Last night's talk at the garden club was by a distributor for peat free compost made from wool and bracken. It was developed in the Lake District by a fifth generation shepherd and his partner who is an environmental scientist. Bracken is harvested from the fells in September before it spores, which is just as well as you wouldn't want to risk spores germinating in the compost and you don't want to breathe them in during harvest since they are carcinogenic. There is a lot of bracken in the Lake District. The wool comes mostly from the local Herdwick, which produce a coarse wool that will do for carpets but not clothing. In consequence demand has been so depressed that the sale price of a fleece doesn't even repay the expense of shearing. The two are mixed together in a process that is kept a proprietary secret since it took the couple eight years to develop, and in variable proportions depending on how much nitrogen the resulting compost is designed to contain.
The speaker passed around some buckets of different grades of compost and it felt lovely, light and fluffy. He assured us that it had excellent water retaining properties while not sitting too wet, that as the wool continued to decompose it would slowly release nutrients to the plants over a six month period, that the need to water would be reduced along with the need to feed over those six months. He passed around photos of plants grown in the wool and bracken compost next to ones growing in other compost, and the wool and peat based plants looked very impressive.
It seemed like lovely compost. I'd have happily switched to it, subject to an initial trial run, a superior product made from natural waste products, bracken and coarse wool, that didn't involve damaging peat bogs or the risk of introducing some plant disease or a dose of weedkiller from a dodgy batch of green waste. There was just one snag. He was retailing it at ten pounds for a thirty litre bag, and that is a pound less than if you buy direct from the manufacturers.
Now B&Q own brand peat based multipurpose compost, which is normally pretty good subject to the drawbacks of peat, that if once dried out it is fiendishly difficult to rewet, retails at £6.93 for a 125 litre bag. Four bags of wool and bracken would set you back £40. That's under six pence per litre versus over thirty-three pence. A lot of garden centre plants are sold in one or two litre pots, and shrubs are often in three or five litre pots, trees in ten litre pots. You can do the maths.
The bracken and peat mixture was also marketed as a mulch and soil conditioner, suggested application rate one thirty litre bag per square metre, cost ten pounds. When my home made compost runs out, as it always does, I can buy spent mushroom compost at £1.50 for thirty litres (plus the cost of driving three miles up the road to collect it and whatever I should charge myself in labour and laundry bills for shoveling it into bags). For ten quid a square metre you could afford to cover your beds in laminate flooring with change left over for a nice rug. Strulch bought by the pallet load comes in at just under £1.60 per square metre, so mulching with mushroom compost and then a coating of Strulch comes in at roughly a third of top dressing with wool and bracken at the recommended rate, and with the wool and bracken mixture you wouldn't get the weed suppressant effect.
I don't understand why it is so expensive. If it were even twice as much as peat based I could draw a deep breath, think of the environment (though until countries stop burning peat in power stations the difference gardeners can make by eschewing peat based compost seems minimal) and make the switch, but six times as much? How can something made out of raw materials that have practically no value be so expensive? True, there was the cost of developing it, but likewise there was for Strulch. True, it has to be processed and packaged and transported, but so do all other composts. So does laminate flooring.
Afterwards the chairman of the garden club quietly lamented that if the Plant Heritage propagation group were to pay that much for compost they would have to put their prices up. I was left with a feeling of regret that a good product that had the potential to go mainstream was being limited to a tiny niche market by its manufacturer's pricing policy.
Wednesday, 7 June 2017
Tuesday, 6 June 2017
summer storm
The kittens, by now cats, could not believe that it rained solidly all yesterday evening, and kept rushing out of the cat door and coming in again, damp and indignant. They like to go out around dusk, and they especially like to go out and frolic in the garden after they have had their supper. Instead they had to make do with frolicking in the study while we were trying to watch an improving documentary about the history of weather forecasting, tobogganing across the nice slidey wooden floor on the broken cardboard box that is their current favourite bed, until they ripped the lid off.
It was rather piquant to get a summer storm, since last night's episode covered the efforts to forecast the weather ahead of D-Day, which was postponed at short notice for twenty-four hours after the Met Office warned of a storm coming in from the Atlantic. Their model of cold fronts, then quite newly developed, had something to do with it, but so did the actual readings submitted every hour from a weather station in the far west of Ireland. What hits Blacksod tonight will hit the English Channel tomorrow afternoon. Today, 6 June, is the anniversary of the landings, and looking at the trees thrashing about outside I could see why you would not have attempted beach landings in such weather.
The artists formerly known as kittens were even less impressed when it continued to rain all through the morning and we got a lot more of the going out, coming straight back in routine, until one by one they gave up and went to sleep. Asleep is how Mr Fluffy spends most of his morning anyway, but he likes to go out and run around for half an hour first. Or perhaps he likes the idea that he could go out if he wanted to. The Systems Administrator had set the day aside for vacuuming since it was forecast to be wet, and the cats did not like the vacuum cleaner either. Mr Fidget and Mr Fluffy eyed it warily, but Mr Cool hid behind the sofa before going and taking refuge in the conservatory.
I don't think too much has broken. I stood the chairs from outside the conservatory down on the lawn so that they could not be blown through the windows, and put the umbrella inside the conservatory in case it should snap, and then remembered to take the auricula pots off the top shelf of their pew-theatre, just in case, and I shut the greenhouse and windward conservatory doors. The gale has made a mess, though. The sage bush in the herb bed and the Phlomis italica in the turning circle have been rather bashed about. Both are lax and not terribly solid shrubs, sending up long flowering spikes that will subsequently be cut off quite far down as the new growth will come from inside the bush, and their flowering stems are now pointing in every direction and chunks of the sage have sagged so that the bush is open in the middle. I fear that now they have flopped they may remain that way until pruning time and next year's new growth restore order.
It was rather piquant to get a summer storm, since last night's episode covered the efforts to forecast the weather ahead of D-Day, which was postponed at short notice for twenty-four hours after the Met Office warned of a storm coming in from the Atlantic. Their model of cold fronts, then quite newly developed, had something to do with it, but so did the actual readings submitted every hour from a weather station in the far west of Ireland. What hits Blacksod tonight will hit the English Channel tomorrow afternoon. Today, 6 June, is the anniversary of the landings, and looking at the trees thrashing about outside I could see why you would not have attempted beach landings in such weather.
The artists formerly known as kittens were even less impressed when it continued to rain all through the morning and we got a lot more of the going out, coming straight back in routine, until one by one they gave up and went to sleep. Asleep is how Mr Fluffy spends most of his morning anyway, but he likes to go out and run around for half an hour first. Or perhaps he likes the idea that he could go out if he wanted to. The Systems Administrator had set the day aside for vacuuming since it was forecast to be wet, and the cats did not like the vacuum cleaner either. Mr Fidget and Mr Fluffy eyed it warily, but Mr Cool hid behind the sofa before going and taking refuge in the conservatory.
I don't think too much has broken. I stood the chairs from outside the conservatory down on the lawn so that they could not be blown through the windows, and put the umbrella inside the conservatory in case it should snap, and then remembered to take the auricula pots off the top shelf of their pew-theatre, just in case, and I shut the greenhouse and windward conservatory doors. The gale has made a mess, though. The sage bush in the herb bed and the Phlomis italica in the turning circle have been rather bashed about. Both are lax and not terribly solid shrubs, sending up long flowering spikes that will subsequently be cut off quite far down as the new growth will come from inside the bush, and their flowering stems are now pointing in every direction and chunks of the sage have sagged so that the bush is open in the middle. I fear that now they have flopped they may remain that way until pruning time and next year's new growth restore order.
Monday, 5 June 2017
clearing the way
The Eleagnus hedge has been encroaching where it was not wanted again, this time across the path from the front garden to the terrace (or patio). I nibble away at the end of the hedge every now and again, but never quite enough, while the top of it has arched over to make a tunnel against the house. The tunnel is rather fun, except when the gales make the hedge thrash about and scrape the wood stain off the cedar clad upper storey. I had a good go at the arching over bits only a couple of months ago with the pole lopper and had got them clear of the wood cladding, except that of course by now the hedge has grown again. However, the passageway at the bottom had got awfully narrow. Things came to a head when I knocked an iron stake into the corner of the flower bed along the wall of the house so that I could run the hose around the corner without it digging into a box ball and squashing the winter flowering iris, and the Systems Administrator pointed out to me that as he already had to cut through the border to avoid the hedge, with the stake there he could only go round the corner himself bent at a very odd angle to keep his knees clear of the stake and his shoulders clear of the hedge.
That is the trouble with entrusting the heavy maintenance to a small person. Any route I make between or underneath branches tends to be practically hobbit sized. The SA is fully eight inches taller than I am, with much broader shoulders, and gaps that I can happily toddle through, foliage just skimming the top of my Tilley hat, leave the SA bent double. I promised to cut the end of the hedge back properly, and the SA magnanimously agreed that the stake could stay and he would get used to it. As the weather hots up and the number of pots at the end of the house increases it is jolly useful having a hose guide.
After lunch I thought I had better stick to my side of the bargain and do something about the hedge. The problem was that several large branches had sagged over time until they stuck out half way across the path at about the height of the SA's shoulders, and there was nothing to be done but take a deep breath and saw them off. The end result wasn't as bad as I'd feared, with only one large bald patch, and I managed to salvage some young whippy shoots with leaves that could be pushed up inside the end of the hedge instead of cutting them off. I expect it will regenerate. It has so far, but cutting hard into two decades old Eleagnus x ebbingei is nerve wracking. Do not plant it as a hedge. Choose hornbeam, or yew.
The finished path was much better, though, and I flagged down the SA when he was passing and made him walk through it to try it for size. The SA said it was fine, and I took off a few more branches at shoulder height for good measure. Come the autumn when we cut down the long grass on the daffodil lawn I am going to have to take the back of the hedge back, as it is bulging out across the lawn and shading the terrace (or patio). Then we will have to look at the butchered remains from the sitting room window for months.
That is the trouble with entrusting the heavy maintenance to a small person. Any route I make between or underneath branches tends to be practically hobbit sized. The SA is fully eight inches taller than I am, with much broader shoulders, and gaps that I can happily toddle through, foliage just skimming the top of my Tilley hat, leave the SA bent double. I promised to cut the end of the hedge back properly, and the SA magnanimously agreed that the stake could stay and he would get used to it. As the weather hots up and the number of pots at the end of the house increases it is jolly useful having a hose guide.
After lunch I thought I had better stick to my side of the bargain and do something about the hedge. The problem was that several large branches had sagged over time until they stuck out half way across the path at about the height of the SA's shoulders, and there was nothing to be done but take a deep breath and saw them off. The end result wasn't as bad as I'd feared, with only one large bald patch, and I managed to salvage some young whippy shoots with leaves that could be pushed up inside the end of the hedge instead of cutting them off. I expect it will regenerate. It has so far, but cutting hard into two decades old Eleagnus x ebbingei is nerve wracking. Do not plant it as a hedge. Choose hornbeam, or yew.
The finished path was much better, though, and I flagged down the SA when he was passing and made him walk through it to try it for size. The SA said it was fine, and I took off a few more branches at shoulder height for good measure. Come the autumn when we cut down the long grass on the daffodil lawn I am going to have to take the back of the hedge back, as it is bulging out across the lawn and shading the terrace (or patio). Then we will have to look at the butchered remains from the sitting room window for months.
Sunday, 4 June 2017
open gardens
We took the morning off from gardening to go garden visiting. This time it was not the grand gardens of Norfolk, but Boxford Open Gardens. I like Open Gardens, with their chance to see what other people manage to do on a domestic scale, and tend to try a new place each time, so in the past we've been to Wrabness, Stoke-by-Nayland, and Chelsworth, and last summer my gardening friend and I worked our way around the open gardens of Sudbury so thoroughly that I don't think we missed a single one. It cannot be denied that sheer nosiness plays a part, for who is not curious about what goes on behind all those garden walls and fences and behind the rows of facades?
Boxford is a pretty village. Besides the village hall, where the garden club meets, and the church across the lane from the village hall, where I once went to a concert, and the pub in the main street where I caught the coach for the garden society outing and helped with the plant stall, I had never really looked at the rest of it. As in nearby Lavenham there must have been money around in Medieval and Tudor times and then not so much afterwards, though Boxford managed to acquire more Georgian frontages on buildings that were much older behind the new front (or so we surmised from looking at the roof lines). In fact, we saw some fabulous roofs, hipped and gabled, upper storeys jettying out to leave perilously narrow gaps between adjacent roofs, and eclectic mixtures of tiles and slate on different bits of the same roof. The river Box runs through Boxford and several of the gardens we saw backed on to it, but according to one owner I asked it doesn't overtop its banks, or hasn't in her memory. There is a doctor's surgery, an infants school, a couple of pubs and several shops, and a pleasant air of it being a real place and not just a dormitory of Sudbury, Hadleigh, or Colchester.
The best garden belonged to the chairman of the garden club. I knew it would be pretty good, having seen a magazine article about it and knowing that the chairman is a knowledgeable plantswoman. Not very big since it is her downsized garden now she is in her eighties, no lawn, beds filled with interesting plants, good combinations of climbers on the walls, some clipped evergreen standards to add height and substance. It was exactly the sort of garden I should like to do when I am in my eighties.
I enquired enviously why her Nicotiana mutablis was already flowering when mine were still little things in nine centimetre pots, and she explained that hers was over a year old rather than from a spring sowing, and that it would behave as a perennial if given some protection in winter, pointing out the medium sized pot nestling in the bed. I had truly not known that plants would over-winter, and am glad I found out before doing anything else with mine, since it will influence what sized pots I use and how densely I pack them. The chairman's pot was about eight inches across and I think had just the one plant in it. Nicotiana mutablis is a species of tobacco flower whose flowers open white and turn pink then magenta as they age, giving a mixture of colours on the same plant. I first encountered it on the Avon Bulbs stand at Chelsea years ago, and it has taken me that long to get organised to grow any.
None of the other gardens were as outstandingly good, though we had a nice time walking around. We saw a solitary Dianthus carthusianorum standing in splendid isolation in one border and I thought that they really were catching on before reflecting that it was probably one of the plants I donated to the garden club plant stall. I was admiring a rambling rose in another garden, with large clusters of small white double flowers with central bosses that were large in proportion to the size of the flower, healthy leaves, and relatively few thorns, and wondering what it was when a charming man with a border terrier appeared and told me that it was 'Rambling Rector'. A sweet and romantic cottage garden with overflowing borders contained an effusive and very friendly spaniel, and a narrow border behind a house in a modern cul-de-sac had a sad little row of pets' headstones. Refreshments were being sold in the village hall and we had tea and very good homemade Victoria sponge for a miserly two pounds a head. There was bunting hung out across the lane between the hall and the village school. The sun shone. It was all very nice.
