Planning

I have come to the realisation in recent weeks that planning is an element of gardening that I have been severely lacking over the past year. I seem to have bungled my way through this year’s planting by guesswork. This has resulted in a number of consequences:

My Osteopermum have ended up hiding at the back of the border behind a tall Penstemon. The Osteopermum is flowering its heart out, and is a very striking colour – bright white with blue and dazzling orange centres – but we can’t appreciate them because they are hiding at the back.

The Heucheras got a lot bigger than I imagined and have dwarfed the cornflowers at the front of the border – in hindsight they should have been planted further towards the back.

Thirdly, I have completely lost my lavender bushes somewhere in amongst the Penstemon, Heucheras, Buddlejia and violas. A job I have planned for the weekend is to don my exploring kit, go in search of them and lift them out to live in pots where they should be a lot happier.

Fourthly, there is a definite absence of the colourful displays I had imagined in my head when planting up the border. I completely failed to consider flowering times when I planted any of the plants and so we have ended up with a rather unimpressive, nay dull, display so far this year. I have a feeling it will explode into colour in the next month and then fade away all at the same time. 

And lastly, I have developed a nasty habit of leaving jobs half-done. I am fairly convinced that this is down to not having any real structure to the way I work in the garden. The border is one example of this slack work ethic: I started to clear the border and plant it up with new plants but then stopped half-way through to work on the front garden. A family of mice have now moved in to the un-cleared area of the border (which the cats are taking a huge interest in) and now I feel terrible about heaving the mice out of their new home. So the border remains unfinished and unkempt looking. While the front garden (also unfinished) has half a chopped hedge in it and currently looks like no-one’s lived there for three years (in fact, I got home last night to find that someone had posted a little scrap of paper through our door which had a phone number on it and a message to call the number for rubbish clearance. Oh the shame!)

I have therefore decided that a small revolution needs to take place in my gardening diary. There needs to be structure and plans…and lists. I think a diagram or two may not go amiss either. Design is not my strong point, I’m the first to admit, but I have a feeling that if I don’t make some sort of effort to gardening slightly more intelligently and with more forethought, I might end up with a garden that is mildly boring and unimpressive, not to mention fit for the rubbish tip.

A visit to Myddleton House

Last weekend, we visited Myddleton House in Enfield. We had a fantastic time - it is a beautiful garden full of history.

Myddleton House was the residence of E A Bowles in the 20th century and his legacy lives on through the immaculate gardens. The visitors centre at the entrance to the gardens has a great exhibition about Bowles, who is the most interesting of characters. They also have some very old ostrich statues and the remains of the original carthouse floor, both very well preserved.

The garden is 8 acres in all and you walk through it in a circular fashion, first taking a look at the conservatory (which had fruiting lemons in it when we were there and they smelled divine):

You then walk onto a path winding round to the pond, which is full of carp and water lillies:

The borders were filled with the most beautiful poppies, some red hot pokers and great clouds of frothy white flowers which looked like Gypsophilia:

The few Agapanthus I spotted were stunning:

However, for me, the Kitchen Garden was the highlight of the day. It was so very neat and ordered – so unlike our allotment! We chatted briefly to the Senior Kitchen Gardener who told us that they try to plant only the varieties that would have been around in Bowles’ lifetime and before. It’s such a wonderful thing to deal with heritage varieties – something I will certainly be doing more frequently. Having recently graduated in History, growing heritage plants seems to me to be respecting and preserving the history of plants through the ages.

I was really impressed with some of the original ideas that the kitchen gardeners had set up. One was the bird deterrent round the sweetcorn. Genius idea to fashion a "bird" out of a small stick with feathers glued on hung from bits of bamboo by a length of string:

We also spotted this sturdy looking trellis which had some sort of vine clambering up it:

Really good design and I'm thinking this might take the weight of squashes or melons.

Myddleton House gardens are beautiful, immaculately kept and keeping the heritage varieties alive. It is a dynamic garden which blends new ideas with old traditions and respects the history of the wonderful character of Bowles. And I was very surprised that it has free entry! What more can you ask for...

Aquatic plants for part-shade

As I'm sure most people do, I have a few spots in my garden that are slightly more challenging to plant than others. One such area is a border that runs underneath a length of leylandii and has a very clay soil which retains water. This results in a border which is in part-shade and is water-logged for most of the year.

Last autumn, I planted snowdrops and lily of valley there but the bulbs soon rotted, leaving an ominous bare patch. This bare patch has been sitting there staring at me for the last few months, stubbornly resisting any attempts by weeds and grass to germinate there. Every time I looked out of the kitchen window it stared back in at me, with its blank stare. I decided it was time I did something about this awkward patch so I donned my coat and hat and took up the challenge.

Off I went to Wildwoods Water Gardens Centre to find me some aquatic plants. It was quite tricky to find plants that wouldn't mind part-shade but I did come away with some beauties: Marsh St John's Wort, Water Violet, Lychnis flos-cucli "Terrys Pink" and "White Robin" and Athyrim niponicum "Metallicum" pictum (or a silvery coloured fern). I also bought a Ligularia to sit with its roots in the damp bit, but I'm hoping it will be tall enough to be in full sun for the majority of the day.

They are all planted out now and are enjoying the torrential rain we've been having here.For the moment, they are keeping the squished Hosta company (the one that Jake the Peg keeps battering) but not for long as I've decided that Mr Battered Hosta needs to move house closer to the fence and out of the way of clumsy paws.

 I have also put my pot of Sweet Peas "Wiltshire Ripple" here as it gets the morning sun and stays nice and sheltered - a great relief during the high winds and rain over the last few weeks.

 Aerial shot of the newly planted-up damp, shady bit

 Lychnis flos-cucli "Terrys Pink" in foreground, Water Violet in shallow pond in background

Smell

Monty Don's article about scented roses and the general focus on the importance of scent in the Gardener's World magazine this month really got me thinking. How many of my plants did I choose on the basis of their smell? The only truly "smelly" plant I have is the shrub outside my front door which was given to me by a friend, I think it is a Lonicera fragrantissima and it smells divine.

I have a Jasmine next to the back door, but it is suffering at the moment and hasn't flowered for the last two or three years. My Honeysuckle is right at the back of the garden so you can only get a whiff if the wind is blowing in the right direction.

The realisation that I do not have enough "smelly" plants in my garden has made me think that I am missing out on part of the enjoyment of gardening and I am quite baffled that this hasn't struck me before. I have now decided to make a new mid-year resolution: to make more effort to garden with scent in mind and to fill the borders with lovely smells.

Here is a good article on the GW website which is about scent and memory: http://www.gardenersworld.com/blogs/plants/scented-plants-and-memory/3438.html