Helen’s Blog

That there Libertia

During a week (the run up to Chelsea ’09, my thoughts go out to the poor souls out there…) of perpetual grey skies and a nasty niggling wind, a friend (called June, ironically) emailed from southern France, with words to the effect that her garden was looking good, but then if you can’t make your garden look good in May you must be a pretty poor gardener…and I suppose she is right.

To me, the first half of May can be a bit of a waiting game which I rather enjoy.  The in-your-face Spring  ‘stars’ are flagging:  the last of my tulips are now dog-eared, juicy Dicentras are leggy and buffeted by the wind.

Of course, there are flowers aplenty – the tree paeony is in top form and it is a particularly good time for Aquelegias.

Appreciated greenery

I am particularly appreciative of my upstanding Euphorbias that seem to glow in the gloom, for that much-loved spikey, dusky-leafed Libertia ixioides (about which I wrote this time last year and which is even more fullsome now).

Almost above all though, I am enjoying the the splendid pristine  contrasts of the green foliage in my borders which I plant with leafy May in mind almost as much as for the eventual colour of its later blowsey performance.

I have a visiting group tomorrow…I hope they appreciate the greenery as much as I do.

Ho Humm. Here’s yet another reason why we should shun dizzy annual bedding plants – particularly those boring little red begonias and busy lizzies (or is that bizzy lusies?).

According to an email I recieved last week, bumblebees don’t like them because they have little nectar on offer. And did you know that the various bumblebee species differ in the lengths of their tongues, and as a result their flower preferences differ? 

Here’s another intriguing nugget – the native flower most attractive to most bumblebee species is Viper’s Bugloss (Echium vulgare).

All this fascinating information came, via my son (the Geek) – from his girlfriend. 

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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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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…)

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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