How we spent our weekend #2

A little update on progress with the fishpond...

This is the Bloke's department - far too much precision involved for ditzy old me. The slabs are a sort of mellow limestone left over from a landscaping project on a far posher house than ours - hubby was the carpenter so he came home with a pile of this really rather lovely, though somewhat brittle paving. Since it did crack so easily I was fretting about how to use it - heavy-duty pathways and the like were entirely out of the question - but it turns out it's a shoo-in for crazy paving.

One sticking point, if you'll excuse the pun, was the cement: I simply cannot figure out how you're supposed to lay paving around a pond to hide the edges of the liner without getting cement in the water. This is obviously A Bad Thing as it poisons fish (and no doubt sundry other wriggly things) but absolutely impossible to avoid. In the end we stopped worrying about it too much and simply re-cleaned the pond at the end of the operation.

The finished product: after clearing up those left-over slabs it'll be the tidiest thing in our garden. Next step is the bog garden and a lot of plant shopping. Now that is my department.

Flower art

By Ellie, aged 9, and Ruby, aged 7:


By way of explanation, the pot in the middle is sugar water. They wanted to look at some wasps up close (don't ask) and since Plan A (chase them and catch them with bare hands) proved unworkable though had some interestingly dramatic effects on the hysteria levels among adults in the immediate vicinity, I suggested Plan B, which was to attract them in and watch from a safe distance. They thought the wasps would be more likely to come if they thought the pot was a flower, so they asked if they could pick some petals from the garden to put around the sugar water. It looked so pretty I just had to take a picture.

How we spent our weekend #1

Have small children clamouring for goldfish and pathological hatred of cleaning out fishtanks...

will dig big hole.

Having drawn some interesting but perhaps not shareable conclusions about our domestic soil profile, we added the preformed liner donated by the in-laws (also pestered by said small children. Someone give them something to do - four of the six weeks of summer holidays have been survived but we're getting desperate.)

In a very clever way (mainly because we looked it up on the internet first) we made the hole about 2" deeper than the pond to allow for a layer of sand at the bottom. This was a blessing - the base of the Big Hole was like a particularly stony brand of concrete (see reference to soil profile above) so there was no way we were going to get this baby level without introducing some leeway.

Half-filled to stabilise it and it's looking good - the water is even lining up with those ledge things quite nicely so I guess that means The Bloke can use a spirit level after all. Actually he did most of this, but since he had his shirt off at the time I'm reserving the evidence for my eyes only. We did line up a lot of wheelbarrows (very small ones for the little people) and move dirt. And I got down in the hole with my girlie border spade and shovelled out the bottom bits (to much praise over my digging technique from mud-phobic husband: you see there was a reason for all that gardening, after all).

There's a clue to what we did next in the last picture. This was the technical bit so I withdrew to a safe distance and watched admiringly. Of which more later.

August flowers

Well, the garden has been looking a bit louche around the edges this month - the salvias have flopped over and the cardoons look dangerously close to pitching drunkenly sideways too (must put in that support post soon...). But there are nonetheless dozens of lovely flowers to look at as long as you concentrate on those and ignore the rest.

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

Bigamous blogging

OK I admit it - I've been two-timing my blog.

Those nice people at online retailer Crocus are branching out from their Chelsea medal winning range of herbaceous perennials and such like, and have started selling fruit and veg plants (and seeds). They kindly but perhaps a little foolhardily asked me about my allotment. So I told them. At length. Again and again.

So all my witterings have now become their kitchen garden blog. Actually I've been secretly wanting to do this for ages - I'm a compulsive grower of fruit and veg and have been for years, but only occasionally allow them onto these pages. They will still turn up here from time to time, but now I can also go on about them at great length and in more detail than you could ever have thought possible.

You, too, can live through the harvest of every pea pod by my side: all you have to do is click here....

A week in Northumberland #5: Last chance to see

On our way home, we stopped off to look at a big ol' wall in a farmer's field (the kind of thing you do in these parts). We found a nice big chunk, and once we'd looked at it and jumped up and down on top of it and stuff - not exactly what the Romans had in mind but there we are - we spotted a sign to Chesters Walled Garden.

This was something of a coincidence as I'd just been reading an article on herb gardens by one Susie White, who, the magazine mentioned, ran a herb garden called... Chesters.

