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.

Of sumptuous sweetpeas...

Last week I trundled around the North Circular at slightly less than walking pace (being a country bumpkin these days I'd forgotten to think this through: Olympic Lanes plus standard rush hour traffic equals journey demanding nightmarish levels of endurance) on my way to East Anglia. It took me four hours to get about 20 miles.

But anyway: I put all that behind me as soon as I walked onto the modest but treasure-filled trials grounds at Mr Fothergill's (also home to Johnsons Seeds and DT Browns, so you get three for the price of one, so to speak).

I was there on my annual pilgrimage to East Anglia (where for reasons buried in the mists of horticultural lore most of the seed companies seem to be based) to get a sneak peek at this year's new varieties.

There are dozens of them, too: the results of years of labouring behind the scenes to select flowers and veg which are just that little bit different. This year there were mini cabbages (container gardening is a rich seam for breeders), a handsome stripey courgette that hadn't even got a name yet, and several of the new long, pointed sweet peppers which look more like big chillies.

Courgette 'TZ 9308'

And there were sweet peas. Row upon row of them, brilliant with colour and a breathtaking sight. Mr Fothergills has declared 2013 the Year of the Sweet Pea and it's introducing 25 sweet pea varieties to its range including six new ones.

They are quite sumptuous to look at, too, with lots of the deep clarets and burgundies I find so ravishing. My only quibble is that the breeders seem to have left most of the scent behind them on the lab bench: most of these are somewhat fragrant, but it's a pale shadow of the rich scent of a 'Cupani' or 'Matucana'. Perhaps they'd be best grown with a few of the old favourites threaded among them, just so you don't forget what a sweet pea ought to smell like.

I adore sweet peas: this year mine have been something of a disappointment (pesky slugs - again) but luckily the school garden I'm currently looking after has two big wigwams of them which nobody's picking at the moment, it being summer holidays, except me.

It won't be long before I'm planting next year's seeds, in loo roll inners, to overwinter in the coldframe. This has been pretty much a foolproof method for me for years now: the overwintered seedlings don't like being moved around and are a little sulky at first but get going eventually, and I back them up with a second sowing (direct) in about March or April to flower well into summer.

So if you're poised with your box full of compost-packed loo rolls just itching to get the seeds in - here are a few new pretties to whet your appetite.



'Beaujolais'

One of the best colours of them all, I thought, though I do have a little thing about this particular shade of flower. Lovely big plant with sturdy straight stems: very little scent though

'Chelsea Centenary'

Guess what the big fuss is going to be all about next year? You couldn't really have a Year of the Sweet Pea coinciding with the 100th birthday of the world's most famous flower show without naming one of your new varieties for it. It's a multiflora, producing lots of blooms on the same stem, and pretty in a lavender sort of way.

'Eclipse'

An old-ish variety bred in 1974 and the perfect cutting flower, with long, straight stems and a good clear colour. It was a little more perfumed, too.

'Fire and Ice'

I liked the two-tone effect you get with this one: mauve, pink, cream and the occasional flower with say a dark purple edging to the petal.

'Juliet'

I found this charming: flowers the colour of clotted cream just splashed with the most subtle of pink tinges. And hallelujah: it smelled wonderful. Very spicy, perhaps too rich for those who like their sweet peas sweet, but I loved it.

'Wiltshire Ripple'

My prize for the most intriguing colouring, with flowers the colour of bruised plums. No scent, though.

'Air Warden'

This one shouted to be noticed with those bright cerise pink flowers: a plant to leap out from the border and demand attention. A little perfume to this one, too.

'Almost Black'

Mmm.... just look at that colouring. Sex on a stem: sultry, sumptuous, gorgeous. I do love a black flower.

'Pandemonium'

Last but not least, another of the new varieties: large flowers with those raspberry-ripple blooms gambolling around the ramrod-straight stems.

It's show time!

You have to be a little bit brave to enter our village horticultural show. 

It's taken extremely seriously and is very well supported - there was disappointment that there had been a mere 200+ entries this year (in the wake of the abysmal summer and subsequent failure of even the most accomplished of local veg growers' crops) - a shadow of last year's 570 entries.

I chose this year (perhaps in anticipation of there being marginally less fierce competition than usual) to make my debut.

I didn't win. Anything.

To be honest, with cucumbers like this to contend with - in early August! - it's not really that surprising. I was congratulating myself the other day on the appearance of my second fruit: it has taken me a little while to get going with the cukes this year as planting them involved moving an entire greenhouse, so they were a little late off the starting blocks. Seeing this lot makes me realise just how late.

And as for the leeks... just look at these leeks!

And these are grown in people's back yards, on their allotments, possibly in their greenhouses I suppose, but with no special facilities. I have, quite literally, no idea how you do that.

I was going to enter my onions - I have a fine crop of onions this year, at least - but I ran out of courage faced with this lot. As you can see, it's not all about size: presentation counts for a lot, and these guys are pros.

However, with a little emergency work with the elastic bands at the last minute I did manage to get my shallots into presentable condition - and scored the triumph I am most proud of: a third!

