From me to me at Christmas

I know this is cheating but just in case I don't get the gift of a book for Christmas, I've bought myself not just one but two.

'The Wild Garden' by William Robinson was first published 144 years ago to illustrate to the Victorian gardener a naturalistic and informal alternative to the fashion for seasonal tender plants used in rigidly formal displays. Although radical at the time you would expect that with the passing of the years his message would have lost its relevance, but with the ever more pressing need for us to garden in a sustainable way, William Robinson's ideas are just as relevant today. Using plant communities that coexist easily and happily without the need for a huge amount of intervention from us to cover the ground and exclude weeds with their vigour is a great way to plant for a Victorian or modern gardener.

The other book I've treated myself to is bang up to date and by two of the leaders of current planting styles, 'Planting A New Perspective' is by Piet Oudolf and Dr Noel Kingsbury. They describe ways of planting to achieve a naturalistic look and an easy maintenance regime using plants suited to the garden's conditions. At first glance these books couldn't look more different from each other, one illustrated by small black and white line drawings the other packed full of exciting vibrant photographs of planting combinations, an explosion of colour, shape and form.

Yet at their heart both books ask gardeners the same thing, to think about what we plant and the way we do it, to understand the plants' needs and use them in combinations which encourage them to perform their best for us in schemes which are easy on the eye and are not difficult to maintain.

It's incredible to think how much has changed in the last 144 years and yet in the world of plants, despite so many new ones having been brought into cultivation. the message remains basically unchanged. It's all about gardening with thought.

By coincidence, it just happens that there's another book I quite fancy called 'The Thoughtful Gardener', but I couldn't buy myself three Christmas presents could I?

Weeding.....

Weeding the garden is a bit like doing the house work, I know that if I keep putting it off things will only get worse and yet I've been doing just that for the best part of a year. I'm a reluctant weeder, not because I find it a tedious task but because I actually rather like weeds. Having evolved to be perfectly suited to our growing conditions, our wild flowers are much more at home here than the fancy ornamentals we would rather have, but there are some that are so successful even I must concede that they really do have to go.

Given the tangled mass of foliage in my beds and borders, any sensible person would dig over the soil pull out all the weeds and throw the lot on the compost heap. But contrary to sound gardening advice if I don't know what a plant is I'll leave it and see what it turns out to be, so my weeding efforts can be very long winded as I inspect and attempt to identify all the seedlings of granny's bonnet, teasel, self heal, valerian, viola, vetch and anything else that might have decided to pop up. I enjoy gardening on this intimate scale, close up, down and dirty with the woodlice worms and beetles. It also means that I don't inadvertently dig out any of the self sown hellebores, poppies, fennel and verbena and it allows me to get to know my garden and its inhabitants in much finer detail.

Where the buttercups are growing the ground retains moisture, the soil is richer so I know it will be a good place if I want to grow Hosta, Rodgersia or Ligularia. The dry patches at the edges of paths I've found to be alive with ants, perfect spots to watch out for a visit from a hungry green woodpecker and at the base of a dry stone wall is a daytime hiding place for snails where I can sometimes see the thrush hunting.

On hands and knees I'm at eye level with the blackbirds taking their daily bath in the pond and the robin as he follows my progress inspecting the disturbed ground for insects.

This isn't just weeding and it's certainly no chore, what I'm really doing is getting to know my garden intimately and hopefully next year we will both be all the better for it.

Self heal - the name gives it away, it used to be used to heal wounds.

Beautiful buttercup

Teasel - brilliant for goldfinches

Granny's bonnet - self seeds everywhere, a great gap filler

Gorgeous, graceful grasses

Ornamental grasses seem to divide opinion more than any other group of plants. Some people, myself included, love them for their grace and elegance, the way they catch the breeze and add colour and movement to the late summer and autumn garden.

Others view them as a passing fashion, or worse, as nothing more interesting than stray seedlings from the lawn to be ripped out with the creeping buttercup and bindweed.

They may be relative newcomers to our gardens but I firmly believe that their positive contribution is here to stay. Some designers like to use grasses in bold contemporary blocks of single species, some in prairie style mixtures with other late flowering North American plants, their natural bed fellows. In my own garden I like to experiment with plant combinations and I've found the diversity and versatility of grasses to be indispensable, they are simply brilliant garden plants.

The cascading copper and olive foliage of Anemanthele lessoniana tones beautifully in shade with the fern Dryopteris erythrosora or in sun with orange roses like 'Lady of Shallott' and makes a perfect backdrop to the sky blue geranium 'Rozanne'. As autumn approaches the tiny droplets of bronze flowers on long falling stems are perfect with Aster 'Monch' and Kniphofia 'Little Maid' or 'Bees Lemon'. 

Low growing with a dense arching habit it's perfect for covering difficult banks

For height without heaviness Miscanthus 'Morning Light' is just lovely. Upright and slightly arching at the tips with a fine white stripe through the light green leaves, it rises slowly over the summer to form a statuesque plant, perfect with Anemone 'Honorine Jobert; white Hydrangea quercifolia or Fuchsia 'Hawkshead, very refined and elegant.

