• Home
  • Features
  • Talks
  • Learn with me

Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Category Archives: garden design

Learning from the master

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by sallynex in design, garden design, garden history, landscaping

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Denmans, design, john brookes

IMG_4052

Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’ catching the sunlight: note the silver-variegated shrub echoing the effect behind

This week I made something of a pilgrimage, to the garden of John Brookes OBE at Denmans in Sussex.

I have a personal debt of gratitude to pay to John Brookes as it was the 1970s edition of his classic book, The Small Garden, that formed my first ideas about garden design. In fact I shamelessly nicked (slightly adapted) one of the designs in that book for my first-ever garden in London, at a time when I was still feverishly taking notes while watching Gardeners’ World (I know, I know).

He has broken new ground in so many areas of garden design we now take for granted that his legacy can’t really be overstated. He was the first to come up with the idea of the ‘inside outside’, making garden rooms – as advocated by Lawrence Johnstone et al – an extension of the living room in the house they surround.

He was – astonishingly – the first British designer to take his inspiration from modern art, specifically Mondrian via his revolutionary geometric garden of interlocking squares for Penguin Books at Heathrow. And he was the first to create a design-focussed garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, at a time when everyone else was just creating showcases for plant nurseries.

Denmans is still his home, and where he runs his garden school. It’s looking a little tired these days, mainly I suspect because there’s just one heroic gardener looking after four acres of intensively-garden landscape and do lone battle with an encroaching army of ground elder. A garden of this stature deserves a few more staff.

But the mark of good design is that it holds up even a slightly woolly garden and gives it bones and structure. And so it is with Denman’s: it’s a softer garden than John Brookes’s usual designs in any case, and the fluid, sinuous curves and gentle naturalism are deceptive as underneath it all lies the solid, well thought out geometry and subtle design touches which are a John Brookes hallmark. Here are a few tips from my notebook I’ll be trying out once I get home.
IMG_4059
1: Don’t ignore the buildings. Reflect the materials used in the buildings in hard landscaping; and echo architectural features in the planting. Here a tall fastigiate yew emphasises the strong verticals in the Clock Tower.

IMG_4048
2. Don’t get too hung up about giving beds clear edges. At Denmans plants flow over the edges of curving gravel paths, sometimes spilling over into the hard landscaping and self-seeding into the edges, giving a soft, organic, very natural look that also, incidentally, evokes the Sussex coastline of the wider environment.

IMG_4045
3. Always be aware of the picture you are creating, and use sculpture to complete the scene. This sitting boy was delightful and added a focal point and a little vignette to an otherwise nice-but-ordinary wildlife pond.

IMG_4046

4. Create a sense of mystery and intrigue by cutting curving (not straight) paths through the planting, giving a glimpse of another part of the garden beyond but not revealing it all at once. It makes it all but impossible to resist following the path to explore further.

IMG_4044

5. Lawns are intrinsically boring. So make them more interesting (and save yourself some hours behind the mower) by only cutting the middle bits once a month. The outer paths you mow once a week – creating a contrast in texture and keeping the sensuous curves of the design at the fore.

IMG_4050

6. Remember your backgrounds – in every direction. This Achillea ‘Moonshine’ shone out in contrast with the dark purple smokebush (Cotinus coggygria) against the wall behind it: what a combination. But turn around, put the smoke bush behind you, and the brooding effect is completely gone to be replaced by airy woodland:

IMG_4053

Same plant, completely different effect. So as you compose your perfect combination looking one way, don’t forget to turn around and look at it the other way, too – and seize the chance to create a wholly new scene.

 

Chelsea 2016: What to look out for

14 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by sallynex in design, garden design, news, shows

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

RHS Chelsea Flower Show, show preview

GetAttachmentThe RHS launched the 2016 Chelsea Flower Show in style yesterday: we had Alan Titchmarsh interviewing Mary Berry and canapés with caviar. I felt positively spoilt.

As always the launch press event is all about the details you want to know but can’t (always) get off the press releases. So here’s the lowdown on what not to miss at Chelsea this year – and I’m not, on the whole, talking gardens:

The Queen’s 90th birthday party: Yes, HRH is a nonagenarian. It didn’t surprise me to learn that she’s now clocked up 51 visits to Chelsea: getting kicked out at 3pm on press day so she can view the gardens without the hoi polloi bothering her is one of the traditions of Chelsea I look forward to every year, mainly because it means an early shout on a Monday.

