The Rural Gardener - Order Amongst the Chaos

The combination of warmth and moisture that July has offered so far, has provided exactly the type of weather to create the conditions I described in my last blog.

In these, ‘growy’ conditions, the garden can quickly become tatty and overgrown without a little attention here and there. I have spent the last couple of weeks trying to keep up with this summer madness in all of the gardens I have worked in. Cutting back perennials which have finished flowering, such as aquilegias and some of the earlier geraniums, can make a big difference just now. Many hardy geraniums will quickly produce a fresh crown of foliage after being cut down to just a couple of inches or so and may provide another flush of flowers later on. Flowered Euphorbia stems can be removed, but remember that the milky sap which drips from the cut stem is irritating to skin, especially in sunlight.

Dead heading lupins, delphineums and roses amongst others will help to prolong flowering and tidy things up. Remember to leave a few seed heads on the plants you want to seed around the garden, young plants can be moved to another spot later in the year if necessary. Myosotes, Aquilegia, Poppies, Foxgloves, Centauria and Alchemillaare all reliable self seeders. Many herbs such as Lemon Balm, Catmint and Chives amongst others, can look decidedly scruffy and ‘tired’ by now. If they are cut right down to just above ground level, new fresh shoots and leaves will appear in no time.

When many plants seem intent on growing at an alarming rate, (wisteria, for instance looks rather wild before it is summer pruned in August,) and you are struggling to keep the weeds in check, there are a few measures you can take to ensure that whilst the garden may look rather exuberant, it retains a measure of calm and control! 

If you don’t have time to remove every weed and finish every job that needs doing…cheat! Concentrate on restoring a sense of order and do the jobs that give maximum effect.

Mowing the lawn and edging up regularly is always time well spent. It can be tempting to neglect jobs such as the edging up when there is so much to do elsewhere, but it really is worth spending time here. Edging the lawn with a pair of Long handled shears and using a Half moon to keep a sharp clean edge along paved areas really does make a big difference to the garden. You can often get away with a few weeds and wayward plants in a border if the chaos is broken by an ordered lawned area!

In a garden without grass, a few strategically placed topiary balls, spirals, cones or low neatly clipped box hedges, provide the same effect of order amongst the chaos! Keep paths open and weed free and concentrate on these areas first when cutting back or tying climbers to structures etc. If there is so much to do that you are unsure where to start, try and attend to key areas such as pathways and seating areas. 

However lovely it is to see a summer garden full of flowers and masses of foliage, it is always easier to appreciate if you provide contrasting calm! The lawn, neatly clipped topiary and weed free paths are all ways of doing this. Another idea is to create a place within the garden that remains well behaved and relatively neat, throughout the year. This could be an area of formal planting or a hard landscape feature which will provide that calming contrast to balance the more flamboyant areas of the garden.

At Stillingfleet Lodge gardens  http://www.stillingfleetlodgenurseries.co.uk/ in total contrast to the Cottage garden style of planting found throughout much of the 2 acre site, the modern Rill garden allows visitors to sit and enjoy a space which is simple and unfussy, even in July! Enclosed within a clipped hornbeam hedge, the seasonal changes in this space are minimal and consist as much of light quality and it’s effect upon water, stone and gravel as with the minimalistic planting.

As I work in Christine’s garden during the Spring, much of the action seems to be down at ground level! A delightful selection of flowering bulbs, hellebores and primulas amongst others, can be found amongst the shrubs and trees. Gravel paths wind through the garden and around a pond and eventually lead in to the Trellis garden. This formal, enclosed area, is separated from the rest of the garden by trellis covered with Euonymus fortunei, and really comes into it’s own during the summer months, when this tranquil shady seating area, provides a complete contrast to the rest of the garden, now overflowing with flowering perennials and summer bulbs! It is this contrast that you experience when moving from one to the other, that adds balance and makes both areas work.

However difficult it is keeping on top of the weeds and however tired I feel at the end of an eight hour day…gardening is EASY, compared to the technological advances I have personally had to make to bring you this blog. I am not the most computer literate amongst us, (I’m still struggling with the realisation that they seem to be more than a passing fad!) As none of my four children are currently at home just now, I have battled with my demons over the last few days to set up a Flickr account, in order to continue illustrating this blog. Apparently, the storage space on here is now full and in trying to be clever and create more, I have inadvertently removed all of my earlier photos!! I hope that the following link works and will try to remember how I uploaded the photos, in order to continue in the future!!    

