PONDERING

 

I can almost hear the leaves breathing in the sunshine and warmth. More rain needed - soft refreshing rain please. 

I have moved the tagetes disliked by R to the back bed where there are some orange poppies and filled the space they came from with nicotianas and cosmos.

Friends have come and I have, with apologies, dumped 20 or 30 back numbers of The Garden, English Garden, Gardeners World and Country Life in their laps. (We only get the latter to look at the houses and mutter, 'Who can afford all these multi million pound houses?'.)

The editorial staff at The English Garden would probably throw their hands up in horror at our "evolved" garden - no parterre, big borders, plenty of weeds, some vague planning - put it in and if it does not work try it somewhere else. In the end plants either find a happy niche or snuff it.

Of course some get too happy and become rampant.

Ponderings - here there is a different flora - meadow sweet (R does not like the heady scent),

marsh woundwort and purple loosestrife, veronicastrum and water lilies, marsh bedstraw, marsh thistles etc etc.

The flowering rush is admired (R would like most of it removed wanting to see the surface of the pond more and our mallard back). 

The gardener has strimmed the banking but had to leave a clump in the middle as the pheasant has decided it would be a good place for a nest.

House martins keep coming and inspecting the eaves but they have not begun serious building. 

Walking up to the top garden is like entering another small world, a good place for meditation or just escaping from this shambles of a world we inhabit. Politicians spout about measures to deal with global ecological catastrophe but I have no faith in them. They will do something but only when it is too late and not too expensive. It makes me glad I am 75 but feel for younger people and this fractured world.

Enough - 

In the trees to the back of the decking we have a clematis and the honeysuckle Halliana. The latter has a wonderful perfume and brings back memories for us of Wolfscastle Pottery in Pembrokeshire where not grew in profusion inside and outside the building.

There is a bed in the corner which a used to weed assiduously but have let go so there is some of the thug pendulous sedge there but also such as primula veris. The stream/ditch runs at the back of this plot and is a thoroughfare for animals and birds to and from the field, especially the pheasants and, less pleasantly, occasional rats. As we have stables next door (very good for manure) we also have rats. Wild yellow loosetrife thrives as does comfrey.

The red currants are gone, most of the black currants picked and raspberries in the freezer for a rainy jam day. Rhubarb is tired but we do have some sweet peas! Not a lot but a small vase or two.

Then when all is said and I am waiting for the agapanthus to flower we have ROSES, glorious roses especially the blowsy Emma Hamilton from David Austin. The only problem it has is when it rains the heads become so heavy and the petals stick together.

Then I go away for a week and it its HOT and it is DRY and plants in pots wither and a rabbit gets into the rabbit proof veg patch and digs a burrow and then we find a young animal dead in the entrance with a bite on the back of its neck . . .  

BUT, if I go away and leave things alone I can grow sweet peas !!!!

GARDENING ON

No, I did not watch all the football, too stressful. They did OK but the best team on the night won (Italy). Now tennis is over and it will be golf. 

We have had rain - so the grass has grown, so the weeds have grown. 

It also means that the bonfire is not lit  - as wet, and the stack of paper from sorting out the year's accounts has not been burned.

Sitting with a friend S by the garden doors we saw a stoat and then a nuthatch on the feeder. 

The canna lily has flowered again and we are eating broccoli and broad beans from the veg beds. 

The black and red currants and the raspberries are  poor, when I can get to them first, before the blackbirds and thrushes.

I woke this morning, window open, to the scent of the philadelphus Belle Etoile which wafts through the house in competition with vases of roses.

Just been in shed and found sack of old potatoes well sprouted so now on compost heap. (The potatoes I mean).

We have been given a pink phormium and I have planted it near the osier.

And the roses bloom on -

I thought I had dug all the alstroemeria from the cutting bed - wrong!

And by the gate the two fuchsia planted to remind us of holidays in Donegal are thriving.