Queen Elizabeth II in the Great Pavilion at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2015.

Not bad for nearly 90, eh? Queen Elizabeth II in the Great Pavilion at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2015 (c) RHS/Bethany Clarke

Anyway: the RHS is laying on an exhibition taken from their back catalogue of photos, plus a floral arch inspired by made for Queen Victoria in Reigate, of all places.

Poppies will be much in evidence and no doubt much discussed: an installation of 300,000 crocheted poppies (yes, you did read that right) will cover 2000 square metres either side of the walkway leading up to the recently denuded front facade of the Royal Hospital in a sea of red. It is – as one journo pointed out – reminiscent of the Tower of London poppy installation a couple of years ago: but cosier.

Poppies

Boy, that’s a lot of poppies…

Poor old Alan got a lot of stick for his part in wiping away centuries of ancient tree and replacing them with a new design by George Carter: but as he said, ‘a Grade I listed building by Christopher Wren deserved better than an overgrown Victorian shrubbery’. Quite.

AMPgarden

Ann-Marie Powell is designing the ‘RHS GGBG HHH’ (as we will henceforth refer to it)

Ann-Marie Powell is designing the RHS garden (better to just say that than its full title, The RHS Greening Grey Britain Garden for Health, Happiness and Horticulture – snappy, eh?). I love Ann-Marie’s gardens: they burst with a kind of irrepressible energy, all enthusiasm and verve. There will be much gorgeousness including a perennial meadow, kitchen garden and demonstration beds. And you can walk through it. Divine.

There’s a new award: the poor folk who work their socks off constructing every painstaking detail of the show gardens yet barely getting a mention in the footnotes by comparison with the glitzy designers (a bit like the drummer in a glam rock band) will – at long last – get their very own award, the Best Construction Award. All gardens which score ‘excellent’ for construction on the judging sheets will go forward automatically for the gong.

There are seven female designers on Main Avenue this year: not, the RHS was at pains to assure us, because of any particular positive discrimination during the selection process but rather because of all the chat last year about the fact that there were only two prompted some of our best female designers to think about putting themselves forward. It’s still not 50:50 (there are 17 show gardens) but it’s a good start.

Artist's illustration - Hillier in Springtime designed by Sarah Eberle

Sarah Eberle’s design for Hillier

Sarah Eberle is designing the Hillier Garden in the Pavilion (as well as her beautiful watery Artisan Garden). Seasoned team member Ricky Dorlay – 50 Chelseas and counting – is there though of course the designer of the last several dozen gold medal winning exhibits previous to this, Andy McIndoe, and ever-smiley plantswoman Pip Bensley have moved on to pastures new. We’re promised a more designerly garden with a central water feature and plant groupings which will work not only with each other, but also in your garden. It’ll be right alongside their old plot around the monument, now taken by Bowden Hostas and the Orient Express’s sister train: the urge to compare-and-contrast will be hard to resist.

Nurseries are going conceptual: several are working with designer Kate Gould to bring a ‘more conceptual bent’ to exhibits in the Pavilion. The Mayan inspired temple pyramid at T3 Plants should be good…

You can wear a bobble suit with some kind of sensor system that lights up and tells you when you’re gardening badly. Have a go at digging on the stand and the team from the University of Coventry will tell you why your back always aches afterwards.

There are two new RHS Ambassadors: Young Hort Jamie Butterworth (is it me or are gardeners getting younger, like policemen and teachers?) and the redoubtable Jekka McVicar have both been recruited to the RHS cause. Both already do such a lot for the RHS we’ll be hard put to spot the difference, but it’s great that their huge efforts and achievements are being recognised.

 

Chelsea here we come!

Tulipomania

28 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in design, garden design

≈ Leave a comment

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)

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.

Dahlia dilemmas

07 Saturday Nov 2015

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

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

dahlia, dahlia coccinea, dahlia merckii, garden design, show dahlias, species dahlias, Tyntesfield

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?

Hydrangea blues

12 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by sallynex in garden design

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

hydrangea macrocarpa, hydrangeas, pruning

IMG-20141208-00078

I think it’s true to say that mophead hydrangeas (Hydrangea macrocarpa) are entering a spell in the garden fashion wilderness. Of course they may have been there for some time without me noticing: I am not the most cutting-edge of fashionistas.

