Great Dixter

On the way to Rye, less than an hour away from here, there lies hidden in a corner of the village of Northiam one of my favourite gardens. This is Great Dixter, the home of the late Christopher Lloyd – colourful, influential, and sometimes controversial gardener and writer who created a very unique garden at his family home. Looked after since his death in 2006 by a charitable trust, the gardens continue to inspire and evolve under the guidance of Christo’s head gardener, Fergus Garrett. From the moment you approach the medieval facade of the house along the path through the wild flower meadow at the front, you know that you’ve arrived somewhere special, and the rest of the garden doesn’t fail to deliver on the promise.

Arriving at the porch the visitor is greeted by a continually changing but always spectacular collection of pots and containers, overflowing with all manner of flowers and foliage and colour. It’s almost worth a trip for this alone –  rich food for thought for anyone with a small courtyard garden or a paved area without flower beds, for the sheer variety and unexpected exuberance of the effect that can be achieved from gardening in this way. It’s true that container gardening can present its own challenges – watering, feeding and weeding need to be approached with more discipline for plants in pots, which are often less forgiving than those in the ground – but the sight of this ensemble is enough to make anyone want to give it a go.

Turning to the left and walking along the front of the house you soon come to a garden with the most amazing clipped yew shapes – geometric forms in deepest green, with topiary peacocks on the top; a lovely mixture of formality and humour. That’s where the formality ends, however, as the spaces between the statuesque forms are packed with billowing perennials and the planting, whilst tightly concentrated in terms of the number of plants, has been allowed to indulge a pleasingly loose attitude as regards the boundaries provided by the landscaping. All this creates a pleasantly disorienting effect, and I realise that my recollection of exactly where the paths go is slightly confused as I grapple with my recent memories of this beautiful yet bonkers, Alice-in-Wonderland space. I remember at some point scaling some steps to the upper level in the peacock garden, which might cause access problems to those with limited mobility. But you have to remember that this was built as a family garden rather than a visitor attraction, something testified to by the narrowness of the paths in many places, especially where the plants spill out over them with apparently unruly abandon, as they often do, adding to the romance of the place.

This is not low maintenance gardening – it’s a plantsman’s paradise and a designer’s dream, but the lack of formality and apparent wanton attitude of so much of the planting belies meticulous planning and many hours continuous hard work by the gardening team. These borders never sleep – whatever time of year you visit, they will be full of interest, as you would expect in the garden of the author of Succession Planting for Adventurous Gardeners. I have heard Fergus Garrett speak on how he will look at photographs of the same small section of the long border taken at different times of the year, planning precisely which plant should follow which as one season gives way to another, what’s working well, and what isn’t earning its place. The plantscape is always changing at Dixter, and a ruthless attitude can be employed by the head gardener if some combination is not working as hoped.

Ducking under the mulberry tree (we’d missed the fruit by a few weeks, more’s the pity), we made our way past the steps leading down to the orchard and the most fantastical bit of bedding I’ve ever seen on – a crazy tableau of sempervivums, echeverias and other succulents – into one of my favourite areas, the exotic garden. A one time cattle yard, and then rose garden, I’ve only known it as a home for dahlias and lush, exotic foliage plants. So verdant on this visit (by now pouring with rain), it was almost impossible to see the path, and we had to literally push aside the plants to make any progress. Giant leaved tetrapanax, bamboos and tree ferns, this is a true jungle, albeit in East Sussex. I almost felt a machete would be in order, although I hardly feel that such extreme pruning would have been popular.

Ed almost gets eaten by the giant tetrapanax leaves

There are many other areas to explore – the high garden, the orchard garden, the horse pond, the sunk garden and the topiary lawn – such that your head is quite reeling by the time you reach the exit. In reality, it’s beyond my capacity to process in a single visit, which is why I feel so fortunate to have Dixter on the doorstep, and I’m looking forward to my next visit when it opens again in April. (It’s a shame to have to wait so long, as I would love to see this garden after a heavy frost.)

An annual ticket continues to be absurdly reasonable, particularly since having seen the garden once, you will doubtless want to come back throughout the year.

More pictures can be seen here.

Dahlia envy

Mid September, and once again I’m struck by the knowledge that I’ve failed to plant enough dahlias this year.

There’s nothing subtle about a dahlia. Subtlety, after all, is not what you really want in the garden towards the end of summer, when everything’s been madly growing all year, when the beds and borders are jam-packed with plants that are either just reaching their best, or just gone over, or long past their best and sprouting crazily from every bud because it’s what they do and they can feel the days are getting shorter and want to make the most of every sun-kissed photon before winter robs them of the warmth and the light they need to grow. Against this crazed backdrop you need something that will stand out.

