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…

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.)

A dragon, caught?

The Phantom Digger is back now the ground is softer.

However, following the recent debate about the nature of the Demon Digger, and some speculation that it may have been a small Welsh dragon, one too young to have developed tell-tale claws, I may – just possibly – have an answer.

Oh, surely not.

This is Splodge (no, not her real name but the name she ought to have, who is otherwise known as NDC – next door’s cat) playing kissy kissy with my white fuchsia. But I did catch her having an vaguely experimental dig – she desisted when she spotted me and did her best too-cute-no-way-I’ve-done-anything pose instead. Despite my certainty that any cat who does that has undoubtedly been up to something (mind you, which cat hasn’t?), I’m not sure Splodge is really big enough.

Am considering webcams and trip wires. Grrrr.

Surprises and the spring show

I suppose, given how bizarre the weather has been / still is, that it wasn’t altogether surprising. I’d been round the garden checking out plants for the village gardening club‘s spring show last evening, earmarked some primulas, worked out which daffs would go in which class, that sort of thing. I’ve never entered anything in a flower show before (well, not since I was about 6 and entered a moss garden in one), so I didn’t know the ropes. I toyed, for instance, with the idea of picking things in advance, but dismissed it for the primulas and the chionodoxas as I knew they wouldn’t last, and thought the daffs would be fine. I did not anticipate a heavy frost and the fact that I’d be selecting my blooms from plants bent to the ground by frost, in snow flurries.

There were rather a lot of rejects, but I eventually ended up with a selection of the least damaged ones:

(The whisky bottle was full of water, meaning I didn’t have to join in any scramble for the sink.) In a ‘normal’ year, I’d have been able to enter something in each of the seven, yes seven, daff/narcissi classes; this year I was restricted to two, and completely failed to notice a trace of bird shit on one of the blooms I chose for the ‘large trumpet’ class. I am just an amateur at this lark!

I was somewhat daunted when I got there, as there were such a lot of beautiful plants and flowers on show, especially given that this is quite a small village, or two villages, rather. However, I got diverted by a debate about what exactly constituted a large daffodil trumpet, which is possibly why I failed to notice the crap. Those above are definitely large; mine wasn’t.

There were lots of entries for the dwarf daffs, which again impressed me. I have three. Correction, had three. No sign of them this year.

But it isn’t just daffodils and narcissi; there are plenty of other classes – no entries for tulips (hollow laugh) or hyacinths (I’ve got some nice dead ones), though.

Plenty for hellebores:

which left me green with envy, as all mine seem to produce is leaves. There were quite a number of flowering shrubs, too, and to my surprise they weren’t all viburnums (mine was).

There were flowering pot plants,

and I loved this cactus – I’ve always had a soft spot for cacti, sometimes several, generally with spines sticking out of them, but I don’t usually persuade mine to flower. Of course the flowering bulbs included amaryllis (I don’t care what anyone says, I like those too):

reminding me that I really must grow one for myself next year instead of just giving them to other people. Yes, they are unsubtle and ‘in your face’, but they are also so remorselessly cheerful – particularly when all is grey and white outside.

I originally entitled this post ‘sod’s law and the spring show’. That was before I went back after the judging…

I’d got a first for my double daffs, and two seconds, one for my chionodoxas in the ‘any other plant not mentioned above’ class (great title – there were scillas and pansies and pulmonarias and some other wonderful things),

and one, to my ‘knock-me-down-with-a-great-big-thing-for-knocking-me-down-with’ surprise, for my floating camellia bloom:

I’d not originally even thought of entering this class. This is prime camellia-growing territory, and all over the place there are gardens with expert gardeners and perfect camellias. Only not this year. This year, they’ve been blasted with the frost, gardeners and plants both. I went crawling through the branches of my giant double camellia tree and suddenly spotted one flower that looked intact right at the back: just one, but no brownness, no discolouration. Cheekily, I thought I’d give it a try. I never, ever expected such an understated bloom to get a second glance, and it got a second prize. Amazing. And now I’m addicted. But before I go mad anticipating the summer show, I must remind myself that mine is a spring garden. In summer, I’d win the ‘great big display of slightly tatty leaves’ class, hands down. But maybe if I start planting soon…

So farewell, then, hy-flipping-drangea

I have had a hydrangea in the garden since I came here. That’s not unexpected; most of the gardens in the area have hydrangeas. Some are gorgeous colours – my favourite is the mix of deep pinky/purply/crimson.

My hydrangea is not deep pinky/purply/crimson. It’s baby blue. With shades of faint lavender fading to washed-out greeny white, turning to unpleasant brown.

Around its feet are wild garlic, all sorts of bluebells (rapidly becoming one sort of bluebell, and the wrong sort), some St John’s Wort, a vast number of Welsh poppies and more of the crocuses.

The hydrangea is very old, very big and very reluctant to put on any sort of show. We’ve pruned it, with varying degrees of savagery, in an attempt to persuade it to a) flower more prolifically, or b) die.

This is the time of year for pruning hydrangeas.

Only this year I had a fit of the vapours:

Take that!

And because hydrangeas can spring back, even from this, take even more of that:

It’s been mattocked, and the root is now reposing on the bonfire heap. I defy even a hydrangea to come back after that.

Now I need to clear up this bed, remove the rest of the Great Root of Doom – and decide what on earth I’m going to put in its place. Any ideas? My soil is acid, the bed is in shade a lot of the day and the wall faces east (killer winds) but does provide shelter from the prevailing westerly wind. There’s an old pear tree nearby which really prevents the introduction of anything large or tall (and is the reason why there are no distance shots of the bed – I’ve taken some but they’re all pear tree).  The world is my oyster, or possibly my azalea, but I’d better do something quickly before the rest of the bed is colonised by the wild leeks and interloping bluebells. So, suggestions please (no, not another hydrangea).

And now I’m off to psych myself up for the village Garden Club’s spring show on Wednesday. I’ve never entered anything in a flower show before, and I would pick the year of the Big Winter Blast, wouldn’t I? Well, at least everyone else is in the same boat…

Just a spot of frostbite…

One day, and such an alteration. Yesterday, the meadow was going mad; the anemones and scillas were out, the fritillaries were unfolding, the primroses were bulking up, the daffodils were really motoring.

Then the weather changed. The temperature dropped like a particularly hefty stone, but it wasn’t just that; it was the bitter, howling, perishing, ear-freezing, brain-befuddling, gate-rattling east wind, one of the reasons why the older houses in the village are tucked into the hill and have very few or no openings on their eastern side. There’s an expression for a biting east wind in Welsh: gwynt traed y meirw – wind from the feet of the dead. Derivation? Well, one story is that it comes from a battle in mid-Wales; there were no survivors and the only way people knew what had happened was the smell of putrefaction carried on the east wind. Lovely.  (I remember reading a description of the way the landscape changes on the journey from Dolgellau to Shrewsbury: ‘…from a Mabinogion landscape, full of severed heads and hunting dogs, to English pastoral…’ Bang on, on both the landscape and the nature of Welsh myth.) Feel that east wind, and you die.

Evidently:

And it’s not just the daffodils. It’s everything (except for me and P – we kept warm by pruning and trimming and ripping up a huge hydrangea). The lush, vibrant crocuses are now flat and slimy. The primroses look as though they’ve ben hit with something heavy. The anemones are barely recognisable as having once been anemones:

and the house is full of daffodils.

I’ve run out of vases, but I really must find something more attractive than a tatty old plastic measuring jug…