Boxford is a pretty village. Besides the village hall, where the garden club meets, and the church across the lane from the village hall, where I once went to a concert, and the pub in the main street where I caught the coach for the garden society outing and helped with the plant stall, I had never really looked at the rest of it. As in nearby Lavenham there must have been money around in Medieval and Tudor times and then not so much afterwards, though Boxford managed to acquire more Georgian frontages on buildings that were much older behind the new front (or so we surmised from looking at the roof lines). In fact, we saw some fabulous roofs, hipped and gabled, upper storeys jettying out to leave perilously narrow gaps between adjacent roofs, and eclectic mixtures of tiles and slate on different bits of the same roof. The river Box runs through Boxford and several of the gardens we saw backed on to it, but according to one owner I asked it doesn't overtop its banks, or hasn't in her memory. There is a doctor's surgery, an infants school, a couple of pubs and several shops, and a pleasant air of it being a real place and not just a dormitory of Sudbury, Hadleigh, or Colchester.
The best garden belonged to the chairman of the garden club. I knew it would be pretty good, having seen a magazine article about it and knowing that the chairman is a knowledgeable plantswoman. Not very big since it is her downsized garden now she is in her eighties, no lawn, beds filled with interesting plants, good combinations of climbers on the walls, some clipped evergreen standards to add height and substance. It was exactly the sort of garden I should like to do when I am in my eighties.
I enquired enviously why her Nicotiana mutablis was already flowering when mine were still little things in nine centimetre pots, and she explained that hers was over a year old rather than from a spring sowing, and that it would behave as a perennial if given some protection in winter, pointing out the medium sized pot nestling in the bed. I had truly not known that plants would over-winter, and am glad I found out before doing anything else with mine, since it will influence what sized pots I use and how densely I pack them. The chairman's pot was about eight inches across and I think had just the one plant in it. Nicotiana mutablis is a species of tobacco flower whose flowers open white and turn pink then magenta as they age, giving a mixture of colours on the same plant. I first encountered it on the Avon Bulbs stand at Chelsea years ago, and it has taken me that long to get organised to grow any.
None of the other gardens were as outstandingly good, though we had a nice time walking around. We saw a solitary Dianthus carthusianorum standing in splendid isolation in one border and I thought that they really were catching on before reflecting that it was probably one of the plants I donated to the garden club plant stall. I was admiring a rambling rose in another garden, with large clusters of small white double flowers with central bosses that were large in proportion to the size of the flower, healthy leaves, and relatively few thorns, and wondering what it was when a charming man with a border terrier appeared and told me that it was 'Rambling Rector'. A sweet and romantic cottage garden with overflowing borders contained an effusive and very friendly spaniel, and a narrow border behind a house in a modern cul-de-sac had a sad little row of pets' headstones. Refreshments were being sold in the village hall and we had tea and very good homemade Victoria sponge for a miserly two pounds a head. There was bunting hung out across the lane between the hall and the village school. The sun shone. It was all very nice.
Saturday, 3 June 2017
gardening at the wood's edge
Finally I have got around to planting out the four Harvington hellebores I bought at the Chatto gardens in early February. It was never meant to take so long, but every time I thought I was going to spend a couple of days weeding along the side of the wood and clear a space for them I ended up doing something else instead. The Strulch needed spreading in the back garden, or it was time to sow seeds, or seedlings needed pricking out, or non gardening activities intruded into time that I'd earmarked for gardening.
One advantage of leaving it this long is that the remaining bits of bramble root have had time to send up fresh shoots, meaning that I can see where they are and have another go at digging them out. I'll be chiseling out tiny shoots of bramble for years, as I do in the back garden, but it would have been a shame to have planted the hellebores and then find a large bramble root ran under them. Likewise there are a few fresh shoots of Gardeners' Garters, which told me where I should dig to extract the last bits of root before planting anything. Gardeners' Garters does not appear to regenerate readily from fragments of root, which is a relief, not like couch grass and its ilk.
One intractable set of roots ran right under a large clump of primroses which I had to lift in order to get them out properly. That was fine since I was intending the split some of the clumps and spread them around, and after flowering is the textbook time to do it. There have been several torrential downpours in the past couple of weeks and the top few inches of soil are now nicely wet, so conditions are on my side for once. The large clump broke down into half a dozen decent sized pieces, and I was careful to pick their roots clean of any last, fat pieces of Gardeners' Garter roots before replanting them, leaves chopped off to save them from losing moisture while they reestablish.
I planted out the first tray of sad little Teucrium hircanum 'Purple Tails', while wondering if they will come to anything. They were ready to go out last summer, only the site was nowhere ready to receive them, and have really not liked spending the past year in pots.
The small and lopsided Styrax japonica is in flower, little white bells dangling. It has led a hard life, being overrun by brambles each time we lose control of that area, and an oak tree that fell over but continues to grow lying on its side. Once a large section of its crown died, shaded out, and it has developed with a very crooked trunk as it attempted to escape from the embrace of the oak. Poor little tree. I shall have to tell myself that its winding stem gives it character. It is certainly testament to a powerful will to live.
One advantage of leaving it this long is that the remaining bits of bramble root have had time to send up fresh shoots, meaning that I can see where they are and have another go at digging them out. I'll be chiseling out tiny shoots of bramble for years, as I do in the back garden, but it would have been a shame to have planted the hellebores and then find a large bramble root ran under them. Likewise there are a few fresh shoots of Gardeners' Garters, which told me where I should dig to extract the last bits of root before planting anything. Gardeners' Garters does not appear to regenerate readily from fragments of root, which is a relief, not like couch grass and its ilk.
One intractable set of roots ran right under a large clump of primroses which I had to lift in order to get them out properly. That was fine since I was intending the split some of the clumps and spread them around, and after flowering is the textbook time to do it. There have been several torrential downpours in the past couple of weeks and the top few inches of soil are now nicely wet, so conditions are on my side for once. The large clump broke down into half a dozen decent sized pieces, and I was careful to pick their roots clean of any last, fat pieces of Gardeners' Garter roots before replanting them, leaves chopped off to save them from losing moisture while they reestablish.
I planted out the first tray of sad little Teucrium hircanum 'Purple Tails', while wondering if they will come to anything. They were ready to go out last summer, only the site was nowhere ready to receive them, and have really not liked spending the past year in pots.
The small and lopsided Styrax japonica is in flower, little white bells dangling. It has led a hard life, being overrun by brambles each time we lose control of that area, and an oak tree that fell over but continues to grow lying on its side. Once a large section of its crown died, shaded out, and it has developed with a very crooked trunk as it attempted to escape from the embrace of the oak. Poor little tree. I shall have to tell myself that its winding stem gives it character. It is certainly testament to a powerful will to live.
Friday, 2 June 2017
a bohemian, a pavilion and a Swiss artist
The rain and thunder have driven me in from the garden, so I can write about yesterday's trip in more detail. That's just as well, since otherwise today's blog would have been an account of turning the compost heap.
As I said, in an ideal world I would pace my pleasures and not make the trip up to town twice in a week. How I ever managed to commute daily I have no idea, except that I was younger then and more energetic and so used to the grind I must have been anaesthetised to the pain. In my ideal world I plan my cultural outings and meetings with friends so that they fall at nice, regular intervals, giving time in between for gardening and the necessary business of daily life. But in practice other people's methods of managing their diaries don't always coincide with mine, and so I realised that pinning down an old school friend who is now a partner in a City law firm to supper on a particular evening three weeks in advance was a fairly hopeless case, and that when she asked if I was free tonight or tomorrow the correct answer if we wanted to actually see each other was Yes. So I swallowed my objections and made a return visit to the capital.
It meant that I ended up catching the exhibition of Vanessa Bell's art at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which I was reconciled to having missed, since it finishes this coming Sunday. I was set to go with a friend who is in the throes of trying to sell her house and had to cancel, so we rearranged and she had to cancel again. I could have gone by myself, but had so much to do in the garden that I gave up and told myself that Vanessa Bell wasn't that good a painter anyway. I am very glad I did go, because she was much better than I had given her credit for. She was taught by John Singer Sergent and Walter Sickert, and Sickert said she was good. She was not original in the way that Picasso and Matisse were original, and you can see their influence in her work, but she was still pretty good in a colourful, early twentieth century modern sort of way. I'd have happily hung several of her portraits and some of the still lives on the wall at home and enjoyed looking at them every day.
New this year at Dulwich is a summer pavilion. The Serpentine has had one for years, and now Dulwich has got one too. It was designed by local architects to a tight budget (£59,000 plus VAT per The Times), and consists of two interlocking decks made out of the sort of boards you see in marinas, painted black, with a rectangular timber roof covered in what looks like the sort of corrugated acrylic sheet we've got on the conservatory roof and an aluminium mesh skirt all around it, and the internal space is divided by a series of slightly distorting mirrors. The uprights supporting the mirrors and the roof are very slender, and the roof appears to hover airily above them, while the mirrors reflect the surrounding grass and trees and in the gaps between them you can see real grass and trees. It is very charming, and I can imagine it being used for all sorts of parties and performances.
I should have bought my timed ticket to the Vanessa Bell exhibition before consuming my Pret lemonade and chocolate brownie while contemplating the pavilion, because I found I could not get admission for another hour, which gave me time to look at the permanent collection but put paid to my vague idea that I could go the Royal Academy afterwards and before meeting my school friend. Their exhibition of American art from the 1930s also finishes on Sunday, but one can't do everything. Instead I went and drank tea in the new members' room and had a preliminary look at Giacometti at Tate Modern. The exhibition has only just opened and is on until mid September, and I will definitely aim to go again over the summer, but the great beauty of being a supporter, even more than the members' room (which is pretty nice and used as an office by numerous freelancers, to judge from the earnest people sitting hunched over Apple laptops), is to be able to drop into exhibitions when you have a spare hour and not feel you have to take in everything because you are never going to see it again.
My school friend and I had a lot to catch up with after four years. Since I last saw her she has qualified as a Lay Minister in the Church of England. I should think she will be very good at it.
As I said, in an ideal world I would pace my pleasures and not make the trip up to town twice in a week. How I ever managed to commute daily I have no idea, except that I was younger then and more energetic and so used to the grind I must have been anaesthetised to the pain. In my ideal world I plan my cultural outings and meetings with friends so that they fall at nice, regular intervals, giving time in between for gardening and the necessary business of daily life. But in practice other people's methods of managing their diaries don't always coincide with mine, and so I realised that pinning down an old school friend who is now a partner in a City law firm to supper on a particular evening three weeks in advance was a fairly hopeless case, and that when she asked if I was free tonight or tomorrow the correct answer if we wanted to actually see each other was Yes. So I swallowed my objections and made a return visit to the capital.
It meant that I ended up catching the exhibition of Vanessa Bell's art at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which I was reconciled to having missed, since it finishes this coming Sunday. I was set to go with a friend who is in the throes of trying to sell her house and had to cancel, so we rearranged and she had to cancel again. I could have gone by myself, but had so much to do in the garden that I gave up and told myself that Vanessa Bell wasn't that good a painter anyway. I am very glad I did go, because she was much better than I had given her credit for. She was taught by John Singer Sergent and Walter Sickert, and Sickert said she was good. She was not original in the way that Picasso and Matisse were original, and you can see their influence in her work, but she was still pretty good in a colourful, early twentieth century modern sort of way. I'd have happily hung several of her portraits and some of the still lives on the wall at home and enjoyed looking at them every day.
New this year at Dulwich is a summer pavilion. The Serpentine has had one for years, and now Dulwich has got one too. It was designed by local architects to a tight budget (£59,000 plus VAT per The Times), and consists of two interlocking decks made out of the sort of boards you see in marinas, painted black, with a rectangular timber roof covered in what looks like the sort of corrugated acrylic sheet we've got on the conservatory roof and an aluminium mesh skirt all around it, and the internal space is divided by a series of slightly distorting mirrors. The uprights supporting the mirrors and the roof are very slender, and the roof appears to hover airily above them, while the mirrors reflect the surrounding grass and trees and in the gaps between them you can see real grass and trees. It is very charming, and I can imagine it being used for all sorts of parties and performances.
I should have bought my timed ticket to the Vanessa Bell exhibition before consuming my Pret lemonade and chocolate brownie while contemplating the pavilion, because I found I could not get admission for another hour, which gave me time to look at the permanent collection but put paid to my vague idea that I could go the Royal Academy afterwards and before meeting my school friend. Their exhibition of American art from the 1930s also finishes on Sunday, but one can't do everything. Instead I went and drank tea in the new members' room and had a preliminary look at Giacometti at Tate Modern. The exhibition has only just opened and is on until mid September, and I will definitely aim to go again over the summer, but the great beauty of being a supporter, even more than the members' room (which is pretty nice and used as an office by numerous freelancers, to judge from the earnest people sitting hunched over Apple laptops), is to be able to drop into exhibitions when you have a spare hour and not feel you have to take in everything because you are never going to see it again.
My school friend and I had a lot to catch up with after four years. Since I last saw her she has qualified as a Lay Minister in the Church of England. I should think she will be very good at it.
Thursday, 1 June 2017
two more exhibitions and an old friend
I have just got back from London. I try not to go up to town twice in the same week, but sometimes it happens anyway. And since I was there I caught Vanessa Bell at Dulwich before it closes this weekend, and had a first look at Giacometti at Tate Modern. And then had supper with an old school friend which was the whole point of going into London in the first place. And then the trains home ran late, though there would not have been enough time to write about the exhibitions in any event, so more of them tomorrow.
Wednesday, 31 May 2017
works in progress
I went to the hairdresser this morning, and like Spike Milligan who could not understand why they cut down hundred foot trees to make him look shorter, was bemused to emerge with seemingly so much less hair when I am trying to grow it. My hairdresser did explain before she started to do anything that we had reached a decision point. Was my aim now to continue to grow my hair, or keep it at around its present length, which is a lot longer than it was but nowhere near collar length? I said I wanted to let it grow longer to see what it would be like, since if it turned out to be awful it she could always chop it off again, and she was pleased because growing out naturally curly silver hair is a project she doesn't get to do every day, while middling length crops for middle aged ladies are bread and butter fare. Though as she is a shrewd businesswoman and all round decent human being I daresay she'd have sounded enthusiastic if I'd said that the current curly halo was as far as I was going.
Apparently we have now reached a tricky phase of the project, as the bit growing on top of my head has to grow down to reach the sides before the whole thing can be shaped into a proper bob. Once that's done the hair can be allowed go down further or be kept up around the level of my jawline without any major reworking. She warned me that the top might go increasingly sticky-uppy for the next five weeks or so, before gravity defeated it and it consented to grow downwards instead, so in the meantime she would shape the bits round the back to make the top look more as though it was that length on purpose. I have trust in her judgement, and anyway I'm curious to see what happens next. If the whole project comes to naught and she ends up cutting it short then never mind, having vaguely comical hair for a few weeks is not a major problem in the grand scheme of things. I think she is genuinely fired up by the great reshaping project. Apparently she has persuaded one of her other clients who has had short hair for ages to try growing it.
I saw my parents for lunch, while the Systems Administrator waited for my mystery parcel. I am expecting a couple of consignments of plants, and thought this one might be from the nursery in deepest Lincolnshire that does some unusual things at very reasonable prices, but does not use Paypal or have a secure online credit card facility so that I ended up sending them a limit cheque. An email from the delivery company arrived yesterday saying that the parcel would be arriving today, but didn't say who the parcel was from, which fitted with the Lincolnshire nursery's slight lack of polish in the customer facing direction. However, when I got home the box standing in the hall was branded Ashwood Nurseries. I was impressed. I only put the order in with them the day before yesterday.
