It was a beautiful morning, sunny and bright, and I had the whole day to spend in the garden. I started off by weeding the gravel in the front. That is, weeding part of the gravel. There's a lot of it, and so keeping it free of weeds and leaf litter is an ongoing project. I decided to devote some time to the gravel, despite the borders crying out to be weeded and the seeds needing to be sown, because a mostly used bright green dumpy bag of gravel had been sitting near the entrance for weeks, and it seemed to me that using it up and getting rid of the bag offered a favourable ratio of effort to visible cosmetic improvement. There was no point in chucking perfectly good gravel on top of the weeds, hence the weeding. Although it was sunny, the wind was keen and made my eyes water, with the irritating result that I kept crying on my glasses. Once I'd cried on them I couldn't see properly, so kept having to stop weeding, take off my gloves, and rummage around under my fleece to find the hem of my cotton shirt to wipe them dry. This is why I have a pair of glasses specifically for gardening.
After I'd cleared the green bag out of the way I returned to the climbers under the veranda. I'm on the home straight (I tell myself), tackling a large honeysuckle that has grown up a huge elder. The honeysuckle was full of dead twigs, and as I cleared those out the underlying structure of twining stems revealed itself. I was able to tie quite a long section of honeysuckle and climbing rose into the trellis under the veranda, once I'd cleaned out all the debris. I'm cutting down the elder, but not until I have tidied the honeysuckle that's hanging from the top of it. That's a task that would be a hundred times more fiddly with the honeysuckle lying in a big collapsed heap around my knees. As I picked up years' worth of fallen twigs I uncovered a mysterious disc of something that looked vaguely unpleasant, and as if it might once have been alive. I wondered if the previous owners had ever had a tortoise, and if I had stumbled upon its shell, and then whether it was a gigantic hibernating toad. Investigating it cautiously I discovered it was an old birds' nest, that had fallen to the ground and started to solidify as it decomposed.
The Trachelospermum jasminoides does not look at all happy, which is a shame since it was starting to look quite good by the end of last summer. Its leaves have gone dull and hand down at the wrong angle. I blame the very cold snap, but maybe I have let it get dry. I put a can of water on it last week, just in case. The Berberidopsis corallina has lost a lot of leaves and the ends of its shoots have died in the cold, but it is throwing a new stem from ground level that looks healthy, and I think it is minded to live.
As I feared, those two nights when the temperature plummeted to around minus 12 C have hit several plants. The Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Wrinkled Blue' that had made good growth in its first season in the front garden has lost all the leaves from its upper branches. I thought they were doomed just after the frost, when they had gone the wrong colour. The branches at the very bottom of the bush look OK, so maybe it will sprout from the base. I'm starting to get chary about using pittosporums as structural features, pretty as they are. It is probably safer to regard them as ephemeral, charming while they last, but not to be depended on long term. Some people are like that.
The hyacinths in pots are opening. I tried a new (to me) variety, 'City of Bradford'. They are a soft blue, with a definite flush of pink while in bud, extremely attractive, and I'm delighted with them. Hyacinths are good bee plants, and today as well as the honeybees I saw a great queen bumble on one of the flowers. One stem had flopped over, and I took a couple of minutes to fetch a slim stake and some string and tie it up. It's worth making the effort, because hyacinth flowers last longer if not allowed to fall down.
Showing posts with label hyacinth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hyacinth. Show all posts
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Saturday, 2 April 2011
more April flowers
The buds on the wild gean are just opening. This is a big, multi-stem tree that sits at the point where the garden meets the wood. It was here when we moved in, and I'm pretty sure it was put there by the birds and not our predecessors, who were not keen gardeners. Prunus avium can be a weed tree in woodland gardens, and I recall being shown around such a one in Suffolk by an owner who regarded wild cherries with the lack of enthusiasm generally reserved for sycamore seedlings. But it is a fine thing in the right place. When in full bloom its beauty will indeed "shine out like a beacon of snow" for a few days. The pigeons have a go at the flowers but it is too large to be unduly troubled by them. Lucky we don't have bullfinches.
Little bulbs are still putting on a fine display. In the gravel, following on from the dwarf iris, there are brilliant blue Scilla siberica, and softer blue Chionodoxa and Puschkinia. Two-tone Muscari latifolium grows there, its flowers brighter blue at the top of the stem and dark blue on the lower half. The white flowered Muscari botryoides album also does well and spreads obligingly. I have a few plants of Anemone pavonina, bought at the Chatto gardens after admiring them in the gravel garden. These come in rich but soft shades of pink and cream, with flowers of a similar size to A. coronaria. They seem reasonably perennial, but my attempt to increase my stock by saving and sowing seed failed, as the seed went mouldy. Maybe they will do the job for me in situ.
