Hampton Court Flower Show 2012

Much to think about following Sunday’s visit to Hampton Court. As always, the grounds were packed full of wonderful plants in beautiful condition, and happy plant shoppers trundling their purchases on folding box trollies, and although the going was a bit soggier than usual, this didn’t seem to put people off. Also represented were the usual array of garden furniture, lighting, tool and accessory companies – you can spend hours pottering and a fortune if you’re not careful, but it was really the gardens I had come to see. I’d purposefully avoided coverage of the show on the television this week as I was keen to approach the gardens without any preconceptions, and didn’t even make use of a map.

And so, having wandered through a beautifully planted woodland copse – including a seating area where people were congregating to chat and relax by a dipping pond surrounded by moisture loving plants like astilbes and rodgersias and ligularia – I abruptly found myself in a city street, complete with yellow lines, concrete walls and washing hanging out to dry. Through another gap in the wall, and I’d entered a wonderful allotment space complete with greenhouse, compost bins and pleached fruit trees; then, bounded by iron railings to the road, an orchard area underplanted with a wild meadow, and then a wildlife garden with log piles and bird boxes, including a communal seating area with a brick fired oven. All around was evidence of the concept behind these gardens – from the graffiti on the walls to the derelict yard and abandoned wreck of a car. This was the Urban Oasis, a joint project between the RHS and the charity Groundwork, designed by Chris Beardshaw to show the impact which community gardening can have on some of the most unpromising of areas. And talking to one of the Groundwork volunteers I found out that it isn’t just a nice theory, but that this kind of urban greening is really having a positive impact in the communities like the one where she works in Brighton, transforming peoples’ lives and giving them a real sense of ownership over their neighbourhood. Really inspiring to see the potential of horticulture to have such a positive and life-changing effect. Undoubtedly the highlight of the show for me.

Our Facebook page has pictures of some of the many other inspiring and interesting gardens, including some from the “Low cost, high impact” section. Here it must be pointed out that “low” is in relation to the normal cost of putting together a show garden – as can be appreciated when it’s understood that the smallest budget for one of these gardens was £7k for the gold medal winning garden from Nilufer Danis – hardly a recession-savvy figure for a tiny garden making a lavish use of recycled scaffolding boards for the hard landscaping element. That said it is a beautifully planted space in a palette of blue and yellow, with verbascums, alliums, Eryngium 'Sapphire Blue' and hemerocallis. Creating an instant mature garden from scratch – rather than building a collection of plants over time – doesn’t come cheap.

All the same I’d have been interested to have seen something wonderful created on a really tight budget, something that might require the creative skip-diving skills and no-nonsense approach of thrifty gardener Alys Fowler, for example. There’s always next year.

Glove affair

I freely admit it. I am not man enough to garden without gloves. It’s therefore a bit of a mystery to me why my hands manage to get quite so grubby and gnarly – obviously I can wave the wizened things about as a sort of gardener’s badge of honour, but it’s a different matter when the mere sight of them causes passing children to run off in tears and the bloke at the supermarket checkout to recoil in horror on handing over your receipt.

My hands are not the most elegant appendages you’re likely to encounter. Even at the best of times there’s no disguising their form: generously sized square palms with five short, sausagey digits attached at regular intervals. They’re a bit rough – calloused, scratched, in spite of my best efforts usually betraying some earthy signs of the day’s activity – but they’re good, honest hands. Since I left off piloting a desk through the corridors of commerce and opted instead for a hard day’s graft in the open air they also appear to have grown in size, which is alarming to say the least. This hasn’t happened visibly, but recently it’s been the devil’s own job getting my gloves either on or off, which led me to the rash decision one day last week to forgo the hand protection for just half an hour. And in that short time my mitts became veritable pincushions with every bramble and thorn possible finding its way through several layers of flesh. So I finally did the sensible thing and bought the next size of glove up, which do leave a little room at the top of some of the fingers but at least I don’t have to cut them off my hands whenever the phone rings. (The gloves; not my fingers.)

An improvement, then, but still not perfect as somehow I seemed to be making a habit of getting thorns buried in the fabric of the glove itself – impossible to see but not to feel, as they persisted in digging in to the skin.

All of which has led me to these RHS-endorsed Gold Leaf gardening gloves (“for people serious about gardening”, if you please) – so fiendishly expensive that the same pair had better still be going strong when I drop dead, rake in hand, several decades from now. There’s a range of different options: gloves for light pruning, gloves for heavy pruning, gloves for cold weather and for gardening in the wet. The ones I’ve opted for have a reinforced palm and finger tips, a waterproof liner and a thermal layer, and are pretty comfortable. Whether or not they’ll be any good, time will tell – so far they’ve survived a week, and the only slight niggle I have is that the various linings make them a little tricky to get off, but not as much as the clearly-too-small gloves of recent months.

