June 21, 2008
Roses in my garden are so much part of the over all picture that I am reluctant to pick them. I have planted some Hybrid Musks (Penelope and Buff Beauty) and a couple of Rosa glaucas and a Rosa chinensis mutabilis, a gloriously scented velvety deepest-crimson old shrub (‘Charles de Mills’) some Rugosas and a curious dull copper/orange floribunda called Edith Holden which looks wonderful underplanted with purple sage.
And there are some showy rosy remnants of the garden that was here before (regretably none of them scented but great ‘doers’), ‘Bonica’, ‘Ferdy’ and dispsite the fact that it eventually succumbs to of black spot, a very prolific ‘Climbing Iceberg’.
On my allotment it is another matter entirely. I have given a substantial amount of space to a dozen English Roses just for picking. I planted them in February 2007, with microrrhizal fungi around their roots and they did pretty well even in their first year.
This year they are covered, I mean absolutely smothered, in flowers.
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Posted by Helen
June 14, 2008
Isn’t every garden a ‘wildlife’ garden? Even a carefully tended greenhouse has ‘wildlife’ – whitefly, vine weevils, woodlice, the odd fatally disorientated butterfly and – in the case of my friend Nicola who regularly leaves her swanky glasshouse door open by mistake – rabbits.
‘Wildlife gardening’ is often treated as a bit of a world apart, ideally and idyllically ‘organic’. But what are we supposed to do about wholesale destruction of various garden plants by ‘wildlife’? Butterflies we want to conserve start life as platoons of ghastly creepycrawly caterpillars that can demolish a square yard of nasturtiums in a day. I have a passion for birds, but don’t get me started on the subject of woodpigeons. And has anyone ever discovered an earthly reason for the existence of slugs, snails or wasps?
On an allotment it may be acceptable, but I don’t want my lovely garden to be festooned with glinting CDs, nor have to grow things under mesh or through cut off plastic drinks bottles – or alternatively live with disfigured flowers and maimed plants with mottled or bitten leaves..
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5 Comments | Musings | Permalink
Posted by Helen
June 12, 2008
Amalee Issa reminded me that a few years ago I answered a question in my column on the subject of ‘Titania’s bank’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
So I had a rootle around my archive and found it – I remember now having great fun putting it together and thought I would give it another airing here…as midsummer approaches.
The questioner was Martin Littlewood, from Caldy, Wirral:
I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania some time of the night
“Where can I find plants to create a bank to impress Titania?”
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Posted by Helen
June 9, 2008
Saturday’s session in aid of the National Garden Scheme, held in the little hall across the road from my house in Wadhurst, and followed by a leisurely stroll around my garden, glass in hand, was a lovely low-key event, one that I am due to repeat this coming Saturday, June 14.
I decided (more or less at the last minute) to make it a problem-airing session on ‘downsizing’, using a PowerPoint presentation I had put together with pictures of my former gardens (mostly of Ketley’s) taken by Jonathan Buckley and by me, enhanced (I joke) by some ‘before-and-during’ pictures of my new place taken by me and Martin Pope from the Telegraph.
These included some mind-boggling shots of a giant pampas grass (thank goodness, now gone) a digger (manned by friend and landscaper Geoff) , piles of concrete and earth, tree removal, borders and paths and a pond under development and construction etc.
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Posted by Helen
June 6, 2008
I have had two or three in my time, and they hate doing it in the middle of the day.
Garden photographers always prefer to hot-foot it to my door before dawn - or when sun, slanting over a sea of catmint and alliums, is definitely over the yard arm.
The most dedicated was perhaps Jonathan Buckley. When he lived in Dulwich, for one whole summer and beyond he would swoop down to my Sussex garden in a battered old white Citroen.
At one point we agreed that I would phone him at some ungodly hour to let him know if there was hoar frost on my agapanthus. I had to trek down the garden en chemise de nuit , a muddy fleece and gardening clogs in pitch dark to find out, of course. There was, and he was there like a shot, well before the crisply seed-heads thawed just after dawn.
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Posted by Helen
June 4, 2008
I don’t have a very elegant camera, so I am finding it really hard to get a picture (as promised) that does this wonderful plant justice.
However, you can see the dark buds and stems here – quite unlike L. grandiflora:
(Click on it for a bigger picture…)
1 Comment | Eldenhurst, Musings | Permalink
Posted by Helen
June 2, 2008
My village, Wadhurst in East Sussex, has just had its charity Open Gardens weekend and – probably to quote a hundred local newspaper reports on similar events this month, ‘the rain held off’ – just.
The lack of precipitation was indeed a mercy afer last year’s wash out – but for those of us who bravely opened our gates it was a bit sad that the flat, grey afternoon sky and only-just-shirt-sleeve temperatures hardly did our beloved gardens justice – so heavenly as they are, empty of all but us and the birds, particularly in the soft light and summer warmth at dusk and dawn.
Of course an event like this just doesn’t happen without considerable effort.
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Posted by Helen
May 31, 2008
I have always moaned about Chelsea for all the usual reasons – the crowds and the scrum; the inevitable domination of the whole event by the show gardens and the fact that they often deceive, horticulturally; and all the drossy, tasteless things on sale (not in the main thoroughfare where the big players have their stalls, but in the ‘off piste’ avenues – it was worse than ever this year).
So I thought that this year I would try to get under Chelsea’s skin a bit more… to see if my prejudices were actually justified.
I was therefore really pleased to have a small input into the SPANA Courtyard Garden - its Moroccan theme, complete with donkey cart, was conceived initially by SPANA’S Chief Exec. Jeremy Hulme and designed by Chris O’Donohue, winner of a Silver Gilt medal at last year’s Chelsea Flower Show.
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Posted by Helen
May 22, 2008
It is 7 a.m. and I was woken about two hours ago by a raucous cacophony – umpteen parent starlings sitting in the oak tree outside my bedroom, calling out to their fledgelings. We have quite a sizeable colony around here – presumably they like the accommodating construction of the eves of Edwardian houses or something.
Some youngsters came out yesterday, many more today. As I write there is a gang of clumsy little birds, gazing myopically, legs bent so that the seem to be crouching, massed around my pond.
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3 Comments | Birds, Eldenhurst, Musings | Permalink
Posted by Helen
May 18, 2008
The thing I love about my gardens in May is the almost overwhelming green-ness and lushness of everything. In stuffed gardens like mine, though, it can become almost too much.
So while I do go around and mete out the rather daftly named ‘Chelsea chop’ on one or two herbaceous victims, thereby stalling their growth in mid-surge, delaying their flowering and/or make them stockier and more floriferous later by virtue of having some or all of their stems cut back by as much as half around now – I do a lot of simple foliage removal during the coming weeks to keep everything in balance.
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Posted by Helen
Roses in my garden are so much part of the over all picture that I am reluctant to pick them. I have planted some Hybrid Musks (Penelope and Buff Beauty) and a couple of Rosa glaucas and a Rosa chinensis mutabilis, a gloriously scented velvety deepest-crimson old shrub (‘Charles de Mills’) some Rugosas and a curious dull copper/orange floribunda called Edith Holden which looks wonderful underplanted with purple sage. 
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