Please do have a look at the photos which illustrate the last blog as well as this one. http://www.flickr.com/photos/julieparishruralgardener

The Natural Pest Control Consultant - Bees decline with more government spin

As we listen to the labour government lame excuses for not providing our troops with more helicopters, you may like to know helicopters are not the only important flying objects this government has neglected, they don’t care much about Bees either! Yesterday the Commons public accounts committee reported on the …

The Gardening Author - Part of the fun

Last week, I was reading the results of a survey (what did we do before those?) about gardening trends. It found that more and more young people are turning to gardening, but that they want immediate results and are doing it for aesthetic reasons, rather than the enjoyment of it. They have read the articles that say a good garden increases not only the value of your property, but also your quality of life and they are keen to adhere to the mantra - as long as it doesn’t require too much input of time or effort.

This reinforces the message that was being given out at the open day of one of the major seed and young plant producers last year, that most younger buyers now want DIFM (do it for me) rather than DIY. Their response was to produce their young plants as kits of container and plants that simply needed assembling - and they were selling very well. This year’s open day is coming up soon and I’ll be interested to hear the follow-up as well as what they are planning next.

Somehow, though, I do find it sad that this instant generation can’t find the time to complete the process. Everyone is so intent on cramming as much as they can into their days that it’s no wonder they’re stressed. They need to take time to “smell the roses” (literally!).

Gardening is a calming and relaxing hobby as well as one that can get you fit, it just depends what you want from it, from a window box to an allotment. Personally, I can lose hours just pottering in the greenhouse … and before you say that it’s a sign of age, I should add that I have been doing this all my life and was just as happy in the garden when I was a teenager as I am now. My first foray into gardening came with a packet of “Cottage garden mixed” seeds at the age of about 2, thanks to my grandmother (I still love Californian poppies to this day). She made sure I learned how to prepare the soil, sow the seeds, look after them as they grew and then (finally) she let me pick them. The later ones I wasn’t allowed to pick, so they could set seed for the following year, and she then showed me how to harvest and save the seed (it was too expensive to buy fresh every time).

I became fascinated by the propagation of new plants, to the extent that the greenhouse was full and I always had some to give away or swap. Putting roots on cuttings is so easy compared to fitting the results into an already crowded garden!

I really hope that having plants around is the first step for at least some of these people and that they get bitten by the bug. It’s a hobby that can last a lifetime, help you relax and make friends and even feed the family with fresh, healthy veg and fruit. New converts to gardening do sometimes tend to be zealots who rush out and write a book, but only because they want to pass on the joy of their new occupation.

I’ve been doing this for, well, a long time and I would never presume to call myself an expert. I’ve met people who spend their entire lives growing one particular type of plant and I could never hope to come close to knowing as much as them about it. They truly deserve the title “expert” on that plant, but they probably know little about any others.

Starting small is good and if buying a kit this year leads to growing more next year, then it has worked. Let’s hope that the survey I read in a few years is one that says gardening is replacing computer games as the number one pastime of the young!

The Gardening Author - Moving on

Well, the show is over and we survived. We talked to hundreds of gardeners and sight-seers alike, from all over the world and sold many of them plants. The exhibits came together in the end and we were awarded Silver for one and Bronze for the other. The show closed at 5.30 on Sunday afternoon and, by the time we left at around 8, there was little left. The stands themselves were dismantled yesterday and today, the RHS construction team have moved on to the site of the Tatton show in Cheshire, which is on next week. How the exhibitors who move around doing all the shows can face another so quickly, I have no idea.

It was noticable that people were spending less freely this year and being quite selective about what they did buy. However, not one person asked about the provenance of the plants. However much governments and lobby groups may bang on about the environment and miles travelled, to the buying public the key factor is cost. They simply don’t care if the plant has been raised locally (and has travelled fewer miles to get to the show than they have) or if it has been flown in from Holland.

This does make it difficult for the local grower. Unlike Holland, where horticulture is heavily subsidised, our growers are on their own and have to pay the market rate for their heating fuels and transport costs. Plants can be brought in from the Continent for a fraction of the cost of production here and the fact that the quality is often variable is irrelevant. The DIY ’sheds’ and chain garden centres would rather shift large volumes of cheap plants than stock local produce that has to cost more. What they don’t offer the keen gardener, though, is a wide choice. And that’s the value of these shows.