As the year moves on and the colour in the garden begins to turn, grasses with good autumn hues shoot like flames around the skirts of fiery leaved shrubs and trees like Acer palmatum, Cotinus coggygria and Amelanchier lamarkii.   Imperata 'Rubra' has red tipped leaves all summer and many of the Panicums have brilliant red autumn foliage, spectacular when teamed with deep red Persicaria amplexicaulis 'Blackfield'.

If you're new to grasses and it's all year round versatility you're after then Stipa tenuissima is hard to beat, light and airy the foliage and long lasting wispy flowers float among so many perfect companions from geraniums and roses to lavender and Potentilla fruticosa cultivars, it's a brilliant grass for any garden style.

'Bee neighbourly'

Whenever I'm out in the garden I always feel the need to be doing something, pulling up bindweed, watering pots, rescuing a plant in the greenhouse from heat stroke, I do find it difficult to just sit.

But I must do try harder because it's in those quiet, still moments when we're just being not doing, that we actually appreciate just how much other activity there is. When we stop being busy ourselves and take notice of what's going on around us it's remarkable how industrious animals are and none more so it seems to me than the wild bees. They have to be I suppose to cram their life's work into just a few short weeks.

I'm paying more attention this year because I have a brilliant bee identification chart so now I can put names to them. Some which I'd always assumed to be just smaller bumble bees are actually solitary ones which as their names suggest don't live in colonies but lay their eggs in individual holes in walls, or in the ground like the tawny mining bees which I watched in the spring disappearing down cracks in the lawn's bare patches. They are the little ginger furry ones, white bottomed ones with the fluffy boleros I've discovered to be tree bumble bees and the black ones with bright orange bums are red tailed bumble bees. There are several with yellow stripes, but they'll have to slow down a bit before I can be confident enough to know whether I'm seeing a buff tailed or a white tailed or even a garden bumble bee!

I always feel much more of an affinity with something when I know what it's called, like being on first name terms with the neighbours, the more I know about the bees which share my garden with me the less likely I am to do something to upset them and just like any good neighbours we help each other out. I leave my lawn uncut so they have big patches of clover, birds foot trefoil and bush vetch in which to forage and from the densely packed fruit along the branches of the plum trees they were very busy pollinating for me this spring.

A very fair exchange, I do hope we stay on good terms now the runner beans are in flower!

Scentsational!

I have made a promise to myself that this year I will not squander the lovely long summer evenings inside, neither at my desk working nor in front of the tv, but be outside enjoying the daylight hours in my garden for as long as I possibly can and so far I'm sticking to it.

I'm equally happy doing something useful and productive like a stint digging in the veg patch or just pottering around looking which new flowers have opened and noticing as day by day the garden gently settles down from it's fresh spring flush into the soft fullness of early summer.

So well known by day, the garden changes into an unfamiliar and magical place as dusk gathers, the blackbirds which always seem to be the last birds to stop calling fall silent and the rooks and jackdaws pass over following the same flight path every night on their way home to roost.

As the natural light fades there's a chance to see bats flit silently but swiftly over the pond on the hunt for moths and as all the colours disappear, in monochrome, any white flowers glow as if artificially lit.

As vision become less certain we notice other sensations like the drop in temperature and a freshening breeze. Hearing becomes a bit more acute picking up the typical night time 'twoo' of a tawny owl and a sharp 'twit' answering call and the scents of the night garden are suddenly really noticeable.

There's the heavy sweet perfume of so many flowers, late bluebells, lilac, honeysuckle, wisteria and as June wears on roses pervade the air but to sniff the delights of many plants we need to rub the leaves to release their oils. Herbs like rosemary, thyme and sage evoke a succulent Sunday roast, Perovskia, Santolina and lavender are a reminder of a Greek island holiday. Mint has to be the freshest of all scents especially after rain, just like toothpaste, but for me the best of all the garden's many wonderful perfumes is yet to come. I'm looking forward to one of the highlights of high summer, walking into a warm greenhouse full of tomato plants, it's just scentsational!

Feeling right at home

From the number of people I see gazing into estate agents' windows, who like me are probably not in the market for another house move, I guess I'm not alone in being nosy about other people's homes. But I wonder how many are as interested as I am in the gardens surrounding them. It's rare to find the garden mentioned as a particular selling point and even rarer to see 'beautiful south facing garden' as I did recently. I think that the orientation of the garden is very important, but not long ago I saw a new client for the first time who had no idea which way her back garden faced and on showing her with a compass she was horrified to find it was north east, so surrounded by very tall buildings, only in mid summer would the sun shine directly into her garden.

For a sun worshipper or lavender lover this would have been a disaster but as it turned out that she didn't like to sit in the sun and her favourite plant was Alchemilla mollis then thankfully my visit ended well.

