Flaming June approaches and the first clematis flower appears

Yes, I know, maybe 'flaming June' may be a little too optimistic but I have watched the rain gradually stop today and the temperature feels as though it's on the up so hey, I'm just gonna go with that feeling.

Today's tour around the garden was, having said that, a bit damp, and not just around the edges. So much so that the rose I've been carefully tying in and attempting to train along my long ugly fence is definitely showing signs of grey mould. Hmmm. Not good. I hope next week's promised good weather will persuade it to change its mind about wallowing in fungus and buck up its ideas a bit - I've threatened it with one more year to behave itself or it's out. 

A nice surprise was the first flower to open on my Clematis 'Miss Bateman'. There are tons of buds on it so by the middle of Flaming June it will look wonderful. Clematis 'Niobe' is growing up the other side of the trellis with a new arrival, Clematis 'Freckles' in between the two, and an Actinidia Pilosula in the middle of the whole thing so there's plenty going on and by next year I reckon the whole thing will be covered.

Clematis 'Miss Bateman'

Meanwhile the Tetrapanax is slowly doing its thing - there are definite signs of growth although it's going to have to go some to reach even the size it was last year when I bought it from the Rare Plant Fair. I am optimistic though - it's in a good site with lots of good homemade compost, ahem, so I think given a half decent summer it'll be well away.

Tetrapanax. Getting its act together.

The Orange Princess tulips are still looking great - really terrifically good value as they have lasted for weeks, and the long awaited first flowering of my Abutilon Suntense is teasingly close now - so much so that I can see it's going to be a purple one rather than the white one my sister Jane has in her garden (she grew both from seeds from the RHS).

Abutilon Suntense. My one's going to be purple!

I'm off filming tomorrow with Pat Havers at Waterperry Gardens. Pat is the Garden Manager and we will be chatting about her inspiration, her favourite plants, and generally what makes her gardening antennae twitch. It's all for a project I'm doing called 'My Garden Life' and I will be posting more on that in the next few weeks. 

In the meantime, I'd love to hear about how your gardens are looking as we approach mid summer (!). You can subscribe by email and don't forget to visit the Nice Tree Films Facebook page and say hello!

Happy Gardening!

A day out with the NGS, some filming in Berkshire and a deadly fruit attack...

It's been raining like crazy here - but at least the wind has died down. The garden is lush and lovely but mostly green still, other than the tulips which I just love and must remember to plant more of come November. 

Cow parsley which self seeds each year

Tulipa Orange Princess

The warm wet weather is the signal for the pests to move in - my Heptacodium Jasminoides has developed holes in the leaves but so far I have been unable to find the culprits. I will need to keep a close eye out for aphids, too, which caused major damage to both it and my Red Devil apple tree last year. 

Before the attack

The worst thing though is the total devastation caused practically overnight to my cherry tree - I don't know who to blame - the pigeons perhaps - but the crop of cherries which in flower made the tree look like a comedy clown's  outfit has been 99% demolished. I hope the culprit has a tummy ache!

After the attack

Last week I was filming for a new project about people and their gardens - more of that coming soon - with Lady Catherine Stevenson, former High Sheriff of Berkshire and self-taught plantswoman extraordinaire.

Lady Catherine is a seed addict - she has trees in her garden which she has sown from seed - and you can visit her garden in late August as part of the National Gardens Scheme.

Paeonia mlokosewitschii - 'Molly-the-witch'

Her garden is just starting to unfurl its secrets including a fabulous Ceanothus Puget Blue, a spectacular if unpronounceable Paeonia Mlokosewitschii, and a host of herbaceous perennials and cottage garden favourites. I thoroughly recommend a visit. You can see more images from the trip at the Nice Tree Films Pinterest page.





Meanwhile a busy weekend was spent helping out at another NGS garden on the Hackney Islington borders - only the second year this one has opened, and a huge thank you to all 92 people who visited.


