Off The Edge Gardening

We get our eggs from a farm a few miles down the road.  It is worth the drive.  When you have had an omelette made from these golden beauties there is no turning back.  Boxes of eggs are piled in the farmhouse porch with a washed out yoghurt pot as honest box.  You serve yourself to the soundtrack of a yapping dachshund silhouetted behind a frosted glass door.  As you leave a silent elderly Alsatian follows your exit with a steely gaze from behind the house.  I prefer to think of this as curiosity rather than menace.  On our last visit the dachshund escaped its confines and rushed to the wooden fence accompanied by an adorable puppy.  A duet ensued with junior’s alto yap counterpointing his mothers fine contralto.  Their bark was not as good as their excited licks.

This giant aquilegia also poked his head through a gap in the fence.  The colours are almost as loud as the canine chorus.

As promised here is my exposé of the All Horts trip to Little Ash Garden near Honiton in East Devon.  This is the garden of my friend Helen Brown and her husband Brian.  Those of you who are concerned that this report might be biased because she is my friend have nothing to worry about. In fact she gets on my nerves a bit because she is so clever.

We arrived a little early.  I had estimated the travel time on journeys previously undertaken in my Reliant Robin. As we were in Max’s souped up Silver Shadow this took a good 2 hours off the journey, in fact we nearly got there before we started out.  One advantage of being unfashionably early was that we got first dibs at the plant table, and dib we did.  Cephalaria, smilacina, ariseama all were bagsied and bagged before the locusts other All Horts arrived.  Soon familiar faces rolled up looking as sophisticated as ever, they had arrived from all corners of the earth, some from a far away land known Oxford and others returning for the occasion from Costa del Dorset.  After polite handshakes and pleasantries, all washed down with a nice cuppa and piece of cake, we were ready for the tour.

So we wandered and we wondered at the spectacle.  Botticellian borders bursting but not over stuffed, packed with interest for the curious, the academic or the aesthete.  From the colour themed borders where self-seeders are encouraged and weeds have no place, to the newly constructed alpine bed dotted with miniature marvels.  Patches of rattle strewn meadow, shrubs and trees that are never quite what you imagine they might be.  Foliage as vital as flower; variegation, golden, aubergine, all skillfully placed to enhance both themselves and their neighbours.  A deep dark aquilegia against buttercup leaved acer.  Purple cotinus entwined by a ruby clematis.  Then to the alder grove and monster caltha, gunnera and candelabra primulas the colour of opal fruits.  Every turn there were questions.  What? Where? And how?  When we got to the end we could have started again and spotted a myriad of missed gems.

After another pit stop at the unrelenting cake-feeding station, Helen announced that if anyone had seen anything they fancied that she had excess of she would dig it up.  I must tell you folks, the resultant maul was not a pretty sight.  Elbows out, the old and infirm crushed to the ground in the rush of the lustful. True to her word, and yet another indication of the kind and generous person she is, she set off down the garden. Like the Pied Piper the hopeful trailed after her dancing to the mesmerising horti-tune.  On the uphill return trip the gallant David pushed the full barrow, which was quite fair as it appeared that most of it was coming home with us.

The rain held off until just as we were leaving.  So who ever was in charge of climate control, I thank you.  Just before we left Helen said “no one ever notices the Vallea stipularis”.  There it was, in all its Chilean glory, flowering its blooming head off.  A very special way to finish this very special day.  Thank you Helen (you big swot). x

For those All Horts who haven’t yet been one of the organised trips I encourage you to do so.  The ones I have been on have been wonderful for many reasons.  You meet like-minded, gorgeous and very friendly people, you learn stuff, you see beautiful things, you are both inspired and encouraged.  And you eat cake.  Really, I don’t know what is keeping you away.  See you next time.

Today we had a brilliant away day at Little Ash Garden with All Horts.  This amazing iris is a tantalising preview.  More to follow tomorrow when I will tell scandalous tales of intrigue and heart rending romance.  I may have spiced up that up a little.  There was however cake and lots and lots of wonderful plants.

The rain held off until I was home safe and sound.  Then it was proper rain; butt filling, ground softening, plant nourishing rain.  Thank goodness for that.

It was a scorcher today.  Perhaps as hot as yesterday which was classified as “absolutely roasting” on the UK Woosy Weather Scale. The difference is that yesterday I spent the day in Somerset woodland. Today I spent a fair proportion of the my day in a Devon greenhouse where we were planting up tomatoes, cucumbers, water melons and sweet potatoes.  When we had finished I carried watering cans up hill and down dale tending to the very thirsty newly planted.  You might think there was no comparison but there were advantages to my toil today.  It was much cheaper than sweating it out in a boot camp, I have faith that the rain will come soon to share the job and it gave me a chance to check on the newbies in the far reaches of the Farm.  And each slop of cool water splashing over arm or ankle was like balm.  I may have been a little less careful than usual on occasion.