But if they can stop my hands looking and feeling like a pair of peppered hams hanging off the end of my arms, that’ll do for me.

Hole Park

To the rather posh Hole Park near Rolvenden for the Wealden Times Midsummer Fair at which, disappointingly, nobody got murdered and Inspector Barnaby failed to appear. But then someone pointed out that the spelling was entirely different and so this rather awful joke doesn’t work anyway. Most disappointing. The fair was a pleasant way to spend a few hours though (Bill enjoyed being made a fuss off). We look forward to going back in order to explore the gardens, the only part of which we were able to see on this occasion was the impressive formal lawn and pond, with accompanying yew topiary, including some fairly (and surely inadvertently) rude shaped specimens at the end of the terrace, unfortunately just out of frame in the above photograph. Rude Topiary, surely there’s a market for a coffee table type book on the subject?

Bill eyes the rude topiary, unimpressed.

Plant rescue

I’ve collected a few waifs and strays over the past week, with the intention of bringing them home and nursing them back to rude health. Whether or not their actual fate will see them consigned to an obscure corner of the garden and left to fend for themselves only time will tell, but the intentions are honorable, and the chances of seeing the thing through appear better than average as they’re all plants I’ve been keen to introduce here anyway.

Plant number one was not so much a waif as a child of cruel neglect, rescued from an otherwise very good nursery in Maidstone where I found it nestling between specimens in finer fettle. It’s a hardy geranium, a cultivar of the dusky cranesbill Geranium phaeum, the Mourning Widow. A native of European woodlands it’s quite happy in dry shade, which makes it useful as well as attractive. Geranium phaeum ‘Samobor’ sports mid green leaves with a dark port wine stain. It’s notable for tall, delicate flowers on which, unlike most hardy geraniums, the petals are reflexed – held backwards – exposing the rude bits of the flower to all and sundry. Inappropriate behaviour for a mourning widow you might say, but each must be allowed to deal with grief according to their own fashion.

Dead heads and seed pods

The specimen in question had flowered and was busy diverting its attention into producing seed, doubtless one of the reasons it looks so ropey, with scarcely a leaf, although this doesn’t explain why it appears to have outgrown its pot. I suppose I should have haggled for a discount, but I’m not very good at that kind of caper, and it was only three pounds fifty. Tough as old boots, these things, so having dead headed it and given it a good drenching of a seaweed based plant tonic I fully expect it to be loutishly romping through the borders in no time.

Patients two and three came together, rescued from the compost heap at the site of a border I’ve been clearing for replanting. They will be be considered most ordinary to some, but closer inspection reveals them to be rather wonderfully constructed, even if they do grow with unabashed vigour. Firstly, we’ve the perennial cornflower Centaura montana, with its beautiful delicate violet blue petals and decorative filigree work beneath. Grows well just about anywhere that isn’t waterlogged, and will even put up with a bit of shade. A useful and, again, tough old thing, not dissimilar in that respect to the red valerian Centranthus ruber, with its generous purple red flower heads and slightly fleshy leaves and stems. Although it will grow happily in reasonably rich soil of a garden border, it seems more than happy to grow in and on walls and self seed quite liberally. However, unlike something like Corydalis which enjoys similar positions it has a tough, woody root, so you might want to keep an eye on established clumps to avoid any damage to the mortar.

Which just leaves me to be a sort of horticultural Florence Nightingale, I suppose. I shall need a lamp.

Old Nick’s porridge

If there was a plant star of the show at Chelsea this year the award must go to Cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris. This didn’t so much sneak its way into just about every garden as proudly proclaim itself a key part of those schemes in which it appeared. On the television coverage designers like Andy Sturgeon could be heard extolling the virtues of the ‘umbellifer’ – basically a big carrot. In the kitchen garden dill, fennel and angelica all fall into this group, although it’s not a genetic classification but a description of how the plant holds its flowers; in ‘umbels’ (an umbrella-like structure). Cow parsley is similarly classified, and while the posh red version Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Raven’s Wing’ was in evidence, it was the humble species which we know from our country lanes and hedgerows that seemed most popular, and with good reason. Six weeks ago, clumps of delicate, fern-like foliage could be seen nestling on the ground, glowing lush green in the damp undergrowth where they’ve been bulking up since last year (Cow parsley is a biennial). Then seemingly overnight, aided by record rainfall and then unseasonable sunshine, the plants achieved a height of about a metre, sometimes more, topped with a froth of delicate, creamy white flowers.

