Sunlight and Shadows – using hard surfaces in the garden

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Sara Davison

My garden is only small; long and narrow, and with my passion for plants it could not really sustain enough grass to make keeping a lawn worthwhile.  That’s not to say I don’t like grass – a well kept lawn is the best foil for a herbaceous border.  But when you don’t have room to do justice to both, something has to go, and there is no way I’m giving up the borders, so when my garden was redesigned, out went the grass.  And what a good decision, I’ve not missed it for a moment.  Because look at the wonderful effect you get from the shadows cast by plants on the paving – you won’t get that sharp definition on grass.

This was a grab shot captured on my iPhone last summer, and I’ve been photographing shadows ever since.  You get twice the beauty of the plant, in the real thing and in its shadow partner.  This lovely example is Tellima grandiflora and it is a delight.  I bought the original many years ago from Beth Chatto’s nursery and have kept it going ever since, it even moved house with me I love it so much. It sends up beautiful stems of lime green flowers in the Spring, perfect among the tulips, cut it back hard after flowering and you have a lovely soft edging plant that takes on some colour in the autumn.  It divides well and I have clumps of it all around my garden, using it to tie one area of planting in with another.

 

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Live, from my garden

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Sara Davison

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I’m writing this post in my garden, I won’t be sitting here long as there are tiny biting things in the air, but I just wanted to share the moment. It is so still, the birds are still singing, the little bats will be flying past soon (eating the biting things I hope). This is what making a garden is all about, peace.

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Russian roulette – for [by] gardeners!

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Sara Davison

When I started writing this blog I stated that my aim was to share not only my successes, but my failures. So here’s a lesson from me to you. Do not use the cheap wooden coffee stirrers, such as are available from any High Street coffee emporia near you, as plant labels – or at least if you do, write on them in ballpoint; gardeners’ felt-tip simply won’t do.

I took the idea from a neighbour, it seemed a good one and when I planted up my dahlia tubers this year I carefully marked each one with a stirrer. However we had a lot of rain and the ink began to run. Not to worry – I’d used ordinary felt tip; I bought a gardeners’ felt tip and, I could still make out the names, I marked them up again. Just to be on the safe side I placed them in batches by name as well. We had a lot more rain. I decided to move the pots to the cover of my log store where they could dry out a bit and hopefully be encouraged to shoot. And they did! However the repeated soaking of the labels had totally obliterated the lettering. And I was no longer 100% sure which order I’d arranged them in.

Now I am pretty sure I know which are the Swan Lake (pure white) and the Bishop of Canterbury (vivid magenta) as I have three of each, and so the leaf shapes make grouping them easy. However the other four; Summertime (pale lemon) Roxy (magenta) Classic Rosamunda (shocking pink) and Bishop of Auckland (hot crimson) are singles, and three have leaves that at the moment are almost identical! The garden has a planting plan insofar as I’ve planted by colour – dark and deep shades at the front as you look at the garden from the house, fading to white at the end.

And so here is where I’ll be playing Russian Roulette this summer – with my colour placing. Will the Bishop of Auckland end up, bold as brass, centre stage in the middle of Swan Lake when he should be delivering a cheeky colour sermon next to the Bishop of Canterbury? I am probably going to play it safe and grow the four singles in pots, and then sink them into spaces that need livening up later in the season. It is not really a problem, they will be beautiful wherever they end up. But I’ve been out and bought some proper labels!

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The healing power of the garden

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Sara Davison

I’ve had one of those weeks; feeling totally frazzled and strung out with work and so tired.  So today I left the office early.  And spent some time weeding in my garden and now feel so much better.  I think as you potter around in the borders, weeding and dead-heading, finding (joy of joys) that at least some of the dahlias you took a chance on last autumn, gave a thick duvet of mulch and then left in situ, are beginning to shoot; all the noise in your head slips away.  I’m still bone-tired, but my head is my own again and I know I will cope with whatever work throws at me tomorrow.  And then it is the weekend, and with luck I’ll be outdoors again, in the garden or on the allotment,  and both if I can get away with it!

And the other lovely thing is that the new gardening books I ordered, two on the recommendation of Flighty, have arrived – now I’m spoilt for choice on which to read first!