We had to pop inside. Or rather, I had to, with small children and resigned hubby in tow. They soon changed their tune: we were all instantly transfixed by loveliness. I have never seen so many flowers packed into such a small space. It was a riot, a symphony, a heavenly chorus of colour: who says you can't make a garden look good in late summer? Just feast your eyes on this lot.

Of course, pictures don't tell the whole story: here, the air you breathe is saturated with perfume, and your ears are buzzing with drunken bees - I have never, never seen so many bumblebees in one garden before. The tranquillity of the place settles over you like a favourite quilt, and you can lose yourself in just wandering and looking.

Now for the sting in the tail: this garden will no longer exist after this year.

It turns out Susie is only leasing the land, and the landlords have pulled the plug. It may have been built in the 18th century, and the current garden has taken over 20 years to create: but it has just a few months left, and has to close by next May. Susie is now looking for another garden in the area to house her national collection of thyme and the many thousands of plants to which she has devoted the last couple of decades. To find out what happens next, you can visit her blog or the garden's website: such a gardener will undoubtedly make another paradise every bit as beautiful, but my heart goes out to her and I wish her the very, very best of luck.

What I was doing at 12:34:56 on 07/08/09

I'd just like to interrupt my wanderings around Northumberland to let you know what I was doing at 12:34:56 on the 7th of the 8th month in the 9th year of the century.

I was feeding my poor dog an antibiotic pill wrapped up in mince (he hates pills of all kinds so a little cunning deception is required). This is not entirely a Northumberland-free post as the reason for the antibiotics, and the very silly collar, is that he gave himself a nasty cut in the leg leaping over a barbed wire fence while we were on holiday, so now has chalked up several stitches and a £500 vet's bill.

In case anyone's wondering why, it's because that mischievous but ever-original VP in Chippenham told me to :D Thanks for a fun meme, VP!

A week in Northumberland #4: A wee wonder

Let me take you along a rain-slick path into a hidden garden of dripping ferns, towering leaves and vividly coloured blooms. It's raining, of course (we are in Northumberland, after all) but the garden is glistening and jungle-like: proof, if proof were needed, that a misty drizzle is every bit as romantic as sunshine. This was my discovery of the week.

Bide-a-Wee Cottage and its delightful nursery, near Morpeth in Northumberland, is open from May to August, on Wednesdays and Saturday afternoons only. I'm told that June, when the Himalayan lilies are in flower, is the best month to go. If you can't get there - they have a pretty fabby online mail order service, too.

A week in Northumberland #3: Poisonous plants

Perhaps the most talked-about bit of an already very talked-about garden is Alnwick Garden's Poison Garden. You're only allowed inside the locked gates with a guide, no doubt mainly because of those pesky health and safety types but in fact a handy way of emphasising just how dangerous these plants can be.

Here you'll find plants in cages. A cannabis plant grown with a special Defra license and a (admittedly a little weedy-looking and therefore not very scary) Datura or two are among the prison population.

There are also a lot of very familiar plants, and as someone who likes to think they know their plants well enough to be pretty sure which ones to avoid, it was distinctly unsettling to learn that ivy, box, and laurel are among the harmful plants with a place in this garden.

So - if you spot any of this motley crew lurking in your beds and borders, or indeed in the hedgerows and fields: be afraid... be very afraid...

Hemlock is a member of the parsley family and looks alarmingly similar to cow parsley in the wild - but it smells like mice and has bright pink stems

Hemlock (Conium maculatum): Probably the most famous poisonous plant of them all, and still found commonly in the countryside. When Socrates used it to commit suicide I don't suppose anyone mentioned to him that it paralyses you from the feet upwards. So you're entirely conscious while it numbs first your legs, then your torso, and finally stops your lungs from working so you suffocate. Meanwhile the brain is entirely unaffected, and remains lucid throughout. Mmm. Nice.

Ivy (Hedera spp): Ever noticed when you're pruning a big mass of ivy that you start coughing? That's not just because it's dusty under there because it's the first time you've clipped it back for centuries. You're breathing in saponins, which in quantity can lead to laboured breathing, convulsions and eventually coma. So next time, wear a face mask.

Box (Buxus sempervirens): If you're clipping box hedges, don't wander off and have a cup of tea before you pick up all the little bits that have dropped on the ground. As they dry, they release buxine, and if you touch it, it'll give you an irritating skin rash.

Even boring old laurel can bite

Daffodils (Narcissus spp): People eat daffodils thinking they're onions. No, really - it's true. Unfortunately the law of natural selection doesn't apply here: though eating as little as half a bulb gives a nasty stomach complaint, it won't rid the world of someone with a criminal lack of common sense.

