Victoria's backyard

The second-month itch

2012-01-29T23:05:00.000Z

Grrrrr! I'm feeling grumpy today. There's nothing annoys me more than the prospect of a cold spell in February - just when one is itching to get on with some pre-spring activity such as creating new beds, or moving things around, or (ahem) planting the polyanthus I bought the other week.

Those poor polyanthus. No sooner did I buy them - during what I thought was going to continue to be a long mild spell - than we had a hard frost. It got mild again. I thought: "I must plant those polyanthus". No sooner did I poke my nose outside than the temperatures plummeted. It's not so much that the ground is too hard to plant, but I can't walk across the grass when it's frosty - it makes black footmarks on the lawn.

This week, it's going to get colder and colder in London, with temperatures drifting towards -4C(25F) overnight. That might not seem much if you live in northern Canada or Siberia, but a sustained blast of that over three or four nights may wreak havoc with some of the more tender plants I thought might get through the winter unscathed.

The polyanthus are Primula elatior 'Castillian', whose flowers come in cheerful shades of bronze, orange, terracotta and yellow, bunched on the typical sturdy stem of P. elatior hybrids. (Elatior is the clue that their great-grandparents were oxlips, rather than primroses.) Best of all, 'Castillian' is slightly scented.

They look fantastically cheerful alongside yellow-leaved grasses such as Acorus gramineus 'Ogon' and the blue-grey emerging foliage of Sedum spectabile. This year, I'm going to try them with Heuchera 'Electra', which is one of my favourites. It seems to keep its leaves in better shape over winter.

I'm going for colour this February. On the recommendation of James Alexander-Sinclair, writing in this month's issue of Gardeners' World magazine, I've invested in a couple of Prunus mume 'Beni-Chidori', the Japanese apricot, which has brilliant magenta flowers.

I normally like a combination of white and green in spring, but in a couple of weeks' time, I'm off to Miami with my daughter for a week's holiday and I know that when I get back, I will find England in late February something of an anticlimax compared to floriferous Florida.

So it's colour all the way. Hey, even the thought of it is starting to cheer me up!

Snowdrops and other excuses for a day out

2012-01-25T20:23:00.004Z

The snowdrop season is upon us; indeed it has been lurking in the wings for some time. The Royal Horticultural Society sent me this photograph of snowdrops in bloom at Rosemoor in Devon around Christmastime, I seem to recall, and the January edition of The Garden, the RHS journal, has Silvertreedaze writing on the subject.
Although you now find snowdrops in the wild, they are not technically British native flowers. They've been here at least since the 18th century, however, and many people believe they were introduced during the Middle Ages. Whatever their origins, they are now widely naturalised, popping up in woodlands and churchyards all over the British Isles.
I like snowdrops, but I'm not obsessive about them. My favourite is the Turkish Galanthus elwesii, for the fairly crude reason that they are big - up to 30cm (1ft) tall. I don't like growing things I can't see without my varifocals. As for all those cultivars that are yellow, or green, or crinkly, or deformed in some way, my overwhelming reaction is ... why?
Some people are fanatical about them, I know - and you can bet anything you like that the RHS Plant and Design Show in London on 14-15 February will be full of galanthophiles, pushing and shoving to get at the choicest new varieties.
For a lot of people, however, including me, snowdrops are not about growing flowers, but seeing them. I have the same reaction to bluebell woods in May, or primroses in early spring - I get a tremendous thrill when I see plants happily doing (if you'll forgive the cliche) what comes naturally.
I love the idea of snowdrop days and bluebell walks, because it is the perfect excuse to get out into a more natural landscape. Deciduous woodland is fast becoming an endangered commodity here in the UK, so anything that helps people appreciate it is fine by me. (OK, a lot of those snowdrop bulbs in NGS gardens that open at this time of year have been planted by some dedicated owner, but the effect is of a wild, woodland garden.)
Perhaps we all have some primeval need to go out and mark the passing of the seasons in this way. Perhaps there is some primeval need just to go into the woods from time to time. Whatever it is, I'm going to enjoy going on my snowdrop outing.
I don't care if what I'm looking at is 'Magnet' or G. Atkinsii, or G. plicatus or G. caucasicus or whatever. So long as I see a sea of white flowers and smell fresh air, I'll be quite happy.

How cold is your garden?

2012-01-22T08:25:00.007Z

I was intrigued to see that the US Department of Agriculture is to unveil a new hardiness zone map this Wednesday, which I'm sure will come as some relief to America's 80 million gardeners.

There have been proposed alterations to this map during the past 10 years, mainly at the instigation of the American Horticultural Society, but this is the first official government update since 1990, I believe.

Given that Americans are far, far more dependent on their hardiness zone information than we are here in the UK, and that climate change statistics have shown a steady upward trend over the past few years, I expect many of our friends across the Atlantic will be saying: "About time too!"

It's very difficult to equate US hardiness zones to the UK. London, for example, is allegedly the equivalent of zone 9 in the US, which puts it on a par with San Antonio, TX, New Orleans, LA and San Francisco, CA. I wish!

And while any American gardener will be able to tell you instantly whether they are in Zone 7 (Richmond, VA) or Zone 10 (San Diego, CA), they will also tell you that the hardiness zone is only part of the story. It's an important part - it basically tells you what is going to get through the winter - but it doesn't take into account summer temperatures, or humidity, or snow cover, or light levels and so on.

It's the same here in the UK. It's well known that in London, you can push the envelope a bit when it comes to growing exotics, because London is an urban heat island (UHI), and temperatures can be up to 7 or 8C(46F) higher than in the surrounding countryside.

Being an island (or group of islands), Britain also benefits from a temperate maritime climate, and this becomes more pronounced the closer to the coast you are. The west and especially the south-west are further protected by the Gulf Stream.

But just as the hardiness zones are just the start of the "will it grow?" story, even in the UK it's always a good idea, I've found, to keep an open mind about your own garden's microclimate.

Conventional wisdom has it that the south side of a garden will be reasonably warm and sunny, the north side will be shadier and cooler, the east side will get early sun and the west will get afternoon and evening warmth.

That's true - up to a point. If I want to grow something that needs lots of sun, such as tulips, or buddleia, I grow them on the south-facing side. My garden faces south-west, and it's sheltered by mature trees, so it's a warm garden. But the existence of that shelter means that some areas are shaded. It doesn't matter how warm those areas are, some plants just won't do well there. Crocosmia, for example, sulks in certain parts of my garden, but runs riot in others.

I have a Campsis grandiflora on the south-facing fence (below). But while it never seems to suffer from frost damage, it needs good light levels from spring onwards to coax it into flower. Just being on the sunny side isn't really enough. It flowered this summer, because we had a very hot spring - but even then, not until the middle of August. It was a bit like watching one of your children put their shoes on very, very slowly - I wanted to shout: "If you don't hurry up, it'll be too late!"

Cannas (below), on the other hand, don't seem to be quite so fussy. This bit of the garden is north-facing, although it gets quite a lot of light all day. Can you see the tree fern on the left of the picture behind the cannas? I don't need to protect it at all during winter - because on the other side of that fence is my neighbour Peter's garden office.

Peter works in there most of the day - with heating on in winter, obviously - so the tree fern, along with a tetrapanax and a trachelospermum, has a very cosy little life. It's so warm that the big fatsia self-seeds. You can just see a little seedling on the left that has started growing in the pot belonging to the tetrapanax.

Indeed, all along that fence on the left are various sheds belonging to neighbours. I'm near a corner, so I have five gardens backing on to mine at right angles. People usually put their sheds at the end of the garden, so ironically, what should be the coldest place in my garden is one of the best-insulated.

On the south side, my neighbour Ruth's garden runs parallel to mine and, yes, her sheds are at the end of her garden. So my sunny south-facing fence has absolutely no protection at all.

Sometimes Ruth and I think it would be nice to have a lovely big wall between us - not because we don't get on, you understand, but because it would retain the heat, and we could have lean-to mini greenhouses, or wall-mounted fountains, or lots of other interesting things instead of our half-rotted fence with its rickety trellis. Sorry, MY half-rotted fence - I think it's my responsibility.

Then we look at all the things we would have to move, untie, cut back or generally deal with in order to achieve this, and we think - no, that fence will do another year...

What price privacy?

2012-01-20T21:11:00.009Z

When I was in Seattle last July, I had the very great pleasure of meeting garden writer Marty Wingate, whose latest book, Landscaping For Privacy, is published this week in the UK by Timber Press. I have to admit that while I was looking forward to seeing it, I expected it to be much more relevant to an American audience - after all, Marty is an American writer and the photographs are of American gardens. (Nothing wrong with that - I love a bit of American gardening voyeurism.) However, to my surprise, I found it very thought-provoking.

We British like to think we know all about privacy - all those castles aren't just there to look quaint, you know. We are an island race, and at the first hint of trouble, our instinct is to throw up a huge wall, preferably surrounded by a moat, with armed battalions standing by to pour boiling oil on intruders.

The materials may have changed (it tends to be Leylandii hedging these days, or feather-edge fence panels), and the armed guards may come a little expensive in these times of austerity, but the same sentiment still lurks beneath that stiff upper lip: Keep Out!

Personally I would feel very exposed in a garden that had no visible, tangible boundaries whatsoever. But the problem with merely building a high fence (6ft 6ins is the maximum you can go without planning permission in the UK) is that you end up with a garden that can be a bit box-like. And of course, you wouldn't want a 6ft fence two feet from your front windows.

So what do you do if you still want lots of light and a feeling of space, but you also want the sense of privacy, of having a veil between you and the world? The answer is simple, says Marty. Buffers.

Buffers can be plants - trees, shrubs, perennials - or they can consist of wooden panels, or archways, or perhaps just a large pot or an obelisk. The key thing is that they give the illusion of a barrier, but without compromising your sense of space.

Buffers play other roles as well. They can act as a teaser - half hiding and half revealing the vista beyond, as with the picket fence and arch in this Seattle garden below. You wouldn't feel you could go through this gate unless you had been invited, so it holds you at arm's length to an extent, but you can still admire the garden that you see quite clearly through it.

Yes, that looks lovely, you say - but I can't afford a picket fence and arch, and if I could, I don't think it would suit my property, and I'd have to find someone to do the work for me and ... blah blah blah.

Well, you don't have to do the full picket fence thing. Vertical accents, such as these wooden trellised obelisks in another Seattle garden, behave like punctuation marks - they stop your eye in the same way as a comma breaks up a sentence, so that you take a visual breath, as it were, before moving on to the next bit.

These conifers, below, act just like exclamation marks! They seem to say: "Look at that view!"

No one in their right mind would want a high hedge or a fence here, but the slim columns of the trees not only frame the view but also give you a sense of being separate from the property below.

Yes, well (you might argue), I don't live in Seattle and I don't have the space to grow huge conifers, nor do I have a handy view of Puget Sound.

Well, here's a solution to that problem (well, OK, not the Puget Sound bit). Admittedly, this garden is in Seattle - it belongs to garden writer Lorene Edwards Forkner - but it's an idea that could be borrowed by anyone anywhere. Lorene has planted conifers in huge galvanised stock feeders, thus creating a barrier that is both temporary and mobile. If she needs access, all she needs to do is move them out of the way. (Notice the irrigation hose, which stops them drying out).

I've used my own pictures here to try to give you some idea of what Marty is talking about. The pictures in her book are far better - and she has lots of other good thoughts too: for example, how water fountains, or plants that rustle in the breeze, act as buffers to counteract traffic or neighbourhood noise. Have a browse - see what you think.

Small colourful visitors brighten a January day

2012-01-18T01:00:00.009Z

I have never failed to find something interesting to see at Wisley, the Royal Horticultural Society's garden in Surrey. It doesn't matter what the weather is like, or whether it is January or June. Yesterday, however, I was visiting the Glasshouse along with Clare, from Plantpassion, to see the colourful visitors that take up residence in its steamy interior during the depths of winter.

Sure enough, there they were, flitting between the towering palms and the exotic tendrils of flowering climbers. Their colours were amazing - brilliant magenta pink for the females, and blue and green, with the occasional splash of bright red, for the males. Some even had those trainers with flashing lights.
What? Who did you think I meant? Oh, the tropical butterflies! Yes, I saw them too. And very lovely they were, but they paled into insignificance beside the sight of children, round-eyed with wonder, thoroughly enjoying a world outside their normal day-to-day routine.
One little girl, in her winter plumage of bright pink parka with fur-trimmed hood, got very excited when she saw a butterfly hatch out and shouted at the top of her voice: "Mummy, Mummy, I saw a WEAF-wing!" It's difficult to say leafwing when your front teeth are missing.
It's the third year Wisley has had butterflies in the Glasshouse. This year, by way of an extra treat, you could also see caterpillars, alongside the emergence cages where the pupae hang, ready to ease themselves out of their chrysalises and into a world of colour and heat.
The butterflies are imported as pupae from Belize, and supplied by the Stratford Butterfly Farm. In the wild, the caterpillar attaches itself to a twig before shedding its skin and becoming a chrysalis. The collected pupae have lost this, of course, and Cara Smith, one of the RHS staff, showed me how they stick the pupae to canes using Copydex glue - it's basically latex dissolved in water, so it's non-toxic (which is why it's good for false eyelashes, apparently).
These green ones below will hatch into Blue Morpho butterflies - they look like a little row of fairy lights, don't they?

Here's an owl caterpillar - it turns into one of those butterflies with a big "eye" on its wings

The butterflies in the Glasshouse have a lifespan of only a couple of weeks, so they die off naturally. They don't perform any pollinating role - they're just there to look pretty. Owl butterflies like laying their eggs on banana plants, of which there are many in the Glasshouse, and the RHS did have a nasty moment once when a mini-plague of owl caterpillars appeared. But they hatched into butterflies, and that was the end of that, said Cara. I suspect f-owl play. (Sorry.)

Here's Cara, below, at the emergence cage, where lots of newly hatched butterflies are waiting to go into the Glasshouse. To my surprise, she showed how to pick them up - she grasped the wings firmly between her thumb and forefinger, quite close to the body. I'd always been told you shouldn't touch a butterfly's wings, because you would cause irreparable damage. But as you can see, these seemed to survive OK, and look quite happy clinging to Cara's fingers.

Actually, it was difficult to decide whether it was the kids, or their parents and grandparents who were enjoying themselves more. It was comforting to see that, although we often tell each other we spend too much time at our computers or in front of the television, there still seems to be something in most of us that responds with wonder and enthusiasm to the natural world.

Cara very kindly released these specimens for us so that Clare and I could photograph them. The minute she let them go, we were surrounded by a heaving scrum of visitors brandishing their cameras and phones. It was as if the butterfly equivalent of Brad and Angelina had arrived in town. Above, some owls, and below are two tree nymphs.

These spectacular creatures below are Malay lacewings. They look like a vintage design by Missoni.

I know, from watching David Attenborough's extraordinary Frozen Planet series on DVD over Christmas (it's available on Amazon.com, American friends) that the sight of an untamed wilderness going about its seasonal business can hold my children transfixed - sophisticated adults though they now are. (I got told off for saying "Wow!" every five minutes.)
But even better is actually going outside to discover the world for yourself, whether you find a piece of it in a leaf, a bug, a puddle, a backyard, a park, or a polar ice field. So all credit to the RHS for giving kids the chance to see these tropical butterflies in such a wonderful setting.

This is either a Great Mormon, or an Asian Swallowtail, as is the butterfly at the top of the post. Both are members of the same family and they look quite alike, so excuse my lack of positive ID.

Treading on my dreams

2012-01-06T19:02:00.009Z

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven,

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)

I love this poem at any time, but the final line always runs through my mind when I'm gardening at this time of year.

I usually delay the big winter tidy-up until after Christmas, because many of the plants in my garden go on well into December, especially if the weather is mild. The snag with rummaging about in the borders at this time of year is that it is so easy to trample on the new shoots of bulbs such as snowdrops and daffodils. You have to tread carefully, or you will extinguish their dream of blooming in a couple of months' time.

It's been a busy Christmas for me, as you may have noticed from the lack of posts. Apart from Christmas Day and Boxing Day, I've been at work most of the time. Coupled with that, my mother - who came to stay with us on Christmas Eve - was ill, and had to be admitted to hospital. She's fine now, I'm pleased to say, but I think both she and I are quite glad to see the back of this Christmas.

So it was with a sigh of pleasure and relief that I stepped outside this morning. It's not too cold here in London - about 9/10C (48/50F), but feeling slightly warmer in the sunshine. A great day to do some gardening.

I always wait until the cannas have been frosted before cutting back their foliage, but as soon as they go over, I am itching to hack off the shroud-like leaves and put the plants away for the rest of the winter. Mine are in pots, so they can go in the garage, which stops them getting too wet and cold.

The red banana below, however, (Ensete ventricosum 'Maurelii') will not regenerate, so that's destined for the tip. If you have a greenhouse, you can overwinter them (Will Giles, at The Exotic Garden, uses the Norwich Cathedral greenhouse for his!), but I don't, so I treat them as annuals. They grow so fast in one season, I'd never be able to lift them if they got really big.

Then there's the general herbaceous detritus. This bed below, for example, is full of old crocosmia leaves. I could leave them, but they are flopping all over the evergreen plants, such as the yuccas, so they get pulled out. I could already see next year's shoots starting.

It's a very satisfying feeling, accumulating a heap of garden waste like this. I love jobs that don't involve any analysis or decision-making, just a vague attention to detail in case you cut off a finger.

Had a quick squint at the pond, above, to check that everything was all right, and that the pump was still working. The fish seemed very lively, perhaps because it was a mild sunny day.

And I found this fat little fellow, cosied up amid a cluster of crocosmia corms. This is the caterpillar of the Small White, or Cabbage White butterfly. He's a bit of a pest if you grow cabbages, so it crossed my mind that I should tread on his dreams pdq. But I don't grow cabbages, and the nasturtiums (which I'm guessing attracted his parent) never seem to suffer from caterpillar predation, so I left him to snooze in peace.

