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    ‘Live and let live’

Two very rare things have happened to me recently, the first being that because there were no immediate deadline to meet I  had time to just potter in my garden and enjoy it and the second is that I’ve just been watching two fat fluffy young thrushes sitting together sunbathing on the patio; it’s uncommon for me to see one thrush in my garden never mind two.

It’s odd isn’t it that we take more pleasure in the rare or unusual, than the common and everyday animals and plants.  I’ve hardly paid any attention to the six or seven blue and great tit babies that are around the bird feeder almost all the time, like collectors of trophies we would rather see warblers than sparrows and orchids than dandelions in our gardens. We even classify the most prolific plant separately as ‘weeds’.

I think it must go a long way back into our early human ancestry when we perceived successful species to be a threat and now we begrudge the success of species that do well, ridiculous isn’t it considering what a threat we are to the rest of life on the planet.

Not a week goes by without someone telling me that a once interesting insect is

‘a pest’, a shrub chosen for its speed of growth, now ‘completely overgrown’ or a creeping perennial, pretty it’s early days has  ‘taken over the whole garden’.

Surely we should appreciate the cabbage white butterflies as we do the holly blues and congratulate ourselves that we have such fertile soil that the honeysuckle we put in a foot high is now up to the bedroom window and those lovely little wild violets, so delicate in a pot, are now seeding themselves into every nook and cranny in the garden.

I think it’s time to live and let live, celebrate the successful, consider them in more detail, appreciate their many good qualities and to that end I’m going to sow again the wild carrot romping through the border, close up its flowers are covered in hundreds of tiny beetles and the white mallow where little wasps hide in it’s lovely shiny cups.

This isn’t just the wildlife fanatic in me being given free reign here, there are some sound principles of design at work too. The boldness and solidity of bigger clumps and drifts of the same plant help to make a small garden seem larger, repetition of the same plant creates cohesion and harmony and if a plant has seeded itself and spread around happily and healthily, then it has to be from it’s own perspective at least, ‘the right plant in the right place’.

Any horticulturalist would agree I think that that is the basis for successful planting and by association a successful garden.

As long of course that it’s not a species being too successful … and when it comes to the number of snails eating the leaves of my runner beans…..but then again, without the snails I wouldn’t have the thrushes.

New favourites

This month's new favourite plant combination, wild carrot and greater burnet. I haven't grown these two native plants together before but absolutely love them; the way the burnet waves and bobs about in the wind is pure magic. Wild and wonderful!

Wild about my garden

I’ve just had a quick whip round my garden to pick a few flowers for a vase to cheer up a shelf in the hallway. It’s a hastily gathered bunch and I’m no great shakes at flower arranging but it does look very pretty with all the artless grace and freshness of early summer. Shining yellow buttercups, tall white willow herb, pink and white  campions, burnt orange fox and cubs, spires of purple toadflax and dog daisies, their faces turned up to the sun.

You’ll notice from the names that there’s nothing terribly exotic here, no hybridised and interbred garden flowers, in fact they are all common native flowers or very close relatives and no less lovely for that.

I enjoy having them in the garden even more than in the house, they are a perfect example of ‘the right plant in the right place’ perfectly suited to the conditions they’ve evolved in. Growing healthily and vigorously, full of flower and joie de vivre they are also full of pollen and nectar for the local insect population and importantly, a food source for bees.

We all know what a hard time bees are having now and how vital they are to our economy as well as our ecology, it’s a scary thought that we couldn’t grow many of our food crops without them but as gardeners there’s so much we can do to help.

Choosing flowers which are bee friendly, rich in pollen and nectar which is easily accessible to them isn’t difficult, lots of traditional ornamental garden flowers like Nepeta, Sedum, Aster, Anemone and Verbena are great but many wild flowers are even easier to grow and lovely to look at too, they are an essential part of my summer garden 

There are flowers arranged in flat topped bunches called umbels, like cow parsley, wild carrot and hogweed and daisies, big and small, are not single flowers they’re masses of tiny ones jam packed together in the centre of a circle of ray florets. These arrangements allow bees to eat and drink their fill within a small area, not wasting energy flying between widely spaced flowers.

