The All Seasons Gardener

Autumn ponds and how to care for them

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:54:00 +0000

That first warning snap of frost reminded me of a hellish task to come in the week ahead. Already the various plants around the pond are looking a little bit jaded and it’s about time to cut them back, paying a lot of attention to removing all the dead, dying and decaying growth because leaving it to pollute the water can cause the water quality to drop and can even affect the health of our fish. I really hate this task, as it requires pulling up the slimy stems of the water lilies and cutting them off so they don’t rot in the water – it’s supposed to be possible to do this in gloves without getting wet, but I lack whatever gene allows you to remain neat and tidy during dirty work, so I end up with green lily slime from my fingertips to my armpits and with my boots filled with nearly as much water as the pond!

The fish are still moving around a lot, partly because of lunatic owners trying to cut through water lily stems, but their activity will cease as the weather becomes colder and they become torpid. We’ll know when they start leaving the food that we throw in for them, although in mild winters they are greedy enough to keep chomping through until early January!

We have to cover a couple of our plants that are not fully hardy, with straw in old tights which we bend around the plant after it’s been cut back and wedge in between the big stones that surround the pond. And the final task before winter strikes is to fit some netting over one end of the pond which is particularly prone to getting filled with drifting leaves from the apple trees.

The silence of the dahlias

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:28:00 +0000

It’s not fair! We can’t have had our first frost already! But when I went out into the garden yesterday morning, there were clear signs of frost damage on the edges of my dahlias! I rang my neighbour, who leaves for work at four in the morning, and he confirmed the dread truth – he’d had to scrape the evidence of Jack Frost’s mischief from his car windscreen earlier in the day. So I’ve spent today trimming any foliage that looked a little dark (difficult if you have planted Bishop of Llandaff, which has conifer green leaves anyway) and cutting any buds that seemed soft and wilted. I can only hope that this one frost was a rogue and there won’t be any more for a couple of weeks, because the dahlias are still in full bloom and I don’t want to have to lift them yet.

You buy dahlias as tubers and plant them in March or April, depending when the soil starts to warm in your area. You can also grow them from cuttings – by placing a tuber in a pot with the old stems just above the surface and putting it in a greenhouse or heated propagator. When green shoots appear, cut them to about two inches and keep them coming on in a cold greenhouse or cold frame, while you plant the original tuber out when the others go into the ground. The third way to increase the numbers it to pot your tubers and raise them as above, but cut each green sprouting tuber into pieces before planting, ensuring each piece has a shoot.

You need to stake many varieties with short but plants with sturdy bamboo canes, being careful not to push the stake through the tuber. The buds appear as threes, usually and if you want really big flowers, pick off the outer two. As flowers fade, cut them off to encourage more to grow.

And here’s the miserable bit - when the first frost arrives you need to trim the stems to a few inches off the ground and dig up the tubers, hanging them upside down in a frost-free place for a few days, to dry out before storing them in trays of dry compost or sand over the winter. In mild areas, it is said you can leave them in the ground, although I never like to risk it.

Growing for beauty and store cupboards

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:33:00 +0000

When I had a real job, I enjoyed several long phone calls with Professor Tim Lang, a man who knows more about food policy, I genuinely believe, than anybody else alive.

And what’s that got to do with gardening, you may ask? Well Tim is a government adviser and his advice, right now, is that one way most of us can fight the ‘credit crunch’ is to turn some of our garden over to vegetable cultivation. What he actually said was, ‘… people have to take more control of their food systems. If you depend on Tesco or Sainsbury's or Waitrose, you are a consumer. In other words your food supply is under their control. But if you garden and can grow at least some food to eat, however little, then you are injecting a little food democracy into your food supplies and asserting your food citizenship.’