Would I plant it in my garden? I might, if I had a large expanse of naturalistic meadow planting. In its favour, it’s native, and rather beautiful. But it can be something of a thug both being a prodigious self-seeder and possessing the ability to reproduce through a spreading rhizome system. It will also hybridize with other members of the carrot family, so if you grow dill or fennel, for example, you will need to sow fresh seed from a trusted source every year in order to keep the plants true to type. In a smaller garden I might be inclined to use something like Bishop’s Weed, Ammi majus, to achieve a similar effect.

Being a native plant it has a host of common names (see here on the excellent seedaholics website for a full list), among them Wild chervil, Lady’s needlework or Queen Anne’s Lace (also a common name for Ammi majus). But my favourites are Devil’s parsley and Naughty man’s oatmeal.

Adding a frothy element to Andy Sturgeon’s Chelsea garden

Main image copyright © fionaandneill, on Flickr.

RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2012

The sun came out for Chelsea this week, baking hot on Tuesday when I visited the show on the day the medals were announced.

There was a tremendous amount going on, and it was good to see an awareness of the the environmental impact of gardening, with a noticeable emphasis this year on water conservation, drought tolerant plant selection and naturalistic styles of planting, although it was evident from overheard comments that, to a significant number of onlookers, the designers’ painstaking attempts to recreate romantic meadow effects were often interpreted as patches of weeds – “there’s a bit like that in my garden behind the shed!”. I thought it was rather lovely, but that’s the challenge for the garden designer keen to promote this aesthetic with all its environmental, bee-friendly worthiness, when many clients just want things to look neat. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Notable also was a consideration of how we can green the urban landscape, with suggestions for even the smallest of spaces and, while there was undoubtedly some very impressive design and plantsmanship in evidence in the larger gardens, it was the small details which were more interesting for me than the broad sweep; how different designers use various materials, and observing the points at which they interact. The more modestly proportioned artisan gardens were a rich source of inspiration – not least because they demonstrated how much can be achieved in a small plot, and with increased demand on our space from housing fewer of us have large, or even moderately sized gardens any more – as can be readily appreciated when looking at the garden of an average new build home.

The Brewin Dolphin garden

Throughout there was a wonderful mix of the formal and informal, best in evidence in Cleve West’s garden for Brewin Dolphin which deservedly won him Best in Show for the second year running. Here he mixed formal elements such as yew topiary, stone gate pillars, and beech hedging, with a less disciplined side represented in the beautifully lush, detailed herbaceous planting. Similarly Arne Maynard’s garden for Laurent Perrier used his trademark copper beech – here in the form of a pleached hedge – as a stately component of the space against which his riotous lower level planting in shades of pinks and silver could frolic. Not noted for my love of roses, I was nonetheless completely smitten by the low mounds of Rosa ‘Reine des Violettes’ trained over hazel supports. Chris Beardshaw’s Furzey Gardens demonstrated that it is possible to create a harmonious, peaceful and lush space using rhododendrons and a variety of ericaceous plants. Wonderful stuff.

More pictures of Chelsea 2012 can be seen on our Facebook page.

You don’t know Jack

Garlic mustard, or Jack in the Hedge (Alliaria petiolata), glowing white and emerald green following a downpour. It’s everywhere at the moment. Find it popping up alongside pavements and in the hedgerows, obviously loving the wet weather and growing away quite vigorously, although not as uncontrollably as in North America where, following its introduction for culinary use in the nineteenth century, it’s become an invasive pest. Like the nettle which it superficially resembles – and in whose company it can often be found – it has a square stem, but the emergence of the vertically-held seed pods after the flowers point towards its true placement in the brassica family, reminding me of canola (the rapeseed plant), a solitary specimen of which occasionally escapes from the fields and appears in similar locations. I’ve yet to introduce it to my own herb patch, or anyone else’s garden for that matter, but I wouldn’t rule it out in the creation of a wild, naturalistic effect, perhaps in the company of cow parsley and a deadnettle or two.

Goosegrass

It was probably inevitable that declaring a hosepipe ban would usher in weeks of heavy rain. After all, it is April. And if there’s one plant in particular that I’ve noticed making the most of the wet weather and romping through every garden, it’s goosgrasss. I spent most of Friday afternoon gardening up to my elbows and, at one point, ears in the stuff (I should point out that I was lying down in order to weed under an awkward cornus – it’s rampant, but not that rampant). Galium aparine is known by many other names; in addition to goosegrass, perhaps most commonly cleavers, but also stickyweed, catchweed, coachweed, bedstraw (from its historic use as a matress stuffing), robin-run-the-hedge and, of course, sticky willy. Though I’m much too mature to find that particular epithet even remotely funny.

