2024: January and February in the garden

Hold on, hold on, don’t go too fast: all the gardening books warn against getting ahead of yourself in late winter. For me, the recommendations to stay inside and wait in the dark months are pointless; I’m almost always still planting bulbs. As true this year as any, ‘I’ve planted in February and they still usually come up!’ I reassured friends – reassuring myself as much as anyone. I was pleased to see Rachel de Thane posting in Instagram about planting bulbs in January.

But it’s true, they do usually still come up! If they’re stored outside, and kept dry and cool, they last longer than you might think. And it’s easy to tell a viable bulb from a dead one: it has the springy resistance of life, rather than being dried out, squishy with rot, or spongy with mould. Some, like tulips and narcissi, may well be sprouting. Some won’t come up, but most will – maybe a little short or a little later than you might expect, but still. And it’s nice to be in the garden in January: the early sunset constrains the time you have, but you can watch the quality of the light changing, from the thin, pale gold sunlight of late December and early January, to the richer, deeper light that heralds the spring. The low sun makes the best shadows, and catches the first new growth, illuminating it into glowing peridot jewels.

Lady of Shallott: before and after

I sometimes think that gardening is actually the best way to make the winter months go quickly: sometimes it feels as though there isn’t time to do any of the things that need to be done before the growing season gets underway. This year, buds were breaking by mid-February (global warming, or just fool’s spring?) and by the time I got round to pruning the Lady of Shalott rose it was already feathered with the soft, copper-green early leaves. But I couldn’t leave it another year: there was too  much dead wood underneath, and the upper part would be hopelessly tangled if I didn’t cut some of the live branches out. I didn’t prune it last year at all apart from a vigorous dead head in late summer, and I didn’t cut it hard this year, but I’ve thinned it out and cut out all the dead wood, and that will hopefully encourage more flowers.

The other thing I found myself desperately having to do at the last minute was the winter wash of the damson and plum trees, and that I did at a very bad time – just before a long rain shower. Since I planted it the damson tree has suffered badly from leaf curl, and although I tried to deal with it gently (I bought ladybirds online) last year the plum leaf curl aphids infuriatingly spread from the damson to the plum. The winter wash I tried is apparently organic, but directions said to spray on a dry day, so I have no idea if heavy rainfall four hours after spraying will stop it doing what it’s supposed to. I didn’t manage to find the time earlier in the year (I was either busy or it was actually raining) but you have to do it before the buds break. Well, I tried, and if it doesn’t work I’ll try again next year, or resign myself to not getting fruit from either tree. But I want damsons! I adore that mouth-crinkling sourness (all my favourite fruits are tart: blackcurrants, gooseberries, rhubarb) and it’s infuriating to never have had more than a handful of fruit. The plum, a Victoria, has never fruited yet, but I live in hope.

The only seeds I sowed in February were cerinthe. Like most gardeners I have to resist that strong temptation to sow early, but this year the mini-greenhouse and the cold frame are full of pelargoniums sheltering from the cold snaps that we had in December and January. I’m not going to move them on until we’re into March, at which point I can start seed sowing. (I vividly remember the heavy snow we had in late February in 2018: I had to get up at 5am to get to a picket line in Essex, and six inches of snow had fallen overnight. A salutary reminder not to count on mild weather until at least mid-March.)

Meanwhile, the iris reticulata are doing just what I intended them to do. For some reason I found I’d ordered a massive range of different miniature irises, so they’ve mostly gone into pots in a display against the back wall. The first few are in flower: Frozen Planet, Pauline, Rejoice, When they go over they’ll be planted into the open ground and be replaced with geraniums and begonias, but there are enough, alongside other small bulbs, that the display should keep going well into April.

Other things that are out: the first few daffodils, and the tete-a-tete narcissi; the deep purple ‘Woodstock’ hyacinths in the planter at the front; the Winter Beauty clematis is covered with little waxy bells, and the winter honeysuckle is not only blooming but attracting bumblebees (is that good? I always feel happy when I see bees but that seems strangely early.) The white chaenomeles japonica ‘Nivalis’ has blossom, and the sarcococca confusa is in bloom with the most gorgeous, rich scent. The hellebores are better this year than perhaps they every have been. And everything seems to be coming into leaf – again, absurdly early. It’s beautiful, but disconcerting.

How it started / how it’s going (part 2)

And so, the back garden! The scale drawing:

The back garden is north-facing, and to the north there’s another three-storey block of flats, so it doesn’t get a huge amount of sun. The sunniest time is the morning, when it gets sun from the east; to the west, there are higher blocks of flats and two trees, so you don’t get much afternoon sun.

