On Tufty’s tail

Something is digging up the lawn. And it’s a different something from the Something that’s making holes in the turf at the top of this garden. That Something is a rabbit, or rather, a community of rabbits, their fiendish excavations discovered by the unexpected disappearance of my foot, and with it a good part of my lower leg, while surveying the kitchen beds. A surprisingly deep hole which took a lot of filling in, for all the good it will do, as the rabbits will no doubt simply pop up elsewhere. Little sods.

No, this Something is digging smaller holes – well, ‘hollows’ would be a more accurate description – and more of them, in a random, almost frenzied manner. You could, if you were inclined towards a spot of gratuitous anthropomorphism, imagine the tiny beasts scampering about and muttering, “I’m sure I buried it somewhere around here...or, maybe over there!”, forepaws a blur of frantic activity in an effort to find the furry critter’s equivalent of the elusive door keys. My money’s on squirrels; several piles of empty, cracked hazelnut shells dotted around the garden would suggest this is a safe bet. Which is odd as for all the time I’ve spent here I have neither seen a single squirrel nor heard its chastising bark. (It often seems to come as a surprise to people that grey squirrels are not mute. In fact, they can make quite a racket, particularly when annoyed or angry, and to annoy a squirrel would appear to be a feat easily achieved. Walking under a tree in which they happen to be sitting causes insult sufficient to trigger an outburst of barking, which you could be forgiven for mistaking for the chattering of a magpie with laryngitis. If, indeed, a magpie has a larynx – I assume it has some similar apparatus. But my point is, grey squirrels can produce a noise, and the noise produced is a rather tetchy, mean sort of sound.) So today I resolved to seek out Sciurus carolinensis, and having elevated my gaze a little higher than normal, sure enough a specimen was to be seen performing acrobatics among the boughs of a neighbouring oak tree. So, it is likely that the vandals in this case are squirrels, though these rural ones seem less tame than you might expect, preferring to keep out of the way of human kind. As well they might if they’re going to cause trouble.

That squirrels can cause problems for the gardener is nothing new. The RHS website has a page documenting their many crimes: in addition to making holes in your lawn and robbing the food from bird feeders, they can strip bark from trees (they seem particularly fond of acers), dig up and eat your tulip bulbs, eat flower buds on magnolias and camellias and munch through plastic netting. And they make that nasty noise. But while in many gardens (unfortunately not this one for reasons of layout and immediate geography) rabbits can be kept at bay with fencing, the aerial prowess of the squirrel makes it an altogether more difficult visitor to exclude. Humane trapping and dispatching seem to be the most efficient method (note the dispatch step; it is illegal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to release a grey squirrel to the wild, so transporting caught squirrels to your local woodland or country park in order to restore their freedom is not an option), but as the afore-mentioned website cheerfully observes, “more squirrels are likely to move in to occupy the vacated territory, so a garden is unlikely to be squirrel-free for long.” Rather galling, particularly as the grey squirrel is a non-native species, whose aggressive behaviour and immunity to the squirrel parapoxivirus (SPPV) which it carries has obliterated red squirrel numbers in England, although a programme of grey squirrel culling in Scotland and the northern counties is seeing numbers of the native reds returning.

All this could drive a gardener to distraction, or possibly to drink. But if the gardener in question is more inclined to seek solace in a bout of comfort eating, I think I may have discovered the perfect solution. A gourmet pie company in London, Little Jack Horner’s, who combine beer, prunes and pearl barley with an interesting free-range and highly sustainable ingredient.


Pies from Little Jack Horner’s

Grey Squirrel Hunter article from The Guardian

Squirrel and sherry pie recipe

Main picture used by kind permission of infomatique on Flickr under the Creative Commons Licence.

Frozen rabbit

Late March, Palm Sunday behind us, and most of the country is in the grip of snow again. Here we’ve escaped the worst of the weather – only the odd flake falling – but outside the wind is bitter and a chill is on the ground. Indoors we’ve been nursing coughs and sneezes and sore throats – my first for at least eighteen months – but out in the cold, fresh air my head clears and thought becomes easier as the steady tempo of work drives out more precious complaints. Here in the ever-present company of robins and the occasional blackbird, to whom clearly both spade and mattock ring sonorous as any dinner gong, I am glad of my hat (sometimes two at once), scarf and thermals, but I muse as I work that the central heating back indoors has spoilt us. Not only does it make us softer and more susceptible to winter illnesses when we get a little run down, but it dries out throats and noses and makes sleep elusive. Still, I ask myself if I am really advocating a return to houses like the one in which I spent my childhood, with gas fires and three-bar electric heaters, where only the side of you facing the heat source was warm and to move more than a foot or two away was to be resubmerged in icy cold so thick you could almost see it eddying around you? I don’t think so. I think rather I’m picturing some cosy aga-warmed kitchen of a woodland cabin or farmhouse I’ve never seen, wet boots and gloves drying on the hearth while supper warms in the oven and a kettle sings on top. Fairy tale stuff, but it’s cold and still dark, and spring’s late, so I think I’m allowed a comforting daydream.