I lied, of course, it’s ridiculously amusing, and at least fifty percent accurate as a description. This stuff is sticky – persistently, annoyingly so, clinging to your hands, your clothes, even your hair as you try to disentangle it from your prize plants without pulling bits of them off in the process. But, like so many other weeds, the characteristics that make it so frustrating for the gardener are the same ones that allow it to flourish and colonise our borders with such abandon, its long, sprawling stems creeping over the ground, and inveigling their way through and over plants, finally smothering them utterly. And then it turns out that the plant isn’t sticky at all – rather tiny hairs on the leaves and stem work in the same way as velcro, with hooked ends which grasp skin, hair and fur, and of course, give the plant a firm hold on any plant matter it feels the need to clamber over. Effective stuff.

While hoiking it out by the handful it may be diverting to muse that herbalists have found several uses for it. Just as well you might think, it being so wanton, although I think I might stick to oranges and tomatoes for my daily dose of vitamin C in which it’s apparently particularly rich. It has been used to lower blood pressure, as a treatment for bites and for cystitis, although quite how you apply it I’m not entirely sure. A tea made from the stuff is a diuretic and a laxative (I have a sneaking suspicion that if you make a tea from sufficient quantities of any plant, it’ll have a similar effect. Unless it kills you first.)

All most interesting and very worthy. Mine’s still going on the compost.

Mini orchard

The apple trees are planted – a milestone in our home. We’ve always known where we wanted them but somehow, with a rundown house to renovate, garden buildings to erect, borders to fill with flowers and the kitchen garden to fill with annual veg, it always slipped to the bottom of the list. Which is a shame because planting fruit trees really should be one of the first things you do when you move into a new house, partly for the practical reason that it will take a year or two before they bear fruit (the maturation period depends on the vigour of the rootstock; larger trees take longer to achieve their productive potential), but mainly because there’s nothing better than planting a fruit tree to make you feel as though you’ve put down roots. Quite literally.


I find it interesting why that should be – it’s wonderful to provide salad and vegetables from your own garden, but an apple or pear tree* provides a more permanent link to the land, and the opportunity to have one growing on your own little piece of the world is a privilege not to be taken for granted. To watch it grown and mature, to see its naked grey twigs clothed with young leaves in spring; to revel in outrageously generous blossom and finally - at last! - to pluck a fruit from the tree and taste your whole garden in one bite of its warm, swollen goodness as the juice runs down your hand. Now that’s a thing.

April lies toward the end of the season for planting bare-root trees, so I shall be relieved when our trees show some signs of life. We have chosen three varieties, each on the dwarf rootstock M27. This means that they’ll need permanent staking, reaching a maximum height of around six feet, but has the advantage for the impatient that they should fruit within a year or two. Firstly, we have opted for Blenheim Orange, a traditional dual purpose apple for cooking and eating, with crisp yellow flesh and large golden fruits striped with red. Known for its disgraceful sexual proclivities as a ‘triploid’ apple it needs to be pollinated by two other varieties, and all three should flower at a similar time for obvious reasons. So we also have the nutty Fiesta, a new strain developed at the East Malling Research station, similar to Cox’s Orange Pippin but, we are told, more reliable to grow, and Laxton’s Superb, which crops from November like the other two. All have excellent reputations for flavour – daft to chose something that doesn’t excel in this respect unless you’re only growing the fruit for throwing at people, and we don’t really have the space here for that, though I imagine some of the windfalls could be used for this purpose at a push. And of course, we have the neighbours’ Bramley which crops heavily on our side of the back fence.

So, our mini orchard is taking shape. Pears next, and an apricot for the south facing fence behind the cold frames. I fear this could become an addiction.


*Surely this should apply equally to cherries, plums and gages, but while I love them, I don’t seem to have the same emotional connection to stone fruits as I do to pome fruits. It’s a personal thing.

Grow Your Own

I’m not a particular fan of the phrase ‘Grow Your Own’. Partly because it sounds like an instruction rather than an invitation (‘Have a Nice Day’ is similarly annoying), and partly because it sounds like something a particularly mean-spirited neighbour might bark at you across the garden fence after being asked if he could spare the odd brussel sprout from his massive glut of home grown produce, quite possibly preceded by an equally unfriendly invitation to ‘naff off’. But however I might feel about the term there’s no gainsaying a phenomenon which has seen an unprecedented increase in the demand for allotment space whilst providing a significant revenue stream for the publishing, horticultural and home improvement industries for the past few years. I do wonder, though, is it all marketing flim flam, tapping into our desire to escape from the rat race to live the good life but never really getting any further than Tom and Barbara, or is there really something of enduring substance behind the hype?