The making of a modern Christmas flower

2011-12-12T18:00:00.004Z

Do you love or hate poinsettias? I’m in the latter camp, I have to confess. When it comes to Christmas, I prefer white to red – paperwhite narcissi, or hyacinths, or amaryllis, not lurid red horrors that sit glaring at you from the dining room table. And as for the salmon ones…
No, as far as I am concerned, there is nothing pulchritudinous about Euphorbia pulcherrima, even if its botanical name does mean “most beautiful of the euphorbias”. The only time I have ever warmed to the sight of a poinsettia was in Madeira, where you can see occasionally see them growing au naturel – huge, leggy shrubs six feet or more high, like supermodels wearing bright-red lipstick.
How was it, I wondered, that this architectural, rather rock’n’roll plant became transformed into a squat red blob, sulking its way through the height of our northern winter and featuring on a thousand Christmas cards?
The man we must blame is Joel Roberts Poinsett, a botanist and physician, who brought back the first poinsettia to the United States from Mexico, where he had been the equivalent of the first US ambassador.
Poinsett came from a wealthy Southern family, and travelled extensively in Europe, and especially Russia – where Tsar Alexander I tried to recruit him for the Russian civil service. He was elected to Congress in 1820 and was appointed first American Minister to Mexico (the precursor of ambassador) in 1825. On a visit to southern Mexico, he came across a flower known as the "Flor de Noche Buena" (Christmas Eve flower) and sent some cuttings back to his home in South Carolina.
Poinsettia had been associated in Mexico with the feast of Christmas since the 16th century, thanks to the legend of a poor Mexican girl/boy/family (depending on the version), who had no money to buy flowers to lay before the manger of the baby Jesus in the parish church on Christmas Eve.
There are several variations on the story, but the basic theme is that she/he/they decided to gather weeds from the roadside, thinking that at least this could provide a comfortable bed for the Saviour. As the stems were arranged around the figure of the baby, the weeds turned to brilliant red star-shaped flowers, symbolising the star of Bethlehem and the death of Christ.
Poinsett fell foul of the Mexican authorities, thanks to what they considered to be an uncontrollable and impertinent urge on his part to meddle in their business, and he took his leave of the country on 3 January 1830.
Although he gave his name to the plant, poinsettias are particularly associated in America with the Paul Ecke Ranch, based at Encinitas, California, the world’s largest and most successful poinsettia breeder. The Eckes began cultivating poinsettias in the 1900s, but the family business made a breakthrough in the 1960s, when Paul Ecke Jnr used cutting-edge technology –ie television – to bring his plants to a wider audience.
By grafting two varieties, the Eckes had turned the leggy wild poinsettia into the more compact plant we know today. However, Paul Jnr was determined to go further, and make poinsettias an obligatory part of the American Christmas experience.
He appeared on The Tonight Show and the Bob Hope Christmas Specials to promote his plants and ensure they were part of the sets. This piece of modern marketing paid off: poinsettias today are as much a part of the holiday season as evergreens and carols.
I’ve never been able to keep a poinsettia alive, so is this because I am an incompetent when it comes to looking after houseplants, or do they feel the hate vibes and keel over in response?
Leigh Hunt, principal horticultural advisor for the Royal Horticultural Society, was surprisingly sympathetic when I put this to him. “It’s a very common phenomenon – you get your poinsettia, it looks OK, you put it on the dining table on Christmas Eve and by Boxing Day it only has one bract left.
“Poinsettias need a minimum temperature of 13-15C. In most modern homes, that’s not going to be a huge problem in winter – so it’s probable that the plant has been shocked before it arrives in your house.
“If you’d bought the plant direct from the nursery where it had been grown in the right conditions, it would probably be all right. But what’s more likely is that it has been loaded on to Dutch trolleys and left standing outside the florist or in the garden centre in the cold. If it has been shocked before you get it, then trying to keep it looking good is going to be an uphill struggle.”
As a member of the Euphorbia family, poinsettia is related to some of the toughest, most adaptable plants on the planet. “Euphorbia is a highly successful and diverse group,” says Leigh, “and has adapted to all sorts of conditions. At one end of the scale there are euphorbias that look like cacti, while at the other are the cultivars that can be found in UK gardens, such as Euphorbia characias subsp wulfenii, with bright green leaves in spring.”
What look like big red flowers are actually bracts – modified leaves – while the flowers themselves are quite insignificant. Bracts, says Leigh Hunt, provide an economical way of advertising nectar over a long period of time. Red is often an indication that a plant is pollinated by birds, and because birds don’t have a strong sense of smell, these plants – including poinsettia – are usually odourless.
If you want to grow poinsettia, says Leigh, there are a few basics to remember.
Choose a position that gives good light, but not too much direct sun.
Choose a room that is consistently warm, and in which the temperature does not drop below 13C. A hall or a porch, where the temperature drops at night, may not be suitable.
Keep the plant moist, but not soggy. The thumb test is always the best – push your thumb into the surface of the soil, and if it feels dry, water.
Some poinsettia fans keep their Christmas plants going from year to year, cutting them back hard in April, and repotting them. They can grow to be quite sizeable plants, but the key thing, says Leigh, is to keep them out of artificial light as much as possible in autumn, so that they follow the natural pattern of shorter winter days. Otherwise, any new bracts will revert to plain green.

An admirer of abelia

2011-12-03T19:23:00.004Z

There are many plants that boast many good points, yet somehow fail to make my heart beat faster. Abelia x grandiflora is one of these. It has glossy leaves that have shades of red and copper, it's semi-evergreen, it flowers for ages - from summer until late autumn - and while it makes a fairly big shrub, it doesn't make you feel as though it's trying to crowd you out of the garden. It's fluffy rather than forceful.

For me, however, it falls into the category of supporting act. While it may have fragrance, and look quite pretty, there's nothing really distinctive about it that would justify pulling it out of the corps de ballet, as it were, and raising it to the rank of ballerina.

A very quick flick through the multiplying piles of gardening books on my shelves (do they breed, do you think?) found only a couple of mentions. Stephen Lacey, in his very readable book Real Gardening, calls it "a stalwart background shrub of the season" (he's talking about autumn).

So I was astonished, when wandering round the Penelope Hobhouse garden at Wisley, to find that this despised Cinderella was the flamboyant beauty that had caught my eye as it frothed around a stone bench at the far end.

Of course, you need a large garden to give it this sort of treatment. But what an imaginative piece of planting. And what a sensible choice, given the long flowering period, the fragrance and the fact that you need to be up close to appreciate the pretty little trumpet flowers. Most people would go for roses, or something formal and evergreen, such as yew or perhaps choisya.

How nice to have one's prejudices turned upside down. And how wonderful to see this shrub flowering away in early December.

This is how the rest of the Hobhouse garden looked this week. As you can see, there's still lots of interest, even at this time of the year - thanks to the very mild autumn we've had in the south-east of the UK. I love the view of the mock Tudor brick chimneys in the distance. They give a rather cosy, domestic scale to the garden - although they actually belong to the laboratory building where the RHS plant pathology team are based.

Winter wonderland at Wisley

2011-11-28T18:16:00.010Z

I haven't been feeling very well for the past few days, so this morning - my day 0ff - I decided that I needed a, some fresh air; b, to get away from everyone and c, to think about something other than work and what to buy at the supermarket.

So I switched off my phone, jumped in the car, and went to Wisley, the Royal Horticultural Society's garden in Surrey, which is about 25 minutes drive away.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Wisley. I love Wisley, but I hate having to share it with hordes of people. Unreasonable and intolerant, I know, but there you go. Today, it was busy. Very busy. There was a craft fair taking place this weekend, the existence of which had slipped my mind until I arrived in the overflowing car park. Dang!, I thought. (Except I didn't spell it that way.)

Anyway, my mission was to photograph the Tom Stuart-Smith borders around the Bicentenary Glasshouse, so I stomped off in search of autumnal vistas and other visual delights.

Wisley looks good at any time of year, but in autumn it can look spectacular. I'd never noticed before that from this angle, the fountain in the Long Pond echoes the shape of the tree in the distance. (Swamp cypress, perhaps?)

The cornus still have their leaves on, but you can see the bright stems underneath, which heightens the effect. This one is called 'Midwinter Fire' - and you can guess why.

The low light of winter makes rich colours, such as these pyracantha and holly berries, really glow. That's one of the great benefits of living this far north - the light is constantly changing, from season to season, from day to day, hour to hour. These colours might look garish in late spring or midsummer, but at this time of year, they are rich and jewel-like.

But even cool colours, such as the blue-green of these euphorbia, can light up the border, especially if placed next to spectacular autumn foliage, or this Yucca filamentosa 'Garland's Gold', with its intensely rich yellow variegation.

Anyway, to the Glasshouse borders. I'm fascinated by these. It's not often that we get the chance to see such a large area of planting take shape, from bare earth just four years ago, and this is a huge site - two hectares (or nearly five acres, in old money). The borders begin at the entrance to the Glasshouse, and sweep round to the western side, where there are two areas of prairie planting, designed by Professor James Hitchmough of Sheffield University.

At this time of year, the two blend seamlessly together, thanks to the extensive use of grasses and prairie-type perennials such as helenium, veronicastrum and echinacea in the Stuart-Smith borders.

Phlomis russeliana is another favourite, its seedheads popping up like exclamation marks above the misty hummocks of grass.

To me, this is clever, clever planting. Choosing plants that keep the structure of the borders going right into winter takes real skill. I just could not get tired of looking at it.

They look wonderful in summer of course - but late autumn allows you to see how the hummocks and humps of grasses - whether they are low-growing festuca or statuesque miscanthus - echo the billowing shapes of the trees and the landscape beyond.

The occasional explosion of orange beech leaves from the intermittent hedging around the lake picks up the vibrant foliage of a distant tree flaunting its autumn colours.

I tend, from time to time, to suffer from the delusion that I am the next Garden Photographer of the Year. Goodness knows why, because I only have a point-and-shoot, I have absolutely no idea what ISO stands for and the nearest I have come to photographic greatness is standing next to Derek St Romaine at the Chelsea Flower Show.

I love the process of going out and taking pictures of gardens, however, so I was really looking forward to my stint at Wisley today. I was down there last week, with my mother, when the Glasshouse borders were glittering and shimmering in the sunshine. Naturally, I'd forgotten my camera, so I'd vowed to go back as soon as I had a minute.

The weather, and my camera, had other ideas. I kept hoping the sun would break through, but it sulked behind a cloud for most of the morning. Whenever it looked like it might make an appearance, the dodgy battery in my camera would give up, at which point the air around me turned blue, and the sky remained resolutely grey.

Three times, I gave up and walked back round the gardens to the cafe in search of a cup of tea.

Three times the sun came out again just as I reached the cafe, at which point I scampered back to the Glasshouse borders (about half a mile away). Each time the sun disappeared by the time I got back there.

Eventually, the mummies with pushchairs - of which there are many at Wisley - were beginning to give me funny looks and tell their offspring to "hold onto the pram, darling". I think it was all the swearing.

Enough with the cute cat pictures!

2011-11-27T23:31:00.006Z

Only kidding! Would I seriously ever say that? I couldn't resist posting these.

This is what you might call a Basket Case Study. It proves the immutable feline law that a cat in the vicinity of a box or basket will feel an irresistible urge to jump inside. Even if there is already another cat in it.

"The Paw you will always have with you." With apologies for misquoting the Gospel of St Matthew.

Designing with plants

2011-11-26T18:06:00.005Z

Arranging plants in a garden is a bit like any creative endeavour. When you get it right, it looks effortless - but trying to get it right is a very different matter. I wrote a piece for The Independent Magazine this weekend, about this very problem and if you want to read it, here's the link.

I was interviewing two garden designers, Jill Anderson and Pamela Johnson, about their new book, called Planting Design Essentials.

As I say in the piece, many aspects of planting design deserve a whole book to themselves - colour, texture, finding the right plant for the right place and so on. But this is a good book to have at your elbow if you're planning a piece of planting, if only to make you more disciplined in your approach, and to help you think through the process in a simple, logical way.

Measuring the space, for example, before you go to the nursery or garden centre, will ensure that you come home with the right number of plants. If you find yourself succumbing to an impulse buy, as we all do, the book advises you to ask yourself some very tough questions about whether you have the right situation for this particular plant.

I've known Pamela Johnson for several years, and she is a valued member of my local gardening group - generous with her advice, and very good at making canapes! If you want to see what her own garden is like, go here.

For Craig

2011-11-19T16:16:00.004Z

In memory of my darling husband, Craig Orr, who died three years ago today.

Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.

We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

Killer cat!

2011-11-18T11:41:00.004Z

Since I lost my lovely Pushkin, other neighbourhood cats have decided to encroach upon our garden. Our two Abyssinians, Mario and Luigi, don't go out in the garden yet - I want to make sure that they are 100 per cent certain to come when they're called before they do. (They're pretty good, so it won't be long.)
But in the meantime, the other cats are making themselves at home - and wreaking havoc. Hardly a day goes past when I don't find a pile of feathers on the lawn.
I've always fed the birds in my garden, all year round. When Pushkin was alive, he would catch the occasional fledgling, but not in huge numbers, so it didn't deter me. As far as I could see, the benefits of feeding outweighed the risk of the occasional death.
When I heard people blame cats for the decline in garden birds, I'd think they were exaggerating (or anti-cat).
The RSPB says that cats are thought to catch around 55 million birds per year, but they add there is no evidence to show that predation by cats is having any effect on bird populations UK-wide.
However, the amount of damage these invading cats do is really frightening. One is a big fat tabby, the other a portly black and white cat. There's an occasional ginger chap, too. You wouldn't think they were capable of walking five yards, let alone catching anything.
Has anyone got any bright ideas as to what I can do about this? Apart from protecting the bird life, I'd like to deter these cats from coming into the garden anyway - I don't want my boys to have to fight for a space on the lawn once they start to go outside.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day: November 2011

2011-11-15T10:17:00.006Z

There was an appeal to gardeners the other day from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who wanted people to stop ripping out, or cutting back, ivy. Ivy flowers at this time of year, providing a much-needed source of food for late-flying insects and birds.

There are gardeners who see ivy as a sort of pernicious weed, to eradicated wherever possible in case it pulls down the house or the fence, or kills a tree. I rather like it, particularly the cultivars with golden variegation, but there are other plants that provide nectar and pollen at this time of year.
Fatsia japonica, which, like ivy, is a plant many people despise, is also in full flower right now, and in my garden, this autumn has been a spectacular season for it. The flowerheads are huge, fluffy flamboyant affairs, which are great for flower arrangements (they look even better while they're in bud).
I always think fatsia looks better from above, when the shapes of the leaves are easier to see, so it's a great plant for a dry, shady basement area, or a lower level of the garden.

It's odd that the plants which provide solutions to common gardening problems, such as dry shade and late summer colour, are often the plants at which people tend to turn up their noses.
Personally, I find fatsia, and its cousin, Fatshedera lizei - a cross between fatsia and English ivy, Hedera helix - invaluable background plants, so it's nice to see them enjoying their moment in the sun.
You can use fatshedera instead of ivy as a climber, if you want something a little less invasive. It has large showy leaves and the same fluffy flowerheads, but it doesn't have aerial roots that cement themselves to a wall or fence. The branches, with their clusters of glossy leaves, can become quite heavy and snap, so it needs to be tied to a trellis or support.
Fatsia, of course, is completely self-supporting - this one in my garden, below, is approaching the size of a small tree. Planted in the ground, they will tolerate pruning, shade and drought. You can grow them in containers (and mine has a habit of self-seeding into any pots nearby) but this hugely reduces their ability to survive quite tough conditions.

Another plant that provides late autumn flowers and fragrance in my garden is the loquat, or Eriobotrya japonica, which is a favourite with late-flying butterflies such as Red Admirals. It's hardy throughout most of the UK, and the flowers have a lovely almond fragrance, like marzipan. It prefers a sheltered spot, and full sun. In a mild winter, it may even produce fruit, but these probably won't ripen and you'll end up with something that tastes like a sour apricot.
Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day is hosted on the 15th of each month by the lovely Carol at May Dreams Gardens. Head over there to see what's blooming in Carol's Indiana garden, and to check out GBBD posts from around the world.

Miaow is for Monteverdi

2011-11-13T14:22:00.004Z

My daughter's close harmony group came round to rehearse today - they are performing at a Christmas Fair at the Battersea Arts Centre tomorrow, and they have a residential choral workshop next weekend. This is them rehearsing Monteverdi's Beatus Vir, written circa 1630.

They were missing a couple of singers, so Luigi decided he would sit in for one of the altos ...

Here he is again. As you can see, he doesn't even need the music...

You can just see Mario get in on the act, on Luigi's left. He's singing second soprano.

How come they can sing so high? Well, they have just been neutered.

Joking apart, at the time that Monteverdi was composing, it was very common to see castrati singing both in operas and in sacred choral music. But I don't think Signor M. had cats in mind when he came to write his masterpieces, somehow.

Sweet peas and apple crumble

2011-11-08T19:44:00.006Z

A completely irrelevant picture of my garden, taken on 17 October, when we could still pretend it was summer

I was invited to a lovely luncheon party today, hosted by Lady Hamilton of Dalzell, vice-president of the conservation charity Plant Heritage, at her home in Surrey.

The journey took me out of London via the A217, a road romantically known as the Sutton bypass. It's not my favourite road, since it is punctuated at regular intervals by speed cameras, traffic lights, and people who want to make inconvenient right turns, but don't always signal this intention until the very last minute.

Today, however, with the last of the autumn leaves clinging to the trees, and a low mist veiling the North Downs, it seemed positively idyllic.

The guests were a mixture of journalists and Plant Heritage people, including three National Plant Collection holders. These were Chris Lane (hamamelis, and also wisteria), Roger Parsons (lathyrus, ie sweet peas) and Michael McIllmurray (orchids). Sadly, I didn't get a chance to talk to Dr McIllmurray, but it was fascinating listening to Roger and Chris.

Chris was sitting next to me at lunch, and he was so bombarded with questions that he could hardly eat his boeuf bourguignon (served with potatoes dauphinois and carrots, and followed by apple crumble and cream. Now that's what I call a November lunch.)

National Plant Collection holders, as you might expect, are men and women with a mission. Chris Lane told us how, when he decided to specialise in witch hazels at his home in Kent, he only had an empty field and the traditional wisdom is that they prefer woodland conditions. Undeterred, he went ahead - and found that his hamamelis seemed to bloom even more prolifically in an open situation.

His nursery is wholesale only, although he does hold open days and you can find details here. Only got room for one witch hazel? Chris recommends Hamamelis x intermedia 'Pallida', which has large yellow flowers, a wonderful scent and yellow autumn leaf colour too.

Roger Parsons has worked as a gardener all his life, but it was only when he took early retirement that he was able to concentrate on his passion, sweet peas. His favourite is 'Albutt Blue', a Semi-Grandiflora variety that is white with a blue picotee edge and a wonderful scent.

Roger, like many gardeners, uses well-rotted horse manure as a fertiliser, but unlike many gardeners, his manure comes from his own horses. His wife is a keen horsewoman and she has introduced Roger - who doesn't ride - to miniature horses. They have their first mare in foal, and the new baby should be trotting around in time for the nursery open days in June.

Details of these will be posted on Roger's website. I'll be there. Wild - or indeed miniature - horses couldn't keep me away.

With a little help from my (blogging) friends

2011-11-03T09:16:00.013Z

As part of the autumn tidy-up, I decided to revamp the pots outside the back doors. We have two sets of glass sliding doors, and in the middle, against the wall, I've always had some sort of large specimen plant. Currently - and satisfactorily - it is a Trachycarpus wagnerianus, which throws nice sharp shadows against the wall when the sun hits it.

It was in a huge galvanised steel container, which was supposed to look modern and chic. While it was busy looking modern and chic, it slowly rusted to pieces and I had to replace it. I decided to get a glazed pot, which in my experience survive frost and wet far better.
I've also edited down the number of pots in this grouping, which I think looks far smarter, especially in winter when flowering container plants (such as daffodils or irises or tulips) tend to look more upright and formal than summer versions such as pelargoniums or Lotus berthelotii, which scramble everywhere.
But what really made me look closely at rearranging this grouping was patientgardener's comment on this blog a while ago that the heights of the pots needed to be more varied.
This is how it looked in summer (below). As you can see, there are more pots, many at the same sort of height, so the effect is one of sprawling chaos.

Not that I have anything against sprawling chaos, mind - but what I was trying to achieve was the effect of the pots outside Great Dixter (below). Revisiting this photograph, I realised that while I'd achieved the effect of lots of pots (not exactly a brain-teaser), what I'd failed to achieve was the graduated height of the display. Much more tricky.
If you ever get the chance to hear Fergus Garrett, the head gardener at Great Dixter, give a lecture (and do go, if you can - he's a terrific speaker) you will be told that achieving this change of levels is one of the most crucial elements of a good design.

The point of all this is that sometimes we need an objective eye assessing what we do, or someone to bounce ideas off, or simply someone with whom to commiserate when things go pear-shaped in the garden. For me, blogging provides this in a way that family (not that interested), or friends (too polite to criticise), or books (informative, but not exactly responsive!) do not.
Many of the people whose blogs I read are professional gardeners and/or designers. Some are talented and passionate amateurs. Some have grandchildren; some have young families; some are retirees; many work full-time. But what they all share is a huge appetite for information, and an enthusiasm for their subject.
The result is access to something that is like a cross between a database and a 24-hour Q&A session. How on earth did we ever garden before the internet, I wonder?
According to the Garden Media Guild, who hold their annual awards ceremony on 30 November, there were eight candidates for the blog of the year award in 2008. This year there are 31.
Not everyone sees the proliferation of these cyber-communicators as a good thing, however. Many - not all - professional gardening writers object to being judged alongside "amateur" writers. They complain that bloggers undercut their rates, and pinch their space, on the basis that publishers, with an eye to their budgets, will persuade bloggers to write for nothing - or very little - thus depriving the professionals of their livelihood.
I used to have some sympathy for this view - writing is a perilous enough occupation, financially speaking, without having to compete with contributors for whom the kudos is more important than the cash.
On the whole, though, I'm becoming increasingly impatient with it. Most "professional" garden writers - ie, those who make their living at it - have no formal writing or journalism qualifications. As someone who has done the National Council for the Training of Journalists certificate, a two-year formal newspaper apprenticeship in the provinces, plus 30 years up the sharp end in Fleet Street, I fail to see quite how they come to be so snobbish about their journalistic abilities.
This is not to say they can't write - many write beautifully, of course. But so do lots of bloggers. And sure, they may have horticultural qualifications - but then, so do lots of bloggers.
The sharing of information - whether it's advice from a fellow blogger about how to overwinter my dahlias, or an account of a visit to a famous garden - can only be of benefit to everyone. When it comes to activities such as gardening, an increase in knowledge usually leads to an increase in enthusiasm - and that means more hits for the bloggers and more book sales for the established writers.

