Interesting but unlovely

Right around the end of April, when streaks of cobalt blue begin to intrude on the peripheral vision of any creature moving through the countryside, signifying the arrival of the bluebell season – as if the gangs of burly Spanish interlopers in our gardens hadn’t already alerted anyone with even half the usual complement of occular equipment in their head to this event in the calendar – right around the time, in fact, that most of us with a mind to are celebrating the appearance of a jewel bright, elegantly arching, exquisite flower, which has the power to be captivating as a solitary specimen, and breathtaking in number – something rather less gorgeous pushes its way up through the leaf litter.

This is toothwort, Lathraea squamaria, a parasitic plant that lives on the roots of hazel, alder, and beech. I’ve written before about this area being renowned for cobnut production; between that and the amount of hazel in the understory of our local mixed woodland, it’s not too hard to find an example of this unloveliest of plants, nestling at the base of a tree trunk.

Now, I’m a lover of weeds, and of nutrient cycles and food webs, fungi and detritivores – I’ve even got a soft spot for wasps, and consider them greatly beneficial to the gardener, at least until they get a bit lairy in late summer –  but I have to confess that I’ve yet to work out quite how parasites fit in to things, unless it’s as a control mechanism to control populations of  a particular organism in order to preserve the balance of an ecosystem. Perhaps it’s that. Do they always have to be quite so revolting? I am not including mistletoe in this group – apart from the fact that it’s a hemiparasite, gaining some of its nutrients from the host plant but also possessing green leaves and therefore the ability to photosynthesis some sugars of its own accord, it’s nice for us human types to look at (or stand below), and the berries provide food for birds, such as thrushes and blackcaps. But I’m afraid to say, the poor toothwort prompts an almost visceral reaction within me.

There’s something rather unwholesome about its appearance. Its leaves remain obdurately subterranean and lacking in chlorophyll (why would they need any when they can pilfer all the nutrients they need from their host?), so the only part readily visible is the short flowers stem. The common name reflects a supposed resemblance to a row of teeth – ghoulish enough, perhaps, but to my mind it’s suggestive of nothing so much as pile of old, partially exsanguinated meat that’s been left out in the rain for a couple of weeks. And before I’m accused of allowing my discomfiture at the concept of the parasitic to influence my opinion of the plant (it does), I was somewhat wary on my first encounter with it, at which point I was entirely ignorant of its identity.

Imagine my delight on discovering it’s also known as corpse flower, reputed to grow wherever there’s a dead body. Perfect for a goth’s garden. My teenage years coming back to haunt me.

Forget me not

Regular visitors to these pages may have formed the not entirely inaccurate notion that, while I am a person who revels in the company of all manner of plants, I am not always in a position to identify the vegetables in question. In this respect I feel rather like a forgetful old gentleman, delighted to find himself surrounded by crowds of grandchildren, and without the vaguest hope of putting a name to any one of them. In fact, when it comes to plant recognition, I have prudently left myself ample room for improvement, the better to guard against the possibility of knowing too much, and thereby becoming bored with the subject.

It’s true that, in this respect, while I know more than most non-gardeners, I often feel that I know considerably less than my horticulturally-inclined peers. In an excess of public feeling I’ve even been known to flaunt my ignorance before a keen amateur gardener, allowing them to bathe in the warm glow of feeling that invariably accompanies the knowledge that you have just ‘got one over’ an individual who, by virtue of their professional occupation, really ought to know better.

All this wordy preamble is really by way of setting the scene for last week’s plant-ID hiccup, which occurred when I got myself into a right old pickle over my Boraginaceae. This is a fabulous family if you’re fond of the colour blue*, including the forget-me-not (Myosotis spp.), lungwort (Pulmonaria spp.), vipers bugloss (Echium vulgare), and Brunnera macrophylla – all of them instantly recognisable, even by me. I’m fine with comfrey too, whether the tall, gangly wild comfrey Symphytym officinale – of smelly-leaf and compost-tea fame – or the much more dwarf, cottage garden favourite, Symphytym grandiflorum, which now oddly seems quite tricky to get hold of.

Comfrey, Symphytum officininale

But when a photo was posted to Twitter depicting a handsome plant with deeply veined leaves and forget-me-not blue flowers, I managed to career about like a demented pinball, bouncing from borage itself, to anchusa – both of the hairy leaf and stem with blue flowers persuasion – before being gently guided towards green alkanet, Pentaglottis sempervirens. For this I’m grateful as always to my kindly twitter friends for taking pity on me, even if some were having trouble hiding their apparent amusement at my floundering.

I should have known really – I have it in my garden and it’s now, I think, firmly imprinted on my mind. Hairy stems, with alternate, deeply veined leaves, also bearing hairs, and rather fat clusters of flower buds with a pinkish tint. The flowers themselves have five, sky blue petals (hence the latin name of the genus), raised at the base where they meet in a central white boss.  A plant of hedgerows and woodland edges, it has a deserved reputation for getting a little unruly, being a rampant self seeder with a long tap root. However, I find it such a handsome presence in the borders that I allow it to stay, if only as a token presence.

And now the next person who asks me about it will be treated to a lengthy explanation of its features, and doubtless its uses as a source of a rich reddish dye extracted from the roots, and used in the colouring of furniture and stringed instruments, among other things.  How fascinating and informed I shall feel, for at least two minutes, until they stump me by pointing at some other specimen and demanding the name, which will, of course, have totally eluded me at that point. At which juncture I shall skillfully change the subject, and distract them with tea and cake.

* Or pink. There's often quite a bit of variation with this gang, sometimes even on the same plant. Flower buds are often pink, even with blue flowers. And then there’s the white and the cream. But I don’t think any family beats it for startling sky blues.

The Great Comp Spring Fling, and The Lump of Green

Glorious sunshine, albeit a bit chilly with a gusty breeze, for this morning’s plant fair at Great Comp. Such a fabulous setting, particuarly in spring, when the burgeoning borders and the upper layers bright with camellias and magnolias charm you to a state where you feel able to smile with benignant forgiveness even upon the ghastliness of of the folly-like mock ruins which are a the only jarring feature of this garden. In a few weeks time, drifts of hellebores in the woodland garden will be succeeded by the epimediums and geraniums mac that are gathering strength, while in the more formal areas paeonies thrust purposefully through the soil, rich with deep red hues and the promise of things to come. It’s a great time of the year to experience a mature garden, especially one as well planted, curated and maintained as Great Comp, and the Spring Fling is certainly worth making the effort to get to if you find yourself within striking distance of North Kent toward the beginning of April.


We arrived twenty minutes after opening, to find the first two car parks full and a good crowd already picking their way around the various nurseries’ stalls, spread out on the square and lower lawns. Louise (she of Rude Border fame) met us on the steps between the two sections, clutching our goddaughter Jenny in one hand and a giant pot of alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) in the other. The plan is to get this to colonise a shady area of the garden – it looks like a beast, so I’m sure she’ll have no trouble there, although to be honest it was happily romping away down by the railway line in Rye in full sun when we were there earlier in the week.

Jenny had secured for herself a rather pretty pot of muscari, which is destined for the rockery. Another colony in the making there, for sure. This came from the well-stocked stall of Rose Cottage Plants, on which I also spied the splendidly odd Campanula 'Pink Octopus'. It was on this stand that I first encountered Persicaria 'Red Dragon', which I love, though have yet to plant.

Muscari 'Bling Bling'

Persicaria 'Red Dragon'

Campanula 'Pink Octopus'

I’m always keen to see what Madrona Nursery from Bethersden have brought with them, having still not managed to get to the actual nursery, in spite of it being only an hour or so away. They always have something which has me reaching for my wallet and, today being no exception, I found myself enamoured with a pot containing a lump of purest green. A perfect, verdant dome, I was hooked on this firm, moss-like cushion, and Scleranthus uniflorus was coming home with me. It’s an evergreen ground cover plant from New Zealand, commonly known as Knawel Cushion, and my instincts are telling me will suit a free-draining growing medium, perhaps planted together with a range of alpine plants. Which is just as well, as the next thing to catch my eye was the diminutive-leaved Roaulia australis, another mat-forming apline native to New Zealand. Two plants, then, to add to my haul from Madrona – I made my escape at this point, though not before casting a longing glance at Ranunculus ficaria 'Brazen Hussy'. Surely I’d be nuts to introduce another lesser celandine to my garden when then native variety does so well? I walked away.

Scleranthus uniflora

Raoulia australis

The sheer variety of succulets from Blueleaf Plants was staggering – aloes, haworthias, crassulae, echiveras, graptopetalums, aeoniums to name but a few. Quite rightly the stand was attracting a huge amount of interest – the interior design world seems to have gone mad for succulents, and you can’t open a magazine at the moment without finding glossy lifestyle photos of terrariums or box frames planted with them, the examples on show today being beautifully executed. It’s also interesting to note that Fiona and her team offer a green roof service from their offices in Warehome, on Romney Marsh.

