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Sally Nex

Monthly Archives: November 2015

End of month view: November

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in end of month view, sheep

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

book, chard, leeks, Nablopomo, November, sheep, winter

eomv1

The veg garden is looking exceptionally woolly and wind-blown at the moment as it subsides gradually into its winter hibernation: good sprouts under them nets though

It’s been November for a whole four weeks now. Season of dreary rain and hat-snatching wind: season of no gardening and damply sloshing wellington boots and mud and dead brown sadly broken stems.

But let’s not get depressed. There are still reasons to be cheerful (honest!):

    • I’ve done it! Against all the odds, I have posted every day this month and completed NaBloPoMo, along the way retrieving my blogging mojo and having a thoroughly interesting time
eomv2

…and the spring cabbages are coming along nicely

    • I have handed in the manuscript of my book! At last! Somewhat late but more or less intact. They tell me now comes the difficult bit – bashing it into shape before publication next Easter; but I don’t care. I’m just really, really happy I’ve finished writing it.
eomv3

The terrace garden… oh dear.

    • It’s nearly Christmas! (Don’t care what all you grumpy bumpies say: I love it)
    • And it’s nearly the winter solstice! Which means we only have a few more weeks to wait till the evenings get brighter
eomv5

…but the yellow-stemmed chard is a bit fabulous and still going strong…

    • My sprouts are HUGE! The hugest, in fact, I think I’ve ever grown
    • I own a piano for the first time in about 20 years. Now all I need is some sheet music.
eomv4

…and one of my best-ever leek crops is in this bit too

    • The sweet rocket is still flowering (even though I couldn’t get a picture of it: you’ll just have to take my word for that one)
    • The prickly pear cactus didn’t get frosted even though I left it outside in minus-one temperatures
eomv6

The back garden sagging slightly under the weight of all that rain…

    • I have planted a LOT of tulips
    • I am booked in for three slap-up Christmas dinners in the next few weeks. And that doesn’t even count the real one.
    eomv7

    …but even on the drabbest of days these two cheer me up. Ewok and Custard, enjoying their winter break eating the hedges and occasionally the lawn (the bit they’re meant to eat)

Art in the garden

29 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in design, news, shows

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

art, art history, gardens in art, paintings

kandinsky_murnauthegardenII1910

Kandinsky: Murnau the Garden II (1910) – at the Royal Academy’s exhibition (love love love this)

Gardens and art walk hand in hand. Gardens inspire art; art inspires gardens. No wonder, really, for both draw their reason for being from instincts for beauty, form and the ability to change the way the person who looks at them views everything that follows.

I’m a bit biased, of course, and I know I’ll scandalise ‘proper’ arty folk, but I’ve always secretly thought gardens the superior art form. Gardens are, after all, four dimensional, to painting’s two and sculpture’s three. Gardens are not only there to be looked at: they are there to be smelled, and touched, and felt. And they exist in fourth dimension, too: that of time. It takes some artist to create a vision that transports the visual and every other sense too, and then keeps it beautiful while it constantly changes with the turning of the seasons.

But anyway, before I start getting too pretentious, the reason I’m going on about this is that anyone who’s a gardener and also likes art (so that’s all of us, then) is positively spoilt at the moment.

nolde

‘Flower Garden’, Emil Nolde, 1922, also at the Royal Academy (love this one too)

I was blown away earlier this year by the Painting Paradise exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, at the side of Buckingham Palace: breathtaking art, garden history and heaven for plant-lovers all in one deliriously happy visit.

