Trendy and not-so-trendy plants

Every year at Chelsea we used to suggest that everyone from our stand sallied forth, surveyed the marquee and the show gardens and came back and agreed on that year’s trendy (and possibly pointless, anyone remember the red delphinium?) plant. I no longer go to Chelsea, but even on the limited amount of coverage I’ve seen, one plant keeps being mentioned: Cirsium rivulare artropurpeum. At last I can join the plantswomen – you know who you are – and cry ‘I’ve got one of those!’

Admittedly, I nearly didn’t have, after it almost got weeded out as being a thistle:

which – of course – it is, but not weeded by me. Let me just document here that I’d have had to cut off the biscuit supply, let alone the cups of tea and Welsh cakes supply, and I will do so in the face of any other enthusiastic weeding events.

Despite the poor spring, it has done really well, filling up nicely from the plant that I bought at last year’s Crug Plant Fair. I’ve been entranced by the opening flower heads,

and I don’t recall noticing them so closely last year – possibly because last year they didn’t spend quite as long in suspended animation. At last some have opened,

just in time for the temperatures to drop away again as we approach this weekend. Naturally, it’s a Bank Holiday. I swear I heard one of the weather forecasters mention snow. Oh, for goodness’ sake!

But away from the trendy world of plants Alan Titchmarsh mentions (er, trendy? Alan Titchmarsh? Blazer man? Have I had too much coffee?), other things are finally coming into their own, albeit slowly. And they are lovely.

At last I have persuaded some of my acquilegias to spread. I know, I know, most people try and stop them spreading, but not me. I want them further into the meadow. Baby steps, ickle biddy baby steps (I imagine that acqueligias wear very high stilettos, so that’s probably why they would spread slowly, tottering precariously over thugs like the knapweed – OK, definitely had too much coffee), but they are reaching out a little. In the meanwhile they are concentrating on posing and looking lovely.

These have developed a marked green tip to the outermost petals this year; I don’t recall having seen that quite so emphatic before. And I am getting more and more in the pink spectrum – strange, I’d have thought they might revert to purple, given that some always were:

but no, the pinks seem to be much more resilient. I don’t care; I like them both. In fact I like all acquilegias, but I do regret their promiscuous tendencies. You get an accidental stunner one year, and next year it’s gone and proliferated and crossed with heaven only knows who and generally tarted itself about so much that all you end up with is pink. They’d never come true, even if I did protect the seed heads, so all I can do is reconcile myself to pink and occasional happy accidents. No great hardship, really.

And maybe next year’s trendy plant will be a pink acquilegia with green-tipped petals. You can never tell.

Garden visiting – and not visiting…

If there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s visiting NGS gardens. There’s always been an element of voyeurism – at last we can see what is going on over this wall – but that was more present when I lived in London. And there what was over the wall could sometimes be quite startling, particularly for some reason in Putney, and not always in a good way.

Happily, it’s not the same here. For one thing, you often know the garden or the gardener, and NGS day is a chance to see the garden at its best. And then you can often see into a garden beforehand; there’s not the same tendency to high walls topped with razor wire and broken glass that you find in south London.  This is true of one garden near here, and it was open under the NGS on the same weekend as the Crug Farm Plant Fair – an embarrassment of riches.

It’s located between the road and the estuary, down in a dip with a stream running down one side. When you’re driving along you can see the tops of trees and some tantalising glimpses of cultivation, but when you actually visit Tanybryn you realise that there’s a lot more to it than that. For me, with my meadow and tree-shadowed areas, this garden was inspirational. And it did leave me with a deep desire to grow a tree heather…

The movement was what sold it to me, even if it did make it difficult to photograph. Still not tracked one down, but I will. I will.

And then there was the wild planting under the trees:

and the meadow areas which included some Solomon’s Seal as well as spreads of wood anemones. The latter may not take with me, but boy have I got some Solomon’s Seal I can shift about. There were also areas with a stunning combination of euphorbia and daffodils, which really worked.

I particularly applaud the lack of obsessive neatness, and I certainly plan to follow an example of tree management I saw here – removing lots of lower branches on the silver birches. It makes seeing the bark easier and, as P pointed out when I told him about it, it will make mowing the paths in the meadow a lot less painful. I’m not sure my budget would extend to planting the ground below with trilliums, though. But there was another idea I plan to adapt:

I have quite a few tall slate slabs (left over from path removal – not removal by me, but by the Western Red Cedar that came down last year), and this got me thinking about how we might use them. Not like this – I’ve only got four – but maybe in the beds. Not informed P of this idea yet (guess who’ll be doing the lifting), but I will. I’ll have to, now I’ve said it here!

