Tag Archives: summer bedding

Postcard from Hampton Court: Carpet bedding is back

04 Wednesday Jul 2012

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The floral (well, green) clock on the wall of summer garden The Wheels of Time (Bronze)
Vertical planting… or carpet bedding?
Another green picture in the Low Cost High Impact garden Summer in the Garden (Silver)

Carpet bedding galore, and all exquisitely executed by the masters of the art at Bournemouth Borough Council’s show garden A Very Victorian Fantasy (Silver-gilt) 

Shed roof at The Garlic Farm (gold, and best exhibit in the Growing for Taste marquee)

And more edible carpet bedding, this time from Dobies: Pak choi ‘Chuchoi’ and ‘Rubi’ with quite the brightest marigolds I’ve ever seen
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OOTS: Bowed, battered, and very nearly beaten

02 Tuesday Aug 2011

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This is, or rather was, one of the more dramatic publicly-maintained council-funded plantings I know: the Victorian cascades at the foot of the hill in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight.

(The other one is the rock garden at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, but I keep forgetting my camera on trips to the beach so you’ll have to wait for that one).

I expect my timing is all out, but I wanted to take a snap of this one as a contribution to Out on the Streets (OOTS), the regular slot on public planting hosted by Veg Plotting, and since I’ve just come back from my hols on the Isle of Wight and wanted to go on about it a bit, it couldn’t wait.

Anyway: the Isle of Wight, of course, enjoys a mild microclimate which makes it very nearly subtropical in terms of plant life. Echiums, aeoniums and even cacti thrive outdoors here; public planting displays are as likely to include agaves and aloes as ageratum and antirrhinums.

However, the IoW County Council has also been taking a hatchet to its budget: £32 million saved over four years, out of a total budget which was only about £200m in the first place. Around £15 million in cuts have already been identified; libraries, regional theatres, tourist information centres, sports facilities and public toilets are toppling like ninepins.

Parks departments are soft targets in such slash-and-burn strategies: £450,000 is coming out of the parks budget on the Island between now and 2013. Quite apart from Ventnor Botanic Garden, which has had its entire funding removed (of which more later) the holes are beginning to show in the Island’s previously perfectly-manicured parks, once the pride of an area which depends heavily on tourism to keep itself solvent.

Unfortunately the budget cuts also coincided with the one of the worst winters in living memory. Even the Island, usually pretty much frost-free, had the deepest snowfall for decades. Not ideal for subtropical planting, and as you can see from the picture much of it was lost.

There’s no money to replace it with either more exotics, or even run-of-the-mill bedding: so we’re left looking at bare soil, right into July and peak tourist season.

I’ve been going to the Island every year for over a decade, and I’ve always looked forward to visiting this bit of Ventnor. I remember the area simply dazzling with colour: vivid orange marigolds and scarlet salvias jostling up against alyssum and magenta aubretia tumbling over the rocks. It wasn’t tasteful, but my goodness, it was jolly, and never failed to put a smile on my face.

It’s so sad to see it like this: still trying, just, but such a pale imitation of what it once was. So is this what we’ve got to look forward to, then? Scraggy bare bits interspersed with brave little patches of yellow daisies or pink geraniums?

Quite apart from cringing to think what the tourists will make of it – so much for Britain plc, then – this is not a country I want to live in. It’s depressing, poor, uninspiring, defeated. You can blame whoever you like for the current crisis: but this can’t, possibly, be the right way to take us forward.

Parks departments may be viewed as the poor relation as far as many local councils are concerned, but you underestimate the work they do at your peril. They’re responsible for the public face we turn to the world: reduce them to a starved, beaten down skeleton, and you do it to all of us, too.

The Grand Tour #2: The Sunny Bit

02 Tuesday Nov 2010

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Now for the one bit of my garden that is undeniably Very Sunny Indeed. It is on the south-facing side, there are, for once, no trees shading it, no house in the way, no high banks blocking out the sun. It isn’t even concreted over. For this reason it is, the garden plan in my head dictates:

The Tropical Garden

(you are allowed to laugh)
Turn your back to the house, look a little over to your right, and you will see to one side of the path (the sunny side, natch) a flat bit. This is remarkable in itself as it is the only flat bit in the whole garden (apart from a concreted-over bit behind it, just visible to the left of the picture, which is where my garden office is going to go so that I can look out over this bit of the garden whenever I tire of my computer screen, which will be often).