And now it’s the turn of more recent paintings to feature gardens: the Royal Academy of Arts is exploring the way gardens led artists from the literal to the impressionistic in ‘Painting the Modern Garden’. Not ‘just’ Monet and Manet, but also Klimt, Matisse, Kandinsky, Van Gogh and – a personal favourite of mine – Mary Cassatt. It opens on 30 January and I will be first in the queue.

edward-chell-exhibition-banner

Edward Chell’s cyanotypes at the Horniman Museum

And there’s more: Bloom at the Horniman Museum is an exhibition of exquisite and other-worldly plant silhouettes created by Edward Chell, inspired by cyanotypes – the same photographic process which produces blueprints – made by 19th century naturalist Anna Atkins (this one closes on 6 December, so get there quick).

strawberrythief_williammorris

‘Strawberry Thief’, William Morris, 1883

At the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (it’s not all London, you know) Rosa Nguyen – last seen making ceramic trees in a London park during the 2013 Chelsea Fringe – is one of the artists featured in The Arts and Crafts House: Then and Now.

Leading light of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, was of course largely responsible for bringing the house into the garden and the garden into the house: his influence spread far beyond wallpaper, and I suspect we owe him much more than we’ll ever realise.

rosa_nguyen

Rosa Nguyen creating her installation ‘Gardening With Morris’ at the Laing Gallery

Then there are the exquisitely detailed paintings of fruits by Shirley Sherwood at Kew Gardens; intricate watercolours of orchids by naturalists The Bauer Brothers at the Natural History Museum; and if your tastes are more hard-core modernist and allegorical there’s always Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds (at the Royal Academy again). What a feast.

Tulipomania

28 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in design, garden design

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Tags

christopher lloyd, Great Dixter, planting combinations, spring, tulips

tulips4I have tulips dancing before my eyes.

I must have planted a thousand in the last few weeks. Not in my own garden, unfortunately: though I have bought in some more species tulips (my particular passion) and some ‘Abu Hassan’, ‘White Triumphator’ and ‘Ballerina’ to bulk out the main borders, my garden is at the bottom of the pecking order so these will have to wait till I can tear myself away from all the other tulip planting I have to do.

All the gardens I look after have owners who adore tulips, so I am planting them en masse wherever we can fit them in.

tulips2

The chicken garden has huge handsome terracotta pots packed with the things out the front and a cutting garden full of ‘Graceland’, ‘Apricot Beauty’, ‘Belle Epoque’ and ‘Sapporo’; yet still they come. I am in the middle of planting a rainbow of tulip colour through the big rose garden border at the moment: it will look fabulous.

In the Dorset garden I look after there are a couple of borders by the house which I planted up with a mix of tulips as an experiment last year.

tulips1

I had, until I did this, favoured the Christopher Lloyd school of planting tulips: great blocks and swathes of the same variety, fifty at a time about 10cm apart for maximum impact. Visit Great Dixter any time in May to see exactly the effect I’m talking about: it looks stunning.

I’ve done this in my own garden for ages and it does mean you get the full impact of each type of tulip to the max. The only problem is that you get one block of early tulips coming up in late April, then a bit of a green flower-less gap before the next block flowers in early May. Or they overlap and you have a slightly jangly contrast before the next block takes over.

Of course this is probably my own cack-handedness in applying the Christo theory and I’m sure Fergus Garrett would get it right.

But just for fun, last year I tried a combination of tulips of different flowering times in the same place.

tulips3

All were a similar colour palette, but I had groups of mixed early- mid season and late-flowering types to provide a succession of colour from April to June.

Amazingly, that’s exactly what happened. They flowered for ages and were joyous and lovely and full of delight: they reminded me of a packet of Jelly Tots. Which also made me realise just how pretty Jelly Tots are.

We loved them so much we took lots of photos (including those above) and I’ve replanted them almost exactly the same this year (with a couple of necessary close substitutes as the original varieties weren’t available). I’m now seeing if I can come up with similarly lovely combinations to use in my own garden.

I thought I’d share the mix with you: here’s what I planted. It’s not all that complicated: just pairs of early, mid-season and late varieties, all toned in so that when they overlap they look good together. Simples.