Laurel (Prunus laurocerasus): Now this one came as a complete surprise. If you stack all your prunings in a big bag and stuff them in the back of the car, then think, "oh sod it, I can't be bothered to go to the tip today" you will pay for your laziness with a car full of cyanide fumes in the morning. Apparently entomologists kill bugs by putting them in a jar with crushed laurel leaves. Much the same principle, really.

Autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnale): Crikey, you don't want to be mistaking this one for onions. In fact most people don't: they mistake it for wild garlic, which it greatly resembles (a lot more than daffodils resemble onions, I suspect). Symptoms sound like something out of a particularly gruesome episode of Casualty: convulsions, cardiovascular collapse and multiple organ failure. Apparently it's a lot like dying of cholera.

Rue is deadly - though the bees don't seem to mind

Rue (Ruta graveolens): Ever heard of the phrase, "Rue the day"? As in, "I rue the day I ever planted this damn thing in my herb garden?" Well though this is a very pretty plant, and found in lots of people's herb gardens, it's really quite a vicious little thing. Brushing against it, especially on a sunny day, can blister skin to the point of burns: what's really extraordinary though is that rue is often recommended (and grown in people's herb gardens) for rubbing onto the skin as a mosquito repellent. Please don't do this: mosquito bites will seem as the kiss of angels in comparison. Eating it causes acute gastroenteritis and eventually liver failure, though fortunately it tastes disgusting.

I've left out the obvious poisonous plants we all (hopefully) know about: the monkshoods, cuckoo pints and nettles which all gardeners should handle with care. But there are a whole lot more - aquilegias, cimicifuga, periwinkles, snowdrops and daphnes to name but a few - which I could have included and which you should know about.

I'm indebted to John Robertson, a former guide at Alnwick's Poison Garden, for supplementing my patchy recollections with extra information: and if you want to know about the bits I've left out, I can only direct you to his exceptionally good website where all these plants and more are described in gruesome detail.

A week in Northumberland #2: Alnwick Gardens

The most celebrated gardens in Northumberland are without doubt those of Alnwick Castle. As it happens, they're also among the newest: a slightly hyperactive television series a few years ago brought their creation to public attention and they've been a big talking point ever since.

Designed by the Belgian landscapers Jacques and Peter Wirtz, and enabled by the dynamic, lively and therefore not-very-Duchess-like Duchess of Northumberland, they are among the most exciting gardens in the country. I loved the mix of the historic and the very modern, the celebration of plants, and above all how much sheer laugh-out-loud fun it all was.


At the heart of the garden is water. This is the only garden I've come across which takes such great delight in reviving the 500-year-old Italian Renaissance sport of Giochi d'Acqua - garden water games. The massive central cascade that dominates the garden is highly dramatic at the best of times - but when it plays, on the hour and on the half-hour, it's enough to make you gape in wonder.


The garden luxuriates in water: it's just everywhere. I loved these funky swirly rills...


...and the way this fountain pours down the steps from the European Garden at the top.


Best of all there are no 'keep off' signs here: the kids are positively encouraged to get wet (you're advised to take a spare set of clothing for them in the brochure) and my girls couldn't believe their luck.

Now in case you're wondering where all the plants are...


The Ornamental Garden at the top of the cascade is on just as grand a scale as the rest of the garden. It's the sort of place where (at the risk of sounding like an M&S advert) you don't just have a pergola: you have a hand-built, 20-foot-high pergola swagged with roses around a bubbling pool. You don't just have a seating area: you have a staggeringly high dome of elegantly-wrought iron clothed in rambling roses and Clematis montana and get a crick in your neck looking at it. Well... you get the general picture.

The formal structure here is just marvellous, and also breathtaking in its scale. Parterre after parterre clicks into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, defined by crisp box and secluded by pleached crabapples. Like the water cascades, it's a modern design celebrating ancient traditions.

The middle parterres were filled with a froth of roses - this one's 'Just Joey', and the scent was heavenly.

The surrounding beds, along the mellow old brick walls, were where the plantsperson's delights were. Now, at the risk of sounding like I'm carping, it wasn't the most inspiring planting I've ever seen: but in their defence, I think I probably caught the borders in their mid-summer slump, and I suspect they would have looked less weary earlier, or indeed later in the year.

Which is not to say there weren't some choice finds in there.