Brilliant concept, not least because I’m way ahead of him. If you grow beautiful fruits and vegetables you get the best of both worlds. On my list of favourite garden plants for consumption are:

• Fennel – lovely foliage, lovely aniseed taste
• Fig tree – great plant to cover an ugly wall and in a good summer produces premium price fruit in massive abundance
• Nasturtiums – cost pennies for a packet of seeds, self seed from then on forever, and both leaves and flowers taste great in salads while you can pickle the unripe seedpods to make capers
• Lavender – harvest the flowers to make lavender cakes and cookies
• Angelica – looks like the most expensive structural plant in the world, something like a tree fern in miniature, but can be used to make wonderful cakes and preserves
• Strawberries – look pretty, smell divine and taste so much better than supermarket berries when you pick them fresh and warm from your own borders

And if that doesn’t influence you, think about this. At present, Britain produces only 50% of the vegetables it consumes and less than 6% of the fruit!

No rest for the gardener

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:46:00 +0000

September should be a time when we sit back and celebrate our labours, a bit like a Harvest Festival for horticulturists, but it doesn’t happen, does it?

This month what I have in mind to do is:

Keeping on with dead-heading roses as the blooms fade away. This means cutting the bloom just above the top leaf on the stem, but I'm letting the rambler rose at the back of the garden simply drop its petals that it forms rosehips which the birds appreciate in the winter months.

The lavender has to be cut back too, just as far as the old wood, and the gladioli and dahlias have to be staked to get the best out of them without the autumn breezes flattening them into the lower border plants. As soon as the flowers are over, I’ll have to lift the gladioli corms and store them for next year, somewhere that the mice can’t find them like they did last year!

Planting up my containers with wallflowers and tulips – for the year ahead I want to try Erysimum cheiri ‘Sunset White’ which starts a sort of primrose and ages to be a cream colour, with Tulipa ‘Spring Green’ which will grow up through the earlier wallflowers and give the pots a much longer life.

Gladiolus courtesy of Carl E Lewis

Autumn colours in the garden

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:41:00 +0000

More pink …

Yes, it’s another offering from my worryingly pink flowerbeds! This time it’s one of autumn’s best performers, the cyclamen. One thing that surprises many people is that this pretty flower, which nods over its elegant green and silver marbled leaves like a butterfly, is actually related to the primrose.

The cyclamen grows from a tuber, and depending on your soil and whether it finds itself in conditions it enjoys, it may form one or two large tubers or many much smaller ones that spread to cover a wide area. Ideal conditions are fairly dry, partly shaded, well-drained areas, like a rockery.

For outdoor hardiness look out for Cyclamen coum which has the classic heavily marbled leaves but with reddish undersides. The flowers are tiny too and may be white, pale pink or tending towards magenta and they are highly resistant to frost – I’ve even had them encased in ice in the early morning and still perky when it melts at midday.

Also worth looking out for is the pictured variety, Cyclamen hederifolium which used to be sold as Cyclamen neapolitanum – this plant has leaves that die away in spring and don’t appear again until the flowers are already on show. The flowers range from white to pink but without the bright magenta and once they have gone over, their stems curl up like the springs inside a ballpoint pen, very pretty!

Being a girlie gardener

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:54:00 +0000

Today I had a visitor who stood and watched me as I prepared to type this blog. It’s a bit disconcerting to be observed while blogging. In fact he put me off so much I stopped and made a cup of tea instead. We stared out of the kitchen window into the garden.

“Your garden’s very pink, he said.

“No it’s not.”

But when he pointed out that just about everything that’s in flower was indeed, a bit ‘pink’ I couldn’t argue with him. We walked around and looked at the cyclamen and the nerines, and most of the Japanese anemones are pink (there are a few white ones though) and the rock rose is definitely pink and this thing, which is part of the potato family and whose name I don’t know because I got it in a lucky dip at a garden centre …

“That’s not pink,” I said, desperately. “That’s magenta!”

“Which is just a way of saying bright pink,” insisted my non-girlie visitor.

