I’m pretty sure these things shouldn’t be happening:
These are all small things which I think might be because some of the plants think it’s spring. It’s been so cold and wet I think they’re waking up early.
Is a mess again. I think it is because….
I’m hoping that writing these down will help me deal with them. Each time I want to plant something I should remember this.
This August, there is nothing flowering in it except the swamp-sunflowers. There’s also a huge angelica which I don’t remember planting and some Greater Celandine.
The one plus is that as we can’t sit on the paved bit (it’s the cricket net) we can only see the bed from the kitchen, so it doesn’t really matter this year. But it would be nice to see lovely flowers and a range of insects.
This week, I have cut the fuschia back. I’ve cleared lots of greenery and put in the only plants I have left in pots. Some Queen Anne’s Lace and foxglove, what might be a scabious and some catchfly. I’m not sure if it will have much effect and it really annoyed the toad, but we’ll see. As we are off next week, it doesn’t seem worth trying to do anything major now. Maybe next week…..
Where’s the line between a wildlife garden and a mess? When does it stop being a garden? I guess it’s like the definition of a weed – you decide for yourself. But I’m still finding where my line is.
When we got back from Norfolk, the garden looked terrible. The comparison doesn’t help! But every thing is too big – I have this problem as a lot of things that survived the kids & the neglect have outgrown their space. And there aren’t many flowers in my garden this time of year, and it has been raining so much, the green has shot up. The fuchsia, which mostly I love so much, has bushed out, and put the whole of the back bed in shade. And in this funny stormy light, it looks a horrid salmony pink.
Turning things from a mess to a garden seems mostly to involve cutting stuff right back, tidying stuff up & killing things. I’ve started in this photo, and also cut the edge of the lawn with shears (I will mow the middle). I like the right-hand side more than the left because it’s still wilder….
So I know like it messy, but I think there is still some way to go to make it look like a lovely garden. The trouble is, as soon as you cut things back, you find things living there. Frogs in the grass, caterpillars in the bushes and the fuschia is so full of honey bees, it buzzes. The old dilemma about gardening for wildlife. When do you stop gardening if you really want the wildlife to flourish?
As I am thinking discontentedly what I need to do to this week to rebalance the garden, I should remember… while Chris and I were sitting in the kitchen today after lunch, a BIG beautiful frog hopped across the garden. It sat by the pots for a bit and then it did a massive jump into the cranesbill. That is worth lots of mess!
I’ve started gathering seeds. So far i’ve got…
I might have gathered the poppies a bit early (I got them from the Other Garden when the foxes ran through it). Also been overly keen on gathering the Cerinthe but I grew it last year and I wanted to make sure I had it again.
So far I have kept them in envelopes in the kitchen. Maybe start thinking about planting them when we get back from Cawsand….
This is not something I really know anything about it.
It still took about an hour to dig out of the bottom of the box, a week to dry and it’s on the cusp of compost/ mulch. But it is getting better…..
I’m adding this to remind myself about how it used to be…
This is a “Sophie’s Perpetual” Rose that Marion gave me – I think for my 40th Birthday. It is lovely and it is reverting, which means it is turning back into the wild, has 7 leaves (not 5) and some flowers that look like wild dog-roses. The internet says it should only happen on canes developing below the graft, but mine seems to have wild leaves on all of it, though only a few flowers that don’t look true.
The leaf cutters are taking over! Luke hit a cricket ball into the box and it fell of the fence, but I’m hoping that’s not going to do them any damage. 13 and counting….(you can’t see the top one because it’s all brown but there).
Up to 16. Nearly a completely full house. Look at the craft!
This is one of the first plants I ever bought, about 20 years ago, in a tiny pot.
Now it is basically a small tree. It wants to bush back into a shrub but I have pruned it over the years to be a tree. I love it because it is beautiful. And partly because it won’t die easily – before I started tree-pruning it, I tried to dig it out and it just grew back; every year I hack huge swathes out of it and it just gets on with it. It is so full of life, that when I use sticks from it as supports for other plants, they start rooting.
And partly because it is a part of THIS garden. It grows out at an angle over the pond, so you couldn’t buy one and plant it like that. It can only be – and can only have grown up over time – where it is.
I also like it because it I once read an article in the FT by Robin Lane-Fox saying tree-pruned shrubs were INCREDIBLY fashionable – mostly for snobbish reasons about how long it takes to grow them – but it made me feel ON TREND.
It is always covered in flowers and full of honey bees, that often bite through the tops of the flowers to cheat their way to nectar.
In the last couple of years, it has got fuchsia gall mite, probably from some cheap plants I got from B&Q to grow on for the school fair (which is galling ho-ho). This isn’t going to kill it, but it distorts the leaves and stops the flowers developing properly so that the plant ceases to be “viable”. I cut the infected bits off, and cut it right back in the winter – I read somewhere that very cold winters can kill the mite. So far this year, it looks alright and I”m hoping the cold winter/ spring/summer has delayed it for it a bit. I’ve also read that it gets worse through the summer, as successive generations breed and numbers grow. I think it is such a large plant it will probably be okay – you can chop it back for ages and there is still loads left, but I would be very, very sad if it ceased to be “viable”.
