Do you want to borrow my hedge cutter?

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‘Do you want to borrow my hedge cutter?’ he said. A generous offer, you might think.

One of my customers lives on a nice quiet cul-de-sac, with a rear garden that unfortunately backs onto the main road. I’d been trimming a large Pyracantha and, unable to reach all of it, had picked up my loppers, step-up, and a green waste bag, and walked the short distance round the corner to get the rest of it from the other side of the fence. I’d just about finished when a white van bumped up the kerb and came to a stop right by me. The head of a young man poked out of the window and spoke the offending words. Maybe it was the Barry bad boy accent, but I didn’t catch what he’d said immediately. And when it registered, it took me a while to assimilate the offer. I didn’t need a hedge cutter, and if I had, I would have used mine, which was in my van. I simply replied, as politely as could be expected under the circumstances, ‘No thank you’.

Undeterred, he continued, ‘Or I could do it for you’, giving away the true nature of his offer. ‘Only, I do this for a living, see’ he added, condescendingly (that’s when someone talks down to you). I realised that he meant gardening, rather than poking his nose into things he didn’t understand (though I suspect that if such a career path existed, he would be rather better suited to it).
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Great Dixter

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Anyone who’s interested in gardening will have heard of Great Dixter. But despite having seen the gardens on various television shows, and read about them in magazines, I’d never taken notice of where they are. And so, when I picked up a leaflet earlier this week, while having a few days away in East Sussex, it came as a complete surprise to find that I was only twenty minutes away from Great Dixter. Obviously, I had to go, even though it had to be a shorter visit than I would have liked. Sadly there wasn’t time to look around the house, but the garden was the main priority.

The first thing that struck me about the place was it’s rusticity. You enter along a path that leads up to the front door. Flanked by orchard trees set in wildflower meadows, it reminded me of the illustration of Kelmscott Manor on the frontispiece of William Morris’s ‘News From Nowhere’. It’s a classic Arts & Crafts look. Despite the garden’s frequent appearances in the media, the only part that I recognised was the front of the house – I remember an article showing the gardeners very carefully composing the many pots that are clustered around the front door. Arrangements of pots are a big feature of Great Dixter, along with narrow paths and wildflower meadows. I particularly liked an arrangement of plants in the exotic garden, and when I got closer I was surprised (and impressed) to see that the Gunnera was in a pot.

I liked all the long grass. It’s good for wildlife, good for the environment (no temptation to resort to chemicals to keep the lawns green and weed free) and it looks good too – it makes a good contrast with the formality of the topiary hedging. The long border was looking good too.


The Long Border

But though I very much enjoyed looking around the gardens, I was a little underwhelmed, considering all the hype they get. Christopher Lloyd (who created the garden and is no longer with us) was apparently known not to mind the odd weed or two, and this ethos has been continued under the current administration. The gardens are an interesting mix of the formal and the informal. But informality often slips into a lack of order, and occasionally descends into full-blown chaos. You can see this in the photo of what I think is the high garden. It’s a mass of plants, without much contrast or, at this time of year, much in the way of flower.

Maybe at some point this garden will explode with colour – I don’t know because I struggled to identify individual plants from the confused mass of mid-green.

In the sunk garden, disorder gave way to a rather careless health and safety disaster waiting to happen, with a self-seeded, eight foot tall Euphorbia sprawling across a narrow path. It was impossible to get past without brushing against and breaking leaves, and that sap is nasty stuff, particularly if it gets in your eyes or your mouth. I’ve known people who have ended up in A & E.

Having said all that, it is a very special place. I like to see plants labelled, so that I can identify the ones I don’t know, but labels can make a garden look like a collection of exhibits, rather than a garden. At Great Dixter there are no plant labels, but any disappointment you  might feel over this will surely be forgotten the moment you walk into the nursery area. So many gardens have plant sales areas with a small range of standard garden centre fare, usually bought in from Holland, that bears little relation to the plants in the garden. But the nursery at Great Dixter is amazing, with a fantastic selection of plants, many of which are grown in the gardens. With only a few exceptions, the stock was all very healthy, and the prices were quite reasonable too. You pay for them in a fantastic old barn, busy with various potting activities, and with a doorway that can’t be more than four feet high.

The estate consists of a collection of ancient buildings – the fifteenth century house, an oast house, and various barns (one of which was being thatched while we were there) – which make a fantastically picturesque architectural environment around which to build a garden. It would, I think, be a wonderful place to work, and with all of the gardeners working away, it looked, not like a recreation of a medieval idyll – it looked like the real thing.

And so, despite my criticisms, I’d love to go back. Great Dixter is beautiful, and perhaps unique, with an amazing atmosphere. If you ever get the chance to visit, I can thoroughly recommend it.

To Mulch, or not to Mulch?