Apricot Beauty (Single Early)
Purple Prince (Single Early)
Negrita (Triumph – mid-season)
Spring Green (Viridiflora – mid-season)
Pink Diamond (Single Late)

And the winner is…

27 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

awards, garden media guild, garden writing, media, photography, Savoy

gmg1a

I have never, ever seen so many glasses on one table before…

I am usually to be found in very muddy jeans and a sweatshirt of doubtful origin, my nails black and not a shred of makeup anywhere near my face. Usually, bum up nose down in a vegetable bed.

gmg1

All dressed up and somewhere to go… Naomi Slade and Natalie Ashbee at the pre-dinner drinky-poos

Yesterday, however, I had mascara on. And I was clean. And – get this – in a Karen Millen dress and heels.

gmg2

Chandeliers a go-go… the ballroom at the Savoy

For it was the Garden Media Guild Awards: the one and only day I ever get dressed up (and that includes Christmas Day). It is glitzy and glamorous beyond the wildest dreams of a humble gardener like me. And I go every year, just to kid myself I’m the kind of person who goes to dine in the Savoy and gets awards and stuff.

gmg4

The food was pretty damn good too… smoked duck, goat’s cheese, marinated beetroot and a walnut vinaigrette. And that was just the starter.

It’s not only a great chance to catch up with old friends but also a chance to meet new people: every year I’m on a table with someone interesting I’ve never met before (even if I might know them by reputation).

gmg5

Dunno who that bloke in the middle is. He gets everywhere though.

This year it was the outstanding garden photographer Clive Nichols and his lovely assistant Julie (doesn’t that make them sound like a magician’s act…! I suspect Julie rarely allows herself to be chopped in half though, literally or magically).

gmg3

Our host for the evening: David Domoney in full flow

And on the other side of me was Jan Miller-Klein, holder of the National Collection of Eupatorium (aka Joe Pye weed), passionate wildlife gardener and all round inspirational lady.

gmg7

… and some other bloke got up and joined him too

Awards were handed out like sweeties: the biggest congratulations go to The English Garden (Garden Publication of the Year), Jurgen Becker (Garden Photographer of the Year) and Ambra Edwards (Journalist of the Year).

gmg6

The incredibly talented nurserywoman and plantswoman extraordinaire Claire Austin winning Reference Book of the Year for ‘Claire Austin’s Book of Perennials’

And a special mention to Adrian Bloom, this year’s winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award and a thoroughly nice chap as well as the kind of nurseryman I think every person who grows plants for a living should aspire to be.

gmg8

Adrian Bloom, very worthy winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award

There’s a full list of all the award winners here.

 

We are all scientists

26 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in education, wildlife gardening

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

citizen science, hedgerows, natural history museum, OPAL, wildlife

OVER-18s-GENERAL-WILDLIFE_Paul-Steven_dormouse-on-forsythia-taken-in-St-Ives-Cornwall

‘Dormouse on Forsythia’ by Paul Steven, St. Ives, Cornwall: winner, over 18s ‘General Wildlife’ category, OPAL Devon & Cornwall wildlife photography competition

Recently I found myself sitting cross-legged staring into my hedge.

I have particularly fine hedges. Good thing too as there are rather a lot of them: half a mile, to be exact.

They are ancient Somerset hedgerows and were old before I was even born. As is the way in these parts they’re built up on banks of churt flint and are mainly hazel: some are laid, but most are not, relying on the density of the species which grow in them to keep animals in and people out.

They are wildlife superhighways (as I know to my cost, having lost more just-sown broad bean seeds to the field mice in my hedgerows than I care to remember). You can tell how healthy your hedge is by counting the number of different species of plant in a three metre stretch, plus noting down evidence of animal activity (holes) and food (berries, nuts) as well as actual animals themselves (in my case, mainly snails, woodlice and centipedes).

My hedges got a silver award for structure (they’re getting a bit gappy here and there) and a gold for animal diversity and wildlife value. I felt quite proud.