Swing {thump}, tread {squish}, lever {thut}, shovel {flump}. I love digging. The sound, the rhythm, the movement. Though I’ve a sneaking suspicion that there might be something in the no-dig method, I've not yet found a way of putting in rabbit fencing without disturbing the soil to at least a spit deep, preferably more, so I feel I can safely complete this job without spectral voices nagging me about damaging the soil structure and the loss of carbon sequestration capacity. Quite apart from which considerations it’s a cracking way to keep warm, so I’ll continue to find many a reason to so occupy myself during the colder months, even if the days of double-, or even single-digging a plot are largely behind us.

Swing {thump}, tread {squish}, lever {thut}, shovel {flump}. I scoop the final mound of earth back into place over the chicken wire barrier, a warm glow steadily spreading through me at the knowledge that my handiwork will keep my clients’ cherished plants un-nibbled this year.

A flake or two of snow has started to fall, and a rabbit scampers over my boot.

The dark side

Spring time. Well, March anyway – time at last for sowing seeds, and the last chance for clearing beds of the rotting bedraggled remnants of last year’s splendour and, in doing so, banishing all memories of a wet and miserable year. Lengthening days, air noisy with the chatter of birds, buds on the brink of bursting, soil warming as the sun gathers strength with every passing day. Gladdened by the prospect of the new year and the end of the long, dark winter, we rashly peal off layers of warm clothing and head for the garden, to be met with ferocious, bitter winds, the coldest March night in 26 years, and three and a half inches of snow. The snow, which started suddenly at half six on Monday morning, continues to fall heavily and apparently, eschewing tradition, almost horizontally, until noon the next day, at which time the sun suddenly appears and begins to melt it away. But by this time we’ve had an evening of travel chaos, schools are closed and gardening plans seriously disrupted.

You’ll pardon us in Kent if we feel confused; the more cautious of us were expecting winter to have a sting in the tail (I may I fear even have predicted it in my last post) but, considering the last couple of weeks have been warm enough to work outside in shirt sleeves, excepting Friday’s torrential rains, it’s hard to plan when the weather is quite so capricious. Suffice to say, it would seem safe to suppose the next week or so will see colder than average temperatures. I wouldn’t mind that if only we could be sure of some decent light – at this time of year, it’s important to resist the temptation of sowing seeds too early and then running the risk of the seedlings going all weak and leggy as they struggle through the gloom. But this is gardening, and there are precious few guarantees. Especially, it would seem, in March.

The bright side

The morning began cold, damp and murky, with mist lying heavily over the distant hills. A few weeks ago I alluded to a sense that somehow Winter wasn’t quite done with us and now, at the end of February, mornings like these leave us in no doubt that this is still the case, though the daily increasing indicators of Spring’s approach suggest the hivernal grip is slipping.

Maybe we’re in for one last bitter wintery fling before we see the back of that season till the end of the year. But tomorrow is March – when the days grow much longer, and seeds need sowing, and the garden really starts to grow in earnest – and I’m optimistically looking forward to a warm, dry spring.

As I loaded rake, spade and barrow back into Digory at the end of the day, the sun came out.

Fashion in the garden

I don’t know who invented knee-pads, but I’d like to shake them by the hand. Possibly I’d squeeze a little too hard, just as some form of recompense for making the straps on the back of mine too short so that, when fastened sufficiently tightly to prevent them from wandering down my shins and consequently making themselves unavailable to my knees at the very moment of greatest need, they bite into the back of my legs. But, on the whole I’m rather pleased with them, at least after their first day in service. They have kept my knees dry and, most importantly to my mind, warm and isolated from the cold winter ground. There have been several chilly mornings where I’ve almost felt the veins in my kneecaps contract with the cold as I knelt on the frosted soil; the immediate moderate discomfort I can deal with, but the long term effects have to be considered as a jobbing gardener. If you want to keep at this into your old age, I tell myself, you need to remain bendy, or at least as bendy as you’ve ever been. I now feel liberated – freed from the tyranny of the waterproof trousers which I seem to have been wearing for months, irrespective of whether or not it’s actually been raining. Hard as it might seem to believe there have been quite a few dry days, at least in terms of precipitation, although the the ground has remained stubbornly, knee-soakingly soggy, something which the overgarments were supposed to counter. Inevitably they didn’t; they might be good at keeping off the rain and snow while walking, but prolonged contact with wet ground under pressure from several stone of solid gardener invariably results in the dampness eventually seeping through. That, and the combined efforts of bramble and briar have shredded several pairs into ribbons.