To begin to answer that question I think we have to consider the reasons why growing your own food has become such an appealing idea. Because it wasn’t; not for several decades. Since the end of the wartime Dig for Victory campaign and the rise of the supermarkets with their cheap, clean, readily available year-round fresh produce, the idea of getting your hands dirty and having to wrest your food from the ground was anathema, and allotments became a retreat for a certain type of man who wished to escape his family and spend as much of his spare time as possible in the cultivation of prize winning parsnips of uncommon size. As long ago as 1962 Rachel Carsson shone a light on the widespread use of pesticides in Silent Spring, but convenience and affordability seemed to be the overriding imperatives for the shopper until the concerns of the organic movement began to gain traction in the nineties. Coupled with a wider awareness of environmental issues, embracing food miles and ethical trading policies, a new eco-savvy consumer began to exert influence on the supermarket food buyers prompting an increase in fair trade and organic food lines, albeit priced at a premium.

With worries over the pesticide content of the food on our plates, its provenance and, especially in times of recession, cost, it’s not hard to see why the notion of growing your own food should once again gain popularity. Particularly so when you consider that food we grow for ourselves need pass none of the tests imposed by the supermarkets in respect of shelf life, suitability for transport, and uniformity of visual appearance. Consequently, the varieties we choose to grow can be selected by more satisfying criteria: I choose to grow this potato because I prefer its taste to that one, or this squash because, well frankly, it looks funny and makes me smile. And I think this is getting to the heart of the matter.

While it’s interesting to consider the background behind the Grow Your Own movement, all we can really be sure of is what motivates us personally. I think choice has a lot to do with it, at least for myself. Whatever you want to grow — which, most sensibly, should be closely related to whatever you want to cook and to eat — there is such a diversity of choice that the process of engagement with the food on your plate begins even before the seeds have arrived. Maybe it’s a wholeness thing, a holistic approach which fulfills something that we’ve lost in our market-driven economy, and restores a lost connection between our land, our stomachs, and our souls. Maybe it’s a chance to cock a snook at the supermarkets. Or maybe it’s just the satisfaction of realising that with minimal resources, good honest toil and a few handfuls of earth we’re able to provide, at least to some small extent, for ourselves and our families.

Whatever the explanation for the current popularity of Grow Your Own, whether passing fad or perennially popular activity, I’m in for the long haul.

Final appearance

This weekend I finally got into my own garden to remove last year’s spent flowering stems, left standing over winter to provide some vertical interest and catch a dusting of frost when it visits. Sunflowers, rudbeckia and honesty, golden rod, echinacea, and straps of crocosmia leaves with jewel-like red seed bursting their pods. Recently, with bright green spring bursting out all around, their dun informality has seemed out of place. But a wheelbarrow full of them still makes for a pleasing show as they put in their final appearance, en route to the bonfire heap.

Dry spring

Fresh green buds breaking on the red stems of the dogwood Cornus alba 'Sibirica'

Mid March, unusually mild, and the sap is not so much rising as erupting, surging upwards through stem and branch and twig and rousing every bud it passes from its winter lethargy. With the exception of two days at the beginning of the month we’ve been spared the usual bitter winds, but we’ve also had yet another dry winter, with precious little rain forecast for the rest of the month.

But it shouldn’t be all doom and gloom for those who love their gardens.
Yes, we are staring down the wrong end of a potential hosepipe ban, but a warm, dry start to spring, following a mainly mild and dry winter does have its pleasant side — it’s dry underfoot now. Usually at this time of year I sink into the lawn as I walk across it which, dear reader, has nothing to do with being unusually fat. As winter recedes we want to be outside soaking up as much of the lengthening daylight as possible, and this is made much easier in the absence of buffeting winds and torrential rain.

Of course, we’ll need to think of ways to conserve water this year, and now’s a good time to check that we have water butts positioned to harvest as much of the rain as possible when it does fall. Doubtless later in the year we’ll cast longing glances at the hose coiled up against the wall as we make yet another trip along the veg patch with the watering can, but we’ve all survived past hosepipe bans and this time round we have the affordable electronic water butt pumpto make the task of garden irrigation less onerous. Perhaps the coming drought will encourage us to be more aware of our water use and spur us into thinking about ways in which we can use grey water on the garden, mulching our borders and beds to minimise the moisture lost from the soil. We’ll need to be clever about how and when we water our gardens, and maybe explore alternative approaches, like Hugelkultur, which I’m in the process of discovering and am very excited about (I hope to write more on the subject later in the year). But for now, we should just enjoy the spring.

This weekend, I predict the air will be thick with the sound of lawnmowers.

Digory receives a sign

It’s high time I introduced a key member of the grow team. This is Digory, our twenty year old Land Rover, named rather appropriately by Emma after a character in The Magician’s Nephew who plants an apple and grows a magical tree. After many months of searching we discovered him on new years day last year, which we took as a very good omen for the business that was to launch a few months later.