Dahlias stand out.

Exuberant, unabashed, garish, uncouth. I love them; the colours, the shapes – some like giant daisies, a child’s drawing of a flower – some, the cactus flowered varieties, more like a spiny sea creature, or the pompoms and spheres whose incurved petals make the blooms resemble paper Christmas decorations. Most of the foliage is unremarkable – although I do like the purple-black leaves of 'After Eight' or 'Bishop of Llandaff' – but you don’t grow dahlias for their foliage. And yes, they can be tricky customers to keep going year after year, digging up the tubers, draining the stems and drying them out and then dusting them with fungicidal powders before putting them in a box filled with dry soil to overwinter in the shed, giving them the best chance of making it through the darker months without rotting. Some people have luck leaving them in the ground and covering them in a deep mulch – I don’t. I imagine you’d need a pretty free draining soil for that to succeed, not my Kentish clay anyway, although I might give it another go. But surely it’s worth the effort...for the flowers. And a great tip for getting bigger flowers is to pinch out the side shoots immediately below the leading bud, while to prolong flowering till the first frosts, remember to deadhead regularly.

But for the next week or so, I’ll carry on glancing enviously at what other people are growing. I’m already making my list for next year.

Genius loci

Every once in a while – if you’re a person who values the process of thinking – it’s no bad thing to be exposed to that which has the power to stop you in your tracks. A positive encounter which threatens to reeducate you, tweaking your view of the world in some way to make an allowance for something significant which until now you hadn’t so much as imagined. Last week’s visit to the gardens of Rousham House in Oxfordshire was for me an experience of that order, to the extent that it’s taken me a few days to be in the position to be able to write about it. And even now I’m not convinced I have the words to convey the wonderment of this garden and this place. But I’ll give it a go, and when words won’t do the job, pictures will have to.


I first heard about Rousham House and its gardens during a talk given by Monty Don at Hadlow College last year, although I now understand that at the time I’d missed the full import of what he was saying. My eager note taking records “Rauscham [sic], Grand house, William Kent (designer), Amazing rill”, and then moves on to record details of Jacques Wirtz’s garden. There is indeed an amazing rill at Rousham, and the knowledge of this together with supporting photographs later gleaned from the internet had so lodged in my head that I’ve been looking forward all year to visiting this miraculous water feature, and maybe even poking a toe in it. This became the reason for the visit and so, upon arrival on a beautiful hot and sunny September afternoon, I was impressed, but not overly moved, by the house, the park and the gardens. A crenellated eighteenth century stately home, with neat clipped box hedging and immaculate bowling green, complete with Cotswold stone-walled haha to prevent grazing animals wandering from the park land into the gardens. At the end of the bowling green, the view down to the winding Cherwell River below was certainly picturesque, but it wasn’t until we descended to the lower level via the cool woodland path on the left that it began to become apparent that this was more than a little out of the ordinary. Classically-themed statues and urns on plinths are revealed to the visitor, their aged stonework softened to a beautiful patina, and glades and vistas open out around corners. Where the site narrows a beautiful arched terrace provides views down across the grassy Venus’ Vale, with its pool and grottoes, towards the river, while functionally acting as a retaining wall to the bank supporting the highest path.

And we’d been wandering a while before it occured to us; there were no flowers to speak of in this garden - it’s a garden of green, and it works wonderfully. And revisiting my notes from Monty’s talk, I see that I did also write something about this, the “power of green”, and that even the white garden at Sissinghurst is really a green garden*. And a few lines on, I find a reference to Pope, who advises “consult the genius of the place”.

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs
Alexander Pope, from Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington

And now, being on the cusp of understanding this, I can begin to hope to appreciate the rill in the context of the garden, not as a feature to be consumed. And not, thanks to Emma, by charging up it from its outlet at the Octagon Pool, but by seeking it out at its source, which must be approached from the vale by taking the lower, parallel path in the opposite direction, towards the statue of Apollo and the Temple of Echo in the glade beyond.

It was worth the wait. Emerging from a hole in the ground – through what means I have yet to find out (A spring? A pump? Some cunning hydraulics?) – a limestone channel winds its serpentine way beneath a wooded canopy. The rill arrives first at the octagonal Cold Bath – a deep, crystal looking glass reflecting the trees overhead and the adjacent grotto, and from there on between well tended hedges of laurel to the pool in the vale. This is surely a prodigious feat of engineering, and certainly a gentle, yet breathtaking spectacle.