Anyway, they’ll be in good company: rhododendrons and conifers have been stubbornly refusing to become trendy again for years despite brave recent efforts at rehabilitation.

Nobody seems to like mopheads any more. They’re old-fashioned, granny plants, blobby, boring. I am ripping them out in every garden I’m doing.

This lot are the heads I saved for drying from a clump of mophead hydrangeas in the chicken garden. You wouldn’t normally, of course, be pruning hydrangeas now: the advice is to wait till spring to allow old flower heads to give some frost protection, then trim down to a pair of buds.

But these are soon to become ex-mopheads. I’m clearing the lot of them: their owner doesn’t like them.

Fortunately she does, however, like hydrangeas, and we’re replacing the mopheads with other varieties. For there are many hydrangeas which have not followed the mophead down the slippery slope to oblivion and remain resolutely fashionable.

So we’re trying to decide between the lacecap ‘Mariesii’ (powdery purple flattened and very beautiful sprays of florets), designer’s favourite ‘Annabelle’ – possibly a bit too compact, though that does mean we can plant around them (I’ve always thought the flowers too large for the plant, mind you); and H. villosa, a big handsome bruiser of a plant I love for its strokeably felty leaves alone. The bed is by the house though so this one might be a bit too wild and woolly for comfort. We’re also thinking about H. quercifolia – fabulous oak-shaped leaves which turn deep red in autumn, but the flowers are paniculata types, like big creamy icecream cones – back to blowsy, then.

At the moment ‘Mariesii’ is a neck in front. Any other suggestions very welcome!

This week in the garden: Going to sow a meadow

24 Monday Mar 2014

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

annual mixes, annuals, flowers, meadows, Pictorial Meadows, wildflowers

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.

November garden: Cut flower terraces

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by sallynex in design, garden design, my garden

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

garden makeover, hard landscaping, hedges, Rosa mundi, roses

terrace_middle

There will come a point when I can’t show you this bit any more: it’s been cut flower heaven this year after a sowing frenzy in spring, but now I’m clearing the flowers to make way for a little demonstration garden for a magazine series. I could tell you what it is, but then I’d have to shoot you. Sorry.

The terraces are a practical solution to a recurring problem here: how to get the garden down the hill. We live 200m above sea level (that’s a shade over 600 ft – or the height of a respectable cliff) in the Blackdown Hills, a gentle landscape of undulating fields, lanes and hedgerows and long views across hills blueing into the distance.

terrace_pots

Clearing away the flowers is a long, slow process, as many are perennials and need painstaking potting up to keep over winter till they can be replanted again. Here are my Achillea ‘Summer Berries’; I’m also rescuing some sweet rocket, lupins, verbena and coreopsis.

Everywhere is either up, or down. There are two flat patches in my garden: the vegetable garden, and the bit directly around the house. Linking the two is yet another slope. Or at least, it would be if someone way back in the annals of the house’s long list of owners hadn’t built walls and terraced the whole slope into three broad plateaux.

terrace_zinnias

There are still flowers here: these gaillardias have hung on till the bitter end, though they’ve only just beaten the zinnias, coreopsis and verbena to the line.

I fret, sometimes, about what to do with my slopes. In places, they’re precipitous: the house sits in a bowl, as it used to be a quarry. Maps dating back well into the early 1800s show our quarry once stretched around the side, where there’s still a bit of rough ground in the cow field behind, and up the hill into what’s now a smooth sheep pasture with not a hint of earthworks to be seen. In our garden, though, the scars of mining gravel and limestone, as well as the chertstone rock (a kind of fractured flint) from which our house was built, mark deep into the earth.

terrace_rose

It may not look much, but this is my little triumph this month: this is a Rosa mundi, a fact I only know for a few pathetic flowers bravely peeking through a thicket of bramble six feet across and as much tall (it covered all you can see in the picture above) and so rampant it had grown thickly into the clematis hedge alongside. I spent a good couple of hours hacking out the brambles with a mattock and some riggers’ gloves until finally – at last – my poor smothered rose bush is breathing once more.

The hedgerows in the back garden grow on top of these near-vertical slopes, and I have been known to trim them while hanging, monkey-like, by one hand from the lower branches and wielding a petrol hedgetrimmer with the other. Don’t try this at home, folks.

