COUNTRY LIFE IS NOT NECESSARILY QUIET

Weeks go  by and nothing notable happens up here in Herefordshire, then it all happens at once. On Thursday we had three people working here: our new WRAG trainee, Advolly, Andrew the hedging guy and Will, our occasional creative-handman. Will was laying herringbone paths in the salad/cutting garden, so we can walk and kneel and generally fiddle about with lettuce seedlings and suchlike, without getting covered in mud.

Andrew’s hedging was mostly just cutting back to get some more light on the bottom of the wildflower (not)meadow, some hedge-laying but also selective cutting back which is a technique I just invented. Problem is with mixed country hedges is that if you don’t cut or lay them they turn into trees/shrubs – they make great windbreaks but they develop gaps lower down, so folks on the public footpath can peer into our garden and basically cease being  a hedge. But…. if you cut or lay the lot, the wind will come howling into our garden (we are near the top of a hill), so I thought , why not cut out about 20% of the contents and let them regenerate, and then repeat next year, and start a rolling programme of cutting back and regenerating.

Then Advolly the WRAG. Stands for Women Returning to Amenity Gardening – I think it grew out of the wartime landgirl thing, a trainee scheme for women making midlife career changes. Advolly is serious mud-stained glam, Zimbabwean-heritage, and hair in African cornbraids but otherwise as English as you can get, especially her incredible enthusiasm for plants and garden history. It’s a great thing having such an enthusiastic and high-powered trainee, makes you sharpen up about why you do things and how you explain them.

Oh, the guys from Southern Solar were fixing the solar-thermal hot water system which gives us fee hot H2O from April to October. Then a guy turns up we have never seen before, with weird tattoos all over his face, and an in-yer-face style which alternates with the synaptic gaps of someone who has over-indulged in LSD at some stage in what looks like a very colourful career, announcing that he is going to build a shed in the woods which overlook us (he owns a strip, but that is another story), and possibly a recording studio (will this be the world’s first wood-powered recording studio?) The only way he can get his kit up there is by hiring a local agricultural contractor who drives it up there in the bucket of a Manitou (a huge 4x4 ag . vehicle , for those of you who think that farming is all about organic lambs bouncing about in fields of bright green grass). In doing so the public footpath is turned into the most horrific quagmire.

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Cold, innit?

Pardon me for sounding middle-aged but a whole generation of gardeners have grown up in Britain who have never experienced a ‘proper’ winter since they started gardening. Anyone younger than me basically. I had started a nursery business in 1986 and that was a jolly cold winter – it wiped out 75% of the exotic plantlife on Tresco in the Scillies, good news for me as it turned out, as I was selling them replacement South African and Australian exotica for years after.

So many gardeners under the age of fifty simply have not gardened at a time when there would be a frost night after night, and a mild spell would be a thankful break rather than the norm. This winter, when there seems to have been a frost every morning for more than a month now, seems exceptional – in fact it is quite normal, pre-global warming. The weather will now come as a nasty shock to the growers of ‘hardy’ bananas, agaves and acacias. But most of them at least know the risks of the game and will take appropriate measures to protect their treasures. More worrying is the whole generation of garden professionals who have no memory of a hard winter, the designers who plant their clients’ gardens with tender species, the wholesalers who sell truckloads of untrialled new Lavendula stoechas varieties or the garden centre managers who sell Cyclamen persicum as bedding plants.

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Working for the council ..... again

Another big planting scheme for Bristol City Council. This time at Brandon Hill, an early C20 park around a monument commemorating the fact that a Bristolian was the first European to land in the Americas (since the Vikings). So roll over Columbus. The existing planting is all very much overgrown dwarf conifers and once-fashionable shrubs. Nice atmosphere though, and a very much loved public open space. A whole bank of shrubs has been cleared away and the idea was for me to create a big perennial planting - slightly odd site though as there is little direct public path access to the site, but it is visible from a variety of angles - but with quite a distance.
So, I thought it needed something very visible and graphic, colourful obviously, but also strongly structural. And given that this is Bristol with a very balmy climate, I thought I'd go for lots of South African thingk like kniphofias, which will have the all-important graphic quality for months, crocosmias, agapanthus, plus lots other things but with a visual matrix of lowish grasses like Stipa arundinacea, deschampsia and the shorter molinias. So something that might look like a southern hemisphere montane grassland.
The general idea is for me to turn up before the planting crew, who arrive at 8am, set out as much as possible, and then hope we get it all planted in time. Setting out is very intuitive, I try to do all the larger and or very structual stuff first, filling in with less strongly structural. It is blended intermingled planting, virtually no groups of things, so quite difficult to get a large area done and then let the guys on to plant - you don't dare let anybody plant stuff before you have finished an area as otherwise you can't see what you have done and you cause a lot of confusion to the planting team. So you have to work real fast, and make instant and irrevocable aesthetic decisions.
very stony, had to use a pick axe in places but we managed to get 1365 plants done in 20 man hours.
We are all looking forward to what its going to be like in the summer.