It measures around 25ft x 40ft: not enormous, but quite big enough to house a selection of exotic and exotic-looking plants. I have for a long time nursed a secret hankering for a tropical edibles garden and this is going to be it.

At the moment my tropical edibles collection includes a big (and splitting) pot of yacon and a fig tree. Not very impressive, really. I hope to add ginger (Zingiber, proper ginger, not Hedychium – although I have two of those too which will no doubt go in there somewhere), some taro roots (Colocasia esculenta to you botanical types), edible passion fruits, kiwi vines, some acocha and a few bananas just for fun. The idea is that it will eventually be the kind of jungly mass of shoots, leaves and, no doubt, eats to pluck romantically from the vine as you waft through its sunshiny shade.

But all that is in the future: here, unfortunately, is it in its current unadorned state.

There is – of course! this is my garden! – a bank. A particularly steep, in fact nearly vertical bank at that. However: ever one to pluck opportunity from the teeth of a bloody ridiculous situation, I am getting quietly quite excited about this particular bank. I see vertical planting a go-go: beans tumbling down from soil pockets near the top, dangling their purple pods among clambering vines of kiwi, passion fruit and acocha…. now all I have to figure out is how to a) support the ones I’m not actually going to plant into the bank, and b) get the bank’s current occupants – mainly stinging nettles and harts-tongue ferns – under control.

The emergency pond lives here, right at the front bit where it curves round to the house. I call it the emergency pond as Mango, who you can just about see under those iris leaves, only just survived the house move: poor old Peanut floated to the top of the rather inadequate fishtank they were living in while we got around to digging holes for ponds (not, admittedly, top of our to-do list on the day after the removal men left). After that and with the anguished wailing of small children echoing in our ears, the fishpond was in within two hours. And very nice it looks: I’m hoping the taro will drape rather elegantly over the edge of it in times to come.

There is a nod at planting: a slightly dislocated herb garden of mint, lavender, rosemary and sage all looking very healthy, if a little without context.

And a splash of colour from bedding. Flowering! In November!

The real splash of colour at the moment, though, is from this viburnum: I’m thinking x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ as it has the most incredible burnished bronze-purple autumn foliage.

And last but not least: some absolutely giant sunflowers. They must be (and I am not boasting here as I had nothing to do with growing them) 12ft tall. It bodes well for the fertility of the soil that they can pull this off in supposedly thin chalk: in fact I think sunflowers, being edible in both seed and seedling stages, definitely qualify for the tropical look.

Bedazzled by bedding

29 Thursday Jul 2010

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Right, time to put on your sunglasses, folks.

Yesterday was one of the highlights of my year: the entirely unmissable Thompson & Morgan sneak preview press day for all us hacks to see what they’re planning to bring in to the catalogue for 2011.

T&M have a huge breeding programme: sometimes misguided (step forward, the frankly mutant mophead hydrangea produced this year with one single flower head 10″ across on an upright stem) but mostly pushing the limits in an occasionally groundbreaking and always interesting way, especially among fruit and veg which is why I trekked all the way up to Ipswich to go have a look. Four hours it took me to get back. Four hours. They closed two junctions of the M25 in case you’re interested. Now that’s dedication.

Anyway: the veg come later but for now I just want to indulge a little. T&M also have a well-deserved reputation for the most spectacular bedding: not usually my cup of tea at all but when you’re there surrounded by the most eye-spinning profusion of flowers you can’t help but be won over. Well, all right, I can leave the magenta petunias (and the ones striped yellow and pink…. bedding truly is the last refuge of spectacularly unashamed bad taste).

But many were really genuinely pretty plants, and quite a few will be finding their way into my patio pots next year.

Petunia ‘Phantom’: now this is a well wierd one. Kind of intriguing in its own rather spooky way.

Actually I think I preferred the flowers when they’re just emerging, a sultry near-black.

Zinnia haageana ‘Chippendale’ paired with Rudbeckia ‘Cappuccino’.