While on the subject of workaday fashion, I’ve also decided to wear eye protection whenever I’m in the garden now, which means finding a pair of safety glasses which look less like goggles stolen from a school chemistry lab, and more like spectacles. I’ve more or less succeeded, but they’re still larger than normal glasses. And then there’s the hat. Several of the gardens I work in are large, rural and exposed, which puts me at the mercy of an often bitingly chill wind, and so a trapper style hat, with faux fur flaps (which I think of as ears), seemed to be a good idea. It seems to be doing the job, but at what price? With the safety specs, I now look like an unholy cross between Ali Gee and Rowlf the piano playing dog from the Muppet Show. With knee pads.

It’s a look.

Notes from the greenhouse

11.5°C in the greenhouse, 7.5°C outside

You know that glorious winter’s day we carry about in our heads; cold, crisp, and golden with sunshine? It was today – and although it’s never a hardship working in the garden, this afternoon it was a positive pleasure. And so, while Emma got stuck in to weeding the veg patch (rhubarb peaking through the soil here; fat, deep pink stems starting to swell), I made for the greenhouse.

I’m nursing a bruised hand from planting digitalis on Friday; the most ridiculous injury, which can only have been caused continually stabbing through the blasted weed control membrane (how I hate that stuff). Consequently my body in its wisdom has decided to isolate my hand by turning my entire forearm into a solid lump of locked-up bone and immobile tendon. So I’ve not been at my most dextrous today, but hopefully my bench skills haven’t suffered too badly. And it gives me something with which to distract myself while avoiding accusatory stares from the corpses of plants I should’ve taken better care to see through the winter. More food for the compost heap.

I’ve potted on some of the Ammi majus sown in autumn, though lots more to do, and also the A. visnaga. It’s encouraging to see at least some of the Bupleurum which I sowed straight into 9cm square pots have made it, and I’m looking forward to having these in the garden this year. I’ve also started sowing sweet peas (Lathyrus odoratus ‘Blue Ripple’ today) as the light levels are increasing — I didn’t sow any in autumn, and I don’t want to start too early this year and end up with leggy, sick looking seedlings that give me rubbish plants. At this point, I need to point out that the current formulation of the peat free compost from B&Q (their Verve brand) is utterly hopeless, rubbish water retention and no structure at all. (You know what you’re left with after a vampire gets staked or wanders too far into the sunshine? Well, that.) I need to find a reliable, good alternative, and am tempted to try Carbon Gold’s GroChar. It’s not cheap, but you get what you pay for, I’m told.

Outside in the beds the tulips are pushing through strongly, though I fear I’ll have to dig them all out and bin them fairly quickly being reasonably certain that last year’s poor show (mottled petals and flowers going over rapidly) was down to tulip fire. It’s a significant investment to have to lose though so I do want to be sure but, if my worst imaginings prove to be well founded, this means no tulips or lilies or fritillaries in the borders for four years. Interestingly, the foliage so far looks healthy. We shall see.

Next time, I’m sowing straight into 9cm pots

Vampire dust

Crumble filling

Reasons to be cheerful...

...one

...two

...three

A jade’s trick

Yesterday the weather played a trick on us. Unusually mild and fresh and bright and, although at one point a dark cloud overhead brought with it a brief rain shower, half an hour later the sun and the breeze had dried everything out. The best kind of rain. The strongly gusting wind, so usually an annoyance, merely seemed to be blowing away all memories of a sodden summer, followed by a wet winter. For the first time in months I returned to the van at the end of the day with clean tools, and all night long the hearth remained unadorned with a pair of sodden, mud caked and gently steaming gloves.

Of course, the soggy weather is back today. Still mild, still windy, but now whipping the rain into your eyes no matter which way direction you face. Fools, says the Winter. Did you think Spring had come early? I’m not done with you yet.

The ostrich and the beaver

There are those who would seek to persuade you that there’s nothing to be done in the garden over winter. Pay them no heed. They are for the most part misguided, although several are bonkers and one in particular has that “Mwaha-HA!” laugh that tends to accompany delusions of a nature not conducive to the wellbeing of society at large. I have noticed that, whatever their peculiar motivation, they who espouse hibernal gardening abstinence fall into one of two categories, and can therefore be designated as either ostrich, or beaver.