At this stage I cast about with no luck for Pineview Plants, probably the closest nursery to Great Comp with the exception of Dyson’s Nursery in the grounds themselves (run by the curator of the garden, William Dyson, and specialising in salvias, alongside some rather choice hardy and half hardy perennials – worth a visit in its own right). Pineview will be at the RHS Great London Plant Fair later this week, so I imagine they’re busy getting things together for that. I’ll have to catch them later in the year.

Several times I strolled past the stand with a sign bearing the legend “Usual and Unusual Plants”. It seemed to have an inordinate variety of bronze leaved specimens of all different description among the plants on offer. This is a colour for which I have a particular weakness – ideally as a foil to green, though if I’m not careful I shall be over-run with the things. I was tempted by rather fine primula (if I’m honest, I’m a bit fuzzy as to where primula finishes and auricula begins – something I need to look into, as a matter of urgency), then a dicentra – in the end, the charms of Ligularia dentata 'Osiris Fantasie' proved too much to resist. Surely this will be just as delicious to slugs as the L. dentata 'Desdamona' I planted last year. We shall see.

Still on the subject of bronze plants, I thought I’d resisted Brazen Hussy. The crafty little celandine caught up with me while discussing a selection of alpine sedums with Philip Johnson of Johnson's Sweet Peas – we needed one more plant to reach the five-for-a-tenner mark, and the rest is history. I can’t wait to unleash it in the garden (you may remind me of that in a year or two, when it’s become a bronzed menace).

Ranunculus ficaria 'Brazen Hussy'

Sedum album 'Coral Carpet'

Sedum spathulifolium 'Purpureum'

Altogether a goodly haul...but my favourite has to be the lump of green.

Bumbles in the willows

Last year around this time I wrote a post about bumble bees swarming high up in the crown of a pussy willow (Salix caprea, aka goat willow). I knew nothing. Nothing. Since that time I have read Dave Goulson’s excellent A Sting in the Tale which, if nothing else, has served to give me some appreciation of the depths of my ignorance.

These are queen bumbles, newly waked from hibernation from which they emerge famished, having used up all their stored energy resources over winter. The female pussy willow is one of the few sources of rich nectar at this time of year, and must be a welcome sight indeed to the nearly knackered queenies. No wonder so many of them descend upon each tree, they must be gasping, the poor things. So, drink up ladies. Ovaries to swell, nesting burrows to find, and eggs to lay. Fortunately for the shagged out queens, no energy will need to be spent upon the tiresome business of mating – that was all done before the winter, the males now less than a distant memory, their sperm being stored within the body of the queen. It will be needed to fertilize eggs to produce daughters, who will become the first generation of worker bees, and later, the next generation of queens. Male bees are produced from unfertilised eggs, their only function in life being to mate. It’s not a massively interesting life – the tend to hang around in groups on the top of hills, waiting for a lady to arrive – but they have it better than the male honeybee. The last moments of a sexually successful male honeybee are somewhat dramatic, involving mid-flight sex, exploding genitals, and death. Way to go, chaps.

But all that is months away. Spring is newly arrived – perhaps a week or two late this year – and the willows are abuzz once more.

More sobering is the revelation that the government’s own research into the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees does not support the conclusions that they drew from it at the time. A recent article in The Guardian describes how Dave Goulson has taken another look at the study from 2012, finding that the evidence gathered strongly suggests a negative correlation between the presence of common neonicotinoids and the number of queen bees. You can read the full piece here; I was particularly drawn to the following quote from Professor Goulson,

“The conclusions (the government) come to seem to be completely contrary to their own results section.

“They find that 100% of the time there is a negative relationship between how much pesticides were found in the nest and how well the nest performed, and they go on to conclude that the study shows that there isn’t a significant effect of pesticides on bee colonies. It doesn’t add up.”

Even a spokesman from the Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA), who carried out the research, concurs that the wrong conclusions were drawn.

You often hear both scientists and politicians speaking of the importance of good, reasearch-based data upon which to base policy decisions. When the research is conducted by individuals and organisations manifestly less than impartial to the outcome, the studies are not exposed to the rigours of peer review and the resulting data are apparently wilfully misinterpreted, one could be forgiven for wondering how well this process is working.

The Great Dixter Spring Plant Fair

A wet and very windy weekend for the Great Dixter Spring Plant Fair. In all honesty I arrived far too late on Sunday afternoon – by the time I’d had a quick peak around the garden to see what had grown since my last visit only three weeks ago, people were starting to think about packing up. I spent all my cash on The Walled Nursery’s stall (Emma had brought scented pelargoniums, amongst other things – any attempt at resistance was clearly going to be an exercise in futility), where I had the pleasure of making the real life acquaintance of a Twitter friend, Philippa Burrough of Ulting Wick near Maldon in Essex, who had come to lend a hand for the day. Philippa and her husband, incidentally supporters of the Great Dixter Trust, open the gardens at Ulting Wick under the National Gardens Scheme several times a year (the next open day being Friday 17 April – more details on the NGS website here). Emma seemed to be doing brisk trade even as the stalls were packing up around her, which was just as well. Back at the nursery, Monty had found it necessary to close due to the high winds, which always carries with it the danger of falling glass (for the latest on the progress of the renovations to the Victorian glasshouses at The Walled Nursery, click here to visit the website).

Emma from The Walled Nursery (left) and Philippa from Ulting Wick

It was also great to catch up briefly with Jill Anderson of growingnicely.co.uk (do pop across to her blog for some cracking garden writing and for details of her book, Planting Design Essentials) – Jill, her husband and I converged upon the wonderful pot display by the porch as I arrived. There’s always such a fabulous splash of colour here, with the different forms and textures of the plants and the play of light and shadow around the various containers; never the same on any two visits, I sometimes think it would be great to have time-lapse footage of this single view of the house and garden, especially for those who aren’t so fortunate to live close enough to make the pilgrimage on a regular basis.

A brief visit then, with lots of weather, but what with meeting friends, buying plants and soaking up a fabulous garden – who could ask for more?

The structure here is always impressive, whatever the weather

The phlox here is much further on than mine – I did divide it quite late

Things to plant with Arum mac. #1 – oriental hellebores

Things to plant with Arum mac. #2 – scilla

Feathered friends

A jackdaw keeps a beady eye on what’s occurring down below

I always thought I was an autumn/winter person. Solitary by nature, it seemed appropriate that I’d gravitate toward a time of year that hardly anyone else appeared glad to see arrive – and it’s true that I feel much more at home in the cooler months. But...these last few days, it's like I've been mainlining spring; within moments of stepping outside, the heart is thumping, spine tingling, and all the while I’m breathing so deeply I wonder if I’ve grown a third lung. Must be the sap rising in me. That can happen when you hang around plants too much.

The spring equinox is now past, and although the clocks won’t change until the weekend, already the longer days make a big difference to how a gardener feels – there’s so much more time to get things done, and you can even get in a quick stint in the garden or greenhouse before work. I wonder if it might be the activity of the birds that makes the most difference in the March landscape, although perhaps this is easy to miss as we rush about our daily business. But the outside world has become a much noisier place over the past few weeks – it’s a racket, albeit an invigorating one. The garden is full of jackdaws plundering the still untidied borders for nesting material, while our resident pairs of collared doves flap about, cooing rather stupidly with a renewed sense of urgency. Sparrows commute every few moments between the pyracantha hedge in the courtyard and the gaps under the eaves, and the hedgerows are packed with blue tits, their bobbing flight keeping pace with you until they lift themselves above the top of the hedge to perch on the branch of an oak tree, a comfortable vantage from which to trill a sound scolding in your general direction.

We have wood pigeons too. Just daring us to plant brassicas

Robins have been keeping me company all through the winter, shadowing my tickling fork and gratefully extracting earthworms of unlikely length from the worked soil. But now, having kept a low profile over the winter, muttering away to themselves in a hedge, the blackbird is starting to become my regular garden companion. I have missed his song, and his bright, black, gold-ringed eye, glimpsed in the corner of my peripheral vision as I furtle about in the beds. Mrs Blackbird too, growing ever more confident until she becomes quite tame, sticking close by while the gang of much larger jackdaws have taken flight, cawing, to their perches on the chimney pots. I’ve not seen a thrush in the garden for years, though I live in hope.