Now, partly this is due to seasonality – you won’t find an early spring flower that’s red for example. The only red spring blooms are polyanthus and tulips and neither of them are the first bloomers: early spring flowers are either purple or yellow. Summer is very strong on hot colours like reds and oranges, which continue through to the autumn with dahlias, for example, but once the leaves start to fall, you’re back to a different palate, usually pinks.

Even so, I’ve got to say he’s got a point – my garden is a bit like horticultural Barbie-land!

Mushrooms in the garden

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 12:06:00 +0000

A 40 year old woman has died after eating poisonous wild mushrooms picked from a botanic garden in the Isle of Wight. Another woman is seriously ill in hospital. They are believed to have tasted the fungi, which has been tentatively identified as the death cap, on Monday after the younger woman had collected them during a visit to Ventnor Botanical Garden the previous day.

This tragedy follows fast on the consumption of highly toxic mushrooms by the author Nicholas Evans (the Horse Whisperer) and his family. And it happens at a time when many of us are finding lots of mushrooms – or fungi as we should properly call them – in our lawns and borders. So we can safely bet that the next couple of years will be great for growing our own mushrooms, but please, invest in a kit via mail order, don’t take risks with wild spore!

You need:

• Mushroom growing kit
• Well-rotted compost or preferably, horse manure
• A bucket, trough or other container

Just spread the sterilised grain (which is coated with mushroom spores) over the compost and you're away. It can take up to a year to see any results, although with the current weather conditions, most people seeding a mushroom bed now can expect a spring harvest as long as they water their container well afterwards and keep it in a garage or a sheltered spot outdoors, moving it into the warmth in winter.

Most people will get two to three 'flushes' of mushrooms - producing up to a couple of pounds of mushrooms each time before the food supply in the compost is exhausted.

Japanese Anemones

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:12:00 +0000

There’s nothing like these plants for the autumn garden – along with nerines, which usually come out later in the season, they give a combination of height and colour that can’t be beaten. Oddly, my nerines are in full flower already, which is very early – normally I wouldn’t expect them to be opening for at least a fortnight.

Anyway, back to the Japanese anemones: the best ones have very clear subtle shades of purple, pink and white and rise gently on slender stems over the heads of shorter shrubs, so that they move in any breeze – despite their apparent fragility, they are quite wind and rain hardy, in my experience.

They are also not Japanese but Chinese! Apart from heavily soaked soil conditions they seem to cope with just about anything: chalk to heavy clay, whatever you’ve got, although they prefer damp, limy loam because they are an anemone and like woodland conditions and shaded or semi-shaded areas. Often they take a year or two to establish, so be patience and don’t crowd them with other plants, they will spread generously. They can be grown from root cuttings, so once they ‘go over’ beg some cuttings from your friends or share around your own bounty amongst your fellow gardeners.

Best performing annual plant this year ...

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:28:00 +0000

Amaranthus caudatus, because it’s beautiful and because it has one of the most impressive sets of common names ever – the best known in the UK is Love-lies-bleeding, but it’s also known as pendant amaranth, tassel flower, velvet flower, foxtail amaranth, and quilete.

It’s a very simple annual, which grows easily and nearly all parts of the plant, but especially the leaves and seeds, are edible and have been used as staple ingredients in South American and across India. The plant grows anything from three to eight feet in height, and produces the best tassels in full sun, but it can cope with both humid and arid conditions. In less clement climates, plants can be started indoors in early spring and transplanted outdoors after the last frost but I just chucked my seeds onto a patch of raked soil in May and they seem to have thrived on my general neglect!

Favourite garden places

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:47:00 +0000

For the past few days there has been something missing from my pond – the dog! Until the rainy weather came, Falco spent nearly every hour of nearly every day sitting on the ‘bridge’ which is actually more of a platform that crosses the pond: it’s meant to provide shade for the fish, rather than a route from one side to the other, but Falco thinks it’s the nearest thing to heaven a dog can have.

The reason I’m so aware he’s missing from his favourite spot is that I’ve spent quite a lot of time under an umbrella, by the pond, looking at a patch of garden that currently is a bit of hard-standing for a barbecue, a home to two compost bins and the nesting place of our currant and blackcurrant bushes. And the reason I’m lurking in my own garden in the rain is that I’m going to be given a greenhouse for my birthday!