I would say mixed so far. I have…
On the whole, I would say
All the poppies in the other garden got knocked over by foxes or drunks. So I cut them down and tied them in bunches. Then I tied them to the mobile in the kitchen, so they could dry out. I felt like Elizabeth Bennet drying lavender.
I thought this would take a couple of weeks but what happened was almost immediately they started spilling poppy seeds onto the kitchen table and it was incredibly difficult to untie them from the mobile and while I was doing that most of the seed came out. So I’m not doing that again.
The Herb Robert on top of the shed is bright red. I think it is because it is stressed by shade, but it still sets seed which grows up red the next year. I don’t see why something this beautiful is a weed.
This is what the pest control man said when he came to get rid of the dead rat in the cellar. He suggested clearing away the “overgrown” bits of the garden and when I baulked he said “if you garden for wildlife, you don’t get to chose the wildlife you get.”
We have got ANTS everywhere. I don’t mind ants, tho I believe the aren’t great in pots because the plant roots can come into contact with too much air not soil. But they are now under everything, in the lawn and inside the hammock. I guess it is so wet, any time there is a hint of dryness, they make a nest.
There are also a lot of skinny foxes around at the moment and every night they poo in the garden. I could do without them. Yesterday I saw a mouse run across the bit by the backdoor and I was VERY BRAVE about it but I don’t like that either. And I read that amongst other things, the toad will eat froglets if it gets the chance. I don’t want this, but I do want the toad and I guess it is the circle of life.
This is a shady, skanky bit of the garden, at the top of the back passage where it meets the main bit. At the moment it is one of my favourite parts of the garden. This is partly because I saw a toad (THE toad?) there the last time I looked and it glowered at me and plodded off.
It’s partly because it’s made out of old bits of weeds that seems to be beautiful and to have come from I-don’t-know-where.
Marion gave me a ceramic bread bin which broke, so I planted it up as a pot. It’s been there for years, and this year, all the cultivated plants had died or got too big. So it just had wild flowers left. I wanted it for the kids for some of the things I got from Core (I LOVE buying things from the Core garden) so I emptied out what was left alive into the skanky bit of the garden and gave it one water and it just got on with it.
I think there is self-heal, and Lady’s bedstraw (or a kind of bedstraw?) and Good King Henry and Herb Robert. And I love it.
This year, all my sweet peas are grown from seed gathered from plants I bought from Sarah Raven last year. There were 3 kinds and they’ve grown in 3 ways:
They are a mixed bag. The ones that grew by themselves are the strongest. I thought they might be wild everlasting sweet peas when they came up as they were so robust in the winter but one has purple and blue flowers and one blue.
Some are doing okay. They’re not AS good as Sarah Raven grown ones, but they’re not a disaster.
Some are spindly and weedy and totally failing to thrive. I don’t know why. I’ve fed and watered them. Some don’t get much sun (as they are so small – lots of sun higher up) but some do. The internet suggests it’s pretty hard to fail with sweet peas and has no ideas.
I don’t seem to have any of the red ones. And not many of the blue. I wonder if the spindly ones are red ones? Or if the spindly ones are across all types but lacking something? More thought needed.
It’s getting better. But it’s still not right. I have been following the advice from the helpful people at Hotbin – and it does smell nice at the top and is proper hot and getting through the waste. But at the bottom, it’s still compacted solid and oozy and a bit smelly.
I thought it was less smelly but my friend Jane came round while I was emptying it and said it reminded her of being in India. So maybe I am just getting accustomed to the smell. I’m still getting lots of fluid and not getting usable compost. Though I think I could use some of this as mulch.
I think this time round, I think I have added enough cardboard but not mixed it in properly. I still have a problem with bulking agent. It’s hard to add enough to stop it compacting, but still have compost (not sticks) at the end.
But on the bright side, Pickle says at least I have a mulch-generator, and looking at the earlier pictures (below from Jan) it is getting better.
NB: those potato starch bags (“just POP them in your food recycling bin”) DON’T break down. Don’t pop them in.
There is campanula growing all round the garden. It’s in the front yard too – and once it even grew up through the floorboards in the sitting room.
This year, it is looking very lovely growing up through the fern by the backdoor. It’s never done this before but has put up long flowers through the foliage.
This is a window box full of it too. This used to be planted with bedding plants but the campanula crept in and took over.
PS these are very beautiful dark bits of the garden – shady corner and back passage
The fox gloves are doing well. We’ve got about 14, white and purple. Some of them have been hit by hammocks and footballs and aren’t doing brilliantly. But some have grown other spikes, when the king spike got taken out. And others are just thriving, though they don’t like the really hot weather.
We can’t work out where all the foxgloves in this post are. But we have found this one:
Edie shown for reference. She’s about 4 feet high. Both spikes have flowered but we don’t know which is the biggest, the old or the new.
I particularly like this one, with lots going on in one pot.
Edith Rose took these photos of the Paul’s Scarlet Climber. She likes them because they’re really red!
Well this doesn’t seem to be working. it could be the very dry weather followed by the hot sun, or being repeatedly hit with a cricket ball – but so far, the dogwood isn’t looking very happy and it might be the way I cut it back…. (mind you it looks alright in this photo).
Not bad.
My Garden 