Trials and tribulations - the 2013 pest and disease chart rundown

An update on the pests and diseases in my garden. 

Coming in at number 4 in the Chart of Pain...blackfly - last year's out of the blocks winners. They decimated the Red Devil apple and the Heptacodium Jasminoides but their 2013 effort seems so far not to be quite as pithy....I have soapy water at the ready to spray the little buggers if they turn up.

This year's highest new entry is blossom wilt - my Granny Smith -  a wonderful old tree that we inherited with the garden has already lost a considerable number of shoots and I am watching with some anxiety to see how it spreads. So far we have cut off the infected parts but I'm loathe to spray partly because I don't like chemicals and partly because it's too big a tree to treat easily. It still feels very cold to me especially at night for the time of year and I just hope things warm up a bit to inhibit the fungal growth, although I have no scientific evidence that this will make any difference, and hey - this is the UK!

Another new entrant for the Nice Tree garden is - for the first time since we moved here  - powdery mildew, which is busy attacking one of my climbing roses (small pink flowers, don't know the variety) . This, despite being cosseted within an inch of its life. There's no pleasing some plants!

And finally, news on the Cherry Sunburst - apparently amazing sweet fruit, not that I'd know. Every single ripe and delicious cherry was eaten by birds last year. This year every single pea-sized unripe and almost certainly not delicious cherry has been eaten by something again....along with all the leaves. Pigeons? Caterpillars? So I will be cherry deprived again and am wondering really, how on earth to people end up with any fruit at all?

These things are sent to try us blah blah blah....and actually there a loads of great things happening too...the ceanothus is putting on its usual fabulous display and covered with bees, my Tetrapanax is growing strongly and my Abutilon x Suntense is bedecked with most delicate violet flowers despite having been out unprotected during a very cold winter indeed.

Filming today at the Earth Trust in Little Wittenham as part of their drive to promote carbon footprint reduction...will post pictures later!

If you would like to follow Nice Tree on Twitter you will find us at @nicetreefilms.

Have a great day!

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

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. 

Of snowdrops, compost heaps and hard winters...

A week or two back I spent a lovely couple of hours replanting snowdrops passed to me by my great friend and former neighbour Sue, a retired occupational therapist with a small but perfectly formed and packed cottage garden, who is a never ending source of inspiration and advice. 

The snowdrops have gone into my new white border. This is still very much a work in progress having been carved out of the lawn last summer. The border is the former site of our compost heap, which, having become the home of several rats, was dispensed with after one of them actually ran over my husband’s foot - much to his chagrin and the rest of the family’s amusement. Consequently the bed has the advantage of having been dug over with two years worth of compost, but the disadvantage of being almost directly under an overgrown Leylandii in the next door garden and being in the shade for most of the day.

Last autumn it was looking pretty bare, its perennials having died down and nothing to show but a newly planted Parthenocissus Henryana and a Tetrapanax Rex (of which more later). Now, however, it’s filling up nicely: white and green tulips (I’ve lost the labels!), my new snowdrops, a profusion of anemone blanda (actually blue, not white, but hey, they can be the one exception to the colour scheme), an as-yet tiny philodelphus which I hope will eventually hide our kids’ trampoline from view, some clumps of Geranium Pratense ‘Splish Splash’, a couple of white Japanese Anemones and some white Nepeta. 

Anemone Blanda

The pride of place goes to a fabulous Tetrapanax Papyrifer ‘Rex’, which my sister grows in her garden in London.  Hers is the most magnificent specimen - enormous, deeply lobed leaves which would dwarf even the most cheffy dinner plate,  and towering stems which appear to grow several feet each year. 

And how is mine doing? Well, let's not beat around the bush. Even if I wanted to there is no bush worth beating around. My Tetrapanax is a stick. It's 6 inches long, and showing no sign of life, having been clobbered by a typically freezing Oxfordshire winter. I await with some trepidation to see what happens. Just like my still dead-looking Toona Sinensis I fear it’s a case of the wrong plant in wrong place and our frost pocket garden can’t sustain it, but I live in hope and will report back in a month or so. The Toona Sinensis, Lazarus-like, did manage to come back last year so I'm not giving up yet.

Tetrapanax Rex - this is how it should look!

This month's list of things to do includes ordering some worms for the wormery that my husband bought for my birthday present two years ago (some girls like shoes and handbags, but I guess I’m just weird like that). The first lot were victim to some persistant summer downpours and ended up drowning (still feel guilty about that) and I’ve been promising to get some more on a monthly basis ever since. Hopefully we will manage to get composting this year without a return of our furry friends. 

If you are in the area and haven't had a chance to get to Waterperry Gardens to see the annual display of fritillaries they are in full bloom right now. If you can't get there you can still enjoy them in all their glory by looking at this short film I made about them last year. Happy gardening!

Seed Planting Time!

I love seed planting time. I’m like a child in a sweet shop with too much choice and no ability to say no. I have probably spent hundreds of pounds over the years on seeds and I am ashamed to say many went unplanted and ended up in mouldering packets only to be guiltily consigned to the bin the following spring. I’m getting better though, and last year managed to not only plant the few seeds I decided to buy or collect, but some of them even flowered! I know, for seasoned gardeners among you this may seem trivial, but for me it was a big deal. 

Perhaps my favourite of last year’s home grown efforts was my Cerinthe (Honeywort). It's such an unusual plant, with grey green foliage and dark purple bunch-of-grape-like flowers which the bees adore, and which look fantastic in the front of a mixed or herbaceous border. They last for weeks too. 