In the north-west corner is a mature ash tree, and next to the western fence some sort of salix/willow (really ought to identify that at some point). For that reason, spring flowers do really well here – they can cope with the summer shade, when the trees are in leaf; summer flowers have to cope with partial shade. Here are the photos when I viewed the flat in 2014:

I got rid of the red mini-shed (my mum uses it as a wood store now) and dug over the bed on the eastern side for flowers (or rather, I paid a friend to do the heavy digging). My idea was that the eastern bed would be for flowers and the other side would be a lawn, with lots of containers on the paved bits. I decided early on to keep the palette in the back to mostly white, with a bit of blue, to contrast with the front garden where there’s lots of red and purple and orange. Also, I painted the fence blue. September 2015:

April 2016 (second photo, you can see the rose I planted, Variegata di Bologna. It’s stunningly beautiful, white flowers splashed with crimson):

Looking really pretty in May 2016 (must plant more foxgloves!):

Still not sure why I have so many more photos from 2016 than any other year. June 2016, pictures pf the containers on the paved side:

Looking a bit rough in December 2016 (pretty terrible photo, but you can see where a couple of fence panels blew down and the council came round and replaced them):

October 2018. I can’t remember when I planted that Japanese Anemone (‘Honorine de Jobert’) but it is marvellous: it blooms from August until the first frost, and I’ve split it and spread its offspring around the garden:

In 2019 I dug up and moved some of the shrubs around: below you can see the white lilac, towards the right, and centre, a white ceanothus. Looking a bit messy in January 2020:

Look how lush in May 2021, with the white lilac blooming:

During the pandemic I bought a sunlounger which, to be honest, I never lounge on. Perhaps because it’s under the trees so in shade most of the time, or more likely because whenever I sit down in my garden for more than five minutes I notice something that needs cutting back or pulling up or tying in. I liked the solar lights, though, but they weren’t very expensive and have since broken. A mistake. June 2021:

And my birthday present from my parents in 2021 was a bird feeding station:

I had the table on the round patio, under the trees, but it worked much better when I moved it closer to the house, outside the back door. It catches the morning sun and I used to sit there before a day of working from home and drink my coffee. Yes, that’s a campaign board from the 2017 election. May 2022:

Also from May 2022. I LOVE this set of shelves, which I found on the street and painted for my pelargoniums. Most of the pelargoniums, sadly, died in the cold snap last winter.

And this is what it looked like last weekend after a big tidy and sort out:

How it started / how it’s going (part 1)

Warning: photo heavy post (and also some of the photos are pretty bad. I need a new camera!)

Because of my tendency to look at my garden and see only the areas that desperately need improvement, I thought I’d sort through the photos I’ve taken of the garden over the last nine (nine! blimey) years and make a record of how far it’s come. This post will be about the front garden, and I’ll do another post about the back.

I bought my flat in 2014 and one of the main reasons I bought it was because of the lovely garden. It’s a ground floor ex-council flat with its own front door and front and back gardens – a lot of the flats in my estate have this arrangement, rather than the communal or shared garden you often see in local authority estates.

To give you an idea of the layout, here’s a scale drawing:

It’s L-shaped; in the north-west corner is a brick wall, the rest has wooden fencing. The bits marked left and right of the front door are paved, as is the path from the gate to the door. It’s south facing, so gets the sun all day.

Here are the (pretty terrible) pictures I took when I viewed the flat in April 2014 (one includes the estate agent). The garden was pretty weedy scrub, with a staghorn tree next to the front gate, a very tall and tatty hawthorn in the south-west corner, and two weedy elders in the north-west corner:

I dug out a border along the front fence, and dug over the whole patch to the right of the path (looking towards the house) to make a deep flower border. And I put raised beds to the left of the path: two for flowers, one for asparagus.

October 2015 (look at the amazing colours the staghorn would go in the autumn). The poster in the window is from the 2015 Greek referendum:

Look how lovely that border was in April 2016 (refugees are STILL welcome):

I took lots of photos in 2016. May (note Labour for Remain poster for the Brexit referendum):

July 2016 (all getting a bit jungly, but look at those lovely dahlias. On the left, the frondy asparagus foliage). You can see that I had the scrubby elder trees in the north-west corner removed:

In 2017 I decided to turn the north-west side bit next to the house into a vegetable patch. This was short-lived because I can’t really be bothered growing vegetables:

January 2018, having a bonfire:

April 2018. That morello cherry in blossom, centre, is no longer in a pot, but planted in the back garden. To the right you can see where I planted raspberries along the western fence, and next to the green compost bin a damson tree.