There are still some issues of course, like what kind of greenhouse, because they can be constructed from so many different materials. Polyethylene ones are just sheets of plastic over a frame – they are cheap to purchase, but need re-covering every two years and in winter are prone to wind or snow damage: wind damage rules these out for us. Corrugated acrylic sheets are said to be not much better because they crack and discolour - polycarbonate materials are more durable (and much more expensive) but I think that’s the route we’re going to take. Glass is the best option but costs a fortune – I’m sure we can’t afford it.

Then there is the frame: cedar and teak last forever, especially if you oil them, ideal, but are very expensive, while ordinary softwood looks just as good but has a very limited life. Aluminium does not rust, but isn’t exactly attractive and one issue with cheaper greenhouses is that the bolts and screws holding the structure together steel which does rust, so we need to pick carefully and if we can’t inspect the interior, ask questions of the retailer to be sure what we’re getting.

The only thing that has already been decided is the siting – a greenhouse needs an open area in full sun because while it’s easy to shade a small greenhouse if the sun is too strong, it’s almost impossible to improve the light entering a greenhouse in shade.

And of course, I have to decide what I’m going to grow in it! Heirloom tomatoes, aubergines and cucumbers for sure, but I also fancy some Hedychiums for their scent and a lime tree … and I’m sure that as the weeks pass I’ll think of more and more I can do ‘under glass’ and the greenhouse will become my favourite place just as the pond is for Falco.

Garden woes for August

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:05:00 +0000

Botanists and phenologists (which is the posh name for people who look at seasonal environmental events like flowering, seeding, migrating etc) have announced that our unseasonably miserable summer hasn’t just been bad news for gardeners – we had already noticed the problem of course, you should see the blight on my tomatoes for a start!

Fungi has gone off like rockets, as I’m sure many people have noticed – there are mushrooms in my garden but also across the grass verges on local roads, areas that usually have too much footfall for the spores to fruit successfully. Wood cranesbill and wisteria have flowered twice within a few months apparently, although not in my garden! The problem is that the strange weather conditions seem to have tricked the plants into believing it is spring again. But whatever it does to us: killing plants or causing infections to spread, raising the prices of certain foods or limiting the flowering or ripening of garden produce, it’s much, much worse for the flora. And where the flora is affected, the fauna suffers too.

Some of the country's best loved animals and birds are already paying the price - moth numbers have been worryingly low and the early berry season also suggests that the crops, which provide vital food for animals and birds in the lead up to the cold winter months, may disappear too early.

So you might want to think about feeding the birds this autumn and winter, and setting up some moth homes and beetle corners, to try and get our rare native wildlife through the starving months ahead.

I say House Leek, you say succulent

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:09:00 +0000

An American visitor looked deeply puzzled when I showed her my sink garden filled with House Leeks. “Those are leeks?” she said. “I thought leeks were kind of … oniony.”

Two gardeners divided by a common language.

Once we’d cleared up the confusion, she was full of admiration in which I basked, although I shouldn’t have, as succulents are one of the easiest things to grow. Within two years of planting a succulent garden it can look as if it has been there for decades – it’s an instant ‘heritage’ item in any garden. Not only that, but if you have a green roof it’s sedums that make it attractive, and the ground level equivalent of sedums is succulents, easy to grow, maintenance free and good-looking all year round.

There’s a belief that succulents must be grown alone, but it’s not true, you can mix them with both perennials and annuals – they are particularly well complemented by salvias, primroses and penstemons. And although the vast majority of succulents delight in full sun and tolerate low humidity through to outright drought, there are a few that are adapted to shady conditions, so nobody has to live without succulents, or – as I prefer to say – house leeks!

