last night, and I think we're up to about 16-18" now. It's the most snow we've had in 18 years (which explains, to you Yanks who regularly hit the two-metre line, why we're getting so excited about it).

All the cardoon seedheads are wearing white bearskins.

Underneath here somewhere are my patio pots.

And Bob (our resident Roman Emperor) is wearing some very natty headgear.

The pond has stayed clear - just.

And as you can see, it's still snowing. Hard. Allotment Dog is not impressed, though he does keep trying to eat it (just in case, you understand) and has a good line in snow somersaults.

Butterflies at Wisley

It's snowing (again) outside as I write, but I'm still basking in the glow of a day spent in the toasty warm glasshouse at Wisley. It wasn't just any old day, either: they've released 3,500 butterflies into the Tropical Zone, where they're fluttering around among the plants and landing on peoples' heads. It's absolutely magical: the girls were captivated, as was I. I took far too many photos than I should - here are a few of them:

We couldn't drag the children away, and had a hard job leaving ourselves (a man comes round at about 4pm ringing his bell and shouting "Time, ladies and gentlemen, please!" No beer on offer, sadly.) The event runs until 22nd February, so get yourselves down there before they've all fluttered away to a better place.

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!

Identity parade

Each week at college we get a load of twigs, bits of leafy stuff, and occasionally a droopy flower or two, all in varying states of intactness, and we have to identify them. Rather than keeping all the pain to myself, I thought I'd share. So this is the first of a weekly series of guessing games - and just to make it really tricky, you only get a photo to look at, and not a very good one at that :D

There's usually a theme - last week, it was mostly twigs from trees, and this week it was mostly ivies (that's a clue, by the way). I won't inflict the whole 11 idents on you, but here's a choice selection - can you recognise any of these? (I'll give you a clue for the more difficult ones).

1.

(Clue: yes it is meant to be up that way.)

2. (Clue: it's changed its name recently - and you'll have to come up with the new one!)

3. (I'm not going to give you a clue for this one - far too easy!)

4. (Clue: this is a juvenile shoot)

5.
(Clue: it's all in the stem colour)

There aren't any prizes, beyond the right to be smug, though I might keep a running total and come up with a little something for the person who gets the most right between now and when this little series finishes, in about June. But for now, let the guessing begin - first person to guess correctly has the point, and if you haven't got them all by next week, I'll give you the answers in the comments section. Have fun!

Plants in wierd places

Spotted growing out of a crack in an old and rather beautiful wall the other day...


I didn't even know euphorbias could do that. Tough little whatnames, aren't they?

Garden makeover #2: Going round in circles

What with there not really being much going on in the plant department, I thought I'd get on with some of the revamping project. This time it was the turn of my tatty and scruffy little front garden.

This is quite a neat shape, in that it's almost a perfect square, and it has the spectacular advantage of a big mature winter-flowering cherry (Prunus x subhirtella 'Autumnalis') in the middle (one of my most-prized plants). But it's always been a bit of a pain - we have a nominally gravel drive which wasn't very well laid by the previous occupants of the house, and the rather odd layout meant there was a whole awkward wasted corner of it which was getting progressively colonised by weeds.

Anyway, so I've spent much of the weekend digging up the drive and laying out a mildly funky new design I came up with at college the other week.

Trouble is it involves two concentric circles - all very cool and all that, but it suddenly occurred to me I'd never actually tried to lay out a circle on the ground before.

Well, there's a first time for everything - so this is what I did:

First, find your centre point: I drew this all out on graph paper to scale first, which may seem fiddly but it's very worth the extra time as drawing with a ruler on paper is a whole lot easier than drawing on the ground, especially if you have to rub it out a lot. That's a long bit of string looped loosely around the cane, knotted at the outer edge of the circle - a bit Heath Robinson, but it works.