This garden, owned by journalist and fitness trainer Jane Taylor of If Ginger Can Do It, was designed by Carol Whitehead 

Carol Whitehead, garden designer

who transformed what used to be an uninspiring urban plot dominated by a huge and ugly concrete stairway accessorised with bindweed and fox poo, into an oasis full of surprises large and small, including a stunning Tetrapanax Rex which wouldn't look out of place in the Kew palm house. 

Abutilon Suntense

Tetrapanax Papyrifer

The garden is now 6 years old, and an unbelievable living testimony to the transformative power of plants.

The sun shone, home made cakes were enjoyed, new plants discovered and new friends made. Roll on next year.

Bergenia

Owner Jane Taylor and visitor

Music among the trees...

A quick but lovely share with you today.

As a film making junkie one of my real joys in life is seeing wonderful films made by other people.

This was made for a mobile phone ad campaign but don't let that put you off - it's fabulous in its concept and execution.  Enjoy!

Hard times? It's a golden opportunity for us all...

The economic news isn't good.
It's pretty clear that most of us are struggling financially,  our children can look forward to leaving university with huge loans, tough competition for jobs and the prospect of never being able to buy their own houses. There is a health crisis in the UK based on lifestyle diseases, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and if you look at the projections of these diseases over the next thirty years, we are facing a health disaster. More and more people are suffering from stress, or depression, or both. I bet you know someone who does. Maybe you do yourself.

The policiticans tell us that we need to get the economy going. Which means we need to consume more stuff. But at the same time, we need to get debt down. Debt is bad. Debt's what got us into this mess.

Am I the only one who thinks the messages are so mixed they're off the scale? That things aren't just a bit broken - they're fundamentally all wrong?

You could wring your hands at the madness of it all. But I prefer to see things a different away.
I think we should think of these tough economic times as an opportunity. Let's concentrate on the things that we KNOW can help - that are healthy, uplifting, and good for us physically, emotionally and mentally. Things that bring us together with friends, family, and our community. Things that reconnect us with our food, and our environment and our own physical wellbeing.  Can you see where I'm heading with this?

I was walking through Hackney in London the other day on my way to a meeting with a client. I lived in Hackney many years ago. It was gritty, a bit dirty, a lot down at heel but bursting with life. It's still bursting with life but a transformation has started to take place. Now, admittedly, inward investment - big money - has been a major part of that. But it's not the whole picture. People have come together, to plant seeds, bulbs, to put up little bits of urban garden - a window box here, a raised bed there. At the sides of the road where maybe there used to be bin bags and piles of litter, there are now collections of herbs and perennials, carefully tended by local people, not experts, just groups of neighbours doing their bit to make their street nicer. Hand in hand with good ruban redevelopment, which has incorporated bushes and trees in the middle of the concrete, this bit of inner London has now got a multitude of spaces that feel welcoming, friendly rather than unpleasant and threatening. Of course the litter is still there - so is the graffiti - it's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot nicer and much of that is down to people getting together and using plants and imagination to improve their environment.

These spaces make us feel better. Green plants and trees make us feel better. Learning to grow and tend them, meeting our neighbours, swapping cuttings and seedlings, sharing advice and tips, all of this makes us feel better. Because at heart, we are social animals and we are part of the natural world, and getting back to the natural world - going for a walk, a jog through the part first thing in the morning with a friend, listening to the birdsong, watching the urban - or rural - wildlife going about its business - these are things that can help us get our heads into a good place for the rest of the day. These things don't need to cost much, or indeed anything, so now is the perfect time. Take the kids. Be part of re-educating a generation into seeing exercise and fresh air as an everyday necessity, not a twice-a-week dose of national curriculum approved PE. You don't need a huge garden to grow your own veggies and herbs. You don't need to shop at boutique supermarkets to eat fresh organic salads and potatoes during the summer. You don't need to belong to an expensive gym to keep fit.

And here's a thought - instead of spending a fortune referring people to therapists, prescribing anti-depressants, treating patients for obesity related diseases, compulsive eating and back pain, why not prescribe people a personal trainer or small group exercise session, twice a week, paid for by the NHS? Not in a sweaty gym, but outside, in the fresh air. With other people! Who might become friends!