Undoubtedly possessing the perfect combination of practicality and country charm to represent us on the roads, he was until last week a little anonymous and, well...naked. And so with the help of talented friend Charlotte who created our wonderful logo and looks after all of our branding, we decided it was time to have Digory signwritten.

Throughout the process, I managed to be somehow simultaneously incredibly thankful for Charlotte’s previous experience applying vinyl graphics to Formula 1 cars, and also rather worried about the dubious skills of her assistant. Thankfully, in the end  the results are even better than we had imagined!

Look out for us on the roads around Sevenoaks and Hildenborough, and give us a wave!

The moment of truth – the first sign to go on!

The dubious assistant tries his hand. Best leave it to the expert, beardy!

Charlotte puts the finishing touches to the side panel

Bramley Apple Week

I’ve just found out that it’s Bramley Apple Week this week. Quite why this should be in February when any half sensible apple tree will be in the middle of a well-earned winter snooze I’ve not the faintest idea, perhaps the autumnal apple harvesting calendar is chock full of national awareness days for other seasonal varieties, and the nation’s favourite cooker had to take the first free spot. Whatever the reason, if you’re lucky enough to have a Bramley apple tree in your garden and were conscientious in storing your harvest, you can still be enjoying the fruits into spring. And if not, there’s always the farmers market or the greengrocer...or even (whisper it!) the supermarket.


We live in the heart of traditional apple country surrounded by hundreds of acres of orchards, although sadly more are being grubbed out each year and in yet more the crop goes unpicked due to low wholesale prices. Which only goes to strengthen the argument for planting apple trees of our own – it’s the perfect Grow Your Own crop for those terminally strapped for time, requiring very little time or attention once planted, and minimal space if a dwarfing rootstock is chosen.

The Bramley apple, or ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ to give the full name, originated in the garden of a Nottinghamshire butcher Matthew Bramley, in 1856 but local nursery owner Henry Merryweather deserves the thanks for developing the fruit commercially. Less sweet and more acidic than dessert apples when picked from the tree, the appley flavour its retained when cooked, while its sugary cousins can become somewhat nondescript to taste. The process of cooking also favours the Bramley’s higher water content, making its texture more succulent than a cooked dessert apple.

A Bramley apple tree in the garden will require two other varieties to pollinate it – any reputable nursery will be able to provide a list of suitable candidates, but it’s worth remembering that insects don’t respect garden boundaries and so any apple trees which your neighbours have may well be suitable for this purpose. And if not, what a great excuse to start your own mini orchard, growing dessert and cooking apples together. Just make sure that the varieties you choose flower at the same time.

For more information, see The Bramley Apple Information Service

The white stuff

Bill’s first brush with the white stuff: I’m sure the garden’s under here somewhere...

Europe shivers, while for us in Kent this weekend brought the long expected snow. Several inches fell on Saturday night, and that would appear to be it for now. After several winters of much worse, this time I think everyone was ready for it.

Having shaken the worst of it off the bamboo (or anything else that might not welcome the sudden extra weight), there’s little else that can be done in the garden while it’s with us. Except, of course, to enjoy it.

Hedging your bets

There are several wise things said concerning he who plants a tree. (Never, you’ll notice, ‘she’ who plants a tree. One can only assume that ‘she’ is off mowing the lawn, weeding the borders, digging the potatoes and pruning the wisteria while ‘he’ has spent the last three hours just digging a big hole, sticking a tree in it and standing back to admire his handy work.) All things considered – excepting the suspect gender bias – the sayings are justified, for a tree is about as wonderful and awe-inspiring a thing as you can get, and to plant one is an act of generosity and hope for the future. But I have to confess to feeling slightly put out that posterity doesn’t seem to have bothered itself with preserving any choice epithets on the subject of they who plant hedges. Because, when all is said and done, what is a hedge apart from rather a lot of trees planted closely together? Of course, an individual plant within a hedge will never grow to the same stature as one of the same species grown as a standard tree – you’d never be able to sit in its shade, build a treehouse in its canopy or hang a swing from its limbs – but that's not the point. A hedge is a living illustration of the thing which is greater than the sum of its parts – it has to be more than a lineup of stunted trees, which sounds horrid, or we wouldn’t bother with the hedge at all.


For centuries hedges have been planted to declare boundaries, control livestock and to mark rights of way, providing wood for fuel, shelter for animals and birds that scurry among their roots or nest in their branches, as well as food for the forager, whether animal or human in form. Their history is inextricably bound to the narrative of our rural past and now, through our gardens, they also have the potential to form a green web that criss-crosses mile upon mile of our urban and suburban landscape, providing the potential for wildlife corridors across entire towns and cities.