It was a tall, narrow box, and I cut the parcel tape so that I could look in at the top to see my plants nicely nestled at the bottom, all leafy and intact. The instructions on the box actually said to open the bottom of the box and let the plants slide out, which I did, carefully, and out they came accompanied by a scattering of compost over the kitchen floor. I have bought from Ashwood before and they have lovely packaging. The plants had bags round their pots, to keep the compost in (or at least most of it) and the roots damp while keeping the packaging dry, then the bagged pots were taped into a shallow box that fitted snugly inside the deep one. The pots could not move around and would not tumble over each other if the package were tipped during transit, so much better than jamming everything in with balls of scrunched up newspaper.
They were three salvias. Not strictly necessary, since I have enough other things to be getting on with in the garden without introducing three extra pots to water, but I love salvias and they are so good for late summer colour when a lot of the border perennials have finished flowering. The absolute pick was Salvia tubiflora, with orange flowers, which I have wanted for ages but last year Ashwood ran out of stock before I got round to ordering any. Then I got a red 'Royal Bumble' to go with the new red dahlia, and the snapdragons growing on from seed. The SA admired 'Royal Bumble' at Chelsea and while I am officer in charge of plant sourcing I do try to take account of what the SA likes as well as indulging my own tastes. Finally I went for Salvia patens 'Cambridge Blue' to go on the terrace. The pale yellow dahlia it is supposed to go with is growing on nicely, but the Cosmos 'Xanthos' are still weedy little things and the pale blue Convolulus sabiatus is still in Lincolnshire, so that particular scheme may or may not be working out.
Apparently we have now reached a tricky phase of the project, as the bit growing on top of my head has to grow down to reach the sides before the whole thing can be shaped into a proper bob. Once that's done the hair can be allowed go down further or be kept up around the level of my jawline without any major reworking. She warned me that the top might go increasingly sticky-uppy for the next five weeks or so, before gravity defeated it and it consented to grow downwards instead, so in the meantime she would shape the bits round the back to make the top look more as though it was that length on purpose. I have trust in her judgement, and anyway I'm curious to see what happens next. If the whole project comes to naught and she ends up cutting it short then never mind, having vaguely comical hair for a few weeks is not a major problem in the grand scheme of things. I think she is genuinely fired up by the great reshaping project. Apparently she has persuaded one of her other clients who has had short hair for ages to try growing it.
I saw my parents for lunch, while the Systems Administrator waited for my mystery parcel. I am expecting a couple of consignments of plants, and thought this one might be from the nursery in deepest Lincolnshire that does some unusual things at very reasonable prices, but does not use Paypal or have a secure online credit card facility so that I ended up sending them a limit cheque. An email from the delivery company arrived yesterday saying that the parcel would be arriving today, but didn't say who the parcel was from, which fitted with the Lincolnshire nursery's slight lack of polish in the customer facing direction. However, when I got home the box standing in the hall was branded Ashwood Nurseries. I was impressed. I only put the order in with them the day before yesterday.
It was a tall, narrow box, and I cut the parcel tape so that I could look in at the top to see my plants nicely nestled at the bottom, all leafy and intact. The instructions on the box actually said to open the bottom of the box and let the plants slide out, which I did, carefully, and out they came accompanied by a scattering of compost over the kitchen floor. I have bought from Ashwood before and they have lovely packaging. The plants had bags round their pots, to keep the compost in (or at least most of it) and the roots damp while keeping the packaging dry, then the bagged pots were taped into a shallow box that fitted snugly inside the deep one. The pots could not move around and would not tumble over each other if the package were tipped during transit, so much better than jamming everything in with balls of scrunched up newspaper.
They were three salvias. Not strictly necessary, since I have enough other things to be getting on with in the garden without introducing three extra pots to water, but I love salvias and they are so good for late summer colour when a lot of the border perennials have finished flowering. The absolute pick was Salvia tubiflora, with orange flowers, which I have wanted for ages but last year Ashwood ran out of stock before I got round to ordering any. Then I got a red 'Royal Bumble' to go with the new red dahlia, and the snapdragons growing on from seed. The SA admired 'Royal Bumble' at Chelsea and while I am officer in charge of plant sourcing I do try to take account of what the SA likes as well as indulging my own tastes. Finally I went for Salvia patens 'Cambridge Blue' to go on the terrace. The pale yellow dahlia it is supposed to go with is growing on nicely, but the Cosmos 'Xanthos' are still weedy little things and the pale blue Convolulus sabiatus is still in Lincolnshire, so that particular scheme may or may not be working out.
Tuesday, 30 May 2017
two exhibitions
I went today to see the Chris Ofili tapestry Weaving Magic at the National Gallery. It had flickered on my cultural radar but no more, however the friend I went with had picked up on it, and we agreed that it would make a good pairing with Howard Hodgkin at the National Portrait Gallery.
The tapestry is really very impressive and great fun. It hangs in splendid isolation in the Sunley room, where the walls have been covered in coordinating Ofili designed grisaille figures. The original design for the tapestry, or strictly speaking the three tapestries because it consists of a triptych, was done in watercolour, not even the dry, precise watercolour of an eighteenth century landscape painter but the bleeding, splashy sort that really puts the water into colour. Unlike Grayson Perry's tapestries, the new Ofili tapestry was handwoven by a team of five people working for three years in close collaboration with the artist. After the exhibition it will hang permanently in the Clothworkers' Hall in the City of London.
As was explained in the accompanying short film, the Clothworkers' Company offered the commission to Chris Ofili partly on the strength of his some of his previous work designing stage sets, because they knew he could envisage his work at that scale. He was initially cautious in case a commission meant that they would want to influence the the work, but accepted their assurances that they wanted a genuine Ofili and would not interfere. The choice of watercolour had an element of mischief: he wanted to see how the weavers could translate something so graduated and subtle into the solid medium of wool. The answer turned out to be, with great skill.
Figures in the two side panels pull back curtains to reveal two other figures in a landscape beyond, one playing a guitar while the other reclines drinking from a cocktail glass perennially replenished by a barman in the sky. It is a very watery landscape. The whole thing is done in jewel colours, purples, emerald greens and bright blues, very rich and intense and very subtly blended. The whole thing is wonderful, and possibly slightly kitsch. I would need to think about that. Most people would not class the Fauvists or Henry Matisse as kitsch, so would I count the original Ofili watercolour as kitsch, or was that my response to seeing it blown up quite so large and enacted in tapestry?
My only gripe was that I would have liked to know more about the process of weaving, how they started a new colour in and secured it so that there weren't any sags or bobbles, whether they floated threads across the back between areas using that colour, what was the thread count (or whatever the term is when it is tapestry), how many colours there were in total, and so on. I wish they had made two little extra bits to hang somewhere in the room, that we were allowed to touch and so that we could see what the back looked like. The accompanying book cost twenty-five pounds and didn't give any more information than we'd already gleaned from the short film. I don't know why I would have liked to be told all that when I am quite happy to spend an afternoon looking at Dutch landscapes of the Golden Age without a tutorial on oil painting techniques, but that's what happens when you start crossing the divide between Art and Craft, suddenly you want to know how it's done.
I went into the Howard Hodgkin knowing very little about him, beyond the bare facts that he was moderately famous, died recently, collected Indian art which he loaned to a very well reviewed exhibition at the Ashmolean which I should have loved to go to but didn't, and that his paintings were colourful. And I liked the one the gallery was using in the advert. My friend knew slightly less, so we visited in a spirit of open minded curiosity.
All except the very early works were pretty abstract, since rather than represent what his sitters looked like, he was painting what he felt when he thought about the encounter. In fact, if I'd been whoever was represented by the rather muddy square of colours on the way in to the exhibition I'd have worried that Howard Hodgkin might not have enjoyed the time he spent with me very much. The show was hung chronologically, and for the first couple of rooms as we progressed through the 1960s I wondered whether my friend minded having paid ten quid to get in. As we hit the 1980s Hodgkin's use of paint became freer, and we began to get to paintings like the one in the advert, and I began to feel cheerful. And I liked the way he continued the paintings up over the frames.
It is probably very shallow and childish to like colour and movement, but I do. Anyway, if a painting is almost utterly devoid of anything representational, and carries no narrative content that anybody not privy to the contents of the artist's head could understand, what are you left with? So I love Rothko and Paul Klee, and I liked some of the later Howard Hodgkins a lot. I am sorry that he died just before the exhibition opened so could not see his paintings from so many decades gathered together, and a new audience discovering them.
The tapestry is really very impressive and great fun. It hangs in splendid isolation in the Sunley room, where the walls have been covered in coordinating Ofili designed grisaille figures. The original design for the tapestry, or strictly speaking the three tapestries because it consists of a triptych, was done in watercolour, not even the dry, precise watercolour of an eighteenth century landscape painter but the bleeding, splashy sort that really puts the water into colour. Unlike Grayson Perry's tapestries, the new Ofili tapestry was handwoven by a team of five people working for three years in close collaboration with the artist. After the exhibition it will hang permanently in the Clothworkers' Hall in the City of London.
As was explained in the accompanying short film, the Clothworkers' Company offered the commission to Chris Ofili partly on the strength of his some of his previous work designing stage sets, because they knew he could envisage his work at that scale. He was initially cautious in case a commission meant that they would want to influence the the work, but accepted their assurances that they wanted a genuine Ofili and would not interfere. The choice of watercolour had an element of mischief: he wanted to see how the weavers could translate something so graduated and subtle into the solid medium of wool. The answer turned out to be, with great skill.
Figures in the two side panels pull back curtains to reveal two other figures in a landscape beyond, one playing a guitar while the other reclines drinking from a cocktail glass perennially replenished by a barman in the sky. It is a very watery landscape. The whole thing is done in jewel colours, purples, emerald greens and bright blues, very rich and intense and very subtly blended. The whole thing is wonderful, and possibly slightly kitsch. I would need to think about that. Most people would not class the Fauvists or Henry Matisse as kitsch, so would I count the original Ofili watercolour as kitsch, or was that my response to seeing it blown up quite so large and enacted in tapestry?
My only gripe was that I would have liked to know more about the process of weaving, how they started a new colour in and secured it so that there weren't any sags or bobbles, whether they floated threads across the back between areas using that colour, what was the thread count (or whatever the term is when it is tapestry), how many colours there were in total, and so on. I wish they had made two little extra bits to hang somewhere in the room, that we were allowed to touch and so that we could see what the back looked like. The accompanying book cost twenty-five pounds and didn't give any more information than we'd already gleaned from the short film. I don't know why I would have liked to be told all that when I am quite happy to spend an afternoon looking at Dutch landscapes of the Golden Age without a tutorial on oil painting techniques, but that's what happens when you start crossing the divide between Art and Craft, suddenly you want to know how it's done.
I went into the Howard Hodgkin knowing very little about him, beyond the bare facts that he was moderately famous, died recently, collected Indian art which he loaned to a very well reviewed exhibition at the Ashmolean which I should have loved to go to but didn't, and that his paintings were colourful. And I liked the one the gallery was using in the advert. My friend knew slightly less, so we visited in a spirit of open minded curiosity.
All except the very early works were pretty abstract, since rather than represent what his sitters looked like, he was painting what he felt when he thought about the encounter. In fact, if I'd been whoever was represented by the rather muddy square of colours on the way in to the exhibition I'd have worried that Howard Hodgkin might not have enjoyed the time he spent with me very much. The show was hung chronologically, and for the first couple of rooms as we progressed through the 1960s I wondered whether my friend minded having paid ten quid to get in. As we hit the 1980s Hodgkin's use of paint became freer, and we began to get to paintings like the one in the advert, and I began to feel cheerful. And I liked the way he continued the paintings up over the frames.
It is probably very shallow and childish to like colour and movement, but I do. Anyway, if a painting is almost utterly devoid of anything representational, and carries no narrative content that anybody not privy to the contents of the artist's head could understand, what are you left with? So I love Rothko and Paul Klee, and I liked some of the later Howard Hodgkins a lot. I am sorry that he died just before the exhibition opened so could not see his paintings from so many decades gathered together, and a new audience discovering them.
Monday, 29 May 2017
planting, weeding and making more
My gamble that I could get away with leaving watering the pots outside the greenhouse until morning after getting back from yesterday's concert paid off, as the overnight thunderstorm brought heavy rain. The three downpours we've had in the past couple of weeks have been enough to make a real difference to at least the top few inches of soil. Planting things out in the back garden today I didn't find a solid layer of bone dry earth just a couple of inches below the surface, as often happens after summer rain. The aquifers must be low after the driest winter in twenty years and there may be trouble ahead (though Tendring has never had a hosepipe ban yet. The last time I saw figures we had the lowest leakage rate and the most expensive water of anywhere in the country, but we have never had a ban) but for the time being garden catastrophe is averted.
Most of what I planted today and yesterday was left over from last year's seed sowing, and looking rather the worse for wear in their pots, so I hope that planting them was not a complete waste of time. The contrast between the huge, fat Digitalis x mertonensis I planted in the ditch bed last autumn, and the wizened little plants that stayed in their pots, was stark. But given an unrestricted root run the latter might find a new lease of life. And I weeded as I went, so the day's work won't have been entirely futile. I gave the Digitalis a scattering of pink Viola odorata around their skirts to finish them off. Those came from the already rooting side shoots I potted up back in the spring, when the parent plants were flowering and I could see what colour they were. The sweet violets had rooted nicely in their seven centimetre pots, so I now know that if you have an existing patch and would like more they are extremely easy to bulk up.
The lupins have suddenly gone over, both the tree lupins and the delightful blue Lupinus chamissonis, a Californian native that can't quite make up its mind whether it is a shrub or not. It is woodier and more branching than a traditional herbaceous border lupin, but laxer and lower growing than your classic Lupinus arboreus. I was slightly surprised they had faded so quickly, and that they did not appear to be setting seed, and when I looked more closely the denuded flower spikes were seething with lupin aphids. Lupin aphids are horrible, larger than normal greenfly, and I guess they must be unpalatable to birds because nothing seems to eat them. Greenfly on the roses is never an issue, and I rejoice in the mornings when I pull the bathroom blind up and see the great tits scuttling up and down the stems of the roses, but lupin aphids are another matter. I wondered briefly whether to spray them, but hoped that ladybirds or something would sort the problem out, and of course the trouble with spraying, even with the sort of organic spray that doesn't have a withdrawal period for edible crops, is that you spray the ladybirds as well as the aphids.
The Californian tree poppy is getting into its stride, at last. It was planted in June 2012, my third attempt at getting one to go and if it didn't work I had sworn there wouldn't be a fourth, while feeling very frustrated because although Romneya coulteri is notoriously difficult to establish in the garden from a pot, our conditions would have been ideal for it if only any of the previous plants had lived long enough to find out. This spring I have finally seen shoots emerging a yard from the position of the original plant. It has started to run, which is what they will do when they are happy. The grey leaves and white flowers are so beautiful that one is delighted that it is, in fact, rather a thug once it gets going.
