Great Excavations

I was given a stark choice this week - dig up the hellebores or lose my gas supply. The gasmen had detected a leak and, after helpfully aerating my flower bed with some sort of gas detecting probe, they announced that they would have to dig a three feet deep hole to get to the gas pipe in order to make a repair.

This flower bed is at the front of the house, and is planted with lots of spring flowers, so it was sad to have such disruption at this time of year. Fortunately, the route of the pipe was in the wide space between the two roses, (which I pruned drastically to prevent them getting accidentally damaged) and nowhere near my fantastic Daphne Bholua "Jacqueline Postill". The only important plants in the way were two lovely hellebores and two primroses, which I planted last year. The only thing I could do was to dig them up with a huge root ball and put them in pots until the gasmen had finished. I thought they would finish in a few hours, but in fact they didn't finish until 7pm, when it was dark and too late to try to replant anything. The plants sat in their temporary pots for 5 days until I found time to sort them out today.



The gasmen had filled in the hole in the dark, and compacted the soil, which meant I had a circular depression in the bed, about three inches deep. Some of the soil was still around the roses and other plants, but I asked the gasmen to leave the tidying up to me so that I could do it carefully in daylight to minimise the damage. This is what the depression looked like:

After brushing the loose layer of soil from around the surrounding plants and replacing it in the depression, I tried to reduce some of the compaction of the soil, by going over it with the fork, making small deep holes to allow drainage. I then mixed in an amount of compost in the top layer to improve the soil, before replanting the hellebores and primroses. Fortunately, the large root balls remained intact and went a long way to levelling the depression. To replace a small geranium which had been dug out, I took a couple of Irishman's cuttings from a geranium in the back garden and placed them at the back of the border. I watered in the plants thoroughly and added more compost over the top. Hopefully this will encourage the worms to do their thing and improve the soil. The area still looks a muddy mess but in time I hope it will look less muddy as the plants fill out.

Fingers crossed that the plants survive their trauma. The good news is that I shouldn't have to dig them up again anytime soon.

New Year, New Camera!

It's been a while since I blogged. But now I have discovered an easy way of uploading pictures from Picassa. It gives me a chance to show my garden in all it's January glory, using my new Camera - a Nikon D3100 DSLR - the first DSLR I have ever owned.

This picture was taken from my bedroom window, using the landscape setting. It shows just how dull my garden is at this time of year, although the bright green box hedges and the Cornus Sanguinea "Midwinter Fire" brighten up the view.

November? Where did the autumn go?

October went by in a blur of holidays, family and work commitments and a fair amount of rain. All of which prevented me from doing much in the garden. I returned from holiday on 8th October to a garden which was full of the soft colours of autumn.

There were plenty of weeds too - particularly between the cracks in the paving. I quite like the way they soften the garden. I will have to get them out soon, but there's no hurry. The slabs themselves are not particularly attractive or well-laid. I wish I could get something like thyme to fill the cracks, but I've had no success with seeds.

There has been a lot of wind this week, and when I went out today, I found that my rose arch had come apart.

Fortunately, I was able to fit the pieces back together without too much trouble. The clematis which was growing up it had been looking quite dead, apart from a few green leaves. I took the opportunity to sort out the dead stems from the one remaining living stem and tie it back onto the arch. Hopefully it will grow strongly in the spring.

I finally managed to plant my tulips in pots today. I have planted:
2 pots of Black Parrot (deep purple, black and frilly)
2 pots of Flaming Parrot (yellow with red streaks, frilly)
2 pots of Red Shine (red, lily-flowered)
3 pots of Pieter de Leur (red, lily-flowered)
2 pots of National Velvet (deep crimson)
6 pots of Ballerina (orange, lily-flowered)

They are now in a sheltered corner, with wire mesh over the pots to keep the squirrel out. I enjoy watching the squirrel, and don't mind if he eats the bird food, but I draw the line at stealing tulip bulbs.