I had many conversations with delighted gardeners who had found plants that were ‘a little bit special’ and ‘not one that I could find in the local garden centre’. This is how the divide is opening up; if you want ordinary plants at a cheap price, then shop at the DIY shed or chain garden centre. But if you are a keen gardener and want something different, then seek out the independant nursery or visit them at shows like Hampton Court or Tatton. These are the growers of the plants they are selling and they are the very best people to ask for advice.

Besides, it’s a very pleasant day out!

The Rural Gardener - Summer Time and the living is Easy…

It happens at about this time every year. Chaos.

Previously orderly and familiar gardens are turning into towering wildernesses of Sleeping Beauty forest proportions. A walk through a wildflower meadow reveals a Rain Forest diversity of biting insects! The sound of the grass growing is only drowned out by the steady creak of snail shells being dragged up the greenhouse towards the vent. This allows mollusc access to young Runner bean seedlings which were sown to replace the ones eaten to ground level outside. If my eyes were not so blurry with hay fever, I would notice a fine collection of weeds, pests and diseases all represented within only a handful of gardens.

So what happened?

Not so very long ago, we were enjoying that first gentle flush of early summer, rejoicing in the smell of freshly mown grass and the appearance of lush foliage and a myriad of flowers in all colours of the rainbow. There is a great sense of satisfaction in watching familiar shrubs produce new growth and newly sown seed emerge and grow. It’s that time of year when the artist within the soul feels inspired to paint, photograph or simply to drink in the picture we have helped to create.

As I said in an earlier blog, there is something reassuringly gradual about the pace of change in the garden during the early part of the year. Every slow motion milestone is a step closer to warm weather and increasing day length. The snowdrops appear and we look forward to daffodils. As the mower emerges from winter hibernation, we look forward to foxgloves, roses and lavender.

Anybody who spends a lot of time outdoors in the garden throughout the year, will understand this feeling of seasonal pace that I am talking about. By late Spring there is the dramatic transformation of bare stems and earth to soft green foliage and new shoots. Gaps are filled and hard lines are softened. Although dramatic, this change has a fresh and delicate quality which allows us to enjoy a wayward shoot and a flower out of place. These little acts of plant rebellion simply help to reinforce the fact that winter has finally passed and bring with them promise! Promise of the summer to come.

All of a sudden it arrives. Summer, the season we have been waiting for.

Long lazy days when the garden can potentially be that picture postcard, chocolate box, magazine cover cottage garden we want. Days when the paddling pool holds more appeal than the computer. Those long warm days make every task pleasurable, snipping flowers for on the table, picking fresh salad and fruit and dead heading the roses to the tune of bumble bees.

Or in the real world, a garden in which there seems so much to do, we barely have time to keep up with the mowing, weeding and harvesting to notice that the days are long, never mind lazy. By early July it would be great if we could slow things down a little and have more time to enjoy the moment. There are plants that flower in firework display fashion, breathtakingly spectacular but over too quickly. Unlike Autumn berries, once the strawberries and raspberries are ripe, they need picking at once.

I have spent the last week trying to keep up with the summer rush in all of the gardens I have worked in. Though each of these gardens is different, the feeling of plants increasing in volume and weeds growing quickly in the hot and humid weather is the same!

Next week I am going to look at a few simple ways to restore order to the chaos of mid summer in the garden!

For now I would like to finish on a positive note. Despite the best efforts of slugs and other pests and of extreme weather which has ranged from blistering heat to heavy downpours, it is good to know that the garden has a few subjects which seem to battle on regardless.

The gooseberry bushes which I am pruning in February on my blogger photo are in my own garden and never cease to amaze me. They look pretty as they come into leaf in the Spring and provide structure in the fruit and vegetable garden at a time when there isn’t much. By late May….I am ashamed to say, they are usually playing host to Gooseberry Sawfly larvae. I do start off by picking off the leaves with eggs or teeny baby larvae on, for a while, I continue to remove the bigger ones that escaped initial detection. The adults lay the eggs on the underside of leaves near the base of the bush. As the larvae hatch, they eat their way up every leaf on a branch if you allow them! 

As the gooseberries flower and the little fruits fatten, there comes a point when I obviously take my eye off the ball. There is so much else going on in the garden! Suddenly, the bushes have tatty remnants of skeleton leaves, with big fat caterpillar type larvae making their way to uneaten patches of foliage up near the top. Yet what amazes me, is that the bushes still produce an abundance of fruit! Three bushes have produced 42lb of gooseberries this year to be precise! Nobody needs 42lb of gooseberries, there is only so much  Gooseberry and Orange jam and Gooseberry Fool anyone can eat in one year!

