Heather at Xericstyle, San Antonio, Texas, hosts one of those 'sharing' events among garden bloggers. You take a picture of your garden (in the long view) and post it on the first day of each month. I've wanted to add my tuppence worth for a long time, but never quite got up the steam. Here I finally am. What's really brilliant about this idea is that not only could it be of interest to other garden bloggers, it's also your own record of what your garden looks like from month to month. I'm planning to take four pictures each month. Three from our balcony and the final picture (left) from the bottom of the garden, through the orchard looking up to the house.
There are some amazing garden bloggers out there. How do they manage to do the garden, take the pictures, and find the time to sit down and write about it (as well as design the post)? Hats off! The beauty of Heather's idea (along the lines of 'Wordless Wednesday') is that you are still sharing your garden, but without having to write so many words (I'm lazy). Take a look at Heather's website, and you'll also find links to other garden bloggers' 'wide shots'. Here we are, my third March in this garden, and people say we are about a month ahead of ourselves. From the first day of March we had no rain for an unbelievable 22 days (the last two years have seen a washout month), with daily temperatures on our south-facing slopes sometimes climbing to 24 or 25 degrees centigrade. The crocuses have now been and gone, and I'm savouring the remaining daffodils. After that long dry spell we had welcome rainfall last weekend, but it seems we will have to hold our breath until the next gift next Saturday, 5 April. It's been quite whirlwind month here - good and bad. To begin with the bad: my second chocolate Burmese cat was put to sleep early in the month. Fortunately Aldi had a special offer on Magnolia soulangeana (already marked in my diary since I'd been planning to plant two in the Hornbeam Gardens). So he's sleeping peacefully down below now, bless his affectionate little soul. Unfortunately they did not have a special offer on chocolate Burmese kittens; I had to make do with gazing at pictures of them on the internet for hours that night. Nick says the cats will rightly be frightened of the month of March from now on (beware the ides and all that ...), since this is the second year running we have lost a chocolate boy in this month. We have two little brown (nervous) ones left, dreading the arrival of next March. My second post ever on this blog was about the first chocolate boy, Musha, now fertilising a spectacular growth (after only one year!) on Rose 'Blairii No. 2' in the Iris Garden. Below are pictures of Eirig being comforted by a friend on the night before his death and the amazing basal growth on Musha's rose. Always fertilise your young roses with dead cats. The Rose Walk is looking PDG, if I do say so myself. I'll not have the Dame's Violet (Hesperis matronalis) that made it so pretty last year - the plants were so big that they swamped the roses, and I decided on lower grower companions. Having said that, I often change my mind. The most recent additions are three clematis ('Arabella', 'Mme Julia Correvon' and a white clematis gift left by the previous owner). I'm feeling quite proud of the little rustic tripods (below) that my gracious hazels supplied. Although the gaps left by the coppicing are still painful (and we needed their shade), hopefully young stems and catkins will be there to keep the snowdrops company next year. I never did manage to tart up my scruffy path with nice paving stones or to cart my rubbish away during the winter ... but that's life. The vegetable garden (above) has now been terraced, although so far I've not had time to do planting/sowing. But - hurrah, hurrah! - today kindly friends stopped by with a heap of well-rotted manure (thanks Clare and Monk!). I'm not sure if the terracing was a good idea after all - there may be weed growth from the top of the landscaping fabric (weeds are sometimes hard to remove on our heavy clay), and the central portion is very narrow. But it's done now, and when I get up a second wind I could always put it back again next winter (unlikely). I missed my veggies last year when I was so busy in the rest of the garden, but the boring job of preparing the ground reminded me how I feel about vegetable growing. I'm relishing the purple sprouting broccoli I'm eating regularly at the moment, but it doesn't quite fill my head with the same exciting visions as alliums, tulips and roses can spark while I'm doing the hard graft. The Long Border (below) is cleared for planting in April and there are plenty of tulips coming up (cheap from, you guessed it, Aldi.) I was very excited to see I had acquired a little Anemone nemerosa - possibly on the roots of the hosta given me by a friend last year. I'm still anxiously awaiting the arrival of the hosta itself, and I've found plenty of holes in the grass in front of the border indicating the activity of the voles. But no lives lost yet, and Syringa 'Charles Joly' is restored to his place on the Long Border (he was savaged last year and left with just a few roots). Note to one of the remaining Burmese cats: you are no longer allowed in the house Dill. Out there and on with it! The structure of the little