Cerinthe (Honeywort)         © Clare Holt

I also managed to grow another wonderful and unsung plant which I discovered during a summer working part time at Waterperry Gardens near Thame - the Shoo-Fly plant, (Nicandra Physolades), which Waterperry had growing in their Rose Garden and never failed to prompt questions and exclamations of delight from visitors.

I think this plant has everything - great structure, graceful arching stems, with a succession of large morning-glory like flowers which emerge from dark purple green buds and go on to produce wonderful seedheads which look a bit like chinese gooseberries. 

I tried for two years in a row to get my collected Nicandra seeds to germinate, and last year they worked a treat. They can be grown as half hardy perennials or annuals and apparently self seed so I am keeping a close eye out to see if any pop up over the next few weeks.

Things have finally started to grow!

Things have finally started trying to grow!

Hacquetia

It's been such a long, cold winter - the third really cold one in a row. This year though, the temperatures have stayed low for much longer - unlike 2012, when things all started growing like mad in March and were then clobbered by the cold and lack of sunshine for the rest of the summer.

Anemone Blanda

That said, there really is no such thing as a 'normal' year, and maybe this is just more typical British weather than what we've been used to of late. Thankfully the last couple of weeks has seen temperatures rising a bit, and even the odd few hours of sunshine! 





In my garden things are finally starting to come up, thank goodness. I have a lot of herbaceous stuff which disappears underground in the summer so it's been looking, well, brown and muddy for months now! But every day I can see more tantalising glimpses of things bravely poking their heads up: species geraniums, achillea, alchemilla mollis, rudbeckia Goldsturm and lysimachia punctata, with its tiny cabbage-like shoots sprouting like a mini allotment patch.

Lysimachia punctata

A lot of these were planted as small '3 for a tenner' plants last spring so it's exciting to see how they will do in their second year. 




Perhaps my favourite is a fabulous catmint: Nepeta nervosa 'Blue Moon' - a great favourite with the bees, and the most intense deep blue flowers. Having failed several times to get lavender to thrive in my chilly garden I think I may give up and plant Blue Moon in its place this year.

Nepeta Nervosa Blue Moon, and happy bee.                                       Copyright Clare Holt

In the new white border (it's probably a bit grandiose to give it that title, but that's what it's going to be!) the tulips I planted last autumn have all come up - - the ones that I didn’t manage to get in, beaten back by the dark and cold of pre Christmas, I have put in the other side in the ‘new’ bed. As I write (mid April) the late-planted tulips are starting to venture out of the earth perhaps encouraged by the slight warming up of the last couple of weeks. I have no idea if they will flower or not - but I take the attitude, perhaps naiively, that plants want to do what they do and given half a chance they'll pretty much get on with it. 

Although the white border is still a thing that exists in my imagination as much as anything else, I have taken advantage of the kindness of my wonderful gardening friend Sue and planted some passed on snowdrops among the anemones, cyclamen and erythronium. Now it's just a case of waiting another year to see how it all looks. Patience, as ever with gardening, is not just a virtue, but a necessity!

Another winter over....

March 20 2013

Hello. My name is Clare Holt, and I run a small production business in Oxfordshire, called Nice Tree Films. I'm also a passoniate, if inexpert, gardener, and have been in the process of re-designing my Oxfordshire garden for the past two and a half years. I love plants, and I love being outside, and I thought that by writing a blog I could document the transformation as it happens. So here we are - Nice Tree Garden Blog - welcome, and I'm really pleased to share my thoughts and gardening highs and lows with you!

We moved here three Easters ago - and it's fair to say that the garden is what sold the house to us!

It was fantastic - large (our previous garden was a postage stamp), perfectly manicured, but, well - perhaps a little too neat. It was home to several specimen plants which succumbed within a year to a particularly harsh winter - so they had to go. Among them was a Eucalyptus, a couple of Yuccas and a huge Phormium. We set about changing the shapes to make the whole thing less formal and introduce some curves, and these beds are still very much a work in progress. The soil is sandy, light and stony, so we have added a generous dose of horse manure and will add more this autumn. Amazing numbers of worms have appeared as a result, and we have a resident robin who delights in fluttering about whenever one of us is out there. 

We are west-facing, with an 8 foot high fence right down one side which casts a shadow over almost half the width of the garden for many hours of the day. Last year I planted a mixed hedgerow of Photinia Pink Marble, Buddleja 'Lochinch' and Spiraea prunifolia 'Plena", which I hope will grow up to cover the ugly fence and provide some interesting colour throughout the year, not to mention somewhere for the birds to hide. We've also put in a number of climbers and shrubs: Sobaria 'Sem', which has gorgeous bronze foliage and spikes of white flowers in midsummer, Actinidia pilosula with its paint-splashed pointed leaves, Rosa Glauca which has a fantasic combination of deep pink single flowers and grey green leaves, and Fothergilla 'Blue Shadow' which has the most amazing crimson and scarlet autumn colour.

These still tiny shrubs will form the backbone of my new borders and I am so excited to see how they develop - it's the first time I've had a good sized garden to play with. I am lucky to have worked as a part time gardener at the wonderful Waterperry Gardens near Thame, and have picked up lots of great tips from Pat the head gardner, and Sian, the volunteer co-ordinator, not to mention my amazing friend Sue, who has brought numeous bits and pieces over from her cottage garden a few miles away.

I'll be posting lots of pictures and some video from time to time, so I hope you will keep reading!