The dry sky

26 July 2010

It begins to grind you down when gardening is reduced to one question: where to carry the can or lug the hose to next. We've had the best of the weather here, alright, in the infuriating phrase the forecasters use, for the past four months. The rainfall figures are: April, 7millimetres, May, 28, June, 17, July (with five days to go),7. Total 70 millimetres, or nearly three inches. The same period last year, reckoned dry at the time, gave us 140.

It is cold comfort to know that Cambridge had a downpour. Week after week the promises are broken. Up the road, perhaps a shower. Down the road, a nice little soak. Across the valley, rain last night. Here, on this sand-coloured grass, zilch.

Magic meadows

14 July 2010

To supper on a June evening with Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith in their garden near St Albans. We were talking about garden eye-catchers; objects that represent conclusion or resolution in the same way as a predictable final chord. I can’t resist them. But am I, as it were, talking down to my visitors, saying ‘look over here', rather than trusting them to see things in their own way?

This seems to be pretty much what Tom thinks. His garden makes theatrical use of tall beech hedges pierced with openings, some of them surprisingly narrow, that inevitably engage your curiosity. You are bound to go and see what lies beyond. Some lead your eye on to another opening, some to a rich patch of planting, some to relative vacancy:

a plain boxed-in lawn you can mentally furnish as you wish.

The main axis from the terrace leads invitingly on through such hedge-gaps, repeated several times, to more green space beyond. It’s hard to tell how far beyond because the end is left blank: the distance is just green. It would be fun to put an urn there, or a gate or an obelisk or any of the conventional conclusions. Tom would rather leave you wondering.

Chelsea Report

5 July 2010

It’s a bit late, I know, but Trad’s annual Chelsea medal has not yet been awarded. Exhibitors’ finger nails must be down to the quick. So here goes. I approve the People’s Choice. The Trad Award goes to Roger Platt, whose garden (the corner one on the left as you turned into Show Garden Row) was apparently voted most popular – but not of course among the judges.

Someone (was it Jill Billington?) said that the Green Movement is the dominant force in gardens today. ‘Puritanical control and the eco-movement’ is the precise quote whose origin I’ve mislaid. One is certainly not surprised to see it in the headlines, but does

this mean it forms a basis of garden design? I didn’t even detect a symbolic clump of nettles in Roger Platt’s garden. Nor a plastic water-recycling butt.  He didn’t see the need for PC gestures; nor did the voting public; nor do I. What he did recycle were many of the well-tried tricks that give gardeners so much pleasure, in a confident pattern of paths, arbour, pool and pergolas in natural and traditional materials that many people

Wedding Day

29 June 2010

They did. If you read this diary in backward sequence I am answering the question in the last instalment.

If no good deed ever goes unpunished perhaps no bad deed goes unrewarded. What else can account for two daughters’ weddings in the garden, seven years apart, being blessed with days of a perfection I didn’t dare imagine ?

What has conspired this year to deliver a garden greener, more full of flowers in first flush, at the point when sprays are still fresh, spires upright, leaves unblemished, than it has ever been before ? Did the seasons hit a magic sequence ; a royal flush of perfect measurement of temperature, sunshine and rain? Certainly after cleansing winter cold there was a good topping up in February

and March.Then no rain for two months meant (among other things) no slugs. And here (though not elsewhere) little damaging frost.

Elbow grease has not been wanting. We watered and dead-headed down to the wire, but the buds had to be there in the first place, and nothing but providence can explain the timing. The Monday before wedding day our showpiece climbing rose, Wickwar, 50 feet (no, just remeasured : 60 feet) into the trees, opened its first bud. On Saturday there were 10,000.

It’s true I cheated a little. I packed the beds with midsummer flowers. Thalictrums of various persuasions are important, along with the delphiniums and emerging campanulas (C.persicifolia the star, both blue and white, both herded into clumps and scattered where it seeded). The first daylilies are finishing; so, sadly are the Siberian irises, the most delicate of that tribe. It is the (slightly late) cusp of summer, with the main performers just finding their voices.