Ornamental vines

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:17:00 +0000

I keep moving my ornamental vine – it doesn’t seem to mind, in fact it’s thriving in its latest spot, but the thing is, much as I love it, it just keeps taking over, so I went back and examined the horticultural information that I got when I bought it. The plant is called vitis vinifera and has beautiful foliage with – last year at least – an awesome number of small black and very bitter grapes.

The info says: A quick growing, spreading deciduous climber which will reach about 7-10 metre. New growth is green and slightly downy which matures to deep green in summer and gives beautiful autumn colour from orange, red through to purple. True grape-leaf shape to foliage. Ornamental fruit attracts birds.

Which is all true, apart from the birds, which never went near the grapes and having tried one, I can tell why!

Then it adds: Screening plant over a fence Climber over a pergola or arch providing shade in summer and sun in winter Works well as a backdrop. Likes: Full sun and well-drained soil Occasional pruning if required in winter to remove twiggy growth.

Not quite … it does grow 10 metres but mine does it in a year! Occasional pruning would leave me living in a house like Sleeping Beauty’s castle – I have to cut it back at least four times each summer and once in winter and that’s why I’m constantly trying to find a place it won’t like quite so much, just to try and slow its beautiful, but rather insane, growth.

August garden - the pond

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:28:00 +0000

I seem to be spending far too much time giving the pond tender loving care! The water level drops as the sun makes the water evaporate (and both dogs and the cats from next door seem to drink an inordinate amount of pond water) and so I top it up with the hose. Then I see some blanket weed, so I go and get a bamboo cane and spend half an hour trying to get it out of the pond, which is like trying to wrap spaghetti round a single chopstick using your left hand only!

Assuming I actually get the blanket weed out of the pond, I then see what it’s been hiding: a couple of yellowing and rotting waterlily pads, so I go and get the net and the long cutters and try to cut through the waterlily stem and catch the rotting leaf in the net, which is a bit like one of those grab machines you get in amusement arcades with which you try to get hold of a Rolex watch and never succeed. It’s absolutely essential to keep going until I succeed though, because if I don’t, the debris from the decaying plant material will add nutrients to the water, resulting in the growth of algae. And because we have fish in the pond we don’t want algae. Finally, while I’m there, I realise that I might as well check the filter for blockages … and that’s most of the day gone!

But there are compensations: the lilies, the mayflies, the sound of the cascade, the dappled light on water … there are worse ways of wasting a day, that’s for sure.

August rain

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:09:00 +0000

I’m trying to find something good to say about this weather. It’s not easy! This summer has produced a lot of blackberries, which is about the only positive I can come up with. And I’m very fond of blackberries, so that’s nice.

On the other hand … slugs and snails! It’s rained at some point every day for the past week and the immediate response to rain seems to be the emergence of a plague of nasty crawlers, some with shells and some without: black ones, beige ones, ones with frilly orange edges, fat ones, thin ones … and all of them hell-bent on eating every leaf, flower and stem in my garden.

I try to be kind – and I’m squeamish, so I can’t do what a lot of more hardened gardeners do which is get out there with the secateurs or the heavy boots and wreak carnage. I also don’t use slug pellets because I worry about their effects on the environment, so it’s slug traps, slug-repelling soil and salt and copper barriers for me. And the salt barriers get washed away every time it rains, so that I have to go and sprinkle some more. It’s a thankless task, to be honest.

But the alternative is to have a garden full of bare twigs and skeletonised plants, so I went out today and bought a new bag of salt …

Getting the best from summer bedding plants

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:50:00 +0000

Summer bedding plants are those annuals which offer complete and constant billows of colour all summer long. While they appear in nearly all hanging baskets and containers, and grace our municipal parks, they are a wonderful addition to garden borders too, excellent for plugging a gap between a summer and autumn display by providing shots of brilliant colour and dense carpeting growth. Busy Lizzy (impatiens) and begonia semperflorens are both fantastic, doing their duty in tubs and baskets or filling the borders, come rain or shine.