The Althaea cannabina have started spreading usefully as well. This is a pink mallow like a very refined hollyhock, tall and multistemmed whose leaves are smaller and more pointed than hollyhock leaves, and flowers smaller than hollyhock flowers. I bought one after admiring it in Beth Chatto's dry garden, then bought a couple more because my attempts to raise more from seed had come to nought. The young plants were grazed by rabbits last year then ravaged by drought this spring, and the only self sown seedlings germinated right at the front of the bed so I had to move them, wondering if I had left it too late since the advice on the web was that they disliked transplanting and it should be done while they were young. Now all three of the plants I bought have begun to shoot up, and the transplanted seedlings are still alive, apart from one that I pulled up by mistake with a handful of horsetail, and my plan to have a veil of small pink hollyhocks hovering over the asters along with the Verbena bonariensis is starting to take shape. I replanted my unintended victim with a sprinkling of miccorrhizae and half a can of water and hoped for the best, but I can see why they wouldn't move well as mature plants, for it had a long, deep tap root.
Most of what I planted today and yesterday was left over from last year's seed sowing, and looking rather the worse for wear in their pots, so I hope that planting them was not a complete waste of time. The contrast between the huge, fat Digitalis x mertonensis I planted in the ditch bed last autumn, and the wizened little plants that stayed in their pots, was stark. But given an unrestricted root run the latter might find a new lease of life. And I weeded as I went, so the day's work won't have been entirely futile. I gave the Digitalis a scattering of pink Viola odorata around their skirts to finish them off. Those came from the already rooting side shoots I potted up back in the spring, when the parent plants were flowering and I could see what colour they were. The sweet violets had rooted nicely in their seven centimetre pots, so I now know that if you have an existing patch and would like more they are extremely easy to bulk up.
The lupins have suddenly gone over, both the tree lupins and the delightful blue Lupinus chamissonis, a Californian native that can't quite make up its mind whether it is a shrub or not. It is woodier and more branching than a traditional herbaceous border lupin, but laxer and lower growing than your classic Lupinus arboreus. I was slightly surprised they had faded so quickly, and that they did not appear to be setting seed, and when I looked more closely the denuded flower spikes were seething with lupin aphids. Lupin aphids are horrible, larger than normal greenfly, and I guess they must be unpalatable to birds because nothing seems to eat them. Greenfly on the roses is never an issue, and I rejoice in the mornings when I pull the bathroom blind up and see the great tits scuttling up and down the stems of the roses, but lupin aphids are another matter. I wondered briefly whether to spray them, but hoped that ladybirds or something would sort the problem out, and of course the trouble with spraying, even with the sort of organic spray that doesn't have a withdrawal period for edible crops, is that you spray the ladybirds as well as the aphids.
The Californian tree poppy is getting into its stride, at last. It was planted in June 2012, my third attempt at getting one to go and if it didn't work I had sworn there wouldn't be a fourth, while feeling very frustrated because although Romneya coulteri is notoriously difficult to establish in the garden from a pot, our conditions would have been ideal for it if only any of the previous plants had lived long enough to find out. This spring I have finally seen shoots emerging a yard from the position of the original plant. It has started to run, which is what they will do when they are happy. The grey leaves and white flowers are so beautiful that one is delighted that it is, in fact, rather a thug once it gets going.
The Althaea cannabina have started spreading usefully as well. This is a pink mallow like a very refined hollyhock, tall and multistemmed whose leaves are smaller and more pointed than hollyhock leaves, and flowers smaller than hollyhock flowers. I bought one after admiring it in Beth Chatto's dry garden, then bought a couple more because my attempts to raise more from seed had come to nought. The young plants were grazed by rabbits last year then ravaged by drought this spring, and the only self sown seedlings germinated right at the front of the bed so I had to move them, wondering if I had left it too late since the advice on the web was that they disliked transplanting and it should be done while they were young. Now all three of the plants I bought have begun to shoot up, and the transplanted seedlings are still alive, apart from one that I pulled up by mistake with a handful of horsetail, and my plan to have a veil of small pink hollyhocks hovering over the asters along with the Verbena bonariensis is starting to take shape. I replanted my unintended victim with a sprinkling of miccorrhizae and half a can of water and hoped for the best, but I can see why they wouldn't move well as mature plants, for it had a long, deep tap root.
Sunday, 28 May 2017
out for the summer
I finally got around to putting the more fragile garden ornaments back outside for the summer. There is the white stone with the hole in it, abstracted from a beach near Flamborough Head, and as seen at this year's Chelsea Flower Show. The designer was interviewed on the BBC and said that all her stones were going back to the beach after the show was over. I felt a bit bad at the time about nicking mine, sneaking it quickly into my anorak pocket, but it was only the one. It wasn't as though I were scooping them up by the bulk bag.
There are the two painted hens with folk art flowers all over them from the Culture Vulture catalogue. I quite like them but they are kitsch and the paint quality is slightly iffy. It was the first time I had bought anything from Culture Vulture, and the hens came courtesy of a heavy discount on your initial purchase. I made a mental note that Culture Vulture must employ a very good photographer to illustrate their catalogue, so that I could apply the requisite degree of scepticism the next time anything caught my eye. The hens go out on the terrace (or patio) which is becoming so cluttered with pots of alpines, cottage pinks and now the orange corner that a touch of kitsch folk artery fits in fine.
Then there are the blue glass leaves that I hang from the branches of the crab apple by the blue summerhouse. I do rather like the blue glass, and could do with some more since the tree has grown. They are rounded, the shape of elongated pancakes, and quite thick. I bring them in for the winter because I am afraid that if frost gets into the tops where the metal hanging loops are embedded in the glass then they will fracture, though they would look nice dangling from the bare branches on a winter's day. I once overheard somebody grumbling to her friend that the neighbours hung crystals in their garden which bounced light in through her office window in a very distracting way, and her friend said that having crystals in your garden was rather vulgar anyway. I wondered if the glass leaves were vulgar, but decided it didn't matter, although I'm quite sure that Nicole de Vesian doesn't have them in her garden.
Mr Fluffy decided that hanging things from the tree was very exciting, and raced up it. Then he advanced as far as he could towards the ends of the branches, and for extra support rested his front feet on my head. Then he sat in the middle of the tree, purring and squeaking, until eventually he was persuaded to bounce back down without breaking off either of the clumps of mistletoe. I smeared ripe berries against the underside of some of the branches a few years ago, then pretty much forgot that I'd done it, and was excited when I discovered I actually had two mistletoe plants. The tree is not very big yet, so I hope they will not harm it. In the meantime I have no feeling for how fragile the mistletoe is, or its powers of regeneration if the whole plant should be broken off at the base.
I came in from the garden early to go to hear the Albion Quartet at Wrabness church. They were very exciting, though being a hopeless middlebrow I enjoyed the Schubert they finished with much more than the Gerald Barry at the start. I keep hoping that if I go on listening to contemporary classical music then eventually the penny will drop and I will Get It, but I still don't. The performers must know in their hearts that most of us don't, as they never risk placing it at the end of the programme, when we could leave before it started. As I set off on my way home it began to rain heavily, and I drove the rest of the way hoping that it was raining on the garden and not just at the far end of the Tendring peninsular. By a strange coincidence Radio 3 was broadcasting on the topic O Albion in Words and Music. You just knew the poem about lying in bed at four in the morning panicking about death had to be by Larkin.
There are the two painted hens with folk art flowers all over them from the Culture Vulture catalogue. I quite like them but they are kitsch and the paint quality is slightly iffy. It was the first time I had bought anything from Culture Vulture, and the hens came courtesy of a heavy discount on your initial purchase. I made a mental note that Culture Vulture must employ a very good photographer to illustrate their catalogue, so that I could apply the requisite degree of scepticism the next time anything caught my eye. The hens go out on the terrace (or patio) which is becoming so cluttered with pots of alpines, cottage pinks and now the orange corner that a touch of kitsch folk artery fits in fine.
Then there are the blue glass leaves that I hang from the branches of the crab apple by the blue summerhouse. I do rather like the blue glass, and could do with some more since the tree has grown. They are rounded, the shape of elongated pancakes, and quite thick. I bring them in for the winter because I am afraid that if frost gets into the tops where the metal hanging loops are embedded in the glass then they will fracture, though they would look nice dangling from the bare branches on a winter's day. I once overheard somebody grumbling to her friend that the neighbours hung crystals in their garden which bounced light in through her office window in a very distracting way, and her friend said that having crystals in your garden was rather vulgar anyway. I wondered if the glass leaves were vulgar, but decided it didn't matter, although I'm quite sure that Nicole de Vesian doesn't have them in her garden.
Mr Fluffy decided that hanging things from the tree was very exciting, and raced up it. Then he advanced as far as he could towards the ends of the branches, and for extra support rested his front feet on my head. Then he sat in the middle of the tree, purring and squeaking, until eventually he was persuaded to bounce back down without breaking off either of the clumps of mistletoe. I smeared ripe berries against the underside of some of the branches a few years ago, then pretty much forgot that I'd done it, and was excited when I discovered I actually had two mistletoe plants. The tree is not very big yet, so I hope they will not harm it. In the meantime I have no feeling for how fragile the mistletoe is, or its powers of regeneration if the whole plant should be broken off at the base.
I came in from the garden early to go to hear the Albion Quartet at Wrabness church. They were very exciting, though being a hopeless middlebrow I enjoyed the Schubert they finished with much more than the Gerald Barry at the start. I keep hoping that if I go on listening to contemporary classical music then eventually the penny will drop and I will Get It, but I still don't. The performers must know in their hearts that most of us don't, as they never risk placing it at the end of the programme, when we could leave before it started. As I set off on my way home it began to rain heavily, and I drove the rest of the way hoping that it was raining on the garden and not just at the far end of the Tendring peninsular. By a strange coincidence Radio 3 was broadcasting on the topic O Albion in Words and Music. You just knew the poem about lying in bed at four in the morning panicking about death had to be by Larkin.
Saturday, 27 May 2017
ever the optimist
Today I spent mostly pottering about in the greenhouse. Originally it was just going to be for a couple of hours, before I went and planted yesterday's abandoned wheelbarrow of plants in the back garden, but then I kept going, apart from the interlude after I ran inside when it began to rain very hard and I remembered that I had left the bedroom window open and thought the rain would splash in and mark the top of the Shaker boxes that live on the chest of drawers under the window. Then instead of running back out again in the rain I ended up writing a reply to an email from my Japanese gardening friend. This is how the hours vanish. One minute you are potting on Papaver orientale seedlings, the next emailing Japan.
I am not sure why I had a tray of Papaver orientale 'Royal Wedding' seedlings. Oriental poppies do well here, putting up happily with the light soil, and I see on the internet that 'Royal Wedding' is very attractive, white with a black central splotch, but why did I order a white one? I ended up putting in three seed orders, one from Derry Watkins because she does such interesting plants, and one with Chiltern Seeds because they had some things that I wanted, and then a third with a friend's gardening club because I could get a discount, and she was keen to sign up as many takers as possible to make sure the club qualified for the full fifty per cent off (we did). Perhaps at some point 'Royal Wedding' sounded appealing, or maybe the packet came free with a magazine.
Acinos alpinus was definitely bought on purpose. A member of the same family as mint and oregano, it is a low grower with small leaves that look rather like thyme, and should have little purple flowers, attractive to insects. After pricking out I had one and a third trays of seedlings, which had grown on into chunky plantlets with roots filling their modules. I moved them on into seven centimetre pots with the intention of planting them out into the gravel of the railway garden once they have fully rooted into their new pots. I don't want them sitting around in a cold frame until next year. I don't have the space, and they look like the sort of thing that would quietly rot and die. Sharp drainage, sunshine and fresh air is what I think they need.
Marrubium supinum, with the delightful common name of Scallop Shell Horehound, is another drought tolerant labiate. If you have never heard of it under either guise I wouldn't be surprised. I certainly hadn't, and if you Google it the first entries to come up are all from American nurseries. Alas, in north Essex it will not be graced by hummingbirds, but I look forward to it being cold, heat and drought tolerant and needing NO SUMMER WATER. As the seedlings grew the leaves were bigger than I'd visualised, though attractive in a wavy, furry, felty way, but out of scale for the railway planting. I potted on the seedlings anyway while wondering quite what to do with them, before inspiration struck and I thought they would do very well for ground cover by the entrance to the garden, where the soil was bad to begin with and worse after the remains of a bulk bag of builders' sand got dumped there, and they would be highly unlikely to receive any SUMMER WATER beyond what fell from the heavens.
At the moment the site is a muddle with two dead sea buckthorn, cause of death unknown, several odd fence posts from now defunct fencing schemes, a wooden anti rabbit gate long out of use and that you couldn't shut if you wanted to because brambles have grown through it, a lot of weedy grass growing back where I weeded it previously, and the dustbins. Just as soon as I have a spare couple of days it will be transformed with a Buddleia alternifolia (so long as my investigations don't suggest the sea buckthorn died of honey fungus, but I'm working on the assumption it was lousy soil plus wind rock), ground cover (the Marrubium. There is not going to be enough but with any luck it will seed itself), an art installation based on a quotation from Samuel Beckett, and maybe even a reed screen to hide the brambles and a box for the dustbins. I will need the Systems Administrator's input for the latter, and indeed to install the installation, and to take the chainsaw to the dead buckthorn to save me having to do it by hand with the bow saw. I have a roll of reed screen left over from something else, but we do not have anything to make a dustbin compound out of, unless the SA has got something stashed away, like the recycled pews that in the end yielded a set of steps and an auricula stand. Actually, I know there are some oak planks down in the garage that were surplus to requirements when reflooring the study, but I suspect the SA would be resistant to the idea of using them for the dustbins.
You can see why the morning's potting took all day. The task of sorting out the entrance that I blithely described as needing a couple of spare days is more like a week's project, when you go through all the things that need to be done. There's about three square metres of cobble mulch that would need moving as well. That's no light task.
I am not sure why I had a tray of Papaver orientale 'Royal Wedding' seedlings. Oriental poppies do well here, putting up happily with the light soil, and I see on the internet that 'Royal Wedding' is very attractive, white with a black central splotch, but why did I order a white one? I ended up putting in three seed orders, one from Derry Watkins because she does such interesting plants, and one with Chiltern Seeds because they had some things that I wanted, and then a third with a friend's gardening club because I could get a discount, and she was keen to sign up as many takers as possible to make sure the club qualified for the full fifty per cent off (we did). Perhaps at some point 'Royal Wedding' sounded appealing, or maybe the packet came free with a magazine.
Acinos alpinus was definitely bought on purpose. A member of the same family as mint and oregano, it is a low grower with small leaves that look rather like thyme, and should have little purple flowers, attractive to insects. After pricking out I had one and a third trays of seedlings, which had grown on into chunky plantlets with roots filling their modules. I moved them on into seven centimetre pots with the intention of planting them out into the gravel of the railway garden once they have fully rooted into their new pots. I don't want them sitting around in a cold frame until next year. I don't have the space, and they look like the sort of thing that would quietly rot and die. Sharp drainage, sunshine and fresh air is what I think they need.