The ostrich – who, like both its avian and metaphorical cousins, spends a proportion of the day with its head in the sand – dislikes facing up to the reality of the garden in winter, and will barricade itself behind closed doors with a glass of something medicinal the moment the days draw in and it becomes too soggy underfoot to be pleasant. Stopping its ears to the plaintive cries of neglected areas of its territory, it will walk with single-minded purpose between front gate and front door without so much as a glance to the side, lest a reminder of the work to be done should inconveniently intrude upon the conscience. It will survey the garden through the window, if at all, until it can be tempted out of doors again by more clement conditions in spring. At which point those tasks which should have been tackled over winter must now be undertaken in an undisciplined scramble, at an inappropriate time or, just as as likely, left until next year. When they probably won’t be done either.

Of course, it is entirely possible that you, dear reader, have Put Your Garden To Bed For The Winter, in which case I salute both your industry and your organisation and confer upon you the Order of the (Busy) Beaver. In an ideal world, I too would have spent the last few weeks of autumn weeding every border to within an inch of its life before spreading a generous several inches of mulch all around, both to suppress the weeds and to insulate the soil from winter’s icy machinations. Enjoying the prospect of a good frosty show, however, I’d still have left the more ornamental seed heads standing, and these would need cutting back around now as they start to take on a louche and bedraggled air, and then there’s the roses and the fruit trees, the grape vines and the second pruning of the wisteria...there are clearly practical reasons why you can’t do all of this in autumn, and if you leave it till spring you run the risk of the pruning cuts bleeding – not usually terminal, but unsightly and a bit messy.

My own list of winter gardening tasks is vast and comprehensive, including weeding and clearing, planting and mulching. There’s a whole host of plants which really benefit from pruning now in their dormant period, and they all need to be be attended to before the sap starts to rise in early spring. Not to mention shed-based jobs such as servicing mowers and strimmers and blowers, and cleaning and sharpening the hand tools. And even though the light is now increasing, there often don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to get it all done.

Fortunately all of these are tasks which I enjoy immensely and, muffled against the cold, the winter garden is a happy place for me to spend my days. Even if there are some who wonder what on earth I can be finding to keep myself busy out there.

Frosticles

Hankering after a cold snap and thoroughly fed up of mild, windy mush, I’ve been cheering myself along with some images from when winter really was winter. All of three weeks ago.

Blithe spirits

The snow has stopped for the moment, though I can see it falling on the downs in the distance. Two pairs of socks and toes still cold, though the rest of me is toasty. In the week since my last visit the tree surgeon has been and removed the dying birch which I had noticed had been rotting away at the base. One of triplets, the remaining pair stand together surveying the low stump with apparent detachment, anaesthetised to their loss. It doesn’t look quite as bad as I had feared, but slightly downhill from where their sick sibling once stood these two appear as though they might drag the green covering of lawn from off the top of the garden. Balance will need to be restored, and a post mortem carried out on the stump.


But that’s for another day. This garden is large enough to be divided onto a series of smaller projects, and today’s priority is to continue the work on the main border, making it both more visually coherent and also more manageable for the busy family who live here. This involves first clearing what’s already here and then implementing a new planting scheme to give year round interest without too onerous a maintenance requirement. To this end, and at the customer’s request, I’ll also be reducing the depth of the borders themselves. It’s not an insignificant task, but an exciting one as the newly planted border will completely transform the view from the house. And so, while some of the plant matter is relocated to a temporary holding bed, the majority will find itself destined for one compost heap or another; inoffensive leafy material to the domestic compost bins, while anything weedy, seedy, or in possession of an overzealously creeping root system to the council green waste collection, where the heat of the municipal heaps soon reduces all to innocuous crumbly goodness. I never feel bad about pulling out plants – if they don’t get preserved whole, they end up as a soil conditioner providing sustenance for other plants. Even the woodier shrubs destined for the bonfire will eventually make it back to the soil, often in the form of potash for the kitchen garden. It’s a happy day’s work, bent over the borders, sorting each forkful for this pile or that, and if I’m surrounded by the ghosts of hundreds of plants, they’re blithe spirits I think, perfectly accustomed to this periodic reshuffling and being helped along their way to their next incarnation.

And the tall birch tree, its wood warming some grateful family huddled round their fireside on a chilly winters evening...I wonder if its spirit will make its way back to this place to stand with its forgetful sisters, and hope instead that it will stay with the ashes from the fire’s grate, nourishing next summer’s raspberries.

Tree time

The first weekend in December, ringing in Advent, and with it, winter. The Christmas tree was bought from the nursery up the road, crammed into the car and – thanks to the help of the good friends we’d invited over – hung with baubles and lights. This is clearly the way to decorate your tree, and I can heartily recommend the following method: assemble the necessary equipment (one tree, one set of LED lights to avoid traditional bulb faffing, one quantity of decorations of dubious taste and unashamed cheer), provide food and drink, and stick them all in a room together with some cheesey music. And Robert, I predict you’ll find, is your Auntie’s signifcant other.


Not for us the practical choice, the non-drop Nordman fir Abies nordmanniana with its soft, generously clothed branches and symmetrical outline. We prefer the traditional Norway Spruce, Picea abies, and all that that entails, from the refreshing smell of pine wafting through the house throughout the festive season to the inevitable carpet of dropped needles beneath the tree. It’s just a part of Christmas; our Christmas anyway. Others are welcome to their artificial trees, I’m sure they are the sensible, economic choice and very realistic these days. But I reserve the right to waste my money and hop barefoot and swearing into the kitchen, another sharp green dagger piercing the sole of my foot.

But big as the tree is, and warm and snug as the stove had made the house, come Sunday morning we were craving fresh air and bigger trees, and so drove to Friezland Woods in Tunbridge Wells, our nearest wood under the care of the Woodland Trust. A dramatic place, notable for the outcrop of massive sandstone rocks at the top end of the woods, over which huge yew trees tower, their roots grasping monumental boulders with iron intent. It’s an impressive sight and the closest thing to Angkor Wat you’re likely to find in darkest Kent.

And a wood is a good place to go for tall trees. While a lone tree out in the field will grow stout in girth and hearty in leaf and bud, its cousins in the woods will grow taller and straight, each in close proximity to its neighbour, drawing one another up in search of the light. Tall, straight timber is to be had from woodland trees, but not on the side nearest a clearing, where the light encourages the growth of the sideshoots and branches that will cause knots in the plank.

Below, the ground in spring is a rug weaved with bluebells, celandine and close relatives buttercup and anemone. Above is yew and holly, birch and hazel, oak and, for the moment, ash, and tall alder trees down by the stream where the steam train to Groombridge startles us and has us all scrabbling for cameras, resulting in a collection of appalling photographs. Then we too go in search of the light, heading up hill towards the edge of the wood, where we emerge to a newly ploughed field in the sunshine to drink coffee from flasks and eat donuts for Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, as we have a friend with us from Jerusalem and he’s come with provisions. Even Bill gets some, though not the coffee. You don’t want to give a terrier coffee.

After which home for lunch and to split some more apple and oak and chestnut for the fire, which has burned low since we’ve been out. A woody, tree filled, friend filled weekend in all.

Everything feels right. What a great start to winter.

Photograph at head of post by kind permission of Grant S. Rogers

Passions and parrotias

There’s a garden that I look after which has it all. A sunken patio surrounded by cottage garden beds, clipped evergreen shrubs, lichen covered stone and a large pond complete with jetty, still water reflecting the ghostly white stems of birches standing tall and silent at the edge. Beyond the artfully hidden compost bins the end of the garden disappears into mature oak woodland. The whole place is quite magical, so much so that in all honesty the prospect of tending it might have proved too much for me to bear had not the previous gardener moved out of the area. A fortuitous day indeed – certainly for me. And, who knows, perhaps also for him. That jetty can be quite slippery.

In my experience gardeners are often outwardly serene individuals in whom passion runs deep and, whilst on occasion the outer serenity may be occluded by a somewhat warmer front, the passion is invariably present. Snowdrops appear to cause normally respectable people to behave with quite irrational zeal, and I’ve witnessed genteel ladies positively foam at the mouth over a tray of Mexican succulents. All gardeners have something which will stir up this fire within. In my own case the trigger is usually a tree of one sort or another; perhaps a majestic, centuries-old oak, silent chronicler of generations and home to a myriad tiny lives, or a knobbly-kneed swamp cypress dipping its feet in the river while unfurling soft new green needles in spring.

The garden in question is stocked with some particularly fine specimens, although not ostentatiously so. Three trees in particular are prone to quicken the pulse whenever I see them – a pair of parrotias and a liquidambar, all of which have been a blaze of colour these past few weeks. The American Sweet Gum (Liquidambar styraciflua) is a medium to large sized tree with glossy leaves which in shape resemble those of a maple (on the tree it’s easy to tell the two apart, as all acers have leaves directly opposite each other on the stem, whereas on the liquidambar the leaves are staggered, or alternate). There is a wonderful example in the gardens at Scotney Castle, where the ground by the boathouse is covered with a carpet of yellow and red leaves every autumn.