Those are mine, on the blue plate. Next year I shall know better and have them beautifully laid out on a tray of dried sand like the seasoned exhibitor who won first prize: sometimes I think entering competitions like these is as much about learning what's required as anything else.

My flowers were an absolute damp squib: I only entered two or three classes but drew a blank in all of them. I dare not take on the rose growers, or the chrysanth growers, or indeed the sweet pea exhibitors, all of whom had been doing it for far longer and with far more dedication than me. I simply bow to their superiority and admire.

I did think I'd have a chance with my 'five sprigs of herb plants, all different' - but I messed up by trying to be clever. My herbs were - to my eye - much bigger, healthier and generally more impressive than the other entries, so I had really high hopes of a first in that one. But I had decided to put in two different types of mint (I am building up quite a collection and they're rudely healthy at the moment) - and that meant I was the dreaded 'NAS' (Not As Schedule) since they meant five different genera of herb plant. Bother.

You couldn't help being impressed by the standard of exhibits: this was one of the floral art entries from our local and very talented florist. She's almost impossible to beat - one of the few times I've been glad I'm no good at flower arranging and therefore have no incentive to put myself in for this sort of thing.

And of course there were the fun classes and the kids' classes. The youngest was mighty chuffed to win a whole £2.50 for her friendship bracelet and handwriting entries (best not to mention the sock puppet). And oldest was doubly chuffed that her painting won a second prize against the grownups: she's too old these days to enter the children's classes.

Probably my favourite class in the whole thing, though, was class 111: an animal made from vegetables, in the 3-4 years age category. Don't you just love this little guy?

A seedy sort of day

Poppy: not white, but full of seeds, more usefully than you'd think

It's funny, isn't it. There are days when one thing just keeps popping up, demanding your attention, in lots of different and usually unrelated places.

Today it's been seeds. First I was researching a seedy subject for an article I was writing: saving seed from your best plants (always a good idea: you save money, you ensure you've got stocks of your favourite variety for next year, and if you do it over a number of years you end up with a strain uniquely adapted to your own conditions: a sort of micro-local heritage variety. What's not to like?).

In this case I was looking into how much better polytunnels are for isolating veg like carrots or chard which would otherwise cross-pollinate all over the place. My friend once ended up with pumpkin-butternuts because her cucurbits got busy and re-seeded the resulting mongrels all over her veg patch: quite tasty but very odd.

I digress. Just as I was putting the finishing touches on the finer points of cross-breeding calabrese, my daughter - on holiday therefore terminally indolent - called me in to see something she was watching on the telly.

It was indeed, as she emphatically informed me, epic: Neil Buchanan, failed rock star, Scouser, and hyper-bouncy presenter of the CITV series Art Attack (which almost - almost - reaches the heady heights of Vision On, and from me that is high praise indeed) was creating an enormous and finely detailed snake, twice his own height, out of poppy seeds. By the wonder that is video on demand, you can see the whole thing here (from 7 minutes in). Poppy seeds as art material. Who knew.

And that reminded me of the thing I was reading last night in this month's copy of The Garden: it was an absorbing and rather wonderful visit to the private garden created by Sybille Kreutzberger and the late Pamela Schwerdt, erstwhile head gardeners at Sissinghurst Castle.

The bit that stuck in my mind was their painstaking pursuit of the cultivars they regarded as the best possible selections. They fell in love with a white form of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, they saw in a picture taken in Afghanistan: it wasn't available in the UK, so they wrote to a bakery which decorated its bread with poppy seeds sourced there. The white poppy is now growing in the White Garden at Sissinghurst. Now that's what I call dedication.

And then just to round it all off, I reminded myself to sign up for Carl Legge's seedy penpals scheme: thanks go to Zoe for the timely blog post. I think seed-swapping penpals is quite the loveliest idea I've come across for a long time. I always have a few spare seed packets kicking about the place and can't think of anything nicer than sharing the love with someone (and hopefully getting some interesting bits & bobs I've never tried before in return).

I urge you to join in, if you haven't already: we could all do with a few more seeds in our lives.

In with the old, in with the new

Sweetpea 'Cupani': the original, introduced in the 17th century

Sometimes I think there's never been a more exciting time to grow your own.

It was brought home to me when I went round the inspirational kitchen garden at Knightshayes recently. It's no showcase museum piece but a belt-and-braces, workaday sort of garden which pays its way by selling its produce, so what it grows needs to be worth growing.

Its indefatigable head gardener Lorraine is a keen advocate of heritage varieties – 104 heritage tomato varieties (she likes German beefsteaks and the near-wild species tomato, Solanum pimpinellifolium) and 10 heritage garlic, plus peas, sweetpeas and potatoes.

Pea 'Magnum Bonum': modern pea breeding has focussed on dwarf, self-supporting peas but hugely tall 19th century varieties like this one and the 'Telephone' strain are far heavier yielding and more satisfying to grow all round

There's a bed of oca next to the onions, and she's got achocha scrambling among the toms in the greenhouse. In fact, it's just like my garden (though on a spectacularly larger and less weed-ridden scale): familiar veg like carrots and cabbages rubbing shoulders with the very old and – to the UK, anyway - the very new.