I love petunias, their large trumpet-shaped flowers are always impressive and because they have an immense colour range you can make lively displays for a very low cost. This year they have been outperformed by the impatiens because their large flowers get damaged by rain and have to be deadheaded more often, but even so, they really do look wonderful. All summer bedding needs to be fed and deadheaded regularly but you are rewarded by more flowers than you could shake a stick at!

Clematis (and wilt)

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:55:00 +0000

A friend of mine was panicking about clematis wilt yesterday so I went round to have a look. Now if you get it, or rather your plant does, clematis wilt is very bad news indeed. The foliage turns black overnight and the whole plant just falls over and dies, but it’s a much rarer condition than most people think and there are numerous other causes for wilt – in fact I’d say that a clematis is likely to wilt just to wind you up!

The first thing to do is NOT to panic – check if the foliage is brown rather than pure black and whether it has veining – unless it’s coal black and the veins have disappeared, it’s not clematis wilt.

Then decide what’s going on – the likely causes of browning, droopy or crispy leaves and a plant sagging on its supports are:

• Brittle stems have twisted and broken in windy conditions – if this is your cause, buy some good supports, and clematis netting instead of relying on ties which can allow the plant to snap
• Slugs and snails (and I’ve heard that earwigs and caterpillars are prone to this, behaviour too, although not in my garden) have munched through stems at the base of the plant, causing all the leaves above them to die spectacularly – deal with the pest first (organically if possible) then prune the plant back to preserve it for next year
• Careless hoeing or weeding around the base of the stem can either cut stems or just damage them enough to cause wilting.

In her case it was simple - dry roots on a plant that likes cool damp conditions for its lower levels!

English roses

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:37:00 +0000

Are intoxicating. Their shape, colour and scent are spellbinding, but let us be completely honest: they are not the easiest thing to grow.

They appear at their best in the early days of summer and early days of autumn – by this time of the year they are looking pretty sad. But don’t despair, there should be plenty of other colour in your garden to compensate and there is just nothing to match them for fragrance. With proper mulching they should only need a really thorough water two or three times a week and some staking – especially in the current August winds!

If you’re an organic gardener (and why not?) instead of investing in a packet of rose feed, you can simply give them a handful of blood and bone meal in spring and another one of Epsom Salts in May with a final handful of Kelp (either as powder or as kelp and bark mulch) to get them happily through the autumn.

The real problem with English roses is black spot or mildew and if you see any, the first step is always to pull the spotted or mouldy leaves away from the plant at the stem and either burn them or put them in the rubbish bin – never compost them or you’ll be re-infesting the whole garden with mould or fungal spores. A new leaf will grow back within weeks and often isn’t infected at all.

Herb gardening again

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 16:18:00 +0000

The uses for herbs in the garden aren’t limited to food, although fresh herbs do improve the taste of any dish. Here’s some ways I use herbs to improve my garden or my hospitality!

• I have a lovely Angelica which thrives in semi-shade. The plant is supposed to reach six feet tall – mine never gets over two because I harvest it so regularly. You can candy the stems of one variety, angelica archangelica which you then use to decorate cakes, but I don’t have time for that – instead I make ice bowls with one smaller bowl (with its outside covered in a layer of cling film) inside a larger one, and water poured between the two. In the water I arrange the huge and delicately cut angelica leaves, so that when I take the ice bowl out and fill it with punch or fruit salad, the tracery of the angelica shows up like a wonderful Byzantine design. The flowers are gorgeous too, as this picture shows.

• Curly-leaved parsley looks brilliant as a lawn or bed edging and is particularly good when set against reds, oranges and yellows. It’s also a potent barrier against slugs and snails. If you find it difficult to germinate, dig a very shallow trench, sprinkle in your parsley seed and then pour boiling water on top – it works, believe it or not!

• If you find you have a gap in your garden, you can divide a clump of chives: either the common purple-flowered or the white-flowered garlic chive and plant them in the gap – cut them down to about two inches as soon as you’ve planted them and they will make a neat little clump within two weeks. They seem to thrive on this kind of behaviour.