Don't you just love this blue? The bluest blue salvia I've ever seen, labelled as S. patens 'Blue Angel'.

Bees were everywhere: here squeezing the last few drops of nectar from Anthemis tinctoria 'Susan Mitchell'. I liked the way they left the heads on instead of dead-heading (my usual knee-jerk reaction to anthemis at the end of its season): they looked like palest yellow pincushions dancing in the breeze.

And last but not least, I discovered this extraordinary hydrangea. It's H. sargentiana, with giant leaves the sultry rough green of old velvet and flowers the slate-purple of a thundery afternoon. Big and moody: I loved it.

For more about the garden, and the many new projects the Duchess has planned for the coming years (including a skating lake - worth a return visit for that alone) there's a website to visit; or you can come back here tomorrow for part two.

A week in Northumberland #1

Come with me, gentle reader, to a little corner of England I bet most of you have only ever gazed at wearily from the window of a car (or train) while hoping it's not too long till Edinburgh (it's not).

Northumberland may be one of the largest counties in England, but it's also one of the emptiest, partly because everyone is too impatient to get to next-door Scotland to stop there, and partly because the few people who do live there keep it close to their stout and farmerly chests.

It's also one of the most beautiful, and even (I'm bracing myself for getting lynched in short order by sundry broad-vowelled people as I write this) outdoes Yorkshire for the sheer volume, to say nothing of idyllic beauty, of its countryside. Best of all, it has some of the most inspirational gardens in England.

Just to whet your appetite - here's a taste of what you can expect to find there:

PS the sharp-eyed among you may notice that Holy Island is conspicuous by its absence. That's because I couldn't see it beneath the three thousand other people crammed on there along with me. Come to think of it, maybe that's where all the people in Northumberland had got to. Anyway, for a place that's meant to be a haven of spiritual reflection and romantic mysticism, it had a very unholy number of chip vans and push buggies. It's enough to make you start writing letters to the National Trust and English Heritage, both of whom should know better. Harrumph.

Happy Birthday James!

It's The Hat's half-century! My heartfelt congratulations on making it this far still with inimitable good humour intact.

As my little contribution to the celebrations, I thought I'd go on a trip down memory lane.

I first met Mr Alexander Sinclair under a rainy bandstand at the Chelsea Flower Show back in 2006, when he was a mere spring chicken of 46, I believe.

It was my first time reporting from Chelsea so I was a bit starry-eyed, but James charmingly pretended not to notice and spared me far more of his valuable time than he probably should have done to talk to me on my rather earnest topic, which was Designers Versus Gardeners (yes, that old chestnut).

Sadly, the original recording on my trusty little Olympus is lost to posterity, but I did keep a transcription hidden in the dusty vaults of my computer's hard drive. So from a happy half-hour of very quotable quotes, here are a few of James's pithier observations.

"I'm never going to be a very good member of a boy band, and I'm never going to be a Spice Girl - so I decided at an early age not to be a Spice Girl and be a garden designer."

"The purpose of clothes is twofold: it's partly to stop you being naked, which is sometimes embarrassing, but also to show yourself off to your best ability."

"I know everyone thinks designers are a load of silk-shirted woofters who just ponce about and say, oh yes, plant that there, and never get their hands dirty. I have very clean hands."

"What percentage of the general public buy their underwear in Marks and Spencers compared to the general public who buy their underwear at Agent Provocateur? Yet everyone talks about the frilly knickers."

Only one of these actually made it into the article along with the sensible bits. As proof that nothing on the internet ever dies, three years later you can still read the version with the serious bits left in here.

Have a wonderful day, James, and may all your knickers be from Agent Provocateur.

Running to seed

Though I say it myself, I've been doing rather well with saving seed this year.

I've had a go with peas and beans before - they're the beginners' babysteps of seed as they just obligingly stay in the pods and dry themselves.

But this year I've got all ambitious. Here are my leeks from last year, which got left over in a container on my patio (I was having an experiment with growing veg in pots last year - it doesn't work well for leeks, at least not in my garden where they've stayed spring-onion slender).

First of all, they've been the most beautiful allium blooms in the garden for the last month. They opened after the main allium display was over and have been flowering their socks off very charmingly ever since. It's given me all sorts of interesting ideas for the main flower borders.

But more to the point, there are seeds in them thar flowerheads and I intend to let them dry and then collect them by muffling them in paper bags, turning them upside down and shaking vigorously. Then I'll see what I end up with next year - they won't come true, but then these were a fairly bog-standard leek variety so that shouldn't be a problem.


