Category Archives: cutting garden

All tucked up

23 Monday Nov 2015

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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…

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A gardener’s nightmare

10 Tuesday Nov 2015

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gyoweddingflowersI was once chatting to a gardening friend who was in a bit of a tizz.

Her daughter had asked her to grow the flowers for her wedding. She probably thought how lovely it would be to involve everyone in the family in her big day: DJing by her brother, dad driving the limo, home-grown flowers by mum…

It’s the ultimate gardener’s nightmare.

I grow to a deadline myself from time to time, usually when I’ve got Gardener’s World mag coming over to do a photoshoot for an article or two. It is an appalling amount of pressure: you do what you think is going to work, several months in advance, then along comes the weather, or a large dog, or several slugs at once, and you have to start again, only this time with just two weeks to go. There is no wriggle room, no way out, no fudge (although I have been known to panic buy plug plants – not an option for a home-grown wedding).

My friend’s solution was sweet peas: lots and lots of sweet peas, all sown at monthly intervals to make sure there would be enough for the wedding itself. Her garden was nothing but sweet peas that year: they were on every fence, over every wall, in every container. You could barely get in the back gate.

It was a lovely wedding, of course: but if only she’d had Georgie Newbery’s new book.

Then she could have calmed down, for a start: Georgie has a lovely measured, practical way of going about things with minimal panic, borne of years of doing this sort of thing herself, every weekend in fact for about 50 weddings a year (now that is my idea of a nightmare… good job we’ve got people like Georgie around, really).

She would have known to include foliage from her garden as well as the sweet peas: she could have fallen back on berries, seed heads and wildflowers. She could also have treated herself to loads of new roses, dahlias, chrysanths and late-summer bulbs like nerines and schizostylis, all of which would have filled the garden with late-summer colour for years afterwards – a fitting reward for all that hard work and stress.

She could have used Georgie’s useful tips for sidestepping the inevitable disasters: cosmos, for example, just keeps flowering and goes with everything, so you can use it to replace anything that fails; and sowing a ‘spare’ tray of each variety from seed under cover as well as sowing direct.

And there are gorgeous photos of bouquets and posies with matching recipes so you don’t even have to worry about the fact that you’re no good at flower arranging. Plus a lot of good advice on general wedding matters: which side to wear a buttonhole, for example, or which side to put the bride’s family (slightly alarmingly, something to do with swords).

I have two daughters. They are, at the moment, reassuringly far from getting married, but no doubt the day will come. And then I no longer have to dread the bright smile and ‘it would be so lovely if you did the flowers, mum’ comment. I won’t worry, because I’ll have Georgie’s book: it will be, quite literally, my lifeline.

Grow Your Own Wedding Flowers by Georgie Newbery is published by Green Books.

Dahlia dilemmas

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in cutting garden, design, garden design, Gardens of Somerset

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dahlia_tyntesfieldI do love a dahlia. They were planted en masse in a vibrant late-colour display in the little garden alongside the orangery at Tyntesfield and were really turning heads.

But that also creates my difficulty with dahlias. Each flower individually is so absolutely sensational that you quite literally can’t grow anything else alongside.

Here there were cosmos, chrysanths, a few rudbeckias… all beautiful in their own right but thrown totally into the shade by the huge cutting dahlias next door.

Dahlia 'Black Jack'

Dahlia ‘Black Jack’

It feels a little churlish to be complaining that a flower is too beautiful. But that’s basically the problem.

Dahlias were bred for show. It was a bloke thing: grown firmly in military-precision rows, their flower forms divided into groups and sub-groups so complex that it satisfied even the most geeky of anorak-wearing fanatics.

They did end up with a lot of breathtakingly beautiful flowers. But in truth, they are only really good for growing in straight lines, on their own: for they will not brook any competition from other flowers.

Dahlia 'Rycroft Delight'

Dahlia ‘Rycroft Delight’

Try planting a pompom dahlia – even the ever-popular ‘David Howard’ – in a mixed border and you’ll see what I mean. It’s trying to hog the limelight all the time: it’s like asking Kim Kardashian to blend into the crowd in your local Tesco’s.

And that, for me, is the rub. They are on the whole generous garden guests: a bit of dead-heading and they will keep flowering profusely till the first frosts. They’re pretty nearly pest free if you can get them past the slugs when they’re young (start in containers and keep potting on till they’re almost mature before you plant them out).

But how do you grow them among other, more ordinary plants?

Dahlia 'Sandia Rose'

Dahlia ‘Sandia Rose’

Of course you can opt for the ubiquitous Bishops: Llandaff, Oxford, York and Dover all have pretty open daisy-like flowers which sit better among other perennials. But the colour range is quite primary, and limited: and then there’s the purple foliage, which is lovely in the right place, but what if you don’t want purple?

I discovered species dahlias a few years ago and they’re now my dahlia-of-choice for borders. Lovely, ethereal Dahlia merckii in lavender pink; little brick red Dahlia coccinea dancing on wiry stems. And there are more to discover: D. spectabilis, in white, perhaps, or sorensenii with drooping petals.