The Persian Ironwood (Parrotia persica) is a more splendid tree even than this, with three features of note. Firstly, a shapely trunk with attractive grey brown dappled bark. Secondly, fantastic autumn colour, with leaves in vibrant golds, orange and red. And lastly – and most wonderfully – tiny filaments of deepest red which materialise to clothe the bare branches in mid winter, reminiscent of the flowers of its relative the witch hazel (Hamemelis sp.).

Of course, all of this means that for much of November I’ve been knee deep in leaves in this garden. I don’t mind. I’m just glad I didn’t have to resort to anything desperate to get here.

Photograph of Parrotia persica flowers (top) © Phillip Merritt

Great Dixter

On the way to Rye, less than an hour away from here, there lies hidden in a corner of the village of Northiam one of my favourite gardens. This is Great Dixter, the home of the late Christopher Lloyd – colourful, influential, and sometimes controversial gardener and writer who created a very unique garden at his family home. Looked after since his death in 2006 by a charitable trust, the gardens continue to inspire and evolve under the guidance of Christo’s head gardener, Fergus Garrett. From the moment you approach the medieval facade of the house along the path through the wild flower meadow at the front, you know that you’ve arrived somewhere special, and the rest of the garden doesn’t fail to deliver on the promise.

Arriving at the porch the visitor is greeted by a continually changing but always spectacular collection of pots and containers, overflowing with all manner of flowers and foliage and colour. It’s almost worth a trip for this alone –  rich food for thought for anyone with a small courtyard garden or a paved area without flower beds, for the sheer variety and unexpected exuberance of the effect that can be achieved from gardening in this way. It’s true that container gardening can present its own challenges – watering, feeding and weeding need to be approached with more discipline for plants in pots, which are often less forgiving than those in the ground – but the sight of this ensemble is enough to make anyone want to give it a go.

Turning to the left and walking along the front of the house you soon come to a garden with the most amazing clipped yew shapes – geometric forms in deepest green, with topiary peacocks on the top; a lovely mixture of formality and humour. That’s where the formality ends, however, as the spaces between the statuesque forms are packed with billowing perennials and the planting, whilst tightly concentrated in terms of the number of plants, has been allowed to indulge a pleasingly loose attitude as regards the boundaries provided by the landscaping. All this creates a pleasantly disorienting effect, and I realise that my recollection of exactly where the paths go is slightly confused as I grapple with my recent memories of this beautiful yet bonkers, Alice-in-Wonderland space. I remember at some point scaling some steps to the upper level in the peacock garden, which might cause access problems to those with limited mobility. But you have to remember that this was built as a family garden rather than a visitor attraction, something testified to by the narrowness of the paths in many places, especially where the plants spill out over them with apparently unruly abandon, as they often do, adding to the romance of the place.

This is not low maintenance gardening – it’s a plantsman’s paradise and a designer’s dream, but the lack of formality and apparent wanton attitude of so much of the planting belies meticulous planning and many hours continuous hard work by the gardening team. These borders never sleep – whatever time of year you visit, they will be full of interest, as you would expect in the garden of the author of Succession Planting for Adventurous Gardeners. I have heard Fergus Garrett speak on how he will look at photographs of the same small section of the long border taken at different times of the year, planning precisely which plant should follow which as one season gives way to another, what’s working well, and what isn’t earning its place. The plantscape is always changing at Dixter, and a ruthless attitude can be employed by the head gardener if some combination is not working as hoped.

Ducking under the mulberry tree (we’d missed the fruit by a few weeks, more’s the pity), we made our way past the steps leading down to the orchard and the most fantastical bit of bedding I’ve ever seen on – a crazy tableau of sempervivums, echeverias and other succulents – into one of my favourite areas, the exotic garden. A one time cattle yard, and then rose garden, I’ve only known it as a home for dahlias and lush, exotic foliage plants. So verdant on this visit (by now pouring with rain), it was almost impossible to see the path, and we had to literally push aside the plants to make any progress. Giant leaved tetrapanax, bamboos and tree ferns, this is a true jungle, albeit in East Sussex. I almost felt a machete would be in order, although I hardly feel that such extreme pruning would have been popular.

Ed almost gets eaten by the giant tetrapanax leaves

There are many other areas to explore – the high garden, the orchard garden, the horse pond, the sunk garden and the topiary lawn – such that your head is quite reeling by the time you reach the exit. In reality, it’s beyond my capacity to process in a single visit, which is why I feel so fortunate to have Dixter on the doorstep, and I’m looking forward to my next visit when it opens again in April. (It’s a shame to have to wait so long, as I would love to see this garden after a heavy frost.)