I have replenished my stock of bird seed for the winter. I am trying to attract a wider range of small birds by having a greater variety of food, so I have feeders full of niger seeds, sunflower hearts, peanut nibs, "woodland crumble" (which is a mix of seeds, insects and mealworms) and a "high energy, no mess" mix. I will see which are the most popular in my garden. I also have hanging fat feeders and tray feeders for dried fruit, cheese rind, dried mealworms and suet sprinkles. These are popular with starlings, pigeons and, occasionally, jackdaws, robins and blackbirds.

In September, I planted some bowls with bulbs and cyclamen. I am very happy at the way the cyclamen have grown and flowered well. They are a lovely shade of red, which is easy to see from the house even on dull wet days.

September already?

I can't believe its September already. The weather has been warm and a bit wet the last few weeks, so some of the flowers are having a second go at flowering. I have been very pleased with this Anthemis Tinctoria EC Buxton. I planted it in the spring and it was flowering by June, in spite of being molested by my sweet peas which grew over it. I cut it back a little in July and it is now covered in flowers again:

I went to the Wisley flower show yesterday, looking for some late summer colour. I was hoping to find Rudbeckia "Goldsturm" which has bold cheerful deep yellow daisy flowers. Instead I found a relative- Rudbeckia triloba. It is the same colour but has smaller flowers with more rounded petals and is much prettier. I hope the slugs don't eat it.

I also bought this Selinum wallichianum, which I hope will have cow-parsley type flowers next summer. It has attractive fine foliage and purple stems:

I planted up two pots with "Minnow" miniature daffodils and red cyclamen for winter and spring colour:

My Japanese acers, grown in pots on the patio, are showing their autumn colour now. This is acer nicholsonii, which is one of the first I acquired, over 10 years ago:

This is acer shirasawanum:

This is acer aconitifolium:

And here are some general views:

August catch-up

During the long drought, when the garden dried up and seemed to come to a complete stop, there was little to do apart from watering the pots and tidying up. It was too dry to plant new plants or seeds to fill in the gaps. Fortunately, the drought was ended with a significant amount of rainfall, bringing on new growth, and the garden now looks full again. There has been a second flush of roses in flower, and the late-flowering plants are just coming into flower.

I removed my angelica in July, once it had set seed and started to look dead. I was planning to replace it with an ornamental grass, calamagrostis brachytricha, which I have growing in a pot. However, the grass was growing strongly and producing flowering stems which would have been damaged if I had tried to transplant it. I decided to wait until next spring, which is the best time to divide and plant grasses. As a temporary measure, I bought a tender deep red grass, pennisetum setaceum rubrum, to fill the gap. This will grow well until late autumn, but I have never had one survive the winter. You can see it here, in front of the tiger lilies.

Talking of lilies, I have had mixed results with the bulbs I planted for this year. The tiger lilies above flowered quite well, but the stems were bendy - possibly due to being too close to the angelica. I purchased these Scheherazade lilies from a plant fair at Wisley last year, and they have flowered very well in pots:

The pink lilium cerneum bulbs I planted in a bowl in February have completely failed. Three of them were eaten by slugs in spring, and the last one has shrivelled and died without flowering.

One casualty of the drought, in spite of my watering, was a white penstemon, which had always struggled and finally shrivelled away. I replaced it with a mathiasella bupleuroides "Green Dream" which I had seen at the Chelsea Flower Show. This has settled well, and is putting on new growth. Hopefully, I will have exotic green flowers next spring:

I'm very pleased with my fennel this year. In previous years, I have had plants eaten to death by slugs. This year, I have managed to plant larger plants which have grown very tall and flowered profusely. I bought three plants grown in hairy pots which allow the roots to grow through without having to disturb them. I think this has helped them settle, so the extra cost was worth it:

 Another casualty of slugs was my caryopteris clandonensis which I planted last year. I have replaced it with a rudbeckia hirta "Cherry Brandy" - an impulse buy from Polesdon Lacey. It is an annual, I think, so I will have to replace it next year. It has lovely deep red flowers:

A lot of tidying up and waiting for rain.