The things you see while gardening:

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:14:00 +0000

• A hawk (probably a kite, but too high to tell) flying way above Sussex on the thermals resulting from last night’s storm
• A large solitary bee, getting very drunk on lavender, and at one point, bending the stem of one flowerhead so far over that it flipped back up, catapulting him across the garden! He was back within a couple of minutes though
• Next door’s cat asleep on top of the wall
• Three tiny tomato seedlings that shouldn’t have been in the flowerbed at all – I moved them into a pot, where maybe they will produce one tiny tomato each and perpetuate their guerrilla existence in my borders
• A second flush on my David Austin English rose – actually not seen so much as smelt, and then tracked down by nose. The second flush flowers are smaller and often don’t open fully, but the scent is just as strong
• Blackberries – lots of them. My thornless blackberry is in full production but somehow, not a single blackberry made it into the freezer from today’s gardening session, I ate them all right off the bush
• Enormous spiders: why do they always hide in dark corners and then run straight towards me when I disturb them? I’m trying to be kind to all living things but I do find it rather difficult when it comes to spiders, especially enormous ones …

When is a garden not a garden?

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:42:00 +0000

When it’s a herb garden! I was lucky enough to find an absolutely brilliant herb stall at a local fair and came home with two bulging (recycled) carrier bags full of plants and seeds.

There’s a real advantage in growing herbs – you get to eat or otherwise use the produce from your garden. There’s also a disadvantage though – many herbs are annuals so there’s quite a lot of work to be doing in sowing seeds and digging up old plants that are past their best, and also that gives you some bare patches at different time, although you can always plonk down a potted plant to cover the bare earth.

So, on the perennial side I already had: bay, lavender, rosemary and angelica (okay, not perennial, but biennial and self seeding, so all I have to do is dig out the old exhausted parent plant every four years or so and let a youngster fill in the parent’s place) and some chives (both ordinary and garlic). I bought lemon verbena (a windowsill plant, but worth it for the glorious scent and to make lemon sugar for baking and a couple of leaves will scent bathwater as nicely as the most expensive bath oil) and a couple of self seeding salads like orach and mizuna which should just keep filling up their space year after year. And I fell in love with chocolate mint – which doesn’t taste as good as ordinary mint in cooking but smells like chocolates and is great in summer drinks and cocktails.

On the annual side I have now added dill, chervil (same family) basil and oregano. The problem is … where am I going to put everything!

How many butterflies …

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:30:00 +0000

… have you seen this year?

We’ve seen cabbage whites, peacocks and chalk blues. We know where there are some wood whites but they are nowhere near our garden and I’m not saying where they live in case somebody goes and damages their habitat. But when I was a kid (and it wasn’t that long ago, really) I used to see many more different kinds of butterfly than I do now.

There’s a plan to build something called Butterfly World, a huge environmental safe space with specialised butterfly habitats. The name may be naff but the project is being supported by the great and good, including David Attenborough.

Butterflies love buddleia, Michaelmas daisies and many of them adore nettles – so if you plant some nettles in a bucket in the corner of your garden, it may actually keep the pesky cabbage whites off your cabbages and hostas! Here’s what you might see if you plant for butterflies:

• High brown fritillary (Argynnis adippe) Numbers down by 79% since 1970 – the most serious recent decline of any British butterfly. This large insect is now found in just 50 sites in the UK.
• Wood white (Leptidea sinapis) Numbers down by 65%. A delicate, low-flying butterfly famed for its “head-bobbing” mating ritual.
• White-letter hairstreak (Satyrium w-album) Down by 53%. A small butterfly with a white “w” on its wings. The species was badly affected by Dutch elm disease in the 1970s, which wiped out its main food. You see them a lot in France where British people on holiday thing they are ‘deformed’ cabbage whites
• Grizzled skipper (Pyrgus malvae) Down by 49%. Known for its rapid buzzing flight, it is typically found in old industrial sites such as quarries, used to be seen a lot on London bombsites after the war, my dad tells me!
• Marsh fritillary (Euphydryas aurinia) Population numbers down by 46%. A gorgeous butterfly now nearly limited to the west of Scotland, this brightly patterned butterfly can lay up to 350 eggs in a single batch.

