The garden gets on with it, whether you’re here or not

As I said in my last post, gardening and foreign holidays are not compatible. It’s a good reason (alongside the weather) to go away in darkest January and February, rather than the English summer. 

But 2022 is when I’m making up for travel lost during the pandemic, so as well as April’s visit to Uzbekistan, we spent most of June in the USA. And in between I was finishing a really enjoyable contract at Sport Wales, so it’s been full on with no time to blog until now.

When in doubt, add flowers

May is when I usually buy lots of plants for hanging baskets and pots. I’d got a head start on some of them this year, having bought a load of plug plants ages ago and carefully nurtured them, first inside the house and then out in the greenhouse. I added a few dozen (hundreds?) more to the collection and, over the course of a week or so, gradually planted them up. 

Quick talley: 7 hanging baskets and 60-odd pots of varying sizes.

Most years I attempt some sort of colour scheme, if not across the entirety of the pots and baskets (who is that organised?), then at least within each one. This year I threw away all thoughts of orderliness and went for a scattergun approach, inspired by how nice a couple of randomly-planted baskets had looked last year. Gertrude Jekyll would not approve.

As the slugs are so voracious around here, I’ve put copper tape around most of the pots to try and discourage them. So far the results are … mixed.

One person’s wildflower…

The rear of the garden is a bit less formal than the front. For “less formal” you can read “unkempt” if you like. 

In April I said I would be “sowing wildflowers (definitely a native mix – no imports) in the space where we took down a holly tree” as part of my attempts to be more wildlife-friendly. Simon cleared the area and we sowed a mix of native wildflower seeds in May. 

We were a bit late for this year’s annuals so must rely on the perennials in the mix to give us some colour next year. That’s assuming we remember what we did many months from now and don’t just raze the whole lot to the ground in spring.

I’m a little worried that while I’m rigorously clearing things like wild carrot in one part of the garden, I’m actively encouraging it in another. One person’s wildflower…

… is another person’s weed

Not all wildflowers are welcome. At the top of the garden there’s a nice flat area with views across the Blackmore Vale. The slope just below is weirdly punctuated with a couple of strips of nettles, cow parsley and bracken. Why? Why did our predecessor let these clumps grow like that?

Simon wants the whole area to be grass. He’s right, it would look so much better to have a continuous flow of grass, rather than this mess. For a change, he’s more of an optimist than I about our chances of doing so.

It means digging out all the existing growth by the roots, waiting for more to emerge (as you never get it all first time) and digging again and again until it’s gone. It’s bloody hard work but he’s super motivated and I cheer him on from the sidelines.

The plan is to sow it with grass seed in September, then rely on mowing/strimming to keep any remaining wild growth in check next year. Fingers crossed.

Not such wild flowers

Also at the rear, there’s a triangular section in the middle that hasn’t had much love lately. I was going to plant mainly evergreen shrubs for simplicity and to make sure there was something there all year. But Simon persuaded me that we needed something more colourful. He sees that part of the garden from his study window so I reckon he gets the casting vote – and flowering perennials it is!

We kept some existing plants – a smallish rose, a skimmia and some hellebores and aquilegia – and Laura planted the bed up after we’d done a lot of scheming, conferring and experimental pot placement. 

I did try to work on a bit of a colour scheme for this bed. Principally blues, some pinks and silver/whites, with a couple of lime and terracotta highlights. I used geranium ‘Rozanne’ , lavender, Astilbe ‘Vision in Red’, Penstemon ‘Fujiyama’, Achillea ‘Teracotta’, Euphorbia, Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’, Verbena bonariensis, foxgloves, cistus and a couple of hebes. 

A month after planting and they were all looking very settled in. 

Can the dahlias do it again?

The dahlias were stunning last year – masses of completely bonkers flowers. I fought the temptation to buy more tubers, sublimating the urge by encouraging my friend Ann to buy more and more for her garden instead.

I overwintered the tubers in dry compost in the greenhouse. From the original 7 that I bought last year, I managed to get 12 pots, of which 10 survived. I’ve put the smaller ones in large terracotta pots, and the larger ones are planted in two areas – a cutting garden and a bed near the house. 

Eat your vegetables … just don’t eat mine

I mentioned a ‘cutting garden’. Yeah, actually it’s just one of the beds laid out for growing vegetables. I figured I might as well use it for that; my vegetable game is not strong here.

Last year’s attempts at homegrown vegetables were thwarted within days by pigeons and slugs – they ripped through broccoli, cauliflower, courgette, lettuce and squash. And my runner beans didn’t germinate.

Undaunted (ok, maybe a bit daunted), I’m trying again this year, on a different scale. So far the rainbow chard has seen off marauders and I didn’t put out the courgettes until they were too big for pigeons to behead. I have a small bamboo structure of runner beans which is also coping with life in the open.

 It’s not exactly the lush array I’d envisaged when we moved here, but I’m grateful for anything after last year’s farce.

Other jobs in the garden

Laura was our housesitter as well as gardener while we were in the USA. One great advantage of this is that the whole place was pristine when we got back from the airport – mowed, strimmed and leaf-blown to perfection. (That’s the garden, of course. We were hot, tired and smelly.)

As well as making it all trim, she (and we, when we were here) managed to:

• divide and move aquilega, hellebores and leucanthemum to different locations
• cut hedges and trim hawthorn, cotoneaster and beech around the greenhouse to let in more light
• cut bay tree, rhododendron back to better proportions
• cut back hypericum overgrowing some steps and clear space around informal pathways 
• deadhead roses
• mulch vegetable beds
• weed beds, paths and banks 
• cut back nettles to prevent flowering
• transplant more bluebells from flower beds into the Bluebell Wood
• start clearing one half of the compost bins ready to turn the other over to begin cooking in earnest

And finally, the alliums

In the last post I talked about tulips. They were followed seamlessly by alliums, which we planted in nearly every bed. They have gone on and on – they’re really one of the best flowering plants in the early summer garden.