I could take my cue from the terraces and turn them into a series of narrow (but flat) ribbons, stepping down the sides of my garden like paddyfields. But I baulk at the major work involved: I could bank up sleepers, perhaps, but I don’t much like the idea of forbidding walls of wood.

Stone walls would be more in keeping – and god knows there’s plenty of stone to build them with – but even so, it’s a huge job and I’m not convinced the end result wouldn’t look a bit… well… over-engineered.

Just now I’m thinking the softly softly, sympathetic approach is needed, and all that’s required is to cut paths winding through and up the cliffs, and maybe landsculpt more manageable, plantable slopes in between. We’ll see.

terrace_top

The view down the terraces: the top terrace I’ve just cleared of a year of Pictorial Meadows loveliness, full of poppies and mignonette and cornflowers. Wonderful. I’ve just planted a seed-sown hedge here too, though it’s so tiny you can barely see it yet: it’s hyssop, and you can’t buy it bare-root in this kind of quantity but you can raise it from seed.

Here’s how the same space looked when we moved here in 2010…

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

October garden: Greenhouses and fruit garden

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by sallynex in garden design, greenhouse, landscaping, my garden

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

aubergines, blight, cold frame, cucumbers, fruit, fruit garden, greenhouse crops, greenhouse growing, hard landscaping, pests and diseases, tomatoes, vegetables

octgarden_greenhousecukes

It’s amazing what you can fit into an 8×6 greenhouse: here be melons, cucumbers, chilli ‘Razzmatazz’, okra, sweet peppers and my amazing tree chilli, now taller than me

The slow dying of the greenhouses is the swansong of my year. They’re the last to go: long after the veg beds outside are brown with dead foliage and slimy with rot, the cucumbers are still challenging me to find new recipes and the chilli peppers are suffusing with colour from green to orange to red.

octgarden_greenhousecukes2

Smaller but perfectly formed: ‘Sweet Crunch’ cucumbers, still going strong

It’s been a good year: and a bad. I have two greenhouses, facing each other in the lee of a hedge across the coldframe I made for my old garden (it’s falling to pieces now – a combination of age and a blackthorn tree just above which keeps dropping branches at inconvenient moments).

In one greenhouse I plant cucumbers, melons, peppers and anything else I fancy growing that year: in the other are my tomatoes.

I always start the year so optimistically with my toms: I love to try new varieties or revisit old ones. This year it’s been Gardeners’ Delight, Costoluto Fiorentino (quite the best beefsteak for flavour bar, perhaps, Brandywine) and the plum tomatoes Rio Grande.

octgarden_greenhousetoms

Not so successful. The other greenhouse has been sick with blight for months: nothing will grow in there but the marigolds. Pretty as they are, you can’t eat them.

But despite the dry weather, despite the perfect growing conditions of this blissfully warm summer, the blight got in.

I mulched with compost from the bins outside: mistake no. 1, as it no doubt carried blight spores. Then a pane of glass in the roof lost a corner, so the rain – laden, too, with spores – could spatter the Costolutos with fatally infected water. And the bush tomatoes I had in the corner – ‘The Amateur’ – turned out to be the most blight-prone tomatoes I’ve ever grown, finishing off my other plants by incubating and then spreading the plague.

octgarden_greenhouseaubergine

This was meant to be a ‘Black Beauty’ aubergine: but it’s turned out more like a ‘Pinstripe’. Duff seeds – veg which haven’t grown into what they said on the packet – have been a bit of a feature this year.

Well: it’s a lesson learned. This winter’s to-do list includes changing the soil in this greenhouse; replacing the broken panes; and fumigating with a sulphur candle. Then next year I shall use nothing but the cleanest compost and water with tap water. I’m considering growing only blight-resistant varieties, too: ‘Losetto’, ‘Ferline’ and ‘Fantasio’, perhaps.

octgarden_fruitgarden

My fruit garden: the only ‘finished’ bit of the garden (and even then it needs a netting cage, quite a few more plants and a bit of extra path put in). My little still small place of calm.

On the plus side, my fruit garden is looking wonderful. I planted it just last winter with two maiden cherries, a redcurrant, a couple of blackcurrants raised from cuttings taken from plants I had on my allotment, and a slew of raspberries. Oh, and a bed of strawberries, of course.