Tubular shaped flowers like honeysuckle, foxgloves and clovers often grow close together in spires or ball shapes and are perfect for bees too, some like white clover are better for honey bees while bumble bees prefer red clover, apparently it’s all to do with the length of their tongues.

It isn’t just their wildlife benefit which makes wild flowers so valuable to my garden, or their lovely vibrant colours, it’s the combining and contrasting of their shapes which gives my garden its summer structure. Just like a flower arranger I can use their forms to create interest, harmony and balance.

No wonder they look so good in a vase!

‘Up close and personal’

It’s no coincidence that we find flowers the most beautiful part of a plant, the whole point of them is to be attractive, by their shape, colour and perfume. It is just about sex after all, their job is to get their pollinators to them by any means available and we find them irresistible too.

From breeding plants together to create ever bigger, brighter longer lasting blossoms to recording them in every possible way, we’ve endeavoured to make the most of their all too fleeting charms to keep them blooming for longer and record them for posterity.

From the Elizabethan ladies at their needlework and the Victorian amateur naturalist with his magnifying glass and watercolours to me and my daughter with our digital cameras competing for the best close up shots of my garden’s flowers, we’ve always felt the need to capture the moment, the peak of perfection of these most transient of beauties.

As a designer I spend much of my time exploring how colours, forms and shapes contrast or combine together, the composition of the whole picture being of more importance than the individual snapshots, but when it comes to flowers I’m just as seduced by them as anyone.

Each single flower is unique, it demands our full attention and the closer we look the more we see there is to appreciate. The subtleties and shadings of translucent colours, the variety of shapes as individual petals fuse or separate and just a sniff of the scent, in one intake of breath, can take us back years to a sun filled happy childhood and granny’s garden.

 

Of all the elements which combine to make a garden, flowers have always had the most meaning to us, that’s why this month when so many are at their most glorious and abundant we should take the time and trouble to really take a good look and appreciate our wild and garden flowers. 

Make the most of it, get out there, up close and personal. 

Design - Why bother?

Absolutely everything ‘man made’ that we use in our everyday lives, from knives and forks and tables and chairs, to the cars we drive and the houses we live in, have the origins of their form – the way they look, in their function – the thing they do.

In other words they have been designed to be fit for their purpose.

So why is it that still most of our gardens continue to just muddle along, bits of them occasionally changing piecemeal when the home changes hands and often it seems with very little real thought and consideration.

Take patios as an example. Most builders’ standard layout (sorry builders!) is a  rectangle of slabs along the back wall of the house regardless of its orientation, the material it’s made from or its age and style.

You might end up sitting shivering in the shade if it faces north on paving that looks just like all your neighbours’, it might be a lost opportunity, but at least it’s not a living thing and it won’t die by being in the wrong place.

Plants on the other hand could very well do just that if so little thought is put into their placing. Different plants need different conditions to thrive depending on their species origins. Some need full sun and well drained soil, maybe these came from the Mediterranean region or coastal sandy soils. Some need shade and deep humous rich soil, possibly woodland dwellers and others will need more moisture than the average coming first from the margins of streams and ponds.

Luckily most gardens can supply several conditions so we can accommodate plants with quite a range of different needs. By a north facing wall, instead of that paving , we could have Hosta and ferns, in the drier shade under a hedge or trees, Epimedium and Pulmonaria and on a sunny bank Lavander, Rosemary, Sage and Thyme.

By choosing plants which are best suited to them, we can use the opportunities these conditions give us to make the most of our gardens.

There’s a lot more to planting design than this of course but fundamentally it’s not about the latest plant fashion, at its heart it’s the it’s the combining of the right plants in the right places.

Our gardens are ‘man made’, and just as worthy of being made fit for purpose and designed with as much thought as anything else, so this spring when you go to the garden centre and buy some lovely new plants make sure that you’ve put some thought into the design of your planting first.

Why bother?  Just look at a well designed garden, it really is well worth it.