Winter Garden is now there as well (to the left, above, the proposed knot garden; to the right the wilder area with the little stepping-stone path). But my poor transplanted hellebores and peonies in this heat! Since I am not buying any more box (due to the blight), the knot garden could be quite a long project while I take my own cuttings. This year I'm going to use it as a cut flower garden - you can just see the two tripods for the sweet peas in place. So much to say, so much to do, but I'm off to a good start for this year. Before I go, just a few plants that have made me happy in the course of the last month. Cowslips this early! They say here that if the cowslips flourish in a given year, there will be a good harvest of hay. I love them (and we now have three babies), but how on earth do you manage them on a formal lawn? It was fine when there was just one good clump - I mowed around them. But a few more sprogs and there won't be a formal lawn left, what with all my squiggles as I move out of their path. Lots to hope for (below). I noticed that my red peonies thrust their way through the ground earlier than the pink. Although the pink are in a much warmer position, I am only seeing their little noses now, virtually the last day of March. The red have been warming me with their colours for the last fortnight. The dry weather and the fact that I have not clipped the box for over a year now (and have removed any diseased growth when seen) means that I can still enjoy that emerald flush of young growth without great fear of blight. How can the French clip those lovely young shoots away? But I am currently being advised to do just that - the French clip twice a year. I shall stick to my English traditions and clip (if I clip - big 'if', dependent on weather) in June or July. Meanwhile rose 'Souvenir de la Malmaison' is already budding up - in March! A little more as per schedule are the buds on 'Canary Bird' and R. banksiae 'Lutea' - this last is going for the 'chapeau', to my great delight, since it has only been in the ground for a year. Whenever we have some sunshine, the bees are loving my little Dutch crocuses, planted in autumn 2012. Strangely, of the 25 Crocus tommasinianus corms that I planted last autumn, only 6 have made an appearance above ground - and much later than the other crocuses. Hopefully they are building strength for a flourish in 2015, but I doubt it. Perhaps I planted them too deeply or they rotted with all our winter rain? I heard my first woodpecker of the year in the forest opposite the garden this afternoon. A little later came the more disturbing sounds of hunters thrashing about in the undergrowth. I find them unnerving (even when they don't lose their hounds and leave them to rush about for hours on their own, baying in a distressing kind of way). A week ago there came terrible screams when they were 'doing their weekend thing'. A short while later a small baby wild boar rushed into the bottom of our garden and charged about in desperation before finally making its way along the river bank. I suspect that the screams were the sound of its mother meeting her end in the woods. Hopefully the baby survived, albeit to live a rather solitary existence. Helleborus x sternii (ex 'Boughton Beauty', courtesy of the Hardy Plant Society seed list in 2012) is starting to come into flower on the Mirror Garden scree bed. I noticed that in a seed pot of Helleborus argutifolius, which was sown and germinated poorly last year, there is a new flush of little seedlings coming up next to the two 2013 plants. The seed pot was given cold treatment in the fridge, but obviously needed more time to break the dormancy of all the seeds. Since they were in a cold room (min 2 degrees), rather than out in the frame this winter, there can't have been much of a 'double-chill' effect. Also looking jolly, a seedling Fraxinus angustifolia subsp. oxycarpa. I had this seed in 2012, the last year that the RHS distributed ash seed, due to the dreaded ash dieback (Chalara fraxinea). Apparently the disease is transmitted by seed, and I must admit I am a little dubious about my seedling, but since it is such a pretty tree with coral-red young growth, I'm taking the risk and growing it on. My little yew hedge (left, above), which will form a boundary between the Rose Walk and the Long Border, is showing quite a lot of reddish foliage. I don't think it has enjoyed this wet winter on my heavy clay at all. Fingers crossed that when everything warms up a little it will battle its way through to health. I'd be sorry if too many plants died, because that would mean I couldn't reliably use low yew hedges as a substitute for box. Beyond the hedge, to the right, are the Cornus alba 'Sibirica' and Cornus alba 'Flaviramea' plantings. Hopefully in the end I'll be able to add snowdrops, Ajuga reptans, hardy geraniums and some Eranthis hyemalis to complete the wilder side of the top winter garden, with the knot garden on the other side of the path.