I discovered that they don't sell those nifty but probably highly un-environmentally sound marking-out sprays in garden centres, so I had a go at the old-fashioned sand-and-drinks-bottle method with a bit of sand I found behind the shed. You basically fill a drinks bottle with the stuff (a lot more difficult than it seems), upend it and hold it upside down at the end of the string with sand pouring out in a steady stream while you mark out a circle. Sounds great in theory, doesn't it? Well - I think a) the sand needs to be very dry, unlike this stuff, which was nearly frozen and full of old leaves, and b) you need to have a funnel or something to get the sand in the bottle as otherwise you end up with half of it all over the kitchen floor. Like I did.


Then the sand ran out (I didn't tell you this was going to turn into a bit of a saga) and I discovered a whole new scale of messiness. House ash, from our fire and kicking around waiting to be chucked out, turns out to show up a lot better against gravel, and pours easier, too. But oh my goodness, I was covered with the stuff by the end of it.


Anyway - many hours of happy messing around later and this was the result. You can see what I mean about the weedy patch...

Final stage - a lot more straightforward, just dig a trench along the line of the sand/ash and sink log-roll edging into it so that the circles are permanently marked out. This, I hasten to add, is not the finished result: the eventual idea is that the logrolls will be hidden under some nifty low box hedges and there will be some truly lovely planting (including a few little surprises) filling the gaps between them.

It may not be award-winning garden design, but it's pepped up my front garden no end, and it only took a couple of days. Can't wait to plant it up now!

Unseasonal flowers

Look what I found in a sheltered corner of the garden today!



Yep - that is a wallflower. In full bloom (this was one of several). In January.

That makes it around three months early. There's a brick-red one budding up and about to open in a less protected spot, too. And this after three weeks of sub-zero!

It feels a bit odd, but it hasn't half cheered me up!

Collateral damage

Oh dear.

A quick tour of my so-called jungle garden (i.e. the place I so optimistically planted up with climate change anticipation plants last summer) reveals I didn't exactly get out of the recent cold snap scot free.

This is (or was) a purple cordyline. I was rather fond of it as it made a snazzy contrast with the libertias and hostas, to say nothing of a canna behind it, and gave me the pleasant illusion that I was quite good at putting plants together. I thought they were meant to be bone hardy, too.

The remains of a Melianthus major that was just getting into its stride last autumn...

...and my poor Astelia chathamica 'Silver Spear', lately of Chelsea 2008, which also looks to be less hardy than you would think.

Some of these might - just - come back, though I'm not sure they'll ever be quite the same again. Now, here's a quandary. do I press on and insist on a jungly area at the bottom of my garden anyway? (I'll have my banana-mad eight-year-old daughter to answer to if I don't). Do I resort to drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants only to have them washed away and drowned in a sea of mud every winter? Or do I plant a sea of English flowers and water them every five minutes all summer, also risking the customary deluge turning to a desert-like scorcher and the whole lot frazzling to a crisp as soon as I turn my back?

You know, this gardening lark isn't as straightforward as it looks.

The great thaw begins

Walking down the garden drops of melted hoarfrost are falling from the trees, and for the first time in three weeks, there is water on my pond.


It's still three-quarters frozen, and all pond-life is suspended just beneath the surface like a snapshot of the moment before the cold snap began: this water soldier (Stratiodes aloides) is meant to have sunk to the bottom for its winter sleep but it obviously didn't get away in time.


My pond is a little shallow so I'm hoping all the newts are still OK in there.

I may be getting optimistic here but who knows - I may even get gardening again soon!

Indoor gardening

Frost has stopped play. The pond hasn't defrosted for a week, and part of the lawn is permanently white. As for the allotment... we had to go and buy some parsnips the other day as the ones I've grown so lovingly are now concreted in to a rock-hard veg bed (yeah, I know, should have lifted them and heeled them in somewhere sandier, didn't get around to it).

The BBC's rather awe-inspiring monthly weather forecast says this will carry on for the rest of January, as it's caused by a wodge of high pressure that's apparently "notoriously difficult to budge". Oh help. I'll be reduced to making curtains soon.