 

These words and picture are brought to you by the lovely Mary who lives in southern France. Mary is Dutch by birth and her husband Ant is an Englishman.  They are blessed with cosmopolitan souls and kind hearts.  And they are the official guardians of my straw hat.  I bought the hat in question in a Portuguese market over 30 years ago.  Shortly afterwards we parted company and I have not seen it since. At the time of the adoption Ant and Mary were in the process of renovating a house in a small hamlet in the Cévennes region of France, an area famous for silk and chestnuts. Their son Mike (my boyfriend at the time) and myself stayed in this still basic but beautiful house for a few glorious weeks at the end of our European adventures.  It was extremely awkward to carry, so when we headed home I left my trusty hat in their safe keeping.  Quite reasonably I assumed that when we returned to the UK the need for sun protection would minimal. Shortly after our return the great romance ended and we went our separate ways. Through the years I have kept in touch with A&M, but I still haven’t back been to retrieve my hat. Last year they sent me a photo to prove the hat was still alive, wide brimmed and a little lonely perhaps.  To be honest I wouldn’t have known if it was an interloper, but it certainly looked very healthy.  I think it is happy just where it is.   Over to you Mary ……

I adore Queen Anne’s lace or Fairy lace or Spanish Lace.  The name alone evokes delicate extravagance.

Long before it’s popularity at Chelsea, I was nurturing it as an exotic garden plant not realising that to anyone who knows about gardening it is an annoyingly successful weed. Only annoying when you want to grow other things, because a path in spring sunshine, bordered by this lovely airy plant is a delight and an experience to lock into one’s memory, as it is brief and it will be a full year before you will enjoy it again.  By that time the plants will be bigger and better… and will have thrown around all that seed and unless you root out young seedlings in the places where you might want to experience other horticultural extravagances your gardening will become monotonous……..or so I have been told as I still adore it.

Perhaps if I call it Cow Parsley or Badman’s Oatmeal or Rabbit Meat I would feel differently.

This was meant to be a different photograph altogether.  My head is yet again hung in shame.

Yesterday we went for a walk.  Along the way I took photos of the many wildflowers we passed as we meandered along the coast. There was golden kidney vetch, cushions of sea campion, dots of blue sheeps bit scabious and masses of thrift in varying shades of pink.  I bravely hung over walls leaning towards the foreshore and bent nearly backwards to take shots of the sheer rock faces rising above us.  In crook and cranny these plants had wedged their roots down deep and were thriving on the north facing cliffs.  My acrobatics were to illustrate how these plants grow in the wild and therefore what will rock their boat when you grow them in your own garden.

Unfortunately the camera’s memory card did not accompany us on this walk.  It was sitting snug and warm in the front of my computer.  This is not the first time I have made this mistake.  If I was to be painfully honest, I doubt whether it will be the last.

Here is a thrift in captivity, sadly not quite the same.

What did you see when you looked at this photo?

Did you see the bee, busy and basking in the early summer sun?  Perhaps you dwelt on the porcelain geranium, pin stripes of sky blue, the violet stamen casting an indigo shadow?  Maybe you wondered about the pink haze in the background, imagining what flower it could be.  Or was it the sneaky bindweed that caught your eye, stealthily in its strangulation?

Some days we see only the flowers.  Other days it is the weeds.  Such is life.

Very tired but very good tired.  Still optimistic which, taking into account the events of previous years, is probably on a downward descent from now on.  But it was a very good week, attempting the impossible and achieving what I could.  Now I am tired, very tired.  In a very good way.

Happy Friday to you all, hope yours was as sun, plant and ice cream filled as mine.

Well here goes, Guest Blog No. 1.  This dubious honour has been given to my dear friend Cathy Marjoram and her photographer (amongst other things) husband Stefan.  This lovely couple were my next door neighbours in Bristol.  Due to their annoying ability to turn their hand to anything and everything, from constructing elaborate fancy dress outfits to making the finest tiramisu, they were known to myself and the OH as The Swotties.  It was here that myself and Mrs M gardened in parallel and got up to our fair share of high jinx.  Their new garden in Somerset is both effortlessly anarchic and irresistibly charming.  A couple of weeks ago, whilst dallying in a meadow, she broke her ankle.  As we would say in Bristol “NIGHTMARE”!  Over to you me deario. 

This month, which should have been one of my more frantic months for gardening, potting stuff on, planting stuff out, reseeding lines of seedlings which have been eaten whilst there’s still time to start again…I have been mostly..doing nothing, on account of my broken ankle. I have tried the odd, doddery shimmy through the borders to remove a clump of mares-tails that I can no longer bear to pass again without action, only to stomp on some eager little seedlings as I fail to execute a graceful pirouette on my purple plastered leg on the way back.

I have also had the tortuous experience of watching other well meaning people do the odd bit of gardening for me. My mum planted out my tomatoes in a formation of which she clearly didn’t approve, jamming them in in a hearty and vigorous fashion, with little regard for their fragile stems – how anything survives transplanting in her garden I do not know (but it does – and thrives). My brother, on the other hand, planted out the sweetcorn with military precision, only to have to replant them all after mum said he should have loosened the roots first…..I didn’t get involved.

After they’d all gone, I quietly hobbled to a shady corner of my vegetable beds, and planted out some desperate carrot seedlings. Wrong situation I know, but it was all I could reach….and I could do it myself, and at the moment, that’s all that matters!