An annual ticket continues to be absurdly reasonable, particularly since having seen the garden once, you will doubtless want to come back throughout the year.

More pictures can be seen here.

Dahlia envy

Mid September, and once again I’m struck by the knowledge that I’ve failed to plant enough dahlias this year.

There’s nothing subtle about a dahlia. Subtlety, after all, is not what you really want in the garden towards the end of summer, when everything’s been madly growing all year, when the beds and borders are jam-packed with plants that are either just reaching their best, or just gone over, or long past their best and sprouting crazily from every bud because it’s what they do and they can feel the days are getting shorter and want to make the most of every sun-kissed photon before winter robs them of the warmth and the light they need to grow. Against this crazed backdrop you need something that will stand out.

Dahlias stand out.

Exuberant, unabashed, garish, uncouth. I love them; the colours, the shapes – some like giant daisies, a child’s drawing of a flower – some, the cactus flowered varieties, more like a spiny sea creature, or the pompoms and spheres whose incurved petals make the blooms resemble paper Christmas decorations. Most of the foliage is unremarkable – although I do like the purple-black leaves of 'After Eight' or 'Bishop of Llandaff' – but you don’t grow dahlias for their foliage. And yes, they can be tricky customers to keep going year after year, digging up the tubers, draining the stems and drying them out and then dusting them with fungicidal powders before putting them in a box filled with dry soil to overwinter in the shed, giving them the best chance of making it through the darker months without rotting. Some people have luck leaving them in the ground and covering them in a deep mulch – I don’t. I imagine you’d need a pretty free draining soil for that to succeed, not my Kentish clay anyway, although I might give it another go. But surely it’s worth the effort...for the flowers. And a great tip for getting bigger flowers is to pinch out the side shoots immediately below the leading bud, while to prolong flowering till the first frosts, remember to deadhead regularly.

But for the next week or so, I’ll carry on glancing enviously at what other people are growing. I’m already making my list for next year.

Genius loci

Every once in a while – if you’re a person who values the process of thinking – it’s no bad thing to be exposed to that which has the power to stop you in your tracks. A positive encounter which threatens to reeducate you, tweaking your view of the world in some way to make an allowance for something significant which until now you hadn’t so much as imagined. Last week’s visit to the gardens of Rousham House in Oxfordshire was for me an experience of that order, to the extent that it’s taken me a few days to be in the position to be able to write about it. And even now I’m not convinced I have the words to convey the wonderment of this garden and this place. But I’ll give it a go, and when words won’t do the job, pictures will have to.


I first heard about Rousham House and its gardens during a talk given by Monty Don at Hadlow College last year, although I now understand that at the time I’d missed the full import of what he was saying. My eager note taking records “Rauscham [sic], Grand house, William Kent (designer), Amazing rill”, and then moves on to record details of Jacques Wirtz’s garden. There is indeed an amazing rill at Rousham, and the knowledge of this together with supporting photographs later gleaned from the internet had so lodged in my head that I’ve been looking forward all year to visiting this miraculous water feature, and maybe even poking a toe in it. This became the reason for the visit and so, upon arrival on a beautiful hot and sunny September afternoon, I was impressed, but not overly moved, by the house, the park and the gardens. A crenellated eighteenth century stately home, with neat clipped box hedging and immaculate bowling green, complete with Cotswold stone-walled haha to prevent grazing animals wandering from the park land into the gardens. At the end of the bowling green, the view down to the winding Cherwell River below was certainly picturesque, but it wasn’t until we descended to the lower level via the cool woodland path on the left that it began to become apparent that this was more than a little out of the ordinary. Classically-themed statues and urns on plinths are revealed to the visitor, their aged stonework softened to a beautiful patina, and glades and vistas open out around corners. Where the site narrows a beautiful arched terrace provides views down across the grassy Venus’ Vale, with its pool and grottoes, towards the river, while functionally acting as a retaining wall to the bank supporting the highest path.

And we’d been wandering a while before it occured to us; there were no flowers to speak of in this garden - it’s a garden of green, and it works wonderfully. And revisiting my notes from Monty’s talk, I see that I did also write something about this, the “power of green”, and that even the white garden at Sissinghurst is really a green garden*. And a few lines on, I find a reference to Pope, who advises “consult the genius of the place”.

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs
Alexander Pope, from Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington

And now, being on the cusp of understanding this, I can begin to hope to appreciate the rill in the context of the garden, not as a feature to be consumed. And not, thanks to Emma, by charging up it from its outlet at the Octagon Pool, but by seeking it out at its source, which must be approached from the vale by taking the lower, parallel path in the opposite direction, towards the statue of Apollo and the Temple of Echo in the glade beyond.

