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Sally Nex

Monthly Archives: May 2010

Plant of the month: May

31 Monday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in plant of the month

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

euphorbia, Euphorbia polychroma

Euphorbia polychroma

Did you ever see anything so like summer?

I grow many euphorbias, which love my dry, sandy soil. E. martinii for its smoky flowers and burgundy stems, the slightly tender E. mellifera (clobbered by this winter’s frosts but I hope recovering), E. cyparissias ‘Fens Ruby’ which I’m forever having to dig out of places it shouldn’t be, but I forgive it anything for its feathery burgundy foliage in spring; E. myrsinites to snake around the skirts of other plants, and a few self-seeded E. robbiae from who knows where.

I love them when they’re flowering, but for the rest of the year they can look a little gaunt, I find. That’s fine in my jungle garden where wierd and gaunt-looking plants abound, but not so happy in the cottagey riot of summer flowers elsewhere. So I tend to hide the foliage behind other things.

Not so Euphorbia polychroma. This is the Jeeves of the plant world: a plant which in a garden full of the unruly, the mischievous and the downright contrary always, always, knows the right thing to do.

In spring, just when you need a foil to your muscari and crocuses, the clear lime-green foliage starts frothing up from the ground. Gradually it expands like a delicate bubble: never too quickly, as it would never be so rude as to outshine the tulips or the daffodils, but just quickly enough to provide a green backdrop at just the right scale.

Then finally, when it reaches a neat and tidy naturally domed shape of such perfect uniformity that nobody believes I don’t clip it, and just when the tulips are going over and you’re starting to want something else to look at, the acid yellow flowers appear – in reality, of course, bracts that attract attention to the inconspicuous true flowers in the centre. They are of a brilliant purity that reminds you of the sun even when there isn’t any in the sky: and when there is, they glow with a luminescence of sunshiny joy that they make me smile every time I look at them.

They last a satisfyingly long time but not so long as to outstay their welcome. I grow an apricot rose behind it, and the brightest yellows last, obligingly, just long enough to combine rather fetchingly with the orangey shades of the rose. Then, like all good performers, it knows when to stop hogging the limelight and retires gracefully into the wings as the bracts fade back to green. Even then it judges its role perfectly, providing a green of just the right shade to set off the daylilies, rock roses and potentilla that also tumble around it.

There it stays, good-natured and accommodating to the last. It keeps its dignity and poise well into winter and sometimes into spring too if heavy rains haven’t bent the branches out of shape, looking terribly sculptural with a good frost.

The only time it’s even remotely demanding is when you need to snip away each branch right to the ground in early spring just as the new shoots come through (wearing gloves, as one of this plant’s few faux pas is to emit an irritating sap when pruned). Then you wait for the whole thing to happen all over again. There’s no better-behaved plant in my garden.

Postcard from Chelsea: Saturday

29 Saturday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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A little wander through the Floral Pavilion for you just before it’s all taken to bits and Chelsea is over for another year….

Postcard from Chelsea: Friday

28 Friday May 2010

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One of my very favourite small gardens: the Global Stone Bee Friendly Plants Garden, designed by Janey Auchincloss and Paul Hammond. I’m not entirely sure why it ‘only’ got a silver: the planting was delightful and there were some great ideas – a crinkle-crankle box hedge, a funky multi-storey herb garden and a sunken centre leading to a fountain. Janey’s friend tells me they got marked down because of the fountain was too high, which seems a bit rough.

Here’s a bit more of that planting: just can’t get enough of it…

Postcard from Chelsea: Wednesday

26 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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Tags

summerhouses


The structure I would most like to nick from Chelsea and take home: Roger Platts’ wooden summer house from The M&G Garden. Traditional, classic, and utterly beautiful.

Wouldn’t you like to be sitting having tea right there?

And the craftsmanship was superb. This finally made my carpenter hubby understand the point of Chelsea. Carved from Sussex oak by ‘a local craftsman’ (who clearly wants to stay anonymous – don’t know why, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops if I’d made this), it’s held together with traditional oak pegs and perfect proportions.

Postcard from Chelsea: Medals day

25 Tuesday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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The Daily Telegraph Garden won Best in Show for the second time running – though unlike last year’s rather cool and unengaging garden I totally fell in love with Andy Sturgeon’s passionate, warm design.