Rousham had by this time given me so much that my head was fairly bursting. But it wasn’t finished with me yet. Taking the path to the left of the house, we descended through the tall hedge, and then through an iron gate into the walled garden with its mature fruit trees, roses and lavender. And from there, on into the Pigeon House garden with a large circular brick building at the centre, of the kind built for harvesting guano for fertiliser, or for gunpowder production. But the central attraction here was not this oversized dovecote, neither the neat parterre nor even the long dahlia border in all its summer glory. Rather, the old mulberry tree, ripe black fruits falling to the ground, provided a welcome and fitting end to our visit. And if we did walk back to the car with fingers stained red with juice, can anyone really blame us? Food for the soul and for the mind had been provided in abundance, and the stomach wasn’t going to be left out. Our visit to the gardens at Rousham House had been a truly nourishing experience

More pictures of the visit can be seen here.

*with the exception of the flower spike on the Melianthus, which is a rusty red, even though Lex laughed at me and said it never flowers, which is odd, because mine does in north Kent less than an hour away.

Blackberry time

All year long – and with last winter being relatively mild it really has been all year – I’ve been battling against brambles. Over the last few weeks the first year stems which will produce fruit next season have been growing away lustily, and in less manicured areas monstrous tentacles thick as a thumb have appeared, thorns snagging skin and clothing alike. But, for a few weeks at least, the time has come to relax about this unwelcome garden rambler.

It’s blackberry time.

The common blackberry (Rubus fruticosus) eschews the discipline and erect habit of its more civilised cousin the raspberry, choosing rather to lounge about in unruly fashion and scramble over anything in its way. Likely as not it also puts its feet up on the sofa, speaks with its mouth full and leaves its underpants on the bathroom floor. But it does possess the distinct advantage of requiring neither planning nor dedicated garden space, as it inserts itself at will and grows wherever it fancies. For those without gardens, or with gardens from which every bramble has been eradicated, a surfeit of free fruit is only as far away as the nearest hedgerow.

So whether yours are destined to be made into jam, used as an extra shot of flavour in a fruit crumble, a key ingredient of a delicious summer pudding or just crammed greedily into your mouth straight off the plant, dripping juice down your chin and still warm with the sun, this time of year provides a great reminder of simple pleasures. Free food is about as good as it gets.

Devilishly handsome

Late July in the garden, and summer is most definitely here. I leave our little courtyard – through the trellis, stooping low under the arching, overladen stems of the pheasant berry Leycesteria formosa – to be confronted by the strident scarlet of Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, jarring nicely with the flowers of the lavender that borders the path. I love how this plant single handedly provides a magnificent boost to the garden at this time of year. Some relief is provided by its fresh green leaves, together with a background hedge of forsythia and mahonia, with the purple smoke bush Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’ and the wheaten tones of the tall grass Stipa gigantea – but the overall effect is anything but subtle and, I think, all the better for it.


This malevolent montbretia has really made itself at home here, now rocketing effortlessly skywards from ground zero in early spring to achieve a height of four feet or more. Just now they are flopping over alarmingly, telling me that one urgent post Christmas task will be to plant them deeper into the soil so as to give the top-heavy stems more anchorage in the ground.

The individual clumps of corms have again become enormous, and while this gives an impressive degree of coverage, it does rather shade out anything planted close by. In spite of the fact that they do flower most spectacularly when congested, I'll be dividing them again in spring, so friends can expect to be gifted with pots of impish delight in the new year.

Before the heat

Verbena bonariensis against a background of Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’

 
In the cool, fresh air of the morning, as the sun gathers its strength for another day baking us till our skins feel fit to split like sausages, I spend far too long trying to capture the diaphanous cloud of pollen that floats away whenever the deschampsia is brushed against. I give up. You need three hands for this task, or at least a tripod, and I have neither.

So I settle for an early morning picture of the flower spike which the acanthus has deigned to elevate above its rampant mound of deep green, spiny leaves. Magic.

Hampton Court Flower Show 2012

Much to think about following Sunday’s visit to Hampton Court. As always, the grounds were packed full of wonderful plants in beautiful condition, and happy plant shoppers trundling their purchases on folding box trollies, and although the going was a bit soggier than usual, this didn’t seem to put people off. Also represented were the usual array of garden furniture, lighting, tool and accessory companies – you can spend hours pottering and a fortune if you’re not careful, but it was really the gardens I had come to see. I’d purposefully avoided coverage of the show on the television this week as I was keen to approach the gardens without any preconceptions, and didn’t even make use of a map.