But beyond the history and the environmental credentials, what exactly is it about hedges that I like so much? That begs me to defend them over and above all other forms of garden enclosure or boundary material, and plant them wherever I can? Perhaps its the sheer variety available. There are deciduous hedges and evergreen hedges, or mixtures of both, hedges with blossom and hedges with berries, spiky, spiney hedges for security and soft, billowing cloud-pruned hedges for fun. Tight, clipped formal hedges and blousy unruly country hedges which, whether plashed by skillful craftsmen or brutishly mangled with a mechanical flail, never seem to mind and continue growing just as robustly all the same.

Contrasted with the uniformity of a fence there is so much more to delight the eye. Even when the hedge in question consists of multiples of one species, there’s a pleasing variety in tone that makes an experience out of simply gazing along its flank. But why plant just one species, when a hedge can consist of a glorious patchwork of different colours, leaf shapes and textures? While fast-growing hawthorn forms the backbone of many hedgerows, this is often augmented with complementary blackthorn and dog rose, beech and hornbeam, wayfaring tree and spindle to name only a handful. These are readily available online from hedging nurseries within their ‘native hegding’ mixes from as little as a pound per metre. Slightly more formal piebald effects can be achieved with a mixture of evergreen yew and deciduous hornbeam, creating a fresh contrast between the deep green of the yew and the vivid, almost lime-colours of the young hornbeam leaves in spring, turning copper orange to brown over winter.

Hedging costs vary depending on the species chosen and the initial size of the plants, but can be comparable and often cheaper than erecting a fence of cheap panels, and significantly less expensive than a well-constructed closeboard fence. But while the cost of ongoing maintenance needs to be factored in when planning for a fence – which will need periodic weather-proofing to delay the inevitable damage from rot and strong winds – this also needs to be considered with a hedge. At the moment it’s not uncommon to see a hedge in dire need of a short-back-and-sides, although more often than not this will consist of vigorously growing species such as the infamous Leyland cypress. Regular trimming, twice a year, is key to maintaining this kind of hedge. Far better to chose something which exists at a more sedate pace in the first place – the western red cedar Thuja plicata looks nicer, smells better, and grows more slowly than the leylandii which it superficially resembles. Planting a broadleaved hedge, whether deciduous (such as beech) or evergreen (holly or privet) allows greater margin for error when trimming, without the danger of creating unsightly brown patches should you cut back too far beyond the growing points (yew is the only conifer suitable for hedging which can successfully reshoot from old wood).

So given the choice, would I chose a fence or a hedge? Something that’s fit for purpose, good for the soul, and affordable too? I’d opt for the hedge every time.

Something rich and strange

Arrested by the heavy, soporific perfume of the Christmas Box, Sarcococca confusa, as I make my way into the garden today. It reminds me that I had intended to write a post this week on this wonderful addition to the winter garden but was beaten to it by Alys Fowler’s excellent piece in the Guardian.

He who snoozeth, loseth, as someone once wrote; Shakespeare, probably. So I’ll have to be content with uploading a photograph and cutting myself a few fragrant twigs to bring into the house.

In, or out?

A ferocious wind has been blowing for the last few days, strong enough to tear off branches and throw trees to the ground. January doing its best to make an impression, for ordinarily this is a time of year marked by anticlimax – following on as it does from sparkly December and all the excitement of Christmas – cold, dark and grey. And while it’s true that you could spend scarcely a thought for your garden this month and suffer few consequences for the rest of the year, that would be a shame. There is work to be done now, whether outside muffled against the weather, or inside by the fire, marshaling resources for the year to come. This is the time for ordering seeds, for cleaning tools and forcing rhurbarb, sowing sweet peas and planting fruit trees, for moving shrubs and for establishing hedges.

Above all though, this is the time for new resolutions, for planning or – better yet – for dreaming of what the garden will be. You can’t do the planning until you’ve done the dreaming, so you should allow yourself the luxury of indulging your imagination this month. Books or magazines, blogs and articles in the lifestyle section of the weekend papers all provide a wealth of material for inspiration, helping you to picture how you want your garden to be, to look and, just as importantly, to feel, over the months to come.

A good enough excuse, should you want it, for staying indoors.

Battling berberis, bramble and briar

I manage to get myself into a tight spot, wedged between the boundary and three prickly customers, armed with only my wits, a garden fork and a slightly inadequate looking pair of secatueurs. The loppers lie tantalisingly out of reach on the barrow only feet away but separated from me by an impenetrable curtain of spines. Obviously the brambles need to come right out now, and I do my best to cut away the tangle and lever out the stubborn roots from beneath the neighbour’s fence, snapping one of the tines off my fork in the process. The second trusted garden friend I’ve lost in a week. Collateral damage. But no time for regrets now, there’s a job to be done, and decisions to be made. How much to cut from the other two, and when? That’s a thornier issue.