And what a list. The golden oats of Stipa gigantea are already waving in the sun with the cool blue leaves of Macleaya in contrast. White foxgloves and blue delphiniums. Clematis durandii, tied into hazel wigwams, in deep indigo (though not so deep as the neighbouring Baptisia). Salvia nemorosa repeats the dusky theme in purple against the greys of Artemisia ludoviciana, lychnis chalcedonica with bright magenta flowers and Phlomis italica with the gentlest pink. Nepeta sibirica and Tradescantia ‘Zwanenburg Blue’ are rather irrelevantly punctuated by the silver of Miss Willmott’s Ghost. Yucca flaccida is still just phallic spikes before its ivory bells appear. Lilium

In bottom gear

14 June 2010

I have never known such a slow and steady build up to summer. Everything has conspired to slow the garden down. The cold winter, the welcome soak of February and March, the total drought of April and May (less than an inch of rain in four weeks) and a mild (ish) and rainy (so far) June seem to have answered every plant’s needs. There is a prodigious amount of leafage in the garden; ramparts of green in the borders with fat buds just beginning to open all around.

Some plants have got their timing wrong. What was a delphinium doing opening its first flowers at the end of April? Most have held back for a grand splurge in late June. And I know why. It’s Lucy’s wedding on the 26th.

Our first daughter’s wedding, on May 31st 2004 coincided with the warmest May day on record, after a cold month. We were congregating in what shade we could find in a garden with precious few flowers.

Thumbnail

13 June 2010

I’m not sure what it would be called if you did it to a sentient being, but I’m certain it would be against the law. In so far as a plant has instincts and urges they are controlled and expressed by its hormones. Can it be legitimate to frustrate them?

At this time of year, when plants are in active growth, their messages are plain to see: the priorities of one bud growing before another, the rationing of vigour between one shoot and another; the election, as it were, of a leader (or the equal energy of several branches) are all determined by hormones.

And we, superior beings, seeing how they are programmed, can outwit and re-direct them as we please with our forefingers and thumbs.

If you wait until the plant has obeyed its hormonal instincts and grows its branch or its truss of flowers you call it pruning (a verb, oddly enough, with no apparent roots or relations). You then have the wasted effort, the amputated stems and leaves, on your hands, your compost heap or your bonfire. Better, surely, to take the initiative and preempt unwanted developments.

A florist disbuds to get bigger and better flowers, choosing to concentrate the available energy into one flower rather than two. I bully my young trees and shrubs in the same spirit, examining them to see what buds have opened, with what consequences, and what buds are next in line.  If a new shoot has set off in a direction I don’t approve, I look for another with ideas that more nearly match my own and eliminate the first. At this early stage my thumbnail is usually the ideal tool.

Soft hummocks

4 June 2010

The most fragrant job in the garden today is pulling the goose grass out of the Scots briars. You have to stand chest-deep in them and their prickles to get a good straight pull, steady or they break off. The roses are right under your nose, and does any rose have a sweeter smell?

Scots briars are hardly the height of fashion today, but if they have ever grown in your ground they are probably still there. They are the roses of, among other places, the sort of sand dunes that become links; thrifty, low-growing with slender stems, advancing gradually by root-suckers to colonize new ground with soft hummocks of tiny leaves.

They are the prickliest of all roses. Their name of Rosa spinosissima describes the dense fuzz of spines and bristles up every stem, certainly calling for gloves but not quite substantial enough to wound you.

Their other name (do they really need two?) of R. pimpinellifolia points out the resemblance of their leaves to salad burnet; Sanguisorba major, or indeed minor.

Burnet is yet another old name for the rose which the French, incidentally, call pimprenelle (or sometimes pimpernelle); nothing to do with the scarlet pimpernel, which is Anagallis arvensis, or indeed Sir Percy Blakeney.

You smell the genes, as it were, of Scots briars in some excellent hybrids. The tall pale

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have simply stopped. They must be transpiring, in emergency mode, and their root hairs finding moisture somewhere in the dust, but new growth, or anything but a tiny travesty of a flowerhead, is simply put on hold. What surprises me is how few plants are obviously losing turgidity in their veins and wilting.

