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Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Tag Archives: Tyntesfield

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?

Nature’s own weedkiller

06 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in Gardens of Somerset, kitchen garden, new plants, unusual plants

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

bindweed, biological controls, couch grass, ground elder, Mexican marigold, Tagetes minuta, Tyntesfield, weedkillers, weeds

tagetesminutaBefore we leave the veg garden at Tyntesfield, I thought I’d just share this bit of veg-growing geekery: just to demonstrate that it’s not only computer whizzes who get unfeasibly excited at obscure things that mean nothing to anyone else, this little patch of 1.5m high nondescript greenery had me jigging on the spot and getting quietly quite worked up while all around me were just wondering what the heck it was there for and hurrying past to have a look at the pretty orange pumpkins.

This is Tagetes minuta: aka the Mexican marigold. It’s a giant of a thing, well over head height. Unlike other tagetes, its flowers aren’t much to write home about either being small, yellow and nondescript: like ‘an impoverished pale yellow groundsel’ as Chiltern Seeds, one of the few who stock the seed, describe it.

But this in veg-gardening terms is the Hadron Collider of weed control. Totally cutting edge, and the very latest thing.

You see, it’s an allelopath: which is to say it emits powerful chemicals from its roots which inhibit the growth and indeed eventually kill any plants which dare to try and grow nearby.

Great Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest strategy: and coincidentally an effective poison against bindweed, couch grass and ground elder. I haven’t heard whether it tackles mares tail too.

Of course you can’t plant anything else while this natural weedkiller is growing: but if you have an area to clear sow it with Mexican marigold and it’s supposed to be a very effective way of doing it. Certainly better than the usual black plastic (which just makes the roots come to the surface in my experience: you still have to weed them out in the usual way and then they break and come back… you know the drill).

The reason I was getting so excited is because this is the first time I have seen it in action, properly growing in the ground. I don’t have an area in my own garden I can clear to give this a try (despite having the bindweed problem from hell) so I was delighted to find Tyntesfield’s gardeners are carrying out the experiment for me.

They won’t know results until the middle of next year: this has been growing in this patch all this summer and so we’ll have to wait till spring next year to see if the bindweed comes back. I will give them a ring in six months or so and find out how they got on. Watch this space.

 

A Tynte of Victoriana

05 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in design, garden history, Gardens of Somerset, greenhouse, kitchen garden

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

national trust, public gardens, Tyntesfield, Victorians, William Gibbs

tyntesfieldI’ve been wanting to visit Tyntesfield in Wraxall, near Bristol, for years. So on the slightly shaky pretext of tracking down a grapevine to photograph for the book (in all good bookshops from next Easter, assuming I can find a blimmin’ grapevine – Ed), and a passing mention of there being a grapevine somewhere in the grounds, I set off up the M5 on what passed for work but was actually a garden visiting jolly.

The house is a spectacularly beautiful Gothic revivalist confection, bought by the Gibbs family in 1843 and owned by them for four generations until the National Trust took it over.

The Gibbs family wealth was built on Peruvian bird poo: apparently guano was a hot commodity in Victorian times. They made fertiliser out of it. What the difference was that made it necessary to ship poo all the way from Peru when there was plenty to be had on the coasts of England is a mystery.

tyntesfield2

William Gibbs – who bought the house – was made a rich man by his lack of squeamishness about trading in the sort of stuff most buttoned-up Victorians wouldn’t even admit existed (and by not caring all that much about the thousands of African and Chinese slaves who died in his Peruvian guano pits, some 40 years after Britain abolished slavery).

He was known as the richest non-nobleman in England, though Victorian music-hall singers, in that wonderfully arch snobbery that was a feature of the period, were less kind: the song went

‘William Gibbs made his dibs,
Selling the turds of foreign birds.’tyntesfield3
Anyway, I digress.

Of course I was there mostly to see the vegetable gardens: and a fine walled kitchen garden it is too, though it’s tucked a bit out of the way like an afterthought at the bottom of the hill that slopes away from the house.

The grapevine, along with some excellent peaches, was in a fine row of lean-to glasshouses (not your average off-the-shelf from the garden centre: think scalloped glass and metal frames). Unfortunately you couldn’t go inside, rather annoyingly, so that was it for my book photography excuse. I just about managed to squeeze the camera in through a side window to take the above photo of an exceptionally well-trained fig tree round the corner, though: must attempt this on a couple of figs I look after for clients.

tyntesfield4
It’s a modest sort of garden, run largely by volunteers with an honesty box outside for the veg. I did like their careful use of traditional materials: here old clay pipes used for forcing chicory and the like. There were some lovely rhubarb forcers too: and I do like a well-written slate plant label.

tyntesfield5

All very shipshape and lovely: even if I wasn’t a bit biased, the veg garden would actually be the best bit of the whole garden for me. There was a rather fetching spot just outside, full of dahlias (of which more later); alongside that was a newly-restored Grade I orangery, but the plants were a half-hearted afterthought – just a few slightly diffident-looking pot plants inside looking as if they’d rather be somewhere else. It was crying out for some majestic lemon trees dripping golden fruit and blossoms.

There’s also a not-bad rose garden, but all on its own, separated from the house by a rather unnecessarily long path (and unfortunately suffering badly from box blight so part-cordoned off when I was there). And there’s a formal terrace in front of the house itself.

But that’s pretty much it – in a 500-acre estate. I came away a little disappointed.

The garden didn’t hang together, somehow: to me, it felt like a series of slightly inconsequential interruptions to the otherwise expansive (and presumably easier to maintain) lawns-and-trees combo the National Trust is so fond of. As if someone had gone along thinking, hmm, we’d better have a bit of garden here – without really thinking about how it all links up.

An interesting lesson, perhaps, in how not to design a garden: it would have been better to group the disparate areas together, leading one into the other and relating to each other in some way. Like the gardens around the house at another local National Trust house, Knightshayes, perhaps – a similar era and style of house, yet the gardens so very much more successful (though for some reason there the kitchen garden is miles away too).

Just goes to show: bird poo can buy you a grand house but it can’t buy you discernment.

Wordless Wednesday

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in wordless wednesday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

autumn, curing, national trust, pumpkins, ripening, squash, Tyntesfield

pumpkins

As seen at Tyntesfield, near Bristol

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