Mrs Blackbird, gathering nest material

There’s a competition running at the moment to decide Britain’s national bird. You can vote at www.votenationalbird.com/ for your preferred option from the shortlist of ten – the robin (odds-on favourite) is joined by the blackbird, hen harrier, swan, barn owl, red kite, puffin, kingfisher, blue tit and wren. Some impressive contenders – I’m unlike to forget the red kite that hung in the air over above my head as I worked a few weeks ago  – but I can’t help feeling that winner should be more ubiquitous than necessarily handsome. Mercifully the feral pigeon, which would surely be returned as the result under this criteria, is not on the list. I think I’d go with the blackbird, but don’t let me sway you. I will say this, however: the puffin’s never going to get it, let’s face it. It’s a wonderful bird with a fascinating song, but who wants their country to be represented by a creature that looks like Dustin Hoffman in a dressing gown?

Sadly, the sparrow didn’t make it through to this stage. I keep hearing that the sparrow population in the UK is in terminal decline. I think they’re all in my garden.

A fluffy-looking female house sparrow – a bit too early for a fledgling

The male sparrow, having a peck at the flowers on Viburnum x bodnantense 'Dawn'

A good day at Great Dixter

If you’re a keen gardener, it’s not unreasonable for you to expect the plants in your care to flourish and thrive. After all the attention and effort you lavish upon them, it would be a bit galling if they were to turn up their toes and die. It does happen though, and even those of use who earn our living from gardening are not immune – no matter how sanguine I try to be in such situations, the walk to the bonfire with my latest vegetative cadaver is rarely undertaken with the jauntiest of steps. And so I was immensely encouraged to hear Fergus Garrett, Great Dixter’s head gardener, confess that much of his considerable wealth of knowledge regarding plant combinations has been acquired not, as you might imagine, from years of study and painstaking observation, but rather “the bitter experience of killing things”.


The context of this comforting revelation was a consideration of the thuggish nature of allium leaves, and the detrimental effect their luxuriant and haphazard canopies can have on perennials which take longer to muster their strength – specifically in this case the notoriously competition-shy phlox, but also other plants with basal leaves, such as asters and heleniums. Not all alliums are guilty – the narrow leaves of Allium sphaerocephalon, for example, are quite well mannered, but ‘Christophii’, ‘Globemaster’ and A. hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ are all guilty as charged. And it’s not just alliums we should be careful with – how many of us consider the foliage of tulips when making a selection, rather than simply the flowers and stems? Big, lax leaves are less useful in a garden situation, whereas a tulip like ‘Ballerina’ has a tidier habit, and can be planted at greater densities.

Fergus had taken an hour so out of his morning working on the Long Border to talk to a room full of garden writers and photographers, an event kindly hosted by the team at Great Dixter for the members of the Garden Media Guild. A perfect spring morning began with tea and lemon drizzle cake (two of the gardener’s basic food groups) and a chance to chat with friends in the education suite, part of the complex of farm buildings recently converted by the Great Dixter Charitable Trust in order to provide a learning environment and accommodation for students. Education lies at the heart of Dixter, and it’s no more than a couple of minutes into his talk before Fergus illustrates this.

“Teaching is what Dixter is about. With Christo, it used to take me three and half days to do the exotic garden. But teaching with students, it takes seven to eight days. Things take longer now, but they’re the future, these kids."

It’s hard to think of a better environment in which this next generation of gardener will hone not just their horticultural skills, but also their understanding of how a complex and multilayered garden works from day to day. With a small team of five full-time gardeners, plus volunteers and students, Fergus relies on a succession of complicated-looking flowcharts (he refers to these as ‘maps’), so that every member of the team knows how their current task fits within the context of the estate, which includes the borders, meadows and vegetable beds within the garden itslef, and the 52 acres of pasture and woodland beyond. Even a brief acquaintance with one of these maps serves to illustrate the intricacies involved in managing a garden on the scale of Dixter’s six acres, the sheer number and variety of the tasks seeming overwhelming at first. But one of the advantages of setting the work out in this fashion is that it allows you to see where the ‘crunch times’ will occur in the gardening year – the end of October and November being one, with another in January to March., and so Fergus is continually on the look out for any jobs which can be brought forward to relieve these busier times. (Any of those unfortunate, ill-advised folk who dare to suggest that gardeners have nothing to do over winter should be made to memorise one of these charts.) To this end, cuttings will be taken in September when light levels are high and rooting is better, and the team will start thinking about clearing and cleaning greenhouses in August in order to move in tender plants the moment the frost warnings suggest, so avoiding the chaotic bottleneck which might otherwise occur.

The wildflower meadows are now key to the look of the gardens at Great Dixter. While for the most part the public has got used to them, there are still some who complain later on in the summer months.  “Why have you left the grass like that?!” The staff seem to take this in their stride, treating this kind of encounter as another opportunity to educate the wider community about the
biodiversity work which has become an increasingly important facet of their role here. The meadows are cut when the latest flowering plant – usually the common spotted orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii – has had the opporunity to drop its ripened seed, around the last week of August. Fergus is experimenting with a mozaic system of management, which involves creating diverse areas of habitat within the meadow area, leaving some areas uncut, and allowing sheep to graze others. The hay is raked off by hand, a slow process, but one which avoids the detrimental impact on habitat management often involved with mechanised raking.

Ursula Cholmley, taking a day off from Easton Walled Gardens to make notes on the meadows at Great Dixter

Gardening at Great Dixter is clearly a cerebral activity, and the gardeners are encouraged to adopt a mindset of continually analysing successes and failures. Having in the past had indifferent success in getting the seeds of Tetranapax papyrifer to germinate, 15 pots were sown, each placed in a different location. The one which was treated to a combination of both misting and bottom heat was the only one to show signs of life, but when all 15 pots were placed in these conditions, germination was 100 per cent. “Don’t believe what’s on the seed packet,” Fergus tells us. “They say you should sow zinnias in March.” At Dixter, they sow the seeds in the first week of June, get germination within two days, and have plants ready to plant out by the end of the month. It’s important to know what works in your location, and this only knowledge comes through experimentation.

Evidence of this rigorous process of experimentation and review is also seen in the approach to plant combinations, which Fergus tries not to repeat, but rather to vary. We were treated to slides of different tulips through a variety of floral ‘carpets’ – aquilegias, arabis, foxgloves, anthriscus – the general idea remains consistent with each iteration, but the look differs dramatically as the principles are varied. On occasion, a combination will get an encore, due to a palpably manifest irritation that the first time round it hadn’t quite gone right. So, after an absence of several years, the pairing of Papaver commutatum 'Ladybird' with Orlaya grandiflora with receive an encore, with the relative ratio of one plant to another adjusted to achieve a more balanced effect. There’s no point in making rules if you can’t break them now and again.

Orlaya grandiflora with Ladybird poppies (detail from Cleve West’s Brewin Dolphin garden at Chelsea, 2012)

Later in the afternoon we were treated to a tour of the gardens by Rachael Dodd, one of the full time staff, a likeable and ebullient guide whose horticultural knowledge is evidently equalled by an enthusiasm for communicating her passion for the plants and for Dixter itself. Standing in the peacock garden, she became almost apologetic about the level of detail into which she had descended while telling us about trimming the topiary. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I was fascinated to learn that  the gardeners use lightweight, electric consumer-level hedge trimmers made by Stihl for this job, largely due to issues of balance, finding (as I often do when attempting something slightly intricate) that the heavier petrol machines are sometimes inclined to sink into the body of the piece, rather than skimming lightly over the surface. I’m not sure I could be doing with the trailing electric cables, but portability and versatility are probably of secondary consideration to the gardeners here.

Electric hedge cutters are used on the yew 'peacocks', light enough to skim across the top surface of the topiary in a smooth plane

How fascinating to learn, too, that the borders in the peaccock garden – normally chock full of plants billowing romantically between the tightly clipped yew forms – are actually the stock beds for the nursery. The plants used to be grown in rows, ostensibly for practical reasons, until Christopher Lloyd decided to lay them out with more of a concession to aesthetics, in layers, organised in sections according to season of interest. In early March, everything feels very calm and controlled, the beds marked out with long canes along the surface to indicate the various plant groupings, and short canes in the soil to flag the location of plant that has yet to emerge above ground. It’s an entirely necessary discipline with a team of gardeners working the same area, and will prove its worth over the months to come, particuarly once the plants start to bulk up.

This year, the far path is guarded by skeletal sentinals – an alarming sight, but a reminder of the resiliance of yew as a conifer that will rejuvinate from being cut back hard. These topiary pieces are old, and have reached a point where drastic measures are sometimes required. Fergus tells us that it will take a good ten years, perhaps more, for each piece to achieve its former stature, so it’s as well that they don’t all require this treatment at once.