It so often happens that the closer plants are to their wild forms, the easier they are to garden with. I wouldn’t want to lose the showier dahlias – but I don’t really want to use them either. We do make things difficult for ourselves, don’t we?

A pocket full of posies

08 Sunday Jun 2014

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tussiemussie1On the whole, I’m a pretty rugged sort of person. A disproportionate amount of my gardening time seems to be spent hammering scaffold boards together, or powering my way through waist high weeds at the business end of a petrol strimmer, or hauling improbably deep tree roots out of pits in the ground.

But the anti-bramble gauntlets, steel toecapped boots and safety helmet hide a more delicate soul. The soul of a person who likes tussie-mussies.

I love the word tussie-mussie. I always think of it as an Americanism: their version of our more prosaic nosegay (bit prim, that) or posy. But the Americans came to tussie-mussies late, around two centuries late in fact, when New England ladies took to carrying them on their way to church. The word was first coined in 15th century England, long before we even knew there was an America (there is an excellent rundown of its meanings, including one rather surprising one I won’t mention here as it’s a family-friendly blog, here). [read more…]

This week in the garden: Going to sow a meadow

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in cutting garden, garden design, my garden, wildlife gardening

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meadow

This is my little meadow area at the top of the terraces. It doesn’t look very inspiring at the moment – there are some crocuses and hyacinths and a few old gold heritage daffodils on the way but I’ve only just begun to build up the bulbs quotient so a few years to go yet till it’s the sheet of spring colour I have in my head.

The sheet of summer colour it will become is very much a recent memory though: this is what it looked like last year:

meadow_2013

And from the other direction across to the lane…

meadow_2013b

I’m sowing the same mix – Pictorial Meadows short annual mix – and have tipped in a couple of packets of Ladybird poppies I got for free in magazines, just for fun.

Second year sowing isn’t quite as straightforward as the first year, when it was a matter of broadcast-sowing across a patch of virgin ground. Now I have bulbs to avoid, and a few weeds, and some self-seeders from last year’s meadow which I don’t want to disturb.

So I started by weeding out the dandelions, cleavers and creeping buttercup seedlings by hand. Then I divided the area up into four.

I weighed my seeds and divided that in four, too: you can also mix them with silver sand which means they’re a bit easier to handle and you can see where you’ve sown. I put each batch of seed into a teacup, then went out and dealt with just one quarter at a time.

My small-headed rake was perfect for raking in between other things, so very gingerly I raked up the topsoil to loosen it, then broadcast sowed as evenly as I could. Another light raking to mix them in with the top level of soil and you’re done.

Repeat for the other three quarters: the timing is also crucial. I’ve put off sowing this for a week now, as the weather has been so dry; yesterday, though, it rained, nicely damping the soil, and it’s forecast to rain again later today and tomorrow, then we’re in for a patch of showery but not too cold weather next week. Perfect for germinating seeds. Can’t wait to take the pics this summer: I still have passers by telling me how lovely my meadow was last year, and this year’s is going to be even better.

The Grand Tour #5: The Terraced Bit

20 Saturday Nov 2010

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Last but not least: the closest we get to a front garden. There is a bit to the right of the drive which is almost an afterthought: it’s the sixty feet or so that occupies the gap between the drive and the garage. But it’s actually the most formal of all the gardens: making its way down the hill by means of a series of rather lovely terraces, held in place by retaining walls, and – amazingly for this garden – more or less flat and straight.

This has given me delusions of grandeur. I have nowhere else in the garden where I can garden formally, and I have a bit of a soft spot for clipped box hedging. However I also need a cutting garden: so I am combining the two into….

The Parterre Garden

You can see the terracing better looking back up towards the house…


Imagine, if you will, a square (or maybe a rectangle) of box in the centre of each terrace, perhaps a curlicue or a squiggle, or an abstract pattern in the style of Tom Stuart-Smith at Broughton. I could even go for the raised look: they had some fine examples at Hatfield House on that Alan Titchmarsh programme the other week.

(Incidentally, they got their parterres and their knots hopelessly entangled in that programme. Repeat after me: parterre hedges have flat tops and a uniform height, knot garden hedges weave over and under each other. They had both on that programme, but Mr Titchmarsh went on and on about the parterres at Hatfield being knot gardens, and then they had a beautiful knot garden which he referred to as a parterre. Was I the only one shouting at my telly?)

Anyway. The point is, I shall fill the gaps in between with dozens and dozens of annual flowers for cutting: cosmos, love-in-a-mist, tulips, anthemis, sweetpeas, cornflowers, Ammi majus, some fennel and stocks and larkspur and…. you get the idea.


The log store, on the top terrace, is… well… less than edifying, and extremely overgrown. I may be commissioning my carpenter husband to do something deliciously gorgeous there instead. It has also, as you can see, been used as a compost heap by the previous lot of people, who kindly left their monster pile of garden rubbish for us to make use of – though I’m going to have to do a lot of shifting around into proper compost bins first.