In case you’re wondering what I’m on about, I was doing a biodiversity survey for OPAL (Open Air Laboratories), the citizen science project run by Imperial College London, the Natural History Museum, the Met Office, half a dozen other universities, and oh, loads of august institutions.

Its surveys have collected over 55,000 records of evidence collected by ordinary people like you and me, involving us in investigating the effects of everything from soil activity (worm-hunting) to water quality (ponds) and air quality (lichen – that was another one which had me peering at bits of my garden, this time the apple trees). There are now nearly 10 separate surveys, and anyone can join in: take a look and choose one you’d like to have a go at here.

They’re great fun, they get you looking at your garden in a whole different light, and what’s more you’re contributing to some really important research, feeding in to the great sea of knowledge from which ground-breaking insights occasionally pop up to influence governments, formulate solutions and generally change the way we think.

Citizen science is a fantastic way for scientists to gather huge quantities of information. The RSPB now has decades of detail about garden birds thanks to the Big Garden Birdwatch in January; the Big Butterfly Count in mid-summer is doing the same thing for butterflies; and the Ladybird Survey is keeping tabs on invasive alien harlequins via records of insects visiting people’s houses, sheds and gardens.

Isn’t it interesting that so many are garden-based? I’m sure it’s partly because that’s the outside space most of us have access to; but I suspect it’s also because gardeners are closet scientists by nature.

I don’t think of myself as much of a scientist; far too woolly of thought. But when it comes to plants and gardening I’ve taken science on board almost without realising it. I test my soil and know all about pH and geology; I can tell you the difference between xylem and phloem and wax lyrical on the ultra-violet patterns on foxglove flowers.

And I think that’s why I like doing OPAL surveys. I’ve become a scientist without noticing. Surprisingly, in the light of my almost overwhelmingly negative memories of science from school, it’s really interesting, too. Citizen science is taking off the lab coats, stripping out the inexplicable jargon and taking down the barriers dividing us into ‘artists’ or ‘scientists’. Turns out you don’t have to choose: it’s just about finding out about the world around you, after all. And it gives you a really good excuse to look at your garden for absolutely ages.

Wordless Wednesday

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in wildlife gardening, wordless wednesday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dandelion heads, fire bugs, garden photography, photography, wordless wednesday

UNDER-18s-GENERAL-WILDIFE_Maddie-Leisham_Fire-bugs-taken-in-Brixham-Devon

‘Fire bugs’ by Maddie Leishman (aged 14) Brixham, Devon, winner of the Under 18s General Wildlife Category, OPAL Devon & Cornwall Wildlife Photography Competition. See more winning pics here

A very capable man

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in garden design, garden history, landscaping

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

18th century, capability brown, garden design, landscaping, tercentenary

capabilitybrown

© Portrait of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, c.1770-75, Cosway, Richard (1742-1821)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

Think of the English countryside, and it’s my guess it’ll be pretty green. There will be fields, and hedgerows, and picturesque little villages nestled in valleys: perhaps a steeple peeping up above a copse of trees.

All very artistic. And not, one shred of it, natural.

Our countryside has been shaped, sculpted, created by people. Whether you live, as I do, in an ancient landscape where the fields still show the lines of old pre-enclosure strips and the hedgerows go back centuries; or whether you’re in rolling acres of emerald green, there is little left of how England was before people arrived.

So all the fuss about what Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown did to the English countryside seems a little unfair to me. He was only, after all, doing what the monks and farmers and squires had done before him, only prettier.

More of a crime to be laid at his door in my opinion is his cavalier way of erasing hundreds of years of garden history, not to mention some spectacularly beautiful formal gardens, in a supremely arrogant gesture that simply assumed people wouldn’t want that. Ever again.

The only English renaissance gardens to escape Capability’s shovels and picks were those whose owners had no truck with this modern claptrap of serpentine paths and copses and ha-has and focal points: the owners of Westbury Court, Powis Castle and Hanbury Court, we salute you.