In the long bed along the edge of the drive I have a lot of hyacinths. I have never bought a hyacinth on purpose to plant in the garden, but after using them in pots, even indoors, I always plant them out. They last for years. This is not unusual: Christopher Lloyd wrote of one clump in his garden that he knew was decades old, because the plants had originally been given to his brother when he had appendicitis. I like to ring the changes in pots from one year to the next, so we have dark and pale blue, yellow, white, and an exciting shade of purple from the variety 'Woodstock'. This looks especially good in the late afternoon, with low sun and the light quality that comes with the threat of heavy rain somewhere, when the purple almost appears to fluoresce (Verbena bonariensis will do the same thing in that kind of light). One of my tasks for this afternoon will be to replant a potful of Centaurea, originally planted last autumn, which I noticed had been pushed half out of the ground by a determined emerging hyacinth snout. Despite their exotic appearance, hyacinths are attractive to foraging bees. My hyacinth pots this year have almost failed though, for the first time in 25 years. They were stood outside, due to lack of space in the greenhouse, and only about three bulbs out of 20 have come through. The bulbs looked fine and healthy when planted, so I presume it was too cold for them.
In the back garden I have some of the dwarf tulips, I think 'Ancilla' and 'Heart's Delight'. They are cheerful little plants that persist well in the border, though sadly mine are blooming through a ground cover layer of sheeps' sorrel, as I haven't managed to get to that bed yet, as I work my way round the ravages of winter.
The only trouble with dwarf bulbs and an enthusiasm for self seeding is that hand weeding rather than hoeing is generally required. I like spending time with the plants, and am resigned to the fact that the garden tends to be rather weedy. Since I have no plans to open to the public I needn't worry unduly about other people's notions of how a garden should look. But if you like things to be tidy then extensive bulb plantings anywhere other than in pots or naturalised in long grass probably aren't for you.
Addendum The irrigation is running in the lettuce field, sending up sprays of water between the rows like a finer version of the fountain in the courtyard at Somerset House, and the fleece is shining in the sun as brightly as the sea. If I were a keen (or even competent) photographer I ought to keep a photo diary of the lettuce farm throughout the year. It could easily fill up a room or two at Tate Modern. Unfortunately I am not a good photographer, finding that walking around trying to capture things in a camera prevents me from looking at them. But somebody should do it.
Little bulbs are still putting on a fine display. In the gravel, following on from the dwarf iris, there are brilliant blue Scilla siberica, and softer blue Chionodoxa and Puschkinia. Two-tone Muscari latifolium grows there, its flowers brighter blue at the top of the stem and dark blue on the lower half. The white flowered Muscari botryoides album also does well and spreads obligingly. I have a few plants of Anemone pavonina, bought at the Chatto gardens after admiring them in the gravel garden. These come in rich but soft shades of pink and cream, with flowers of a similar size to A. coronaria. They seem reasonably perennial, but my attempt to increase my stock by saving and sowing seed failed, as the seed went mouldy. Maybe they will do the job for me in situ.
In the long bed along the edge of the drive I have a lot of hyacinths. I have never bought a hyacinth on purpose to plant in the garden, but after using them in pots, even indoors, I always plant them out. They last for years. This is not unusual: Christopher Lloyd wrote of one clump in his garden that he knew was decades old, because the plants had originally been given to his brother when he had appendicitis. I like to ring the changes in pots from one year to the next, so we have dark and pale blue, yellow, white, and an exciting shade of purple from the variety 'Woodstock'. This looks especially good in the late afternoon, with low sun and the light quality that comes with the threat of heavy rain somewhere, when the purple almost appears to fluoresce (Verbena bonariensis will do the same thing in that kind of light). One of my tasks for this afternoon will be to replant a potful of Centaurea, originally planted last autumn, which I noticed had been pushed half out of the ground by a determined emerging hyacinth snout. Despite their exotic appearance, hyacinths are attractive to foraging bees. My hyacinth pots this year have almost failed though, for the first time in 25 years. They were stood outside, due to lack of space in the greenhouse, and only about three bulbs out of 20 have come through. The bulbs looked fine and healthy when planted, so I presume it was too cold for them.
In the back garden I have some of the dwarf tulips, I think 'Ancilla' and 'Heart's Delight'. They are cheerful little plants that persist well in the border, though sadly mine are blooming through a ground cover layer of sheeps' sorrel, as I haven't managed to get to that bed yet, as I work my way round the ravages of winter.
The only trouble with dwarf bulbs and an enthusiasm for self seeding is that hand weeding rather than hoeing is generally required. I like spending time with the plants, and am resigned to the fact that the garden tends to be rather weedy. Since I have no plans to open to the public I needn't worry unduly about other people's notions of how a garden should look. But if you like things to be tidy then extensive bulb plantings anywhere other than in pots or naturalised in long grass probably aren't for you.
Addendum The irrigation is running in the lettuce field, sending up sprays of water between the rows like a finer version of the fountain in the courtyard at Somerset House, and the fleece is shining in the sun as brightly as the sea. If I were a keen (or even competent) photographer I ought to keep a photo diary of the lettuce farm throughout the year. It could easily fill up a room or two at Tate Modern. Unfortunately I am not a good photographer, finding that walking around trying to capture things in a camera prevents me from looking at them. But somebody should do it.
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