The virtues of autumn

2011-10-29T16:58:00.004+01:00

I've just been reading Veg Plotting's post about her GMT tidy-up. The clocks go back in the UK tonight, from British Summer Time (BST) to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and VP says she uses this as a moment to remind herself to do an autumn clear-up and square everything away for winter. I think it's a really good idea.

I was pottering about in the garden today too, impelled not so much by the time change as the fact that for once - for the first time for weeks - I didn't have to do anything tedious like go to the tip, or tidy out the garage, or stack books.

There's something very calming about autumn chores. Sunshine is a bonus, rather than an expectation, and the earlier dusk drives you indoors for a cup of tea before you get over-exhausted. It doesn't matter if you accidentally stand on something or chop something back by mistake, because unless you're very unlucky, it's about to go over anyway.

And autumn chores are cheaper! In spring, there seem to be endless temptations to splurge - buying new plants and new pots to replace those damaged by frost; buying new plants and pots because, ahm, I can't resist them and so on.

Tidying, on the other hand, doesn't cost anything, and there isn't the same sense of urgency as there is in spring, when everything is growing at 100 miles an hour. I felt very virtuous as I swept leaves, cut back dying annuals and subsiding perennials, and put unused pots away in the garage for winter.

Golden October

2011-10-22T17:44:00.003+01:00

It seemed odd, when I got up early this morning and found the car registering a temperature of 7C (44F), to look back and think that only three weeks ago, we were basking in 28C (82F) sunshine.

It seemed even odder to find that, by the time I'd done all the chores and finally got out into the garden, it was 16C (61F) and I had to dispense with my padded down jacket.

We're due for another seasonal see-saw over the next few days, with London predicted to hit 20C (68F) tomorrow, before the weather turns colder and wetter by the end of the week. If I had one of those weather houses with a little man and woman, I bet they'd be whizzing round in circles by now.

Still, I shouldn't really complain because it's perfect weather at the moment for doing a bit of tidying up in the garden. My resolution this year is to chuck out all the summer bedding in the front garden and replant the containers for the winter, adding some bulbs for a spring display.

I make this resolution every year, but invariably end up pulling out the frozen, mushy wreckage of pelargoniums in early March in order to replace them with ready-grown daffodils because a, I couldn't bring myself to throw out the pelargoniums earlier and b, never got round to planting the bulbs.

However, this year is different. I have already cleared out the containers in the front garden and replanted with skimmia and spotted laurel, underplanted with 'Thalia' narcissi.

I have even bought pumpkins, and a 'Happy Halloween' banner for the front porch, plus some rather chic spiders with pink and orange glitter on them to decorate the trellis. Goodness, I'm organised!

The back garden has been left to its own devices while all this is going on. I usually clear out those containers once we've had the first frost, at which point I cut down the cannas and put them in the garage for the winter.

I've been out to fill up the bird feeders and mow the grass at regular intervals, however, so I've noticed that the eucalyptus which was pruned at the beginning of September (on the right of the picture) is showing signs of growth.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to take a picture of this, because the branches are higher than me and trying to photograph them results in silhouetting them against the sky. I must get up on a stepladder, though, because it's been a fascinating, rather teenagerish process.

Normally, the eucalyptus has very smooth, creamy bark, particularly at this time of the year when it has shed its old top layer. But where the tree has been pruned, I've noticed what look like tiny pustules appearing along the branch. New shoots!

As the weeks progressed, these pustules have got bigger until now they are on the point of sprouting. It's very exciting - and rather nerve-racking, given the see-sawing temperatures.

I'm going to keep my fingers crossed.

Home makeover: final episode

2011-10-17T08:59:00.011+01:00

So where was I? Oh yes, I was about to have the study redecorated. Well, today I can report that for the first time in three weeks, I can sit down at my own computer, at my own desk, on my own chair. Oh, the luxury!

I find that any sort of home makeover project is a bit like childbirth. You embark on it with great excitement and enthusiasm, only to discover that most of the process is quite tedious and involves a variety of problems, false alarms and delays. When it's finished, however, you're thrilled with the results - and after about a year, you've forgotten all the discomfort and inconvenience and you're thinking about the next one.

While the study was being redecorated, I also went through a Fridge Trauma. I won't bore you with it: I started writing down the saga and nearly sent myself to sleep. So I'll just say that my fridge was out of action for four weeks. It's OK now (more or less) but I never imagined that being without a fridge could prove so stressful.

While all this was going on, of course, the garden was rather neglected. We've been having a spell of very good weather here in the UK, which is lovely but also a bit worrying. We need rain at this time of year if plants like camellias are going to give a good display in the spring, because late summer and autumn is when they are forming their buds.

Love the autumn colour of this sumach, which was a passalong from my friends Peter and Delphine. The coleus beside it is Trusty Rusty.

Seeing the decorators at work inspired me to paint the bird table. In the end, I went for a safe, boring cream, but I think it looks good. I also painted some trellis to go across the front of the house, but that's another post. I did so much painting, in fact, that my daughter remarked drily that she was surprised that the cats were still their original colour.

Talking of the cats, here they are.

As you can see, they get on quite well. Luigi, on the left, is the criminal mastermind, and Mario is his willing accomplice. They are very good at stealing food and I have had to buy a pedal bin instead of a touch-top bin, as Luigi worked out that if you jumped on the bin, and then onto the work surface, it opened. Mario could then jump into the bin and retrieve whatever took his fancy. They are thieves and scoundrels - but very cute and cuddly.

One of the great pleasures of autumn is the low light, which illuminates foliage like a spotlight. The alocasia on the left is A. portadora.

There's a lesson here for anyone who wants to grow dahlias (centre) in close proximity to yuccas (bottom left). Don't. You won't be able to get in to deadhead the dahlias without donning a suit of armour.

The one-minute review solution

2011-09-24T12:30:00.010+01:00

I'm in the process of packing up my study. (Oh dear, just typing those very words makes me want to go and lie down.) I'm having the room redecorated because it has got to the point where the wallpaper is beginning to come away from the ceiling. Wallpaper? Ceiling? Shows how long it is since it has been decorated properly.

The kids and I use the study as a second living room, and we spend quite a lot of time in there, so it seems silly not to have it looking nice. I also want to de-office it, so all the metal bins and desk accessories and so on are going out and instead I'm going to have rattan baskets and warm textures and colours.

It's the only room in the house that's never been professionally decorated, mainly because it is full of books and my computer. The thought of being without those (oh, dear, I think I want to go and lie down again) has always put me off clearing it out. But the moment has now come. Or rather, the decorators will come, on Monday morning.

I feel a bit guilty about this, because no sooner did I start packing the books up than I realised there were several that I had been meaning to write about. So if you'll forgive me, I'm going to do a very quick, one-minute review of each.

1 Planting the Dry Shade Garden by Graham Rice

I don't know any gardener who hasn't got a bit of dry shade somewhere in their plot. It's one of the most common, and one of the trickiest, problems to solve. As Graham says in the piece that he wrote for The Independent Magazine, "it's the patch of dark and dusty soil that reminds you perhaps you're not quite as good a gardener as you'd like to be."

Graham is editor-in-chief of the Royal Horticultural Society's Encyclopedia of Perennials, and an RHS judge, so he knows his stuff. But the book is written in a very easy and relaxed style - much like Graham himself, in fact!

The result is a how-to manual, that fills you with have-a-go inspiration. Graham offers various solutions for dealing with drought and lack of light and of course offers planting suggestions. too. This isn't just a list - there is a page for each plant, each lavishly illustrated with photographs by Graham and his wife, Judy White.

2. Designing with Grasses, by Neil Lucas

Like the next book, this one has, in my opinion, a slightly misleading title. It's a beautiful book, with gorgeous colour photographs, by one of Britain's leading experts on grasses. However, the emphasis is very much on the grasses themselves, and not so much on designing.

Neil Lucas, for whom I have huge admiration, might find that a rather nit-picking criticism, because there are lots of planting suggestions. There's a section on grasses for shade, for example, and one on year-round interest.

It would have been nice, however, to have a couple of sample border plans or container recipes that people could try out in their own gardens, especially if they were new to growing grasses.

Having said all that, this is a must for anyone who wants to plant any grasses anywhere. Published in January, it is already well on the way to becoming one of those classics that you find on every serious gardener's bookshelf - and deservedly so.

3. Designing with Conifers by Richard L Bitner

This book is by an American author and is really aimed at an American audience, but conifers are so unfashionable here in the UK, it is difficult to find a book that takes them seriously. I love them, for their variety, their year-round interest and their texture, so I was anxious to get my hands on this volume, which - like the previous two books - is published by Timber Press.

The author studied horticulture at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, which I visited some years ago. But while there are photographs of very grand conifers in very grand gardens, like Longwood, there are also examples of suburban gardens and even containers.

There are no planting plans, as such, but there is a case study garden -Cassandra and Bryan Barrett's amazing conifer garden in Eugene, Oregon - showing how the various layers of planting work with each other in terms of height and shape. One of my favourite chapters was on Railway Gardens, showing how dwarf conifers in particular can be used to great effect in creating miniature landscapes for model railways. I suspect Mr Bitner has a bit of a weakness for such things!

4. Armitage's Garden Perennials by Allan M Armitage

Another North American book, also by Timber Press. When it arrived in the post, I stuck it on a shelf, thinking: "Guide to perennials, yeah, yeah" and left it there for a few days.

I eventually opened it to look up the section on sedums, and was completely charmed by this opening sentence. "I love the sedums for their amazing diversity of foliage, flower and plant habit, but there are so darn many of them, it is impossible to grow or know them all."

This is a guide to perennials with attitude. Here in the UK, we tend to take our gardening books rather seriously - a colleague was genuinely shocked when Graham Rice, writing for The Independent, described himself has having "grown a huge number of plants while searching for those to include in his book (see above) and killed many of them in the process". So it's very refreshing to hear Allan Armitage say, on the subject of achillea: "Yarrow is used for making beer ... Having tasted some of the concoctions of my beer-making friends, no ingredient in homebrew surprises me!" Or, recommending Rudbeckia 'Henry Eilers': "Find it, buy it. Full sun."

5. Our Plot, by Cleve West

I should declare an interest here. I know Cleve, and I'm a great fan - not only of his garden designs, but also of his writing. In 2002, when I was editor of The Independent Magazine, I hired him to write our Urban Gardener column, which ran for five years. He often wrote about his allotment during that time, but even so, I was intrigued by the idea of a book. Would it be a "year in the life of my allotment" tome, or a "how to grow your own" manual? In fact, it is as close as you can get to wandering around the allotment with Cleve himself, one minute talking about wildlife, the next talking about his fellow allotmenteers, interspersed with lots of sensible observations. "If you are new to gardening," he warns the novice veg grower, "the best way to injure yourself and dampen your enthusiasm is to go at it hammer and tongs from day one ... Little and often is best." It's a fascinating glimpse of allotment life - but it's also a fascinating insight into Cleve himself. Perhaps the final word should go to my mum, who to my knowledge has never ever read a gardening book. She picked up my copy of Our Plot, flicked through it and said: "This looks really interesting."

Gotta go pack up those books now.

The garden bird rant

2011-09-19T09:58:00.004+01:00

A great tit on the feeder outside my study window

The concept of a garden as an "outdoor living space" has a lot to answer for. At the weekend, I was talking to someone who complained that all the birds seemed to have abandoned their garden.

The garden used to be full of birds, they said, but now - despite putting out bird feeders and suet balls and so on - there was not so much as a chirp. Did I think this was the result of global warming, or some sort of bird epidemic?

Further enquiry elicited the information that they had lived in their garden flat for about 18 months. The first year had been spent doing up the flat and it was only this summer that they got around to tidying up the garden.

Yup, you've guessed it. They have ripped out all the "messy" ivy and removed all the overgrown shrubs. Their garden is now an "outdoor living space", complete with painted fence, paving, and a few plants in containers.

Colleagues or friends of friends tell me stories like this quite often. One couple I know cut down the conifers in front of their house because they thought it would give them more light. (The conifers weren't Leylandii, and they weren't that close to the house.) Then they wondered why the "cute little birds" (a colony of goldcrests) had disappeared.

Because you've cut down the trees, I said. But we've put out a bird feeder, they said, and we've got an apple tree in a pot...

The stories are always the same, and the question is always the same. "Is the disappearance of the birds due to climate change?"

I always want to answer (but of course am far too polite to do so): "No, it's the result of Stupid Human Syndrome!"

The irony is that the same people will probably get quite exercised about the disappearance of the rainforests or the pollution engendered by the attempts of countries like China and India to make a decent living for themselves. They just can't make the connection between habitat loss and their own backyards.

This is depressing, because it seems as if I have read thousands of articles about how our gardens provide a vital refuge for songbirds. The RHS and the RSPB do a fantastic job in trying to educate the public about gardening for wildlife.

The trouble is, most of the time they are preaching to the converted. What we need is a really hard-hitting campaign that has a far greater popular impact. If only Pixar would make a film about a group of garden birds coping with a shrinking habitat (Bird Story) or Disney would come up with a plot involving birds in an alien environment (BIRD-E).

In the meantime, I shall go on patiently telling people that birds like cover, and that it doesn't matter how attractive your garden furniture is, or how much your paving cost, they won't come down to a feeder if there is not a single shrub or tree in the vicinity.

GBBD: September 2011

2011-09-16T22:34:00.003+01:00

Phew, only a day late! I don't know where the time goes. I thought September was going to be a relaxing month, but for some weird reason it isn't - and I can't work out why. Or at least, I haven't had time to sit down and work out why!
Anyway, here's the garden. Cannas are in full swing, nasturtiums are still going strong and there are a few other bits and pieces too.

Canna 'Striata' (or 'Pretoria'). These are from Crocus and they are magnificent specimens.

I think this variety of nasturtium is 'Tip Top Apricot'. It's fractionally too peachy for here (I carefully haven't photographed it with the dahlias it clashes with), so I'm making a mental note to grow something more vibrant next year, such as 'Ladybird'.

The campsis, which is still going. Not sure of the cultivar - I think it's grandiflora.

This dear little clematis was a present from my colleague Charlotte, to whom I donated an Ikea sofa that was surplus to requirements. Her mother, who came round to help shift the sofa (who needs men, anyway?) is a keen gardener, which is lucky for me, because she went to Wisley and picked out this Raymond Evison variety, which is called 'Peppermint'. It looks fantastic with this carex, so I think that's where it might have a permanent home.

This is Crocosmia 'Columbus' which has been going for weeks now. The sedum is only just starting to flower, but this is a relatively shady spot.

The next few weeks are going to be hectic, as I have the decorators coming in to do my study, so I may not have much of a chance to sit at my computer. I'm hoping they'll be finished by October GBBD!

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day is hosted by the utterly delightful Carol at May Dreams Gardens. Why not go over there and see what everyone is up to?

Major (tree) surgery

2011-09-06T09:54:00.005+01:00

The tree surgeons came today to prune my eucalyptus. I don't have the usual E. gunnii, which you see looming over many London gardens, but Eucalyptus pauciflora subsp debeuzevillei, or snow gum.

This is a very pretty eucalyptus and much more suitable for an urban garden as it doesn't grow quite as big (40ft as opposed to 80ft). The bark starts to peel around this time of year (August-September) revealing beautiful cream branches.

As its common name implies, it is one of the hardiest eucalypts, but its Latin name is completely misleading. Pauciflora means, literally, poor-flowering, but in reality, the tree is covered in white fluffy flowers in late spring.

Mine has been stooled (ie coppiced when young), so it is multi-stemmed. This has two benefits - it grows more slowly and it produces an attractive framework. So, if it's so wonderful, why am I having it pruned?

Well, the garden that backs on to my fence behind the eucalyptus used to have a lot of trees along the boundary, which meant that my eucalyptus started to grow forward, across my garden, in order to get its share of light.

A year or so ago, the next-door neighbours cut down all their trees in order to build a huge shed across the bottom of their garden, which meant that my eucalyptus now has permanent access to light from the south. My tree surgeon, Edward Payne, suggested pollarding, or cutting it right back, so that the new growth would go up rather than across.

I trust Ed, but even so, I was a bit nervous about this, so I asked plant-hunter Tom Hart-Dyke, who holds the national collection of eucalyptus at his World Garden at Lullingstone Castle in Kent what he thought. I sent him the pictures above and he agreed wholeheartedly that this was the way to go, so I got Ed to book his guys in.

The newly shorn tree always looks a bit bereft, but you can see that the basic framework of the tree is still there, and still looks quite attractive.

I've still got branches I can hang my bird feeders on. And Ed's guys are so good - they're fast, they tidy up really well, but best of all, they seem to really care what the tree looks like! And they didn't have an easy job on a morning like this one, which was wet and windy.

Because of the huge fatsia growing alongside it, the eucalyptus doesn't look as naked as it might. Now all it has to do is put on some new growth. Watch this space!

Going totally tropical in south London

2011-09-05T23:27:00.004+01:00

When I opened my garden on Sunday 28 August, among the visitors were Clive and Steven, who were opening their own garden for the National Gardens Scheme for the first time this Sunday, 4 September.

I'd seen Clive's blog so I knew his garden was sub-tropical - far more so than mine. If that wasn't enough to entice me over to Camberwell, in south-east London, I felt the least I could do was to go and support two new boys! Even after five years of opening, I still know that feeling of terror mixed with excitement...

Clive and Steven put me to shame. I only remembered to put up a poster outside my house on the morning of the opening. They had fliers on the trees in the street - thank goodness, because although I'd taken a note of the postcode, for the sat-nav, I'd forgotten to take a note of the house number!

If you didn't know, you'd never have guessed they were opening for the first time. The atmosphere seemed completely relaxed and welcoming, from the friendly person taking the money (Steven's father, I think) to the tea and cake area. Clive and Steven were both chatting away to the visitors as if we were old friends, which was lovely. I do like it when owners are friendly.

The garden is quite exciting, because it's an L-shape, consisting of the usual back garden, plus a bit of land to the right, which runs behind the neighbouring houses. There's a pond at the end of the original garden, and a greenhouse in which Clive grows carnivorous plants.

The new bit has given Clive a blank canvas (if you can call nettles a blank canvas) on which to create a vegetable garden cheek by jowl with borders filled with dahlias, crocosmia, sunflowers and tithonia, which glowed in the late afternoon sun.

Did I say sun? Well, it was sunny when I was there, which was about 4.30pm, but they'd had exactly the same experience as me the week before. Just before they opened the garden, the heavens decided to open too. It's so demoralising when that happens, so I'm delighted to hear that they eventually got 130 visitors.

You enter the garden by pushing your way through a tropical fantasy of tree ferns and palms and bananas, before you emerge on to the broad open lawn. I love this approach - some people find it claustrophobic, but I like the sense of going on an adventure and not knowing what you're going to see.

The white dahlias on the left are 'Klondike' and the sunflowers are 'Earthwalker'. Clive said he was a bit disappointed with them because the heads drooped but I thought the colours were gorgeous.

The vibrant reds and oranges of the dahlias were reflected in the vegetable garden, where marigolds jostled with kale and lettuce. And even Mina lobata, below, which was blazing away in the courgette patch.

Here's another one of those sumptuous sunflowers. You can see some tithonia on the right, looking as if it's standing on tiptoes to try to be as tall.

It was difficult to tear myself away from Camberwell, but I wanted to go and see the garden belonging to my friend Nigel Buckie, who was opening for the British Red Cross. We used to open on the same day for the NGS, but Nigel had some issues with his bamboo so didn't open for a year or so while he sorted it out.