Anyway, I'm trying to comfort myself with the thought of millions of tiny slugs freezing solid, and meanwhile doing some indoor gardening. This is long overdue: I'm very late in planning my seed order, which I must send off this week as otherwise the spuds won't be chitting in time. I've also, at last, come up with a coherent design for the front garden, and I'll be measuring up those bits of the back garden I'm not already digging up shortly - all part of the Great Garden Makeover of course. The only trouble with plans is, you then have to put them into some sort of action... which in my case almost always means half-finished projects all over the garden as the summer rush takes over yet again.

I've also been making some New Year's Resolutions to ring in 2009. A bit of a pointless exercise, of course, but I like to see how quickly I jettison them each year. This year, they are more informed at least thanks to all this blogging (mine but more frequently other people's).

• I'm going to start a diary (I do this every year. Never got past March yet. At least I know what I was doing in early spring back to about 1975).
• While I'm taking those photos for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day each month, I'm also going to photograph the whole of my garden, warts and all, as a record of all these improvements I'm making (this of course will be strictly not for publication: all photography found on this blog is a triumph of the macro lens over reality).
• I'm going to start some of those projects I'm planning (see above)
• I'm going to finish some of those projects I'm planning (see above)
• I shall try not to get impatient when my eight-year-old wants to plant tulips in my potato beds, but shall let her with a beneficent smile in the interests of keeping her gardening (and will secretly replant the tulips back in the same spot after harvesting the potatoes).
• My reading of other people's blogs shall not take over my working life
• ... and nor will surreptitious trips to the allotment when I should be at my desk
• I shall cram in as much knowledge as I can about gardening, plants and plantspeople, and hopefully end the year a better gardener.

Right, that'll do for now. I wish everyone who drops by this blog from time to time all the very best for 2009. Happy New Year!

Happy Christmas!

I don't care what you call it - I love Christmas, and have been spending lots of happy days in the last few weeks... well.... spending.

I've even bought two plants, which I always swore I'd never do, on the principle that I hate it when other people buy plants for me. They're invariably the wrong sort or wrong colour, grow too rampantly or not rampantly enough, or would have gone in the last garden but not this one. Those who know me well only ever acquire horticultural gifts from an approved list, drawn up by me and revised no more than one week before said Christmas/birthday/anniversary. Draconian? Moi?

I absolve myself on this occasion though as both plants are Daphne odorata 'Aureomarginata' (one for each set of parents) and I'm seriously thinking about filching both of them and pretending I forgot to buy presents this year.

Anyway - I'm off to enjoy myself - hope you are too! May this Christmas/Winterval/Perisolstice be everything you wish for, and may the New Year bring you wonders of the horticultural kind galore.

I'll look forward to seeing you all again in 2009!

Recycled lavatories

The other week at my ever-challenging and interesting plant design course at Capel Manor, we got to talking about environmentally-friendly gardening.

Now, I'll nail my colours to the mast here and say I'm not entirely organic - I've been known to spray bindweed with glyphosate when nobody's looking, and my most heinous crime is to Pathclear my patio and driveway every year which I will no doubt have to account for in the afterlife. However - five minutes of talking to my very knowledgeable classmates has made me realise there's rather more to it than that.

We were talking about gravel. I've got loads of the stuff here - on my driveway, on the patio, and under my cold frame. It's cheap and easy as pie to use, I buy big jiffy bags of the stuff every few years or so to top things up, and until now I'd thought that was a relatively neutral material, insofar as I'd thought about it at all: the RHS promotes it as a good alternative in its "don't pave your front driveways" campaign, after all, doesn't it?

Not so. Marine-dredged gravel is the worst of all: "harvested" by something akin to Spanish trawlers only much, much more devastating. They suck everything up off the seabed to a depth of a couple of metres, killing all marine life that happens to be in their way, then they clean, grade and sort the gravel and spit back into the sea what isn't needed. Incidentally smothering all marine life that happens to have wandered into the area in the meantime.