Shouldn't we be taking advantage of the move to online shopping rather than bemoaning the loss of retail space, by converting those spaces into community exercise hubs, public gardens with veg boxes and flowers and bees and butterflies joining with buskers and performers and pop up art galleries. Getting the generations together by bringing in older people to help teach the young-uns the secrets of growing perfect peas and beans. Re-creating our town centres as places here our kids can re-learn what our grandparents knew during the war - that you don't need to have luxuries to get by, and actually, shared values and community spirit is worth any number of hours shut away on your own playing on the computer. Surely that would be better than even a Woolworths renaissance?

Instead of whining about the social change the internet and the global financial crisis has brought, let's celebrate it, and seize the chance to make this a positive change that works for us all. And most of all let's not wait for someone else to make it all happen.

And on that note, time to stop blogging, go outside, and take a dose of my own medicine!

Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst...

Last year was the wettest year in the history of the universe. Or the world. Or since records began a few decades ago. Anyway, it was bloody wet, and cold, and windy.

I hate the wind. I hate it more than any other kind of weather. From the days when I used to report for ITV Central News, I have hated it. Any other weather is cope-able with - not always pleasant, but you muddle through. Travelling back from the Namib-desert like conditions at Silverstone racetrack in 100 degrees, with a sulky work experience student, in an car blessed with no air con -  hey, no sweat. Standing for hours in the rain at Kemble airfield while your shoes take on the all the absorbent qualities of blotting paper and your legs develop rising damp - hey, all in a day's work... Trying to pronounce the words of your carefully honed piece to camera in temperatures so low that your lips start feeling as though they have had several injections of pethedine - hey, all part of the service. But the wind - it messes with your head. Literally. And a messed up head is not what you want when you're about to go live from outside court on the lead story into the evening programme.

I have moved away from the rigours of live reporting,  but I still hate the wind. It's the meteorological equivalent of an annoying toddler (I know what they are like - I've had two), poking you for attention every few seconds. It scorches and dries and causes things to collapse including my new found springtime get up and go.

What's it actually for, anyway? Apart from Ben Ainslie, who needs wind? It's so...spiteful. And irritating. And boring, day after day, with its coterie of companions - usually in the form of clouds like bad tempered candy floss and hail stones the size of marbles.

Oh, to live in a country where the climate is reasonably predictable, calm and pleasant for at least 5 months of the year. But no, the doomsday scenario that this 'summer' could be *whispers* as bad as last  year's is starting to loom. The Met office people have been on the news, weakly assuring us that it's 'too early to write off summer yet. YET! It's almost enough to turn one into a Daily Express reader.

Last year my only consolation was that a. Glastonbury wasn't on and b. it was gloriously, miraculously, wonderful for the Olympics and Paralympics. Meanwhile the garden got on with itself, some things suffered, some things rotted, and whether or not it's the weather's fault or not, two of my three new apple trees have no blossom on them at all this year. Not a jot. So what to do? My hunch is that this is pretty much what English summers used to be like when I was a kid. Generally disappointing, with the odd fabulous two or three days which occasionally happened over a weekend, if you were really lucky. And then we got suckered into thinking things were better than that thanks to a run of hot summers in the nineties and noughties - with endless stories on the news about droughts, struggling farmers and soaring ice-cream sales.

So I have decided it's time to change my attitude. The weather is what it is, it's getting less predictable and more extreme, and we're all going to have to get used to it. So, my mission is to learn to love the wind, to embrace it, to take on the mantra that there is no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing. Anyone up for a spot of kite flying?

A Whole Heap of Trouble...

Composting is a mug's game.

There - I said it.

I'm aware that there are those of a gardening persuasion who would vehemently disagree with me. But I tried and tried, and failed and failed,  and eventually came to the conclusion that it was either me or the compost heap - one of us had to leave. And obviously it wasn't going to be me.

At that time, our council were encouraging everyone to invest in subsidised compost bins. We did our duty, took delivery of our very own black plastic dalek and began the process of filling it up. 