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When I first started as a gardener, seven years ago, I went to a machinery shop for advice on what equipment to buy. A lawnmower is not a lawnmower. There are all sorts of variations, in size, weight and function (and even power source). A rear roller is best, as it can help to level out the lawn. It can also help prevent the mower slipping over the edge and scalping the grass. But it’s not so good if you’re likely to be cutting grass in less than ideal conditions – when it’s wet, or when the grass is long, for instance. Even more so with cylinder mowers, which can make a great job of a lawn that’s level, dry and not too long, but which need to be kept sharp, and are useless in the wet.

Say hello to Mr Sneezy

So I went for the most versatile, utilitarian option – a four-wheeled rotary mower.  Continue reading →

Celandine, Celandine; surely not a friend of mine…

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Is it my imagination, or is the Celandine particularly rampant this year?
This is a very difficult weed to deal with, mainly because of the small tubers that form under the soil at the base, and that tend to break off and lose themselves in the soil when you dig up the plants.

You can see these in the picture to the right. The RHS refers to these tubers as ‘tubercles’, which sounds a bit like a disease. And I can tell you that, faced with a patch of ground that’s covered in Celandine, it feels a bit like a disease too! You can never dig all of them out without leaving some of the tubercles behind, and if you’re not careful, by digging, you can turn a small colony into an infestation.

Mulching may well be the best organic approach to control. The RHS recommends a 10cm layer of organic material, but warns that this may not fully eradicate them. Membrane, with organic material over the top might be more effective. Although I know of at least one garden that has been mulched with heavy plastic, with gravel over the top (not my doing) where the celandine is pushing up forcibly around the edges, and at the base of the roses that were planted through the plastic.

If you’re happy to poison your soil, you could always douse the effected areas with glyphosate every spring.

The RHS encyclopaedia says Celandine is ‘good for a wild garden’. I must admit I’m a bit prejudiced against that because, with a few notable exceptions (such as Daffodils), yellow isn’t my favourite colour in the garden. But perhaps we shouldn’t get too worked up about this little plant. It’s easy to panic when you see a carpet of the stuff where you’d intended to have cultivated plants. But Celandine provides good ground cover, colour (albeit yellow) at a time when that can be in short supply, and by early summer it’s died back so as you’d never know it had been there. Maybe the easiest option is to learn to love it!

Lunch on the Beach

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A short walk down to the beach for lunch today (I don’t get the chance to do this every day). The Bahama’s it’s not, but I’m not complaining. It was actually quite warm, and the sun was out for most of the time. I ate my sandwiches, drunk my flaskoffee, and then toddled off back up the hill to the garden I was working in.

The Shelf Life of Compost

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Last week I went to my local garden centre to buy some organic, peat-free compost, in preparation for a frenzy of potting activity at the weekend. I came away with four large bags. I didn’t really need four bags, two would have done. But there was a deal on, and I couldn’t bring myself to pay eight pounds for two, when I could have four for just another two pounds. Just how many times do I need to get caught before I learn the lesson that if something is being sold cheap, there’s probably a reason?

Some of the plants I’d been hoping to pot on

It looked like a good deal, but in fact, it stank. I found out just how much it stank when I opened the first bag. For a moment, I thought I must have picked up the farmyard manure by mistake, but no, it was compost all right, it had just gone off. I suspect it was last years stock; they wanted shot of it, and so they’d reduced the price. It was stored outside, and partially under cover, but it must have got wet. And festered. To the point where now, it smells of drains.

Soil is supposed to contain bacteria, but I dread to think what that foul-smelling community of microscopic delinquents might do to a young plant. Fortunately, I also bought a bag of John Innes, which was OK, so we were able to get some potting done. And I risked using some of the bad stuff, mixed with sand and vermiculite, to pot up some of the Cannas. A bit of a risk, but we’ve got more than we can use. And as they seem able to not just survive, but to thrive in our compost bin, I hope they can do the same in this rancid compost.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with the other three-and-a-half bags. Throw them in the canal, maybe? (Joke!) I could take them back, but it would cost me more than they cost in fuel and time. Plus, I don’t think I can face the conflict. And it wouldn’t get me back the time I lost at the weekend. I don’t have many free weekends (or much energy left) to work on my own garden, so to have lost one under such circumstances is quite frustrating. Work is picking up now too, and I’m having to fit it in around the rain, which is still frequent, so there’s even less time. Oh well!

Narcissus Thalia – the fruits of some potting I managed to fit in last year.

Does anyone want some rancid compost?

No Spring Drought This Year

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Marigolds, like miniature suns, have kept going right through the winter.

March last year was a good month, from a work perspective. By mid-month I was pretty much up to my full working schedule. How different it is this year. I cut a few lawns, and then wet weather set in. Lawns are now too wet to cut (or even to walk on),  and the ground is too saturated to work. At least there have been a few sunny spells today, between the showers. Over the past week or so the weather has been miserable.
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