We make our way through to the vegetable garden where, after a winter of mulching and soil amelioration, the compost heaps are still of a prodigious size. The use of this compost is restricted to certain areas, as they don’t get hot enough to kill all the weed seeds. In addition, Rachael tells us that they get through spent mushroom compost “by the truck load”; 25 tonnes of organic material is brought in each year. Fergus has phased out the use of inorganic fertilizers, relying on bonemeal and fish, blood and bone, and the nursery is now entirely peat free.

By the time we reach the end of the long border my brain has turned to jam from all the information, but it’s always a joy to walk this path, greeting like old friends the stalwart, ever-present characters – the towering golden ilex at the far end, the pinus mugo in the middle, and the pair of aucubas nearer the house – while peering with a mixture of curiosity and delight at the more ephemeral tennants of the various bedding pockets incorporated throughout for seasonal interest.

Male and female spotted laurels. Aucuba japonica 'Crontonifolia' and f. longifolia

Towards the end of the tour, by popular request we get to poke our noses into one of the cellars, where a new use for fish boxes is revealed – stuffed with dahlia tubers and cannas and stretching from the entrance through another doorway and beyond, no doubt shortly due to be potted up and making their way to the cold frames.

There was plenty more to the day. I’ve not found time to write about the tour of the house, nor the work done with by the guys in the barn using coppiced chestnut from the woodland – pieces which are used in the garden, or sold on to offset the cost of their employment. It’s all up here though *taps head*, and in here *taps notebook*, to be used at a later date, no doubt. I’m especially glad to these last two chaps, as they kindly helped to get me back on the road after I'd stupidly left my car headlights on and drained the battery flat. But that’s another story.

With especial thanks to the Garden Media Guild and the team at Great Dixter for a thoroughly interesting day.

Tight clipped

‘Various things poking up through the peacocks’ Rachael

Fluffy pruning

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The Great Dixter Spring Plant Fair marks the opening of the gardens, on Saturday 28th & Sunday 29th March 2015. Admission £8.00 including entry to the gardens.
www.greatdixter.co.uk

The Ledge of Reason

I have Window Ledge Envy. Self diagnosed, I admit – I’m not even sure if the condition I’ve identified has a name, or even whether it might be recognised by the medical profession, but I appear to have been suffering from a chronic form of it for some time. I find myself in the houses of friends, gazing over their shoulders as they offer me a cup of tea, a veritable green-eyed monster in the face of the wealth of anterior casement shelvage that they appear to take for granted; that any normal person living in a house would take for granted; that anyone but the perverse creatures who built our house should expect to find on the roomward side of a window. It’s not that the builders of our modest Edwardian semi didn’t believe in window sills – every box sash has a reasonably generous one; on the outside. Which is great for window boxes, but hopeless for houseplants, overwintering tender things or seeds we want to get going in February and March, but fear to abandon to the capricious atmosphere of the unheated greenhouse.

Internal window sills are utterly wasted on the person who has yet to discover the joys of gardening. What do they use them for? Chintzy ornaments, doylies, a portable radio, cups of tea? The absolute travesty would be a window sill kept clear of anything at all – sacrilege! Think of all the planty splendidness that would make a home of such a spot, warmed by the sun, baked by the central heating, laughing through the glass at the worst of the winter weather. Admitedly care must be taken of more delicate specimens in what can become quite arid conditions, although certain plants might take to such an environment as a home from home – a hardy succulent, perhaps? Even I have trouble killing Crassula ovata, for example, and I’m a notorious houseplant assassin.

While I’m no student of architecture, it does seem to me that at some point in the early twentieth century, some influential builder must have said something along the lines of, “Hang on a minute lads, I think we’ve been fitting these windows back-to-front all these years”. As supporting evidence for this thesis, I cite the fact that on the average house built after the late 1920s, the windows start to become flush with the outer wall of the house, leaving a handy sill, of a depth equal to at least two courses of bricks, on the inside. Perfect for houseplants, overwintering tender things or seeds you might want to get going in early spring. Admittedly, less good for window boxes, but I can conceive of several solutions to that problem, all of them more elegant than anything I’ve been able to come up with to overcome my lack of a ledge on the inside of the window.

Regular readers of this blog may by now have formed the accurate impression that we enjoy in winter a winning combination of cold greenhouse and freezing home – rather limiting when it comes to germinating seeds at this end of the year. My hankering to provide a bit of bottom heat recently got the better of me, and I rashly ordered a very simple heated propagator for the one window in our house which has anything approaching a ledge on the inside. This happens to be in the kitchen where, for some reason, the original windows have been removed and replaced with a long, metal-framed Crittall unit, flush with the outer wall. It’s still a narrow ledge – several centimetres short of the depth of the propagator, which was the narrowest I could find – but, sod it, I thought. I’ll construct some Heath Robinson contraption to prevent the base from toppling off onto the work surface below. And so, having arrived in a box large enough to have contained a coffin, you can imagine my joy when the thing turned out to fit the shelf almost perfectly, mercifully requiring no elaborate (and probably ultimately doomed) cantilevered constructions to support the leading edge.

Plugged in, and off we go – not the most sophisticated of devices (there’s no thermostat, for example, only the vents in the covers for the individual trays to regulate the humidity within), but germination seems to be pretty speedy, which is no small thing in this draughty old place. I still have nowhere for houseplants and overwintering tender things, so for now, I’ll just have to go on killing those.

February catkins

There’s a lot of hazel around here. That’s Kent for you. If it’s not apples, it’s cobnuts, or at least it used to be. Food fashion and falling prices have taken their toll, and you can’t help but worry that these crops will go the same way as the hops that used to cover the county. It’s not uncommon to see fields full of grubbed out trees, lying forlornly on their sides with their roots in the air. It’s a heart-rending sight, a shocking and violent end for orchard or platt, home to bats and badgers, owls and woodpeckers. The hope is that farmers markets and a growing consumer preference for locally grown food will save the day, and certainly as far as cobnuts are concerned, there seems to be a mood of cautious optimism, no doubt encouraged by the increased revenue from the bumper crops over the past two or three years.

Grubbed out orchard in a nearby field, earlier today

Several of the gardens I have worked in recently have been on the site of cobnut platts, a few of the characteristically nobbly trees remaining, pruned into the traditional open goblet shape. But, even in areas without this agricultural heritage, you don’t have to look far before you spy a hazel tree or two, on the margins, the understory of a woodland garden, or within a hedgerow. Both the wild hazel and the cultivated cobnut tree are dripping with catkins at this time of year, the conspicuous male flowers an inch or two long, apparently out of all proportion with the tiny female flowers, red styles just about visible if you look closely (close enough to poke your eye with a twig, so care is advised). The discrepancy in size is perhaps explained by the fact that the hazel relies on the wind for pollination, a far less efficient method than those more sensible plants who co-opt insects or even birds to undertake the task, and one which requires great clouds of pollen to be released to the air in the hope that at least some fraction of it will waft across to the female flowers of the next tree. As a method of procreation it’s a particularly messy business, and surely explains why the hazel chooses to go about the task unencumbered by clothing, which would only get in the way; all this happens weeks before the trees have even given thought to putting on leaves.

Wanding a cobnut platt

My own great fondness for the hazel (Corylus avellana) is less to do with the nuts than the wood. I love the long lenticels, and the metallic sheen of the young bark, so characteristic of walking sticks made from this tree.This is a tremendously versatile plant for the gardener to have access to – the traditional practice of coppicing hazel in the woodland understory provided long, straight poles for construction of light structures, barriers and for plashing hedges, tripods and bean frames in the garden and on the allotment, while the younger wands – fabulously pliable when green, are used for pea sticks and plant supports. Wanding tends to be done when the leaves are off in winter – it’s a much simpler task to accomplish when the leaves have fallen. Of course, pruning at this time of year encourages exactly this kind of long, straight growth, but as there’s always a use for the cut wands in the garden, that’s exactly what we want. Left unpruned a hazel tree will grow to a height of 12 metres given sufficient light, reaching average age of 80 years, although coppicing greatly increases life expectancy, with some hazel stools remaining productive for several hundreds of years. It both astonishes and saddens me to think that, except in a very few cases, we have ceased to manage the woodland we have left in the UK – a source of the most fantastic, renewable material for building and for fuel – instead choosing to import from overseas products such as bamboo canes for the garden and charcoal for the barbeque, while our coppices are grubbed out and built over or abandoned to become neglected and overstood. Bonkers.

All this being said, you’d think I’d have more hazel growing in my own garden, but we weren’t fortunate enough to inherit any with the garden, and have only very young plants in the hedge we planted when we moved in. Instead, I tend to filch my hazel poles, pea sticks and cobnuts from friends and clients. After all, living in Kent, I’d be crazy to pay for these things, wouldn’t I? People do, though.