Annoyingly I seem to have lost a whole bunch of photos from 2019 and 2020, so you can’t see my photos when I had the staghorn and the hawthorn removed.

In early lockdown I paid a friend to paint the fence blue and the brick wall in the corner white. I also replaced all the raised beds with slate edging, which looks a lot nicer than wood and lasts a lot longer. The cold frame was made for me by my brother. December 2020:

Also December 2020 (taken while planting bulbs). The cherry tree, front, died and was replaced by an apple tree:

Here’s a photo while I was putting the slate edging in, January 2021:

Where the staghorn tree had been next to the front door I put a rose arch. March 2021:

And in the L part next to the side wall, my mum and I built a little herringbone brick patio. I can’t remember when I installed those green metal raised beds, I think 2019.

Looking super jungly and weedy but nice in May 2021 (no political poster visible but the garden was somewhat neglected in spring 2021 when I was campaigning in Newham’s local governance referendum):

Front border looking really lushly full (if a tad parched) in June 2021, and strawberries in troughs along the path:

June 2022, the rose arch at its absolute peak (note Vote Labour poster in the widow, still there after the 2022 local government elections). The rose is ‘Félicité et Perpetué’, a rambler with very charming little button roses:

And taken post-drought last year (after the first rains in late August 2022, but too early for the grass to have greened up again):

And that’s as far as I got with sorting out my photos. Not sure if it’s wildly interesting to anyone except myself, but I hope it actually gives some sort of idea of where the garden has gone over the years.

It is heartening to see that I’ve actually done a LOT over the last few years – as well as to see that there are things which have definitely been better in the past. That front border has definitely had good years and bad years, and it wouldn’t take much to improve it a bit now. It’s noticeable to me that I haven’t taken many photos of the ‘worst’ areas – there is a large wooden compost bay in the south west corner that was basically a mistake and has looked really tatty almost since installation. One of my aims for this year is to dig it out, use whatever compost it contains, and replace it, perhaps with another slate-edged flower bed.

Next week, the back garden!

Is this spring?

Spring is here! Why doesn’t my heart go dancing?
Spring is here! Why isn’t the waltz entrancing?
– Richard Rodgers

Is spring here? Yes, according to the meteorologists: meteorological spring started on the 1st March, when I also went out and bought a bunch of supermarket daffodils to mark St David’s Day, in deference to my Welsh heritage. No, according to the astronomers: astronomical spring starts at the equinox on the 20th March. For me, the most meaningful date is the 14th March, when sunset in London will take place at 18.01; after that, the sun won’t set before 18.00 until the 19th October. That’s a nice turning point. Twelve days after that the clocks will go forward, on Sunday 26th March; and who could say that it’s not spring then.

Yes, it’s spring; last week I walked home from work along the Regents Canal, and narcissi and crocuses were blooming on the banks. Prunus cerasifera, the cherry plum, the first blossom, has been in bloom all over London for weeks now; the first violets can be found in patches of rough ground. The weeping willows are just about to come into leaf, with their almost-but-not-quite bare branches an elusive colour, midway between green and gold.

In my garden, two daffodils have appeared, and the damson and Victoria plum are both speckled with tiny buds, although still weeks away from actual blossom. Bulb shoots are poking through everywhere, and the snowdrops (a tiny clump: must plant more snowdrops) have already come and gone. A big square pot next to the front door is overflowing with beetroot coloured ‘Woodstock’ hyacinth, and behind it the new shoots of the clematis ‘Étoile Violette’ are stretching upwards.

Branches are breaking into leaf all over the place; that wax-soft new growth which you can cut with your thumbnail. Best of all is the new growth on the roses: on the ‘Lady of Shalott’ the tiny leaves are coppery orange, and on ‘Emma Hamilton’ garnet red. The low sunlight illuminates them like jewels, and makes patches of grass seem to glow.

Of course, the BBC says it might snow on Wednesday.

That’s fine with me. Having only planted the last few tulip bulbs in early February, I’m quite happy to huddle indoors for a while, reading seed catalogues, making lists and thinking deeply. This is the start of the gardening year, and one may as well not leap in immediately. Reculer pour mieux sauter.

