A coarse Leicestershire Gardener's Blog

Batemans

2011-10-08T11:00:00.000-07:00

I abandoned my own garden at the beginning of the month and went on a 5 day coach tour of the Gardens of Kent.
There was something to admire in each of the five gardens we visited but my most treasured memories are of Batemans, home for over 30 years to my favourite author.

Photo taken by Linda Spashett

I can imagine how Kipling must have felt when he first saw this isolated 17th-century house, with its mullioned windows and oak beams, set in the woodlands of the Sussex Weald. His wife apparently was not so impressed at the prospect of living so far from civilisation.
The property is fortunate to be under the protection of two societies, - the National Trust that owns and maintains it and the Kipling Society that provides enough help and information to keep a visitor occupied for a week let alone the five hours available to our party.

It rained much of the day we were there but I managed to get out between showers to wander round the gardens that provided the settings for Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies
and inspired

The Glory of the Garden.

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.

For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You will find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all;
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks:
The rollers, carts and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.

And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and 'prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.

And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:--"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.

There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick,
There's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick.
But it can find some needful job that's crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!

Rudyard Kipling, 1911

Linden trees

2011-07-23T03:36:00.000-07:00

This is my favourite time of the year for taking an evening stroll or pottering about in the front garden watering or deadheading .
The linden trees (also known as lime or tilia or basswood) are in blossom- not conspicuous flowers, granted, but oh! the perfume, far more powerful this year than for several in the past. One very poor summer, two, or was it three, years ago, all residents commented that they had missed the perfume entirely. In any case, it lasts no longer than a fortnight. When at its best, one forgives the trees their tendency to block up gutters and drains with leaves in Autumn and drop twigs and small branches onto cars in all year round gales.
Most tall linden trees, like the ones in our road are remnants of the Victorian era. Nowadays many councils do not regard them as suitable for urban planting.
I am told that there are two dwarf varieties of linden 'Green Globe' and 'Lico, that look like lollipops on sticks and usually grow to know more than 15' in height. If their blossom is as well perfumed as the species lindens they may well become desirable street plants.
For a fuller account of Linden trees, botanically, pharmaceutically and historically see the article in Wikipedia

Opening Up

2011-02-26T08:24:00.000-08:00

I had a patch in my garden, enclosed by a hawthorn hedge, dogwood and conifers. In summer an aspen turned the area into a green walled cave. In winter bare branches let in the sunlight and the ground was covered with snowdrops that few visitors ever saw. In summer I slung my hammock here and would stare at patches of blue sky glistening between aspen leaves in complete privacy. Shade and a thick hawthorn hedge made me invisible to neighbours only a few feet away.
The downside was that the very dense conifer which kept me hidden from the rest of my garden also hid the view of my favourite tree, the beauty pine. Whereas most pines have stiff prickly needles, the needles of the beauty pine slip soft as silk through one's fingers. It's large pine cones are beige crescent moons. In December I prune it and use great branches to stand in for a Christmas tree. While pruning this year however I noticed that the dense conifer nearer the house was excluding so much light from the the from the beauty pine that its branches on one side were dying. The dense conifer had to go.

Since the offending tree was at least 20 ft tall I asked Chris to cut it in three portions. The wood was soft so the sawing didn't take long but I was surprised by the weight of each trunk section. As usual I used each section of trunk to demarcate the side of a garden bed. The ends of the branches where foliage was green we stacked against a fence to dry out and I shredded the rest of each branch where the foliage was dead, I used the shreddings to cover paths in the vegetable garden. The next job is to cover the regained ground with lower growing shrubs.

I have lost my private haven but can now see the snowdrops from my conservatory window

Winter plants surviving after 15 degrees of frost

2011-01-28T03:45:00.000-08:00

For the past three years winter here in the East Midlands of the UK has followed a middle eastern calender, with intervals of just 324 days between big freezes (so we had January 2009 to February 2009, December 2009 to January 2010 and November 2010 to January 2011 with freezes growing colder each year). However, while winter has been roaring in earlier, spring has been arriving later so, who knows, this winter may be twice as long as the one four years ago.