The end result is an improvement, I think - there is more contrast between textures, and whereas before Nigel had a rill, which was like a straight, shallow canal, he now has a proper pond with koi in it. There's a bridge over the pond too, with a bamboo pole, and the sound of the fountain gushing into the deep water blocks out the usual south London noises (traffic, sirens, neighbours etc).

He's also built himself a tiki bar out of bits of bamboo at the end of the garden. It was all set up for cocktails, but it was getting rather chilly, so I settled for one of Nigel's scones and a cup of tea.

I loved these little birds, which looked as if they were about to run off through the undergrowth. Apparently someone who came to visit the garden just left them there.

Of course, the garden I would have loved to see on Sunday was my friend Karen's garden.

She was opening for the NGS for the first time too, in north-west Wales.

I'm sorry, Karen - I had to steel myself to face the South Circular on a Sunday afternoon, let alone north-west Wales. But I'll make it one day!

Now we are two - sometimes

2011-09-03T20:03:00.004+01:00

I was so busy getting ready for the garden opening, and then so busy getting over the garden opening that I haven't had time until now to tell you about our new arrival. On Monday morning, my daughter and I set off to collect Mario.

He was supposed to arrive with Luigi, but broke his leg, so he's been staying with the breeder, Karel, until he was given the all-clear by the vet. He's now fully recovered, with only a patch of shorn fur to show for his injury, and that's growing back fast.

Mario is a very glamorous little chap, because he is a chocolate Abyssinian, and these are still quite unusual. The darker fur, on his head, back and tail, is a kind of milk chocolate colour, but the overall effect is a sort of toffee shade.

I was a bit apprehensive about what would happen when the two cats met. There was no way they would remember each other after six weeks, and while Luigi had settled into our household very happily, Mario was older and bigger and had yet to get to know us. Would they fight?

Well, the answer is yes. And no. For the first few days we kept Mario shut in the study with his own litter tray and food. This was to allow him to get to know us, and feel secure about his surroundings before venturing out into the rest of the house - or encountering Luigi.

Luigi was intrigued by the new arrival, but also rather miffed. He would scratch at the study door occasionally, and on the few occasions he managed to slip inside, he made Mario's life a misery by chasing him round the room and jumping on him.

However, while the two had these wrestling matches, I didn't notice any hissing, or ears going back, or yowls of pain, so I was hopeful. Neither of them seemed to suffer any injury. (We, meanwhile, are covered with scratches from where "affectionate" cats have leapt onto our laps or shoulders.) The chasing and the ambushing were a strange, silent ritual, in which Mario (the bigger cat) always gave way to the pestiferous Luigi.

I found this article on the internet, to which we clung in the same way that new parents cling to the works of Miriam Stoppard or Gina Ford. Every paw-thrust or pause in the hostilities sent me rushing to the computer to see whether I should be embarking on the Next Stage.

In the end, we let Mario out of the study this morning. Luigi chased him round and round the living room again and again. And again. We got very bored with it. And eventually, SO DID THEY!

By the time I had to shut them both (erk!) in the study while my daughter threw a surprise birthday party for her best friend, they were well on the way to a truce.

After a tasty supper of incredibly expensive cat food, it was time to settle down for the night.

A quick goodnight kiss...

A last goodnight miaow for me...

And it was off to sleep. Shhhhh!

A bright September morn

2011-09-01T08:24:00.008+01:00

The morrow was a bright September morn;
The earth was beautiful as if newborn;
There was nameless splendor everywhere,
That wild exhilaration in the air,
Which makes the passers in the city street
Congratulate each other as they meet.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

September dawned with a beautiful morning today, so much so that those of us who were on Twitter first thing were positively lyrical in our celebrations of the first day of autumn. It inspired me to get out in the garden and take some pictures.

I was also inspired by patientgardener's End of the Month View meme, which I always love to read, but don't always participate. I like her honesty about her garden, and the way she identifies the problem areas - although I have to say that every time I've seen it, it looks absolutely wonderful.

So having wandered around taking September morning sunshine pictures, I thought I'd identify a couple of problem areas in my garden. The first two involve luzula, or woodrush. Why anyone would want to grow this plant is completely beyond me. I inherited it from the previous owners and it have never looked anything other than a mess, even when in flower.

I suppose the only good thing you could say about it is that it is pretty much indestructible. (And that's possibly not a good thing to say.) It's not architectural like some grasses, and the colour isn't very interesting. It just sits there in a green, spreading lump.

This is woodrush in its normal tatty end-of-summer state. This one looks even more tatty than normal - not quite sure why. I think I might have left a pot sitting there earlier in the year.

Here's another patch. I've been meaning to take this out for ages, but I think autumn/winter 2011 may be the moment. While I'm at it, I may dispense with the Brunnera 'Jack Frost' as well. Very nice plant, but not here - it's too silver.

This is the border that leads up to the luzula beneath the holly tree. It's also a problem, as it only really looks fresh and interesting in spring. The feathery acer is in a pot, which makes me think I might take the advice of Graham Rice, who has just brought out a new book called Planting the Dry Shade Garden, published by Timber Press.

Graham wrote about this in The Independent Magazine a couple of weeks ago, and if you have problems with dry shade (and very few of us haven't), the book is well worth a look.

I was particularly struck by his suggestion of building a raised bed in dry shady areas, which gives you the chance to put in a reasonable depth of soil, and help plants combat problems such as rain shadow, and lack of nutrients thanks to tree roots. This border is a perfect candidate.

I'm also thinking of ripping apart the bit above. I like the bronze phormiums, but the libertia, while very pretty in spring, soon look past their sell-by - and these have been here for years. I've tried to get away with revamping it by placing pots among the existing plants, but I think it needs a total replant.

The lawn got somewhat trashed by the visitors on open day, but I know from experience that it will bounce back, given a bit of top-dressing and spiking.

So what does look good? This red banana (Ensete ventricosum 'Maurelii') was the first to be potted up this season, so it's also the biggest. It's at least 6ft.

And this pheasant grass was a present from Peter Clay, who is a fellow NGS garden owner - and also happens to co-own Crocus. He very kindly tried to persuade me to have something more exotic, but I just loved this, particularly with the bronze phormium beside it.

It used to be known as Stipa arundinacea, but is now called Anemanthele lessoniana. I do wish that when botanical experts were renaming things they'd spare a thought for those of us who have to tell other people what the plant is. "Stipa" is much easier to say than "Anemanthele".

I'm very proud of the fact that my Fascicularia bicolor flowered for the first time this year. It was a huge talking point at the open day - unfortunately, because like Anemanthele, it's not the easiest name to roll off the tongue. Fascicularia look incredibly exotic (they're known in my house as the "baboon's bottom plant") but they are really, really tough. I've got two and they've been in pots in the garden for years without any protection whatsoever. They'll grow in sun or shade too. A perfect plant - if you like the saw-toothed leaf look.

The 'phew, that's a relief but I had a great time' post

2011-08-29T19:22:00.002+01:00

I'm indebted to VP for the title of this post. The days leading up to opening your garden to the public are nerve-racking, especially if the weather is not being cooperative. So it made me smile when she left a comment on my last post saying she was looking forward to the "phew, that's a relief, but I had a great time' post. It showed great confidence in me - which at the time I did not share.

I'm also indebted to the other blogging friends who made the effort to trail over here. There was Julia and her husband, Paul (below); Arabella Sock; Simian Suter and his missus, and Cleve West and his partner Christine, who were making their second visit. Cleve hardly ever has time to blog, so if you want to know more about what he's up to, it's probably best to go to his website .

I was so pleased to see them all. Obviously, not everyone can always make the opening, but it makes a huge difference to see friendly faces. It's exactly the sort of morale boost you need when you look out of the window five minutes before you're due to open and see that it is pouring with rain.

I'd like also to mention my friends Peter and Delphine, who have loyally turned out every year that I've opened. I'm so touched by their support. And my neighbour and gardening group compadre Ruth not only brings loads of friends, but lends me several kettles as well.

Family, of course, play a huge part. My daughter Nevada, below, and her boyfriend Charlie served the tea and cakes. All the cakes were baked by moi, except the rather stupendous raspberry gateau which was contributed by my friend Pamela Johnson, who not only makes rather gorgeous cakes, but is also a brilliant garden designer.

Here's Cleve taking a picture of the garden. I meant to take more pictures myself, but as usual, didn't manage it.

So, how many people came? And did I feel that it was all worth it? Well, we had 127 visitors, which was fantastic considering what the weather was like. (It did brighten up later, thank goodness.) Our record is 166, and the lowest number we've ever had is 92, last year, so I was absolutely thrilled. I haven't had the energy to count the money yet, but I think we made around £600, which all goes to charity.

There is always the temptation to do a bit of last-minute "plonking", just to tart the place up before visitors arrive. I try to resist it, because there is a danger that a quick "plonk" can turn into a full-scale revamp. However, I think this "plonk" worked quite well. I'd bought the purple sedum from Crocus, but decided it needed something lighter as a contrast. These are Leucanthemum superbum 'Broadway Lights' and they really do light up this corner.

Two days and counting...

2011-08-25T22:02:00.003+01:00

There's tomorrow (Friday) and then Saturday, and then my open day.

I've manage to catch up with most of the chores, and filled most of the gaps, and managed to hide or disguise various bits of mess.

These include potting up my coleus, which have been languishing for months in tiny plastic pots. I could almost hear them saying: "About bloody time too!"

I've also tidied up the "glory hole" bit right at the end of the garden, where I'd piled everything that had gone over or been chewed (such as lilies and hostas), and that I didn't have any other space for (wheelbarrow, spare garden chairs). Well, I say tidied up, but an important part of the project was positioning other pots of plants so that you couldn't see it...

I still have to plant: one heuchera, seven Carex oshimensis 'Evergold' (don't worry, six are going in windowboxes).

I still have to move: three "winter" conifers in pots. It's a very nice having things in pots that you can move into prominent positions at particular times of the year. The only problem is what you do with the pots at the other times of the year.

I still have to get rid of: the bramble that always grows up through the holly tree. (You can see why I don't rush to do that job.) Plus the garden hose, and the ladder, which are lying in wait for an unwary pedestrian on the side pathway.

I should, but know I won't: sort out the big containers under the window at the front of the house. My excuse is that Julia is going to come and take away my cycad, which is in the middle. It was a rescue plant from someone in my gardening group who didn't have room for it.

Apart from that, I have to cross my fingers, light a candle and pray for a sunny Sunday.

Oh, and make some cakes.

An uncharacteristically tidy view of the garden.

Coleus (or solenestemon, if you must) around the table area. The one below has got a bit leggy, because it looked rather good indoors, so didn't get chucked out in the garden with the rest.

Vital tools. Trowel, string, two pairs of secateurs (for when I put one down and can't remember what I did with it), and a cup of tea.

Eek! Tweak! There's only a week!

2011-08-21T18:59:00.006+01:00

Luckily, it has been a lovely day here in London, because despite my promise to myself to make an early start with tidying up the garden (well, to be scrupulously honest, to make an early start yesterday), I didn't actually get going until about 3pm.

Today's chores involved a lot of maintenance - staking, weeding, deadheading, taking off brown leaves, that sort of thing. I don't normally need to stake anything, but two of the crocosmia - 'Lucifer' and one of the yellow ones - got so enthusiastic about flowering this year that they nearly fell over.

(By the way, if someone invents a foolproof way of taking the dead leaves off a mature cordyline without a ton of dirt and muck falling down the front of your T-shirt, let me know.)

I open my garden for the National Gardens Scheme a week today. As usual, I'm alternately panicking about it - and worrying that I'm not panicking about it enough. One minute I'm ringing up Crocus and bothering them about what they've got in flower. The next, I'm sitting reading the Sunday newspaper and eating a cookie instead of Getting On With Things.

I've got the week off work, though, and there is something very nice about the prospect of pottering around the garden and the kitchen without interruption for the next few days. And Crocus have my favourite dahlias in stock, so I can use those to fill any gaps. Phew.

I love the canna leaves when the late summer sunshine hits them in the evening. Now what about some flowers, guys?

'Vancouver Centennial' pelargonium. I was wondering the other day whether this was too lurid. But in the afternoon sun, it looks good - as if you could warm your hands at it.

Canna 'Tropicanna Gold'. I casually assumed this was the same as 'Pretoria'. It isn't. Although the leaves look identical when it's in the nursery or garden centre, it doesn't get as big and the flower is not orange, but, erm, gold. As anyone but me would expect.

Ooh, look, a helper. Trouble is, Luigi thinks that "cutting the grass" means nibbling the ornamental varieties. He only comes out in the garden if one of us is out there too - we don't let him out on his own. He really enjoys bounding around, chasing bugs and butterflies ... and flattening plants. Sigh. He's so cute, though, it's impossible to be cross with him.

Simply Red: GBBD August 2011

2011-08-15T10:28:00.004+01:00

I don't usually get involved in memes - usually because I'm too busy or disorganised. However, I met Carol from May Dreams Gardens at the garden bloggers' fling in Seattle, and I'd like to mark the making of new friends by joining in her Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day meme this month. If you'd like to get involved too, follow the link. Carol, it was such a pleasure to get to know you!
You'll probably think I'm mad if I say that I don't actually like red very much. But I do like unusual foliage, and very often - especially in the case of pelargoniums - that seems to come with brilliantly coloured flowers.

I've never understood this. If I was breeding a plant for foliage colour, I would go for more insignificant flowers that don't detract from the leaves. But what do I know?

This is the tender fuchsia, 'Thalia, with its orangey-red flowers and dark leaves. It will sometimes survive a mild winter, but never seems to recover as well as a hardy variety. It's partnered here with Pelargonium 'Occold Shield', which was bred by the Reverend Stanley Stringer, and named after his parish, Occold, in Suffolk. There's a fascinating article about him by Andy Andrews here. Apparently the Rev Stringer once started to read his Sunday sermon, only to find that he'd brought his pelargonium list to church by mistake.

Campsis grandiflora, or Chinese Trumpet Creeper. It's an absolute thrill to see this flowering so well. It is hardy (it's on a south-facing fence), and always produces lots of leaves, but it needs a lot of sun and heat to flower. I think the hot spring helped. I prune it back every year to keep it under control. Apart from that, it's a really easy plant.

Pelargonium 'Vancouver Centennial'. Fabulous foliage, but not so sure about the flowers. I've been known to cut them off.

Nasturtium 'Empress of India'. For some reason, this always does well in my garden, even under the Montezuma pine, where other nasturtiums tend to falter.

Another 'Occold Shield'. Unlike lots of pelargoniums, this will tolerate quite a bit of shade, and in fact the leaves tend to bleach if it gets too much sun.

Fuchsia magellanica 'Gold Mountain'. The leaves don't look particularly gold in this light, but this is a bombproof hardy fuchsia, which bounces back each spring as if winter had never existed. By August, it has put on about three feet of growth.

So why have all the red if I'm not sure that I like it? Well, as you can see from the picture above, you can put quite a lot of bright colour into my garden without really noticing it. It needs the occasional pop of yellow, or orange, or red as a contrast to all the green.

One of the lessons my garden has taught me is that you can't always plant something just because you love it. I often hear people say that they don't like grasses, or heucheras, or conifers. They want flowers, and more flowers. But sometimes, we need to think outside our own prejudices in order to provide contrast and texture.

If it's any consolation, once I've experimented with a plant I wouldn't normally have thought of planting, I usually become addicted to it. Happy Bloom Day!

Dusk and the evil hour

2011-08-14T21:08:00.003+01:00

"Putting off the evil hour" was one of my grandmother's favourite expressions. It originates in the Bible, of course (Ye that put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence to come near - Amos 6:3), like so many of the expressions we still use today.
For my grandmother, however, the "evil hour" usually referred to some distasteful task or event, such as the ironing (in her case) or piano practice (in mine).
It basically means to procrastinate, or to use a more modern idiom, to fill your time with displacement activities rather than getting on with the job at hand.
I know this will resonate with many of you, especially patientgardener who remarked on Twitter the other day that she has been known to clean the whole house before writing a commissioned blog post. "Commissioned" is the key word, because while I can sit down quite happily and witter away on my own blog, the minute I have to write a piece for someone else, the whole process becomes much more fraught.

I've been trying all day - all week - to sit down and write a piece for the Independent Magazine about my garden. What could be easier? And yet I find it so difficult to focus on it.

I meant to sit down and start at 6pm, but decided the lawn had to be cut instead. Then a bit of weeding and deadheading just had to be done.

Part of the "putting off the evil hour" involved taking pictures of the garden at dusk, inspired by photographer David Perry's blog. David gave us a photography seminar while I was in Seattle (I might get around to posting about it one of these days).

The results were a bit mixed, unlike his wonderful examples, but I did take a photograph of my fig tree, which for the first time has what look like viable figs. This is because I actually got round to pruning it this spring, and pulled off all the unripened figs last September as you're supposed to do.

So, there's a lesson here. Don't put things off, and you'll be rewarded. I'm off to write my piece now!

After the storm

2011-08-07T23:46:00.005+01:00

I've got a photographer coming to shoot my garden tomorrow, so today was a day of frenzied activity interspersed with heavy showers. I can't garden when it's raining hard - I've nothing against getting wet, but my glasses aren't fitted with wipers. So when the sky turned black, I got in the car and headed for the tip

Eventually, I got almost everything that needed doing done, and nearly all the rubbish disposed of, thanks to my son who helped me heave it all into the car. I've still got a few odds and ends to sort out, but basically, things look OK.

At least, they will look OK until the photographer gets here, at which point I shall notice a large strand of bindweed waving about, and a plant that I forgot to pot up, and a bunch of dead leaves in the pond, and ... several other things, I daresay.

I love the light after a storm. I nearly fell down the step rushing out into the garden to photograph these cannas while a single ray of sun shone down on them.

Shooting into the sun. I quite like the misty effect you get.

The shadow of the cordyline on the lawn looks like something out of Sesame Street - Big Bird, perhaps.

If you don't look too closely, my hostas still look OK. That's a canna in the front, helping the illusion along.

My bargain Washingtonias from Homebase. I love the way the light shines through their leaves.

Eucomis, pelargoniums and Carex oshimensis 'Evergold'

Every time I see this colour combination, I want to wolf-whistle. It is just so outrageous.

Fabulous year for the campsis. Some years it doesn't flower at all - it needs a long season of warm weather to get up to speed. The hot weather we had in spring must have helped it on its way. It's got loads of buds.

More eucomis. I don't know what variety they are - they're pass-along plants from my neighbour Ruth - as are some of the red-leaved cannas. I don't know what she does to eucomis, but hers always look spectacular, so I was delighted when she gave me a clump.

Luigi is learning fast

2011-08-06T21:32:00.005+01:00

Blogging came crashing to a halt last week - in other words, I went back to work. I find the task of writing a daily editor's letter quite cures me of any creative writing urges. (You can find me on page 3 of the i newspaper every day next week.)

I haven't finished my Seattle posts, and I have a queue of articles to write or organise. Luckily, Graham Rice has helped ease the load by agreeing to write a piece for The Independent Magazine about the theme of his new book, Planting the Dry Shade Garden. It's published by Timber Press on 1 September, but you can read Graham's article on 20 August.

I've only had time to have a very quick flick through the book so far (it arrived in the office yesterday), but it looks great - full of advice, ideas and planting suggestions.

I'm supposed to be writing a piece about opening my garden, which is, erm, three weeks away. Eeek! The photographer is coming on Monday morning, which means a frantic tidy-up. So have I been busy gardening or thinking up ideas for articles? Er, no. I've been taking silly pictures of the cat.

He's so cute, I felt you'd like to share an update on how he's getting on. As you can see, he's turning into a very useful member of the household ...

He's been learning to sort the laundry...

... and fold the ironing

... and hang up the washing

(must just straighten these trousers)

... and load the dishwasher

... and clean the kitchen floor

... and recycle the rubbish

... and check whether the kitchen plinths have been wiped recently

... and found time to appreciate a bit of classical music. What a clever kitten!

Seattle is hot, hot, hot

2011-08-01T19:59:00.013+01:00

The sun had decided to make an appearance on the first day of our tour, and by the morning of Saturday - Day 2 - the Seattle news channels were forecasting a fine summer weekend. Not only did this confound the nay-sayers at home in the UK ("Going to Seattle? Better take an umbrella, huhr, huhr"), it also allowed us to appreciate fully the view from the first garden on the day's itinerary.