And then I found some lovely things in the more formal beds. This particular delight was on a steep slope, where it ended in a wall. Lovely. And that’s from someone who doesn’t like pink.

The garden is open again under the NGS at the end of the month. I will definitely be going…

And then there was the weekend just past.

Very frustrating, what with one thing and another – a complete contrast to the last one. Partly this was due to the weather and the return of winter, complete with hailstorms and thunder, and partly due to – well, one NGS garden.

I set off to visit a couple of nearby gardens quite early as the weather was supposed to deteriorate (and it did). Found first garden, uphill and along single-track road – but car park shut. Garden definitely open – could see plants sales area, signs, etc – but not car park. Single track road. Cannot park in passing places. Dumped car in road, tried to open gate into field signposted as car park. Gate not shiftable. Rain start. Return to car, drive down to main road, turn round and try from other direction, in hope someone lovely has opened gate. Hope unfounded. Rain worse. Gate even less inclined to respond to physical violence. Boots leak. Drive to other garden. Feet steam in warmth from car heater. Rain now so heavy have to use double-speed windscreen wipers. Give up completely and go home.

Now I do appreciate that the NGS cannot control the weather (bechod – shame), but I do think that if you advertise a car park, you should at least make sure it’s accessible. Grr. Oh, enough already – there are many more weekends to come to make up for it, and it can’t rain on all of them, can it? I’ll be there anyway, no doubt…

White-daffodil Wednesday…

and it won’t be wordless. Of course.

Every year my daffodils – broadly; this tends to be weather-dependent – follow a sort of succession plan.

First come the big yellows; next are the smaller double yellows, then the frothier yellows (I haven’t many of those due to the fact that their heads and stems don’t match, and heavy heads on spindly stems stand no chance in this garden). As they fade, the white-trumpeted daffs come in, then the white-petalled exotica,

and then the ‘true’ narcissi.

Some years they all bunch up, but this isn’t one of them, much to my surprise. I’d assumed that the weather and the slow start to the season would give me a real  mix, like last year, but no – and the result is that the meadow now looks rather more refined and elegant than it did last year. Well, it would look rather more refined and elegant if it wasn’t for all the yellow-daff foliage dying back. If I’m honest, I must admit that dying-back daffodils were one of the reasons for developing the meadow in the first place – they look horrible on a well-behaved lawn. Not that I do well-behaved lawns. I do well-behaved moss.

And then I fell in love with whites. It’s no good; apart from the poet’s eyes and the Old Pheasant’s Eyes above, both of which I deliberately bought for their astonishing scent, I have no idea what any of them are. Some I inherited, but others have come in miscellaneous collections. I really must be more organised – what on earth is that second one, for instance?

That’s this one, which is a bit like Cheerfulness, but much bigger and not multi-headed:

and with an almost-metallic sparkle or sheen to the white petals. That’s a characteristic that is shared by quite a lot of the whites, but I’ve never seen it so obvious as it is on this variety (it’s quite hard to photograph, grr). I’ve now got two clumps of it, and absolutely no recollection of splitting either of them. Sometimes I think I have gardening brownies – the fairies, not a troupe of small girls belonging to a paramilitary organisation – who come and move things about in the night.

They can do that all they want; it will save me some shifting. I do need to split some clumps this year, notably of the white trumpets which have become somewhat overcrowded quite suddenly. I also cut the skirt of a huge skimmia back last summer (a lot more of it is coming out this year, and not coming out in a telling-its-parents-something-they-always-suspected sort of way, but in a giant crowbar, physical violence, chainsaw and bonfire sort of way), which revealed even more clumps:

They’re a wee bit tatty, possibly due to the shock of sudden exposure to the full intensity of the weather, but they’ll get used to life in the light. I wonder if they were flowering their socks off all these years? I suspect they were simply producing lots of leaves, but whatever was going on undercover, I’m glad they’re visible now.