Last year was a very weird year for gardening: the drought meant the summer was almost a complete write-off. My dahlias struggled until the heavy rain in September, and then bloomed exuberantly until late November. A couple of weeks later the heavy snow finished them off completely. Some tentative exploration of the dahlia tubers in pots (done when I was looking for places to plant yet more tulip bulbs) suggests that the combination of sharp cold and heavy rain has turned most of them to mush. Another reason to consult the garden catalogues.

And there will be other things that don’t return this year as expected. The very cold snap was unusual: a couple of weeks straight with the temperature barely above zero. That’s probably finished off a few perennials, and will certainly have killed the osteospernums and antirrhinums which are technically annuals but survived the last couple of mild winters. Already I can see that replacing my pelargonium collection will have to be a project for the year.

So I’m happy for spring to come in like a lion – and a bit of rain would be nice – and not in a hurry to start Doing Things. Instead I can go through the seed box, order things, make random lists of dahlias and annual bedding, fix the cold frame, do some general tidying and then the gardening year proper will begin: the bulbs will be up and it will be time to sow seeds and start the year.

2022: January in the garden

A new year! A new start! Well, January is a trying month, and it’s always good when we reach February, when we gain nearly four minutes of daylight every day between the first and the 28th. But this January has been odd weather – very, very dry, and in the last week this strange weather which is both mild (for the time of year) and sunny. Amazing sunsets, though: yesterday I walked the dogs round Wanstead Flats at sunset and the light and the skies were just stupendously beautiful.

Skies over Wanstead Flats

England should get 55mm of rain in January, but last month we got 34mm. Last weekend I watered all the pots and some of the borders. I check both my weather apps every day to see if we’re going to get any rain, but no. Maybe Friday. The weather generally is terrifyingly weird. There have been a few really cold nights, when I have lovingly brought all my tender plants into the house, and cocooned my pelargoniums in bubble wrap, but this mild but sunny weather is distinctly odd. If it’s going to be mild, at least give us some rain.

Pelargoniums happily survived -2° temperatures swathed in bubble wrap

Despite more epic bulb planting I still haven’t finished planting all the bulbs – I have a couple of dozen tulips left to go in. I have planted tulips in February before and as long as the bulbs are still OK they tend to come up – a little late, a little short. Unless they are affected by the very dry weather, I suppose. But some of the bulbs planted last autumn and in previous years are already showing – there was one tiny iris reticulata our last weekend, and these hyacinth ‘Woodstock’ (a lovely rich beetroot colour) are coming up nicely and look pretty with supermarket violas interplanted. Later in the summer a clematis ‘Étoile Violette’ should grow up through the trellis that is planted behind.

Shoots of hyacinth ‘Woodstock’ and violas.

I am determined to grow more from seed this year and having the zip-up greenhouse is a big help for that. I haven’t got started on serious seed sowing this year, but I couldn’t resist starting some white larkspur last week and re-sowing cerinthe ‘Kiwi Blue’ to supplement the autumn-sown cerinthe seedlings I already have. I also have a lot of perennial plugs growing away, the more-trouble-than-they’re-worth result of various special offers from garden companies. Perennial plugs really are a pain – they need as much fussing as seedlings really, and my lackadaisical style of gardening means that I never really get around to potting them on in time. In future I must remember that £6.99 spent on one decent potted perennial plant is better value than 32 tiny plugs, especially if it is something that will bear propagating later from cuttings or splitting.

Seeds in the zip up greenhouse

And this may be the first time in years that I actually have sweet peas for summer! These are the result of my autumn sowings, and I’m going to plant more this weekend. I like the deep, rich colours – so far I have Blackberry, Black Knight, Almost Black (a theme emerges…) and the more prosaically named King Size Navy Blue, which a garden writer, I can’t remember who, described as the best blue sweet pea available. For the last few years I have meant to grow sweet peas, but then been too late in sowing them, too lax in watering them, too depressed to even think about them… but this year I will have some. The ones sown last October need pinching out to make them more bushy, and I have more to sow: Nimbus (dark purple striped), Lisa Marie (maroon stripes), Scarlett (self explanatory), Henry Thomas (crimson) and America (scarlet ripple). I think the last time I had loads of sweet peas to pick in the summer was 2016 – I can’t wait.

Sweet pea seedlings

Another new year – 2022

I love a new year – like a new notebook, it seems to hold so much promise. 2021 was such a terrible year for me that 2022 feels as though it cannot possibly be worse; therefore, it must be better (she said, hubristically).