June and July are too hot for gardening in a small west-facing garden with little shade. This year has been particularly hot and extremely dry from early spring. The roses and other early-flowering plants have gone over quickly, leaving tired, dry leaves behind, and nothing seems to be in a hurry to replace them. This last week it has been windy, which has battered some of the taller perennials and knocked over the allium skeletons so that they no longer look attractive. My time in the garden has been spent cutting back and tying up and hoping for some serious rain.

One job I completed a few weeks ago was the trimming of my little box hedges. These were formed from two clipped box balls and a number of smaller box plants sold for hedging which I planted about five years ago. I aim for an informal effect, retaining the natural curves of the plans, rather than straight lines.  This is how the hedges looked before I started clipping:

And this is the result of an hour in the sunshine with a pair of secateurs:

I quite like the irregularity of the two shapes and the fact that there are two types of box, with slightly different shades of green.

Other work has included the dead-heading of all the roses, and cutting back those branches which had grown too far away from the support. Most of the roses will have a second flush of flowers and will continue to flower until about November.

Taking all the self-sown poppies and aquilegias out of the bed on the left of the garden, and cutting back the other perennials has left a fair amount of bare soil to be filled. Fortunately, a trip to Hampton Court Flower Show produced a small number of suitable impulse buys to fill the gaps. I have planted three Helenium "Moerheim Beauty", which have orange daisy-like flowers in late summer, and a potentilla "Arc en Ciel" which has red flowers edged with a touch of gold.

I was delighted to see another of my wild flowers blooming -Centaurea Scabiosa (Greater Knapweed). It is quite a small flower, and much more delicate and attractive than its larger garden versions:

The allium sphaerocephalon are in full bloom now. These are small round flower heads on long thin stems. As the flower heads grow bigger, the stems start to bend and sag in a very informal manner.

The flowers also attract a lot of bees, particularly these little bumblebees with orange tails:

One plant which I have retained despite its obvious deterioration is the angelica. This has finished flowering and is producing its seeds. It has been attacked by blackfly aided and abetted by ants which farm them for their honeydew. This in turn has resulted in an infestation of ladybirds and their larvae, which feed on the aphids. With all this frenzied activity, I haven't the heart to take the angelica out just yet. The garden will benefit from the increased ladybird population.

Another predator of aphids is the hoverfly. Here is a picture of one on the oxeye daisy.

Also performing well this month is the trachelospermum jasminoides, which survived the cold weather much better than I expected given its reputation for being tender. It fills the garden with a sweet jasmine scent.

June Catch-up

I've been busy doing other things, such as bird watching and going on holiday, and now I find that I haven't posted for most of June, when the garden has been at its peak, with all the roses having their first flush, and many other perennials coming into flower too.

The irises in pots came out very shortly after I potted them up, and looked very pretty:

The roses were equally beautiful:

I am particularly pleased that the last rose pictured - Corvedale - flowered well this year. It was planted two years ago, but has been slow to establish itself.

I was also pleased that the dwarf hemerocallis, which I divided and planted in March, has produced some flowers - not many, but at least all three pants are thriving, and hopefully there will be more flowers next year.

Also in March, I planted two oriental poppies "Beauty of Livermere" and these are now producing buds. One has fully opened and is stunning:

Also new this year, the anthemis tinctoria "E.C. Buxton" has flowered, and is supporting the sweet pea "Matucana" which is growing forward. This wasn't planned, but is an interesting combination. I have added some support to stop the two plants falling too far.

Some old favourites come up every year, and are always welcome. This pink geranium is a little too enthusiastic for the available space and I may move it in the autumn.

This penstemon "Sour Grapes" is also enthusiastic, but is very pretty and long-flowering, so worth the space.

This alchemilla mollis edging was originally one plant, which failed to thrive in the front garden. I moved it, split it into small sections and planted it at the edge of the paving, in front of the slightly raised bed containing the ponds. It covers the unattractive edging and looks fantastic for most of the summer.

The stipa gigantea is at its best and looks fantastic as it catches the evening sunlight

And finally, here is a view of the whole garden, through the rose arch: