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Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Tag Archives: chalk soil

Wild at heart

06 Monday Jun 2011

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

chalk soil, wildflowers

I came back from a recent weekend hiking over the chalk downlands of Oxfordshire aching rather more than expected in joint and muscle but also puzzling over the distinctions we make between wild flowers and garden flowers.

A sort of pinkish vetchy sort of thing…. wildflower identification never was my strong point

When is a wild flower not a wild flower? When does it cross the line and become a flower that is somehow more acceptable: somehow not untidy, pretty even?

Common toadflax (Linaria vulgaris)

Is a cornflower a ‘wildflower’, or a ‘garden flower’? When we buy garden wildflower mixes, do the plants that grow become, de facto, garden flowers? Or are they still somehow ‘wild’?

Common knapweed (Centaurea nigra)

It was brought home even more forcefully because what I optimistically call my top field (mainly because it is home to my chickens) has been gradually filling up with flowers all season. That’s because – to the horror of the local farmers – I haven’t been mowing it. First, I just couldn’t be bothered; second, I didn’t have the time; and third, I just couldn’t bring myself to cut down all the wildflowers.

Dog rose (Rosa canina)

In both Oxfordshire, where my poor walking companion had to endure frequent pauses for me to take the photos on this page, and the top field, the flowers are classic chalk downland wildflowers. That’s a protected habitat under the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, which is as good an indication as any of the quality and diversity of the plants, insects and animals which live there.

Field poppy (Papaver rhoeas)

This weekend I had small blue butterflies flitting around my head as I made the trek back and forth to the chicken run. The air is buzzing with insects; not just bees, but hoverflies and little funny-looking blue flies and big clumsy may bugs. The field is surging with life (unlike the barley field next door), and in my gardener’s book, that’s just as it should be.

Fox and cubs (Pilosella aurantiaca)

And never mind the wildlife: the whole thing has been a picture of loveliness. First it was a powder-blue sheen of bluebells and ajuga, later sprinkled liberally with starry speedwells; pink campion and white campion danced with ox-eye daisies, cow parsley and jack-by-the-hedge later on, with clover and sheets of yellow buttercups skipping at their feet.

Meadow cranesbill (Geranium pratense)

Of course some ‘wild’ flowers are deemed acceptable: few gardens are without their foxgloves or forget-me-nots. But why do we go to the effort of growing Ammi majus – lovely as it is – when cow parsley is every bit as beautiful and rather more statuesque? Not to say easier to grow?

Comfrey (Symphytum officinale)

Don’t you lose your heart to red field poppies every bit as much as to oriental poppies? But why are field poppies ‘wild’? And why are cornflowers and corncockles relegated to the ‘wildflower’ bits of the garden? Why aren’t they allowed to hold their own with the penstemons and the salvias and the astrantias?

Hesperis matronalis… I think

It strikes me as all rather arbitrary. I suppose I should take heart from the fact that there are wildflower bits of anyone’s garden; it wasn’t so long ago that Beth Chatto was almost disqualified at an RHS show for daring to bring Helleborus foetidus, deemed ‘wild’ and therefore undeserving of appreciation. At least these days we’re allowed to have ‘wild’ flowers in our gardens.

But I do feel sad that we are divided and labelled. We are ‘wildlife gardeners’ – or we are other sorts of gardener. I don’t consider myself a ‘wildlife gardener’, whatever that is; I love having wildlife in my garden, yet I do my own thing and don’t garden around them (and am quite horrible to a lot of wildlife, especially if it’s furry and tries to eat my lettuces).

White campion (Silene latifolia)

If anything, I’m a kitchen gardener; but I also love to grow flowers. I like having wild things in my garden, too, and even like several of the so-called weeds (wildflowers?), as long as they behave themselves, more or less. I hoick a lot of them out as well: but then I dug up a rose bush last week because I didn’t like it and it was in the wrong place. So does that make roses weeds in my garden? No, of course not; and neither are cow parsley or cranesbills, though I treat them much the same in that I grow them where I like them, and pull them out where I don’t.

Guelder rose (Viburnum opulus)

Well: these were idle thoughts, and rather rambly ones, and I don’t pretend to have any answers. But I do make a plea for everyone to stop all this pigeonholing. Personally, I shall grow campion and cranesbills among my cosmos and crocosmia, and hang the consequences. They’re just far too pretty to leave out.

End of month view: March

31 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by sallynex in greenhouse, herbs

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Anemone blanda, chalk soil, cold frame, comfrey, daffodils, end of month view, fig tree, lupins, Pawlonia, peonies, pulsatilla, rock gardens, vegetables, wind flowers

What a difference a couple of months makes.

Last time I did the rounds with the camera was the end of January: barely a leaf had burst its bud at that time, I hadn’t even started the post-winter clearup, and everything was looking decidedly bleak and not a little scruffy around the edges.

I woke up, along with the garden, some time in mid-February. And in the six weeks or so since then, everything has changed.

First up (of course) is the veg garden: always my first priority at seed-sowing time. I’ve been ferrying eyewatering quantities of scaffold boards back on the roof of my poor groaning family estate to divide up the long, thin space into 4ft x 10ft beds. At first they were all re-covered with the black plastic which has been keeping my soil protected over winter: but now, gradually, it’s all coming off.

January:

…and now:

The far end is well up and away: with the addition of a bit of bought-in soil improver (not yet quite confident about how good my soil might be), new potatoes, onions and shallots have joined the overwintering broad beans and autumn-sown onions.

Under those cloches are two varieties of pea; Feltham First (early and robust) and heritage variety Telephone, which reaches up to 5ft tall, so I’m told. Further down there are rows of leeks and carrots under fleece for protection against carrot fly.