Still, lets hand it to these productive and resilient little shrubs!

Another, ‘good do-er’ this year, has been the wild strawberry. This smaller version of the plants grown for their fruit, spreads about by runners at quite a rate. It can take over an area if you let it, but is so easy to remove that it is not usually a problem. In more natural settings, such as amongst woodland plants and as ground cover where it can spread about happily it produces tiny, shiny, bright red fruit. 

I picked two small punnets in Yvonne’s garden, where they cover a small gravel courtyard area. She told me to pick more to take home…and I almost didn’t bother as it was hot and late! However, the wonderful smell and the fruit shining like little jewels in the sun proved too tempting to ignore and I filled my little sandwich box before leaving.

My own strawberries at home have been weeded, fed, de-runnered and we share them with the blackbirds and slugs. The tiny wild strawberries are neglected and perfectly unblemished. Sitting in Chris’ garden with her mum later that evening, Sybil and I marvelled at nature, as we ate the delicious strawberries with fresh cream!!

The Rural Gardener - Patience..A Forgotten Virtue?

It seems fair to say that those of us living in the more developed parts of the world are living life at a faster pace than ever before. Why?!

The technological advances made over the last fifty years or so have provided freedom from many time consuming and mundane chores at home and in the work place. Surely this means that we have more time to enjoy an improved quality of life?

As the washing machine gets to work on our whites, we are free to meditate our way closer to a spiritual enlightenment. The mere flick of a switch is often all it takes to illuminate and heat our home on the coldest of winter evenings. Great! No flickering candles and draughty ankles! Instead of collecting kindling and chopping wood, we can make good use of the extra time and read a book or knit a pair of socks….

…but we probably wont. The chances are, there isn’t time. To pay for our, ‘improved lifestyle’, the minute the washing machine is loaded we are either rushing off to work or collapsing into bed having spent the day at work. As for knitting wooly socks, are you mad? Who needs them in our modern cosy homes and after a day at work it is much more relaxing to watch TV or play on the X Box anyway.

This has had a big impact on our choice of hedges.

                                                                                Yes, really!

Along with improved technology and everything that goes with it, our expectations of what we want out of life are higher. It seems that ours is the age of speed and instant gratification, where surprise TV garden makeovers can reduce grown men to tears! To return home after a weekend away and find an instant garden, is obviously what some of us desire.

Nurseries and Garden Centres cater for this modern demand, by supplying a wide range of large container grown plants. There is an obvious pleasure that comes from seeing the transformation that a few large shrubs or trees can make to a garden, (more so if we have had some degree of input in the project ourselves in my opinion but that is a separate issue!)

So what’s the problem then? I hear you ask as you wonder if this blog has anything remotely to do with hedges.

There is nothing wrong with buying large containerised plants, but they do come at a price. If you have saved for the odd fruit tree or a specimen plant or two this is one thing but if you are planning a new hedge, it might be worth considering your options. So many people tell me they would rather pay a little more and have decent sized hedge plants rather than go for young bare rooted or even plants in small pots. This often attracts them to faster growing varieties which are a less expensive than slower growing plants which have taken longer for the grower to produce.

It seems a shame to compromise on our preferred variety in order to have bigger plants for the first few years. Bigger plants need more planting preparation and even allowing for this being provided, they seem to ’sit still’ for a couple of years after planting. Watering is critical until new plants become established and this takes much longer with bigger plants.

Planting small inexpensive hedging plants might seem like a poor alternative initially. However, if the plants are watered in and protected against rabbits where necessary, this will probably be the only after care necessary. Even during the first growing season the plants will grow away. The young plants seem to suffer less of a planting check and quickly find water and become nicely anchored. Within a few years the hedge grown from bare rooted stock will be established and well grown. 

All new hedges benefit from careful pruning even before they reach their required height, to keep growth nice and close and to encourage new shoots to fill in the base of the plants. Pruning deciduous hedges such as Hawthorn, Hornbeam and Beech by about one third of new growth, stimulates new growth and branching. If this is done two or three times a year and the hedge is kept slightly narrower at the top, you should produce a well shaped and thick hedge. The first cut can be made before the leaves open in early Spring followed by a couple more through the growing season.