I wouldn't mind so much if tender pests were being killed off but the lily beetle that migrated into the East Midlands during the preceding spell of mild winters, was still with us last summer.

November's freeze ruined the first flush of the vanilla fragrant pink flowers of Viburnum Dawn that usually grace December and January in my back garden. The second flush is struggling from brown mush despite still heavy frosts and low daytime temperatures so if, for the rest of winter, night temperatures fall to no more than a few degrees below zero, I may still enjoy a shrub full of perfumed blossom while most other plants are sulking.

I am not sure how cold it has to get before the hardy evergreen viburnum tinus gets fazed, but its white flowers are happily opening over the porch although their coarse perfume holds no appeal to me.

Choisya Sundance brightens up the winter with its golden foliage but the flowers disappeared with the first mild frost.

Garry elliptica's catkins are still fresh and the leaves have not been seared. as they were a few years ago, by a less cold but fierce wind from the South West. Swirls of broom twigs too have a quiet beauty of their own.

Most other plants of interest this January, however, unfurling hellebore buds, emerging spears of snowdrops striped with white, primroses showing but single flowers on their spikes, escape notice unless searched for.

I don't seem to be able to position photos where I want them in this blog, the white buds are those of the hellebore (Christmas rose) the shrube is Choisya Sundance

The Sparkle of early Autumn

2010-09-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

Here at the end of the month, a sunny daybreak, chilly but still frost free creates sparkles from last night’s raindrops. Spiders’ webs create glittering barriers so intrinsically woven one turns back to seek another route rather than vandalise these works of art.

Toads

2010-09-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

A few years ago the fence between my front and side garden collapsed. Gradually I created a burglar resistant replacement barrier from thorny hawthorn and rose prunings, densely leaved shrubs and other large pieces of plant material. In due course, ivy and honeysuckle rambled over the 8 ft pile to give it the semblance of a living hedge.
Last week, for reasons that I cannot now recollect, I decided to exchange this somewhat unorthodox garden feature with two 6' x 4' garden sheds set sideways on, united by a section of conventional fencing. In the process of removing the old material to a bonfire site I found an abandoned robin's nest, five foot above ground level built into a discarded Christmas tree. Inside, I discovered a large toad.
Since the start of a six year frog plague, at last I hope over, my garden has become home to an increasing number of flat toads, all closely resembling chunks of black mudstone.
I have always thought of toads as solitary creatures but recently when I lifted a brick pressed into the soil,I uncovered a cluster five toads, two full grown and three very small. I would have taken them for a family if I didn't know that toads desert their offspring once the males have fertilised the spawn. This ununusual sociability was probably a sympom of overcrowding. The toad I found in the nest probably couldn't find privacy at ground level.

Peace by the pond, at last.

2010-05-18T09:24:00.000-07:00

I sat on my Thai garden chair and enjoyed my frog pond for the first time in at least four years.
The frog plague is over! For the last few years I have been scooping up at least fifty dead frogs with red skins and spawn has also come tinged with red.
Before that for several years there were so many frogs marching into the garden from all directions that although the pond is quite large for an urban garden there was more frog than water and so many males clung to each female that even healthy females drowned. Serenity was non-existent even if one coulld stomach the smell of decaying flesh.
This year, however, I saw no more than 12 frogs and had only two clusters of spawn. There are now many tadpoles swimming happily, at least they do while the sun shines. Under clouds cover they tend to stay dormant.
The occasional tadpole gets eaten by newts that zoom in on them like dinosaurs seen through the wrong end of a telescope but that is nature. I suppose red leg frog plague is also nature's way of reducing an oversized frog population but it smells far worse than death by predator!

Beauty in Neglect

2009-08-25T02:50:00.000-07:00

I broke my hip ten days ago and spent a week in hospital. Luckily it rained heavily while I was incarcerated so the outside plants were not short of water. I was amazed when I came out to find how beautiful my garden still was despite the lack of weeding. The dahlias have all come out giving a glorious display.
The back garden too is looking good. Again the dahlias add colour.

I am worried about my greenhouse which I can't get down to inspect. My daughter kindly took my aubergines home to look after and has brought them back. They are in the conservatory now looking fine. We are intending to have mousaka for dinner tonight,
I knew the cucumbers had developed stem rot before I fell over, and pulled them up but the melon, tomatoes and peppers were all doing fine. However while I was in hospital my son informed me that my tomatoes all had blight and he was going to dig them up. I suggested he left it to Chris, who helps me three hours a week but he was firm he would do it himself as 'EVERY leaf has to be picked up and disposed of properly, Mum.'
However when my son phoned me in hospital he said he hadn't cleared them himself and had asked Chris to do it after all but Chris had refused saying he hadn't time.

I detected a hint of trouble behind this and phoned Chris as soon as I was out of hospital. He was in a very aggrieved state.
'Your son asked me to clear the tomatoes because he said he didn't want to bring blight to his tomatoes, but what about my tomatoes! He wasn't bothered aboout those.'

I soothed him down as best I could but it din't occur to me that he hadn't watered the greenhouse as a result of my son's remarks.
The next day when my daughter and son-in-law went down they said the melon plant was completely frazzled, the peppers were just about surviving but the tomatoes although completely dry looked fine.
They watered the melon and next day they assured me it had perked up and the peppers were standing straight.
I just wish I could go and look at them myself, though.

Slinging my hammock

2009-06-15T03:01:00.000-07:00

Last year I bought a simple brightly striped cloth hammock for £5 from a local supermarket and then had to hunt for a place to hang it.
I needed two trees about 3 metres appart with trunks that bifurcated into stout branches at shoulder height. The reason the trees needed to bifurcate at shoulder height was so that two iron bars slipped between the metal rings at each end of the hammock would press against the branches and keep the hammock in place without the need to screw strong hooks into the living wood.
I found two suitable trees, a hedge hawthorn and an aspen I planted about ten years ago after weeding it out of a vegetable bed, in my mini-wood,( i.e. two border beds one between a pebble path and the overgrown hawthorn hedge dividing my garden from next doors and one between the same path and a winding lawn so narrow that in garden professional vocabulary, it is known as a ride. Over the past fifteen years, I have planted up these two borders with trees and tall shrubs.)
By the way a garden here in the UK is what North Americans call their yard. Being British we usuallly surround our gardens with fences or hedges. My hedges once enclosed a tiny private field on the edge of one of the village's great common fields and may well be over 200 years old although my house is only just over 80.
We had such a bad summer last year that I didn't get much use out of the hammock until the autumn - but what magical moments I enjoyed then with the sun shining through chinks in a curtain of red and orange leaves created by a virginia creeper that had taken over the hedge.
I took the hammock down for the winter but when I went to sling it up again this May, I found the hard way that the hawthorn tree I had used last year had rotted.
It took me some time to find a safer hawthor suitably close to the aspen but now the hammock is back in use for the summer.
I wonder whether I find the hammock so much more relaxing an outdoor resting place than either recliners or those metal and overstuffed-cushion monstrosities that have usurped the title hammock, because of some remote tree dwelling ancestor who constructed a sleeping place out of branches. It could be though that it is because both i need to sleep with my legs rest higher than the base of my spine or else I wake with a stiff back. It could be also that the surrounding trees and the enclosing canvas keep off the chilly winds so I am warmer in my hammock den than I am out in the open on the lawn.
So far this late spring and early summer thre have been several days when I have been able to lie in my hammock reading. I prefer reading outdoors in summer as on a clear day I don't have to use spectacles. I just hope this summer is going to be better than last year's washout.

