Electric Green

Herbs at Sheepdrove Organic Farm I walked the long way home by the canal yesterday just because it was there, all narrow boats, sunlight and ducklings (ahhh!) and blackthorn blossom blowing into the water. Soon I am going to the official launch of the National Gardens Scheme Yellow book, a genteel and pleasant occasion and I am looking forward to seeing my NGS friends. It is perverse. The more there is to blog about, the less time there is to do so and vice versa. On the work front there are places to go and people to see and on the garden front it is all getting going in a very exciting fashion. My car has very rudely gone bang, which means that my garden centre list is starting to get slightly out of control. I try and exercise extreme restraint at all times, but right now I want to get pelletted chicken manure and two Lonicera fragrantissima and a cardoon and a small shrub rose and a couple of dark orange Erysimum and some candelabra primulas and an evergreen shrubby thin...

A fluffy bud of Magnolia x loebneri 'Leonard Messel' It has been an absolutely cracking weekend for gardening. Roses propped, check. Trees pruned, check. Seeds sown, yup. Little hide built for dustbin, uh huh. As part of the plan to divide the back garden into different parts and create a sense of journey and surprise (TM), I have got a new garden arch to go across the path just the other side of the apple tree. When things dry up a bit I will paint it my regulation shade of soft aqua but I have got the plants in anyway – a box ball provides a punctuation point at the base of the arch and the beginning of the border and rose ‘Ena Harkness’ will romp up it, adding to the hot colour scheme in that particular bed. Next to that I put in the Hemerocallis ‘Burning Embers’ that I impulse bought, along with Magnolia x loebneri 'Leonard Messel', at Waddesdon Plant Centre the other night while attending the launch of the regional Berkshire and Buckinghamshire NGS booklet. ...

 Spreads of snowdrop Galanthus nivalis at Welford Park in Berkshire  Anyway, there I was at 7am last Saturday listening to one of those compilations with a title like 'The Essential Power of Ultimate Music, Ever', on my way to a hot date to talk gardening with BBC Radio Berkshire, when up pops Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’. You know: I want to love you but I better not touch (Don't touch) /I want to hold you but my senses tell me to stop/I want to kiss you but I want it too much (Too much) /I want to taste you but your lips are venomous poison. etc. Driving when one should be sleeping leaves plenty if time to be pedantic about artistic licence. As any fule kno, but possibly not as any snake-fancying rock icon kno, poison is not in itself venomous. Venomous animals use fangs or a sting to inject their venom which is a biotoxin. Poisons can be absorbed, ingested or inhaled and need not be organic. Technically, wasps are venomous while poison arrow frogs are, well, poisono...

Exploded Spaghetti It has finally got warm enough to do some gardening, which is rather nice as it is high time I gave my plot some attention. A merry hour or two has been spent mulching and cutting things back and while not exactly finished and not exactly tidy in every facet, it does look a little bit more intentional. This weekend I also got around to putting up a new rose arch (glamorously leading to the compost heap), planted Rose ‘Malvern Hills’ up against it and spread around the packet of Biochar soil conditioner that I was given at the Garden Press Event last year. Been busy, that is my excuse. Anyway the borders in question will doubtless be grateful. Still on the to do list is to tie up the Parthenocissus henryana as the top stems are drooping somewhat and it needs to work twice as hard this coming year to make the wall look nice following the sad demise of the Hydrangea petiolaris that couldn’t hack its dry position. Despite the chill, the plants seem to be se...

 Brassica seedlings - a rather more planned sowing... Yesterday I woke up to the sound of rustling and a light staccato hissing, as of rain or small beads falling, punctuated by the occasional satisfied ‘ga!’ of a toddler employed in a really good game. Quiet games being cause for some concern, I opened my eyes to find that my youngest had helped himself to a document wallet that I had been slinging packets of seeds into as a holding bay during the gardening mayhem of the last six months. He had been happily pouring out the open ones and ripping up the closed ones and was sat in a pile of clean laundry with seeds of all sizes sprinkled gaily around. Clearly I have only myself to blame for leaving things within reach (although ‘out of reach’ seems to be a smaller place every day that passes) but this does leave me with the problem of what to do with a mixed selection of endive, wild rocket, beetroot, coriander, lettuce ‘freckles’ and something that may or may not be kale. Doubt...

I was talking to my botanical uncle about snowdrops the other day, in the context of bigging up our welsh garden. Turns out that my paternal grandmother put in all sorts of exciting things but he reckons that quite a lot have faded away – and anything that has any susceptibility to slugs just gets munched and won’t bulk up. Anyway, we have a niceish spread of Galanthus nivalis ,and some others which I have been told are probably G. elwesii (they have bigger, greyer leaves, apparently) although my uncle suggested they could just be from a different population of G nivalis, snowdrops being a heterogeneous bunch. I will go and have a closer look in the spring, but the flowering times are certainly different. I would like to get some interesting ones, but at the same time it would be a bit daft to splash out on slug food. We shall see. I had quite a party week last week, with the annual Garden Media Guild Awards in London. It has been blogged to death, so I will sum it up as glitteri...

Ingredients for a bouquet Back in the summer I went on a floristry course to Green and Gorgeous in Oxfordshire. Historically, I have not been at all keen on formal floristry. It seemed rigid and stuffy, coming up with arrangements that had names like ‘Orchid and Sphagnum on a Tortured Twig’. But at G&G they laid my demons to rest with an intensive day learning how to make fashionable naturalistic bouquets. Since then I have had little need to use these dark arts, but as the autumn colours intensified the floristry bug intensified too. Venturing out with the secateurs I acquired Pyracantha berries, bronze and gold forsythia leaves, soft grey goldenrod seedheads (cunningly stabilised with a blast of extreme-hold hairspray to stop the seeds dropping off), and some Sedum flowers. I bought some Physalis and cellophane from Lulu Flowers round the corner – where they also gave me a quick refresher in wrapping them for travel. So, with much garden wire and raffia, I assemb...