Tiny female flowers (top centre), with the long, dangling male catkins

Further information
The Kentish Cobnut Association www.kentishcobnutsassociation.org.uk

A quiet tickling

Tickled soil, tickler, and wood sorrel

A dry, still day. Not quite mild, but the lack of the usual bitingly chill gusts up here on the roughway makes a welcome change. Nothing to hear but the sound of birdsong, the occasional putter a light aircraft overhead and, every now and again, the hammering of a woodpecker from higher up in the woods. The wind is such a feature of this site that its absence is almost unsettling.

The mulching and the heavy pruning done, the garden is at a stage where I can spend this time tweaking things, doing a passable impression of someone to whom a ruthless sense of tidiness is entirely natural. And so I patrol the borders and the lawn, tutting over twigs of birch and eucalyptus and every last fallen leaf that has yet to make it to the composting area, fingertip weeding between the lavenders and even indulging in a spot of soil tickling. As to the last of these, I know I shouldn’t, but old habits die hard, the clients like the look of it, the weeds love it, and my companiable robin friend is in seventh heaven and getting rather fat on it. Everyone’s happy, and no-one has yet berated me for unnecessarily releasing a pathetic amount of additional carbon to the atmosphere – I have a border fork in my hand to deal with such ridiculousness should they try. In all seriousness, it does actually help to control the colony of creeping wood sorrel (Sleeping Beauty or Oxalis corniculata var. atropurpurea) that would otherwise run riot through this bed. Often thought of as an annual, it’s clearly not a problem in February, but as roots and straggly stems do persist throughout the winter I tend to think of it as perennial. Rather a pretty plant, with its deep bronzed leaves and yellow flowers, but something of a tiny thug nonetheless, requiring a firm hand.

I’m not blind to the fact that there’s an element of procrastination in all this micro-faffing and beautification. There are other, less immediately obvious tasks which need seeing to – for example, the huge amount of woodchip churned in with soil that the tree surgeons have left me, all of which needs barrowing away from an area we want to replant (there’s enough honey fungus in this garden without us making a giant crater-shaped buffet for it). But you have to make the most of the stillness at this time of year. Not just the stillness of the weather (naturally, you always have to make the most of a good gardening weather in winter), but this apparent pause in activity that occurs, maybe lasting no longer than a few days, as winter transitions into spring. The mornings are getting lighter, and in a matter of weeks it will kick off and every gardener will be dashing about like a whirlwind blur with a barrow on the front. Perhaps you’ll pardon me if I take full advantage of the lull, and enjoy a quiet tickling while I may.

The Walled Nursery

I’m a sucker for a walled garden, and so every opportunity to visit one is met with eager anticipation. Even so, it’s been too long since I’ve visited The Walled Nursery in Hawkhurst, and so an open invitation for a guided tour, and perhaps even a cup of tea, awaited merely a suitable space in the diary. Such a space appeared invitingly upon the page for this morning, and so off I went.

Deep in the heart of the Wealden landscape, a mere stone’s throw from Hawkhurst’s improbably pretty high street, lies this local treasure – a testament to the combined vision and horticultural experience of its owners, Monty and Emma Davies, and proof of what can be achieved with determination in the face of apparently insurmountable odds. You can forget the soulless big-name garden centres, now all too often little more than amusement park cum retail “experience”, where plants are clearly little more than an afterthought. Here, everything from the handwritten chalk boards to the room dedicated to vintage gardenalia bespeaks a passion not only for plants but also the process of looking after them. To resist the charm of this place would be a challenge for anyone in possession of even a passing interest in gardening – soul is something it has in spades.

You could be forgiven for attributing this to the setting. February is not the most inspirational time in the garden – snowdrops, hellebores and winter-scented shrubs aside – but in spite of the dismal grey skies and the fact that the nursery won't be open for another week, there is distinct atmosphere within these walls. Thirteen Victorian glasshouses within a bounded two-acre space will tend to have such an effect – so much wood, glass and cast iron, not to mention red brick. Though now sympathetically commandeered for the purposes of the nursery, I can’t shake the feeling that at any moment I might bump into one of the nine-strong workforce of who once tended Tongswood Gardens, as it was known at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But the magic of the nursery can’t be accounted for merely as a product of its history and architecture. Even with the shelves and benches half empty, the spaces between them seem filled with a kind of latent, fizzing energy. Perhaps it’s that thing that only gardeners feel at this time of year; that faint but ever-present background hum as an entire landscape full of plants muster their strength for the long-awaited jubilant push in spring, bursting up from soil and out from bud with an explosive release of potential force. Plants in pots and liners obey the same natural laws, so there’s no reason not to feel the vibrations on the nursery. But I’ve a feeling that the dynamism and purpose isn’t limited to one particular season here. Rather, it’s something that proceeds from the relationship between these unique buildings and the family in whose care they now find themselves. It’s hard to pin down, but evident in the numerous signs of Monty’s ongoing programme of glasshouse maintenance, in Emma’s informative and carefully handwritten plant labels, and even in the matchbox car left by one of the boys on the ridge of the coldframes – a reminder that this is a home, as well as a business.

All the magic in the world would be of little practical use without in-depth knowledge of the plants being raised for sale, and there’s no arguing with the horticultural pedigree of the team. Monty and Emma’s training in landscape management and commercial horticulture respectively, coupled with his experience as a self employed gardener and hers working in three of the county’s most significant gardens (volunteering at Dixter and on the staff at Pashley Manor and Sissinghurst) should leave no doubt that these folks know their alliums. And, having taken early retirement as chief propagator at Sissinghurst after 22 years, the arrival of Jaqui Ruthven at the nursery two years ago was something of a major coup.

“Jacqui’s like a propagating machine,” says Emma. “She’s only got to look at a plant and it multiplies, I’ve never seen anyone like her!”

Pellies and cast iron

The evidence is there to be seen when I pop my head into yet another glasshouse to say hello, finding Jacqui busily at work surrounded by benches stuffed with pelargoniums – I spy many scented-leaved varieties, regals and some species too – and through an opening into the rear section all manner of succulents jostle with the flamboyant hues of Tradescantia pallida ‘Purpurea’.

The benefits of this in-house expertise are several; customers can be happy in the knowledge that they are supporting a local business by buying homegrown plants, while the nursery maintains tight control on the stock’s provenance, and importantly avoids seeing precious margin trickling away down a long supply chain.

It’s as well the staff are so experienced since, in addition to the usual business of running a nursery, the unique nature of the site also provides its biggest challenge.

“Most of the material used in construction is what they call redwood timber – Scots pine” Monty tells me. It’s not the cheapest softwood, but it requires constant maintenance to protect it from the effects of the weather, “and, as you can see” – here he uses his finger to dig out a worryingly large chunk of rotten wood from a rail of the Carnation House – “sadly, that hasn’t always been the case.”

There’s also the issue of the glass itself. The nursery takes a battering from the winter weather, in a single two month period last year losing over 300 panes of glass. Clearly the maintenance – in reality, the renovation – of these historic buildings is a challenge, and I wonder how the couple are intending to meet this additional pressure.

“In addition to grants and sponsorship, we have to diversify” Emma explains, “and this year we plan to open a restaurant. Our customers often ask us to recommend somewhere to eat, and we have to send them away. Why not cater for them here, ideally showcasing food we’ve grown ourselves?”

Why not indeed? There’s certainly the space, while leaving plenty of room for other ventures – there are plans to build upon last year’s successful forays into weddings and outdoor theatre. But how, I wonder out loud, do you avoid losing that emphasis on plants that brought you here in the first place? “We have to wear a lot of different hats” says Emma. “One each for horticulture, sales, book-keeping, marketing, events – and mum! But we’re plant people, that’s what makes us tick”.

I do love a handwritten label

We’re drinking tea at the big kitchen table in the old gardeners’ bothy – now home to Monty, Emma and their two boys – when Emma proudly produces a notebook stuffed with various lists of plants and seeds which she wants to grow on the nursery. “I love reading about new plants, or finding them at plant fairs, or tracking them down on the internet. I scour the country for stock plants, give them to Jacqui, and then – she’s off! That’s why – in spite of having to diversify to keep the place running – we won’t lose our focus. We want to be a horticultural hub for the area.”

It’s hard not to get caught up in their enthusiasm, or to resist being impressed by the dogged way in which the nursery’s current owners have bounced back from each weather-related setback. Making my way back to the car park via the shop, I find Monty unpacking a huge order of vegetable seeds, muffled up to the eyeballs with barely an inch of skin visible. It’s pretty fresh in here. “This used to be the potting shed,” he tells me. “You can just picture the poor gardeners in here, no heating, trying to coax some feeling into their fingers.” That’s a feeling I know all too well from gardening over the winter months. I bid my reluctant farewells, comforted by the knowledge that the horticultural future of this nursery is in safe hands.