Early Butterflies and other Insects

2009-03-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

It was a gorgeous day today so I spent most of it in the garden. Two species of butterfly showed themselves - the brimstone yellow and the tortoise shell. The garden was also full of bees, both bumble and honey. Midges abounded too, although I was not bitten. I hope the pear midge was not among them.

Daffs Galore

2009-03-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

With February and the beginning of March so cold, the early daffodils and the late ones are flowering together. They make a wonderfuls spectacle in shades of yellow and white, strapping toughies clustered at the sides and rear of the back garden, dainty fairies on narrow stems with elegant foliage, dwarf tete a tete proliferating at the front of beds and arround the pond. The perfumed jonquils will wait for April as usual.
Daffodils and snowdrops, enduring all the cold and wet that is chucked at them, recovering quickly when struck prostrate by a fierce frost, proliferating by both splitting their bulbs and ripenening their seeds, these must be the best value bulbs in the British garden. All the gardener has to do is stand and admire while taking note of location so as not to dig up dormant clumps by mistake when planting fresh shrubs.

Lenten Rose

2009-02-21T08:38:00.000-08:00

The weather has been milder these past few days. The snowdrops in my mini-wood are looking magnificent. I have been out doing a bit of tidying up. I cut back some ugly blotched leaves from a Lenten rose I had planted two years ago. When I bought it, it had five very pretty pale yellow flowers but last year it produced just one flower. This year, after the cold, I thought I would have no flowers at all but cutting back the leaves revealed eight perfect flowers in full bloom. Those ugly leaves had obviously protected the flowers from the vicious cold and damp.

Struggling out of Torpor

2009-01-28T18:23:00.000-08:00

I took my camera into the garden earlier this week. Gradually I am shaking off sloth. Today I managed at least five jobs I have let slip for over a month.
This evening I started on the 2009 volume of my online garden journal which is now in its eleventh year. Only the January page works at the moment and I suspect the link to the 2008 volume is broken but as it 2.30am British time I am leaving it and going to bed.

Snowdrop time is here again

2009-01-21T14:23:00.000-08:00

Snowdrops have been late to appear here in Leicestershire, but we have had some sun over the past week although our nights have been frosty. When I went into the back garden yesterday I noticed that the snowdrops in my mini wood were showing white although not exactly in full bloom. I have taken no garden pictures so far this January. I must remember to take my camera outside tomorrow

January ennui

2009-01-18T11:25:00.000-08:00

I feel disenchanted with my camera. I suspect it is a case of the old cliché - A bad gardener blames her tools, but whatever the cause, I didn’t chase round the garden last December snapping every open flower, every tree glowing with gold in the low sun, every unseasonal event.

On the assumption that most gardeners who visit my online Garden Journal rarely look beyond the photos, I have bowed to another cliché, a picture is worth as many words as ships launched by Trojan Helen’s cockney boat, and usually use few words but several pictures in the monthly entries.

This proved awkward for the entry for December 2008, which I didn’t get round to creating until mid January 2009. The only half-way relevant photo I found on my camera was one of three branches pruned from my Beauty Pine and tied together as a Christmas tree substitute.

Not only did I have no more pictures but since I had spent the whole of December from the 1st onwards, involved with family and parties, with a slight interval for a stay in hospital, I had no gardening news either.
Now, if only I could shunt any gardener visiting the site over to a blog, I thought, as I surveyed the meagre page, they would: neither expect pictures nor expect the author to stick to a theme.

So I dug up a blog application I had purchased at least two years ago, but had never learnt to use, and as before found I still couldn’t get it to work so I hunted around for the commercial blogging host I thought I had once tried but had forgotten about after an episode of TGA (transient global amnesia a medical happening doctors diagnose but can't explain) and this is the result.

Next entry I hope will actually have something in it pertinent to gardening.