A SHAKE OF THE HEAD

 The cardoon is assailed and ailing, beset with aphids and stunted. The wilder garden is too wild and after the rain flattened grass. 

The buddleia is out with bees and butterflies - painted ladies, red admirals, small tortoiseshells and gatekeepers not to mention various whites so I won't. 

And there are bursts of colour here and there and in one or two other places.

Though there are a few of the essential whites.

The pond is a dance hall for damselflies even though there is still little water in the stream - there are a few mole hills in there though.

And we have some fruit - a few greengages and apples but loads of plums, pears and damsons.

One colour that I am not enraptured by is pale mauve pink -

 

Acanthus (very prickly)(in fact a vicious plant) and the lace cap hydrangea at the woodland edge.

So, at least, we have bearable temperatures as long as I have my fleece.   

I cannot see why people are expressing surprise - we have been warned for years that if the politicians did not get their act together this would happen - and it has! It is probably too late to do much (except move to Iceland.)

As a bit of a fogey I am not too worried for myself but for young people this might be a nightmare? Time to make selfishness illegal?

Some chance.

THE BEST TIME OF THE YEAR

 So, there I was going to the new veg beds, newly surrounded by chicken wire fencing and about to sow some Sweet Williams and wallflowers for next year when there was a disturbance and a large rabbit jumped the fence and scurried away. Where I had planted some broccoli there was a big hole and no plants!

That is all I need - leaping rabbits. I mean sheep and deer are bad enough but - 

I love this time of year, May and June, the birds still singing, everything growing, light and shade though this photo is a bit of a cheek as it is of the Green Lane at Orcop Hill in Herefordshire!

It is Sunday and I look up the garden from an upstairs window. There are four rabbits on the lawn! Two adult, two smaller and they are eating the grass. Later I walk down to the compost heaps to empty the kitchen waste bin and then search for a rabbit hole. Nothing! As R says they are coming in from all sides to dine on our luxurious plants.

So to flowers, flowers and a few favourites -

This is one called The Poet's Wife and given to us by our children.

Of course, having a wild garden (jungle) we have wild flowers too - The simple meadow buttercup, foxglove and green alakanet.

Do not talk about veg beds - no germination of carrots or parsnips, some signs of beans, chomping slugs despite nematodes though first signs of potatoes albeit put in late. We have let the asparagus go, there are signs that french beans are appearing and fruit is on some of the fruit trees. The currants look good but they will also look good to the blackbirds.

Sometimes it is not colour and contrast that catches the eye, shape and design can too like the Allium Christophii.

At the moment I am reading Time Song by Julia Blackburn about the lost world of Doggerland in the North Sea. It makes one realise that everything in the garden is so transient as is life in general. It has been suggested that we are heading for a new Extinction like with the dinosaurs (though they fly around the trees today - birds) but this one is caused by a plague called humanity. Actually a dinosaur is still pecking on our glass doors.

Cheer up lad, the Rambling Rector rose is flowering in the old ash tree and has survived the winter storms.

So I leave you with rabbits, again - a small one having breakfast by the pond.

It is only when the wind gets up that you realise what you have forgotten to stake so job to do.

THE PLATINUM REPORT

So Platinum Jubilee, party for locals at the house - we even had sunshine - and I got to mow what was needed. You can see all the yellow rattle in the meadow area, some sorrel but not much else yet.

Having visitors makes one look at the garden with different eyes. Then I saw the bark chewed off one of the white birches - deer or grey squirrels? There are flowers still on the Magnolia stellata, still on the camellias and the sycamore flowers had quite abruptly become seeds! 

And so to the story of the potato from the veg cupboard. I stuck in on top of this glass container filled with water and waited. As I was proud of its root display I brought it into the kitchen just before the Jubilee do. It did not last long and was back in the utility immediately. R, obviously, did not appreciate its finer points, especially when it is backlit by the sun.

We do have some glorious roses - this is one called The Poet's Wife.

Back to the garden, I had forgotten the Clematis montana Albert up the old Christmas tree and am pleased that the red campion is out in the wood (even in some of the flowerbeds) and that we have one or two white variations. The Rose Rambling Rector took a hammering in the storm but is now staring to flower where it has survived. I had also forgotten the Gladiolus nanus in the main rose bed.

S the wonderful gardener had been just before the do and strimmed the lower banking (so the pond could be seen from the house). He left the Hedge parsley and the Comfrey. No duck or pheasant nests there this year.

He also finished the central path in the veg beds with chippings over a permeable membrane. Not far from there is the greengage tree we were given by our daughter and son-in-law - we are a bit far north for lots of fruit but with global climate change we hope. We do have a few fruit this year and pray they survive.

There is plenty of colour, poppies and camassias, alliums and geraniums and, we hope, much more to come. The BBC said that it had been the fifth warmest May on record - I wonder where that was? I must go and pot on a few struggling pot plants.

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 !!!!