Now these have been delighting me since early spring - this is the dried version, but in full flower it was a glorious brassy yellow umbel borne fully 6 feet above ground.

For those who haven't already guessed: it's a parsnip. And a truly lovely one at that. The only slight setback is that it's covered in blackfly - can't think what they're finding to eat in those papery stems. It's keeping the ladybirds happy, but I don't know if it's going to affect how good the seed is.

And this has been a real surprise: I munched my way through the kale last winter (it's "Dwarf Green Curled", or rather, was) but sort of forgot to take the plants out in the spring rush, and they've flowered.

Brassica flowers all look much the same - nice enough, but yellow flowers which are a bit too straggly to be called beautiful. The seedheads are something else though: architectural and full of texture (and, of course, seeds). Again, they're very tall - not quite at parsnip height but still a good five foot.

They're now very dry and brittle and due to snap open at any moment - I really must capture a branch or two and upend them into a bag before they explode all over the place and the seeds are lost to the four winds.




Here's a glimpse of what's inside: they break open just like peas in a pod to reveal those very typical brassica seeds, each with its own little dent in the soft white down that coats the inside of each pod.


It's all a rather wonderful experiment, and I'm finding it a bit of a revelation that not only has it given me free seed for next year - it's also made me look at my veg through new eyes. They may be confined to the allotment this year, but next year I think they'll be making a bid for the borders...

Our Big Lunch

We've been having lunch with Tim Smit today.

The Big Lunch is an idea of his which I first heard about this spring, and mentioned to a few friends as it was an obvious one for us. The idea is that everyone in the country gets together with their neighbours and has a street party - for no other reason than that it's nice to do things like that.

We've got a big green outside the front of our houses which is ideal for parties, and we hadn't had one since the Queen's Jubilee (and that was a party people still talk about). Trouble is nobody wanted to organise it - so we didn't. I have a sneaky feeling we were supposed to start a Grand Campaign way back and grow lots of our own food in time for the Big Day, put up posters, get street musicians, make bunting and other such energetic frippery. But basically, nobody could be bothered.

So we just put a hastily-cobbled-together flyer through people's doors and turned up with a tent (it looked like rain) and a barbecue. I did make a cheesecake with some home-grown blackcurrants but that's about as much gardening as was involved, I'm afraid.

The funny thing is, I don't think we needed to do much more. People just joined in: brought their own barbecues, a few picnics, a lot of beer and a gazebo or two. Someone brought a volleyball net, and we were set for an afternoon doing just the thing which Tim Smit had in mind all along - which is getting together with our friends and neighbours and having a stonking good time. I met a lot of people who apparently have been my neighbours for some time yet who I've never actually spoken to, and also spent some proper time having fun with neighbours who are already friends (as opposed to a hasty "hi!" as we pass on the way to work/school/the shops).

What's more it's become a fixture - everyone enjoyed it so much we're doing it next year too. We've even set a date. I don't know how many other people out there have been doing this today - the Big Lunch website says 2 million but heaven knows whether that's number of events or number of people taking part - but in a way, being part of a national 'day' didn't make a difference: this is about the local, not the national, and you don't have a special day to do it. It's just perhaps a bit of a shame that it's taken Tim Smit to persuade us to get on with it. But I'm glad he did.

Return of the Rumble Memorial Pot

You know, I'm supposed to have a pretty container frothing with flowers just outside my front door to welcome visitors. The idea was that I filled it with colourful bedding, petunias or some such, in summer and replanted with a cheery mix of winter pansies and maybe some spring bulbs in about November.

Well: this is it.

Yes, those are - or rather, were - the bedding plants under the cat. The trouble is that the very thing that makes this a good spot for bedding - sunny, bright spot and all that - also makes it very covetable to pussycats.

My late and much-lamented black-and-white cat Rumble used to do exactly the same: in fact, I had christened this very container the Rumble Memorial Pot after he died, and it always made me a little sad to see bedding actually thriving in it instead of being squashed. So since Rumble's junior partner in crime Pippa has taken to doing the same thing I'm rather perversely cheerful now that I'm having to look at a pot of dead foliage all summer once more.

July flowers

Now this is so easy. All Garden Bloggers Bloom Days should be in July.

Hope you enjoy it! And thanks as always to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting this lovely exercise in appreciating our gardens.