Achocha in the greenhouse: this one is the exploding cucumber type (Cyclanthera explodens) not the edible achocha which is a finer, less coarse (if also less amusing) plant. The fruits of the edible one taste of sweet peppers

Until about 10 or so years ago, we had to put up with a limited range of ever-blander varieties created not for us little insignificant gardeners but for large-scale farmers and supermarket buyers. That meant they were all exactly the same shape and size, they were robust and held together well enough to be picked by machine, and they stored well for long periods of time in refrigerated lorries.

Well, as a set of criteria for choosing something worth growing in your back garden I can't think of a worse lot of reasons.

You may have noticed that there are a few things missing from the list. What about flavour? Juiciness? Explode-in-the-mouth ripeness that makes you dance round the kitchen in glee?

Babington leeks and and old Italian variety of green garlic, in the main garden

Now we've got the rediscovery of heritage veg, nostalgia veg (I'm talking samphire, scorzonera, Hamburg parsley, skirret – whole families of edibles we used to grow but don't any more) and the arrival of a whole world's worth of exotics. Joy Larkcom started it by going to China and bringing back mizuna, mibuna and pak choi; now there's Mark Diacono and his Szechuan peppers and James Wong persuading us to grow everything from wasabi to electric buttons (Spilanthes oleracea) which pop and fizz in your mouth like space dust.

It's telling that at the Edible Gardening Show earlier this year, when Suttons brought a few Danish trolleys' worth of the weirdest edibles they could think of as an experiment, they'd sold out by lunchtime on the first day. This is no passing fad: our curiosity is well and truly piqued.

And then there are all the ornamentals which turn out to be edible: Fuchsia berries (try 'Riccatonii'), flowers from sweet rocket to nasturtiums and violets, Eleagnus berries and elderflowers.

Heritage toms in the lean-to greenhouse. Lorraine says they go through a 'teenage' stage and sulk for a while when they reach about 6" tall: but they get over it, and romp away so fast they catch up with everything else around

Some argue heritage varieties aren't worth growing; well, I'll continue to swoon at the faint-inducingly gorgeous flavour of my 'Marmande' beefsteak tomatoes, if that's OK with you. Tricky as hell to grow, but you keep going just to have one unforgettable taste – and you try buying that in the shops.

And besides, heritage varieties saved by The Heritage Seed Library preserve our genetic pool of veg varieties – whether or not they're worth giving garden room to - so we don't narrow it all down so much we're breeding in ever-diminishing circles.

At the other end of the spectrum you've got the early adopters: those who say traditional veg are boring and everyone should be throwing out their spuds in favour of yacon. Well: given that all my potatoes have gone over to blight in the last week there might be something in that (though I'll mourn the loss of my 'Duke of York' should that sad day ever come).

But on the whole, for most people (certainly for me) the whole process of getting to know exotics is a series of experiments. I've tried and rejected tomatilloes – lovely plant, but not enough crop or uses for it (much as I like salsa) to justify the greenhouse room. But I now grow sweet potatoes every year, in big baskets under cover, as though the crop isn't huge it's big enough and it makes a nice change from the spuds.

And just as we thought there was time to get bored, along come yard-long beans, Chinese arrowroot and lablab beans courtesy of Sally Cunningham's Sowing New Seeds project for Garden Organic. Some will go the way of ra-ra skirts and beehive hairdos: others (my money's on the lab-labs) will be the allotment staples of tomorrow. Isn't it great?

Wordless Wednesday: Sculpture

'Cheval' by Joolz Doncaster
for the Wicked Willows sculpture trail at Knightshayes, East Devon

July flowers

I have been feeling a bit gloomy about my garden this year - along with most of the gardening population of the British Isles I suspect (with the possible exception of Mr Colborn).

It's so hard to keep walking outside when it's pouring with rain in the sure knowledge that you'll get water in places it really oughtn't to be however well waterproofed you are while also knowing you're fighting a losing battle against the slugs and the weeds and the terminal torpor of those plants you want to grow. Everything is at best, half-hearted: or at worst, munched to a sad little stump just above the ground.

Or at least, that's how it was in my head. I think gardeners suffer from an unfortunate habit of only seeing the things which are wrong. And that's why I value Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens so much: it forces you to venture out with your camera and look at what's good, and beautiful, and above all working. And it always leaves me feeling much better about things than I did before.

Here are a few of the lovely things I found, to my surprise, thriving and rejoicing in the relentless rain, and proving that this awful summer is, after all, good for something.

Astrantia major

Geranium pyrenaicum 'Bill Wallis'

Rosa 'Charles de Mills'

Rosa canina: not sure of the selection but it grows rampantly
over my front wall and flowers furiously all summer long

Hemerocallis dumortieri

Meconopsis cambrica

Tropaeolum speciosum 'Cobra'

Paeonia officinalis, looking a bit louche and about to seed but
I rather like them like this with their corsets loosened

One of the very many oriental poppies seeding themselves about:
they're almost a weed but I haven't the heart to pull them out when they look this lovely

...and another one

Thymus 'Coccineus Group'

Valeriana officinalis