This photo shows my borders last September, the dahlias in the foreground (just stems and buds among the phlox) are the ones I’ve discovered today.

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Recommended Reading 3 – ‘Consider the Lily’ by Elizabeth Buchan

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Sara Davison

 

A novel, this time, rather than a ‘how to’ or garden diary style of book.   I love this book and have read it many times.  Elizabeth Buchan is the daughter of gardening writer Ursula Buchan so in ways it is no great surprise that at some point her writing would weave gardens and gardening into the story.

Set in a rural England, after the end of the Great War it tells the story of a bride, newly married into a close knit family, and as a result of a variety of obstacles, never quite fitting in.  Taking over the somewhat shabby and run down ‘big house’ she transforms it, and then, still lonely and left out she turns her attentions to the ruined garden and for me this part of the book really makes it.  The garden restoration is told in loving detail, gardeners will recognise the plants selected, and want to add them to their own collections, you can smell the roses and lilies.

It is an easy read, and from my own experience I found myself totally absorbed in the story, coming to the end with a real sense of loss.  A great book for those days when it is too wet to garden, or when you overdid it digging the day before and need a bit of a break, but can’t quite shut the garden out.

The image in this post is the exquisite ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ by John Singer Sargent.  The original can be found in Tate Britain and is the painting I always make a point of visiting whenever I am there; it is one of my favourites.

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A busy day

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Sara Davison

Well the sun has been shining this weekend, perhaps not quite as much as the forecasters predicted on Friday, but I’m not complaining; it has stayed dry and been warm(ish).  Had today to myself, so have probably spent longer in the garden than is really wise, but it has been very productive.

Out early and on the allotment first thing, I was determined to complete the weeding of the rhubarb bed (I’ve christened it that just because it’s where the rhubarb grows, and makes the allotment sound a little bit productive!)  I’m hoping the allotment agent will hold to his promise to strim the grass verges for me as that and the freshly dug soil will immediately lift the presentation of my little piece of ground.  It also means that on my next visit I can either start to dig over one of the large beds, or faff around with the compost bins, even perhaps a bit of both just to ensure I do spend some time standing upright rather than bent over my spade.

As well as a plastic composter of the variety that you throw all the weeds etc into the top and (eventually) shovel out lovely crumbly humus to make David Bellamy proud, from a little door at the bottom I also have a very overgrown heap fenced on three sides by some wooden pallets.  Both require a good dig out, turning over and putting back again; such fun!

Whilst at the garden centre I also treated myself to a few packets of annual seeds; Larkspur, Nigella and Cornflowers – these will go into the rhubarb bed to give me some flowers for cutting in a month or two.  Then, before I wrote this post I ordered myself a new gardening book or three (oops!).  Two have been recommended to me via my Recommended Reading page, and the third on planing a bee friendly garden was inspired by the various bee keeping blogs I’ve been reading.  I’m not ready for bees of my own yet, but this way I can make sure I help along those bees that do stop off at my garden.

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Planting up the new garden 1

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Sara Davison

This is the blank canvas I had to play with a year ago, surely every gardener’s dream, lots of lovely rich soil just waiting to be planted! My brief to my garden designer had been that I would do the planting myself, using firstly the plants I’d removed, and then adding new plants as I worked out what I wanted to go and where. She’d made recommendations in the plan, for instance the empty bed to the right of the path would be ‘prairie’ planting, which I interpreted to be as inspired by Piet Oudolf, whose double borders at Wisley are a sight to behold in midsummer, if only I had that amount of space to play with! The other thing I wanted to do was to use colour more effectively and I planned to start with deep intense colours close to the house, through to cool shades and whites at the end of the garden. Naturally some of these rules will get broken, but if you can’t break your own rules now and then, what is the point?

So of course, the first rule to be broken was the siting at the front edge, the spectacular Viburnum plicatum ‘Mariesii’ that you see in the foreground. This treasure had been hiding its light under the proverbial bushel up near the shed pre-redesign, and my garden designer realised how much better it would look as a specimen as you enter the garden. However it has been in the garden longer than I’ve lived here and so we had to approach the moving of it with care, and it needed very careful nurturing all last summer. But I”m thrilled to say that it has survived the move and is just starting to flower for me this year. The lime green buds release a froth of white flowers that are held in tiers, it is a bold shrub but airy and dainty enough to occupy the spot it does, and this time of the year before the garden is flowering at full tilt, a bit of contrast in with the deeper colours in the rest of the border works just fine.