Peacock butterfly courtesy of Neil Phillips

What happened to the sounds of summer?

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:18:00 +0000

I’ve just got back from a week in France and there was one thing I couldn’t help noticing. Over there you could sit in the garden and hear very little but the sound of pigeons, neighbours picking figs and beans, and the occasional slosh of water from cans or hosepipes as it splashed over the huge leaves of courgettes and pumpkins.

But then I came back and took my morning cup of tea out into the garden on Sunday … to find myself surrounded by those traditional rural sounds: power washers cleaning 4x4 cars, hedge-cutters ripping through privet, wood chippers mashing up the trimmings produced by the hedge-cutters, tractor lawnmowers (why? Nobody around me has a lawn bigger than a couple of double sheets) and drills. There was somebody (presumably a man with a middle-aged crisis going on) working on the engine of his jetski who seemed to feel the need to rev the engine every two or three minutes for two or three hours …

At least I have some idea why. Apparently we Brits are spending more time gardening as the credit crunch bites home. According to Legal & General, 42% of us spent between £1 and £1000 on garden equipment or home improvements in June. Then investment group LV found more families are going on a ‘traditional bucket-and-spade seaside holiday’ in Britain this summer as 71% admitted being concerned about their finances. So it’s not surprising that the power tools have come out and the men of the house are wielding them – the logic must be that it’s cheaper to do home improvements themselves than to pay a professional to come and do it. And that means that my Sundays will be orchestrated by motor-mowers etc until the recession recedes again. I do wish we had more of the Indian style of lawn mower though – perhaps if things get bad enough, people will think the petrol costs are so high they’ll invest in an oxen-powered instead?

Lawnmower courtesy of foxypar4

Gaps in the garden

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:31:00 +0000

If you’re anything like me, it can take you a while to notice what isn’t there – especially at this time of year. This morning, touring the ‘estate’ I realised that something wasn’t there that should be.

There are not any foxtail lilies – proper name eremurus, which originated in Northern India and Persia. I bought five, four years ago. Last year only three of the five flowered and this year, none. I can’t understand it.

They are said to enjoy being planted in the same conditions as paniculata grandiflora and Azalea mollis and both of those do well in my garden. They require shelter from spring frosts, which I gave them, and they need their roots planted well down, at least six inches below soil level – which I did! They thrive in deep, rich, sandy loam, with the addition of some well ripened cow manure, and that’s exactly what I gave them. The proof that conditions were good for foxtail lilies can be found in the fact that they flowered for the first two years, but now they are definitely AWOL.

I have my suspicions … I think the squirrels have had them!

Another dangerous garden!

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:35:00 +0000

Well, the garden wasn’t dangerous in itself, no man-or-woman-eating plants or concealed pits, but dangerous for me, because it’s given me ‘ideas’ – himself has gone into hiding already, knowing that garden tours always result in my coming home with a madly grandiose plan.

This time it’s a greenhouse. Not any ordinary ‘just for growing things’ greenhouse, but a proper conservatory, with a space for me to do yoga, a desk for my laptop so I can write about gardening matters in an inspiring environment (your screen will fog up, says himself, in a doom-laden voice) and a wooden trellis up one wall so I can grow hibiscus.

I mean look at it! Who could resist a wall of hibiscus? (It will hide insects, the wood will rot, you’ll want something else within a year or two, says himself.) And our garden is not equipped to grow it, so we need to do something that allows us to grow it, right?

Himself points to the pot of hibiscus I have bought during my visit. How much did that cost, he asks. £2.99 I answer (it’s a bargain, you’ve got to admit.) And you want me to build a £3,000 conservatory for it, he says.

I couldn’t think of an answer for that one …