The barberry gets away scot free. It has a pleasing, open shape and there is something about the contrast between its dainty red berries and evil spines which earns it its right to remain unmolested. The rose too escapes unscathed, at least for a few weeks. February is rose pruning time – I have to have something to look forward to after Christmas. I’m conscious that this might be considered too cerebral an approach to winter pruning, surely the one time of year to indulge a testosterone-fueled session of Man Pruning (by which I mean pruning in a typically male manner, not the pruning of men, which is something altogether different). Sexist? Maybe. But I have yet to meet one lady who will charge around a garden with a manic look in her eye, indescriminately hacking away at vegetation, whereas I do know several gentlemen who fall prey to the condition and have to be lured away from their frenzied activity by the promise of a rare steak dinner and a game of rugby on the telly. On occasion, a slash and burn approach is entirely appropriate, but it needs to be dictated by the particular requirements of the garden, the plant in question and time of year. An uninformed approach fails to take into account the phenomenon of some plants’ disposition never to recover from the traumas of a severe disciplinary pruning, while others respond with greatly increased vigour.

I remember one poor cherry tree outside the building where I used to work. Each new year the owner of the office and adjacent house would employ someone to cut every branch and twig to exactly the height of her garden fence, with no consideration for the shape of the tree or where each cut appeared in relation to the buds. The result was a crazy beast of a thing, with massively thick knuckles at head height from which every spring would burst a mass of rampant epicormic shoots several feet high, much to the annoyance of the householder. If only they’d cut it in late summer, before the leaves had fallen, then the energy which the tree would preserve over the winter would have been appropriate to its new, reduced size, rather than to the size it remembered being was when it entered its winter dormancy.

Ideally, a little restraint is caused for, or at least a pause for thought. Before hacking away it helps to find out what it is that you’re about to attack, and how it might react over the next season (the online RHS Plants Selector and several of the organisation’s encyclopedias and manuals contains this helpful information). I’ve come to learn that while enthusiasm for the battle and brute force can play their part in the garden at this time of year — especially in more overgrown areas — it’s really strategy that wins the day when it comes to pruning. Timing is all, because nature has a way of winning over the long game, and it makes life easier with her as an ally rather than a foe.

Above: pruning in the alliteration border.

Digging December

I’m not sure that anyone spends much quality time in their garden during December. Even the keenest of gardeners will find more pressing things to do in the run up to Christmas, and it’s probably no accident that the holidays occur at a time of year when there’s little work to be done outside and the garden can be left largely to its own devices. But for those determined few prepared to contend with claggy lawns and inclement weather, there’s the promise of a calm, quiet space so different from the frenzied maelstrom which too often typifies our experience of the end of the year.

Admittedly, this is not a month when the garden looks its best. Dun grey sogginess rules in the absence of snow or a transforming frost, and those keen on crisp lines and defined edges may need to find something to distract them for a month or two. But December air is crystal clear, and reason enough to get me through the back door, warmly wrapped against the weather and sucking in great lungfuls of the stuff.

And once outside, you can just linger, and breathe, and enjoy the peace, or you can get stuck in. There’s plenty to be doing should the mood take you. Providing the ground is sufficiently soft and not buried under snow the winter months usually find me digging: carving out new borders, renovating old ones, or planting a hedge, something for which I never seem to lose the passion. I have dug our Kentish clay in all weathers and conditions; when the ground has been baked dry and every bone-jarring thrust of the spade reverberates through your body, to when the waterlogged soil has had to be sliced like a thick, stinking jelly. After six years of incorporating compost and manure the structure in our garden is greatly improved, but this year, following a relatively rain-free autumn, the going is pretty good in general. Hand me a spade, a radio and a cup of tea, and I can lose hours in the garden, with only my thoughts and the occasional inquisitive robin for company.

If all this sounds too much like hard work, there is another way to enjoy a spot of festive digging: by watching somebody else do it, preferably from the warmth and comfort of the house, mince pie and glass of something fruity in hand. There’s a strong argument to be made for the vicarious enjoyment of this particular winter sport. Although come boxing day, having been cooped up indoors with the family and after one helping too many of leftover turkey, a lungful of fresh air and an excuse to expend some pent up energies might just hit the spot.

Above: Scenic December dig, preparing the ground for a client’s new box hedge. This trench took a casualty as a stubborn euonymus bent my steel-shanked spade. Perhaps Father Christmas will bring me a new one.