In most gardens, as the sun moves around it, we can move our spots to sit and benches strategically placed in a few locations not only give us different views but also the choice to be in light or shade.

Our plants unfortunately have to put up with what they've been given and all too often planting is a case of looking for a gap and sticking it in which at best only gives the poor plant a fifty/ fifty chance of survival. It's good for plant sales of course when we buy a replacement but it's entirely possible to avoid the guesswork and buy appropriate plants for the conditions we have and embrace the philosophy of putting the right plant in the right place.

The first rule of green fingers is to make an honest appraisal of our garden and consider which plant's tastes we might best accommodate, like lavender, thyme and sage from dry and sunny Provence, rhododenrons and camellias from the misty forests of Asia, grasses from the open prairies of America or should it be bluebells, wood anemones and wild garlic from under the opening canopy of a British woodland.

Although impulse buying plants is very tempting, for just a bit of consideration they really will repay our thoughtfulness and just as we do, they settle best, grow well and thrive where they feel most at home.

Therapy

I am writing this after one of those vanishingly rare Sundays when having enough time to spare to spend the best part of the day in the garden has coincided with the most glorious warm spring sunshine and it has been blissful.

It strikes me that if we all spent more time out in our gardens immersed in the rhythms of the seasons and the way that nature responds to it, watching and enjoying the plant and animal life that shares our gardens with us, then the world would be a much happier place. I've always thought that being close to nature is great therapy, good for body and soul and whatever ails them and it turns out that much research has been done on the subject and guess what, I was right all along and there are now specialist organisations set up to help us in our search for wellness.

Ecotherapy focusses on our connection with the natural environment and how through learning to care for it we can in turn learn to care for and nurture ourselves.

Thrive is a charity which helps people with physical disability or mental ill health through horticulture and gardening and Project Wild Thing aims to educate adults about the essential developmental needs of children though their relationship with nature.

These are just a few of the groups working to get us outside and back where we belong doing wonderful worthwhile work but how sad that there is a need for them when just outside our own back door there it is, the natural world which many of us have forgotten, or never learned, that we need to belong to.

Now in mid spring is the very best time to appreciate it, every day sees changes, plants are growing almost as we watch, new unfurling leaves are fresh and vivid green, the spring flowers are bursting open and all the animal life that depends on them is busy making the most of the increased light and warming temperature to feed up, find a mate and rear their young.

Now in the garden is the most positive and life affirming place we can possibly be. Why would anybody want to be anywhere else?

Spring has sprung!

I love March, it's one of my favourite months of the year, there's so much anticipation in the garden and as the level of light is rising life is responding to it. Bright and cheery daffodils shine out from borders, dainty little violets and primroses nestle into grassy banks and under trees where the first of the year's new fern leaves are preparing to unfurl are the glamorous flowers of hellebores.

There are so many exciting cultivars of Hellebore, cups of pristine white, frilly pale pink, deep and dusky shades of sultry purple, some are spotted and streaked and others the most delicate picotees, the edges of their petals washed with the lightest brush stroke of colour.

Where happily established they will promiscuously interbreed, their progeny adding yet more variety year after year.

One sunny days the first of the season's bees will be busily bumbling about foraging for food from early dandelions spangling the lawn underfoot and higher up from pussy willow catkins, gleaming silver against a blue sky and later in the month fat and golden with pollen. The first of the Prunus, the cherry family, are coming into flower, sloe are usually the first with plum following close behind. With flowers much smaller than the deservedly popular Japanese cherries sloe flowers form a haze of white so that the whole tree looks like a cloud, a lot like hawthorn from a distance but easy to differentiate, sloe flower on dark bare and leafless branches, hawthorn flower after the leaves have emerged.

In the pond the frogs are back, mild damp nights have them croaking noisily and the mornings bring shining blobs of black dotted jelly, usually in the shallows where the water will warm up more quickly in the sun and encourage algae to form, we're not so keen to see it but for growing tadpoles it will be a feast. As the birds turn up the volume the resident robin's beautiful melody warns others to keep away, this is his patch, while more sociable sparrows chatter in the hedge and the blackbirds sing out from their lookouts higher up in the trees.

This is a month to savour in the garden, despite the chill there's so much to enjoy, whatever the weather throws at us now spring has sprung, lets get out there and be part of the action.

Perfection

Yet another day of driving rain and blustery wind, but as just another in a long succession of them this winter I was determined today to actually get out in my own garden and trim off some of last years dead growth to see if there are any treasures lurking beneath. I'm not a tidy gardener and like to leave last year's foliage as shelter for tender new growth from hard frost but this is my first winter here and the temptation of revealing hidden treasure has been too much.
On a perfectly hideous day I have found perfection in the shape of exquisite hellebores and wonder that they retain such purity through all that the elements throw at them. But nature knows just what she's doing and leaves last year's tatty old leaves to protect the new blooms....until someone stupid comes along with secateurs....