It was worth the wait. Emerging from a hole in the ground – through what means I have yet to find out (A spring? A pump? Some cunning hydraulics?) – a limestone channel winds its serpentine way beneath a wooded canopy. The rill arrives first at the octagonal Cold Bath – a deep, crystal looking glass reflecting the trees overhead and the adjacent grotto, and from there on between well tended hedges of laurel to the pool in the vale. This is surely a prodigious feat of engineering, and certainly a gentle, yet breathtaking spectacle.

Rousham had by this time given me so much that my head was fairly bursting. But it wasn’t finished with me yet. Taking the path to the left of the house, we descended through the tall hedge, and then through an iron gate into the walled garden with its mature fruit trees, roses and lavender. And from there, on into the Pigeon House garden with a large circular brick building at the centre, of the kind built for harvesting guano for fertiliser, or for gunpowder production. But the central attraction here was not this oversized dovecote, neither the neat parterre nor even the long dahlia border in all its summer glory. Rather, the old mulberry tree, ripe black fruits falling to the ground, provided a welcome and fitting end to our visit. And if we did walk back to the car with fingers stained red with juice, can anyone really blame us? Food for the soul and for the mind had been provided in abundance, and the stomach wasn’t going to be left out. Our visit to the gardens at Rousham House had been a truly nourishing experience

More pictures of the visit can be seen here.

*with the exception of the flower spike on the Melianthus, which is a rusty red, even though Lex laughed at me and said it never flowers, which is odd, because mine does in north Kent less than an hour away.

Blackberry time

All year long – and with last winter being relatively mild it really has been all year – I’ve been battling against brambles. Over the last few weeks the first year stems which will produce fruit next season have been growing away lustily, and in less manicured areas monstrous tentacles thick as a thumb have appeared, thorns snagging skin and clothing alike. But, for a few weeks at least, the time has come to relax about this unwelcome garden rambler.

It’s blackberry time.

The common blackberry (Rubus fruticosus) eschews the discipline and erect habit of its more civilised cousin the raspberry, choosing rather to lounge about in unruly fashion and scramble over anything in its way. Likely as not it also puts its feet up on the sofa, speaks with its mouth full and leaves its underpants on the bathroom floor. But it does possess the distinct advantage of requiring neither planning nor dedicated garden space, as it inserts itself at will and grows wherever it fancies. For those without gardens, or with gardens from which every bramble has been eradicated, a surfeit of free fruit is only as far away as the nearest hedgerow.

So whether yours are destined to be made into jam, used as an extra shot of flavour in a fruit crumble, a key ingredient of a delicious summer pudding or just crammed greedily into your mouth straight off the plant, dripping juice down your chin and still warm with the sun, this time of year provides a great reminder of simple pleasures. Free food is about as good as it gets.

Devilishly handsome

Late July in the garden, and summer is most definitely here. I leave our little courtyard – through the trellis, stooping low under the arching, overladen stems of the pheasant berry Leycesteria formosa – to be confronted by the strident scarlet of Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, jarring nicely with the flowers of the lavender that borders the path. I love how this plant single handedly provides a magnificent boost to the garden at this time of year. Some relief is provided by its fresh green leaves, together with a background hedge of forsythia and mahonia, with the purple smoke bush Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’ and the wheaten tones of the tall grass Stipa gigantea – but the overall effect is anything but subtle and, I think, all the better for it.


This malevolent montbretia has really made itself at home here, now rocketing effortlessly skywards from ground zero in early spring to achieve a height of four feet or more. Just now they are flopping over alarmingly, telling me that one urgent post Christmas task will be to plant them deeper into the soil so as to give the top-heavy stems more anchorage in the ground.

The individual clumps of corms have again become enormous, and while this gives an impressive degree of coverage, it does rather shade out anything planted close by. In spite of the fact that they do flower most spectacularly when congested, I'll be dividing them again in spring, so friends can expect to be gifted with pots of impish delight in the new year.

Before the heat

Verbena bonariensis against a background of Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’

 
In the cool, fresh air of the morning, as the sun gathers its strength for another day baking us till our skins feel fit to split like sausages, I spend far too long trying to capture the diaphanous cloud of pollen that floats away whenever the deschampsia is brushed against. I give up. You need three hands for this task, or at least a tripod, and I have neither.

So I settle for an early morning picture of the flower spike which the acanthus has deigned to elevate above its rampant mound of deep green, spiny leaves. Magic.