And so, having wandered through a beautifully planted woodland copse – including a seating area where people were congregating to chat and relax by a dipping pond surrounded by moisture loving plants like astilbes and rodgersias and ligularia – I abruptly found myself in a city street, complete with yellow lines, concrete walls and washing hanging out to dry. Through another gap in the wall, and I’d entered a wonderful allotment space complete with greenhouse, compost bins and pleached fruit trees; then, bounded by iron railings to the road, an orchard area underplanted with a wild meadow, and then a wildlife garden with log piles and bird boxes, including a communal seating area with a brick fired oven. All around was evidence of the concept behind these gardens – from the graffiti on the walls to the derelict yard and abandoned wreck of a car. This was the Urban Oasis, a joint project between the RHS and the charity Groundwork, designed by Chris Beardshaw to show the impact which community gardening can have on some of the most unpromising of areas. And talking to one of the Groundwork volunteers I found out that it isn’t just a nice theory, but that this kind of urban greening is really having a positive impact in the communities like the one where she works in Brighton, transforming peoples’ lives and giving them a real sense of ownership over their neighbourhood. Really inspiring to see the potential of horticulture to have such a positive and life-changing effect. Undoubtedly the highlight of the show for me.

Our Facebook page has pictures of some of the many other inspiring and interesting gardens, including some from the “Low cost, high impact” section. Here it must be pointed out that “low” is in relation to the normal cost of putting together a show garden – as can be appreciated when it’s understood that the smallest budget for one of these gardens was £7k for the gold medal winning garden from Nilufer Danis – hardly a recession-savvy figure for a tiny garden making a lavish use of recycled scaffolding boards for the hard landscaping element. That said it is a beautifully planted space in a palette of blue and yellow, with verbascums, alliums, Eryngium 'Sapphire Blue' and hemerocallis. Creating an instant mature garden from scratch – rather than building a collection of plants over time – doesn’t come cheap.

All the same I’d have been interested to have seen something wonderful created on a really tight budget, something that might require the creative skip-diving skills and no-nonsense approach of thrifty gardener Alys Fowler, for example. There’s always next year.

Glove affair

I freely admit it. I am not man enough to garden without gloves. It’s therefore a bit of a mystery to me why my hands manage to get quite so grubby and gnarly – obviously I can wave the wizened things about as a sort of gardener’s badge of honour, but it’s a different matter when the mere sight of them causes passing children to run off in tears and the bloke at the supermarket checkout to recoil in horror on handing over your receipt.

My hands are not the most elegant appendages you’re likely to encounter. Even at the best of times there’s no disguising their form: generously sized square palms with five short, sausagey digits attached at regular intervals. They’re a bit rough – calloused, scratched, in spite of my best efforts usually betraying some earthy signs of the day’s activity – but they’re good, honest hands. Since I left off piloting a desk through the corridors of commerce and opted instead for a hard day’s graft in the open air they also appear to have grown in size, which is alarming to say the least. This hasn’t happened visibly, but recently it’s been the devil’s own job getting my gloves either on or off, which led me to the rash decision one day last week to forgo the hand protection for just half an hour. And in that short time my mitts became veritable pincushions with every bramble and thorn possible finding its way through several layers of flesh. So I finally did the sensible thing and bought the next size of glove up, which do leave a little room at the top of some of the fingers but at least I don’t have to cut them off my hands whenever the phone rings. (The gloves; not my fingers.)

An improvement, then, but still not perfect as somehow I seemed to be making a habit of getting thorns buried in the fabric of the glove itself – impossible to see but not to feel, as they persisted in digging in to the skin.

All of which has led me to these RHS-endorsed Gold Leaf gardening gloves (“for people serious about gardening”, if you please) – so fiendishly expensive that the same pair had better still be going strong when I drop dead, rake in hand, several decades from now. There’s a range of different options: gloves for light pruning, gloves for heavy pruning, gloves for cold weather and for gardening in the wet. The ones I’ve opted for have a reinforced palm and finger tips, a waterproof liner and a thermal layer, and are pretty comfortable. Whether or not they’ll be any good, time will tell – so far they’ve survived a week, and the only slight niggle I have is that the various linings make them a little tricky to get off, but not as much as the clearly-too-small gloves of recent months.

But if they can stop my hands looking and feeling like a pair of peppered hams hanging off the end of my arms, that’ll do for me.

Hole Park

To the rather posh Hole Park near Rolvenden for the Wealden Times Midsummer Fair at which, disappointingly, nobody got murdered and Inspector Barnaby failed to appear. But then someone pointed out that the spelling was entirely different and so this rather awful joke doesn’t work anyway. Most disappointing. The fair was a pleasant way to spend a few hours though (Bill enjoyed being made a fuss off). We look forward to going back in order to explore the gardens, the only part of which we were able to see on this occasion was the impressive formal lawn and pond, with accompanying yew topiary, including some fairly (and surely inadvertently) rude shaped specimens at the end of the terrace, unfortunately just out of frame in the above photograph. Rude Topiary, surely there’s a market for a coffee table type book on the subject?