Last year I wrote about my resolutions for 2021; none of which were completely fulfilled, but most of which I made some progress with. Last year I ended up not doing a huge amount of gardening – or a huge amount of anything much. I started with good intentions, but as the year wore on I found that gardening, like many of the other things that usually give me pleasure, became instead a struggle. Instead of being motivated by my plans and ideas, I managed to turn my to-do list into an oppressive reminder of just how little I was capable of doing. That seems to be changing; it was refreshing to have a couple of days during the Christmas break when I went out into the garden and became absorbed in the process, moving from task to task without any great effort of will (or reference to the to-do list) and enjoying the sensory pleasures of weeding, digging, planting, putting my hands in the living earth.

I did write about the garden occasionally, but it fell off gradually over the year. I still want to do that; and as for documenting my progress with the garden, I looked out various pictures over the nearly eight years I have gardened here and will do a couple of posts showing how both gardens have developed since I have been there. This year I still intend to post more regularly about the garden and try and take more photos. I do continue to keep my paper garden diary – possibly the most systematic journal I have ever kept – and it’s very useful to have a record of everything I have planted and when I did it. But I will try and update this blog at least once a month this year as the garden develops.

I did make great strides with the front garden, but there are still two big things to tackle: the spaces between the beds and what I think of as the disaster area in the corner. The spaces between the beds started off as scrubby grass, with a fair bit of couch grass in it; then I covered over part of it with weed proof membrane with the intention of putting down either gravel or woodchip. Now I am wondering whether turf wouldn’t make more sense. Something to think about.

The ‘disaster area’ is the corner where I have my compost bins; the two plastic Dalek bins are fine, but the wooden bin I bought because I thought it looked nice is a weedy mess, with a huge weed elder growing behind it. I want to empty out the wooden bin, use what compost I can from it on the border, cut down the elder, and have three Dalek bins neat and tidy in a row. A big and dirty job but I will get round to it this year.

I suppose I could say that I have grown more from seed – inasmuch as I have sowed sweet peas for this year, as well as cerinthe and verbascum in the autumn. But my grand seed sowing plans for 2021 never went much further than this beautiful plan that I drew up last January:

Isn’t that nice? So neat, so organised. Look at those lovely ruled lines. But I didn’t sow a single seed from it. I did acquire a mini greenhouse, so this year I will have somewhere to put my seeds – all my indoor windowsills are occupied with houseplants. And I have plenty of seed to use up in my seed box; hopefully most of it will still be viable.

I did pretty much cut out peat; the few plants I bought were mostly from the supermarket, where they seem to use coir fibre, and B&Q no longer sell peat compost. I can’t say that I exerted myself over it; it was more a side effect of not having done very much gardening in 2021. But it seems easier and easier not to buy peat or plants grown in peat, so I will continue that.

Finally, the back garden potting area remains, shall we say, a challenge. Still, it’s good to have a project, and hopefully this year I will turn it into a more useful storage and working area. I need to organise the various rubbish, put up shelves, maybe even paint the wall, and then I will have somewhere sheltered to do potting up and fiddly work, and be able to find all my tools and bits and bobs when I need them.

What’s in a name?

Rosa ‘Atom Bomb’; picture from Gabriella Hirst’s website

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I’ve never been able to believe it. I don’t believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.” – L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Regular readers of plant and seed catalogues like myself will have spent a lot of time contemplating the names chosen by plant growers and their marketing teams for new plants, sometimes with horror. There are the revoltingly cute names – calling a hydrangea ‘Pinky Winky’ is an insult to a lovely plant. And there are the obvious marketing ploy names – a plethora of roses called things like Ruby Wedding and Golden Anniversary. I have a personal prohibition on buying any plants named after members of the Royal family, of which there are many: my own unnoticeable republican defiance. Upmarket rose growers David Austin tend to favour literary references and allusions to a romanticised English gardening past: Lady of Shalott, Gertrude Jekyll, Sceptr’d Isle.

This year, in recognition of the role played by the NHS during the pandemic, David Austin marketed a new rose Nye Bevan, “an uplifting rose bearing unusual open cupped flowers of soft yellow, paling to cream”. I’m not sure why they chose a yellow rose to name after the great Labour politician and founder of the NHS – surely red would have been more appropriate? – but I look forward to David Austin persevering with the rich possibilities this new naming convention might offer. Perhaps in the future they will produce a robust orange rose called Barbara Castle, or a vigorous climber called Harold Wilson. Breeders of other plants could join in: Clematis Attlee. Herb-ert Morrison. Hardie perennials… (that’s enough – Ed).