The tulips and alliums (right, above) are comforting me with lots of healthy shoots. Best of all, I seem finally to have made Eryngium giganteum 'Mrs. Willmott's Ghost' at home! I've been trying to germinate seed for a number of years now. Last year was the breakthrough, and four plants in the Rose Walk have come through the winter. If you also garden on heavy clay, in a cold, continental climate, you might be interested in the list of plants that have survived here. I'm planning to add it in the next few weeks and would welcome your thoughts. I thought that this was only a religion in rural France, amongst the older generation. An acquaintance has people from his village continually commenting over the wall (with expressions of pity) when he appears to be doing something 'at the wrong time'. Fortunately, although people can shout down to me in my garden, they can't actually see what I'm doing because they are too far away. I'm also learning to lie. But now that I'm subscribed to a weekly gardening mag (both for my French and to improve my vegetable-growing skills), I notice that my periodical of choice has recently become obsessed and even slightly hot under the collar that I ensure everything is done at an opportune moment. Something to do with us all having a fresh start at the beginning of a new season. Since I'm one of those people who wishes to remain a student for life, I became excited and took careful note of what was required of me. And I love the idea that someone is bothering to remind me of what might be important that week. (As well as caring enough to include snappy little slices of fascinating, if useless, information.) As an ex-Buddhist I still firmly believe that we are all part of 'the whole', and it seems very obvious that the moon exerts a powerful influence on our lives. I'm thinking tides and so on, and I hope you are still (sort of) with me. When I began to read about gardening with the moon, I thought - yes! I'm going to try it! I'll make sure that I sow things when the moon is in the ascendant and prick out/prune/harvest when it is in the descendant. So I studied my free annual guide to the moon's movements with excitement. I sowed all of my Hardy Plant Society seeds when the moon was rising on a 'flower' day, 2 February. (Don't tell anyone I didn't quite make the 13.58 deadline - but all the pots were prepared by then, it was just a question of sowing ...) Later, on 10 February (still a root day, up until 17.43), I sowed my onions ('Paille des Vertus'). This probably seems a little late to British gardeners, since Boxing Day is traditionally onion-sowing day, but theoretically we have a longer growing season in France. But here comes the rub. I noticed (finally - sometimes I'm a bit slow on the uptake) that a 'flower day' meant that the moon is in Gemini, Libra or Aquarius. A 'root day' means it is in Taurus, Virgo or Capricorn (typical - we Capricorns always get stuck with the dirty, hard stuff no one else notices until they benefit). At this point I realised that what a national gardening magazine was asking me to do was to believe in astrology for plants. Now I'm already a bit of an ashamed addict (it cheers me up when I'm low - sometimes!), but this is taking things way too far. I would love to hear the opinions of others? Do you do it? Does it work? I'm going to carry on 'following my stars' for a little while. I keep good records, but I'm not sure that I'll really be able to assess whether or not my onions are better this year than last. And I'm a bit worried about sowing salad crops once a fortnight to keep up a succession - how will that work? The photo above is of my rootstocks waiting to receive their scions - this 'must' be done after 21 March, no matter the season. (There's sense there - that's a date when the sap can be guaranteed to be rising, essential for achieving a good graft union). But presumably, nearer the time, I will be instructed to do it on a 'fruit day' when the moon is rising in Aries, Leo or Sagittarius? If I follow the rules, could be fruit nirvana this year! I was putting the daily temperature readings into my gardening journal this morning and read my comment from last year: 'might be fun to have a blog?' A bit of a wake-up call - for weeks I've ignored the fact that now I have that blog! In fact I'm nearly up to my first anniversary of starting out as a blogger at the beginning of March 2013. Not sure if that's cause for celebration or not? It does take over your spare time a bit. In fairness to lazy me, there's really been nothing special to record in pictures. Not so anyone passing by would sit up and take notice. I guess that's the bind with a new garden - there still aren't enough plants and there's an awful lot of dirty work going on. But, in spite of the fact that I'm not tapping the old keyboard continually these days, things have been happening. In the course of the last month I've completed my bareroot plantings for this winter: all of the coloured-stemmed willows, a little row of four Amelanchier lamarkii (where my husband didn't want them) and a Cornus mas (all purchased last year, with no time to plant them). The cornus brings back fine memories of mature specimens at Kew, although I doubt I'll live long enough to walk beneath its branches and sniff that sharp, sweet scent that always takes me back to winters as a student gardener, feverishly botanising in my lunch hour so I wouldn't make a fool of myself in the test that we endured every fortnight. My little bareroot Spiraea x vanhouttei had virtually no roots at all when I dug it up from its temporary home. Perhaps the water voles have eaten them? I realise now that