The thing is, once you have a good selection of white daffs, you also have an irresistible desire to add more – or I do, anyway. I’ve been poring over last autumn’s edition of Blom’s bulb catalogue wondering what might be in it this year, and where I might slot a few more in. OK, shoehorn a few more in, in addition to the ones I have to split and the ones I am moving up from elsewhere in the garden. There’s this patch, you see, which is a little lighter on the daffs…

I think I need a specialised twelve-step programme. Now. Or at the very latest, before Blom’s catalogue for spring 2014 comes through my letterbox in about August. Help…

A tale of two teas – and Crug Farm Plant Fair

Sometimes I can be quite good when I’m shopping. Sometimes I can be quite discriminating. Sometimes I can be quite restrained. And sometimes I cannot.

I mean, could you resist this?

Ahem. I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s the excitement.

And anyway, that summary isn’t entirely fair. I can generally manage to stay within a budget and, when it comes to buying things that I need but which fail to interest me, I can manage to walk away and do something more involving (like, if I’m supposed to be clothes shopping, cleaning out the grout on the kitchen floor). Last year I even managed to extend this philosophy to plants and the wonderful plant fair at Crug Farm. Kept to budget, bought four plants, planted four plants, all four plants flourishing. This year I just set a bigger budget…

And so three of us set off. Everything is much delayed, so we weren’t at all sure what would be available; there were even still pockets of snow on the mountains above Crug:

But this is one of the best plant fairs I’ve ever been too (I’d definitely put it on a par with the ones at the Tradescant Trust that I used to go to when I lived in London), so we knew there’d be something fab…

And it is a truth universally acknowledged that a trio of women in possession of a plant-buying budget must be in want of a cup of tea, and possibly also a slice of cake, so we were off to a promising start

before hitting the plant stalls, even if the cups were polystyrene and would not meet with Mrs Bennett’s (or Miss Austen’s) approval.

I knew that I wanted plants for the long bed at the bottom of the garden which P and I have been clearing. In my mind this bed – which has a beautiful red acer and a glorious-in-autumn ginkgo in it – was going to be fundamentally red, orange, yellow and with lots of autumn colour, so I made a beeline for Special Perennials and their selection of Heleniums.

Unfortunately, this bed is also shaded for parts of the day and, though some areas are sunnier than others, it soon became clear that my original Helenium dream would not really work. Time for adaptation, and I did manage to find one which could cope – Helenium ‘mahogany’. I snaffled it quickly, adding an Echinacea ‘white swan’ – seen in the Artist’s Garden and much admired. Then I moved away before I bought the rest of the stall.

And it went like that. From the stall above I bought – and I’m not entirely sure I haven’t lost my mind – a Geranium macrorrhizum. I know, I know, I’m constantly trying to get rid of my G. macs, but they’re G mac album, and the one I bought has bronze foliage and is called ‘espresso’. Lovely thing.

What else did I get?

Well, the epimedium at the start of the post; couldn’t resist that. I’d just bought something else which took me to budget, then changed my mind and went back and swapped it. Then I found the ‘something else’ on another stall – an Actaea simplex atropurpureum - and decided I really, really wanted it. Quick recalculation and there was still money in the budget, so I bought it too. And a scarlet Monarda, and a Phlox stolonifera – ‘Franz Purple’. Eventually we were all carrying so many plants that we had to find a wheelbarrow to take them to the car.

Time to go.

And then we then stopped off at Fron Goch garden centre, ostensibly for a break on the journey back but really for a look round. This resulted in the purchase of a sweet little Dicentra (me) and a lot more plants (the others) and the second tea of the day:

and a final tally…

Well, I didn’t do badly, only exceeding my budget by – er – 20%. That would be the Dicentra – too sweet to be left – some organic plant food and the refreshments, but none of that counts. Honest.

Doesn’t look that much, really. Roll on next year…

Almost-wordless wowzer…

Spring is here:

because the birches are finally putting on leaves;

because there are fat flower buds on the Cirsium rivulare and only two of them were blackened by frost;

because even the dragon’s digging has failed to prevent the artichoke from coming beautifully back;

because you can keep tulips going from year to year, happily;

because the lawn is covered in speedwells, and they pinged right back after it had its first cut – and because this is finally happening:

Eureka!

(‘Hooray, hooray, the first of May / outdoor cough, splutter begins today.’ Despite the leaves etc, if you tried any outdoor cough, splutter round here today you’d get frostbitten bits. Still some way to go, but we are – at last – getting there.)