The Walled Nursery
Water Lane
Hawkhurst
Kent TN18 5DH
Closed Mondays
www.thewallednursery.com

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The English Garden Future Fund
The Walled Nursery has been shortlisted to receive a grant of £5,000 towards the much-needed renovation of the Carnation House. Please support their application by going to the website of The English Garden magazine and voting for them. Voting closes 28 February 2015
Click here to vote for The Walled Nursery.

Potentially Poisonous Pernettya

The sight of a bush full of fat, colourful berries on a blisteringly cold winter’s day causes sentiments of comfort and wellbeing to abound in the bosom of the beholder. I rather suspect that something in our evolutionary history has predisposed us to feelings of warm fuzziness upon identifying a potentially rich source of nutrition within a harsh and inhospitable landscape, but this suspicion does nothing to lessen the pleasure I get from gazing upon this particular shrub, especially this morning, when the overnight frost has generously dusted the plump berries, the red stems and the diminutive, deep green leaves with countless tiny crystals.

All the same, one can’t help but wonder how many of our prehistoric forbears had to drop dead before the rest of their relatives knew which berries to eat, and which to avoid. They heaven for them that they’d had have to wait several millenia for writing to be invented, because what’s written about the toxicity of Pernettya mucronta (syn. Gaultheria mucronta) is decidedly inconclusive. The taste of the berries is described most often as being sweet, but a bit, well...meh – but the very fact that the taste is often described should offer some encouragement, suggesting as it does the likelihodd of surviving at least for the few moments required to make such a description before – who knows? – either carking it on the spot, or going on to make old bones and bounce the great grandchildren upon the knee. One or the other. I do love the internet*.

I regret to admit that I’m unable to offer my personal testimony on the matter, not because in this case I’m too nervous to try, but because, until writing this, I’ve never thought to. Perhaps this is attributable to a decidedly unadventurous disposition; it never occurs to me to pop a strange object in my mouth – particularly brightly coloured, fleshy ones hanging off bushes, which tend to make me think “Ooh, poisonous”, rather than, “Yum, dinner.” Maybe I’m missing out on a whole new way to experience the garden. Well that’s a chance I’ll just have to take.

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Pernettya mucronta, as you’ll usually find these plants labelled in the nursery or garden centre, is now classified in the genus Gaultheria, of which the most well-recongnised is Gaultheria procumbens, or wintergreen (the berries of which are edible and, according to James Wong’s Homegrown Revolution, rather tastier). The various cultivars of P. (or G.) macronta have either only male or only female flowers on them (known as dioecious), and so you will need one of each to ensure a decent crop of berries. There are some hermaphrodite varieties, so it pays to check the label carefully. Whatever their sexual proclivities, they’re of the ericacious family, eschewing alkaline or chalky soils and being most at home in acidic conditions. A periodic top dressing with ericaceous compost, needles from the Christmas tree, or dousing from a watering containing a sachet of sequestered iron would keep them in fine fettle. Shade is not a problem for this shrub, although you’ll notice they flower best (and consequently develop the most berries) on the parts exposed to the sun.

*Further discussion on the toxicity or otherwise of this plant can be found here, at the website written from the garden of splendigly named Paghat the Rat Girl. It’s just as inconclusive as this post, but better referenced.

Spurge laurel

Peering out of the shadows in a dry, seemingly uninviting spot, you might find this rather handsome plant. In fact, the odds are stacked pretty heavily in favour of your coming across it – I don’t think there’s a garden I’ve worked in where I’ve failed to spy it lurking about furtively, though nobody ever remembers planting it (and, before you ask, no, I’m not responsible for spreading it about, like some latter-day Miss Willmott*). Ah – spurge! – you might think to yourself, and you could be forgiven for doing so. There’s something rather euphorbia like about its mounding habit, its serpentine, grey-brown stems topped by whorls of spatulate leaves. As with the spurge family, the sap is a skin irritant, but for all this, and despite its common name, it’s not kin to the euphorbiacae. Neither is it a laurel – to be honest, no one in their right mind would think it was, in spite of the dark, glossy evergreen leaves.

In late winter, the appearance of clusters of small, scented, lime green flowers nestled below the leaves give the final clue to the true identity. This is Daphne laureola, one of our two native daphnes, the other being the deciduous Daphne mezeureum, on whose bare stems fragrant pink blooms appear before the leaves in February.

Unsurprisingly, removed from its natural habitat Daphne laureola can become an invasive weed, and in Canada and the United States it romps through woodland, smothering native flora in much the same way as Rhododendron ponticum does in these islands, albeit with a less imposing presence – the daphne rarely gets much taller than 1 metre.

To keep it or dig it out? That rather depends on how much you like it. Given its ubiquity, I don’t think I’d paticularly seek it out in a nursery, although a slightly posher cultivar with frilly flowers, Daphne laureola subsp. philippi, offers a little more to the inveterate collector. If you find yourself in possession of a specimen, you can be reasonably assured that it won’t go crazy in a UK garden – although it can run from the roots, it’s unlikely to do so with alarming vigour, spread as it is primarily by birds who find its black berries (poisonous to humans) a choice treat in spring. Thought it might be considered a weed, it can form a rather attractive shrub, one which thrives in the kind of dry shade conditions that has other plants turning up their roots. If yours has obligingly plonked itself in a convenient position, I’d be tempted to leave it be, admiring its deep, glossy green foliage and revelling in the harmony between the dark leaves and the citrus green flowers in winter. More often than not, though, it’ll will have decided to grow in a particuarly inconvenient spot, getting up close and personal with your mexican orange blossom, in which case I’d hoik it out. Being rather deep rooted, a feature it shares with other daphnes, I’d also save myself the anguish of trying to nurse it through transplant shock, and wait for an obliging feathery friend to sow one in the right place.

Daphne laureola, bottom centre, trying hard to look like Choysia ternata

*Miss Ellen Willmott, 1858-1934, gun-toting plantswoman, gardener, influential member of the Royal Horticultural Society, and British eccentric. So enamoured was she of Eryngium giganteum, she was reputed to scatter its seeds in every garden she visited – the plant would mysteriously spring up several months later, earning it the soubriquet “Miss Willmott’s ghost”.

Trigger’s broom

“This old broom,” says Trigger, “has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles”. To the mind of the nation’s favourite road sweeper from Only Fools and Horses, nothing about this statement sits uneasily with the fact that he’s just won an award for being in possession of the same broom for 20 years. We all laugh knowingly at the character’s naïveté, but the paradox of whether an object is essentially the same when its constituent parts have been replaced has appeared in the musings of philosophers through the ages, from Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus to Hobbe’s favourite sock*.

I’m always reminded of this when the time comes to replace one part or another of my secateurs. I’ve had this pair for over ten years and, while the handles remain the same – albeit now featuring rather tatty red cushioning on the grips – several of the other parts are of a less impressive vintage. In addition to regular, often daily maintenance – cleaning, sharpening, lubricating – each winter they get completely stripped down, every part being treated to a program of rejuvinaion. A hibernal tool spa – beginning with a gentle, abrading exfoliation with wire wool, a deep cleansing with Muc-Off, and a luxuriant drenching in WD40 to replace the oils lost during the cleaning process. With the abuse they get throughout the rest of the year, I figure it’s the least I can do.

I once got into one of those daft twitter conversations – you know the ones, where one moment you’re having a nice, jolly chat, and the next, some rabid individual you’ve never before encountered is foaming at the mouth for a reason as unaccountable as it can be important. In this particular instance I had happened to mention that not only was I deeply fond of the brand and model of secateurs I use (Felco number two, if you’re interested), but that I’d also had cause to replace the odd bit over the years. Enter rabid, tweeting Herbert, with an almost audible virtual “a-HA!”, roundly berating me with the essence of the above-mentioned paradox, in the manner of one who had just had the most strikingly original and incisive thought, before advising me that any gardener worth their salt should of course be using those fancy-pants Japanese pruners (they do look rather nice, but I’ve no reason to change – perhaps a birthday/Christmas present? Hint?). Naturally, I extracted myself elegantly from the conversation and went about my business – I’m known for my tact and finesse, on Twitter, as in all other spheres.

Today a new spring is called for. The old one was more or less holding its own, working admirably on even quite thick dry, dead stems, but fill the mouth of the pruners with a handful of thinner material and the jaws would stick together. With the old part next to its replacement, it’s not hard to see why – the spring is noticeably compressed – small wonder it lacks the energy under load to push the handles apart. A couple of seconds to remove the worn piece and substitute the shiny new one, et voilà! As good as new.