We weed in it (in a verbish rather than nounish sense). This is not weird at all. Apparently human wee is a good accelerant. We dutifully cut up all our woody waste, developing Iron-Man style muscles in our hands in the process.  Only to find we were breeding a monster crew of slugs and nothing much else. By the time it was ready to turn out it was so heavy we couldn't actually get it open to distribute whatever lay inside around our postage stamp garden. And so it remained there, our very own installation, minding its own business and about as useful as a fish on a bicycle. It was still there when we moved house.

Then there was the compost heap in my current garden: made of wood, with a nice home-made lid to keep it neat and tidy. We inherited it 3 years ago. Being, at the time, still enthusiastic and committed, I set to. I wasn't going to make the same mistakes as last time - I'd come on in the composting world. This time I stirred it regularly with a specially purchased compost aerator-stick thingy, because my friend Liz said I should.

One afternoon there I was in an aerating reverie when I became aware that I was not alone. 

There, running in a rather panic stricken circle, inside my heap, not two feet from my face, was a mouse. I like mice. How sweet! I thought.

'Come and have a look at the mouse, kids!' I yelled at my two sons.  

'Where? Let's see!' They ran over eager to see the wildlife I had unearthed. 

Cue mouse number 2.

'Oh look - another one! Poor things - they must be frightened of us - don't shout!' I said. 

Privately I was thinking that these mice were entirely too glossy, and - well - large, for my liking. What were they eating in there? I didn't remember composting several pounds of cheese.

It was just then that mummy mouse appeared. Not a mouse. Not at all. Two feet FROM MY FACE.

I'm not generally squeamish, with the exception of very large house spiders  apparating in the centre of the living room in the middle of Newsnight, but a full grown rat at close quarters was not something I'd encountered before and it turned out NOT to be one of those 'feel the fear but do it anyway' moments.

Shooing the children back inside I did the obvious thing, and Googled the problem. 

'Hey, live and let live - they are wildlife - they're not going to harm anyone' said one post.
'KILL KILL KILL OR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY WILL DIE OF DISGUSTING DISEASES!' said another.
'They'll be off as soon as it's summer time,' said still another. 
It was summer time.
'Face the facts, if you have a compost heap, you're going to get rats', said still another.

This is confusing, I thought. 
I'll get my husband to deal with it, I thought.

My husband, it turns out, is really scared of rats. 
Bummer.

When I'd finished laughing at him, we decided to call in the rat people. 
Turns out it was a bumper year for rats. Turns out we had pretty much done the equivalent of putting together a pretty good viral ad campaign called 'Calling All Rats' by a. feeding the birds (rats love bird food, even more than birds do) and b. providing them with the rodent equivalent of the Ritz to live in. 

'We've not stopped all summer,' said the rat man, rubbing his hands together.
But how does your stuff...you know... kill them? I whispered.
'They bleed to death,' he said cheerfully. 'Internally.'
'Okay,' we said, ashamed.
'Seventy quid please,' he said.
The rat people were laughing all the way to the bank. 

Weeks later, armed with rolls of chicken wire we re-constructed the compost heap, rodent proofed it, and started over. No more rats! Hurrah! we thought.

And then, a few months later, I was sitting in the garden when a rat RAN OVER MY HUSBAND'S FOOT and scarpered down the garden. Very much in the direction of the compost heap. Which would have been loads funnier had he not been standing right by our open back door at the time.

A week later we spread out a tarpaulin, and, encouraged - from a distance - by my man, I dug out the compost (which was, actually, full of pretty good compost, all dark, crumbly and not smelly) and dismantled the heap for good. 

Rats aside, making good compost isn't easy. It's a bit like taking part a Great British Bake Off Technical Challenge. You can't just chuck in your old banana skins and potato peelings. Oh no, you have to get the composition just right. It turns out not everything can go in it. And the ingredients, like a particularly complicated Baked Alaska, have to be precisely mixed and layered, with not too much of this and not too much of that. It can't be too wet, or too dry. It can't be cold, or in the shade. It's higher maintenance that Madonna. 