Bill eyes the rude topiary, unimpressed.

Plant rescue

I’ve collected a few waifs and strays over the past week, with the intention of bringing them home and nursing them back to rude health. Whether or not their actual fate will see them consigned to an obscure corner of the garden and left to fend for themselves only time will tell, but the intentions are honorable, and the chances of seeing the thing through appear better than average as they’re all plants I’ve been keen to introduce here anyway.

Plant number one was not so much a waif as a child of cruel neglect, rescued from an otherwise very good nursery in Maidstone where I found it nestling between specimens in finer fettle. It’s a hardy geranium, a cultivar of the dusky cranesbill Geranium phaeum, the Mourning Widow. A native of European woodlands it’s quite happy in dry shade, which makes it useful as well as attractive. Geranium phaeum ‘Samobor’ sports mid green leaves with a dark port wine stain. It’s notable for tall, delicate flowers on which, unlike most hardy geraniums, the petals are reflexed – held backwards – exposing the rude bits of the flower to all and sundry. Inappropriate behaviour for a mourning widow you might say, but each must be allowed to deal with grief according to their own fashion.

Dead heads and seed pods

The specimen in question had flowered and was busy diverting its attention into producing seed, doubtless one of the reasons it looks so ropey, with scarcely a leaf, although this doesn’t explain why it appears to have outgrown its pot. I suppose I should have haggled for a discount, but I’m not very good at that kind of caper, and it was only three pounds fifty. Tough as old boots, these things, so having dead headed it and given it a good drenching of a seaweed based plant tonic I fully expect it to be loutishly romping through the borders in no time.

Patients two and three came together, rescued from the compost heap at the site of a border I’ve been clearing for replanting. They will be be considered most ordinary to some, but closer inspection reveals them to be rather wonderfully constructed, even if they do grow with unabashed vigour. Firstly, we’ve the perennial cornflower Centaura montana, with its beautiful delicate violet blue petals and decorative filigree work beneath. Grows well just about anywhere that isn’t waterlogged, and will even put up with a bit of shade. A useful and, again, tough old thing, not dissimilar in that respect to the red valerian Centranthus ruber, with its generous purple red flower heads and slightly fleshy leaves and stems. Although it will grow happily in reasonably rich soil of a garden border, it seems more than happy to grow in and on walls and self seed quite liberally. However, unlike something like Corydalis which enjoys similar positions it has a tough, woody root, so you might want to keep an eye on established clumps to avoid any damage to the mortar.

Which just leaves me to be a sort of horticultural Florence Nightingale, I suppose. I shall need a lamp.

Old Nick’s porridge

If there was a plant star of the show at Chelsea this year the award must go to Cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris. This didn’t so much sneak its way into just about every garden as proudly proclaim itself a key part of those schemes in which it appeared. On the television coverage designers like Andy Sturgeon could be heard extolling the virtues of the ‘umbellifer’ – basically a big carrot. In the kitchen garden dill, fennel and angelica all fall into this group, although it’s not a genetic classification but a description of how the plant holds its flowers; in ‘umbels’ (an umbrella-like structure). Cow parsley is similarly classified, and while the posh red version Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Raven’s Wing’ was in evidence, it was the humble species which we know from our country lanes and hedgerows that seemed most popular, and with good reason. Six weeks ago, clumps of delicate, fern-like foliage could be seen nestling on the ground, glowing lush green in the damp undergrowth where they’ve been bulking up since last year (Cow parsley is a biennial). Then seemingly overnight, aided by record rainfall and then unseasonable sunshine, the plants achieved a height of about a metre, sometimes more, topped with a froth of delicate, creamy white flowers.

Would I plant it in my garden? I might, if I had a large expanse of naturalistic meadow planting. In its favour, it’s native, and rather beautiful. But it can be something of a thug both being a prodigious self-seeder and possessing the ability to reproduce through a spreading rhizome system. It will also hybridize with other members of the carrot family, so if you grow dill or fennel, for example, you will need to sow fresh seed from a trusted source every year in order to keep the plants true to type. In a smaller garden I might be inclined to use something like Bishop’s Weed, Ammi majus, to achieve a similar effect.

Being a native plant it has a host of common names (see here on the excellent seedaholics website for a full list), among them Wild chervil, Lady’s needlework or Queen Anne’s Lace (also a common name for Ammi majus). But my favourites are Devil’s parsley and Naughty man’s oatmeal.

Adding a frothy element to Andy Sturgeon’s Chelsea garden

Main image copyright © fionaandneill, on Flickr.

RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2012

The sun came out for Chelsea this week, baking hot on Tuesday when I visited the show on the day the medals were announced.