the landscaping fabric I've been using is a favourite place for the voles, who adore walls and slopes (in France these days they often set up home quite far from the water). I use it as a temporary cover in areas I want to begin to cultivate, and then lift it off to get going. When I took it away from the second area on the veggie plot there were many little telltale holes, evidence of a happy vole population (and a threat to the gardener's peace of mind). And so, I find myself in the same mindset as this time last year - walking round suspiciously eyeing up all the little holes I see in my borders. I think most are innocent enough. Although I've found more tulips lying on the surface than I did last year. Only time - about a month? - will tell. Above you can see that the hazels have been coppiced and the winter knot garden is ready for planting. Because the box blight was so bad last year, I'm going to lay a square of landscaping fabric and insert cuttings from my own healthy plants through it, to protect them (hopefully) from rain that will splash the spores remaining in the ground after I ripped out the infected plants in the autumn. The idea of investing in more diseased material is not appealing. My healthiest plants are up on the edges of the terraces where there is plenty of air circulating and, as I've previously mentioned, I didn't clip any of the box in the garden last year because that serves to encourage the disease. But then there's the tricky issue of those mulch-loving voles to be got over. The snowdrops are up. The patches of common G. nivalis, 'Sam Arnott' and 'Wareham' (a G. plicatus selection as you can tell from the beautiful foliage in the picture below) that I planted in 2012, my first year, are thriving. Unfortunately G. elwesii has turned up its toes - can't find a trace. I noticed this week that there's a double snowdrop up in the Mirror Garden - perhaps a sad reminder of our garden in Ireland, from which we've so few plants left. Nick went on a little bulb raid there, just before we sold the house and was more successful than I realised, I guess. I couldn't bear to go back myself. I've bought so many snowdrops in my time (as well as being given them by some expert galanthophiles when I still lived in England) - but you really need to settle to enjoy them. I always swore I'd add three new types every year (they are expensive, aren't they?), but 2014 might be the exception. I've a lot in common with my Canadian grandfather who fought at Paaschendaele. Heavy mud that clings to my boots, continuous rain, little beauty to distract the mind or the heart. But fortunately this is only my garden, although I often become submerged in the muddiness of it all. Finally, there's nowhere left to hide. I've completed the heavier work that I could afford this winter (except for clearing away the rubbish - I can still do that!). The most pressing task is now the terracing of the vegetable garden. There are already young seedlings sprouting that are going to want to get out there and carve some sort of life for themselves in my mud during March. There are more than the usual number of hopeful signs in the garden in this mild February. Today, as well as enjoying the promise of flowers on a green Helleborus orientalis, I was shocked to see a swelling foliage bud on my white clematis (don't know the name, it was left in the garden). It's due to move up to the Rose Walk when the soil dries out and warms up a bit, but the idea that it is preparing itself for spring on 9 February is a bit frightening. In the course of an afternoon I mostly battled the cold north-east wind (although the thermometer showed an incredible 5 degrees), pruned and tied in roses - and relished the tiny bit of sun that's waking all those plants up too early. Christmas has left me with a broken camera and a persistent lack of energy. Much more positive is my growing obsession with coloured stems, especially of the willow variety. It all started with the hardwood cutting material I received from World of Willow last year and the need to move both these (now rooted) and some dogwoods down to the bottom of the garden, just at the point where it starts to flood. The result is that I've ended up with a vision for not just one but two winter gardens. The top garden (which will need to be worked in the spring) is going to be a kind of small knot garden, but I've started on the willow woodland down below during these last few days. The colours are truly amazing (better in life than in pictures, I think, since they are rather subtle in their variations). With a broad tract of occasionally flooded garden this could become a bit of a collecting mania (I've already caught the rose fever - 37 planted in the garden over only two years). All of the dogwoods (Cornus alba 'Sibirica') have now been transplanted down to the willow woodland (hope they don't feel like intruders!). To compliment their bright reds are the dark stems of Salix daphnoides 'Continental Purple' and the olivey green, reddish-purple tipped shoots of Salix purpurea (right). I read that the stems of this species are only sometimes purple - presumably depending on the maturity of the wood as well as natural variability. Next to go in will be Salix viminalis. I've four other colours still to add: S. myrsinifolia 'Nigricans' (the