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!

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

 

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!

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!