The write-up goes on about Southern Cape fynbos and Mediterranean maquis in a rather overblown travel guide sort of way that entirely fails to do justice to what is so engaging about this garden. I could go on for ages about all the things I loved most about it: but I’ll just pick out a couple that everyone could borrow easily to adapt in their own garden.

  • The first is the echoes that run right through the planting. For example: he picks up the silver spikes of those Verbascum bombyciferum ‘Polarsommar’ with relatively low-growing Eryngium giganteum nestling by the ground and then echoes it again in the tall, stately Onopordium acanthium at the back (now I know where all those onopordums I saw at Crocus earlier this year were destined for). The result is a three-layer planting with symmetry running like a thread to draw your eye through the garden.
  • The second is the simple trick of picking up the colours of your hard landscaping (in this case, corten steel) very precisely in your planting. Here’s a pic to prove the point. I have yet to find out what the cultivar of these bearded irises is: but when I do, I shall acquire some forthwith (and hopefully some corten steel to go with it: it is a match made in heaven).
  • And last but not least: quite simply, the planting was sublime. Quite a muted palette of silver, bronze and purple: which has now become one of my all-time favourite combinations. This is the one which is going in my notebook so that one day I can nick it pretty much wholesale for my garden.


I haven’t quite got it all yet, but a good start would be:

Verbascum ‘Clementine’
Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’
Euphorbia ‘Blue Haze’
Euphorbia mellifera
Geum ‘Cooky’
Eryngium giganteum
Libertia peregrinans
Nepeta racemosa ‘Walkers Low’
Ozothamnus ledifolius
Stipa tenuissima

Postcard from Chelsea: Build-up day

23 Sunday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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The Great Pavilion is slowly filling up with flowers…. though it always amazes me how late they leave it to finalise their displays. Most of the stands are still only half-finished by the night before judging; and right now, the whole place looks like a building site (even more so than Main Avenue does outside).

I’m having a slightly odd Chelsea this year as I’m spending most of it in an edit suite in an obscure back street nearby watching the lovely James do his thing as elegantly and wittily as ever, if rather disjointedly as we’re cutting his links together with footage in a telly sort of way. You too can hear his wise words on BBCi (aka Red Button, aka the nice people who have employed me as part of the team covering the show this year).

But I’m back in the showground on Wednesday for a swanky party… all will be revealed in a multiple postcard winging its way to you then.

Wordless Wednesday

19 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

euphorbia

Euphorbia mellifera (I think)
as seen at Vann, near Godalming, Surrey

May flowers

15 Saturday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

≈ 6 Comments

Now, let’s see. What’s in flower this month?

Oh blimey, I can’t be bothered to list all that lot. Right, so what isn’t in flower this month?

Answer: not much. May is such a wonderful, wonderful month to be in the garden, especially after all that bleak midwinter hoo-hah. It does your heart good to walk among the tulips and the forget-me-nots and the first roses of summer and just drink in all that colour.

But I must choose which ones to take photographs of this month as Carol at the topically-named May Dreams Gardens is hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day: it’s probably easier to choose what to leave out than what to leave in.

I feel a slideshow coming on.

Perfect partners #5

13 Thursday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Anemanthele lessoniana, heuchera, perfect partners

Tulipa ‘Chinatown’, Heuchera ‘Beaujolais’ and Anemanthele lessoniana
as seen in the Floral Pavilion at the Malvern Spring Gardening Show

Malvern flowers

11 Tuesday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

floral marquees, Malvern

Never mind the show gardens: at Malvern it was the Floral Pavilion which just blew me away.

Every bit as good as bigger shows like Chelsea and Hampton Court, I was like a kid let loose in a sweetshop: actually I was entirely paralysed when I first went in as I just wanted everything I saw.

To save the bank balance I contented myself with taking photos of my very, very favourites. Well, mostly: I will admit three more scented geraniums and a Gillenia trifoliata somehow found their way into my bag.

So here were the ones that got away:

Camassia leichtlinii ‘Pink Selection’
(Avon Bulbs)

Euphorbia dulcis ‘Chamaeleon’
(Claire Austin Hardy Plants)

Paris quadrifolia
(Mary Green at The Walled Garden, Lancs)

Hosta ‘White Feather’
(actually, I didn’t want this one, but I thought it was proof if proof were needed that breeders always push it that little bit too far)

Dicentra ‘Bleeding Hearts’
(Cath’s Garden Plants)

Epimedium ‘Amber Queen’
(Edrom Nursery)

Trillium sulcatum
(Chris Cooke Plants)

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