only cuttings which have grown on less than completely successfully), S. alba 'Chermesina Yelverton', S. gracilistyla 'Melanostachys' and S. alba x fragilis. I'm afraid that I may lack imagination. Whenever Nick mows or strims an area and leaves lines of raked grass where I hadn't expected them, my brain wrestles hard to go back to the original plan I had hovering in my head. But the line in the picture on the right is actually quite useful, since it does mark a point beyond which the floodwater never rises in the garden. The so-called 'Willow Woodland' is to the right of the raised turf line, in the occasionally flooded area. After studying it over several weeks, I'm thinking that I should run with it as more than a simple boundary. I've propagated too many apples and pears for our orchard. I now have three young plants of 'Cox's Orange Pippin'. (What I was thinking the day I chose the scion material? Three of the same cultivar in one small orchard! At least it's a good one.) Also growing on are a plant each of 'Caville Rouge d'Hiver' and 'Transparente Blanche' (a lushly juicy summer apple, which has to be eaten as soon as it is ripe). Then there are three pears: 'William', 'Fondante Thiriot' and 'Doyenne de Comice'. My inspiration is that I'll use the line Nick has created and plant them all as free-standing espaliers (on posts and wires) in a line dividing the wild (flooded) area of the garden from the much more formal orchard and hornbeam gardens. I will fit more cultivars into a small area and I think the boundary they make will be superb, especially when they are flowering. I'm not fussing too much about the way I plant, because I've so much to do and willows are pretty tough. So it's a little in the style of tree planting in a lawn - a circular hole with the plant in the middle (I'm putting all the rooted cuttings of one cultivar in the same circle because they are still quite smallish and I know I can space them out later). S. viminalis and purpurea are the most common osier species for basketry and the woven garden ornaments that have become popular. We have the national school of reed-growing and basket-making close by and I'm so turned on by the colours of my willows that I'm thinking I'll enquire about short courses there. I can fancy birds strutting their way through my orchard some day, just as they do at Fayl Billot. This year we will have the joy of relatively clean and distinct areas of the garden, all ready for planting. The last two years have been a simple slog of weeding and clearing - let's hope 2014 is where the fun begins! A few memories of 2013 for my mum & Nick, who are rarely here to see for themselves. In 2014 I'm going to be dreaming of more borders ... and more flowers. Happy New Year to anyone else who stops by! I was all set to write about the little winter knot garden I'm trying to make so that we have lovely patterns and colours to look down on from our balcony, even when the steps are too slippery or icy to allow us to enjoy using the garden. But then Pauline at Lead up the Garden Path left a comment on my post about the view from my living room window and her words brought a 20-year-old memory rushing back. A group of us were on a visit to the home of an alpine plantswoman. Unfortunately we were treated to particularly gloomy weather that day and did the tour of her smallish garden in heavy drizzle (it was either November or February, one of those slightly blue months). Eventually we crowded into her living room and carried on the talk about her exciting cold frames full of trillium seedlings and the other things we'd enjoyed outside. After a while I stopped concentrating, because I could hardly take my eyes away from her big picture window. There, framed as if they were in a painting, were the trunks and bare branches of two trees, planted in close partnership: Betula utilis var. jacquemontii and Prunus serrula. The colours and shapes seemed to fill the room with a vibrant sense of the garden outside, in spite of the miserable weather. I planted these two together in the garden of our house in Ireland, but a year or so later we moved and I was never able to enjoy the effect. Here it would be impossible. But if you are looking for two reasonably small, well-behaved trees to bring the 'outside in', think of this pair. The picture of the birch above was borrowed from the website of the Stone Lane Gardens in Devon, both a garden and a tree nursery, which holds the NCCPG collection of birches. Do take a peek at their website (I hope they forgive me for 'borrowing' their picture, but at least it's to promote birches and their collection). Better still, pay them a visit and post about their beautiful plantings. If only I still lived in the UK and could visit myself! It is difficult to buy plants in this part of France, and I have to resort to buying new things online. If anyone who lives in Europe can recommend good nurseries (with good prices!) that deliver in France, I'd appreciate it. Below are two pictures of the relatively small area where I'm hoping to put the winter knot garden. I had to rip out the young box plants in September when they came down with blight, and now I'm wondering if hedges of Sarcococca humilis or S. confusa might do as a box replacement? Meanwhile, Merry Christmas to anyone who happens to stop by! |