Sometimes it is the name which makes the rose. In the 1930s, French rose-grower Francis Meilland developed a new hybrid tea rose which he named Madame A. Meilland after his mother, and sent cuttings of it around the world to protect the rose during the German occupation of France. In 1945, he asked Field Marshal Alan Brooke if the rose could be renamed after him to honour him for the role he played in the liberation of France, but the Field Marshal declined and suggested instead that the rose be named ‘Peace’. Duly named, Peace roses were sent to every delegate at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations.

Today, it is impossible to walk down a suburban street in the UK without finding a garden where Rosa Peace is grown. It is a rose with beautiful flowers – yellow with soft pink edging – and although I am not wild about it as a shrub, it is easy to grow and disease free. But I wonder if it would have reached its level of popularity, not to say ubiquity, with post-war gardeners if it had still been known as Madame A. Meilland, or Field Marshal Brooke.

Rather less peacefully named is the red rose Atom Bomb, bred in Germany in 1953 by Reiner Kordes. Very little information is available about this rose online, except for this very brief description (“Floribunda. Red. Blooms in flushes throughout the season.”) Nor is it mentioned in any of my rose books; one assumes the name was chosen as an emblem of modernity and the space age, in a time before the anti-nuclear movement had become mainstream. Writing in 1958, Katharine White identified a similar trend: “In several of the catalogues, there is a new petunia called Satellite. I suppose it was inevitable. There is also a calendula named Radar and a gladiolus named Atom. Satellite is quite pretty – a brilliant rose-coloured single petunia marked with a perfect white star.”

Rosa ‘Atom Bomb’ is not available to purchase, as far as I can tell, but Australian artist Gabriella Hirst tracked down a plant and propagated it for her artwork How to Make a Bomb. Several Atom Bomb roses were planted as a peace garden/art installation in Gunners Park, in Shoeburyness, with a plaque explaining the connection between the installation and the history of the nuclear weapons development site at Foulness Island, where the first British nuclear bomb was built in 1952, a year before Rosa ‘Atom Bomb’ was developed.

It’s a beautiful idea for an artwork; the contrast between the tender, patient work of grafting roses and the vast destructive power of nuclear weapons is so powerful, as well as the geographic links between the weapons development site at Foulness and the testing sites on indigenous land in Australia. Hirst said that her work “aimed to hold space for contemplation of British colonial legacy – an unavoidably complicated legacy which contains such seeming opposites as rose gardens and enduring nuclear violence. “

No complaints were made by the residents of Shoeburyness, but two Conservative councillors insisted that either the wording on the plaque be altered or the garden be removed, so you can’t see the artwork/garden any more. It is a great shame, and yet another awful example of the way that the right wing in this country are increasingly seeking to censor and erase honest examination of our violent colonial past.

The British Nuclear Test Veterans’ Association quotes a nuclear test veteran who was present at the 1956 Operation Mosaic Commonwealth atomic tests, who said “it is just facts that are quoted, and I think the Council are going over the top with their complaint in this respect. I love the garden and would like to have a rose if possible.”

June in the garden

Oh June, what a mixed bag you were. 27° on the 2nd June, 12° on the 21st. I don’t think I’ve ever had my heating come on automatically on Midsummer Day before, or spent it shivering in a jumper wondering if I should have a second hot bath.

But actually I love alternating rain and hot weather and would be quite happy if that pattern were continued for the rest of the summer. I could live without the cold, but there’s nothing that gives me quite such a sense of wellbeing as the smell of summer rain on warm earth, particularly after a week of hot dry weather.

And after a long, cold spring, the combination of rain and sun means that from the first hot spell in June everything ran riot: exuberant, rich green growth. I have spent June cutting back and weeding (I want to write a post on the joy of pulling weeds from warm, damp soil). May felt frozen in time: nothing grew, everything was paused, holding its breath, before a great summer explosion of bloom. June really did bust out all over. The front border, which has never looked quite right, for the first time ever looked like a border: roses, knautia macedonica, oriental poppies and geums all came out in June in a gorgeous mix of purple and pink and peach and orange. I must remember it: for some reason I have hardly taken any photos of my garden this year – maybe because while working from home I haven’t had to capture it, I can go outside into it any time I like.

The miserable coldness of May meant that I lost my gardening mojo (don’t even ask about my writing mojo; the first half of the year has been a miserable, cold, and arid period for my mind as well as my garden) but with the sunshine it started to come back, and I finally got round to doing a lot of things which had waited far too long.

I finally replaced the rotting wooden raised bed around my asparagus patch with the same slate edging I have used elsewhere in the garden – a pallet of reclaimed Welsh slate roof tiles, bought on Ebay last summer, has gradually replaced all the raised wooden beds that I built when I moved in to this flat eight years ago.