Great, isn't it? It was quite a long time before we could tear ourselves away and look at the garden. The little dark smudge on the horizon, below, is downtown Seattle.

The Eppings built their house themselves, about eight years ago, on a steep corner site. This not only gave them the spectacular views, but allowed them to take full advantage of light and space. A path gently sloped up round the side of the garden with strategically placed focal points - a water feature, a bench, a set of steps. It wasn't steep, but if you did run out of breath, there was always something that you could stop to admire.

I liked their use of containers - this one almost looks as if the plants in it have dripped onto the earth below.

I had serious hakonechloa envy when I saw these huge clumps of Japanese forest grass. So many plants in Seattle look as if they're on steroids; these were very different from the meagre fronds in my garden.

I liked the stone head, on the right, with its dreadlocks of trailing succulent, and the focal point that led you into the woodland part of the garden. The garden looks so well-established, it's difficult to think that it's only been here for a few years.

Here's that view again. Sorry, couldn't resist. Another feature I found irresistible, but failed to take a picture, were the glass urns from which the Eppings served us iced tea and pink lemonade. They were exactly the right kind of garden hosts - kind and welcoming and patient. As, indeed, were all the people we encountered in Seattle.

The next garden on the list was the Lanes' garden, a complete contrast. Here, a woodland garden wrapped itself around the house on three sides. The site was about an acre, but by cultivating right up to the road and creating various areas within the garden, the owners had made it seem much larger.

I liked the gunnera leaf fountain on this formal pool. I think I would have been tempted to plant gunnera beside it, but it's such a monster of a plant, perhaps it would have been out of scale.

Great birdhouse tree...

And another water feature, this time in a sunny clearing...

And another one...

One of the most impressive things about the Lane garden however, which I didn't photograph, was the outdoor kitchen, which you can just see in the background of this picture. It was paved with huge tiles made of concrete stained the colour of redwood, and the Lanes very kindly let us have lunch there. There was ample room for all 70 of us.

After stuffing our faces and feasting our eyes, we made our way to the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, where the first thing I saw was a garter snake. I hate snakes. When I was a child, I couldn't even look at a picture of a snake in a book - and I didn't take a picture of this one either, because my hands were shaking too much (much to the amusement of my American friends).

Indeed, I didn't take many pictures at all at Bellevue because I was too busy buying a sun hat in the gift shop. Yes, you heard that right - a sun hat. I'd packed wet weather gear, but nothing to wear if it got hot. And as you can see from the pictures below, it was getting very hot indeed.

The Americans seem to do really good straw sun hats. I bought my favourite gardening hat in Florida and I've come to the conclusion that if you want a hat for wearing in the sun, it's best to buy one in a climate that sees a lot of sunshine. Both this one and the Florida one are crushable, too, so you can ram them in a suitcase.

Hat on head, it was time for the final item on the day's itinerary - the Olympic Sculpture Park, part of the Seattle Art Museum. I'd come across a new word in Seattle: docent. I think it's a German word, but in the States it typically means someone who leads a tour - around a gallery or museum, for example - and is usually a volunteer. I'd quickly learned to head for the docent with the loudest voice and the feistiest personality since they will a, probably tell funny stories, and b, you can hear what they say.
The sculpture park docent was brilliant. She gave us a quick history of the park (it's called Olympic after the mountain range you can see in the distance, by the way, not the Games) and a tour of the major sculptures.

This is one of the first things you see at the sculpture park - this is Split, by American sculptor Roxy Paine. Stainless steel trees are Paine's "thing", as it were, posing the question: "What is nature, what is art?" A perfect philosophical debate for garden bloggers. Check this out too.

The sculpture park is extremely popular with wedding parties, who go there to be photographed and even have receptions there. I loved the way this bride's veil formed a soft, floating counterpart to the monolithic concrete structure. But if you don't want to keep dodging out of the way of wedding photographers, don't visit on Saturday afternoon.

Father and Son, by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, who died last year. It was funded by a legacy from Stu Smailes, a former executive of Safeco, the US insurance group. He gave $1m to the city of Seattle on condition it purchased a piece of public art that included realistic, lifesize nude male figures. Apparently, he was very keen on Ancient Greek sculpture and the male nude in art. At this point, Barbara muttered behind me: "But we won't go there," which gave me the giggles. One of the figures is obscured by the fountain while the other is on show. Only when the fountains change once an hour can you see both figures stretching out their arms to each other.

Alexander Calder's monumental The Eagle. I loved the way it framed the Space Needle in the distance, but if you look at it from the other side, it almost seems on the point of taking flight above the ocean.

Bunyon's Chess, by Mark di Suvero, who uses found objects in his work. It looks like the skeleton of a sailing ship, with its mast-like structure and heavy timbers.

Louise Nevelson also used found objects in her work. If you pull up this picture and look at the piece lying on the ground, you can see that the middle section is composed of document holders - the sort that you can buy in stationery stores to hold magazines or papers. This is called Sky Landscape I.

I love the way the plants and the sky are reflected in this sculpture, so that you're not quite sure what is there and what isn't there. This is Perre's Ventaglio III by Beverly Pepper.

In a park built on a monolithic scale, you need a really huge piece to maintain the impact. I think we were all impressed by Wake, by Richard Serra, which unrolls like a series of giant waves as you reach the lowest level of the park. At first glance, it looks like an enormous steel wall. Only as you get closer do you realise that it is separate components.

The structures suggest the hulls of ships - appropriately for a port city - and one of the machines used in their manufacture was once used for French nuclear submarines.

The surface of the weatherproof steel varies according to whether it faces the prevailing wind or rain. Those facing the ocean look almost like leopard-skin, while the other side of the structure is more streaky and linear. Seen from a distance, they look like a convoy of smokestacks - there's something rather menacing and purposeful about them.

But then we Flingers probably looked rather menacing and purposeful too.

Emergency mini makeover

2011-07-31T19:09:00.008+01:00

It's funny how much a holiday can really re-energise you, particularly if you have been looking at other people's gardens. I returned from Seattle (and yes, I will carry on with blogging about that) to discover that I couldn't stand the sight of my poxy box a moment longer.

Friends had suggested leaving it until after the garden opening, on the basis that visitors like to see that a garden isn't perfect. However, it seemed to me a bit unfair to inflict such an eyesore on the paying public. I know how hypercritical I (privately) am when I visit gardens. I wouldn't be too impressed if I saw this in someone else's garden.

I didn't think the box had blight, but it had something. And since I have other box plants in the garden which, so far (touch boxwood), seem to be completely healthy, I decided I needed to find out what was bugging my box asap.

Three things were on my mind. First: could whatever was attacking the box live in the soil? Would I be able to replant box in the same place?

Second: how easy would it be to remove the box? Would it be a huge and difficult job?

Third: what would the soil be like underneath it? It grows in a space in the middle of the paving - I had visions of finding nothing but hardcore where there should be earth.

I live close enough to the RHS garden at Wisley to be able to drop in and use their advisory service. It's free to any member of the Royal Horticultural Society and you can also send samples to them for analysis in the post (for full details of the service, go here.)

I'd hardly got my sorry sample out of my bag before the horticultural advisor had nailed the diagnosis. "It's mussel scale," she said. "But let's have a look under the microscope and you can see what's going on." Yuck. There on the twig was what looked like a miniature mussel bed.

So what to do? The horticultural advisor said mussel scale was a slow-moving pest, but a really strong systemic insecticide was required to get rid of it, and it would probably need several applications.

I said I didn't want to use insecticide. I would rather dig the plants up and get rid of them, but first I needed to know whether mussel scale could survive in the soil and affect subsequent plants. Fair enough, said the advisor, and she called an entomologist colleague for further advice. He said that the mussel scale would not survive in the soil. However, he recommended leaving the site to overwinter before replanting with box, just to be on the same side.

I decided that I would dig up the box. I would possibly replant with box next spring, but not so much box - maybe three balls instead of six, interplanted with grasses, a la Diarmuid Gavin at Chelsea this year. Perhaps.

I finally got around to the digging out bit this afternoon. (4pm is my optimum time for projects in the garden, for some reason. Possibly because I need to be fortified by a cup of tea.) I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I have spent more time writing this post than I did digging out the box plants. To my surprise and delight, they came out really easily - mainly because they were in nice, reasonably deep soil. Hurray!

Going...

Gone.

So what to plant? I nipped round to the garden centre. First thing I bought was a wheeled pot stand to put my cannas on. I'd been meaning to do that for years. Then I got some topsoil and manure to top up the soil level.

I decided that I didn't want anything too expensive in case I ripped it out next spring to make way for the box. So that ruled out anything exotic, but on the other hand, I wanted something that would fit with the rest of the garden. It also had to go with the cannas, which are 'Pretoria', and have bright orange flowers and striking green and yellow-striped leaves.

In the end, I decided on some crocosmia - this is 'Columbus', which I have already, and which seemed an appropriate choice for someone who likes visiting America.

I also chose some grasses (Carex testacea, a name which for some schoolgirlish reason always makes me want to giggle, and Carex oshimensis 'Evergold') and a purple-leaved sedum called 'Rainbow Xenox', which is supposed to change colour from yellow through to bronze. Hmm. I'll be amazed if they're anything other than dirty pink. I liked the foliage, though - contrasting with the grasses, it reminded me of the stone cairns we saw at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens in Seattle.

I love, love, love C. 'Evergold'. It is the most useful plant - it's quite drought-tolerant, it's evergreen and it looks like patches of sunlight. It does well in a pot, and I find it works very well when it comes to adding texture or softening edges - it's like adding a fur collar to a winter coat.

I'm going to dress the bed with pebbles and cobbles, but since I've just hoiked six 3ft box balls out of it, I'll let it settle for a couple of weeks and top it up again before I do.

Seattle is sunny...

2011-07-29T22:42:00.018+01:00

Day one of the fling, and we were up bright and early to board the bus to see our first Seattle gardens. Here are Frances, Gail, Elizabeth and Cindy

And here's Lorene telling us all to siddown and SHUDDUP. (Just kidding. She was really asking if everyone had been to the bathroom.) Thanks, Lorene, for helping to organise a fantastic fling.

The first two gardens we visited were neighbours in NW 116th Street, on the side of a hill. If you craned your neck and peered through the trees, you could see a sliver of ocean in the distance.

Both had big front gardens, and back gardens on different levels. Suzette and Jim Birrell's garden was a plantaholics' paradise, crammed with clematis, geraniums, roses, and a vegetable patch lit up by the rainbow colours of brilliant chard stems. Shelagh Tucker's front garden was inspired by Beth Chatto's dry garden, with grasses and drought-tolerant plants. Her back garden was designed as a series of interlinking spaces, each with its own character, and each offering different vistas of the garden.

Lots of the Flingers asked me if I thought the gardens seemed very English in character. It was a question I found myself pondering throughout the weekend. What is it - beyond the stereotypes - that gives a garden a national characteristic?

Although I was familiar with most of the plants in the Birrell garden (the first plant I saw, pictured above, was Geranium 'Blue Sunrise', which I have in my garden at home), it didn't look to me like a typical English garden. Perhaps it was the tall conifers that surrounded it. In the UK we usually grow conifers either as hedging or as specimen trees. They don't tend to be the background trees in the landscape beyond the garden. (Did you know that only three conifers - yew, juniper and Scots pine - are regarded as native to Britain? America has something like 200.)

Perhaps it was the Adirondack chairs, set invitingly at the rear of a sunny lawn.

Here's Kylee, taking pictures in the front garden.

I loved the plant combinations, such as this cotinus, or smoke bush, with alstroemeria.

I was very envious of this Gloriosa superba 'Rothschildiana', or gloriosa lily

Here's the back of Barbara, a view with which I was to become familiar! Barbara, it was so lovely to meet you face to face (when you weren't taking photographs, that is).

Why don't my zantedeschia look like this?

I went to all the trouble of asking the name of this gorgeous clematis, only to forget it before I had time to write it down. A sign of impending senility, no doubt.

Shelagh Tucker's garden had more of an English feel about it, although at first glance, with its clapboard house and Adirondack chairs in the front garden, it looks typically American.

I think it was the use of the formal terrace, the thyme planted in between the paving stones, the sense of enclosure created by the use of the gate and the "rooms".

I liked the simplicity of the pond, and the grasses set in the gravel courtyard.

A secluded fountain in another, shady courtyard filled with hostas and ferns.

I loved the quirky cast-iron mat with its pattern of frogs ...

... and the way that the garden was designed to offer a vista from every angle. It came as no surprise to learn that Shelagh was not only from England, but also a painter.

It was so kind of Suzette and Jim, and Shelagh, to let us invade their gardens and take pictures. Shelagh also provided cold drinks and pastries to revive us - a gesture repeated by other gardeners who were hosting us on the tour. Standing beneath the blue sky, feeling the warmth of the sun on my bare arms, and with an iced tea in one hand and a palmier in the other, I felt very glad that I'd decided to come to Seattle.

Another view of Shelagh Tucker's front garden, frothing with Stipa tenuissima, Allium sphaerocephalon and Lychnis coronaria

Another view of the back garden ...

... and roses against the grey paint of the house. I loved this combination of colours.

Reluctantly, we gently untwined ourselves from the two gardens and set off for lunch at the Dunn Gardens, designed by Olmsted Brothers, the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, who created Central Park and designated by some as the Father of American Landscape Architecture (the other claimant to that crown is Andrew Jackson Downing, who designed the grounds of the White House and the Smithsonian Institution).

The sunny lawn was a great place for a picnic, which was followed by a tour of the grounds. I was astonished to see Cornus florida and rhododendrons still in flower at what was nearly the end of July.

As an ignorant Brit, I'd never heard of Olmsted, pere or fils. Reading up on Frederick Law Olmsted's theories of landscape design, I was interested to see that he believed in cherishing "the genius of a place" (retaining its natural essential character, if you like) and in "democratising nature" - providing open, beautiful spaces for the working man and woman to enjoy.

It's a philosophy that is in sympathy with the Arts and Crafts movement. Along with William Morris, roughly a contemporary, Olmsted shared the view that utility should never be subordinate to ornament - as Morris put it: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

However, Olmsted also believed that the hand of the artist should not be too apparent in landscape design and I think this is where I would stop nodding in agreement with him. I like structure, and formality, and a sense that there is a logical purpose behind any design. I found The Dunn Gardens, erm, parklike. It was a very pleasant park, with mature trees, interesting plants and meandering paths, but it didn't really blow me away.

The next stop on the tour was the Miller Horticultural Library at the Center for Urban Horticulture. This is a fantastic resource for gardeners, with not only books, but an advice line, garden tours and plant sales. The Center is also home to the Soest Garden, which is used to examine how plants grow under different conditions. This is how Barbara looked in sunny Seattle conditions.

I was, quite frankly, exhausted by this stage, so I wandered back to the hotel to put my feet up for five minutes before the evening event at the Ravenna Gardens nursery in the shopping mall next door to the hotel.

Ravenna Gardens is as gorgeous inside as it is outside. I defy any gardener to go in there and not come out with a purchase. I'd almost decided I was too tired to go, but perked up after a glass of wine and a goodie bag.

Cocktails! Is there any other way to start a meal? Here are Robin and Layanee at dinner on the first evening.

Seattle is cool...

2011-07-29T22:18:00.003+01:00

I arrived in Seattle on a sunny afternoon, looking down from the plane at a landscape of blue sea and green trees, punctuated by mountains. After nine and a half hours in a 747, I felt the need for a walk, so after checking into the hotel, I wandered along to the shopping mall a couple of blocks away.

The first thing I saw was an Anthropologie store, and the first thing I heard was a live band playing. Everywhere I looked, people wandered in the evening sunshine with smiles on their faces. Seattle was cool, I decided.

The following day, Thursday, bloggers began to drift into town, looking forward to the Seattle fling. I know of no pleasure greater than renewing old friendships, unless it is making new ones. It was such a thrill to see Gail again, and to meet Carol and Robin for the first time.

Here are some more of the group enjoying an al fresco bowl of minestrone (and a cocktail or two) that evening. We were amused to see that the restaurant provided red fleece blankets for its customers if you wanted to sit outside. Yes, this was Seattle - and it was cool!

From left, Leslie, Kathy, Dee, Mary Ann, Carol and Gail.

Seattle, here I come

2011-07-19T17:52:00.004+01:00

I'm off to Seattle, to meet all sorts of fascinating, lovely people. Luigi is in charge of the blog while I'm away.

(... and just in case you're wondering, my son is in charge of Luigi.)

Time to reveal the "reveal"

2011-07-17T19:02:00.004+01:00

Actually, this is probably going to turn out to be a big anticlimax. I like to work really fast in the garden when I'm doing a new project, but the weather here has been so bad I've only been able to finish reshaping in the lawn in slow and laborious steps, rushing out in between downpours.

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But here it is, a nice, neat zig-zag instead of a rather indeterminate curve.

I'm very happy with it. What's interesting is that now I have a shape I'm happy with, I feel I want to take things away, rather than clutter it up. I guess that tells me I'm a great one for hiding problems rather than solving them.

You may remember that I started this by creating a little peninsula around one of my cordylines, below, which for various tedious reasons was growing in the middle of the lawn.

I think I now need a bench in the far right-hand side. But let's not go there right now, because I don't have time for any more makeovers. Shame, because this is a good time to buy garden furniture at reduced prices in the sales...

Here's a day lily, 'El Desperado'. My day lilies aren't really in the right place, so they flower in a rather sulky, well-OK-if-I-really-have-to sort of way. When they do, however, they look spectacular.

I love this combination of colours - created here with a coleus (OK, OK, solenostemon, but coleus is a darned sight easier to write) and Euphorbia characias wulfenii. The coleus is 'Trusty Rusty'. Here it is again with a yellow-leaved maple.

I'm much happier with this bed too (For mini-makeover earlier in the year, see here). I used to have green and yellow striped cannas here, with the yellow crocosmia and agapanthus and Verbena bonariensis. The red-leaved cannas (these are 'Durban') are so much more dramatic.

I was inspired to use this combination after seeing a picture of a garden with yuccas and red-leaved cannas. Sadly, I can't remember whose it was, but thank you very much!

Next to them, but out of shot, is a buddleia. I thought I'd bought 'Nanho Blue' but it turned out more like 'Black Knight' - a really rich purple. It looks wonderful with the dahlias, which are 'David Howard'.

Could I just say, I'm sick of the weather this July. It has been a complete wash-out - the sort of English summer we get teased about. Endless rain, endless wind, temperature down around 16C (which oddly enough is 61F). So I'm jolly glad I'm off on holiday this week.

Yes, I'm off to Seattle on Wednesday! Where the weather is, ahm, rainy and windy, and the temperature is down around the low sixties. I know I'll get a really warm American welcome, though, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Welcome home, Luigi! Our new kitten arrives

2011-07-16T15:13:00.004+01:00

We picked up our new kitten today. He is a blue Abyssinian and his official pedigree name is Kazizkatz George Burns, but we're going to call him Luigi.

Regular readers will recall we were supposed to get two kittens. Well, we are - but the other kitten, Mario, has had an accident and broken his leg. So he's going to stay with the breeder for another four to six weeks while it heals.

Luigi miaowed all the way home in the car. I felt like miaowing all the way home too - it was pouring with rain this morning and the traffic was horrendous. The journey to the breeder took an hour, but coming back took an hour and a half.

We're going to keep Luigi in the study for a couple of days while he gets used to us, then as he gets more confident, he'll have the run of the house. I don't think it will take long, though. He seems a very affectionate, playful little chap.