I have a natural tendency toward the personification of natural phenomena and inanimate objects, and so, I worry. Has this action somehow damaged my secateurs’ own sense of self? I hope not. Does this programme of incremental renewal to which I subject them make them fundamentally different than they were before? I don’t believe so. To my mind and, more to the point, in my hand, I can’t honestly say that they feel any less like my own, trusted pair. I’m with Trigger.


*More recently, during the noughties many of us had cause to wonder whether the Sugababes really were the Sugababes when none of the original members were left in the band.

Can’t Buy Me Gloves

Gardens provide a wealth of stimulation for each one of our five senses – so much so that it often strikes me as redundant to use the term “sensory” when referring to a particular style of garden (you know the kind of thing – the ones with the florally flowers and the features full of wet water). But the sense that’s been concerning me these last few weeks is that of touch; particularly with reference to those parts of my body that come into physical contact with the garden in all its wintery glory; cold, wet, and muddy.

My feet are generally kept in a state approaching comfort by means of a pair of thick socks and a well-placed PostIt note reminding me not to leave my boots in the land rover or porch over night (safety toe-caps seem to retain the cold for an unfeasibly long time given half the chance – they must contain the same stuff that you find in ice packs). I confess I’m still wearing shorts, partly due to the odd bout of housemaid’s knee, but mostly because I just find them easier to move about in. Thus exposed to the elments, you’ll doubtless be delighted to hear that, nonetheless, my knees are coping admirably when called upon to interface with the frosty ground. If I find myself having to kneel for a long period of time on frosted soil, a knee pad or two can be pressed into service. But really, it’s my hands that are of most concern, or at least, finding appropriate protection for them.


I get through gardening gloves at a rate of knots, and it’s not because I’m a cheapskate. In fact, my glove of choice is the Gold Leaf ‘Dry Touch’, which aren’t inexpensive – made of reasonably tough, supple leather, with a light fleecing and moderate waterproofing, they’re the best I’ve found for general work, but I’ll still shred a pair within a fortnight, spending the next couple of weeks with the torn fingers bandaged in duck tape* before I take the plunge and invest in another pair. They’re not the warmest gloves either – you’d want the Gold Leaf ‘Winter Touch’ for that (I wrote a post on these here). These are like luxurious insulated riggers, but you can forget them if you want to do anything requiring even a moderate level of finesse. Frankly, though your hands will be nice and toasty, you might as well wear mittens unless all you intend to use them for is pruning with loppers and picking up sticks with the girth of a rolling pin.

Look nice when they’re new, don’t they?

Not so good after a couple of weeks

Even worse close up. This are beyond even duck tape.

I spend a fair amount of time over winter perched with my weight distributed over a wide board, and my fingers scrabbling about in the wet clay soil, pulling out weeds. Thick gloves don’t do well in the mud, so I resign myself to cold hands and select a much thinner glove, usually some stretchy polyester knitted thing with a rubberised coating, like the ones pictured at the top of this post. These have the benefit of giving a level of protection while also allowing freedom of movement, and you can easily rinse your hands off when the mud gets too much (oh, the joys of Kentish clay in the winter!). They also keep your hands relatively clean for the moments when, inevitably, my phone rings and has to be hauled out of a deep pocket. A downside I’ve found is that the colour invariably runs, and I return home at the end of the day with my hands a deathly shade of green, exhibiting the kind of palour you’d expect to see on a body lying in the morgue, rather than a living, breathing, albeit only slightly warmer specimen.

The corollary of all this is that at any one time I’ve got at least two, often three pairs of gloves with me. Perhaps I should toughen up and develop rhino-like, craggy skin on my hands, so thick you couldn't push a crataegus thorn into the palm if you tried. To be honest, though, my hands are already hard enough to get clean after a day’s work, and I don’t relish the thought driving, or dealing with the diary, phone and payments with muddy paws. I find it mystifying that, with all the developments in modern materials, there doesn’t seem to be a single brand of glove on the market that provides an acceptable combination of warmth, protection, waterproofing and dexterity for the gardener, even at the higher price points. Surely it must be out there somewhere? Apparently not. But I intend to keep searching, all the while wrapping metres of duck tape around my constantly-disintingrating hand attire.

These ‘Reinforced Riggers’ lasted two hours. TWO HOURS! Rubbish.

If you’ve found the perfect gardening glove, or have had similar frustrations with yours, do let me know in the comments below. Misery loves company!


*I looked it up, if you’re wondering. Apparently, both Duck Tape and Duct Tape are correct. In fact, it appears the former was used before the more specific title was applied. It said so on the interweb, so it must be true.

Fireside reading

It’s blowing a gale outside. The first week back in the new year, and there’s been a fair amount of weather to contend with. Frozen toes first thing on Wednesday, soaked through to the skin on Thursday morning, and throughly windswept by the start of the weekend. Not that I’m really complaining; while I’ll admit that I’d prefer my waterproofs to be a little more resistant to the very worst of the weather, the utter drubbing I got earlier in the week provided the perfect excuse to spend an extended lunch time reading by the fire with a hot toddy (Advocaat, two glugs; Scotch in a similar quantity; a teaspoon of honey and hot water to taste – purely medicinal, you understand, though it would be wise to avoid driving or operating heavy machinery for the rest of the day). Thank heaven for seed catalogues and the seemingly ever-increasing pile of gardening literature into which I’d intended to make larger inroads over Christmas; if the weather continues to throw the odd ghastly spell at us – and there’s no reason to except that it won’t – I’m sure this won’t be the last time I find myself in need of some wet weather reading matter.



The book I’ve just finished is Dave Goulson’s A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees. I’ve been meaning to read it in full ever since hearing extracts from it on the radio some time ago, and am delighted that I made time for it. If you’ve not read it, I would thoroughly recommend it as not only an informative and eye-opening read, but also in places a decidedly funny one, not least in the opening section where the author describes the gruesome results of his childhood experiements with taxidermy and bee husbandry – the latter well-meaning but, alas, doomed. He’s come on a bit since then – now Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Sussex, and founder of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust (BBCT), he gives a fascinating account of his work in conversation with Jim Al-Khalili on this episode of Radio 4’s The Life Scientific.

Two things strike me forcefully as a result of reading this book. Firstly, a career in biological sciences sounds rather fun – why did noone tell me this when I was at school?* And secondly, I really knew hardly anything about bumblebees, other than that they are furry, and that they’re related to wasps and ants. The list of insights into these splendid creatures that I’ve gained from this book is somewhat lengthy, but I don’t think I’ll be revealing any spoilers if I mention a few here by way of example: for instance, I had no idea that bumbles don’t die if they sting you (honeybees generally do), that tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and chillies are all pollinated by bumblebees, and that there is a huge commercial market for mass-reared bumblebees for that very purpose – an international market with little regulation, which threatens to undermine the genetic integrity of domestic bees, and has the potential to spread diseases and to adversely impact native ecosystems. I had also forgotten that dumbledore is the old country name for a bumblebee (which puts Harry Potter in a new light).

It’s a book that delights, with its detailed and affectionate descriptions of a charming and vital creature, but also delivers a sobering message... almost depressing in its depiction of yet another intricate and beautiful aspect of the natural world which the combined forces of liberal economics and globalisation are seeking to commodify, displaying scant regard to the long term impact, or even passing reference to the precautionary principle. But there is some hope too in the final chapters. These deal with the setting up of the BBCT and the project to repatriate the short-haired bumblebee to the UK (the result uncertain at the time of the book’s publication, but apparently a success according to the website of the Short-haird Bumblebee Project at www.bumblebeereintroduction.org).

One of those books that inspire you to do something. I toddled off and joined the BBCT, and am eagerly awaiting the first signs of spring when the young queens will awaken and gather in numbers high in the branches of the pussy willows, the air thrumming with the sound of excited, hungry bumbles. I could tell you about winter active bees, and how the buff-tailed bumblebee has recently started to display a reluctance to go into hibernation, particularly in the South East. I’m becoming a bumble-bore, and unapologetically so.

*I admit, I’ve had my suspicions that this might be the case for a while now, but having been brought up as a young person with an appreciation of The Arts it has come as a bit of a revelation that it’s quite possible to have both a career in this field and a sense of humour. I’m not sure who to blame for making the subject seem so dry and tedious at the time, but I’m sure it was due to the negligence of various adults into whose care my education had been entrusted, and nothing at all to do with my continual obsession with turning on the science lab gas taps and carving rude messages into the benches, when I should have been applying myself to my lessons. Prof Goulson, with his cheery manner and accounts of bee hunting expeditions on the other side of the world, leaves me in little doubt that one could do a lot worse than embark upon a career as an entomologist. Granted, funding’s an ever-present pain in the arse, but continuity and security of income is scarcely a subject limited to a scientific career. In fact, if I had my time again...