Every year I wonder if the asparagus patch is a bit of a waste of time, but the couple of weeks during which I can cut a handful of fresh asparagus every couple of days makes it worthwhile. I like the ferny top growth which happens when you stop cutting the new spears, too, and this year I noticed how much the bees also like the minuscule bell-shaped flowers it grows. This year I’ve tried poking a handful of nasturtium seeds into it after the asparagus has gone over, on the principle that deliberately growing something vigorous and simple might reduce the need to weed it over the summer. I also made another slate bed and planted it with bare root peonies

I finally replaced my broken strimmer with a cordless one and vowed I would strim regularly – the garden looks so much better when I do – but the alternating rain and sun and rain meant that the grassy patches between my raised beds went wild again, and the stinging nettles grew taller than me. Still, the insects like the nettles, too.

Summer is the time for annual bedding plants, so I bought some white petunias and impatiens and planted them into my blue strawberry pot – the impatiens (busy lizzies) in the top of the pot, and the petunias trailing out of the holes. Buying annual bedding always feels like a fast food version of gardening, but much like fast food, there are times when it hits the spot. I suppose I could do all the fiddly early sowing and pricking out and potting on that raising tender annuals from seed requires, but my seed sowing efforts have always been so erratic that I prefer to save my energy to sow perennials or at least biennials, which are easier and last longer.

I put trailing white pelargoniums in my various neglected hanging baskets and potted up a selection of bright red and pink zonal pelargoniums to stand next to my front door, on a table I rescued from the street. A lot of my gardening has been fiddling with things: moving pots, wedging bedding plants into any container or corner that will take them, generally tidying up, and cutting things back.

Oh, the cutting things back, what an odd satisfaction. For years the shrubs I planted in my back garden – hebes, white buddleia, ceanothus, deutzia, a white-flowered chaenomeles, a lilac and various winter honeysuckles – have looked small and reluctant. This year the back garden suddenly became a jungle, and I could wield my secateurs indiscriminately without the garden looking any less lush and green, and without worrying that I would discourage growth. I should have known that, as my mother always used to say with relish, growth follows the knife. I filled ten bags for the council green waste collection.

Now the roses have gone over and been dead headed – fingers crossed for another flush – and the June flowers are mostly done. June is the time for fleeting glories: in July come the long-stayers, the hot-country plants that will, given luck and not too awful weather, carry on flowering into November. The dahlias are on the cusp, and the verbena bonariensis is waving its wiry stems up to the sky. And the whole garden is filled with the gentle humming of the pollinating insects.

Fleeting

There are things in the garden which are beautiful for months on end, and there are the things which flare briefly into gorgeousness for a matter of days and then subside for another year. June is full of the second kind of things.

Papaver Orientalis ‘Patty’s Plum’

At the moment, the oriental poppy ‘Patty’s Plum’ is unfolding – every day a new flower, and more buds this year than any years since I planted it. This is one of my favourite things in the garden: that amazing subtle colour, a dusty, smoky, warm violet, and the petals that unfold like crumpled silk skirts being shaken out. In two weeks it will be over for the year, but the anticipation of its arrival starts when the first fat buds begin to form in early May.

Unnamed pale pink peony, possibly ‘Sarah Bernhardt’

Next to the rose arch in the front, a nameless peony which I planted by mistake – it was supposed to be a red one – but which I now can’t move for fear that it will suffer a setback. It could be Sarah Bernhardt, but maybe it’s too white and not pink enough? This also took years before it flowered, but this year it had thirteen buds – it would have been fourteen but I knocked one off accidentally – and waiting for the fat round buds to emerge into palest pink ruffles is also a joy. Once they emerge they last a few days and then they’re over.

Rosa ‘Variegata di Bologna’

Lots of my roses are repeat-flowering – the Lady of Shalott, in the front garden, has been known to bloom from February until December if I deadhead her diligently – but the Variegata di Bologna rose blooms only for a couple of weeks, with gorgeous white flowers splashed, Jackson Pollock-style, with crimson.

Purple bearded iris (iris germanica), not sure of the variety

And pretty much over now until the next year, the iris germanica. I can’t remember any of the variety names, but I have about six or seven and this year only two bloomed – a deep purple one in the front garden, and a pale blue one in the back garden, with the most amazing and surprising scent.