So I've given up. The garden waste can go to the Council tip where they know what they're doing, with their heated compost piles to 100 degrees and all that malarky. And where the rats can gambol, haemorrhage free, to their little hearts' content.

I'm all about the wormery now. And that's another story.

Old friends and a new discovery

I wanted to share some pictures with you today from Waterperry Gardens. 

I spent a summer working as a seasonal gardener at Waterperry having been a regular visitor for years, and going back there is always a treat. The plants feel like old friends and I now grow many of them at home.

The recent warm sunshine has turbo-charged the emerging perennials in the famous Herbaceous Border, and whilst still virtually all green, it’s growing and changing virtually by the hour. It’s only a matter of days before the flowers start to bloom in earnest: the Aconitum first, followed by geraniums, achillea, climbing roses and of course, the wonderful delphiniums, which will tower 6 or 7 feet high, dwarfing even the huge Crambe which explodes with a fountain of confetti like flowers in mid summer. 

Skirting the front of the border is one of my favourite plants: Alchemilla Mollis. It spreads like anything and is covered with foamy pale yellow flowers in mid summer, but it's the leaves I love: rosette shaped and grey-ish green, they collect raindrops like diamonds and, unlike many plants, are at their most beautiful during inclement weather.

Alchemilla Mollis

All this is to come. For now though, it's enough simply to admire the structure and form of the plants, the brilliance of the design, and Garden Manager Pat Havers' fabulous hazel staking which will form an essential and invisible backbone of support to the thousands of flowers.

The herbaceous border

The formal garden 

In the formal garden the box knot hedges are looking all first-day-of-term clipped and precise and the wisteria walk is pregnant with buds - once opened the perfume from the plants is heady and full of the promise of summer.

Wisteria in the formal garden - in a a few weeks time this will be draped with flowers

Tulipa 'Maureen

It's still early and tulips are enjoying their moment of glory, from the serene “Maureen” in the formal garden to the more flamboyant examples in the colour border. 

One of my favourite bits of the garden - the Virgin’s Walk - is alive with bluebells, omphalodes, comfrey, and unfurling ferns which are the greenest of green. Virgin's Walk proves that shade is no obstacle to being able to enjoy a variety of wonderful plants throughout the year with plenty of colour and structure.

Omphalodes Cherry Ingram

As I was walking back through the garden, I discovered a new thing: the wonderful Trillium chloropetalum, hiding its light under a bushel in the island beds. 

Trillium chloropetalum

I have Trillium grandiflora in my garden having fallen in love with it at a visit to Wisley, but this one beats even that - all silky white-and-purple-blushed petals, like a bowl of black-cherry and vanilla ice cream. Delicious.

What's looking lovely in your garden at the moment?









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All pictures are © Clare Holt

 

A kind of blue

This time of year is all about blossom and bluebells. 

Birds and Bee Flies

The trees have all dressed up in their best frocks and the birds are flirting and yelling at each other.

I sleep with the window open and each morning at this time of year the dawn chorus wakes me - the glade at the bottom of our long thin garden is a surburban haven for an assortment of great tits, blue tits, blackbirds, robins, starlings and dunnocks, and of course the ubiquitous and seemingly ever-expanding wood pigeons.  I don't mean the population of pigeons is expanding. The birds themselves appear to be getting steadily bigger each year - mini zeppelins constantly fussing, cooing and blustering around in the next door neighbours' conifers, high-wire necking and harrassing each other on the phone lines that criss cross our garden. 

A pair of dunnocks were indulging in an altogether more endearing bit of courtship this morning, all ruffled feathers and downy, coy glances.  It's always a delight to hear the bell-like peals of this understated bird - surely one of the most beautiful songs you can hear in the average back garden.

Within a couple of minutes of starting work in the garden there is always a signature rustle of wings and our local robin appears. I have realised that he believes this garden belongs to him, not me (and he's probably right, actually). He announces his presence with a chirruping warble - parking himself just above me, with no particular interest in the spoils of my weeding and hoeing.  I think he just wants me to know he's there, on his patch, and I'm very much just a temporary visitor. 