After Christmas

I love that week between Christmas and new year’s day, although I’m never quite sure what to call it. ‘Christmastide’ seems a little forced as an expression, and ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, whilst being overlong and unwieldy, also refers to a much longer period. ‘Twixmas’, a name coined by the travel industry in order to flog short breaks into a traditionally quiet time, is clearly too ghastly to be of use to anyone other than a travel agent or journalist. Whether this time has its own name or not, it certainly has a distinct feeling; with the first seconds of Boxing Day morning, something seems to pass, and a new mood descends for the next few days.


This is one of my favourite times of the year, bringing with it space for considered reflection on what’s gone before, informed planning for the year to come, moments of hibernation in front of the fire, and a sense of peace and tranquility. Even the B road through the village is silent – at four o’clock in the afternoon, that’s unheard of at any other time of the year. Quiet. Stillness. Bliss.

It’s also a great time for pottering, with a measure of rootling thrown in, and while engaged in these mutually compatible activities in a corner of the shed I unearth a stash of bulbs I bought in autumn but haven’t got round to planting yet – hyacinths and narcissus, which really should have been in the ground months ago. I’m rarely too distraught at the discovery that I’ve missed the proper time for sowing or planting something, which is just as well, as such epiphanies occur with a regularity that a more delicate soul might find discouraging. A long-term subscriber to the school of bung-it-in-and-see-if-it-works-anyway, I choose to look upon this as an opportunity, rather than another reason to berate myself, and dash off to get the metal planters I bought last week when I was supposed to buying Christmas presents for other people.

Fortunately for me, bulbs need little mollycoddling between lifting (or buying) and flowering; it’s the period between flowering and dormancy when they really benefit from a bit of TLC, as they build up their store of energy for the next year’s display. Several weeks of cold and dark in a dry corner of the shed haven’t done them any harm – spring bulbs need a period of chilling (or ‘vernalization’) in order to trigger the formation of flower buds, and also to encourage rooting. These neglected specimens all appear firm and healthy, with no sign of rot and a couple of centimetres of healthy looking leaf poking through the tops meaning, if nothing else, that even I should be able to work out which way up to plant them.

It only takes a few seconds to drill drainage holes in these metal planters

I’m using a light, soil-based compost with some added grit, as hyacinths do like good drainage. That being the case, I’ve also drilled some holes in the bottom of the metal containers. If you remember to buy specially heat-treated hyacinth bulbs in September, you can grow them indoors in containers without drainage holes, but you’d need to use a free draining bulb fibre instead of compost, and go easy on the watering. If you’re cunning about it, you can force them into flowering early – in time for Christmas – but you have to be mean and keep them in a dark, cool place for a good six weeks. That’s the kind of organised gardener I aspire to be. In reality, I’m faffing about planting my bulbs several months too late, crossing my frozen fingers and hoping that they’ll feel inclined to produce some roots, and thereafter, some flowers.

Hyacinth bulbs. I spy small rooty things growing out of the basal plate. Hurrah!!

A good horticultural education can give you a keen scientific appreciation of exactly what it is you’re doing wrong. Will that be enough to change my behaviour? Probably not in my own garden. Gardening for other people, I have to be on my toes, but here I can afford to bumble about, buy things, and then forget about them for months. After all, the rediscovery of these bulbs has given me a good hour or so of happy activity in the fresh air, although as the temperature plummets it’s time to retreat back indoors. I put the newly planted containers on the table in the courtyard, where I can look out at them while I prepare another mountain of bubble and squeak to accompany the leftover turkey.

New client

Boxing Day, barely two degrees above zero, and I’m on my hands and knees in the garden, attempting to rescue the edge of the vegetable patch from the clutches of the lawn while the cold ground freezes all sensation from my muddy knee. It’s the perfect antidote to the bustle of Christmas – the noise, the stresses, the motorway driving – it’s wonderful to catch up with the family, but it’s ever so nice to be home again. Not that it’s exactly quiet out here. Once, I had entertained romantic notions of the bleak, hushed stillness of the winter landscape, with nothing but the drip drip of melting icicles to shatter the silence until the first bird of spring. I’m not quite sure how that idea got into my head, particularly when I consider the number of our avian friends that migrate to this part of the UK from the continent in search of a relatively mild winter. Today, the starlings are deafening and, while my gardening activity is pleasingly solitary, I’m not short of company; robins, blackbirds and collared doves all drop in from time to time to check on my progress, while our resident jackdaws wheel around the rooftop and hop about between the chimney stacks, ack-acking all the while.


The other immensely satisfying aspect to this morning’s activity is that I’m gardening in my own garden. This doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should, and it shows. I’m painfully aware that over the past few years, I’ve been carefully honing a whole arsenal of useful skills in gardens belonging to other people, skills which are all too rarely unleashed upon the wilderness outside my own back door.

Well, no more. Enough is enough, a line must be drawn and all that guff. From the new year, I shall be taking on a new client;  a grumpy, capricious and exacting character, as short of temper as indeed of stature, with the mind of a butterfly, the mouth of a sailor and the feet of a hobbit. Me, in other words. I’ve come to realise that the only way I’m going to gain any traction here, in my own garden, is to put it in the diary. To hell with the expense and the inevitable impact upon the rest of the week’s work, I’m convinced it will be worth it, not only for the obvious positive benefits for the garden itself, but also to free my mind of the constant, nagging feeling that there are several (many) things which I really ought to be doing.

So this is the plan, and you, dear reader, may hold me accountable for it. In fact I ask you to do just that and if, in a few months time, the place persists in looking as though a family of hephalumps has been rolling around in it, you have my express permission to berate me strongly, and stick wads of goosegrass down the back of my jumper. After all, I’ll do the same for you.

At the Garden Media Guild Awards

Yesterday I exchanged mud-caked boots for polished brogues, grabbed my trusty umbrella with its dog-chomped handle, and boarded the train to London. At midday I was due at the Savoy Hotel, there to attend the annual Garden Media Guild Awards; I arrived early, and spent half an hour strolling around my old stomping ground of Covent Garden, where Christmas shopping was in full swing, and the gardens of the actors’ church of St Paul’s, over which my old office window offered a fine view, are in distinct need of a good tidying up.

I arrived a second or two behind Carol Klein but, both of us managing to successfully negotiate the hotel’s entrance, the amusing anecdote of how-I-got-stuck-in-the-revolving-doors-with-that-Carol-off-the-telly entirely failed to be engendered. It’s probably just as well; no-one likes a name-dropper. There ensued a time of mingling, drink in hand, at which accomplished networkers could be seen working the room; I picked up tips, and filed them away in my head for future use. It was much more fun to poke people with my umbrella, which I’d refused to surrender to the cloakroom staff.



By one o’clock we were seated in the opulent splendour of the Savoy’s banqueting suite, a room so stuffed full of garden media royalty that you couldn’t lob a bread roll without hitting at least three of them. I did not lob a bread roll, neither anything else for that matter, concerned that such behaviour from one at the awards for the first time might have been considered rude. I am never rude until at least my third visit, after which I am rarely polite. Invitations to visit for a fourth time are, unsurprisingly, somewhat rare.

Having thus adopted the manner, if not quite the appearance, of someone who has at least a vague idea of how to behave in such company, I was able to to enjoy the meal, the conversation, and even the smattering of slightly weary applause (clapping fatigue sets in with surprising speed at an award ceremony) when this blog was announced as a finalist for the Blog of the Year award. This was something about which I think I can allow myself to feel both slightly chuffed, and rather more grateful, both to the judges who deemed it worthy of shortlisting, and especially to all the blog’s readers who comment upon the posts, retweet the links and provide the general encouragement and feedback that’s so essential. And so in a rare moment of sincerity from me, thank you – your support is truly appreciated. I will, however, save my tearful acceptance speech till we’ve actually won the thing.

Whilst this was all very gratifying, of at least equal merit to me was the discovery that so many of the people who do this garden writing thing for a living – of whom I am slightly in awe (imagine my surprise on finding myself on a table with many of them) – are actually thoroughly decent and approachable human beings, who weren’t at all sniffy about having an upstart blogger with a barnet full of sparrows in their midst (I had given the sparrows a bath for the occasion).

It was a good experience; more enjoyable and less terrifying than I had feared. In truth I’m still processing many things about the day. But this morning I was happy once more to be welly-clad and back in my element, building up the compost heap with an enthusiastic robin for company and a chipped china mug to drink my tea out of. I know my place.