Greenhouse no. 1 – unheated – is filling up: the other day I had to rig up the coldframe (in bits since the post-move chaos) in a hurry to get the first of the sweetpeas, chard and overwintered marigolds ready to go out.

But just look at Greenhouse no. 2 – the one that’s frost-free. I have run out of room. There is no other way to put it. The windowsills in the house are groaning with seedlings too. What am I going to do!

Right, never mind the veg: what about the rest of it?

Here’s the rock garden, or rather the herb garden to be. Nicely trimmed these days: and I’ve started placing a few pots of bits and bobs around the place ready to be planted.

January:

…and now:

In the blue pot is an olive tree, about six inches tall when I got it (it was a freebie which looked a lot better in the magazine than what actually arrived on my doorstep).

I nurtured it and nursed it, and now it’s about 5ft high and a lovely healthy young tree. Then it got left outside in the snow and ice, and I resigned myself to losing it: but no. It didn’t even lose its leaves.

So since it’s survived that, I figure it’ll breeze being planted outside. It’s moved around this patch a few times now, trying to find the right spot for what I hope will one day be a fetchingly gnarled evocation of Italy on my doorstep, and a rather fine backdrop to all my Mediterranean herbs.

There’s also plenty going on here quite independently of my own feeble efforts to spruce things up. Little pretties keep popping up all over the place. I keep stopping in my tracks on the way out of the house: the other day it was because I spotted a clump of pulsatilla. Pulsatilla! In my garden!

Aren’t they lovely? Those palest grey fluffy feathers set off the dusty mauve of the flowers so perfectly.

And look at this: in the hollow between two sides of the old stone wall, partially collapsed, a little colony of windflowers has sprung up.

I’ve spent many thorny hours clearing the bank above where my tropical edibles patch will eventually be. It’s not only painful, but also slightly unnerving as this bank is about 12ft high and much of my bramble removal was done while hanging precariously off a handy branch. Must invest in a ladder.

January:

…and now:

It’s all looking a lot better now, so I guess the splinter-pocked fingers were worth it.

There’s more pot placement here: you can make out the fig in the far corner, and just out of sight there’s a Pawlonia tomentosa I was given – half-dead on arrival but now, rather excitingly, reviving.

And other things are popping up here, too: lupins and a carpet of some kind of small white comfrey. It’s beautiful, the bees love it, but it is obviously a little invasive: I shall have to think carefully about where I move it to.

So on to the only other bit I’ve done anything to; the circular bed around our shady seating area.

January:

…and now:

I’ve recently been told by someone who’s lived in the village a lot longer than me that this was once a pond. This is answering a lot of questions: why, for example, a hefty Rodgersia (usually a bog plant) can survive so well in a free-draining, chalky soil.

I have an uncomfortable feeling this circular bed may be hiding a pond liner of epic proportions. We’re talking probably concrete; maybe not even split. We are talking bog garden.

This may rather alter my plans to turn this area into a scented garden full of daphnes and Christmas box and wintersweet.

For now however I have just cleared the winter debris and I’m about to launch into a huge weed-through, followed by my standard fall-back in situations where I have little time and large areas to fill: I’m planning to sow this lot with seed from Pictorial Meadows, already sitting in an inviting little packet on my desk as I type.

It isn’t all weeds and bog plants though: tucked up on the bank, a little higher than the rest, there is a paeony already swelling into bud.

A paeony! In my garden! (another chalk-loving plant I have never been able to grow before. My cup brimmeth over: snowdrops, primroses, pulsatillas and now peonies. Can it get any better than this?)

And last but absolutely not least: I haven’t touched this bit but I have been in love with it for a whole month now. I have, on the hill that rises at the back of my garden, a host of golden daffodils.

There are hundreds of them, across the width of the garden, and we have been giving them away to friends in big fat bunches as well as stuffing every vase in the house. Whoever planted them, many decades ago: I hope you are somewhere just as beautiful right now.

Thank you to Helen, aka Patient Gardener, for hosting the End of Month View: the perfect opportunity to take a step back and take the big view for a change.

Season of mists…

12 Friday Oct 2007

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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Tags

chalk soil, leafmould, trees

There’s a definite autumn tinge to the air now. It’s been misty the last couple of days and the leaves are just turning that russety shade of brown that means any minute now we’ll be out with the leaf rakes and collecting what seems like tons of the things.

Which is why I’ve been sorting out the leafmould bins for one of my clients. She has a fabulous big woodland garden, full of lovely mature natives like beech, oak and whitebeams (one of the loveliest trees if you have a chalky soil – it has silver undersides to its leaves). Unfortunately, though she has two massive leafmould bays, they were full of roots and half falling down, so they took a lot of work to get functioning again!

I’m there now though, after a couple of sessions of digging out a mixture of nettle and tree roots and sorting out the rotted stuff – some many years old – from the new leaves which had been dumped on top. Now I have two bays, about 10ft x 10ft (I told you it was a big garden) made of posts driven into the ground with green wire chainlink fencing round it. You need plenty of air in a leafmould bin to make good mould, so things like compost bins, with more solid sides, don’t work: chainlink fences are ideal and last for years, though you have to have strong uprights which are well driven into the ground as the weight of the leaves can be enormous.

Now I have lots of lovely old leafmould to spread as a mulch on her borders. It makes a great autumn mulch as it’s low in nutrients so won’t spur plants on to put out unseasonally tender growth, and it still adds plenty of organic matter to the soil (desperately needed on her thin chalk). One of the many good reasons to have a garden in the woods!

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