open gardens

It was the Open Gardens in the village where I work, and for once it was held on a weekend when I wasn't working.  I'd been saying that I was going to go to the Open Gardens, ever since I discovered that I could go, to see what the people I sell plants to do with them when they get home.  When it came to it, this morning it was so beautiful and peaceful in our own garden, and I had so much to do, that if it had been any other village and not the place where I worked, I probably wouldn't have bothered.  But having announced I was going, I thought I'd feel rather silly tomorrow going into work and having to confess that in the end I hadn't bothered with it, and then later I'd probably wish that I had gone.

Not having a ticket, a programme or a map, I started with the garden of somebody I know, and knew was opening.  She is a professional plantswoman, and her garden, which I have seen before at Easter time, was looking wonderful.  I congratulated her on this, and she said that I should have seen it yesterday, after Friday's wind, and that they had half killed themselves getting it ready.  It really didn't look like a garden that had been recently flattened, though when you observed very closely you could see how the stems of the Crambe were tied around with loops of fine black string.  Apparently they were laid flat by the wind.  She has a great many nice and interesting plants, and I liked her use of the yellow leaved Philadelphus coronarius 'Aureus' as a clipped dome.  I admired that on my previous visit, and saw this time that despite the clipping it does manage to flower.

Then I called at the garden of a former colleague, who maintains a phenomenal quantity of trimmed box single handed.  Long runs of box hedging can be made more entertaining if the top isn't kept the same height.  Pyramid shaped sections rising up at intervals, preferably in places that relate to other features of the garden design, give the whole thing more pizazz, a trick used here, and at The Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury.  My old colleague is another able and inquisitive plantswoman, and her borders are packed full with an interesting mixture of plants.  I bought a little Polemonium with yellow and brown flowers from her plant stall, which I never saw before in my life.  She promised me it would self seed, and I thought it would look charming wandering around our semi shaded bed along the ditch.

One of the music society committee members had opened her garden, which I'd never been into, though I presume that one of these years it will be her turn to host the annual committee supper (I don't know if we'll ever have to do that, or if our house will be deemed too far away, or not large enough).  That turned out to be very pleasant and rather grand, with spectacular views out across the Stour vale to Dedham church, and a huge and magnificent tree on the very large lawn which was either a sycamore or a plane, but I never went right up to it to work out which.  There was a Greek temple, and a thatched rustic summerhouse, and an avenue of pleached limes underplanted with two long rows of Alchemilla mollis, which was one of the simplest and most stylish bits of underplanting I've seen.  A small boy asked his mother who cut the grass, a very good question, and I thought that it must take a long time.  It was a lovely setting, but the garden didn't speak of owners with a passion for plants.

None of the other gardens were as large.  There was a professional garden designer's garden, very Chelsea, with brick and knapped flint paths, a folly, a bridge over a pond, and lots of little ornaments and details, which hovered between charming and kitsch.  Overall I rather liked it, but on my way out I overheard another visitor telling her companion that it had been a bit much for her taste.  The garden owner was taken by my Polemonium, and showed me where she had one that had self seeded into the end of a raised bed tucked away in a corner, and I asked her the name of a geranium with veined flowers I liked, and discovered that it was G. versicolor, and that I could buy one for a pound.  She gave me a plastic bag for the plants, which was handy.

Part of the amusement in looking at a selection of private and amateur gardens is in seeing how other people choose to do things.  You get the straight paths brigade, with axes (as in plural of axis, not axe), cross-axes and focal points.  In some gardens the borders have straight edges, or long sweeping curves, while in others they meander in and out in what is presumably intended to be studied informality but can come across as annoying little wiggles.  You get the multiple  island bed approach, and the method of dotting of individual shrubs around in cut grass, which I find exhausting, just thinking about the convoluted mowing pattern you would be forced to adopt, and how long it would take to cut all the edges.  Some gardens are divided into separate sections using trellis, others more subtly divided with a nod to distinct areas, using tall plants and climbers on supports.  Some gardens open out to your gaze in a single panorama.

Later on I bought an ice cream, and an Iris 'Holden Clough'.  I had one of those before, and am not sure if that's what the half drowned iris is or not that I rescued from the swamp behind the bamboo, so I thought I'd get one as an insurance policy when I saw it, as they are not very easy to find.  It is a cross between the bog loving Iris pseudacorus and something else, and likes a heavy, rich soil that is reliably damp but not permanently waterlogged, though it tolerates occasional flooding.  I'm hoping I can find a suitable not too wet, not too dry spot for it somewhere at the bottom of the garden.  It has strange, sinister, not very large flowers of brown and purple, and leaves that always seem to look a bit streaky.  I used to suspect the stock we had at work of being virus infected, but when I asked the woman selling it if the leaves were always slightly striped she became quite animated, and told me how she had been discussing just that very thing with the owner of one of the big Norfolk wholesale nurseries the other day, and they had decided that it was not virus infection but simply how the plant was, since they were always like that.

I didn't form any very dramatic conclusions, but I wasn't expecting to.  I decided that if you are going to divide a garden into different sections with trellis you should then go for a change of planting palette or mood in the different areas.  If the sections look and feel the same as each other then there's not much point in having the dividers.  Owners of large gardens with a lot of grass, that they need to keep open as grass, maybe to preserve a view, can generally usefully turn some of it over to wildflower meadow in the summer.  It cuts down on the mowing, brings in the insects and is more interesting to look at than too much mown turf.  Bare earth in June is wrong, unless in a vegetable patch or bed holding summer bedding that hasn't had time to fill out yet.

My tour round the village did make me realise how good our garden would be, if I were on top of the weeds.  In terms of layout we're up there, apart from the one glaring error in the front over the location of the sheds and greenhouse in full view, and failure to provide anywhere where bulk loads can be dumped.  There's no way round that, without demolishing almost everything in the front garden and starting again, so we'll just have to live with it.  If we could get the concrete outside the sheds tidy that would help.  We would beat most of the gardens I saw today for plant interest, some of them by a considerable margin.  I simply need to conquer the weeds, which means adding to the planting matrix and investing in mulch until there is no bare earth and much less naked gravel showing anywhere by the end of May, and then getting into a routine where all digging out of dead stumps, planting and rejigging, goes on between September and March, so that in the summer I can spend my time edging, dead heading, and pulling out horsetail to keep the place looking tidy.  Not too tidy, because that's not atmospheric, but not festooned in goosegrass and thick with horsetail.  Unfortunately I have to go to work tomorrow, but action can resume on Tuesday.