Evergreen plants such as Privet and Laurel will also need pruning to create well branched thick hedges. Once again, try to encourage growth at the base by pruning back shoots. April pruning of evergreen hedges is a good time to stimulate new growth. If the hedge is pruned two or three times during the growing season in the first few years, it will form a dense well shaped hedge later on. Many conifers form naturally dense well shaped hedges and will need only occasional shaping until they reach the desired size. Do remember to prune conifers that seem to be top heavy or in need of shaping before you need to remove too much growth and risk cutting back into old wood and spoiling the hedge.

With a little patience it is possible to create a beautiful hedge quite inexpensively. During the process, you may find the rewards of producing a solid living wall from a row of baby twigs are far more than economical!

The Rural Gardener - Think about a Hedge Fund!

In my last blog, I wrote about Garden Boundaries. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more dull, today I am talking about hedges! Trust me, hedges can be interesting if you want. As a child I was always fascinated when we passed a topiary train that appeared to sit on a front garden wall. I missed writing my blog last week, so have decided to divide this subject and post two today.

Hedges provide shelter and privacy as well as an attractive backdrop to plantings within the garden. A mature hedge is often a much better windbreak than a solid structure such as a wall or fence. By allowing some air flow to filter through, there is less of a wind tunnel effect and as a hedge, particularly a deciduous one, will move with the wind it is less likely to be damaged in gale force conditions. A living hedge or screen will also reduce noise from traffic and other sources to quite a degree and will provide nesting places and cover for all sorts of animal life.

Unlike a fence or wall, a hedge takes up water and nutrients and is also much wider than we often realise, taking up between one and two metres or so of garden width. In a very small garden, hedges can work if they are kept clipped and in scale or perhaps a sturdy trellis with suitable planting would be an alternative. In a small garden where the effect of a hedge is desirable but space is very limited, it might be better to create a screen of mixed shrubs which helps to blur the boundary of the garden and therefore creates the illusion of space in a way which a bare wall or fence would not.

Maintenance is worth careful consideration before making any decisions about whether a hedge is the right choice and if so, what type of hedge. After the initial purchase costs, hopefully you should not need to replace your hedge and it definitely won’t need painting! It may however need watering during early establishment and you may suffer the occasional attack from pests and disease which need attention in some cases. I am thinking in particular here of aphid attacks on conifer hedges which cause large dead patches if untreated.

Most hedges need regular trimming, either by hand with a slasher or shears or mechanically with a hedge trimmer. If you plan to do this yourself, will your electric cable reach or can you manage the weight of a petrol trimmer? Do you feel safe going up the ladder if the hedge is going to be above waist height?  How long will this take, a spare morning every week or so throughout the growing season or maybe once or twice a year? Perhaps you would prefer to get somebody in to do this for you and if so, how much will this cost? 

These practical considerations are just as important when making the choice of plants as whether you want evergreen or deciduous plants, green or gold, shiny, prickly or whatever! Good plants for formal hedging, are generally those which make relatively tight neat growth and respond well to being kept within the desired framework. Many years ago, when some of the famous gardens we still know today were planted, hedges of Yew, Taxus baccata  and Box, Buxus sempervirens,  must have been tiny for the first few years of their life. Unfortunately there are fewer people these days who are prepared to wait for a few years whilst these wonderful evergreens make a sizable hedge. For those that do, the rewards are many because as well as looking fantastic, the relatively slow growth means that even clipping only twice a year provides a hedge of neat and close growth. For a permanently well manicured effect, clip more regularly. Because x Cupressocyparis leylandii is faster to establish, many people go for this option, despite the subsequent growth rate and the fact that it will dominate most gardens if not carefully controlled! Another conifer to consider for garden hedging might be the Lawson cypress, Chamaecyparis lawsoniana. Most conifer hedges need regular clipping twice a year because they do not respond well to being cut back hard if they have grown too large. Once you cut back into old wood, the hedge will not make new growth. Yew is an exception to this rule and it will often make new growth from even very old wood so can usually be restored from overgrown quite successfully.   

If you want a deciduous hedge, Hornbeam, Carpinus betulus, is a plant which seems at home in most gardens on most soils. Beech, Fagus sylvatica, is good even on chalky soils and both retain their dead leaves through the winter which help with screening properties and provide seasonal interest.

 

The following link gives further ideas for hedging plants. http://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profiles1000/hedge_selection.asp

Of Course the list of plants which you can use as hedging can be as long as your imagination! Whatever type of plants you decide on, if you are prepared to buy small plants or plan ahead and take cuttings to grow on, a hedge can be relatively inexpensive to establish. For those determined to go for mature plants to create instant impact, this will be more expensive and there are other drawbacks which I will discuss in my next blog.