Marrubium supinum, with the delightful common name of Scallop Shell Horehound, is another drought tolerant labiate. If you have never heard of it under either guise I wouldn't be surprised. I certainly hadn't, and if you Google it the first entries to come up are all from American nurseries. Alas, in north Essex it will not be graced by hummingbirds, but I look forward to it being cold, heat and drought tolerant and needing NO SUMMER WATER. As the seedlings grew the leaves were bigger than I'd visualised, though attractive in a wavy, furry, felty way, but out of scale for the railway planting. I potted on the seedlings anyway while wondering quite what to do with them, before inspiration struck and I thought they would do very well for ground cover by the entrance to the garden, where the soil was bad to begin with and worse after the remains of a bulk bag of builders' sand got dumped there, and they would be highly unlikely to receive any SUMMER WATER beyond what fell from the heavens.
At the moment the site is a muddle with two dead sea buckthorn, cause of death unknown, several odd fence posts from now defunct fencing schemes, a wooden anti rabbit gate long out of use and that you couldn't shut if you wanted to because brambles have grown through it, a lot of weedy grass growing back where I weeded it previously, and the dustbins. Just as soon as I have a spare couple of days it will be transformed with a Buddleia alternifolia (so long as my investigations don't suggest the sea buckthorn died of honey fungus, but I'm working on the assumption it was lousy soil plus wind rock), ground cover (the Marrubium. There is not going to be enough but with any luck it will seed itself), an art installation based on a quotation from Samuel Beckett, and maybe even a reed screen to hide the brambles and a box for the dustbins. I will need the Systems Administrator's input for the latter, and indeed to install the installation, and to take the chainsaw to the dead buckthorn to save me having to do it by hand with the bow saw. I have a roll of reed screen left over from something else, but we do not have anything to make a dustbin compound out of, unless the SA has got something stashed away, like the recycled pews that in the end yielded a set of steps and an auricula stand. Actually, I know there are some oak planks down in the garage that were surplus to requirements when reflooring the study, but I suspect the SA would be resistant to the idea of using them for the dustbins.
You can see why the morning's potting took all day. The task of sorting out the entrance that I blithely described as needing a couple of spare days is more like a week's project, when you go through all the things that need to be done. There's about three square metres of cobble mulch that would need moving as well. That's no light task.
Friday, 26 May 2017
Britain basks, I weed
It is the sort of weather during which Britain is traditionally expected to bask. That's what the newspapers always say, Britain basks in the however many degrees celsius it was, illustrated with a photograph of a middle aged couple in deckchairs on Brighton beach or young people lying down in Hyde Park. I must admit I am not awfully keen on basking. I can manage a couple of days in July with a reasonably good grace, but that's about my limit, and late May is definitely too early. I've got things to do, without spending all day lying down.
Still, with James Basson winning another Chelsea gold medal for another Mediterranean themed show garden, our front garden is bang on trend. Olive tree, fig, myrtles, fennel, Phlomis italica, lavender, they are all happy to bask. The foliage of the little bulbs is yellowing rapidly in the heat, and adds that James Basson show garden weedy look, as do the actual weeds. The Dianthus carthusianorum, raised from seed and planted last year, are sending up their spindly stalks topped with pink flowers, also very Chelsea, and I have a tray of Dianthus cruentus seedlings coming along to keep them company. The little Viola corsica I planted out a few weeks back are battling along, but I watered them to be on the safe side. Self sown asparagus is sending up great fat stalks that are far better than anything I managed to grow in the vegetable garden.
The planting in the front garden is chosen to be highly drought tolerant. Where it was not chosen wisely it has evolved to be so: the list of plants tried in the long bed and no longer with me is long, and depressing or educational depending on your point of view. Trying Phlox was just silly, but I blame youthful enthusiasm and inexperience coupled with the Svengali influence of Christopher Lloyd. It pays to choose your guru carefully. Falling under the sway of somebody gardening on clay that has already been cultivated as a garden for a century is not the best idea when you garden on deep sand and gravel in the driest part of the country. I was surprised that alliums weren't having it, but they weren't, and while Centaura montana looks as though it might be drought tolerant with its grey leaves it turns out it is much happier on clay in the back garden. Cardoons likewise were a dwarf fiasco.
Colutea x media 'Copper Beauty' is very happy. It has grey leaves and burnt orange pea-shaped flowers, out now. I grow it near a purple leaved cherry, with bronze fennel and an orange flowered Potentilla within hailing distance, and they make a good combination. I am very fond of the Colutea and was gratified to see them extensively used in part of the Piet Oudolf designed walled garden at Scampston Hall in Yorkshire. The orange flowered Agastache I tried did not last. Agastache is not the longest lived thing, but they didn't seed themselves either. Life is too short to keep replacing it.
The grey leaved Perovskia that should have formed part of the group was an utter failure. Some journalists claim that it is a great plant for dry soil, the drier and poorer the better, but they can't have tried it themselves. It looks as though it should be happy in those conditions with its fine grey leaves, but it doesn't do at all. I must have killed half a dozen in various parts of the long bed before conceding that it was a very bad idea and was never going to work.
Even with the drought tolerant Mediterranean species I am going to have to do some watering. I noticed when watering in the greenhouse that the little myrtles I put in by the Systems Administrator's blue summerhouse in 2015 were looking very stressed. And as for the back garden. There is nothing as ambitious and ill-chosen as Phlox, but the asters are starting to look stressed, and some Digitalis x mertonensis I planted last year are beginning to droop. And I'm worried about the clematis, especially the ones that only went in a year ago. And I had better clamber in behind the oil tank and find out what is happening to the Sarcococca and rambling roses. Clearly there is no time to be wasted in basking.
Still, with James Basson winning another Chelsea gold medal for another Mediterranean themed show garden, our front garden is bang on trend. Olive tree, fig, myrtles, fennel, Phlomis italica, lavender, they are all happy to bask. The foliage of the little bulbs is yellowing rapidly in the heat, and adds that James Basson show garden weedy look, as do the actual weeds. The Dianthus carthusianorum, raised from seed and planted last year, are sending up their spindly stalks topped with pink flowers, also very Chelsea, and I have a tray of Dianthus cruentus seedlings coming along to keep them company. The little Viola corsica I planted out a few weeks back are battling along, but I watered them to be on the safe side. Self sown asparagus is sending up great fat stalks that are far better than anything I managed to grow in the vegetable garden.
The planting in the front garden is chosen to be highly drought tolerant. Where it was not chosen wisely it has evolved to be so: the list of plants tried in the long bed and no longer with me is long, and depressing or educational depending on your point of view. Trying Phlox was just silly, but I blame youthful enthusiasm and inexperience coupled with the Svengali influence of Christopher Lloyd. It pays to choose your guru carefully. Falling under the sway of somebody gardening on clay that has already been cultivated as a garden for a century is not the best idea when you garden on deep sand and gravel in the driest part of the country. I was surprised that alliums weren't having it, but they weren't, and while Centaura montana looks as though it might be drought tolerant with its grey leaves it turns out it is much happier on clay in the back garden. Cardoons likewise were a dwarf fiasco.
Colutea x media 'Copper Beauty' is very happy. It has grey leaves and burnt orange pea-shaped flowers, out now. I grow it near a purple leaved cherry, with bronze fennel and an orange flowered Potentilla within hailing distance, and they make a good combination. I am very fond of the Colutea and was gratified to see them extensively used in part of the Piet Oudolf designed walled garden at Scampston Hall in Yorkshire. The orange flowered Agastache I tried did not last. Agastache is not the longest lived thing, but they didn't seed themselves either. Life is too short to keep replacing it.
The grey leaved Perovskia that should have formed part of the group was an utter failure. Some journalists claim that it is a great plant for dry soil, the drier and poorer the better, but they can't have tried it themselves. It looks as though it should be happy in those conditions with its fine grey leaves, but it doesn't do at all. I must have killed half a dozen in various parts of the long bed before conceding that it was a very bad idea and was never going to work.
Even with the drought tolerant Mediterranean species I am going to have to do some watering. I noticed when watering in the greenhouse that the little myrtles I put in by the Systems Administrator's blue summerhouse in 2015 were looking very stressed. And as for the back garden. There is nothing as ambitious and ill-chosen as Phlox, but the asters are starting to look stressed, and some Digitalis x mertonensis I planted last year are beginning to droop. And I'm worried about the clematis, especially the ones that only went in a year ago. And I had better clamber in behind the oil tank and find out what is happening to the Sarcococca and rambling roses. Clearly there is no time to be wasted in basking.
Thursday, 25 May 2017
mistaken identity
I wandered down to the bottom of the garden this morning to see what it was doing. As I stood contemplating the rather dry bog bed, a series of high thin squeaks behind me revealed the presence of Mr Cool. He seemed pleased to see me, and as I stroked him a series of loud squawks announced the arrival of Our Ginger, followed by a black blur and a thud that were Mr Fluffy dropping out of a tree. I hadn't noticed him up there, but he is a keen and agile climber. Looking out of the greenhouse the other morning I saw him in the very top of the cut leaved elder in front of the oil tank, apparently hanging on to the thin branches with all four legs while the whole shrub swayed, like a cat in a cartoon.
Something in the scene was not right, however, apart from it raining cats. There should not have been a string of five purple primula weaving through the orange ones. I have never deliberately planted purple primula in the bog bed, whereas I did plant five more of what were purportedly the orange flowered Primula bulleyana earlier in the year. I could only conclude that the firm I dealt with had sent me the wrong thing.
Mistakes will happen. I know from experience in my own greenhouse and from working at the plant centre how difficult it can be to keep track of different batches of plants stood near each other. In the early stages of cultivation you tend to rely on standing them in blocks of the same variety rather than go to all the labour of writing or printing a label for every pot and sticking it in. So easy to muddle the blocks if you need to move them for any reason, or to pick pots out of the wrong block, because you are in a hurry and they look similar, or because even though they look wildly different you don't have the faintest idea what either of them are. I was once sent a Berkheya instead of a Beschorneria yuccoides, the former being a prickly leaved grey herbaceous species from South Africa and the latter having rosettes of strap shaped leaves and hailing from Mexico. When I rang to complain the person I spoke to initially suggested that maybe young plants looked different to mature ones, and when I explained that on the contrary the plant I'd been sent wasn't even a monocotyledon they insisted I sent a photo. After that they congratulated me on my plant identification skills and agreed that it was indeed a Berkheya, and I got a replacement.
Being English I hate having to complain to shops. I kept quiet about the twenty-five pink 'Little Beauty' tulips that should have been the orange 'Little Princess', partly because I see the vendor socially at gardening events and it would be embarrassing and partly because as I grow both varieties it didn't matter so much. My protest when one entire third of a viola order two years ago turned out to be substitutes was confined to some weak whimpering down the phone when the nursery person's mother who had been roped in to call to say the order was being dispatched mentioned it. I will not buy anything from either of them again, and they will never know the reason why, and that is the English way of doing things. But I did not want five purple primulas. I did not want them in absolute terms, because I wanted a big patch of apricot orange, not a mixture, and I did not want them anywhere near the orange ones because if they were what I suspected they were then they would hybridize and I would not get reliably apricot coloured seedlings in future, but a mixture of orange, purple and every colour in between.
So I managed to find the original confirmation email from the supplier that showed I had ordered Primula bulleyana, and sent off a reply explaining that I had been delighted with the plants and they were all doing very well, only the Primula bulleyana had all come out purple and must be something else, and they replied very promptly saying that in that case they must have been P. beesiana, which has identical leaves, and will cross with P. bulleyana. That was what I had guessed they were and was why I didn't want them, quite apart from the fact that they were the wrong colour. The supplier offered to send some more in a month's time when the next batch were ready, and I said that would be great and as I had been planning to buy some more from them maybe I could do that at the same time. I felt mean that they would incur a second delivery cost on the replacements, but what can you do? People who take themselves seriously as gardeners, and those who sell plants for a living, are apt to look down on the punters who are so shallow that they only buy plants from garden centres when they are in flower, but at least that way you know what you are getting.
Something in the scene was not right, however, apart from it raining cats. There should not have been a string of five purple primula weaving through the orange ones. I have never deliberately planted purple primula in the bog bed, whereas I did plant five more of what were purportedly the orange flowered Primula bulleyana earlier in the year. I could only conclude that the firm I dealt with had sent me the wrong thing.
Mistakes will happen. I know from experience in my own greenhouse and from working at the plant centre how difficult it can be to keep track of different batches of plants stood near each other. In the early stages of cultivation you tend to rely on standing them in blocks of the same variety rather than go to all the labour of writing or printing a label for every pot and sticking it in. So easy to muddle the blocks if you need to move them for any reason, or to pick pots out of the wrong block, because you are in a hurry and they look similar, or because even though they look wildly different you don't have the faintest idea what either of them are. I was once sent a Berkheya instead of a Beschorneria yuccoides, the former being a prickly leaved grey herbaceous species from South Africa and the latter having rosettes of strap shaped leaves and hailing from Mexico. When I rang to complain the person I spoke to initially suggested that maybe young plants looked different to mature ones, and when I explained that on the contrary the plant I'd been sent wasn't even a monocotyledon they insisted I sent a photo. After that they congratulated me on my plant identification skills and agreed that it was indeed a Berkheya, and I got a replacement.
Being English I hate having to complain to shops. I kept quiet about the twenty-five pink 'Little Beauty' tulips that should have been the orange 'Little Princess', partly because I see the vendor socially at gardening events and it would be embarrassing and partly because as I grow both varieties it didn't matter so much. My protest when one entire third of a viola order two years ago turned out to be substitutes was confined to some weak whimpering down the phone when the nursery person's mother who had been roped in to call to say the order was being dispatched mentioned it. I will not buy anything from either of them again, and they will never know the reason why, and that is the English way of doing things. But I did not want five purple primulas. I did not want them in absolute terms, because I wanted a big patch of apricot orange, not a mixture, and I did not want them anywhere near the orange ones because if they were what I suspected they were then they would hybridize and I would not get reliably apricot coloured seedlings in future, but a mixture of orange, purple and every colour in between.
So I managed to find the original confirmation email from the supplier that showed I had ordered Primula bulleyana, and sent off a reply explaining that I had been delighted with the plants and they were all doing very well, only the Primula bulleyana had all come out purple and must be something else, and they replied very promptly saying that in that case they must have been P. beesiana, which has identical leaves, and will cross with P. bulleyana. That was what I had guessed they were and was why I didn't want them, quite apart from the fact that they were the wrong colour. The supplier offered to send some more in a month's time when the next batch were ready, and I said that would be great and as I had been planning to buy some more from them maybe I could do that at the same time. I felt mean that they would incur a second delivery cost on the replacements, but what can you do? People who take themselves seriously as gardeners, and those who sell plants for a living, are apt to look down on the punters who are so shallow that they only buy plants from garden centres when they are in flower, but at least that way you know what you are getting.
Wednesday, 24 May 2017
we went to Chelsea
We spent yesterday at the Chelsea Flower Show. In the ordinary way I'd have blogged about it when I got home, but as I made my final tour of the Grand Pavilion I began to feel unnaturally tired, and on the train coming back began to feel rather shivery and prickly, and when we got in I simply went to bed, leaving the Systems Administrator to water the plants in the greenhouse.
Chelsea is changing, I am afraid. Doubtless I am changing too, and after attending for the past three decades I can't expect it to have the same impact as it did when I started off. I have encountered more plants since then, so the thrill of making new discoveries is less than when practically everything was a new discovery, and every show garden now is weighed up against my memories of hundreds of other show gardens. Nonetheless, Chelsea is changing, and not necessarily in a good way. It is becoming more of a lifestyle show, which is all very well, but not what it primarily used to be or what I would like it to be.