So few have survived the Brown tsunami, and so much has been lost: I’d have loved to have seen the 17th century water gardens by de Caus (complete with joke fountains in the Italian style) and parterres which were once the glory of Wilton House in Wiltshire. But Capability saw to it that such vulgar spectacles never survived beyond the 18th century and they only exist, sketchily, on paper now.

I think part of my problem with him is that I don’t trust ‘gardeners’ who don’t do plants. Landscapers tend to talk in broad sweeps: I’m a detail person, the turn of a petal, the contrast of purple against lilac, the simple glory of an opening daisy. I don’t think Lancelot had much time for all that. And that’s why I instinctively don’t respond well to his style of doing things.

Of course, there’s no escaping Mr Brown at the moment, and it’ll get worse next year when the tercentenary starts: the 300th anniversary of his birth is as good an excuse as any to reassess his life and legacy. Carved into the hillsides of England as it is, you can’t ignore it.

Fortunately it’s to be neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job: just an honest reappraisal of the man who left us Stowe, Chatsworth, Blenheim, Alnwick, Hampton Court, Badminton… the list goes on (there are more than 250 of them).

There are to be learned conferences at Bath and Sheffield Universities, and at Hampton Court Palace (where Capability had his office) looking at everything from his management of historic gardens to his impact on the British landscape.

Lots of gardens are restoring Brown-designed chapels (Compton Verney, Warwickshire), re-envisioning Brown’s landscapes (Moccas Park, Herefordshire), or rolling back later growth to reveal Brown’s landscapes as he would have wanted them seen (Trentham Park, Staffordshire).

And already there’s lots of thought-provoking stuff out there about Brown, his legacy, his genius.

This Channel 4 programme was a real eye-opener: there’s a brilliant bit where John Phipps, who knows more about Brown than pretty much anyone, walks Alan Titchmarsh through Belvoir Castle explaining how to ‘read’ a Capability landscape.

Mr Phipps also pens a fantastic blog, The Brown Advisor: you can write in and put any question you like to him. Recent gems include ‘Where are Brown’s conkers?’ and ‘Did Brown sing in the bath?’

It all amounts to a lot of work and a lot of thinking about the man who had a longer-lasting and more profound effect on the English landscape than anyone before or since. It’s no more than he deserves: you can see his influence in everything from Prince Charles’s views on architecture to Dan Pearson’s advocacy of a sense of place in design. Like him or loathe him, there aren’t many people you can say are still making an impact 300 years after they came into the world and changed it forever.

All tucked up

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in chicken garden, cutting garden

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cut flowers, dahlias, frost, frost protection, overwintering, winter

dahlias_overwinter1

Tuck dahlias up for their winter hibernation as soon as the stems are blackened by frost

I arrived at the Chicken Garden this morning to find the big, handsome dahlias hanging their heads, their lush leaves turned slatey black and drooping disconsolately.

Abbie – garden owner – grows dahlias by the armful to cut for guests at the B&B, and very gorgeous they’ve been for the last few months. So there are two whole rows of them in the cutting garden as well as a dozen or so in various spots around the main flower beds.

dahlias_overwinter2

If you’re leaving them in the ground, cut stems right back (if lifting, leave 15cm of stalk intact)

You can leave dahlias as they are till the blackened-leaf stage (and they’ll keep flowering, too, if you dead-head) but once the first frost has struck it’s time to leap into action.

dahlias_overwinter3

Mulch thickly – at least 15cm deep. Autumn leaves are ideal for this as they don’t hold on to moisture as much as compost.

I always prefer to leave a plant in the ground if at all possible, and in the balmy south-west we’re in just the sort of place where you can get away with it with dahlias most years. But you never know quite what the weather has in store: if it’s a really wet one, or possibly even a really snowy one, you could still end up losing the lot.