You’re not supposed to grow fruit on chalk, and my soil is grey with the stuff. But as a gardener to the core, I’m going to try anyway. So far I’m encouraged: the raspberries have not turned yellow as I expected them to (though three canes have turned up their toes for reasons unknown); the cherries are thriving; and the blackcurrants have had their first fruits already.

Here’s how it looked in 2010:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

October garden: Veg plot

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by sallynex in garden design, kitchen garden

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

kitchen garden, my garden, October, triangles, veg plot, zigzags

octgarden_veggardenzigzags

The beginnings of the zigzags are emerging at the far end: that’s my first asparagus bed on the left there, planted this spring

We have been here three seasons now: and what better time to start recording the garden that’s emerging slowly, painfully, from 30 years’ worth of indifference.

It is a humbling thing to create a garden. You come in with all kinds of grand ideas: you try to impose your own character on the soil but it turns around and says, no, this is me, I am this way and you cannot change my nature.

This garden has been far wilder than any I have made before. Nature insists on being taken account of: the great, woolly ancient Somerset hedgerows that surround us, for example, defining the space, and though we can cut them back to their bounds they are a physical, boisterous, living presence we can’t ignore.

And then there’s the growth: the exuberant, fecund, joyous speed with which greenery thrusts from the ground into the kind, West Country air. That’s great from a gardener’s point of view: I have never grown such lush, huge, wonderful plants. And exhausting, too: it includes hogweed above your head, bindweed sprinting madly up flower stems, cow parsley romping through borders and nettles thick as forests.

The previous owners dealt with the rampancy by mowing it within an inch of its life. They did little other gardening, in fact: it probably took all their time to get round the place with hedgetrimmers and ride-ons.

The veg plot was a long, thin lawn between looming hedges when we moved in. Very neat, very pleasant, very dull. There were four fruit trees: the remains, I think, of an orchard but sadly clogged with lichen and moss, the air still and heavy inside the bulging, overgrown hedges that left a narrow strip just 8ft wide down the middle.

octgarden_veggardenfurtherdown

At the near end it’s more chaotic but I laid out the zigzags with canes and string last winter. I love growing in big triangles: so much more creative than four-by-ten beds.

I change my mind more about where I grow my vegetables than anywhere else in the garden, probably because this is the beating heart of the place where I spend most of my time: it’s no coincidence that this is the first part of the garden I tackled.

So this bit has undergone a few reincarnations since its hedge-choked early days: at first, fresh from my allotment, I laid out the beds in a practical line of sensible, not-too-wide raised beds, the path down the right-hand side, smaller paths between each bed.

But I got so bored: sooo bored of looking at those straight lines, and though I tried to shoehorn a little imagination in there – frothy ‘Salad Bowl’ lettuces at the feet of my Telephone peas, that kind of thing – it wasn’t the inspiring space I wanted it to be.

Cue triangles: big ones, hugely impractical, possibly verging on the perverse, but ah! so beautiful. I weave peas among the feet of my beans, and march lettuces along the edges; I froth nasturtiums over the boards and draw zigzags in beetroot leaves. Every time I go in here my soul sings and I get so excited about what becomes possible when you throw out the rulebooks and follow your heart.

Here’s what it looked like in 2010 when we moved in:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

← Older posts

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • June 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • September 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • May 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006

Categories

  • book review
  • chicken garden
  • children gardening
  • climate change
  • container growing
  • cutting garden
  • design
  • education
  • end of month view
  • exotic edibles
  • France
  • Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day
  • garden design
  • garden history
  • garden words
  • gardening without plastic
  • Gardens of Somerset
  • giveaways
  • greenhouse
  • herbs
  • kitchen garden
  • landscaping
  • my garden
  • new plants
  • new veg garden
  • news
  • overseas gardens
  • Painting Paradise
  • permaculture
  • pick of the month
  • plant of the month
  • pond
  • poultry
  • pruning
  • recipes
  • seeds
  • self sufficiency
  • sheep
  • shows
  • sustainability
  • this month in the garden
  • Uncategorized
  • unusual plants
  • videos
  • walk on the wild side
  • wildlife gardening
  • wordless wednesday

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Sally Nex
    • Join 6,908 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Sally Nex
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...