background reading

It rained this morning at a point when the Met Office forecast gave a five per cent chance of rain, and then Storm Brian blew in in a half-hearted fashion.  The Systems Administrator trundled out between showers then in again like the little people in a cuckoo clock, only to the accompaniment of rumbling from the up-and-over garage door instead of a mechanical cuckoo.

I tidied away the muddle of pots of things waiting to be planted that had collected outside the front door, refilled the council brown bin from the bags of stuff waiting to go in the bin, wondered again if I should get a second bin, moved some of the bags of Eleagnus shreddings from the edge of the drive to the compost bin, and decided I had done my bit outdoors for the day.  The shreddings are not all going to fit on the heap unless it squashes down a lot more, and in any case I am trying to layer them between bucket loads of less woody material, so some are going to remain in their bags for a fair while yet, but at least they are now doing it out of sight of the house.

Instead I went on reading though my pile of garden magazines and noting down any nurseries of interest, particular plant recommendations that might fill a gap, and gardens open to the public that might fit in with future holiday plans.  Tracking down gardens to visit is not entirely straightforward, once you start looking beyond the National Trust, English Heritage, and the big name stately homes like Alnwick or Chatsworth.  Those that open for charities like the National Gardens Scheme or the Red Cross are easily looked up, and as many open on other days as well or by appointment the Yellow Book is always a good place to start, as is the list of RHS Partnership Gardens.  The Daily Telegraph book used to be a reliable source, but as it hasn't been revised for years it is getting steadily more out of date.  I have an almost equally old guide to Cornish gardens, but there aren't any guide books to most areas outside the tourist honeypots.  Links from tourism websites can be surprisingly hit and miss, a marker perhaps that in general privately owned gardens, even if they run to a little tea room in the summer, don't have a marketing department.  We always keep our eyes peeled for leaflets, though when you are only visiting an area for a week you may not see the leaflet until too late in the holiday.  Learning half way through the week that there is a garden you would have liked to see, but it was open yesterday afternoon, or is a thirty mile drive from where you are staying and near to the castle you already visited on Tuesday, is not entirely helpful.  So articles in garden magazines or national papers can be very useful.  We first became aware of Mapperton in Dorset and Herterton in Northumberland via pieces in the press, and both turned out to be wonderful gardens and very untouristy.

The main pitfall of binge reading garden magazines is the risk of succumbing to garden envy, or at least feelings of profound inadequacy.  After viewing an almost endless parade of manor houses, honey coloured stone, ancient walls, miles of yew hedging, inherited mature trees, lakes, natural streams, and tonnes of lead and bronze statuary, our scruffy couple of acres wrapped around a miniscule wood and 1960s shoebox of a house can start to seem inadequate.  And for every owner who admits in print to having at least one full time gardener (or three gardeners and two trainees for one especially lovely expanse of rolling lawns, borders, yew, and stone, plus I'm guessing the Keswick name might have been a clue to an underlying family banking fortune) there seem to be three more who maintain their several acres of high horticulture all by themselves, with just one day of help a week.

Maybe.  Or perhaps they don't remember to count the chap who comes in annually to do the tree work and big hedges as help.  Or they managed to acquire plots that did not have horsetail, creeping thistle and sheeps' sorrel to contend with (though we don't have ground elder or lesser celandine, and doesn't everybody's garden have something?).  And buying all their plants instead of raising any from seeds or cuttings would save time.  Or perhaps gardening in places with better soil and more rain so that the things you plant grow faster and don't die as often is quicker.  But perhaps the owners in the glossy magazines are telling the exact truth, and it's just that they work harder than I do, putting in a full forty hour week on their gardens and not catching colds.  It's a mystery.