Spring hits the meadow – at last!

It’s finally happened. I know it’s going to get colder at the weekend – yipee – but the meadow couldn’t wait any longer. There have been daffodils blooming away for a few weeks now (I’ve already picked or deadheaded 510), but the rest? Nah. Too cold. But then things warmed up a little…

It began with the palest yellow primroses taking off about ten days ago,

starting to form a carpet and filling in the unmown areas. I snatched this photo from the box room to show clearly what happens when you mow paths, and when you just leave a ‘meadow’ like mine to do its thing and allow the primroses to set seed. And it’s a lot less effort, too. Not – perish the thought – that this entered my mind for a single second when I came up with the meadow idea. Certainly not.

The next thing I noticed was that one of the new damsons had covered itself in blossom overnight,

and that is a real treat. The other is catching up now and, as if in competition, the Victoria plum suddenly has ten flowers on it. I have explained that unless it produces more fruit than last year (four plums, two of which fell off) it will be firewood. The threat does not appear to be working.

But the rest of the meadow is certainly performing:

and, much to my optimistic delight, the Comice pear in the foreground is covered in tight buds. Yes, please, please let’s have some pears this year. I know I rescued you from a bin in Lidl, I know you’ve been ill done by, but no longer. Go for it. (No firewood threats here. Yet.)

The primulas really have suddenly gone bonkers, and there are a lot more to come. You have to be really careful where you tread,

and not just because of the primulas, as you can see. I reckon I’ve lost about a fifth to a quarter of my fritillaries this year; they were just beginning to lift their heads and form substantial buds when the Arctic blast hit. Some were shrivelled, some were merely damaged, but more than I expected have survived.

and I keep coming across them. Many are stunted and have taken to hiding, and I cannot blame them in the slightest, poor little things!

The yellow daffs are now going almost over though there are still plenty to lift the heart (and if I miss bright yellow, I’ve always got dandelions),

but the whites and pure narcissi are coming into their own, and this year they are stunning (they’ll be getting a post to themselves soon). The creamy-white pet–– no, let’s wait; there are plenty of other meadow delights to distract me, and I am ceaselessly amused by the clear path tracks -

like the one curving above – which criss-cross the meadow. They’ll probably get their first cut next week, I think; the rest, of course, waits till September / October and the Great Strim of Fate. We hang on to give everything a chance to set seed as lavishly as possible, and I am presently scouring the developing meadow for hints of the Salvia pratense having spread. Not a hint. Yet. Hopefully.

And another plus is that, finally, eureka, the birches are just beginning to put on some leaves. Phew. I know the bark is lovely but I’ve been admiring it for ages. Now I want fresh green leaves.

The same cannot be said for most of the other trees, but doubtless they’ll catch up.

Maybe after this coming weekend…

What a difference a day makes!

I went outside a couple of days ago and had a scout about. Not much had changed; many things seemed to be stuck, in suspended animation or even hibernation. Most of the trees were twigs without a hint of green or, indeed, of anything else.

Then we had a warmer day. I went out yesterday (not today, so this doesn’t really qualify as a Wordless Wednesday post and anyway I don’t tend towards wordlessness) and discovered this:

From a standing start, the Magnolia stellata has gone PING.

Or maybe that should be PING!

I’m entranced.

I’m always entranced. Unfortunately I also have to clamber over a load of old flower pots, empty bags, etc to photograph it, as it leans over the roof of the old pigsty, otherwise known as the general dumping ground.

But that doesn’t really distract from its beauty.

Maybe it even emphasises it?

Which is just as well, because the old pigsty is what it is and will never be anything else, and is also far too useful to be demolished. Originally hidden behind a giant Rhododendron ponticum, the Magnolia has always been something of a semi-secret treasure, even though one of the first things I did on coming here was rip out the rhodie.

Leaving me with this to appreciate. Sigh…

For a little while, at least – today we are back to normal, in the teeth of a howling gale which is making the windows rattle and which is also, no doubt, busy ripping the petals off the magnolia. Oh well, c’est la vie… ici, c’est la vie.

Do you have any hidden treasures, private surprises? Er, in your garden, that is?* Er, um, qualifying once again, cough, cough, as far as plants are concerned?

(*There was an old edition of the OED which blissfully defined a gazebo as ‘an erection in a garden’. Well, quite.)