There was a tremendous amount going on, and it was good to see an awareness of the the environmental impact of gardening, with a noticeable emphasis this year on water conservation, drought tolerant plant selection and naturalistic styles of planting, although it was evident from overheard comments that, to a significant number of onlookers, the designers’ painstaking attempts to recreate romantic meadow effects were often interpreted as patches of weeds – “there’s a bit like that in my garden behind the shed!”. I thought it was rather lovely, but that’s the challenge for the garden designer keen to promote this aesthetic with all its environmental, bee-friendly worthiness, when many clients just want things to look neat. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Notable also was a consideration of how we can green the urban landscape, with suggestions for even the smallest of spaces and, while there was undoubtedly some very impressive design and plantsmanship in evidence in the larger gardens, it was the small details which were more interesting for me than the broad sweep; how different designers use various materials, and observing the points at which they interact. The more modestly proportioned artisan gardens were a rich source of inspiration – not least because they demonstrated how much can be achieved in a small plot, and with increased demand on our space from housing fewer of us have large, or even moderately sized gardens any more – as can be readily appreciated when looking at the garden of an average new build home.

The Brewin Dolphin garden

Throughout there was a wonderful mix of the formal and informal, best in evidence in Cleve West’s garden for Brewin Dolphin which deservedly won him Best in Show for the second year running. Here he mixed formal elements such as yew topiary, stone gate pillars, and beech hedging, with a less disciplined side represented in the beautifully lush, detailed herbaceous planting. Similarly Arne Maynard’s garden for Laurent Perrier used his trademark copper beech – here in the form of a pleached hedge – as a stately component of the space against which his riotous lower level planting in shades of pinks and silver could frolic. Not noted for my love of roses, I was nonetheless completely smitten by the low mounds of Rosa ‘Reine des Violettes’ trained over hazel supports. Chris Beardshaw’s Furzey Gardens demonstrated that it is possible to create a harmonious, peaceful and lush space using rhododendrons and a variety of ericaceous plants. Wonderful stuff.

More pictures of Chelsea 2012 can be seen on our Facebook page.

You don’t know Jack

Garlic mustard, or Jack in the Hedge (Alliaria petiolata), glowing white and emerald green following a downpour. It’s everywhere at the moment. Find it popping up alongside pavements and in the hedgerows, obviously loving the wet weather and growing away quite vigorously, although not as uncontrollably as in North America where, following its introduction for culinary use in the nineteenth century, it’s become an invasive pest. Like the nettle which it superficially resembles – and in whose company it can often be found – it has a square stem, but the emergence of the vertically-held seed pods after the flowers point towards its true placement in the brassica family, reminding me of canola (the rapeseed plant), a solitary specimen of which occasionally escapes from the fields and appears in similar locations. I’ve yet to introduce it to my own herb patch, or anyone else’s garden for that matter, but I wouldn’t rule it out in the creation of a wild, naturalistic effect, perhaps in the company of cow parsley and a deadnettle or two.

Goosegrass

It was probably inevitable that declaring a hosepipe ban would usher in weeks of heavy rain. After all, it is April. And if there’s one plant in particular that I’ve noticed making the most of the wet weather and romping through every garden, it’s goosgrasss. I spent most of Friday afternoon gardening up to my elbows and, at one point, ears in the stuff (I should point out that I was lying down in order to weed under an awkward cornus – it’s rampant, but not that rampant). Galium aparine is known by many other names; in addition to goosegrass, perhaps most commonly cleavers, but also stickyweed, catchweed, coachweed, bedstraw (from its historic use as a matress stuffing), robin-run-the-hedge and, of course, sticky willy. Though I’m much too mature to find that particular epithet even remotely funny.

I lied, of course, it’s ridiculously amusing, and at least fifty percent accurate as a description. This stuff is sticky – persistently, annoyingly so, clinging to your hands, your clothes, even your hair as you try to disentangle it from your prize plants without pulling bits of them off in the process. But, like so many other weeds, the characteristics that make it so frustrating for the gardener are the same ones that allow it to flourish and colonise our borders with such abandon, its long, sprawling stems creeping over the ground, and inveigling their way through and over plants, finally smothering them utterly. And then it turns out that the plant isn’t sticky at all – rather tiny hairs on the leaves and stem work in the same way as velcro, with hooked ends which grasp skin, hair and fur, and of course, give the plant a firm hold on any plant matter it feels the need to clamber over. Effective stuff.