…and the equally sunshiny Calendula ‘Neon’

Another Rudbeckia, this time ‘Cherry Brandy’. Described as the first red rudbeckia ever bred but I’m sceptical: looks more bronze to me. Still lovely though.

Isn’t this pretty? And it’s a Zinnia: ‘Zahara Starlight Rose’, to be precise. Zinnias have always been temperamental for me but I might have another go if they’re going to look this good.

A little soothing pastel to cool things down a bit: Salvia farinacea ‘Fairy Queen’

This dwarf sunflower, called ‘Chocosun’ for reasons that entirely elude me, grows just three feet tall but looks lovely planted en masse.

Verbena ‘Peaches and Cream’

…naaah. That was all getting much too tasteful. Here’s Salvia horminium ‘Marble Arch Mixed’: now you couldn’t miss that, could you?

Return of the Rumble Memorial Pot

17 Friday Jul 2009

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You know, I’m supposed to have a pretty container frothing with flowers just outside my front door to welcome visitors. The idea was that I filled it with colourful bedding, petunias or some such, in summer and replanted with a cheery mix of winter pansies and maybe some spring bulbs in about November.

Well: this is it.


Yes, those are – or rather, were – the bedding plants under the cat. The trouble is that the very thing that makes this a good spot for bedding – sunny, bright spot and all that – also makes it very covetable to pussycats.

My late and much-lamented black-and-white cat Rumble used to do exactly the same: in fact, I had christened this very container the Rumble Memorial Pot after he died, and it always made me a little sad to see bedding actually thriving in it instead of being squashed. So since Rumble’s junior partner in crime Pippa has taken to doing the same thing I’m rather perversely cheerful now that I’m having to look at a pot of dead foliage all summer once more.

Colour, colour and more colour

03 Sunday Aug 2008

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Just got back from a week’s holiday in the Isle of Wight – lovely, thanks, and more of which later, but in the meantime I had a few pics from the Thompson & Morgan open day in Suffolk which I went to just before I left.

Now this is something of a fixture in most garden journalists’ calendars but it was the first time I’ve actually made it along. Bedding isn’t really my thing so I hadn’t really made it a priority before. How wrong can you be.

Now I’d better declare a blatant attempt at bribery on the part of the T&M people, armed as they were with oodles of freebies and a slap-up lunch. But – honest guv – I didn’t really need all the buttering up. This was an amazing display of gorgeous flowers which just bowled me over.


Not that there wasn’t any good old-fashioned traditional bedding: in fact there were buckets of it, including many in those awful gaudy candy-pink shades that old ladies love so much. However – stay with me here: in among the god-awful colour clashes there were some superb plants: ones which caught my eye included Begonia boliviensis ‘Bonfire’, in sizzling, sultry red, and much more subtle greeny-yellow Petunia ‘Susanna’ – as cool and reserved as the begonia was in-yer-face.


And here’s a close-up of the sexiest fuchsia ever – Fuchsia denticulata. I love species fuchsias. Must collect some more.


Bedding outside – they don’t bother with subtle colour combinations, do they? But don’t you love that millet (Pennisetum Purple Majesty)?


And here’s a close-up of the Nicotiana – it’s N. suaveolens and planted en masse like this creates an ethereal, airy effect like dancing fairies.


I liked this nasturtium, too – a sultry red with purple-tinged leaves called ‘Cobra’. They gave us a packet of seeds in with the freebies so I’ll look forward to growing it next year.


These sunflowers (‘Irish Eyes’) made me smile, too. They were a bit small for my liking – about thigh-height – but looked great in a big massed planting like this.


My only complaint was that we didn’t get to see more of this – the trials field, where T&M develop their new varieties, so you get a sneak preview of varieties in development. Quite apart from anything else, the whole (highly commercial) process of breeding new variations that might become tomorrow’s stalwarts is fascinating.

Still – maybe next year! I haven’t even mentioned the fruit & veg, either – lots of great ideas (standard-trained fig, anyone?) The trials are open to the public too – T&M’s open day has been and gone, but all the major seed companies do it so get along to one if you possibly can (even if you are a bit sniffy about bedding!)

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.