In the Grand Pavilion, which was always my favourite part of a fabulous whole, there were still some excellent displays and some proper nurseries. Rosy Hardy was there with the largest stand I've seen her on yet, and Kevock from Scotland where I could feast my eyes on blue Himalayan poppies and the wonderful red Meconopsis punicea without falling into the trap of trying to grow them in Essex. The City of Birmingham had produced a completely over-the-top tower of bedding in every colour imaginable so long as it was bright, topped by a Heath Robinsonesque animated train. There were sumptuous exotic orchids, and Protea from Kirstenboch exhibited by two fabulously enthusiastic South Africans. There was the identical same display of unbelievably huge and perfect delphiniums above massive bright orange begonias that Blackmore and Langdon have exhibited at every Chelsea I've been to, and so far as I know at every Chelsea since the very first show. Kelways had brought mouthwatering intersectional peonies with petals like tissue paper, Blom's tulips were as splendid as ever, and there was a fascinating display of tubers of different potato varieties.
And yet. There were no auriculas. There was one stand with violas, but it must have been very small for I never found it. In fact, there was a marked decrease in the number of smaller nurseries taking part, with the sort of stand where you can ask for advice from somebody who actually grows the plants and knows how they behave. The flower arranging section was much larger than in previous years, but floral art leaves us both cold. The big site around the war memorial, that was inhabited by Notcutts for years before passing to Hillier, had been subdivided leaving Hiller with a smaller stand, and the rest of the space given to the Wedgwood tea garden. Proof comes from the show catalogue (now priced at an eye watering ten pounds) where the list of exhibitors of perennial plants is half the length of the list of exhibitors selling sculptures and there are more firms listed under Stationery than Trees and Shrubs. Maybe the cost of exhibiting at Chelsea, now it extends to an extra day and everything to do with London from the congestion charge to the price of overnight accommodation is so expensive, puts smaller firms off. Maybe now they can showcase their wares via the internet they don't need to come in person to hand out catalogues to potential customers. Whatever, the reason, they are not coming and I miss them.
It had been well flagged in the press that the number of show gardens was down, only eight in the large Show Garden category, with a ninth sponsored by the RHS based on ideas for greening City developments. That was designed by Prof Nigel Dunnett of Sheffield University, who was responsible for the Olympic Park gardens. I have a lot of time for Nigel Dunnett and liked his Chelsea design. Of the other eight we only really liked one, the Royal Bank of Canada's wetland forest garden. The garden based on the Chinese Silk Road was madly kitsch and quite hideous, the garden about breaking down barriers in education cluttered with weird structures vaguely resembling giant wine racks that were presumably meant to symbolize barriers being broken down but failed to divide the space in any aesthetically meaningful way, and we didn't see one of the gardens at all. The design inspired by Maggie's Keswick Jencks' cancer centres was one of those enclosed gardens where you have to queue to file past it, and we looked at the length of the queue and decided not to join it.
The County of Yorkshire had sent a diorama of a boat on a beach, below a slope of wild flowers and a decidedly dodgy background painting of Yorkshire scenery. Dioramas used to be a big thing at garden shows before falling out of fashion and this one was quite fun, except that somebody had decided that the way to create the effect of waves on the beach was to attach one of the three mooring buoys to an underwater motor that sent it plunging up and down like a space hopper.
It had also been well flagged in the press that many of the design stars of recent years, including Tom Stuart-Smith, Cleve West, and Andy Sturgeon, were all taking a break from Chelsea. That needn't be a barrier per se. I like all of their work, probably in that order, but it's good to make space for new talent to come through. If only it does. There has also been talk of the lack of sponsors, variously blamed on Brexit in particular or the climate of uncertainty in general. It was depressing to read in the Standard on the train home that the winner of the Fresh Gardens section, which was a really good expression of ideas for planting around some low rise flats, had been unable to find a sponsor despite having won three previous Chelsea gold medals, and ended up financing her entry from her own landscaping business. Does that confirm a general lack of available sponsorship, or just prejudice against female designers?
In the Artisan Gardens category there was one standout good display, based on the greening of a post industrial landscape using rusting cranes, recycled wood and metal and some covetable rusted metal sculptures, and we were pleased when we found out it had won in its category. The others were pleasant if not brilliant. The difference between Artisan and Fresh Gardens seems to be that if it references traditional crafts or historic customs it is Artisan, and if it includes giant pink perspex triangles and half the planting is hidden underground it is probably Fresh.
I had one shopping mission for the day, to buy a packet of beige plastic stick in plant labels. Beige does not sound very exciting, but that is the point, since it blends discreetly into the background in terracotta pots and I wanted some for my display pots, but I drew a blank since the place I got them last time didn't have any. A quick Google search this morning revealed that of course I can get them somewhere else online though the cost of delivery will be almost twice that of the labels.
So that was Chelsea. Nice but not as thrilling as it should have been. The trouble with the plethora of sculptures, statuary gifts, ceramics, candles and diffusers, jewellery, and non-gardening accessories and footwear is threefold. Firstly, many are quite horrible and I wouldn't receive them with joy as a gift. Secondly, I couldn't afford to buy most of them even if I wanted them. And thirdly, I could look at that sort of thing at the Country Living Fair for £14 or the London Art Fair for £15, instead of paying the RHS £72 for the privilege of going to the first members' day at the Chelsea Flower Show. We agreed as we left that we would go next year, but if it continues down the same path I doubt we'll be there in three years' time.
Chelsea is changing, I am afraid. Doubtless I am changing too, and after attending for the past three decades I can't expect it to have the same impact as it did when I started off. I have encountered more plants since then, so the thrill of making new discoveries is less than when practically everything was a new discovery, and every show garden now is weighed up against my memories of hundreds of other show gardens. Nonetheless, Chelsea is changing, and not necessarily in a good way. It is becoming more of a lifestyle show, which is all very well, but not what it primarily used to be or what I would like it to be.
In the Grand Pavilion, which was always my favourite part of a fabulous whole, there were still some excellent displays and some proper nurseries. Rosy Hardy was there with the largest stand I've seen her on yet, and Kevock from Scotland where I could feast my eyes on blue Himalayan poppies and the wonderful red Meconopsis punicea without falling into the trap of trying to grow them in Essex. The City of Birmingham had produced a completely over-the-top tower of bedding in every colour imaginable so long as it was bright, topped by a Heath Robinsonesque animated train. There were sumptuous exotic orchids, and Protea from Kirstenboch exhibited by two fabulously enthusiastic South Africans. There was the identical same display of unbelievably huge and perfect delphiniums above massive bright orange begonias that Blackmore and Langdon have exhibited at every Chelsea I've been to, and so far as I know at every Chelsea since the very first show. Kelways had brought mouthwatering intersectional peonies with petals like tissue paper, Blom's tulips were as splendid as ever, and there was a fascinating display of tubers of different potato varieties.
And yet. There were no auriculas. There was one stand with violas, but it must have been very small for I never found it. In fact, there was a marked decrease in the number of smaller nurseries taking part, with the sort of stand where you can ask for advice from somebody who actually grows the plants and knows how they behave. The flower arranging section was much larger than in previous years, but floral art leaves us both cold. The big site around the war memorial, that was inhabited by Notcutts for years before passing to Hillier, had been subdivided leaving Hiller with a smaller stand, and the rest of the space given to the Wedgwood tea garden. Proof comes from the show catalogue (now priced at an eye watering ten pounds) where the list of exhibitors of perennial plants is half the length of the list of exhibitors selling sculptures and there are more firms listed under Stationery than Trees and Shrubs. Maybe the cost of exhibiting at Chelsea, now it extends to an extra day and everything to do with London from the congestion charge to the price of overnight accommodation is so expensive, puts smaller firms off. Maybe now they can showcase their wares via the internet they don't need to come in person to hand out catalogues to potential customers. Whatever, the reason, they are not coming and I miss them.
It had been well flagged in the press that the number of show gardens was down, only eight in the large Show Garden category, with a ninth sponsored by the RHS based on ideas for greening City developments. That was designed by Prof Nigel Dunnett of Sheffield University, who was responsible for the Olympic Park gardens. I have a lot of time for Nigel Dunnett and liked his Chelsea design. Of the other eight we only really liked one, the Royal Bank of Canada's wetland forest garden. The garden based on the Chinese Silk Road was madly kitsch and quite hideous, the garden about breaking down barriers in education cluttered with weird structures vaguely resembling giant wine racks that were presumably meant to symbolize barriers being broken down but failed to divide the space in any aesthetically meaningful way, and we didn't see one of the gardens at all. The design inspired by Maggie's Keswick Jencks' cancer centres was one of those enclosed gardens where you have to queue to file past it, and we looked at the length of the queue and decided not to join it.
The County of Yorkshire had sent a diorama of a boat on a beach, below a slope of wild flowers and a decidedly dodgy background painting of Yorkshire scenery. Dioramas used to be a big thing at garden shows before falling out of fashion and this one was quite fun, except that somebody had decided that the way to create the effect of waves on the beach was to attach one of the three mooring buoys to an underwater motor that sent it plunging up and down like a space hopper.
It had also been well flagged in the press that many of the design stars of recent years, including Tom Stuart-Smith, Cleve West, and Andy Sturgeon, were all taking a break from Chelsea. That needn't be a barrier per se. I like all of their work, probably in that order, but it's good to make space for new talent to come through. If only it does. There has also been talk of the lack of sponsors, variously blamed on Brexit in particular or the climate of uncertainty in general. It was depressing to read in the Standard on the train home that the winner of the Fresh Gardens section, which was a really good expression of ideas for planting around some low rise flats, had been unable to find a sponsor despite having won three previous Chelsea gold medals, and ended up financing her entry from her own landscaping business. Does that confirm a general lack of available sponsorship, or just prejudice against female designers?
In the Artisan Gardens category there was one standout good display, based on the greening of a post industrial landscape using rusting cranes, recycled wood and metal and some covetable rusted metal sculptures, and we were pleased when we found out it had won in its category. The others were pleasant if not brilliant. The difference between Artisan and Fresh Gardens seems to be that if it references traditional crafts or historic customs it is Artisan, and if it includes giant pink perspex triangles and half the planting is hidden underground it is probably Fresh.
I had one shopping mission for the day, to buy a packet of beige plastic stick in plant labels. Beige does not sound very exciting, but that is the point, since it blends discreetly into the background in terracotta pots and I wanted some for my display pots, but I drew a blank since the place I got them last time didn't have any. A quick Google search this morning revealed that of course I can get them somewhere else online though the cost of delivery will be almost twice that of the labels.
So that was Chelsea. Nice but not as thrilling as it should have been. The trouble with the plethora of sculptures, statuary gifts, ceramics, candles and diffusers, jewellery, and non-gardening accessories and footwear is threefold. Firstly, many are quite horrible and I wouldn't receive them with joy as a gift. Secondly, I couldn't afford to buy most of them even if I wanted them. And thirdly, I could look at that sort of thing at the Country Living Fair for £14 or the London Art Fair for £15, instead of paying the RHS £72 for the privilege of going to the first members' day at the Chelsea Flower Show. We agreed as we left that we would go next year, but if it continues down the same path I doubt we'll be there in three years' time.
Monday, 22 May 2017
summer bedding
As I continued excavating the contents of the greenhouse I discovered some more plants for the orange corner. In among the Zinnia and Cosmos seedlings were some Tithonia rotundifolia 'Torch'. Tithonia grows quite tall and has warm orange flowers. I saw it somewhere, possibly on Gardeners' World, and was charmed, though I have since heard that it needs a warm summer to do anything useful. I sowed seed a year or two ago, but barely any germinated and the resulting miserable seedlings never came to anything. Probably I watered them too much or too little at some critical stage. This year's sowing germinated far better, and since I moved the seedlings into individual tiny pots they have continued to grow, although not race away. Today I potted them on to nine centimetre pots, not knowing if it was safe to put them straight into their final containers or if they would take umbrage at all that unused damp compost around them and rot off. The tiny pots were gratifyingly full of roots. So far, so good.
The splendid garden near Lavenham I visited last autumn with the garden club had a small patch of what I correctly guessed was Tithonia near the house, and the owner was rather shamefaced about it. I saw no need to be apologetic. You do not get nearly as many points for large orange flowered bedding plants as for rare cyclamen, but a garden containing nothing but small obscure bulbs would not be half as much fun.
The Zinnia went into nine centimetre pots. I said last year I would not grow Zinnia again, because they were such miffy plants, resentful of over and underwatering, stems rotting off at the least opportunity, and with such coarse leaves. I relented because the fat, multi-petalled flowers are so theatrical and make such vivid pops of colour in among airier things like the Cosmos. I had some seed left of last year's bright purple variety, which germinated well. Clearly it is worth husbanding Zinnia seed from year to year. New this year is a lime green and pink variety I saw on Derry Watkins' website and fell for. This time as an experiment I used John Innes compost for sowing and pricking out, to see if it overcame the problem of small pots drying out in the greenhouse, or sitting too wet as I over watered them in an attempt not to let them dry out. Perhaps Zinnia prefer JI to B&Q multipurpose, or perhaps the weather has been more to their liking, or I have been luckier or more careful with the watering, but so far none of them have collapsed.
The Cosmos were sad little things. I sowed a pale yellow called 'Xanthos' from Derry Watkins and two different sorts of pink ones that came free with garden magazines, and they all germinated quickly as Cosmos do, but have been slow to grow on, and have not made nearly such good roots as the Tithonia. Perhaps Cosmos don't like John Innes. Or the weather. Or they are not such vigorous varieties as the 'Sensation Mixed' I've grown for the past few years. I moved the Cosmos directly into the pots they will be displayed in because I've always moved them up to a big pot in one fell swoop in the past and they haven't minded. At the moment they look so small and spindly it's difficult to imagine there will be anything to display.
The only bedding I have bought this year are five white flowered Begonia boliviana alba for the porch, and two Calibrachoa and two trailing Verbena in coordinating shades of raspberry for the ancestral pot. I don't think you get any points at all for the Begonia, but I like them. They have long, pointed leaves and the flowers are not brilliant white but a nice, muted shade of cream. And they will grow on a shelf that gets half sun at the front and is in shade much of the time at the back. There are lots of critical things one could say about seasonal bedding. It is time consuming. It is not sustainable. Piet Oudolf and Nigel Dunnett would not have anything to do with it. But it is great fun, and helps carry the garden on into late summer when otherwise there would be a lull until the leaves changed colour and the berries ripened. And just think, having all these plants in pots is one of the reasons why I almost never go anywhere, so in the moral stakes I can offset my two bales of compost and a few nights of the greenhouse fan heater in winter against your weekend break to Barcelona.
The splendid garden near Lavenham I visited last autumn with the garden club had a small patch of what I correctly guessed was Tithonia near the house, and the owner was rather shamefaced about it. I saw no need to be apologetic. You do not get nearly as many points for large orange flowered bedding plants as for rare cyclamen, but a garden containing nothing but small obscure bulbs would not be half as much fun.