Measuring the changes in the seasons by breaking shoots and fattening buds is something all gardeners share. It’s the encouragement we need to remain optimistic as the chilly March winds blow . Winter is nearly behind us, spring just round the corner and then it will be summer with all its blissful flowery fullness.

If it stays cold and I need a bit of reassurance, then I go through photographs of gardens I’ve designed. They are usually taken in mid summer, preferably on a good day. After all, as well as a visual record for me, they are my shop window so I like to display the results of my designs at their sunny best.

They also give potential new clients faith and confidence in my abilities, knowing that the beautiful gardens they can see in them have grown and blossomed from the seeds of ideas developed and drawn up as plans.

It’s in this same spirit of confidence and faith in nature that we go out and buy packets of seed. It’s amazing to think that those tiny specks of dust and parcels of genetic material will become flamboyant silky headed poppies, shimmering white saucers of cosmos or sprawling nasturtiums. What incredible reward we get for such little effort and a bag of compost.

When it comes to growing vegetables it’s incredible value for money too. So easy to grow yet expensive to buy, runner beans are an absolute essential for me and one day I’m going to weigh the crop from one bean plant just to calculate the return on my investment in one bean seed.

My dad had even better value for his money, he always saved his bean seeds form one year to the next, driven as much by his ‘careful’ nature as the fashion of the time.

Gardens and plants are as prone to the whims of fashion as anything else we can be convinced to buy, but there’s one at the moment I’m all in favour of.

From the rise in popularity of vegetable growing it seems to be the current one and what a great way to use your patch of land.

Good for the body, good for the soul and good for the environment, as long as you garden organically of course.

It can’t be done with anything other than a spirit of optimism and I can’t think of any better way to prepare yourself and your garden for summer.

Brilliant birds!

This winter my garden has been an absolute delight, there’s been so much to look at I’ve hardly been able to drag myself away from the window. What has kept me there when I should have been doing other things is nothing directly horticultural but much more a result of the prolonged spells of cold weather and my investment in generous offerings of peanuts, bird seed and fat balls!

It’s been just like Autumnwatch, the number and variety of visiting birds over the winter has been exceptional, especially as my garden is on the edge of a housing estate.

For sheer size of wingspan in such an enclosed space the heron made the biggest impression and was the most surprising with a pair of pheasants strutting up the drive a close second.

Less of a surprise but just as welcome have been the passing fieldfares and redwings dropping in and lovely to see that the solitary thrush who’s been around for a while now has a mate and has overcome his shyness enough to hop down out of the tree onto the hanging bird table,

In terms of sheer numbers, the blue tits, great tits, sparrows blackbirds and starlings were the indisputable winners but the goldfinches brought all their relations, encouraged I think by the ‘mixed finch’ seed I splashed out on. This has also been a bit hit with a flock of beautiful apricot coloured bramblings, they first came in ones and twos with a group of chaffinches, then suddenly increased to at least ten, flitting about too much for an accurate count.

With such a number and variety of avian visitors it does seem churlish to complain about species I haven’t seen in my garden but I was very disappointed that the beautiful waxwings which were spotted on Goldwire Lane passed me by. Apparently they are attracted by large numbers of berries and although I can offer them hawthorn, sloe and guelder rose as well as the more exotic Crataegus prunifolia

(a hawthorn relative with marble sized orange berries still hold on in January) they were obviously not impressed.

If only I had a bigger garden I’d plant a rowan tree especially for them.

I’ve found from experience that attracting birds, like any other wildlife can be reasonably straightforward. Provide food, water and cover and if they’re in the area they’ll find the garden, but I have made some mistakes too. In the spring I split and moved a big Miscanthus grass whose seed heads had brought in reed buntings and linnets last winter, but it hated being moved, sulked and refused to flower so not only did I miss its striking winter silhouette, there were no reed buntings or linnets either this year.

Oh well, winter’s nearly over and longer hours of daylight bring the opportunity for more time outside and a bit of a revamp. Another Miscanthus will be top of the list and if only I had room for a rowan… I wonder how well one would grow in a pot!