Published: July 31, 2022
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Another day in the Garden – 13th June 2013
Today's date is almost a mirror of itself, these things please me, I notice them and feel something special about that day or that thing, it creates a sense of order perhaps, who knows. But anyway this month the garden has little or no apparent order. It is abundant with lush growth, weeds and flowers alike, so there is little point in my picking out favourites, The rain and the relative warmth have conspired to make everything spring up wonderfully just so that this wind, that is gusting round our house and garden as I write, can knock everything down, in spite of the staking that I do put in! Our valley is a bit of a wind tunnel for gales coming from the west, so I am wondering what will be there to photograph after I have written this little journal.
House and garden
From the kitchen window
The summer veg are doing well and I finally managed to plant out all the overgrown baby veg plants that were swelling my greenhouse to bursting. It has been a little cold at night but they seem to be fine in spite of it. They are getting their feet down now and starting to grow ever outwards or upwards, which is most gratifying. I managed to get a second rabbit proof fenced area in the veg garden which means I can actually grow climbing beans without having to wrap the bottoms of the plants with the clear plastic sleeves usually used to rabbit proof sapling trees in hedgerows. That trick did work after a fashion but there were two problems with it, the first being that sometimes the plant got too fat with leaves and it sort of got stuck inside the tube and the second being that if I did not make sure it was right on the ground, the plants would get bitten off at the base anyway. Crafty blighters, these bunnies. So to have a rabbit proof fenced area number two was a major highlight of the year, and will allow better rotation of crops. Such little things please the passionate gardener I think. I also made some lovely falafels with the herbs fresh from the garden; they were so delicious I set two more trays of coriander and parsley seeds off so we could have an abundant supply of falafels with home grown salad this summer. My mouth is watering at the thought of all those rabbit proofed sweetcorn, and beans too, borlotti and flageolet for drying for winter stews as well as eating this summer and French and runner for munching in huge steaming piles with butter or simple sauces and dressings. I do love to eat my garden too.
The chicken house
Rabbit proofing
In pots
Speaking of eating, the edible flowers are coming on a treat. We already have calendular and rocket petals which I put into green salads. The nasturtiums are coming on now, which self-seed every year and I let roam across anything and everything in the veg plot as a foil for the cabbage butterflies to lay on. I do like their pretty white wings but net the cabbages and summer kales from them and pigeons too. Borage and violas are other favourites and I intend on trying out sugaring/crystallising some of these as an experiment. The lavender beds are swelling nicely with their waving flower heads coming up everywhere. These have so many uses.
Abundance is the word that sums up my aim in gardening, overflowing chaos with lots of colour and plants jostling each other for space, growing up through each other; this is my inner vision and in parts of the garden this is how it is now. Not much staking usually needed because everything holds its neighbours up anyway, no room for flopping unless the whole lot goes over. I shall venture out later today with the camera and see what the damage is. Anyway we have started our seasonal weekly arrival of new visitors and each party have said how lovely the garden is, who does all the work and can we use it. Yes please is my response, I am not a sitting in the garden person, just a doing the garden person with the odd tea-break sitting in it to take stock. So my chuffed level is off the scale. The best thing though was yesterday when some friends came for a birthday lunch for two of them, including a special 60th celebration, and one of their party said they had just been to Kew and they thought the view from my kitchen window would be hard to beat and there had been nothing at Kew that luxurious. This all makes my heart sing because I express myself in the garden but I am not a plant expert or a garden designer, I just get pictures in my mind's eye of how I want things to look and roughly speaking I keep at an area until it matches that look, for a while that is and then it has to come out again and be replanted so that my babies can be split and divided and rejuvenated and moved around a little too. Blue seems to be the most prevalent colour, and the bold reds of Papaver orientale Goliath or Beauty of Livermere. I bought one of each, at different times, knowing them to supposedly be the same plant renamed but Goliath has a slightly deeper colour, so who knows. Maybe they do just vary slightly, but they are glorious and two little girls picked up some dropped petals and were stroking them for the silky texture; this is how a garden should be experienced I think. We have seen people enjoying breakfasts and evening drinks out there already this year, and lots of children playing running games around the various rooms. It fills me with joy to make this garden for people to use and hold in the holiday memories as part of their wonderful experience.
Island bed
Herbacious border
Green corner
Secluded path
We have just started developing a new seating and viewing area which has its basic small terrace and benches in place plus a window space cut into the hedgerow, and we plan to build a small raised tree-house platform for nature watching. There are stunning borrowed views and vistas from the garden all around. The platform has yet to be built but it is already my new favourite tea break spot if the visitors are out. There is a mound at one side already starting to be planted with edge of woodlanders like native primroses which I divided earlier this year, Geranium phaeum Samobor, and native self-sown Foxgloves and Nicotiana sylvestris as it is in semi shade most of the day. I think the spires of foxglove and Nicotiana will fill this newly planted area well until I can fully colonise it with hardy perennials, ferns, hostas that claim to be slug proof, and woodland bulbs. This is my new vision and entails much poring over catalogues planning the purchases for this autumn. I shall use the intervening times as a weed extraction opportunity also as the soil has been moved from a mound we excavated from another area some years ago and are gradually redistributing around the place to make features like this. Plenty of hand pulling as I pass by each day as those dastardly weeds show their faces.
Another seating area
Face to face
Picnic table
New seating
My very last wonderful treat this month, which sadly I cannot get the camera into, is a lovely blackbird nest in our court yard complete with two or three babies being fed a daily diet of insects. I do hope this wind is not making it too difficult for the parents to collect this essential sustenance. I am so pleased we grow Mahonias for the winter bees. The summer fruits are now feeding the parents and we can watch them from our kitchen window pulling the berries as they hop around inside the bush. It doesn't have to be colour or even structure that gives a plant garden worthiness year-round does it?
Lush growth
Home for the bees
Oh and the bees are flying well and the hives are filling, but they are not that bothered with home at the moment when there are abundant fields of rape and hedgerows of hawthorn flowering nearby, so they are all off.
Sylvia Clare
Text and photographs by Sylvia Clare, who has been an HPS member for more than 10 years.