So - you avoid that like the plague, and source it as land-dredged gravel, right? Well - if you can get companies to specify where they get their gravel from - this is certainly better. But the amount of fuel it takes to suck the stuff out of the ground, sort, grade and then transport it where it's needed requires a few aircraft-longhaul equivalents of carbon a throw.

This was all getting me in a real gloom. I was already having a conscience about using paving to hard-landscape the area around my shed and greenhouse (the garden makeover is proceeding apace, of which more later). It's not just the (itself not very eco-friendly) paving: it's also the sand and the cement-based hardcore I don't like having to use. Now it turns out the so-called 'better' options like gravel actually aren't.

The 'green' alternatives to gravel - bark chips, recycled tyres or bright blue recycled glass bits - are either too hippy or too horrible to contemplate. Or they wouldn't last five minutes. And then I discovered the wonderful world of recycled aggregates.

This is basically some of our rubbish that would have gone into landfill but is instead crushed down and sold back to us as gravel-like surfaces for pathways and hard standing. Surprisingly, for what might seem like an obvious idea, it seems to be a bit new, so there aren't that many people doing it yet. Long Rake Spar, in the Peak District, does a gravel made of crushed building materials that looks pretty good (and very like regular gravel), but the one I really like the sound of is sold as Traxmax. It's ceramics, either tiles or bathroom suites (I wonder if it's sometimes avocado-coloured?) taken out of the local tip, hopefully cleaned up a bit, smashed up into little bits and delivered in a big bag. The best thing about it is that because the original ceramic was made of clay, once it's broken up it becomes a little sticky again - so when you put it down on your path and it rains, it bonds to itself and becomes a solid surface.

You get it from this company - the only supplier I could find - and it's not even very expensive. There may be a catch: but I'm going to give it a go and I'll let you know what it's like. And anyway, I kind of like the idea of walking over second-hand loos on my way down the garden.

Perfect partners #1

Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Nigrescens', Hakonechloa macra 'Aureola' and Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Silver Magic', spotted at Wisley on a frosty day.

(By way of explanation: We've been set an assignment for the Plant Design course I'm doing at Capel Manor to compile lots of plant combinations that we particularly like, so since it's going to take me all year to do, I thought I'd share them as I go along.)

Winter wishlist

The moment has come - I'm going to have to opt out of Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day for this month.

This is because there are actually no blooms in my garden. Well all right, that's a bit of an exaggeration as the winter pansies are still struggling through, and the heliotrope in the greenhouse is in exactly the same state as when I put it in there in October. The pyracantha berries are still looking great, but that was kind of cheating last month anyway. Otherwise - zilch. Nada. Rien. Even the leycesteria which has been soldiering on right through since June has finally dropped its leaves and gone to sleep. To be honest I feel like joining it. I don't do houseplants (they take one look at me and die) so no joy there either.

So I thought I'd cheat. Here are the blooms I would like in my garden this month:

Clematis cirrhosa var. balearica 'Wisley Cream'

Garrya elliptica

Chimonanthes praecox (I do actually have this at the end of the garden but it's extremely shy to flower, so this isn't so much one to buy as one to cast a spell on)

Daphne odora 'Aureomarginata' (just)

Coronilla valentina subs. glauca 'Citrina'

No pictures, of course, as these are the flowers that are not blooming in my garden today.

I'll stop at five for now, though I'm sure everyone else has suggestions here. But let this be my lesson for 2008: by this time next year there will be no excuses!

Dead plants

At this time of year it's a blessing that some plants continue to look good even after they've turned up their toes. You have to experiment - I find a lot of the plants supposed to hold on to their seedheads, like Rudbeckia, Echinops and many grasses, actually collapse sideways into a soggy heap around November, which hardly counts as winter these days. But when you find the ones that work, they really are worth their weight in gold (which is the colour many of them are on a frosty winter's day, too).