There's no place like home

Another mini-makeover

2011-07-11T03:55:00.006+01:00

I like straight lines. I'm not sure why - perhaps it's because I've spent quite a bit of my career doing newspaper page layout, which consists mainly of lines and rectangles.
In my garden, I like the idea of the ground being a kind of grid, like a blank page, on which one places rectangular shapes. The planting areas are like the pictures on the page, while the focal points are the headlines. In between, you have "text", in the form of lawn or paving.
If it was all text, it would look very boring. If it was all headlines, or pictures, it might look rather muddled - you wouldn't know what to look at first. As with newspaper layout, it's a question of balance.
No circles, you ask? Well, I think of the plants as circles. Indeed, some of the plants in my garden are circular - or rather globular, such as the box balls. And others - cordylines, for example, or clumps of grasses - inhabit a strongly circular shape. Pots are circular (well, they mostly are in my garden, anyway). When you think about it in that way, the garden is pretty well full of circles.
Until now, I have had two curving lines in my garden, where the lawn widens out into the middle section. They were there for all the wrong reasons - I couldn't think of a way to square the corners without chopping off lots of lawn, so a curve was the easy option.
However, about three weeks ago, on advice from my garden designer friend Pamela, I cut a new rectangle into the lawn to break up the long line on the righthand side of the garden. (You can read about that here.)
The minute I'd done it, I was thrilled with it. I loved the right-angles - every time I looked at them I felt myself smiling. I had to get rid of those curves!
My usual technique for making changes to the layout of the garden is not to draw it on paper (far too much like hard work. Far too much like real work). I use bamboo canes laid out on the ground so I can see what the changes will look like in situ.
This weekend, I pottered about arranging my canes, nudging one an inch to the left here and an inch to the right there. When I'd got it all straight, I stood back. Wow, that was quite a lot of lawn to come away. I decided to ring Pamela.
Luckily, she'd been working flat out on a lecture and was ready for a break and a cup of coffee, so she came over and had a look. She approved the idea of the square edges, but agreed that my design involved cutting away quite a lot of lawn.
Instead of cutting the right-angle inside the curve, she suggested creating it by building up the outside of the curve, using the bits of turf I'd cut from elsewhere. Genius!
So here we go - the non-professional's guide to cutting a new lawn edge.

I mark out where I want the new line to go with bamboo canes. Once I've decided on the layout, I use an old plank of wood, which you can just see at the top of the picture.

The plank is heavy, so it doesn't move around. I then pour sand along the plank, to mark a straight line on the grass. I got this tip from Alan Titchmarsh, who uses dry sand in a bottle to draw the line. I never seem to have nice dry sand, just damp sand, so I use a water glass.

Once you've drawn the line, you can cut. I use an old half-moon edger which is really sharp. You can just see it at the bottom of the picture.

Then I deturf using a spade. This spade actually has a picture of Alan Titchmarsh on it! It's from Bulldog, and I'm very fond of it - not because of the picture of Alan Titchmarsh (what kind of person do you think I am?) but because it's a nice light border spade that suits my height, and it has "shoulders" on it that save my Birkenstocks from getting chewed up.

This is the non-professional way of getting a right angle. Get an old crate (or a box of some kind) and create the angle around it using two (straight) pieces of wood.

At this point, I had to go to Evensong to hear my daughter singing with her school choir and by the time I got back and cooked supper, dusk was falling. It's very difficult to get on with energetic gardening when your stomach is full of salmon and new potatoes and your head is full of John Rutter.

So I'm afraid you'll have to wait to see how it looks once it's finished - the "reveal", as they call it in makeover shows.

End of the month view

2011-07-02T08:47:00.007+01:00

I always love looking at everyone's end of the month views, but rarely get organised enough to do my own. However, I had one of those very rare moments in the garden the other day when I thought things were looking OK. I knew it would only last two minutes, so I wanted to capture it while I could.

The main reason for this is the lilies, which are currently in bloom. I feel very proud of them because I spent ages hovering over them earlier in the spring, squishing every lily beetle I could find. I don't know which variety they are - I've forgotten. If anyone knows, please tell me. I'm very fond of them because I bought them at Sissinghurst while I was there with Gail of Clay and Limestone and Frances, of Fairegarden.

More unidentified lilies. I've had a look through lots of lily catalogues and can't find them. They are Asiatic, I know that. I bought some 'Patricia's Pride' at the Malvern show, which looked similar, but I don't think they are the same at all.

My "waggie" (Trachycarpus wagnerianus). I had a bay tree in this pot for ages, which never looked very happy. Each year it looked more and more sickly, so this year I bit the bullet and ripped it out. The trachycarpus looks so much better. Do you ever do that in your garden - finally get rid of something and wonder why you didn't do it years ago?

One of the great features of the waggie is that it throws wonderful shadows on the wall behind when the sun hits it in the afternoon.

I wish I could be a minimalist, stylish gardener and just leave the waggie to shine in a solo spot. But I can't resist having lots of things in pots clustered around it. I think of them as a sort of little backing group. Waggie and the Echeverias. It's not exactly a snappy name for a band, is it?

The cannas were really held back by the cold temperatures in June, but they're now beginning to get under way, thank goodness. I didn't get them out until the middle of May, which I now regret because they could have made an earlier start. But who knew the spring was going to be so nice? If I had got them out earlier, they would probably have got frosted...

The box is really suffering, however. I think the problem is drought, so we'll just have to see how they go.

End of the month view is hosted by Patient Gardener, so why not check out her blog and see how everyone else is getting on.

The Crocus survival guide

2011-06-28T18:52:00.004+01:00

Crocus, the online plant nursery, is having another open day this Saturday, 2 July. Unfortunately, I won't be able to go as it is a, prize day at my daughter's school, and b, the Streatham Choral Society summer concert, in which I am singing*.
In a moment of madness, I considered sneaking down to Windlesham first thing in the morning, but luckily sanity prevailed. Bad enough to have to change clothes twice in one day (smart casual for prizegiving, long black for concert) without having to climb out of grotty gardening gear as well.
I can't really complain - I've been to two Crocus open days this year. If you haven't yet been, here's what I hope will prove an informal but useful guide.

1. Wear comfortable clothes and shoes. The site is much larger than it looks, and in any case, you're going to be walking up and down rows of plants, not just going once round the whole site. If it's sunny, wear a hat. All that stooping over things and peering at plant labels will give you sunburn on your neck. I know this from personal experience.

2 Learn how to be a trolley-stalker. Everyone else will seem to have a trolley except you. The trick is to nobble someone as they come out of the paying area and ask them if you can have their trolley when they've unloaded. You then have to walk with them back to their car, and it's a nice generous gesture to help them unload (if they want you to). On the way to their car, and upon your triumphant return to the payment point, you will be accosted by other "trolley stalkers".

3. Remember that Crocus is not a retail operation. This is not Sainsbury's or Tesco - they can't just open up another 10 tills if it gets busy. If you have to queue for a bit, it will all be worth it when you get to the till and find the bill is at least £20 less than you thought it would be. And while you're waiting, you can admire your plants. And have a nose at other people's choices.

4. If you think you're going to buy loads and loads of things, ask for two sets of stickers. You'll be given these stickers, which have a number on them, at the start of your visit. The system is that you put a sticker on the plant you want, and it is then collected up by the many trailers touring the nursery and returned to your crate at the payment point. Your crate(s) will have the same number(s). It's very frustrating to be in the farthest reaches of the nursery looking at grasses, say, and find you've got to walk all the way back to the entrance for more stickers.

5. There are limited catering facilities (a van selling burgers etc, and drinks), and limited seating. There's a cafe at Hillier's next door, but on a sunny day, when it's likely to be busy, it's best to take a snack and a drink with you.

Happy plant shopping!

*Mozart, Mass in C K317
Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb
George Dyson, Hierusalem

Why you might like to think about talking to plants

2011-06-22T17:04:00.013+01:00

The idea that plants might have feelings is usually greeted with loud guffaws in Western circles. We've smiled tolerantly at the idea of Prince Charles talking to his plants, while the national newspaper cartoonists must have thanked their lucky stars the day the story broke.
The subject always reminds me irresistibly of the scene in the Richard Curtis comedy, Notting Hill, when the Hugh Grant character, William Thacker, is being set up by his friends with a rather earnest girl called Keziah, who tells him she is a fruitarian.

William: And, ahm, what exactly is a fruitarian?
Keziah: We believe that fruits and vegetables have feelings, so we think cooking is cruel. We only eat things that have actually fallen off a tree or bush - that are, in fact, dead already.
William: Right. Right. Interesting stuff. So, these carrots ...
Keziah: Have been murdered.
William: Murdered? Poor carrots. How beastly!

However, a new book by Dr Matthew Hall, of the Centre for Middle Eastern Plants at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, seeks to challenge this attitude. It's called Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany and it explores the relationships between humans and the plant world.
The proposition, to put it as simply as I can, is that we tend to see the world in zoocentric or anthropocentric terms, which means we do not consider plant life to require the same sort of moral consideration as humans or animals.
Because of this, we are often more destructive and callous in our attitudes to plant life than we might be towards what we consider "higher" forms of life, such as mammals (and goodness knows we are pretty careless about those).
This hierarchical view of the natural world is something that has developed over millennia, both from the ancient Greeks and the teachings of Aristotle, and from the Old Testament, which teaches that man has "dominion" over the world.

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Genesis, 1:26

Indeed, I have to admit that I am so deeply steeped in this tradition that I personally find it very difficult to get my head around the idea that there may one day be a "plant liberation" movement in the way that we have an "animal liberation" movement.
Dr Hall says: "In the ‘West’ (wherever that is) we don’t include plants within our moral sphere, a situation which most people think is ‘normal’. I basically wrote the book to try and find out why that was our default position, and to see if there were other ways of looking at plants, both from other cultures and from within plant science writings about the 'intelligence' of plants.
"The first three chapters look at this ‘exclusion’ of plants from the moral sphere and my argument is that this exclusion has been a deliberate process aimed at distancing humans from any sense of kinship with plants, something which we did once have.
"This is done by humans deciding that the faculties which humans or animals possess are somehow radically different and better than those plants possess. This has led to the idea that plants are a lesser form of life with lesser faculties, lacking in sensation, movement and intelligence.
"It’s really difficult to say why we’ve done this, but it always seems to be connected with a need to claim the natural world purely as a passive human ‘resource’ (as happens in Plato, Aristotle, the Bible) rather than as an equally valid, and related, place of life and being.
"For me, this process only really became clear when I looked at other cultures where plants are related to as proper persons (as well as being resources) because they are related to humans as creatures that come from the Earth, and because (as anyone who looks closely at plants sees) they obviously actively live their lives. Most interestingly, this way of looking at plants is backed up by lots of recent scientific evidence on plant behaviour."
So which cultures DO regard plants as worthy of the same care and consideration? What about Buddhists?
Dr Hall says: "Interestingly, Buddhism is actually split on whether plants are sentient or not. In Tibetan Buddhism for example, plants are not one of the six realms of sentient life. Tibetan Buddhists can’t be reborn as plants and therefore eating plants doesn’t involve ‘proper’ killing.
"It’s thought that this is a reversal from an earlier position where plants were thought to be sentient, but similar processes of exclusion rendered the situation similar to the one we have in the West.
"However, in East Asian Buddhism (traditions such as Zen), there has been a tradition of regarding plants as sentient, and some thinkers have even regarded them as enlightened(!), because they show the hallmarks of enlightenment e.g. not accruing any karma, wisdom, patience…
"Plants have been regarded as ‘sentient’ in early Hindu texts and very strongly in the Jain tradition. In Indigenous cultures and in Paganism, people tend not to use the word ‘sentient’ but speak of kinship with plants which are actually related to as proper family (for example, my uncle’s uncle is a kurrajong tree – and with all the respect that deserves) and as proper persons. Amazing really!"
Amazing, indeed - it's the sort of subject that leads you on and on into further investigation and inquiry. I'd always thought, for example, that Jainism was a branch of Hinduism until I looked it up. I now realise that despite superficial similarities, they are actually quite different.
I won't pretend to you that this is anything other than an academic book, but I think the ideas in it are fascinating. I know that, for some years, the Catholic church has been moving towards the idea of "stewardship" rather than "dominion" over the natural world, and for many Christians in general, the ethical issues involved in conservation are beginning to supplant the old belief that the planet was ours to do with as we liked.
However, for us to think differently about the world often requires a really radical shift. Dr Hall ruefully admits that a lot of his scientific colleagues "run a mile at even the mention of the word religion".
He himself takes up no particular religious position, merely asking where these beliefs come from and the effects they have had.
So, are you still guffawing? Or are you feeling rather thoughtful? If it's the latter, and you want to find out more, go here

Mini garden makeover!

2011-06-18T18:43:00.006+01:00

When we first moved into our house, we had a climbing frame at the end of the garden, and either side of the little slide that came down from it were two cordylines. At that time, they were quite small - about 30ins tall. One went ages ago, when we built what is now the pond. The remaining one has grown into quite an attractive, multi-branched tree.

Every year, in late spring, it has spectacular flower sprays, which the bees love. It has always looked a bit odd, sticking up in the middle of the lawn, but I'm fond of it. However, since I've gravelled the area around the pond, this has created a long straight line along the right-hand side of the garden, which I don't like. Apart from anything, it makes the cordyline look even odder.

Solving the problem of how to make the tree look as if it belongs with everything else in the garden, and how to break that long stern line, has niggled away at me for years.

On Monday, my gardening group met at my house, and my friend Pamela, who is a garden designer came along. I told her I was willing to pay her whatever her fee was to sort the problem out. Pamela is an extremely generous person, and she immediately said not to worry about the fee and what was the problem? I told her, and she said: "Oh, that's an easy one."

She got me to move a big pot with a huge hosta in it to the left of the tree. She said this would help tie the tree to the garden. Then, she said, I should deturf a rectangle around the tree, and gravel it, as I had done with the area around the pond. She said I should plant low-growing plants there, such as the Mexican daisy, Erigeron karvinskianus, which grows all over the garden.

I thought this was a brilliant idea. I could hardly wait for today - Saturday - to get stuck into that turf. Every morning before I went to work, I gazed longingly out at it...

I always mark everything out with canes before I start on a new area - it gives you a pretty good idea of how things will look, and whether you've got the lines vaguely straight.

Goodness, I hate deturfing! It's a backbreaking, knee-aching job.

Oops, there's a light here, which illuminates the cordyline at night. I went round it very carefully, so as not to sever the cable or electrocute myself.

All I did when I put the gravel down round the pond was to lay a thick layer of sharp sand before putting down the stones. The sand is soft, so it's easy to level, and to bed the bigger stones in. You have to be sure where you want to put your plants as well - there's nothing more irritating than trying to dig a hole in the middle of a lot of small stones.

In the end, I used my hosta pot, plus a phormium that I had lying around (as you do). This is 'Sundowner' which will look fabulous with the afternoon sun shining through its leaves.

I didn't want to block the view behind, but just half-hide it, so that you want to go round and see what's there. With the phormium, I planted a couple of Euphorbia 'Ascot Rainbow'. I turned my nose up at this when I first saw it (another gimmicky euphorbia, I thought). The foliage is "grey-green, edged in yellow, flushed with shades of red, pink and orange. From early spring it bears clusters of lime-green flowers". Sounds ghastly, doesn't it? But it looks great in my garden.

As every woman knows, you should always check the back view, too...

This is the view from behind the new bit. I love the way the view of the garden is now framed.

Thank you, Pamela!

The rose gardens at Mottisfont Abbey

2011-06-13T22:37:00.011+01:00

I achieved a long-cherished ambition today. I finally managed to visit the rose gardens at Mottisfont Abbey, in Hampshire - arguably one of the finest in Britain. I went with Zoe, who lives locally and knows the gardens really well. She also loves roses, so it was a bit like having a private guided tour from an expert.

As the name suggests, Mottisfont was originally a monastery, founded at the beginning of the 13th century. Like so many religious communities, it was confiscated during the Dissolution of the Monasteries ordered by Henry VIII, and given to one of his favourites. The "font" refers to the fountain, or spring, which gushes from deep in the ground.

The house has been extended and rebuilt over the centuries, and is set in peaceful parkland.

A short stroll from the house leads up past the stable block to the rose gardens, where the historic collection of old shrub roses amassed by Graham Stuart Thomas is held. As advisor to the National Trust for 30 years, Stuart Thomas was responsible for restoring some of the most beautiful gardens in Britain. You can read more about his work at Mottisfont here.

The rose gardens are in what used to be the old walled kitchen garden. The first is divided into four squares, with a lawn in the middle of each square. The old walls help contain the fragrance of the roses.

When I was little, rose gardens meant rows of hybrid teas in bare soil, pruned within an inch of their lives, so that for most of the year they looked like a bizarre collection of sticks. I think this is what has given hybrid teas such a bad name. Many of them are gorgeous roses, which smell fantastic. I think it's true, though, that they are rather ungainly plants compared to the old shrub roses, that can arch and swoop through a border.

At Mottisfont, although the predominant plants are roses, the borders are also planted up with campanula, hardy geraniums, phlomis, achillea and even the extraordinary giant scabious, Cephalaris gigantea.

Apple trees support not only climbing roses but also clematis, while sprouting the odd bunch of mistletoe just for good measure.

The planting is cleverly balanced so that the roses, although they have a starring role, do not completely overshadow the herbaceous perennials. You're still aware of contrasts in colour and texture and shape. The result is very harmonious, which makes the garden a lovely place just to be.

This is the classic view of Mottisfont, the rose walk - planted with the climber Adelaide d'Orleans. It's a very pale pink, with darker buds.

There are two rose gardens at Mottisfont - the historic old roses garden and the new rose garden, below.

The climbing rose on the pergola is 'Debutante', a Wichurana rambler (below)

I love the eremurus erupting from this border like a flowery firework.

Even the propagation area is as pretty as a picture

Coming soon: The Kittens

2011-06-11T14:33:00.003+01:00

This is just a quick look at the two little people who will be joining our household in a month's time. We went to visit them this morning for the first time.

This is Mario, who is a chocolate Abyssinian.

And this is Luigi, who is a blue Abyssinian.

Here's Luigi with his mum, Angel, who is also a blue Abyssinian.

What taking home a piece of Chelsea looks like

2011-06-05T18:15:00.006+01:00

I went to the Crocus Chelsea sell-off sale on Saturday. I'd been to one of their open day/sales before and really enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to going back. This sale had been much more widely publicised, and anyone within 100 miles who had seen something they coveted at the Chelsea Flower Show was determined to pitch up and snag a bargain.
Crocus were the contractors on two Chelsea gardens, Luciano Giubbilei's Laurent-Perrier Garden, which won a gold medal, and Cleve West's design for the Daily Telegraph, above, which won Best in Show. They also supplied some of the plants for Robert Myers' Cancer Research Garden, so they knew exactly which plants each designer had used.
All around the nursery, plants bore labels stating in which garden they had had a starring role. The only major omission was the gorgeous dark red Dianthus cruentus used by Cleve West, below, which had been a sensation at Chelsea and had sold out days and days ago.

Saturday was a hot summer day, and Crocus was busy. Really busy. It was like the opening day of Harrods sale. As I arrived, at 10.15am (thanks to roadworks, I was held up for 45 minutes coming off the M3), there were already queues to pay and tractorloads full of plants waiting to be unloaded. One innovation was the presence of plant experts in blue jackets, who were available to answer queries.

I was charmed by the fact that the tractorloads looked like mini Chelsea gardens all on their own. No one had designed them to look like that, but the combination of colours and textures looked sophisticated all by themselves.

Does this mean we don't need garden designers? No, not at all. If Cleve and Luciano and Robert hadn't chosen those particular varieties, the public wouldn't be buying them. The designers had set the style and the public was following.

When I was at the Chelsea press day, Anne Wareham was interviewing people about whether Chelsea is still relevant. Caught on the hop, I wittered something about the RHS. But I think that ideas is what Chelsea is for. If all the show does is to demonstrate how to combine plants in a pleasing way - some of them cultivars that are a bit more unfamiliar, such as the white centranthus, or the now famous Dianthus cruentus, then that's good enough for me.

Here's another little mini "Chelsea" garden, below. What's interesting about these plants is that they belong to different buyers. At Crocus sales, you go round with a sheet of stickers and label the plants you want to buy, which are then picked up and taken to the central payment point.

So while at first I thought this was someone's selection for a border, looking more closely I found it included the choice of several buyers. Yet it all looked good together. Interesting.

Luckily - and no offence to Cleve - I didn't actually want Chelsea plants, but was hoping to grab some Canna striatus at a reasonable price instead of the normal exorbitant one. I very rarely see it on sale for less than a tenner a pot (come to that, I very rarely see it on sale full stop), but the special open day price at Crocus was £5. I bought four.