While hoiking it out by the handful it may be diverting to muse that herbalists have found several uses for it. Just as well you might think, it being so wanton, although I think I might stick to oranges and tomatoes for my daily dose of vitamin C in which it’s apparently particularly rich. It has been used to lower blood pressure, as a treatment for bites and for cystitis, although quite how you apply it I’m not entirely sure. A tea made from the stuff is a diuretic and a laxative (I have a sneaking suspicion that if you make a tea from sufficient quantities of any plant, it’ll have a similar effect. Unless it kills you first.)

All most interesting and very worthy. Mine’s still going on the compost.

Mini orchard

The apple trees are planted – a milestone in our home. We’ve always known where we wanted them but somehow, with a rundown house to renovate, garden buildings to erect, borders to fill with flowers and the kitchen garden to fill with annual veg, it always slipped to the bottom of the list. Which is a shame because planting fruit trees really should be one of the first things you do when you move into a new house, partly for the practical reason that it will take a year or two before they bear fruit (the maturation period depends on the vigour of the rootstock; larger trees take longer to achieve their productive potential), but mainly because there’s nothing better than planting a fruit tree to make you feel as though you’ve put down roots. Quite literally.


I find it interesting why that should be – it’s wonderful to provide salad and vegetables from your own garden, but an apple or pear tree* provides a more permanent link to the land, and the opportunity to have one growing on your own little piece of the world is a privilege not to be taken for granted. To watch it grown and mature, to see its naked grey twigs clothed with young leaves in spring; to revel in outrageously generous blossom and finally - at last! - to pluck a fruit from the tree and taste your whole garden in one bite of its warm, swollen goodness as the juice runs down your hand. Now that’s a thing.

April lies toward the end of the season for planting bare-root trees, so I shall be relieved when our trees show some signs of life. We have chosen three varieties, each on the dwarf rootstock M27. This means that they’ll need permanent staking, reaching a maximum height of around six feet, but has the advantage for the impatient that they should fruit within a year or two. Firstly, we have opted for Blenheim Orange, a traditional dual purpose apple for cooking and eating, with crisp yellow flesh and large golden fruits striped with red. Known for its disgraceful sexual proclivities as a ‘triploid’ apple it needs to be pollinated by two other varieties, and all three should flower at a similar time for obvious reasons. So we also have the nutty Fiesta, a new strain developed at the East Malling Research station, similar to Cox’s Orange Pippin but, we are told, more reliable to grow, and Laxton’s Superb, which crops from November like the other two. All have excellent reputations for flavour – daft to chose something that doesn’t excel in this respect unless you’re only growing the fruit for throwing at people, and we don’t really have the space here for that, though I imagine some of the windfalls could be used for this purpose at a push. And of course, we have the neighbours’ Bramley which crops heavily on our side of the back fence.

So, our mini orchard is taking shape. Pears next, and an apricot for the south facing fence behind the cold frames. I fear this could become an addiction.


*Surely this should apply equally to cherries, plums and gages, but while I love them, I don’t seem to have the same emotional connection to stone fruits as I do to pome fruits. It’s a personal thing.

Grow Your Own

I’m not a particular fan of the phrase ‘Grow Your Own’. Partly because it sounds like an instruction rather than an invitation (‘Have a Nice Day’ is similarly annoying), and partly because it sounds like something a particularly mean-spirited neighbour might bark at you across the garden fence after being asked if he could spare the odd brussel sprout from his massive glut of home grown produce, quite possibly preceded by an equally unfriendly invitation to ‘naff off’. But however I might feel about the term there’s no gainsaying a phenomenon which has seen an unprecedented increase in the demand for allotment space whilst providing a significant revenue stream for the publishing, horticultural and home improvement industries for the past few years. I do wonder, though, is it all marketing flim flam, tapping into our desire to escape from the rat race to live the good life but never really getting any further than Tom and Barbara, or is there really something of enduring substance behind the hype?


To begin to answer that question I think we have to consider the reasons why growing your own food has become such an appealing idea. Because it wasn’t; not for several decades. Since the end of the wartime Dig for Victory campaign and the rise of the supermarkets with their cheap, clean, readily available year-round fresh produce, the idea of getting your hands dirty and having to wrest your food from the ground was anathema, and allotments became a retreat for a certain type of man who wished to escape his family and spend as much of his spare time as possible in the cultivation of prize winning parsnips of uncommon size. As long ago as 1962 Rachel Carsson shone a light on the widespread use of pesticides in Silent Spring, but convenience and affordability seemed to be the overriding imperatives for the shopper until the concerns of the organic movement began to gain traction in the nineties. Coupled with a wider awareness of environmental issues, embracing food miles and ethical trading policies, a new eco-savvy consumer began to exert influence on the supermarket food buyers prompting an increase in fair trade and organic food lines, albeit priced at a premium.