They come, they are beautiful, and then they’re gone. Other things last longer – the repeat flowering roses, the dahlias that produce hundreds of blooms from July until November, the verbena bonariensis which is full of bees all summer long. But the things that give just a few moments of glory give as much joy as the stalwarts of the late summer garden which give months of pleasure.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. – T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

January in the garden

January has been difficult. I don’t want to write too much here about the devastation of the pandemic and the government’s criminal irresponsibility and failure, because one reason I garden, and write about my garden, is to take my mind, at least temporarily, off the grimmer aspects of life in a failing society, and to try not to think about terrible death figures and the constant grief and fear. But at the same time how can one not acknowledge the tragedy? When I’m outside working in the garden it’s been very noticeable, for the past couple of months, how frequently one hears the ambulance sirens going past in the background. Sirens are a part of city life, but this is something different. It feels odd to preface a blog post about ‘things I have done in my garden’ with such dark thoughts, but I think it would be odder not to mention something which occupies such a lot of my waking thoughts and is constantly present for everyone.

And this lockdown has been exhausting. It is dark most of the time I’m not working; and when it’s not dark, it’s either freezing, or raining. When it’s not freezing, or raining, and even when it is, the sky has been that flat, leaden grey: weighty, as though it’s only a few feet above one’s head. Only in the last few days have we had a few hours of the soft, clear sunshine that suggests that spring may, at some point, arrive.

So the snow last weekend was a magical, ephemeral moment when everything was briefly transformed. In Stratford it lasted barely enough time to take pictures of the garden. I could wish for more snow; not just for that transformation, but because a spell of properly cold weather would be good for my peonies, good for my roses, good for a little natural control of the slug and snail population. And good for the soul. Still, there have been a few mornings when the buckets outside have been iced over, and there’s nothing more satisfying than prising off the top layer of ice, like a sheet of glass.

I finished planting all the bulbs, and wrote about the bulb madness, but between the rain and the darkness January has been a quiet month. I cut back the autumn-fruiting raspberries, mulched them with horse manure, and put in stakes so that next year they will have a little support – the stakes are soft iron fencing pins which I bought online from a landscaping supplier, and will rust gently in an attractive way.

I planted some new roses: some climbers and some shrubs, bought on the last working day of the old year, as a sort of early Christmas present to myself. The shrub roses are Desdemona, a white David Austin rose which is supposed to have a beautiful scent, and Boscobel, another David Austin rose which I am looking forward to seeing in bloom, because the colour comes out so differently in photos, from dark pink to almost orange (David Austin describes it as ‘coral-pink’). And an orange hybrid tea called Just Joey, because I love orange roses, and Joey is what my mother calls me. The climbers are Danse de Feu (brick red), Schoolgirl (coppery apricot), and Compassion, also known as Belle de Londres, the namesake rose of this blog (salmon pink tinged with apricot). They are intended to climb over the south facing side wall of my garden; in the spring I will drill holes and stretch wires across the wall to support them.

I also pruned my existing shrub roses and am very heartened to see tiny red buds already appearing on them, especially since for once I actually took the time to look up how to do it correctly, rather than just enthusiastically slashing and chopping until the red mist and bloodlust had receded. I pruned my blackcurrant without taking the same care and then realised I should have pruned it last summer after it fruited, not in winter. But hopefully it will survive, even if I miss out on this year’s fruit.

And I’ve spent plenty of time planning, the ultimate January garden activity. Every year I make a list of what I want to grow, when I need to plant it, and where it will go. I rarely stick to it, but this year might be different; I imagine I’ll end up spending more time than usual in my garden. In any case whether one sticks to the plan or not, there are few nicer ways to spend a cold, wet dark January evening than in planning the summer garden with a pile of seed catalogues, the last of the Christmas cake, and a mug of tea.

Not much is in flower at this time of year, but the tiny white violas I planted last autumn have stayed in bloom all winter, and the pansies I left far too long before planting have just come into bloom again. The white chaenomeles has a few blossoms, but I think needs a hard prune after flowering to encourage it to become more bushy. And one of the winter honeysuckles has its tiny creamy white flowers, which have a beautiful delicate scent in the sunshine (I can’t remember any more if it’s lonicera purpusii or lonicera fragrantissima,  but it is very fragrant.) One of the hellebores has just put up its first flower, and all over the garden the green shoots of imminent bulbs are showing. Next month there will be snowdrops and crocuses, and maybe even the first few narcissi.

(The image at the top is from Eugène Grasset’s calendar designed for the French department store La Belle Jardinière. There is an Art Nouveau lady gardener for every month and I think they’re very pretty and fitting for these monthly updates.)