I am taking a can to this year's new trees (luckily there are only half a dozen) daily. I might as well be pouring it into a hole in the ground: it all disappears as fast as I can pour it. I mentally map the rootscape underground: the soil must be full of tiny roots from big trees competing for moisture. What happens when they meet? Does the big horse chestnut challenge the cedar of Lebanon for the last remaining drops? Are some roothairs bigger bullies? Miraculously they seem to get by without destroying each other.

There is one clue, though, to what is going on out of sight. With the grass merely ticking over the deeper-rooted lawn weeds come into their own. And trees prone to suckering send up a forest of sprouts. We haven't had to mow for weeks; instead I hand-pick the succulent shoots of acacias, cherries, the wingnut and above all the prolific cedrela, Toona sinensis, before it obliterates the grass under a groovy toona grove.

In June the generous blocks of herbaceous planting (‘borders’ gives the wrong idea) were like magic meadows – as though Hertfordshire had an endless flora of tall, short, feathery, gesticulating, creeping, aspiring, pale, dark, transparent or solid herbs in generally complementary colours. More than anything I was reminded of Beth Chatto’s celebrated stands at Chelsea in the 1970s. The unusual (her term) plants she put together always spoke quietly to one another. It was an intelligent conversation among flowers that had no need to show off. She was making you look at what till then you had passed over: the ingredients of a hay field, a stream bed or the early flowers of a coppice that disappears in summer in drought and shade. Her lessons gave many of us a permanent distaste for the cosmetics of the nursery business. This is Tom’s taste too, I fancy – with significant exceptions when a perfect peony, shall we say, is called for.

Beth Chatto had a quiet celebration, an open day for friends, on June 28th; 50 years to the day since she opened Unusual Plants at Elmstead Market, near Colchester. I have watched nearly forty years of its evolution, from an unremarkable stream under some senior oaks to a landscape emulated wherever people garden. Beth’s dry garden, never watered, come what may, is an extraordinary one-step lesson in ecology. Her bog gardens around shining ponds are the same. Perhaps in her writing I discern most love of all in her description of the woodland she developed later and the plants that flourish before oaks cast them into shade.

Eye-catchers? I think I know what Beth would say about a statue. ‘What a waste of money’.

can afford. And arrange good plants in relatively realistic ways.

The official winner was Andy Sturgeon. What the judges must have liked about his creation were the row of rusty rectangles, the bold straight concrete edges and the eclectic planting (one of this, one of that) allowing you to see the essential earth. If there was a green theme it was well-concealed (at least from me).

Tom Stuart Smith is unmistakable for his evocative simplicity. Somehow his quiet dark rectangular pool among mounds of box created the sense of a real place – even a place with memories of emotions. I suppose his copper  box of a summerhouse made sense – but someone will have to explain it to me.

Roz Ulph picks flowers for the church

regale is raising its trumpets to blow. Allium are fading and penstemons preening, lavender a forest of pale green tentacles, alstromeria flecked with tentative colours.

Pale roses shine so bright at dusk that the others almost disappear. Iceberg above all, but also Buff Beauty and Penelope, with Paul’s Lemon Pillar, fading on the wall, filling up with a violet Clematis viticella. Euphorbia palustris is more important than ever as a bulwark of brilliant green. Geraniums, pale pink and Johnson’s Blue (an easy name to remember) surge over the grass. As for paeonies, a full frilly white and the absurdly formal Bowl of Beauty, I have never seen so many, let alone so many standing up straight.

The paths are frothing, here and there, with valerian, here white, there pink, and the unstoppable little paving (or Spanish) daisy (or fleabane), Erigeron karvinskianus. At dusk the honeysuckles breathe out (is Early Dutch the six o’clock one and Late Dutch the follow-on at seven ?)

Can a garden feel, and echo, the happiness of a wedding ? So it seems.