With worries over the pesticide content of the food on our plates, its provenance and, especially in times of recession, cost, it’s not hard to see why the notion of growing your own food should once again gain popularity. Particularly so when you consider that food we grow for ourselves need pass none of the tests imposed by the supermarkets in respect of shelf life, suitability for transport, and uniformity of visual appearance. Consequently, the varieties we choose to grow can be selected by more satisfying criteria: I choose to grow this potato because I prefer its taste to that one, or this squash because, well frankly, it looks funny and makes me smile. And I think this is getting to the heart of the matter.

While it’s interesting to consider the background behind the Grow Your Own movement, all we can really be sure of is what motivates us personally. I think choice has a lot to do with it, at least for myself. Whatever you want to grow — which, most sensibly, should be closely related to whatever you want to cook and to eat — there is such a diversity of choice that the process of engagement with the food on your plate begins even before the seeds have arrived. Maybe it’s a wholeness thing, a holistic approach which fulfills something that we’ve lost in our market-driven economy, and restores a lost connection between our land, our stomachs, and our souls. Maybe it’s a chance to cock a snook at the supermarkets. Or maybe it’s just the satisfaction of realising that with minimal resources, good honest toil and a few handfuls of earth we’re able to provide, at least to some small extent, for ourselves and our families.

Whatever the explanation for the current popularity of Grow Your Own, whether passing fad or perennially popular activity, I’m in for the long haul.

Final appearance

This weekend I finally got into my own garden to remove last year’s spent flowering stems, left standing over winter to provide some vertical interest and catch a dusting of frost when it visits. Sunflowers, rudbeckia and honesty, golden rod, echinacea, and straps of crocosmia leaves with jewel-like red seed bursting their pods. Recently, with bright green spring bursting out all around, their dun informality has seemed out of place. But a wheelbarrow full of them still makes for a pleasing show as they put in their final appearance, en route to the bonfire heap.

Dry spring

Fresh green buds breaking on the red stems of the dogwood Cornus alba 'Sibirica'

Mid March, unusually mild, and the sap is not so much rising as erupting, surging upwards through stem and branch and twig and rousing every bud it passes from its winter lethargy. With the exception of two days at the beginning of the month we’ve been spared the usual bitter winds, but we’ve also had yet another dry winter, with precious little rain forecast for the rest of the month.

But it shouldn’t be all doom and gloom for those who love their gardens.
Yes, we are staring down the wrong end of a potential hosepipe ban, but a warm, dry start to spring, following a mainly mild and dry winter does have its pleasant side — it’s dry underfoot now. Usually at this time of year I sink into the lawn as I walk across it which, dear reader, has nothing to do with being unusually fat. As winter recedes we want to be outside soaking up as much of the lengthening daylight as possible, and this is made much easier in the absence of buffeting winds and torrential rain.

Of course, we’ll need to think of ways to conserve water this year, and now’s a good time to check that we have water butts positioned to harvest as much of the rain as possible when it does fall. Doubtless later in the year we’ll cast longing glances at the hose coiled up against the wall as we make yet another trip along the veg patch with the watering can, but we’ve all survived past hosepipe bans and this time round we have the affordable electronic water butt pumpto make the task of garden irrigation less onerous. Perhaps the coming drought will encourage us to be more aware of our water use and spur us into thinking about ways in which we can use grey water on the garden, mulching our borders and beds to minimise the moisture lost from the soil. We’ll need to be clever about how and when we water our gardens, and maybe explore alternative approaches, like Hugelkultur, which I’m in the process of discovering and am very excited about (I hope to write more on the subject later in the year). But for now, we should just enjoy the spring.

This weekend, I predict the air will be thick with the sound of lawnmowers.

Digory receives a sign

It’s high time I introduced a key member of the grow team. This is Digory, our twenty year old Land Rover, named rather appropriately by Emma after a character in The Magician’s Nephew who plants an apple and grows a magical tree. After many months of searching we discovered him on new years day last year, which we took as a very good omen for the business that was to launch a few months later.

Undoubtedly possessing the perfect combination of practicality and country charm to represent us on the roads, he was until last week a little anonymous and, well...naked. And so with the help of talented friend Charlotte who created our wonderful logo and looks after all of our branding, we decided it was time to have Digory signwritten.

Throughout the process, I managed to be somehow simultaneously incredibly thankful for Charlotte’s previous experience applying vinyl graphics to Formula 1 cars, and also rather worried about the dubious skills of her assistant. Thankfully, in the end  the results are even better than we had imagined!

Look out for us on the roads around Sevenoaks and Hildenborough, and give us a wave!

The moment of truth – the first sign to go on!

The dubious assistant tries his hand. Best leave it to the expert, beardy!

Charlotte puts the finishing touches to the side panel