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Latest acquisition

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Sara Davison

I wanted to share my latest ‘treasure’ for the garden – this is Iris ‘Sinister Desire’ – which is perhaps rather a forbidding name for such a beauty. If you read my last post you will know one of my plans for the weekend included the local NCCPG plant fair, and I hoped my favourite Iris nursery would be there. They were, and they did not disappoint. Now I’d spent time looking out of my kitchen window at the garden before heading off, planning in my mind what colour iris I wanted, what height and so on. Naturally once I was there I had to shelve my plans because there were no tall pale pinks only dwarf ones; tall Iris are later in the season I learned, so another plant fair beckons. So, I was looking at the Intermediate ones, which are about knee high. This lovely dark purple, almost black in some lights, looks lovely against the acid green of the new growth on the Buxus and the Tellima which is the background in this image.

Since my garden has been re-designed I’ve had to totally change my plant buying habits. Previously, being a bit of a collector I would buy single plants, so I could get more plants for my money – but the result was a bit of a pin cushion, and lacked impact. So, my garden designer had firm words with me about this, and now I buy to plant in groups, usually in threes as the garden is quite small, and I get an immediate impact, but then as things bulk up I can still divide them and so increase the spread of the planting. Therefore, on Sunday, rather than buy three different colour Iris, as I would probably have done in the past, I chose three of the same – and this evening I’ve planted them by the side of my path, but in an asymmetrical shape, two on one side, one on the other – so as to bring the planting either side of the path together. I’ll keep you posted on the success, or otherwise. The rest of the plan is to now buy a further variety and do the same, but the opposite way around. Whether or not I achieve this in this planting year remains to be seen – I need to make a bit of room – already!

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Transformation – complete!

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Sara Davison

The first photo here is of my transformed garden one year ago today (please note any member of the Hosepipe Police checking in, I’m not contravening the ban; the photo is 12 months old!)  The landscapers had packed away their wheelbarrows & tools and I had it all to myself.  I’d started placing out my ‘treasures’ in their pots, just getting a sense of where I would plant them – and the glorious iris in the foreground are what I bought at the NCCPG plant fair (mentioned in my previous post) last year – you can see why I’m hoping the iris grower will be there again this weekend!  This year it looks as if only one of the three will flower, and because it has been so chilly the flowers are still hiding in the stems.  But they will come.

One year ago today

And this is what my garden looks like today!
Every time I look at it I am amazed at how mature it looks in just a year.  The very wet April we’ve just had has done wonders, everything is so lush and leafy, and the bulbs are lasting for weeks rather than days – which is great, and more about them in a future post.

To everyone who has followed this blog so far, thank you for joining the journey – of course this is only the beginning of the story, but now you know how it started.

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Long weekend ahead…

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Sara Davison

It’s Thursday evening, it is damp and chilly, the clouds are so low I can’t see the top of the hill.  I’m telling myself we still need the rain; we do, and that it is good for the garden; it is, but a bit of sunshine and warmth would help the seeds germinate and encourage my dahlias to put forward shoots, just to reassure me there is life there.  Never mind, just tomorrow in the office and then we have the May Day weekend, and an extra day off.

If the weather is fine, I have my garden and my allotment to play in – looking at the allotment this evening all the dandelions have gone to seed, and it is too wet for any photographic artistry.  But if the weather continues like today’s and I don’t get any garden time I have plenty of other things to choose from.  I could decorate the bathroom (not likely) do some baking (much more likely) start to do some drawing exercises and some botanical studies for a project I have in mind (very probably) visit RHS Wisley or the garden centre for a browse (worth considering) read a good book (no argument) in fact the list goes on and on.

One thing I will be doing for certain, is going to the NCCPG (National Council for the Preservation of Plants and Gardens) Spring Plant Fair.  I’m hoping my favourite Iris nursery will be there so that I can add to my collection, and also Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants, who always have  a fantastic range of perennials to choose from.  Watch this space!

www.nccpg.org

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