Just picked more raspberries and now have 2 1/2 pounds which is ideal for Mrs Beeton's wonderful jam recipe.

The petunias flower and flower though I am not sure how much I like the colour. I have put some tagetes in one of the flower beds and R definitely dislikes them and their colour so I will have to move them, somewhere, but where - time for a think.

The lilium regale have survived the beetle attack and are looking splendid, flowers out, scent out and many more buds to come. They have been in the same big pots for five or six years

The cosmos Purity and astrantia (masterwort) are a delight both lighting up dark corners in different ways, the astrantia delicate, the cosmos brash.

SUMMER ONLY SIMMERS

The new flower bed created because of the house extension is doing well and we are waiting for the agapanthus to come out.

The Rambling Rector roses are in full flood, one sixty feet up the old ash tree above the white willow herb, the other growing through the flowering currant at the site of an old well.

Then there are the other roses, some golden, lighting up a dark corner, others with patterned petals like one of R's favourites, Rosa mundi.

Other fantastic blooms include the peonies and poppies.

 

But not all are huge single flowers - the Royal Fern, Osmunda regalis,  by the stream is looking better than ever. 

Elsewhere we would be eating redcurrants if the blackbirds had not got there first despite netting the bushes and they are now having a go at the black currants. We are eating broad beans and broccoli though the chard had to go when it reached seven feet tall!

Another statuesque plant is the Phormium tenax variegata which is really too big and in the wrong place but would be a nightmare to move. It is also called New Zealand flax and it has rather strange flowers.

Our attempts to grow an aeonium after the assassination of our previous plants by a hard winter frost is ok but slow. I have put the pot outside beside the petunias.

On the way down to the pond, by the Wendy House, the rose Albertine and another climber whose name I have forgotten are climbing the young ash and sycamore growth. The scent of the Albertine is glorious. I have noticed that it is growing through the trees and is much better on the far side - for next door.

As is the heady perfume from the cut-leaved elder that has exploded in growth this year.

And thanks to P for this gunnera, a slow start but surviving by the stream.

We also decided to let the banking below the house go wild but it will only be for a while. I feel a gardener with a strimmer coming on.

AND HEAVEN IN A FLOWER

Well, yes, I know, sorry Blake, "Heaven in a WILD flower." So below are a lot of garden flowers. The red currants are netted but when I go down there is a clatter of blackbirds. I pick some and all the time they are scolding me from the damson tree.

But first the bad news - these have appeared on our lovely lilium regale and I hope I have caught them before they lay their eggs. The larvae have the delightful habit of covering themselves in their excrement to deter predators. Now there is an idea, better let the SAS know? Them I look and have to rub off the gooey black larvae!

Flowers outside become flowers inside, especially roses and peonies.

Speaking, well writing, of roses here are few of the roses now filling the garden with scent.

And other flowers, cosmos purity and philadelphus belle etoile.

The senecio as was, now brachyglottis are coming into flower. There is something about the grey foliage and the yellow daisy like flowers that I like.

Lambs' lugs, Stachys Byzantina silver carpet is another plant where the colours compliment one another - purplish-pink and grey add to which is the soft downy feel of the leaves. It divides easily and spreads slowly.

The pots by the door are overflowing with violas, petunias and euphorbia and will do so as long as I remember to feed and water them.

And I have just put three, yes three! sweet peas in a vase in the kitchen. 

Been to the supermarket and bought two osteospermums to fill a gap in the bed at the back of the house then lopped two lower branches off the grey poplar as they were encroaching on the weeping silver pear.

The geraniums in the garden are so valuable - flower for so long with little care. 

However this one has goosegrass (cleavers) growing through it and it is surprisingly difficult to pick the weeds out from the rest of the growth.

Finally - this is the maple that Sue gave us and we can remember her by, growing at the back of the rotting tree trunk that was made into a seat and above self sown foxgloves, a wild flower surely welcome in all gardens?