The Zinnia went into nine centimetre pots. I said last year I would not grow Zinnia again, because they were such miffy plants, resentful of over and underwatering, stems rotting off at the least opportunity, and with such coarse leaves. I relented because the fat, multi-petalled flowers are so theatrical and make such vivid pops of colour in among airier things like the Cosmos. I had some seed left of last year's bright purple variety, which germinated well. Clearly it is worth husbanding Zinnia seed from year to year. New this year is a lime green and pink variety I saw on Derry Watkins' website and fell for. This time as an experiment I used John Innes compost for sowing and pricking out, to see if it overcame the problem of small pots drying out in the greenhouse, or sitting too wet as I over watered them in an attempt not to let them dry out. Perhaps Zinnia prefer JI to B&Q multipurpose, or perhaps the weather has been more to their liking, or I have been luckier or more careful with the watering, but so far none of them have collapsed.
The Cosmos were sad little things. I sowed a pale yellow called 'Xanthos' from Derry Watkins and two different sorts of pink ones that came free with garden magazines, and they all germinated quickly as Cosmos do, but have been slow to grow on, and have not made nearly such good roots as the Tithonia. Perhaps Cosmos don't like John Innes. Or the weather. Or they are not such vigorous varieties as the 'Sensation Mixed' I've grown for the past few years. I moved the Cosmos directly into the pots they will be displayed in because I've always moved them up to a big pot in one fell swoop in the past and they haven't minded. At the moment they look so small and spindly it's difficult to imagine there will be anything to display.
The only bedding I have bought this year are five white flowered Begonia boliviana alba for the porch, and two Calibrachoa and two trailing Verbena in coordinating shades of raspberry for the ancestral pot. I don't think you get any points at all for the Begonia, but I like them. They have long, pointed leaves and the flowers are not brilliant white but a nice, muted shade of cream. And they will grow on a shelf that gets half sun at the front and is in shade much of the time at the back. There are lots of critical things one could say about seasonal bedding. It is time consuming. It is not sustainable. Piet Oudolf and Nigel Dunnett would not have anything to do with it. But it is great fun, and helps carry the garden on into late summer when otherwise there would be a lull until the leaves changed colour and the berries ripened. And just think, having all these plants in pots is one of the reasons why I almost never go anywhere, so in the moral stakes I can offset my two bales of compost and a few nights of the greenhouse fan heater in winter against your weekend break to Barcelona.
Sunday, 21 May 2017
in the orange corner
I spent the day getting the pots of tender summer flowering stuff out of the greenhouse, and starting to pot on things that need it. The weather forecast out to Saturday 27 May doesn't show any night with temperatures even in single figures, and I think the risk of frost is over for this spring. The welter, the absolute chaos of pots, is incredible. I hope I am at peak mess, and that by tomorrow evening I'll have started to restore some sort of order, though frankly, I don't understand how so many pots fitted in the greenhouse in the first place.
Last year's dahlias, those that survived the winter, are arrayed in three sections. Some are to go outside the conservatory, arranged in the order I want them to end up, pale yellow and dusky pink at one end, deep purple at the other. One bright purple cactus variety, new last year, has not come back to life, its tuber sitting apparently solid but entirely inactive in the compost. As a compensation, the mini plants I bought this year from Halls of Heddon have all made sturdy plants which are now filling their nine centimetre pots with fat roots. I am potting them into two litre pots, and will grow them on in the greenhouse for a while longer before moving them into terracotta pots for display. And I will keep the terracotta a size smaller than the ones they are destined to end up in. I think I over watered some of the newer dahlias last year and their roots rotted.
The second cache of dahlia pots is destined for the shell pink and mid purple scheme outside the garage, and there are a couple of big, blowsy ones in a soft orange to go in the orange corner on the patio (or terrace), along with some other tender, orange flowered plants that have made it through the winter. I've had Lobelia salicifolia for years, and am glad it's still going as I haven't seen it for sale recently. It produces tall, thin stems with narrow, willow-like leaves and tubular orange flowers, and runs gently at the root, and I have moved it into a larger pot to give it more scope. I did experiment planting some out in the garden the last time I split it, but I haven't noticed any signs of life from them so it's just as well I still have the potful.
Sitting on the low retaining terrace wall I have put my Lotus berthelotii, bought as summer bedding a couple of years ago and experimentally nursed through the following winters, kept frost free and on the dry side. It produces long, lax,branching stems clad in very fine grey leaves, which have a distressing propensity to drop if it is allowed to get too dry, and I think that of the three little plants in the original bedding scheme only one now survives. Again, I am glad that it does as the garden centre where I bought it didn't have any this year when I called in to buy something else. The flowers are claw shaped and a dark, fierce shade of orange, and I am very fond of them.
Salvia confertiflora has been shuffled round the corner from the conservatory to the corner of the terrace, as I thought it might like a real baking and I'm making a thing of orange this season. It makes a big plant, and mine is not so bushy and splendid as the ones I saw first at Kiftsgate and then noticed once I had got my eye in at East Ruston Old Vicarage. I have promised to feed it more, but wondered if it would like a change of aspect. The flowers are tubular, individually smallish, carried on tall spikes, in a nice bricky shade of orange. I got my plant at Kiftsgate Court when we visited on holiday, and it spent the rest of the week by the kitchen window of our rented flat, horrifying me each time it wilted as I got the hang of the watering regime. It is quite thirsty when in growth, with its big felty leaves. In winter I keep it pretty dry, terrified of it rotting.
I fell for the charms of Dicliptera suberecta when we visited Spetchley Park in Worcestershire. It is a grey leaved, woolly sub shrub that sends up vertical flowering stems with whorls of soft orange flowers. I wanted one very much, but it is not the easiest thing to track down, and eventually I discovered that a nursery in Lincolnshire that I was buying some verbascums and other bits and pieces from stocked it. It is slowly clumping up at the root and was filling its pot, so I have given it a larger one. Again, I keep it quite dry in winter.
A trio of seed raised silver leaved Gazania left over from last year will complete the orange corner. For several years I raised a whole divided tray's worth of plants and put them out in the gravel, but they struggled in the drought and the sand, and I have gradually realised that they do well in pots, and make it through the winter in the greenhouse quite reliably. Pot culture is the way ahead, I think. I would have liked some Arctotis 'Flame' since seeing them in the gardens near the house at the Hillier Arboretum, but I have not managed to find anywhere that would let me buy a sensible number of just that variety. Instead they came bundled up with other colours so that I'd have ended up buying nine or fifteen plants, six or ten or which I didn't greatly want. I have read that Arctotis come readily from cuttings, so if I could just lay my hands on one plant that would get me started. I certainly don't want to buy fifteen. They are easy from seed, only I did like the colour of 'Flame' and none of the ones I've grown from mixed seed have been quite as good.
Last year's dahlias, those that survived the winter, are arrayed in three sections. Some are to go outside the conservatory, arranged in the order I want them to end up, pale yellow and dusky pink at one end, deep purple at the other. One bright purple cactus variety, new last year, has not come back to life, its tuber sitting apparently solid but entirely inactive in the compost. As a compensation, the mini plants I bought this year from Halls of Heddon have all made sturdy plants which are now filling their nine centimetre pots with fat roots. I am potting them into two litre pots, and will grow them on in the greenhouse for a while longer before moving them into terracotta pots for display. And I will keep the terracotta a size smaller than the ones they are destined to end up in. I think I over watered some of the newer dahlias last year and their roots rotted.
The second cache of dahlia pots is destined for the shell pink and mid purple scheme outside the garage, and there are a couple of big, blowsy ones in a soft orange to go in the orange corner on the patio (or terrace), along with some other tender, orange flowered plants that have made it through the winter. I've had Lobelia salicifolia for years, and am glad it's still going as I haven't seen it for sale recently. It produces tall, thin stems with narrow, willow-like leaves and tubular orange flowers, and runs gently at the root, and I have moved it into a larger pot to give it more scope. I did experiment planting some out in the garden the last time I split it, but I haven't noticed any signs of life from them so it's just as well I still have the potful.
Sitting on the low retaining terrace wall I have put my Lotus berthelotii, bought as summer bedding a couple of years ago and experimentally nursed through the following winters, kept frost free and on the dry side. It produces long, lax,branching stems clad in very fine grey leaves, which have a distressing propensity to drop if it is allowed to get too dry, and I think that of the three little plants in the original bedding scheme only one now survives. Again, I am glad that it does as the garden centre where I bought it didn't have any this year when I called in to buy something else. The flowers are claw shaped and a dark, fierce shade of orange, and I am very fond of them.
Salvia confertiflora has been shuffled round the corner from the conservatory to the corner of the terrace, as I thought it might like a real baking and I'm making a thing of orange this season. It makes a big plant, and mine is not so bushy and splendid as the ones I saw first at Kiftsgate and then noticed once I had got my eye in at East Ruston Old Vicarage. I have promised to feed it more, but wondered if it would like a change of aspect. The flowers are tubular, individually smallish, carried on tall spikes, in a nice bricky shade of orange. I got my plant at Kiftsgate Court when we visited on holiday, and it spent the rest of the week by the kitchen window of our rented flat, horrifying me each time it wilted as I got the hang of the watering regime. It is quite thirsty when in growth, with its big felty leaves. In winter I keep it pretty dry, terrified of it rotting.
I fell for the charms of Dicliptera suberecta when we visited Spetchley Park in Worcestershire. It is a grey leaved, woolly sub shrub that sends up vertical flowering stems with whorls of soft orange flowers. I wanted one very much, but it is not the easiest thing to track down, and eventually I discovered that a nursery in Lincolnshire that I was buying some verbascums and other bits and pieces from stocked it. It is slowly clumping up at the root and was filling its pot, so I have given it a larger one. Again, I keep it quite dry in winter.
A trio of seed raised silver leaved Gazania left over from last year will complete the orange corner. For several years I raised a whole divided tray's worth of plants and put them out in the gravel, but they struggled in the drought and the sand, and I have gradually realised that they do well in pots, and make it through the winter in the greenhouse quite reliably. Pot culture is the way ahead, I think. I would have liked some Arctotis 'Flame' since seeing them in the gardens near the house at the Hillier Arboretum, but I have not managed to find anywhere that would let me buy a sensible number of just that variety. Instead they came bundled up with other colours so that I'd have ended up buying nine or fifteen plants, six or ten or which I didn't greatly want. I have read that Arctotis come readily from cuttings, so if I could just lay my hands on one plant that would get me started. I certainly don't want to buy fifteen. They are easy from seed, only I did like the colour of 'Flame' and none of the ones I've grown from mixed seed have been quite as good.
Saturday, 20 May 2017
finishing a half done job
Today I finally finished washing the conservatory windows, a task which has been sitting half done since last weekend. In the meantime it was not possible to sit in there, or very easy to move around to do the watering, because I had moved so many of the pots in order to get at the glass. It was a slow and fiddly job, shuffling things over to make space to put the step ladder up, climbing up and down with my damp cloth and finally rinsing the windows with the hose, all the while trying not to snap any stems or break off any fat emerging shoots.
In order to get at the outside of the windows in the shadiest corner I had to lift all the shade loving plants out of the way, except for the big Fatsia japonica which I tried to shuffle to one side. Its pot had been broken and glued back together at some point in the past, and without thinking I pulled on a glued piece, which came off in my hand. I looked at the triangle of exposed root ball, pushed the broken piece back into the space, looked at it some more while I calculated that there was no way I could glue it in place while the plant was in its pot, and the loose triangle fell out of the pot and smashed into half a dozen small bits.
That answered that question. I was going to have to repot the Fatsia, which added to the length and complication of the proceedings as I had to go and hunt in the pot shed to see what I had that was suitable, and fetch down some compost from the greenhouse. I ended up using a large egg pot that previously held one of the Hamamelis, before I settled on classic Italianate orange pots for them. The egg pot was quite handsome, with a pattern of delicate horizontal ribs, but as I found out with the Hamamelis was not ideal for long term shrub plantings, because the fattest point of the pot is just below the rim and the root ball will not slide out when you want it to for repotting. But I already had the egg pot and didn't want to have to go out and buy another large container. They went through a period of being fashionable several years ago and then fell out of fashion so that when half the Hamamelis pots disintegrated in a hard winter and I had to replace them I found it was impossible to buy any more in the same style. It was at that point that I discovered how difficult it is to remove a mature shrub from an egg pot that has not already broken apart.
It was a fiddle getting at the Fatsia, as the deck outside the conservatory was cluttered with the smaller shade loving plants I'd moved to get at the window, plus the succulents that are brought out for the summer which I'd just moved to make space inside to move the ginger lilies away from the glass, plus a Geranium maderense that is flowering on a stem so lopsided it has to be propped up on its neighbours.
Eventually it was all done. The orange Clivia that I bought at a Plant Heritage meeting and the brilliant red Clianthus grown from seed, that are both in full flower, can now bloom against a backdrop of sparkling windows (at least when the sun doesn't shine directly through them and show up the smears) and swept and tidy floor. The Eriobotrya jaonica 'Coppertone' has been relieved of its tatty spent flowers so that you can admire the soft bronze and grey of the emerging leaves. The two Regal pelargoniums are making lots of bushy growth since I fed them, making me think I had better do that oftener. The purple flowered Tibouchina is starting to produce new shoots from the bases of some of the older and fatter stems, confirming that it is alive, though I think it was a close-run thing.
Both of the triphylla fuchsias that overwintered in there are stone dead, never a sign of a single new shoot since the weather warmed up. It must have been critically too cold for them at some point. I lost a plant of the purple flowered Fuchsia arborescens in similar fashion a few years back. A souvenir of a visit to Powis Castle, it was doing pretty well and grew quite a lot, then after one cold night every leaf fell off, never to reappear.
Tomorrow we can have tea in there. We were going to today, but I hadn't finished tidying up, and anyway Mr Cool had bagged one chair and Our Ginger the other, and they didn't look as though they wanted to move.
In order to get at the outside of the windows in the shadiest corner I had to lift all the shade loving plants out of the way, except for the big Fatsia japonica which I tried to shuffle to one side. Its pot had been broken and glued back together at some point in the past, and without thinking I pulled on a glued piece, which came off in my hand. I looked at the triangle of exposed root ball, pushed the broken piece back into the space, looked at it some more while I calculated that there was no way I could glue it in place while the plant was in its pot, and the loose triangle fell out of the pot and smashed into half a dozen small bits.
That answered that question. I was going to have to repot the Fatsia, which added to the length and complication of the proceedings as I had to go and hunt in the pot shed to see what I had that was suitable, and fetch down some compost from the greenhouse. I ended up using a large egg pot that previously held one of the Hamamelis, before I settled on classic Italianate orange pots for them. The egg pot was quite handsome, with a pattern of delicate horizontal ribs, but as I found out with the Hamamelis was not ideal for long term shrub plantings, because the fattest point of the pot is just below the rim and the root ball will not slide out when you want it to for repotting. But I already had the egg pot and didn't want to have to go out and buy another large container. They went through a period of being fashionable several years ago and then fell out of fashion so that when half the Hamamelis pots disintegrated in a hard winter and I had to replace them I found it was impossible to buy any more in the same style. It was at that point that I discovered how difficult it is to remove a mature shrub from an egg pot that has not already broken apart.