There is also, according to the plans, a well under that compost heap. We await the alarmed cry and distant splash which will tell us it hasn’t, after all, been capped off.

The plant life is little more than overgrown shrubs: some are quite nice. This cotoneaster is in very full berry…

…and there’s a fine cotinus at the other end. Both, however, aren’t quite nice enough to out-compete the parterres. Though the cotinus may find a new home somewhere: I do like them. Something to do with that chocolatey shade of purple.

And the inevitable rose. This one is fighting it out with a rampant clematis in the corner: so far it’s survived against all the odds, so I have a certain admiration for such gritty determination. And besides, it’s very pretty even in November. It stays. For now.

Home-made perfume

11 Monday Jun 2007

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One of the sidelines of my cutting garden is left over from its previous incarnation as a herb garden: I’ve got a row of plants specifically dedicated to producing perfume.

At the moment – since the whole thing got interrupted so wasn’t completed properly – it consists only of English lavender and Apothecary’s Rose (Rosa gallica officinalis). The rose is currently flowering its head off and so I’m gathering the petals and drying them on a shelf in the shady corridor that runs from one back door to the other, between my office and the kitchen. It might sound like an odd place for drying flowers, but in fact it fulfils all the main requirements in that it’s shady, cool and there’s a draught running through it regularly.

At the moment I’m not quite sure what I shall do with the dried petals: I could make simple rose-petal pot pourri, which just means dried rose petals in a bowl. That would be nice, but I’m not sure how long it will last. What I’d really like to do is to make wet pot pourri – the type for which it is named (it literally means “rotten pot”!). This involves packing layers of petals which have been dried for just two days in a big crock with rock salt. Unfortunately since the pot needs to be clay or similar (i.e. not see-through) I’ve got a problem sourcing one – large glass jars are relatively easy to find, but big clay crocks went out with my grandma. The search begins!

Flowers for cutting

17 Thursday May 2007

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I thought I’d say a bit about my cutting garden, as it’s this year’s project and very much at the front of my mind just now.

I’ve carved out a more-or-less square plot, about 19ft x 19ft, on the far side of my greenhouse where it’s pretty sunny most of the day. It’s overshadowed by a large goat willow, but not too badly, and I’m in the process of raising the willow’s crown so it doesn’t cast too much shadow.

The design is quite simple: a 2ft bed around three sides of the square (the fourth is for my greenhouse and coldframe), with two 4’6″ wide beds across the middle. It’ll all be enclosed in 1″ x 4″ pressure-treated timber to define the beds and make maintenance easier. There are also 30″ paths around the beds for access.

The area was previously a herb garden (a bit ott since I had it in mind once upon a time to set up a herb nursery – then realised how much work was involved). Result is I need to dig out large amounts of lemon balm, chives and lovage before I can plant. The good news there, though, is that the soil is in good heart as it’s already been dug over and improved once.

So far I’ve got lavender and Rosa gallica officinalis, also known as Apothecary’s Rose, along one long side, for drying as pot pourri; the short side will be for perennials for cutting – so far a clump of asters dug up from the main herbaceous border, but I’ll be adding bulbs (daffs and tulips), a statice (great for drying) and whatever else I can find. I’ve added a Chimonanthes praecox (wintersweet) in the corner – again rescued from imminent suffocation in the big herbaceous border – thinking I’ll cut branches if ever it gets around to flowering (they’re notoriously slow to settle). Along the front edge will be dahlias, chrysanths and any other late-season perennials I can think of.

In the centre beds, so far there are only sweetpeas climbing up rustic hazel poles: but my antirrhinums are chomping at the bit in the coldframe waiting to be planted out, and I’ve got plenty more coming on to join them there. It just needs me to keep up with them by digging out a home, and we’ll be raring to go!

Sun today, rain tomorrow

14 Monday May 2007

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The weather really can’t make up its mind. We’ve just had the driest spring on record: six weeks without a single drop of rain. And that’s in 20-degree temperatures – by English standards, that’s summer. My poor garden was getting more dessicated than a Dr Who victim (sorry, my 7-year-old is obsessed and I therefore have an hour’s Dr Who indoctrination every Saturday evening. It has a way of seeping into everything else, too.)

Now, we’ve had nothing but rain for more than a week. Admittedly, that’s far more typical of your average English spring, but we do usually have the odd dry-but-cloudy spell to ring the changes. Now the path down the garden is once again under three inches of water and I can’t get out there as it’s a quagmire and there’s no point planting anything until it dries out a bit.

My greenhouse is very well-tended, anyway – the only dry spot in the place. I put my cucumbers into the earth border today (this post should probably go in my allotment blog but what the hell). They’re “Cum Laude F1” – the seed cost a bomb but lovely little plants. The rest of the greenhouse is bursting at the seams – I’m sowing seed every two weeks all this year to keep allotment, cutting garden and Christopher Lloyd summer bedding scheme in full production, and my humble little 6ft by 8ft can hardly stand the pace.