This time all the roses will be out at once. The forerunners, Maigold for example, may have finished, but the main battery, which in this garden is mainly hybrid musks and ramblers, will be firing salvo after salvo. On our sunniest wall Paul’s Lemon Pillar has joined Maigold, white after orange, with the orange Lonicera tellmanniana and the pale buds of Clematis Perle d’Azur scrambling over a philadelphus already smothered in white.

In the borders cream thalictrums and my favourite goat’s beard with its almost-white spikes (why goat’s beard?) are the main background to the erupting roses. The full-flowered French fire first: Comte de Chambord, Jaqueline Dupré, Baronne Prévost, Belle de Crécy; all tones of pink and purple. Best of all with Madame Alfred Carrière, just-blushing white, high in a holly tree.

Round two, just underway, includes Felicia, Iceberg, Cornelia (who should be kept away from Felicia - her coppery pink shouts at Felicia’s silvery pink), the custard-coloured Buff Beauty and the cooler, creamy Autumn Delight.

Round three looks perfectly timed for wedding day. Indeed it starts with Wedding Day, high in a pear tree, and Rambling Rector, covering a shed, and culminates in our fifty-foot Wickwar, occupying three Christmas trees – with Paul’s Himalayan Musk scattering pink bouquets through a rather jaded old Chinese pine. Treasure Trove and Mrs Honey Dyson are still alarming us with 12 foot shoots. Will they make it to the wedding?

obvious. Fir trees put up one leader surrounded by incipient branches like a ring of spokes. So strong is the hormonal drive to keep going north, as it were, that when a pigeon lands on and snaps a newly-grown and still green leader (its wood unripened and fragile) one of the spokes gets a hormonal command to take its place. How does this work? The growing cells on the underside of the chosen shoot (chosen by whatever mysterious form of election) begin to multiply further than the rest. The shoot bends upwards as result. Very soon its terminal bud becomes the highest point of the tree, the leader and hormonal dictator. It even develops buds all round in readiness for a new ring of spokes next year.

Intervention is pointless with such a clearly-programmed plant. When a rather splendid fir in the garden here lost its leader to a bird in the usual way I did try to help it, from a ladder, tying a light bamboo to the top of the trunk and hoisting one of the side branches into the leadership position, secured with string. When I came back two months later the tree had ignored my advice and produced a new leader from a spare top bud lurking among the needles.

There are deciduous trees that seem to share the fir’s philosophy. Alders often have the same simple spoke-like rings of branches; many poplars, too. You can count the age of trees of this persuasion: it is the number of rings of branches – up to the point where circumstances take over: breakage or uneven light and shade modify the simple pattern.

It is oaks that keep my thumbs busiest. Quercus is quirky. An English oak rarely leads with an end bud pointing straight ahead. It has buds in clusters that seem to leave all its options open, to grow into whatever space offers most sunlight. In a crowd of seedlings this will usually be straight up, but an oaklet with equal illumination all round will hesitate, first prefer one direction and then another, and soon become a tangle of zig-zag branches with buds pointing in all directions.

Welsh sessile oaks are worst; herding cats is straightforward compared with directing a vigorous little Welsh oak tree. It may seem obvious which branch or shoot is dominant and should be encouraged. There are never less than four buds on each shoot, though, ready to surprise you. I suppress three with my thumbnail, or snip little shoots with my secateurs, favouring the one nearest to vertical. I’ll come back weeks later, to find all the tree’s energy has gone into a bud I didn’t notice, heading for Machynlleth.

It’s a curious hobby for a grown man, I’ll grant you.

yellow Fruhlingsgold has a fragrance that seems related, and so does Stanwell Perpetual, a seedling of unknown parents that seems to have popped up in the 1830s at Stanwell in the outskirts of Colchester. Stanwell Perpetual is a soft pale bush with complex pale pink flowers and again that swooning-sweet smell just tinged with lemon.

At one point in the19th century, I read, there were many hundreds of Scots briars and their near relations listed in catalogues. Does anyone collect them now? The little white-flowering original in my photo (if that’s what it is) is good enough for me.