I also bought two Musa sikkimensis 'Red Tiger' bananas (also a fiver), a couple of bronze phormiums to replace the slightly ratty ones in my garden, two Trachelospermum jasminoides to replace the jasmine that got clobbered in the winter, a Dryopteris wallichiana (I have a bit of a fern habit at the moment).

And I bought two Euphorbia cyparissias 'Fens Ruby', to which I am also somewhat addicted. The label said this plant had been used by Cleve West in his design. Well, I couldn't go all that way to deepest Surrey and not bring home a little tiny bit of Chelsea, could I?

I am half-sick of shadows, said the Lady of Shalott

2011-06-05T10:46:00.009+01:00

When people ask me what life as a modern journalist is like, equipped as we are with multimedia information technology, I usually reply that it is rather similar to that of the Lady of Shalott.

For those of you unfamiliar with Tennyson's poem, the Lady of Shalott is a mysterious woman - witch, queen, princess? Tennyson doesn't really say - who has been cursed for some equally mysterious reason. She must weave a magic web and see the world only through a mirror which reflects the activities in the world outside. If she looks directly at the world, or ventures outside, the curse will strike and she will die.

Journalism - certainly my job - is rather similar. I see what's going on in the world through the mirror of my computer screen while weaving the web that will eventually become a newspaper. It's very rare that I have time actually to go out and meet people, or to be present at a particular event. (Perhaps that's why I enjoy the Malvern, Chelsea and Hampton Court shows so much - for me, they usually involve the effort of going on a proper outing.)

I won't be cursed, of course, if I look away from the screen or go out - but I might miss my deadlines. There isn't room in my week for a lot of going here and there and doing this and that. I've already turned down three invitations to press launches next week.

I've always thought The Lady of Shalott is a terribly sad poem. In one sense, the thought of being locked in a tower, able to get on with your work without interruption, yet with one eye on the world outside, can seem rather cosy. Especially when it's raining (and especially when it's snowing).

But if you live that kind of life, it does often seem that the world is, literally, passing you by. You have no power to affect anything unless you go outside and join in. In which case, what do you do about that magic web (work, housework, children, more work) that is waiting to be woven?

What was Tennyson trying to say? That you can never reconcile the need for time to create something with the need to go out and find inspiration for the creative urge? It seems that, even at the height of Victorian romanticism, the work-life balance was an issue.

There's more to it than that, though. Real encounters with real people become the exception rather than the norm. That's good in a way, because I treasure these meetings. Sometimes, the cybersphere can actually help achieve this. There are many people I wouldn't have met if I didn't blog, for example.

However, there is a point at which virtual communication becomes a kind of sugar-rush substitute for human contact. Twitter, for example, I find a bit like listening to the radio when the station isn't tuned in properly. Conversations come and go, fade and return without me having much of a clue as to what is going on. Facebook can be the same - by the time you've caught up with an issue or a joke, there are 27 comments and yours seems a bit redundant.

It's frighteningly easy to spend two hours at your magic computer mirror feeling you have really made connections with people, only to get up and go and make a cup of tea in an empty house and feel their virtual company evaporate in an instant. Is this healthy? I'm not sure.

I'm going to stick to blogging. At least it has the benefit of allowing me freedom of expression, which is a kind of liberation from the curse of other people's parameters - deadlines, demands, and the tyranny of 140 characters. And Facebook genuinely keeps me in touch with dozens of old friends, and I value that contact. But I think I might give up on Twitter.

The moveable feast

2011-06-01T08:27:00.004+01:00

I’ve never been a great vegetable grower, more for lack of time and space than anything else. However, I do like home-grown tomatoes and this year I found the perfect way to plant them.

I bought an EarthBox, which sounds a bit like something a cat might use to relieve itself, but which in fact is a sort of windowbox on wheels.

You could be forgiven for thinking it was a solid gold windowbox on wheels, because I thought it was quite expensive considering that it is basically a plastic box.

I have to admit, the price really put me off, and I dithered for ages about whether to buy the plant support system that went with it too. The box was £35 and the staking system cost £25. I bought mine at Wisley, but you can buy them on Amazon.

Those of you who have allotments are probably rolling about on the floor laughing at my extravagance by now, but a, I bought the EarthBox with some gift vouchers that my family gave me for Christmas and b, I am now growing tomatoes and lettuce for the first time for years.

What’s wrong with a growbag, I hear you ask. Well, growbags are great (I used one to fill my EarthBox), but they are also static. And heavy. So you can’t whisk them out of the way if you suddenly decide you want that space for something else.

The EarthBox on the other hand, rolls gently across the patio out of the way if you have, say, people round for drinks and need more room for seats. You can also turn it round to follow the sun. And of course it is reusable.

I have lost the odd lettuce leaf to slugs and snails, but nothing major, which is pretty good considering I've done nothing to deter them.

The EarthBox is also self-watering. I think I have topped up the tank once since I assembled it, which given that this has been the hottest, driest spring for centuries, is pretty good.

Basically, there is a big reservoir in the bottom, which you fill via a plastic tube. You give the whole thing a good watering before you plant and from then on, the water is drawn up through the compost.

The cleverest bit, as far as I'm concerned, is what the manufacturers call a mulch cover. This is like a plastic shower cap that fits over the top of the box, which stops the water evaporating. The manufacturers are proud of the fact that it keeps weeds down, thus eliminating the need for herbicide. I must say, I laughed when I read this - the idea that you might need to resort to weedkiller in a space this small was hilarious. No, make that tragic.

I'm glad I bought the staking system, as it is very sturdy. It comes with a net for climbing plants, but I've tied in a couple of canes to support my tomatoes.

The manufacturers claim that the assembly instructions are foolproof, which is true, up to a point. However, if you've bought the staking system, you cannot assemble it after you have filled and planted the EarthBox. Again, if you have the staking system, the wheels from the basic EarthBox are used in a different way. I think the EarthBox instructions should make this clear.

The only other quibble I have is with the name. Rather than EarthBox, with its connotations of kitty litter, I think I would rechristen it The Moveable Feast.

First impressions of Chelsea

2011-05-22T21:40:00.011+01:00

To the Chelsea Flower Show today for a sneak preview. The show doesn't open until Tuesday, and official press day and judging is tomorrow, so you'll have to forgive the odd untidy edge, or gardener person, or television camera skulking in the background.
I often spend so much time gossiping on press day that it's quite useful to go to the show on Sunday. That way, when people ask you what you think of a particular garden, you have actually seen it. These days, however, you bump into lots of people on the Sunday as well, so I've already done more than my fair share of Chelsea chat.
I thought on balance the general standard of the show gardens was good. The photographer Derek St Romaine said he thought it wasn't a vintage year, but it's not a bad year either. Some of the gardens I thought I'd hate, but I found I rather liked them. And despite all the doom-mongering about the bad winter, the dry spring, the heat and - today - the wind, the plants were in the main very good quality.

Here are some first impressions of the show gardens.

The M&G garden by Bunny Guinness. She describes it as a modern kitchen garden, but to me it seemed more of a romantic take on a potager. Vegetables planted in raised beds, with a colour scheme of purple and crimson.

I think this garden will be popular with the public, because at first glance it looks very pretty, but I found it too cluttered. There were so many elements - raised beds, ornate cloches, trellis obelisks - it was difficult to see what was going on.

Nigel Dunnett's design for the Royal Bank of Canada's New Wild Garden. The wonderful oak and stone benches are by Henry Brudenell-Bruce and his Dartmoor Bench Company.

Professor Dunnett is Britain's green-roof pioneer, so as you'd expect, this garden ticks all the environmental boxes. According to Mark Gregory, whose Landform Consultants were the contractors on this garden, the habitat walls were a labour of love, involving hours and hours of meticulous work. I loved the colour scheme - the orange of the geums and the blue of the container shed - and the sempervivums planted in the tops of the walls.

Diarmuid Gavin's Irish Sky Garden was one I had mentally filed under B for Bonkers, but I found myself first intrigued by it and then rather liking it. Diarmuid was kind enough to let us on to the garden, and into the flying pod, although we were unable to get airborne because of the high winds. The pod is suspended from a huge crane, which winches it in to the air. Because of the crane, the garden is big and has a great sense of spaciousness.

The pink pod - Wonka pink, as Diarmuid described it - contains two Lutyens benches fitted with seatbelts and carved with the names of his father and mother-in-law, who have both passed away. The pod is the most flowery bit of planting, with pale pink peonies picking up the "Wonka pink". Diarmuid said the idea was to try to make people feel relaxed and comfortable in case they were nervous when it came to lift-off.

The rest of the garden is almost entirely green, apart from this Zantedeschia aethiopica. It's a very cushiony garden, composed of topiarised yew and box, and hummocks of grasses. I loved it, especially the way the path threaded you through the planting and up to the pod.

There are a series of pools in the garden, some of which are inky black, like the pools you see in bogs, while others have pebbles in them. Diarmuid says that by tomorrow, there will be fountains playing from pool to pool.

I'm wondering whether being a city dweller influenced my view of the Irish Sky Garden. In London, you tend to be grateful for any cool, green colour that comes your way. My colleague Anna Pavord said she thought it looked like a topiary catalogue. Anna lives in the middle of the Dorset countryside, so the idea of being surrounded by green is probably less of a novelty. And I rather like topiary, although I know a lot of people don't.

Perhaps it's just that I have a bit of a weakness for foliage, because I also liked Ann-Marie Powell's garden for the British Heart Foundation. The design is supposed to represent heart strings and corpuscles, and the only two dominant colours in the garden are the green of the leaves and the red of the arbour and stepping stones.

I like things in the garden to be useful as well as decorative, so I'm a bit allergic to structures for the sake of it. But the "heart strings" act as a pergola, or corridor, around the garden before arching up into an arbour that shelters a seating area. It felt like a lot of thought had gone into the concept.

I knew I'd like this garden. Here's a master at work - Cleve West, for the Daily Telegraph. Gorgeous planting in quite a subdued palette, lifted by the silver centaurea and pale yellow achillea at one end of the scale, and the vibrant red of Dianthus cruentus and valerian (Centranthus ruber) at the other.

The columns, inspired by the Roman ruins at Ptolemais, in Libya, have a wonderful texture, while along the creamy yellow wall, a series of plain, chunky spouts pour water into a rill.

Just gorgeous. Pass the gold medal, please.

Here's another garden I didn't expect to like. It's the Monaco garden, designed by Sarah Eberle. I really admire her work, so was determined to keep an open mind, despite the fact that I found the sketch of her design a bit "meh", as my kids would say.

I was glad I did, because the more I looked at this garden, the more I liked it. I loved the colours - the exuberant orange geums and purple salvias, with the spikes of yuccas breaking up the straight lines of the hard landscaping.

You must walk down the side of this garden, because otherwise you'll miss this "wow factor" interior, which gives on to the stair to the roof terrace.

This is a very confident, hedonistic garden, and I could imagine sitting in it and feeling rather pleased with life.

Mirabel, a memoir and a wonderful surprise

2011-05-19T22:30:00.005+01:00

I got home from work this evening to the usual paraphernalia of home life - pile of mail (hmm), delivery of plants (oooh!), various school communications which demanded my immediate attention (aargh). I'm sure you know the sort of thing.

I admired my plants (Euphorbia characias 'Portuguese Velvet', since you ask) and turned to the mail. In the pile was a package which looked as if it contained books. Goodness, plants and books. How lovely! Could life get any better? Yes, it could.

In the package was a copy of The Rain Tree, the memoir by Mirabel Osler which has just been published by Bloomsbury. With it was a paperback edition of A Gentle Plea for Chaos, which Bloomsbury have simultaneously republished (it's been out of print for years).

Many of you will know the work of Mirabel Osler, a writer who could make a shopping list seem lyrical. If you don't know it, here's your chance to be totally beguiled by someone who speaks to - and for - the silent poet that lurks in every gardening soul.

In the way of a taster, I offer you this extract from A Gentle Plea for Chaos:

"There are many ways of starting a garden. Abstract ideas may originate in the mind, and are then meticulously transferred to paper, when every bed is plotted for colour, shape and size before the first plant goes in. Another impetus may come from a cherished longing to have one area of your own, where no one can constrain you and where no conformity compromises your imagination.

"Or, after the culmination of years spent hoarding articles and seed catalogues, the gardener knows already what needs to be done. Yet others may be haunted by childhood memories of magic places of make-believe, of games, scents and secrets. Gardens may start from a bare piece of earth surrounding a newly built house, or from the sheer necessity of hiding some hideous building, or maybe from a desire for self-protection from sea and tempests. Others need a little space for sitting in the sun, for hanging out the washing, where children can play or just where the cat naps.

"Whatever it is, once started a garden holds you in its thrall. However irksome it becomes at times, who can go outside and kick a lily?"

Hope you enjoyed it. I'm off to read my book.

Meet at Malvern Reunited (well, some of us, anyway)

2011-05-15T22:52:00.007+01:00

Wednesday

I set off for the Malvern Spring Gardening Show on a bright spring day, threading my way through the London traffic en route for the busy M40. Once you turn off at Oxford for the A44, the traffic evaporates and you can make steady progress through the Cotswold countryside.

It's a long journey, though - four hours, including a stop for lunch and supplies - and it was a relief to pitch up at our cottage in the middle of the Herefordshire countryside and find VP putting the kettle on.

I admired the view from my window (above), gulped down the tea, drew in a few deep breaths of fresh country air, and set off for Patient Gardener's house, where we were meeting our fellow bloggers: Artist's Garden, Elizabethm, Zoë, and Dobby, who is an honorary blogger.

PG had cooked us supper (salmon, new potatoes and salad, with various puddings), which was delicious, and although we missed the Malvern Class of 2010, it was nice to be able to hold a general conversation.

Thursday

Showtime! Press day at Malvern is also open to RHS and Three Counties members, so although it's not packed with people, there's a cheerful bustle. It's best to try to hit the Floral Marquee as early as you can as it fills up fast. I'd previewed Malvern, so I was able to go shopping or wander around in a dream with a clear conscience. I'd only got five paces into the marquee before I'd spent £20 and bought seven plants.

You can't buy at Chelsea (though you can place orders), and although the Hampton Court show is a good place to buy plants, it always seems a bit frantic. At Malvern, the growers seem much more relaxed; indeed, everyone seems much more relaxed. VP and I had lunch in the press tent (after a couple of glasses of Pimms, we were extremely relaxed), then set off to view the show gardens.

Two of these were outstanding, winning well-deserved gold medals. Above is the Graduate Gardeners' Garden For Life, which also won Best in Show. The A-frame building has solar panels and is designed to maximise the harvesting of rainwater. A greenhouse and bin store are built into the eaves, and the deck is made of eucalyptus, which is a sustainable hardwood.

Below is Hannah Genders' Bicycle Garden, in which everything was sourced from within cycling distance of the designer's home. What impressed me most about this garden was the fact that although most of the materials were recycled, the end result is very smart rather than fraying round the edges. It was a good, straightforward concept that really grabbed the public imagination, and it was brilliantly executed.

Here's Patient Gardener in the lecture theatre (below), trying to pretend she hasn't bought any plants. ("What, these old things? I've had them for ages.") Some more bloggers arrived to say hello - Trillium and Arabella Sock - much to the amazement of Becky Rochester from Timber Press. She was there looking after a couple of her writers, Neil Lucas and Noel Kingsbury, who were talking to James Alexander-Sinclair about their books.

Yet more plant buying, followed by quite a lot of plant-purchase-picking-up. Finally left the show at 5.45pm, with only just enough time to scamper home and change for dinner. We met up with the others at the Malvern Hills Hotel and had a great evening followed by the usual furtive-looking car park rendezvous where various plant swaps were made.

Friday
Back to the show, so VP could file her Guardian blog post from the press tent, then it was off to meet PG who had very kindly agreed to drive us to Bryan's Ground (see earlier post). We were all shattered when we got back, so PG decided to have an early night, while VP and I went off to join the Socks and Lazy Trollop and her husband for a drink.

Saturday

VP and I went to hand the keys back to Ella at the Old Country House B&B and have a wander round the garden. It really is the most idyllic spot: the call of a cuckoo had woken us each morning.

I'd had a look at a couple of hotels further into Malvern, thinking it might be more practical to be closer to the show (and everyone else). However, when you're in the middle of the gorgeous Herefordshire countryside, it's very difficult to imagine staying anywhere else.

Ella showed us a couple of the B&B rooms, one of which had a dear little bat asleep on an armchair. That clinched it. I am booking the Bat Room for next year.

It's very difficult to tear yourself away from Malvern. I made one final visit to the show, and bought two huge Moroccan lanterns for the garden, plus a couple of dishes. Luckily, by this time, the boot of my car was full, so I had no choice but to go home.
It was lovely to get back and see the kids, but I'm already looking forward to Malvern 2012.

Bryan's Ground: a triumph of art and craft

2011-05-15T00:26:00.014+01:00

I've spent the last few days at the Malvern Spring Gardening Show, and I'll post about that very soon. First, however, I want to talk about Bryan's Ground. It's a garden that I've wanted to visit for a long time; a garden with which you too may be familiar, if you have ever read the gardening magazine Hortus.

Like Hortus, Bryan's Ground is the creation of David Wheeler and Simon Dorrell, who moved here in 1993. The house itself was built in 1912, and is typical of the Arts and Crafts period. But it is Wheeler and Dorrell's art and craft that has transformed this building from what could have been just another large, almost suburban mock-Tudor home, and given it a new life at the heart of this extraordinary garden. Originally cream, with black beams, it is now a soft ochre, which seems both to have aged it by a couple of centuries and rooted it in the landscape.

So why did I like Bryan's Ground? Well, it has that sense of stillness that all great gardens have. It's difficult to describe, but it's like the garden equivalent of self-confidence and poise. It reminds me a bit of Great Dixter - with the same delightful shagginess around the edges - but this garden is much more art-directed than Dixter.

Christopher Lloyd made some dramatic changes at Great Dixter, but in the main he adhered to the original layout of the garden which of necessity also resulted in compromises (roses in the Exotic Garden, for example). If there are compromises at Bryan's Ground, I didn't spot them.

Wherever you look at Bryan's Ground, from every angle, there is a focal point, or a view across an interesting piece of planting or topiary. Vistas and verticals - for me, that's what Bryan's Ground is about.

Have you ever noticed that, when people describe gardens, they describe them in horizontal, or two-dimensional terms? Borders, lawns, paths, walls, trellises - we think of them all as linear features. Yet when we draw, we tend to start with the vertical lines - the walls of a house, the outline of a human figure, the trunk of a tree, the stem of a flower.

Maybe that's why we feel instinctively comfortable with yew pillars and hedges and topiary. They fill the field of vision in a very satisfyingly solid way.

There's also a very whimsical side to Bryan's Ground, however. All sorts of "found" objects have been pressed into service as architectural or decorative details, such as the pediment below, which is made from bits of scrap metal and wood. There's no attempt to paint them or pretend they are anything other than what they are, which stops them falling into the category of knick-knackery.

I loved the bondage lady, below, and the way the gargoyle seems to be gazing at her as if he's trying to summon up the courage to ask her out.

A "sculpture" made from an old hot water tank and a lawn rake

You pass this dresser on the way into the garden. It's full of pots and funny little objects and mini bonsai. It's the equivalent of the place in your house where you dump your keys, and the mail, and any odd bits and pieces for which you can't instantly find a home.

I wanted one of these semi-circular watering cans, which are perfect for hanging on the wall. Simon Dorrell thinks the Roman numerals might once have been part of a floral clock - they originally had little spikes with which to hold them in the ground.

Inside the greenhouse, where succulents and geraniums bask around a Moorish fountain.

I can feel the plantaholics among you becoming slightly restless, fidgeting in your seats and muttering: "Yes, Victoria, but what about the plants?" Well, like most good gardens, Bryan's Ground has its signature plants. There is Eleagnus pungens 'Quicksilver', which you can see erupting like a silver fountain in the picture below. This is a deciduous large shrub or small tree, which in May and June produces small creamy flowers which from a distance look a bit like the flowers of Christmas box and are also scented. There are several of these at Bryan's Ground and on the day I visited, they filled the garden with a subtle, spicy perfume.