I decided to cut my losses: so I’ve left the bigger (and therefore, I reason, more hardy) border varieties in the ground and lifted any smaller plants and also those in pots and containers where the roots are more exposed.

dahlias_overwinter4

And finally: cover the whole thing with a layer of hessian (as here), insect-proof mesh, weed-suppressing fabric, old t-shirts… in fact anything that’s breathable. Two purposes: 1) it holds the leaves in place and stops them blowing off, and 2) it gives one extra layer of frost protection to the tubers. Pin down securely with bits of sturdy wire. And that’s it till spring (I hope…)

In the cutting garden, I have covered one whole row and lifted the other. They’re currently trimmed back to about 15cm and turned upside down to dry and drain, the shortened stalks poked through the slats of the greenhouse staging to hold them in place.

Next week, once they’re fully dry, I’ll pack them into boxes of damp-ish sand or spent compost and move them to the shed (drier than the greenhouse). After that I shall be going round with fingers permanently crossed till the spring warms up next year and I can pull back the covers to see if my luck has held. Here’s hoping…

A gardening gift for Christmas

22 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in education, self sufficiency

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

christmas gifts, gardening gift vouchers, My Garden School, special offers

MGS-Ad-300x250-xmasStuck for something to buy a green-fingered loved one this Christmas?

Well – My Garden School are now offering gift vouchers.

I hear the Advanced Veg Growing & Self-Sufficiency course is good….. 😀

(we’re currently having lots of lively discussion about the mystery ailment afflicting one student’s leeks, plus gardening in Idaho and Florida… my students do get about a bit!)

Gift Vouchers cost £145 and are available to buy here (you could always treat yourself if you can’t persuade anyone else to!)

Happy Christmas!

Chilli fiesta

21 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in greenhouse

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

chillies, rocoto, tree chilli

greenhouse1

Ah. Yes. The tree chilli.

Also known as a rocoto, it’s one of the few varieties which you can overwinter fairly reliably in a frost-free greenhouse in the UK. This monster has just finished its third year: it is my pride and joy (I think I have mentioned it here and in magazines and basically anywhere I can get away with several times as I am so inordinately pleased with it).

Apart from a close encounter with a bevy of marauding aphids earlier this year it’s been quite easy to look after (once I got the message that it needs serious support: that lot is braced with two-by-one posts at each corner). It is absolutely enormous. And it’s laden down to the ground with dozens of lovely fat red chillies.

chillies1

Trouble is, we still have bags of chillies in the freezer from last year’s bumper harvest. I have palmed off as many as I can on friends, family and passing dog-walkers: but I now need to pick the rest. The overwintering routine for my pet chilli monster is to cut back the top growth by about a third, then bubblewrap the greenhouse (somehow working it behind that forest of branches) and switch on the heater to just above freezing.

Cutting off the top third of this lot is going to involve removing most of the chillies. So – anyone want some?

I have come up with a scheme so we’ll see if it works. What I suggest is that if you send me a fiver by Paypal (including postage & packaging), I’ll send anything up to 10 fresh chillies to you by post (if you don’t want all 10, please specify how many you would like).

chillies2

You can use them in your cooking, of course: they’re pretty hot at between 50,000 and 250,000 scoville heat units (around the habanero scale of pokiness), so you only need about a quarter of a chilli to turn the heat up quite considerably. You can’t dry them, as they’re too fleshy, but you can freeze them: I do mine individually in muffin trays, then decant them into a plastic bag till I need them.

Or of course you can extract the (jet-black) seeds and dry them for sowing next year, so you too can have one of these fabulous plants staging an invasion of the end of your greenhouse.

So – what do you think? First come, first served: post here with your name to bag your chillies (UK residents only I’m afraid), then once I’ve confirmed that you have the chillies send your payment via Paypal to sallywhite (at) hotmail (dot) com. Once I’ve run out of chillies, I’ll let you know in the comments below!

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