There will be much excitement in the next week as very own harbingers of summer, the swifts, will arrive. Last year it was May 10th, the year before May 3rd. Oxford Museum of Natural History, which has been studying these amazing birds since 1947, recorded swifts around its tower on April 25th this year. This is good news, as 2012 was a dreadful year for them,  and for the first time since the Oxford Swift Project began, they abandoned live young. The relentless rain meant there simply weren't enough flying insects around for them to eat. You can read all about the Oxford Swift Project here.

Our own swifts  - between 10 and 20, I would say, are a determined and noisy bunch. I guess determination is a necessary pre-requisite if you are to survive the long flight from Africa. This quality - one might even say it strays into ruthlessness - became evident a couple of years ago, when we were startled by a clamour of protest from a house sparrow which was nesting in the eves, only to find an aerial squatter had arrived with every intention of evicting the sitting tenants. I grabbed my camera and filmed the result  - the swift was victorious and the next day our son found the consequence of this little tragedy in the form of an injured (and soon to be dead) female sparrow lying under the shed.

I have been seeing a lot of bee-like things around this year. So have my friends up at Waterperry. But, they appear NOT to be bees at all, despite possessing many bee-ish qualities (good at hovering, a fondness for nectar, a nice line in fluffy outerwear). No, this is a Bee-Fly - Bombylius Major, which, according to the Natural History Museum's Identification and Advisory Service, lays its eggs inside the nests of solitary bees, wasps and beetles, so its larvae can eat the unfortunate offspring inside. There are no fewer than 9 species in the UK and you can read all about them here.

Bee Fly - Bombylius Major on my fig tree

As for real bees, it hardly needs to be repeated that they are having a hard time. Do your bit by planting bee friendly plants and eschewing the use of pesticides. Friends of the Earth have made 2013 the year of the bee - have a look at their 'Bee Cause' web pages with lots of ideas and bee-ish events to take part in. Do your bit - bees need our help! I'm off to get some borage seeds as apparently they are bee magnets. Happy gardening!

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Ironing? It can go hang...

I've come to two conclusions - that you can only be who you are. And that life's too short. Some people are cat people, some are dog people. Which doesn't, of course, preclude the possibility of switching camps - I used to be firmly of the cat persuasion and now, to be frank, I really don't like them at all and can almost see myself having a dog one day....as soon as they invent one that doesn't wee or poo.

Similarly, I am most definitely a garden person not a house person. I've tried - I really have - to be conscientious about housework. Whereas I used to work on the basis that the ironing got done when the pile was about the same height as me (and I'm 5 foot four (ish) I now manage to do at least some of it at least once a week (ish).

But on days like today, well, there is simply no contest. Yes, the paintwork in the hallway needs some radical touching up. Yes, there's always more laundry to do (and honestly, how may pairs of pants and socks does one family of four need?) And yes, the windows need cleaning again. And I guess pasta and pesto for the third time in a week is probably pushing it, even for my pasto and pesto addicted sons. 

But....the garden is growing, glowing, sprouting and shouting at me. Things need weeding, planting, tidying, planning, moving and admiring. I can't stay out of it. The sun is shining and it is properly warm... and these precious days must be soaked up, relished and savoured because you never know when the Jet Stream will bugger off southwards like it did last year and hey presto, the summer's over before it even properly began. 

Life, then, is simply too short to be hunkering down over an ironing board, scrubbing lime scale or hoovering stairs. Or slaving over emails and accounts and to do lists. There are, occasionally, days when these things have to be put in their proper place. The dust can gather, the emails can wait, and the laundry can go hang....I'm off out to plant some lettuces.

Wood Anemones, growing in the glade

My new tulips. Stupidly I have lost the labels but they are really buttery and opulent and I need to get some more!

Pheasant's Eye narcissus, long lasting, scented, and joyous.

Doronicum 'Little Leo', planted in the glade last year. Like tiny suns.

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