It was a fiddle getting at the Fatsia, as the deck outside the conservatory was cluttered with the smaller shade loving plants I'd moved to get at the window, plus the succulents that are brought out for the summer which I'd just moved to make space inside to move the ginger lilies away from the glass, plus a Geranium maderense that is flowering on a stem so lopsided it has to be propped up on its neighbours.
Eventually it was all done. The orange Clivia that I bought at a Plant Heritage meeting and the brilliant red Clianthus grown from seed, that are both in full flower, can now bloom against a backdrop of sparkling windows (at least when the sun doesn't shine directly through them and show up the smears) and swept and tidy floor. The Eriobotrya jaonica 'Coppertone' has been relieved of its tatty spent flowers so that you can admire the soft bronze and grey of the emerging leaves. The two Regal pelargoniums are making lots of bushy growth since I fed them, making me think I had better do that oftener. The purple flowered Tibouchina is starting to produce new shoots from the bases of some of the older and fatter stems, confirming that it is alive, though I think it was a close-run thing.
Both of the triphylla fuchsias that overwintered in there are stone dead, never a sign of a single new shoot since the weather warmed up. It must have been critically too cold for them at some point. I lost a plant of the purple flowered Fuchsia arborescens in similar fashion a few years back. A souvenir of a visit to Powis Castle, it was doing pretty well and grew quite a lot, then after one cold night every leaf fell off, never to reappear.
Tomorrow we can have tea in there. We were going to today, but I hadn't finished tidying up, and anyway Mr Cool had bagged one chair and Our Ginger the other, and they didn't look as though they wanted to move.
Friday, 19 May 2017
fiddling about
I was slow off the mark this morning, deciding I did want a second mug of tea after breakfast, answering a couple of emails, and walking with a letter up to the postbox with a swift detour to fit some more green waste in the brown bin before the binmen came. By the time I'd changed into my gardening clothes and sorted out my bucket of tools it had begun to drizzle. I stood in the fine, sifting rain with the bucket, trying to decide if it was real rain or not enough to count, and decided that it was really raining and that I, and the contents of the bucket, were getting wet.
After the rain passed it was quite grimly chilly, in that bone piercing way that a cold, grey, damp spring day feels colder than a dry, sunny winter one that is, objectively speaking, colder. The thought of toiling in the cold and the damp was not very appealing, and I thought I would go and get some growbags for the tomatoes, since I was going to need them soon. As I approached my car I thought that the nearside front tyre was bulging oddly over the gravel. I prodded it experimentally and it felt squishy. Car tyres should not be yielding to the touch. I summoned the Systems Administrator for a second opinion, who confirmed that the tyre was partially flat.
The SA had independently planned to go to Screwfix to pick up an order via the dump to drop off five bags of rubbish from clearing out the workshop, and suggested I could come too as there is a branch of The Range opposite Screwfix, and get the bags there. As we trundled towards Clacton I said we knew we were really middle aged when we were going to the dump together and then to a DIY and homeware store. The SA said that for the complete effect we should stop at a garden centre for a cup of tea on the way home.
The SA experimentally turned left back out on to the main road instead of going back the way we had come, to test a theory that we would be able to cut up to the industrial estate and avoid the traffic in Clacton. Instead we found ourselves entering Holland-on-Sea. I once went to give a woodland charity talk in Holland-on-Sea and got horribly lost on the way there because I had made the mistake of thinking I knew where Holland-on-Sea was, and instead found myself in an industrial estate. Now we were looking for the industrial estate and had got to Holland-on-Sea. We drove across the Holland gap, the low lying area separating Clacton from what you suddenly see are the lofty heights of Frinton, doubled round, and eventually found ourselves popping out by the Skoda garage in Little Clacton.
By the time we got home it had warmed up, and I started getting the pots of overwintering pelargoniums out of the greenhouse on the basis that the five day forecast gets me through to 25 May, and if there isn't frost forecast by that point then there isn't going to be any. Some had got fresh infestations of root aphid, to my annoyance. I checked all the plants I gave to a couple of plant sales, and they were clean, so it was disappointing to find root aphids on my display specimens. A couple had outbreaks of sap sucking pests on their leaves, and really the sooner they are out of the greenhouse the better.
I'd volunteered to cook supper, and made a baked dish of courgette fritters layered with tomato sauce and cheese from the Two Greedy Italians book. It is a good recipe, like a vegetarian lasagne but using layers of battered courgette slice instead of pasta, but I'd forgotten how long it took to make, what with having to fry all the fritters in batches before you can assemble it and then waiting forty minutes for it to cook in the oven.
Tomorrow I will be fantastically productive and get out there straight after breakfast, moving things out of the greenhouse and setting up my growbags, instead of fiddling around with letters and shopping and getting lost in magical mystery tours of the outskirts of Clacton. Or perhaps not.
After the rain passed it was quite grimly chilly, in that bone piercing way that a cold, grey, damp spring day feels colder than a dry, sunny winter one that is, objectively speaking, colder. The thought of toiling in the cold and the damp was not very appealing, and I thought I would go and get some growbags for the tomatoes, since I was going to need them soon. As I approached my car I thought that the nearside front tyre was bulging oddly over the gravel. I prodded it experimentally and it felt squishy. Car tyres should not be yielding to the touch. I summoned the Systems Administrator for a second opinion, who confirmed that the tyre was partially flat.
The SA had independently planned to go to Screwfix to pick up an order via the dump to drop off five bags of rubbish from clearing out the workshop, and suggested I could come too as there is a branch of The Range opposite Screwfix, and get the bags there. As we trundled towards Clacton I said we knew we were really middle aged when we were going to the dump together and then to a DIY and homeware store. The SA said that for the complete effect we should stop at a garden centre for a cup of tea on the way home.
The SA experimentally turned left back out on to the main road instead of going back the way we had come, to test a theory that we would be able to cut up to the industrial estate and avoid the traffic in Clacton. Instead we found ourselves entering Holland-on-Sea. I once went to give a woodland charity talk in Holland-on-Sea and got horribly lost on the way there because I had made the mistake of thinking I knew where Holland-on-Sea was, and instead found myself in an industrial estate. Now we were looking for the industrial estate and had got to Holland-on-Sea. We drove across the Holland gap, the low lying area separating Clacton from what you suddenly see are the lofty heights of Frinton, doubled round, and eventually found ourselves popping out by the Skoda garage in Little Clacton.
By the time we got home it had warmed up, and I started getting the pots of overwintering pelargoniums out of the greenhouse on the basis that the five day forecast gets me through to 25 May, and if there isn't frost forecast by that point then there isn't going to be any. Some had got fresh infestations of root aphid, to my annoyance. I checked all the plants I gave to a couple of plant sales, and they were clean, so it was disappointing to find root aphids on my display specimens. A couple had outbreaks of sap sucking pests on their leaves, and really the sooner they are out of the greenhouse the better.
I'd volunteered to cook supper, and made a baked dish of courgette fritters layered with tomato sauce and cheese from the Two Greedy Italians book. It is a good recipe, like a vegetarian lasagne but using layers of battered courgette slice instead of pasta, but I'd forgotten how long it took to make, what with having to fry all the fritters in batches before you can assemble it and then waiting forty minutes for it to cook in the oven.
Tomorrow I will be fantastically productive and get out there straight after breakfast, moving things out of the greenhouse and setting up my growbags, instead of fiddling around with letters and shopping and getting lost in magical mystery tours of the outskirts of Clacton. Or perhaps not.
Thursday, 18 May 2017
the stately homes of Essex
I went on a visit this afternoon to Layer Marney Tower. It is Grade I listed and has the tallest Tudor gatehouse in England. I've been there a couple of times in the past, once to attend the AGM when I briefly belonged to the Essex Gardens Trust, and once to buy a historic rare breeds Christmas turkey, when I got hopelessly lost in the maze of lanes and had to ask a man in a Land Rover. Today, having studied Google maps carefully before setting out, I did not get lost on the way there, but did get lost on the way back because I had not thought to visualise my planned route in reverse, and so my mother and I saw more of the new housing developments going up around Colchester garrison than we had intended.
The Tudor brickwork is really very fine, although the owner who was showing our party around delighted in pointing out where the Tudor builders had slipped up and the pattern of black bricks weaving through the red had gone awry. The battlements, which look like carved stone, are actually early UK examples of terracotta. Layer Marney Tower was built by a courtier to Henry VIII, a successful courtier in that he started under Henry VII, achieved the rare feat of staying on in the court of the next king, and died very rich and at a ripe old age before Layer Marney Tower was finished. What we see today is the stupendous gatehouse and one side of what should have been a whole palace surrounding a courtyard. His only son only outlived him by a couple of years, following which nobody had any interest in finishing the building project. By great good fortune it has passed down through a series of owners who all managed to keep it more or less structurally intact but lacked the means to substantially alter it.
Inside the house the room that is now the main hall, originally a carriage arch, provides a rare opportunity to see genuine Tudor and reproduction Edwardian Tudor panelling side by side. The owner during the early twentieth century recycled some original Tudor panels from elsewhere to do up the archway, but ran out and had to finish one wall with reproductions. The Edwardian craftsmanship is fine, but you can see the difference between the machine cut wood and the entirely hand crafted panels.
Upstairs in what is now called the large spare bedroom is a rare ceiling, decorated with hexagons and pentagons in the Italian renaissance style, but without the decorative Tudor roses and acorns that came into fashion after the split from Rome as the English upper classes strove to show how patriotic and definitely not Italian or Papist they were. So said our hostess, and I am inclined to believe her. Before marrying the heir to Layer Marney Towers she took a degree in art history at Manchester.
The tower commands a clear view towards the mouth of the river Blackwater, Bradwell power station, St Peter's chapel and all. According to our guide this is not accidental. Following the Norman invasion of 1066 a whole string of manorships along the ridge north of the river were granted to loyal Norman knights, so that centuries later you still see their names in the names of the villages strung out along the line of the hill, Layer Marney, Layer Breton, Layer de la Haye, Tolleshunt Knights and Tolleshunt D'Arcy. I had never thought about why there was this localised outbreak of French sounding names among the more usual Thorpes and Wicks of Essex, so I am quite prepared to believe the theory.
Some of the stories were more personal. When the first generation of Charringtons to live at Layer Marney Tower decided to move out and hand the tower on to the next generation they took enough furniture with them to fill their new house and split what was left among their four children, leaving the heirs to Layer Marney with nineteen rooms and nine chairs in total. A while later Charrington senior was visiting his club and discovered that it was being refurbished. He rang his son and told him, I've got you some chairs but you have to come and get them now. And so it was that Sheila Charrington found herself in Pall Mall outside the Athenaeum taking dining chairs out of a skip and loading them into a livestock trailer.
The village church is close to the house, and although it was and remains part of the Church of England and not the property of the Layer Marney estate, it was still reclad in matching brick and extended when the hall was being built. There are tombs for the first Lord Marney and his son, the father's effigy being notably more finely carved. At the time of the visit I didn't understand why it should have been made out of black Cornish granite, but looking the family up afterwards on Wikipedia I saw that an ancestor married a Cornish heiress. There is a medieval wall painting of St Christopher, gently and inexorably peeling off the limestone plaster. According to Sheila Charrington the wall paintings in churches would have been repainted many times to keep them going, but since the convention switched from restoration to conservation the practice has stopped, and since no method of conservation has been found that can cope with the inexorable movement of water through lime plaster, in another two or three hundred years they will all have vanished.
A highly sociable and agreeable ginger cat accompanied the tour, strolling into the hall as we assembled there and following our group into every room, lounging on the large spare bedroom bed, reclining on the billiard table in the tower, and finally popping up in the tea room where perhaps it hoped to be allowed to lick out a dish of cream from the cream teas.
The Tudor brickwork is really very fine, although the owner who was showing our party around delighted in pointing out where the Tudor builders had slipped up and the pattern of black bricks weaving through the red had gone awry. The battlements, which look like carved stone, are actually early UK examples of terracotta. Layer Marney Tower was built by a courtier to Henry VIII, a successful courtier in that he started under Henry VII, achieved the rare feat of staying on in the court of the next king, and died very rich and at a ripe old age before Layer Marney Tower was finished. What we see today is the stupendous gatehouse and one side of what should have been a whole palace surrounding a courtyard. His only son only outlived him by a couple of years, following which nobody had any interest in finishing the building project. By great good fortune it has passed down through a series of owners who all managed to keep it more or less structurally intact but lacked the means to substantially alter it.
Inside the house the room that is now the main hall, originally a carriage arch, provides a rare opportunity to see genuine Tudor and reproduction Edwardian Tudor panelling side by side. The owner during the early twentieth century recycled some original Tudor panels from elsewhere to do up the archway, but ran out and had to finish one wall with reproductions. The Edwardian craftsmanship is fine, but you can see the difference between the machine cut wood and the entirely hand crafted panels.
Upstairs in what is now called the large spare bedroom is a rare ceiling, decorated with hexagons and pentagons in the Italian renaissance style, but without the decorative Tudor roses and acorns that came into fashion after the split from Rome as the English upper classes strove to show how patriotic and definitely not Italian or Papist they were. So said our hostess, and I am inclined to believe her. Before marrying the heir to Layer Marney Towers she took a degree in art history at Manchester.
The tower commands a clear view towards the mouth of the river Blackwater, Bradwell power station, St Peter's chapel and all. According to our guide this is not accidental. Following the Norman invasion of 1066 a whole string of manorships along the ridge north of the river were granted to loyal Norman knights, so that centuries later you still see their names in the names of the villages strung out along the line of the hill, Layer Marney, Layer Breton, Layer de la Haye, Tolleshunt Knights and Tolleshunt D'Arcy. I had never thought about why there was this localised outbreak of French sounding names among the more usual Thorpes and Wicks of Essex, so I am quite prepared to believe the theory.
Some of the stories were more personal. When the first generation of Charringtons to live at Layer Marney Tower decided to move out and hand the tower on to the next generation they took enough furniture with them to fill their new house and split what was left among their four children, leaving the heirs to Layer Marney with nineteen rooms and nine chairs in total. A while later Charrington senior was visiting his club and discovered that it was being refurbished. He rang his son and told him, I've got you some chairs but you have to come and get them now. And so it was that Sheila Charrington found herself in Pall Mall outside the Athenaeum taking dining chairs out of a skip and loading them into a livestock trailer.
The village church is close to the house, and although it was and remains part of the Church of England and not the property of the Layer Marney estate, it was still reclad in matching brick and extended when the hall was being built. There are tombs for the first Lord Marney and his son, the father's effigy being notably more finely carved. At the time of the visit I didn't understand why it should have been made out of black Cornish granite, but looking the family up afterwards on Wikipedia I saw that an ancestor married a Cornish heiress. There is a medieval wall painting of St Christopher, gently and inexorably peeling off the limestone plaster. According to Sheila Charrington the wall paintings in churches would have been repainted many times to keep them going, but since the convention switched from restoration to conservation the practice has stopped, and since no method of conservation has been found that can cope with the inexorable movement of water through lime plaster, in another two or three hundred years they will all have vanished.
A highly sociable and agreeable ginger cat accompanied the tour, strolling into the hall as we assembled there and following our group into every room, lounging on the large spare bedroom bed, reclining on the billiard table in the tower, and finally popping up in the tea room where perhaps it hoped to be allowed to lick out a dish of cream from the cream teas.
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