Winter is here - garden still looking (not bad?)

Globe artichoke making new growth NOW! adding a touch of life to an otherwise wintery scene. Solidago rugosa to the right standing well. The first stages of a prairie planting behind - actually part of a septic soakaway scheme - same idea as a reedbed, soaking up nutrients.





Grasses (mostly Calamagrostis 'Karl Foerster' and perennials in November sunlight. Anything which has collapsed into a soggy mess by now has been cleared away - leaving things which should stand a few months more. I'm re-organising and re-planting around these surviving stems - so much easier working around landmarks than a site cleared of all above-ground growth, especially since these are all the good long-season structural elements.

Box blight - latest idea from Germany

Thought I had better pass this on. This is a summary of a letter to GartenPraxis which I recently spotted.

The fungicides Chlorthalonil and Prochloraz are carcinogenic and persistent enough to possibly present a danger to water supplies – both are in the process of being de-listed from the EU list of permitted fungicides

Acute cylindrocladium infections  have been treated with a thick dusting of rock flour on the foliage. Apparently the results are surprising in their effectiveness. It is suggested that the high pH of the material is what is negatively affecting the fungus. The article goes on to suggest that soil acidity is detrimental to box health – it is a plant of calcareous soils.

From GartenPraxis 11-2008, p. 7


So – what the **** is rock flour?? Can I make bread with it?
Rock flour or rock dust is finely-ground rock which bio-dynamic companies are promoting – don’t ask me where you can get it. The bio-d brigade claim that soils are deficient in essential minerals after years of cropping which this stuff puts back in - fair enough, but since this gardening methodology is inspired by the  quite honestly barmy Rudolf Steiner philosophy, there is an awful lot of guff about “life-force energy” in any of their literature. On this occasion though it looks as if one of their products may just do the trick.

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To stake or not to stake

Whether to stake or not? Or give it the Tracy Chop.
This is our so-called big border, with in the centre of the pic, the plant that everyone always asks about. It is a form of Eupatorium fistulosum, originally from North Carolina. It always grows to 3.4m every year and never blows over or flops - wonderful architectural plant. But the Sanguisorba tenuifolia to the left is embarassingly over - which it always does, and did in the last garden too. I have decided that it is one of those things for whom border conditions are simply too good, and it grows too well and cannot support its own weight. This winter I intend to dig it up and move into the meadow and see what happens; I assume competition will reduce its growth and height and it should stay upright.
The sanguisorba is probably not a candidate for the Tracy (DiSabato Aust) chop, as I think it would just produce lots of flower heads lower down and look a mess. The infamous flopper Campanula lactiflora however has done very well with a Tracy chop, bushing out and flowering for more than 2 months. But the rain will have helped.

Not really a gravel garden but a load of subsoil covered in gravel

Looking towards the Pavilion, across the so-called gravel garden. This was quite a nice gravel garden, installed by the previous owner, until the builders trashed it. Trouble is though, it had been installed over terrible heavy subsoil and a variety of weeds (horsetail, creeping thistle, bindweed). A classic example of ‘instant garden design’ – cover soil with geotextile, plant through holes, send in invoice, scarper. The weeds won’t appear for a year, and not become a real problem for 2 years. Which is when we bought the place.

It’s a slow process re-making a garden here. I’ve decided to rely on self-seeding. Stipa tenuissima just about does it, Verbena bonariensis does a great deal, Deschampsia cespitosa comes up from the soil seed bank (classic Welsh borderlands). California poppy does well, Knautia macedonica. Lot of other plants here just linger. So, I don’t really know how it’ll turn out. A case of slowly working with what works, if you know what I mean.