Another signature plant is the Iris sibirica (I'm guessing 'Papillon') which fill the beds either side of the serpentine canal in front of the house.

If you look through the grid of iris beds, the canal appears to be a series of circular pools, half hidden by the flowers.

Seen from the front, the curving edge is very dramatic.

Other favourite plants appear to be Centaurea montana, or perennial cornflower, and spring flowering perennials such as thalictrum (below) and aquilegias.

In such a theatrical garden, it is only right that there is an actual theatre. I could just imagine a string quartet playing here, or perhaps a recital of baroque arias. Messrs Wheeler and Dorrell, I applaud you.

Goodbye to Pushkin, the nicest cat in the whole world

2011-05-10T19:10:00.006+01:00

It's with great sadness that I have to tell you we said goodbye to Pushkin at the weekend.
Lots of you have been asking after him, which is really sweet, but I couldn't face writing about him until now.
As you know, he had a problem with his back, which turned out to be a form of arthritis. We took him to an orthopaedic vet, but he started to improve, so we decided to wait and see if this continued.
A couple of weeks later, without any warning, he lost the use of his back legs. He was able to heave himself about using his front paws, but it was awful to watch him trying to scramble up onto the sofa or try to get into a comfortable position to eat.
Although he liked the idea of eating, he started to eat less and less. We would hold the bowl at a comfortable height for him so he didn't have to strain, but he would still turn his head away after a couple of mouthfuls. He very quickly lost more and more weight.
At first, he still managed to struggle to his litter tray, but then the effort became too much and he started to soil himself. This in turn made him distressed, as he couldn't clean himself properly, so eventually we took the very difficult decision to have him put down.
The vet was in complete agreement with this, and on Saturday we took him in to say goodbye. My daughter and I were in floods of tears and although my son was doing his "man of the family" thing at the vet's, bless him, once we got home he disappeared up to his room. He came down a couple of hours later with his eyes all red from crying. I don't blame him - I can feel tears pricking my eyes as I write about this even now.
As soon as the vet gave him the injection, Pushkin laid his head down as if he was exhausted. He probably was, poor baby. The vet said you could see what a release it was, and I think that's true.
But he has left a huge hole in our lives. He was a loyal and beautiful companion for 11 years, and he will always have a very special place in our hearts.

Good intentions and bad-tempered gardeners

2011-04-27T22:28:00.005+01:00

OK, that's enough frivolity and garden shopping and barbecues and so on. It's time to think, really think, about the garden. Any garden, come to that.
I've been reading Anne Wareham's new book, The Bad-Tempered Gardener, which is published on 5 May. It's quite eclectic - there are chapters on snowdrops and alchemilla mollis, and deadheading and visitors, as well as deeply personal accounts of why she created Veddw, her garden, in the way she did.
I would say the linking theme is passion - passion for Veddw, passion for her reflecting pool, for plants such as the Stipa tenuissima on her terrace, for ways of thinking, for ways of doing things, for ways of not doing things.

There's a sort of searing honesty about it that isn't always comfortable to read. There's a great sense of Anne's vision of herself as an outsider; how she is often bewildered or puzzled by gardens; what she calls the dishonesty of the gardening world, and her fears for the future - how will she cope with Veddw in years to come?
I have to declare a bias here: I like Anne, because she makes me think. I don't always agree with her (a virtual chasm yawns between us on the subject of lawn edging, for example) but I like the way she nudges - no, make that jolly well shoves - my brain into gear. She is the human equivalent of the sort of strong cocktail - a White Lady, perhaps - that makes you gasp in shock, but feel invigorated afterwards.

Take, for instance, her views on buying plants. "The nursery habit is at the bottom of the absymal British garden. That and plant sales at NGS garden openings. All those little specials, all needing to be squeezed in somewhere in an already over-stuffed garden."

Anne prefers repetition - "I can almost always think of a further use for a plant that is good and does well with me" - which she says adds to a garden's unity and integrity, but warns that this is not a common view in British gardening.

I think this is both true and not true. I personally feel nervous about having too much of one thing in my garden - too many hostas or libertia, not enough flowers - so I recognise that pressure to diversify and how difficult it is to resist it.

On the other hand, I know lots of gardeners - mainly those with a "nursery habit", it must be said - who feel that, ideally, their gardens could do with being de-spotified. So they recognise the aesthetic pitfalls that await the gardener/collector even if they don't really do anything about it. And I'm as susceptible as the next person to an impulse buy at a nursery or show.

Anne's also very scathing about the National Gardens Scheme, for a variety of reasons, but in the main because, she says, they help perpetuate an uncritical fantasy view of gardens. As the owner of a Yellow Book garden, this made me wince. And yet, and yet ... NGS gardens do vary in quality, it's true, and it's also true that no one is ever rude about them, because they open for charity. Is this good or bad? At least we ought to think about it.

There are far more bits of this book that make me nod in agreement than make me throw it down in frustration. The chapter headed: "I hate gardening" made me laugh out loud. (The bit about lawn edging made me quite cross, but I was in the bath at the time, so thought better of chucking it in the water.)

I was rather amazed to find that I share some of Anne's enthusiasms and dislikes. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with hellebores. I have a bit of a weakness for succulents. I like hostas and Erigeron karvinskianus 'Profusion' and crocosmia, and I can quite see that one could almost fall in love, Narcissus-like, with a reflecting pool like the one at Veddw.

So, criticisms. Not enough pictures. Or maybe not big enough pictures. It's not that I want a coffee table book, with huge close-ups and minimal captions, but Anne is married to a very good photographer, and I would have liked to have seen more of Veddw. It's the sort of garden where structure, texture, colour, form cry out for closer analysis. I'm guessing printing costs were an issue.

The proof reading could have been a bit sharper - there were quite a few typos. (I hope Anne didn't have to do all the proof-reading herself - you can never spot your own literals.)

These aside, I have enjoyed the process of reading this book, of being constantly challenged and made to stop and think.

The title is a reference to Anne's reputation as a critic, but it is also a jocular nod to Christopher Lloyd's The Well-Tempered Garden, which is itself a play on The Well-Tempered Clavier, the title of Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues.

Bach composed these in every major and minor key to show off the tuning of the newly invented piano. They have become required repertoire for any pianist who takes themselves even the least bit seriously; Daniel Barenboim says he likes to play at least one every day.

It would be nice to think that Anne's book might become required reading in the relatively new field of garden criticism.

After the party garden

2011-04-25T11:33:00.002+01:00

... and this is what the garden looked like after my daughter had her friends round for a birthday barbecue.

Thunderstorm garden

2011-04-23T18:10:00.003+01:00

It's been a record-breaking April here in London - the warmest since records began, according to the Met Office. Driving home from work yesterday evening, the car was registering 25C (77F).

This afternoon, thankfully, we had a thunderstorm, which was greeted with huge relief by me (thinking of my plants) and apprehension on the part of my daughter (thinking of her birthday barbecue tomorrow).

I love the light in the garden when there's a storm. Everything takes on a kind of intensity. I even love the sound of thunder. It's like a one-act drama without any actors.

Colour me beautiful

2011-04-19T23:18:00.003+01:00

I'm useless with colour. I'm not one of those people who can unerringly point to the hue that is just right for the living room/bedroom/garden furniture. If I'm having any remodelling done, I ask the decorator, Ralph, to choose a colour. I'm serious - he has good taste, and it saves me hours of dithering over paint charts.

I know lots of gardeners who are good with colour - who paint their trellis, their shed or their front door just the right shade of greige, or sea-blue, or dark green. Oregon gardener Grace Peterson has a header picture on her blog that includes a cherry-red trellis which looks gorgeous. I hanker after colour too - but I'm too much of a scaredy cat to commit myself with a brush. The most I've ever done is paint a couple of seed trays (below) - and let's face it, that's hardly Sistine Chapel level.

Indeed, merely painting the seeds trays involved hours of dithering over the Cuprinol Garden Shades range in the local DIY store. The colour is Seagrass, and I can't remember why I chose it. I was initially drawn to Sunflower, but thought it might look like raw yellow wood, rather than yellow paint. This also put me off using Terracotta, Berry and Deep Russet, as I thought it would end up looking New Fence colour.

I did think of mixing colours - Country Cream with Sunflower, to get a pale creamy yellow - but chickened out. I thought it might look a bit Country Living as opposed to Urban Jungle.

I don't like blue, so that ruled out Barleywood, Iris and Forget Me Not. And I'm not really a Lavender person, though I can see it might look very pretty in some gardens.

So what do YOU think? If I were to paint the bird table below, which I have often thought of doing, what shade should it be? Should I go back to Sunflower? Or should it be Seagrass, like the seed trays? And whatever colour I paint it, should I paint my old garden bench to match? I'd like something that looked vaguely Oriental, or Caribbean, rather than shabby chic. Or should I just leave it?

Can't wait to hear your thoughts.

A paradise for plantaholics

2011-04-16T15:14:00.005+01:00

Open day at Crocus, who must by now be the UK's biggest online nursery. They have a real nursery, as well as a virtual one, just outside Windlesham in Surrey, and today they flung open their polytunnel doors to the general public.
Crocus also supplies many of the Chelsea show gardens, and were offering tours so you could see what plants were being grown. My neighbour Ruth and I had fully intended to go on one of these tours, but from the moment we arrived, we were far too interested in shopping for ourselves than to go and look at other people's choices.

It was the first time either of us had been to a Crocus open day, and we were very impressed by the organisation. When you arrive, you are given an explanatory leaflet with a guide to the prices, and a couple of strips of stickers with your number on it.

As you go round the nursery, you pick up any plants you want, put a sticker on them and leave them in the aisle, where they are picked up by helpers. These are then loaded onto trailers and taken back to the central payment point, where your collection of plants is held under your number until you want to pay.

It sounds a bit haphazard, but it works - it means that you don't have to carry the plants round with you, and there isn't a traffic jam of garden centre trolleys everywhere. Brilliant.

If I had to make any criticism at all, it would be that it was quite difficult to find someone who knew about the plants. Most of what I assume were temporary staff brought in for the day seemed to be Polish and spoke little English. However, they were so eager to help, and so charming, that it seems churlish even to mention this.

In any case, there were loads of knowledgeable customers around. The only plant I drew a complete blank on was Asphodeline liburnica. No one seemed to have heard of it, but its feathery stems were so extraordinary, that this didn't stop anyone buying it.

Areas that were out of bounds for various reasons - customer orders, Chelsea plants etc - were clearly marked.

The quality of the plants was fantastic, as was the range available. The Crocus website has a "wish list" feature which, in my case, always runs to at least a dozen plants. Ruth, who is more organised than me, had actually printed out her wish list and brought it with her. How many times have you visited a nursery or garden centre only to find that they haven't got what you want? At Crocus, I got everything.

One of the tractor-trailers bears its load back to the central payment point, below. Someone then totted up your total - so you didn't have to unload and load up all the plants again - then gave you a slip of paper to take to the till.

The prices, by London standards, were amazing. A typical 2-litre perennial, normally something like £7.99 or £8.99 or even more in a London garden centre, cost £5. I bought something like 15 plants for £80, which included a Trachelospermum jasminoides, on special offer at £12.50 (usual price £24.99). Ruth bought a tangerine and a lemon tree, which were on special offer at £20 each. They were fantastic plants, too - bushy and glossy and green.

Ruth and I arrived at about 11am and by the time we left, it was 2.15pm. We were exhausted but very happy - we both agreed it was one of the best day's plant shopping we'd ever had. Crocus are having three more open days, and you can get the details here. It's well worth a trip.

A day at Loseley with Zoe

2011-04-15T23:01:00.004+01:00

Loseley Park is an Elizabethan (1562) manor house just south of Guildford, near Godalming, and about 45 minutes drive from me. It's on the edge of the North Downs, where the air is clear and sweet and smells of grass and trees.

The walled gardens are not particularly well-known by great English garden standards, but they are definitely worth a visit. They are a blend of formal yew hedges and cottage garden sprawl that is traditionally English and very restful.

Nothing is staked within an inch of its life as in more formal gardens - plants are allowed to seed around. The herb garden in particular is beautiful at this time of the year, with huge drifts of sweet cicely, woodruff and the bright new foliage of angelica.

The picture above shows the rose garden - astonishingly green at this time of the year, and rather attractive, in a stark sort of way. Below, the huge lime-yellow heads of Euphorbia characias subs. wulfenii act as pointers to the spring garden, where forget-me-nots, tulips and wallflowers run amok beneath pleached fruit trees.

I didn't notice the patterns on the bark of the fruit trees until I uploaded the photographs. But I loved the combination of the brilliant cherry red tulips and the ornamental rhubarb.

I'd gone to Loseley to meet Zoë, and to have a mooch around their spring garden show. This was held in the walled gardens themselves, which was a lovely setting. The stalls included plants, garden bygones, secondhand tools and furniture, but I have to confess that we spent most of our time sitting chatting.

I'd turned up with no cash, which I thought would stop me buying stuff. This ploy did not work. I bought two all-weather rattan garden chairs on my credit card (well, I had to have that to buy petrol), and Zoë lent me £14 to buy a secondhand half-moon lawn edger and a broom.

Memo to self: if you want to save money, do not go to garden shows with fellow bloggers. I'm kidding, of course - what could be nicer than to go to garden shows with fellow bloggers?

Zoë was very taken with a vintage chicken feeder (read her blog and you'll see why) and the lady on the stall was very impressed that she knew a, what it was and b, how it worked. So was I.

I never thought I'd be the sort of person who would get enthusiastic about old garden tools. When I was a child, everything in our garden shed was either rusting or broken. We had an enormous garden roller that weighed a ton and shrieked like some mythical creature if you tried to move it. My idea of the perfect garden tool has always been something that gleams and cleans easily - preferably involving stainless steel and bright coloured plastic, so I can see where I've left it.

However, there is something very nice about a spade or a hoe that someone has lovingly polished and restored. Worn smooth with years of use, the wooden handle on my half-moon edger seems to fall naturally into the hand in a comfortable position. The broom is new, but just the right size. Unlike my existing yard broom, which is huge and heavy, the head is small and neat but with stiff enough bristles to brush up dried mud and damp compost.

If you want to visit Loseley, the best time is June, when the rose garden and the organic vegetable garden are at their best. They're also having a Grow Your Own show on Sunday and Monday 1 and 2 May.

Danger: woman at work

2011-04-10T16:12:00.006+01:00

Last time I posted about the garden, I mentioned that I was rejigging this particular bit, and maybe putting in a terracotta pot as a focal point. Well, the pot's there, but I haven't done much else.

Life being what it is, I went down with a cold in the middle of last week, so two glorious days of sunshine this weekend - a golden opportunity to get on with some gardening - has been somewhat disrupted by endless sniffling and coughing.

I've managed to get quite a lot done, but Nature has managed even more - everything seems to be racing ahead. These hostas were scarcely showing their noses above the soil a couple of weeks ago - now they're burgeoning fast.

It feels more like June than April, so it is a bit disconcerting to look around the garden and find that there are no bananas, or cannas, or eucomis in place yet. They're still sitting in the garage, or in the glasshouse at the nursery.

The great thing about blogging is that you have a good excuse to straighten your aching back and head inside to get the camera. The bad thing about blogging is that you then go round the garden with the camera and notice all the untidy bits. So you put down the camera and start deadheading or whatever.

I had this stupid fantasy that I might get a minute to sit in the sun and read a gardening magazine.

Instead, I put up these wall units which you can just see at the back of the picture. They're from Ikea. Well, at least it was furniture-related, even if I didn't get to sit down.

A post about Pushkin

2011-04-07T22:04:00.005+01:00

Some of you already know that my cat, Pushkin, has been through a bit of a bad time recently. He has injured his back, and this has been a huge worry. At one point, we thought we might have to have him put down, but I'm hoping that won't prove to be the case. Apart from his fracture, he's a very healthy cat and the children and I find the thought of life without him very sad indeed.
Apparently, he has a couple of fused vertebrae in his back. Beneath this area is a bony deposit, and it is this deposit that has fractured. This in itself wouldn't be a problem, but a bit of the bone has broken off and is causing him discomfort.
Pushkin has been to see a specialist orthopaedic vet who says that this bone may be pressing on nerves and affecting his back legs. We're currently waiting to take him for an MRI scan which will show what impact this is having on the spinal column. It could be just a case of simply removing the bit of bone in an operation, but we don't know until he has the scan.
I thought I'd write about this because at various points, we almost gave up on Pushkin - but thanks to the internet, we didn't. If anyone else is unlucky enough to go through this sort of distressing experience, I hope this will be of help.
When Pushkin first injured himself, he went missing and we eventually found him cowering in the garden. He flinched away from us when we tried to pick him up and wouldn't even miaow. He then went missing again, which meant a delay of a few days before we could get him to the vet. During this time, we were convinced we would never see him again.
However, I remembered that Yolanda at Bliss had blogged about losing her cat Vita. I read her account of how they hunted for Vita for weeks and it gave me hope that I might find Pushkin.
I also found a blog called Pet Detective which doesn't seem to be active any more, but which has some invaluable advice for cat owners.
First, when your cat is ill or injured, he doesn't "go off to die" as many people, including me, tend to think. It is his natural instinct to hide, and not to make a sound, so as not to attract the attention of predators when he is not in a fit state to fight them off.
Second, he really will hide - yes, even from you, his loving owner. It's not enough to leaflet neighbours - you have to get down on your hands and knees and crawl around their garden. Even when we got Pushkin safely back in the house, he still managed to tuck himself away in corners and crevices.
On one occasion, I left him shut in the study while I answered the door and when I came back he was gone. I thought I was going mad! In the end, we discovered he'd tucked himself into a cupboard full of DVDs. (And this with a bad back.)
This instinct is called "hiding in silence" and while it might be useful for avoiding predators, it is the worst thing a domestic cat can do. While he's hiding, he's not eating, or drinking, or receiving medical attention, which means that his condition will deteriorate much more quickly.
At the moment, Pushkin is doing quite well. He's eating loads and his back legs seem to be working, after a fashion, though they get a bit tangled up if he tries to turn round too fast. I'm praying that the vet will be able to sort him out. He's far too lovable to lose!

Sssh, I'm re-reading my garden

2011-04-01T23:53:00.001+01:00

I was at parents' evening at my daughter's school the other day, and listening to her English teacher talking about re-reading the set text - in this case, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. He was saying that the more one studies a book, the more you find in it the second, third, or twelfth time round.

I am a great re-reader of books. I have what I call "flu books" - novels that I re-read when I'm feeling a bit under the weather. These include all of Jane Austen, Elizabeth Arnim's The Enchanted April, E F Benson's Mapp and Lucia series and Stella Gibbons' Nightingale Wood.
This last was recently republished in paperback, I'm delighted to say, and more will be available in August. I'm a huge fan of Stella Gibbons, who wrote dozens of novels, hardly any of which have been in print for years.

As well as falling with delight upon favourite phrases, it's amazing how often you notice something new, even in a book that is dog-eared with years of use. As one's experience of life increases, so does one's insight and perspective, I suppose.
The same goes for gardening books. The more years I spend gardening, the more I find that I see certain chapters in a new light. Something I may have flicked over four or five years ago now holds my attention. It's like learning a language: suddenly, all those unfamiliar phrases make sense.
This also helps me re-read my garden. I think we all have a corner, a bed or a problem patch that somehow, whatever we do, just refuses to come right. I've got a bit on the right-hand side of my garden that I've never really got to work. I've looked at it, and looked at it, and never until now had the courage to rip it apart and start again.
One day a couple of weeks ago, I was flipping through some books on Oriental and exotic garden design and wishing I had a rare Chinese ceramic shrine like the one in the picture. Then it struck me (the realisation, not the ceramic shrine) - I like the look of something that's motionless and monolithic amongst the movement and jumble of leaves and flowers and bees and whatever else is rustling in the undergrowth. That's what drew me to the picture.

Perhaps this explains why there are so many empty pots (focal points, as I like to think of them) in my garden. Perhaps what I needed was one more, in the middle of this particular bed...

I'll let you know if it works or not.

The bit of border in question, in high summer last year.