Spiky seedheads of Cynara cardunculus towering overhead against a December sky.

Verbena bonariensis is one of the best for looking good all winter - as long as the bluetits don't tear the seedheads to bits first.

Perovskia 'Blue Spire' puts up a forest of ghostly silver stems.

And of course poppy heads: many of these do collapse sideways but there are always a few left standing. I wonder what critter chomped its way through the side of this one looking for seeds?

Avant gardening #2

The erudite and charming Tim Richardson got in touch with me after my earlier post about my doubts over "conceptual" gardens and so I've been having a very absorbing chat with him via email about what is, and isn't, a garden, the relationship between gardening and art and many other thought-provoking questions.

In case you've had your head under a hedge for the last few years, Tim is a stalwart champion of modern garden design, and the author of Avant Gardeners, which as I told him I have on my Christmas wishlist. He's kindly let me reproduce his thoughts in response to all my ditherings, since I thought they cast far more light on the subject than I ever could.

On whether conceptual gardens are actually gardens...
"I know what you mean about the 'garden' definition but in some ways for me it's like the discussion as to whether gardens are 'art' or not. Quite interesting but a bit of a cul de sac -- perhaps the definitions are not so important after all? In a way we need to call them 'gardens' because calling them 'art' or suchlike would be like trying to jump up on the coat-tails, like a puppy dog, of something supposedly 'higher' up the artistic hierarchy. We should be able to rise above such matters! Perhaps art should aspire to the condition of the garden . . . [faced as we are with a global ecological conundrum, I am not joking]"

And on garden history and modernism...
"At risk of sounding like a self-publicising lunatic, on the Jekyll gardens thing -- sometimes people imagine I am some kind of iconoclast dedicated to smashing down 'old' ways of horticulture [a recent letter to Garden Design Journal said I should be made to crawl on my belly all along the A road to Beth Chatto's garden and pay homage..] but in fact I think I am only qualified to make any suggestions having made a serious study of 20th c planting styles, to be found in an earlier book: English Gardens in the 20th Century, which includes a reappraisal of Jekyll as an avant-garde artist coming from the Aesthetic rather than Arts and Crafts tradition. That book is a decade by decade, careful evaluation of the development of planting styles -- so I am not in any way 'against' plants, which is what yet another leading designer [good -humouredly] accused me of only the other night. But designers are not always very interested in historical matters I find.

"For me, future potential can only be discerned via knowledge of the past; the two go hand in hand. But it is surprising how little crossover there is between contemporary garden/landscape design and garden history."

Those who stick their heads above the parapet unfortunately get shot at, generally speaking. But I for one am very glad we have people like Tim to make us think, and occasionally move forward from time to time.

Trying to get it all done....

Blimey, where did those weeks go?

Here's one answer: I've been a total slave to my leafmould bin since about mid-November. What with the painfully short hours of daylight, I've been grabbing my leaf rake every chance I get and not coming in till dark (that'll be when the kids get home from school, then). And on top of that I've been planting the remainder of the tulip bulbs, putting the last few plants mouldering on my patio into the ground at last, and finally getting on top of my legions of weeds.

I get very obsessed by autumn leaves at this time of year. The bottom part of our garden is pretty much a woodland, what with four mature apple trees and a boundary with next-door lined with hazel, oak and ash. So the result is a blizzard of multicoloured autumn leaves which starts some time around October and is only just starting to die down now.

I raked through the whole lot in November, and then turned round and started again. Now I'm on the home run with only a few stragglers thumbing their noses at me from the treetops and a leafmould bin piled high with lovely crispy leaves. It'll take a year to rot down into good soil conditioner (if you want it for mixing up potting composts, leave it another year) - and though it's a lot of work and a long wait, it's so worth it. Piles of the very best black crumbly perfection to add to your soil every autumn - you can almost see the plants plunging their roots into it luxuriously the moment you shovel it on.