Garden Action 🌿

Pantaloons for plants have been compulsory here since the 2010/2011 cold winter that we weren’t supposed to get but which nevertheless cost us a heartbreaking number of evergreen shrubs : pittosporums - from tall Pittosporum tenuifolium Purpureum down to ‘Tom Thumb’ plus freestanding bays, coprosmas, corokias, ceanothus, big clipped Rhamnus alaternus Argenteovariegata,  griselinia and even escallonias and Olearia macrodonta. These were all structurally vital plants the loss of which necessitated hasty replanting/redesigning. The loss of the rhamnus in particular precipitated a significant design rethink in the sunk garden. 

      Such disasters can be viewed as opportunities but at that point in time, with the exhibition starting in early April, it was not an opportunity we welcomed. The subsequent replant was infinitely less guided by the ‘now you can grow these’ global warming riff. Furthermore, we moved the opening date forward to May.  

     However, one cannot live by bread alone so to safeguard the limited number of pittosporums etc that we did replace, we now roll out fleece by the yard in late November or early December.

        It doesn’t add much to garden walkabouts to have plants wearing billowy pantaloons which require daily readjustment because the wind is always getting up their skirts but pantaloons it has to be because it would be disastrous to lose the marginally tender that are not in some way protected by proximity to a building.

   Caring for the annuals/half hardy plants in the polytunnels is another daily job. The seeds that we sowed last September - the calendulas, cornflowers, echiums etc are now sizeable plants in 1 litre pots, ready to fill the May gap before the roses and main perennials get going. Though their care is labour intensive, we find rearing them in individual pots convenient for selective placement in the borders come spring. 

 There have been one or two disappointments. The Orlaya has failed to thrive - it’s not obvious whether that is due to mice nibbles or something else. We sowed more in early December with our fingers crossed, hoping they’d manage a spring sprint as the days lengthen. That’s looking more and more doubtful. The back-up plan is to buy plugs. But orlaya plugs are not commonly available and those that are would be sent out at a time/size to flower later than we need them to. Thinking … thinking …

The Cerinthe major, on the other hand, roared away and had to be ‘stopped’. Looking a bit sulky but we should clear sufficient decent ones to fill gaps in the sunk garden. So far there is no mildew on anything which is cheering - it can become a problem. Cornflowers and calendulas are annoyingly prone to it - in February we’ll move them up to the covered verandahs where the better air flow seems to help. 

 Today, however, the problem is that even in the polytunnels their pots are frozen solid. I comment airily that they will be fine. This has happened before. Indeed it has and they have survived but nevertheless I begin to wonder where the heat mats are. Heat mats are like waterproof electric blankets that can be rolled out on indoor benches to provide a low level of bottom heat. We didn’t use them last year, and possibly not the year before, so a dusty exhumation from the depths of the shed was involved. It all seems rather a stark contrast to the precocity of the hellebore flowers.

 In fact, the radiant heat from the house walls makes the verandahs a warmer proposition than the polytunnels. Plants up here - some young aquilegias sown last May and brought undercover to avoid water logging - are not frozen. 

 The other group of plants, housed in the smaller polytunnel comprises semi-hardy things like Salvias (I’m especially fond of Amistad) and young plants eg phormiums, heucheras, lavenders, osteospermums, that are being grown on. Some of these, like Verbascum Southern Charm and Penstemon Cambridge are from autumn bought plugs. 

    Needless to say, everything out on the benches is frozen to them. Immovable. Ho, hum …

     Winter/spring pruning is an up and coming task. I talked about the problems with our rose border last time ie the fact that a lot of the roses in there, all David Austin’s, are reaching the end of their natural lives. Twenty years, give or take, is apparently typical for highly bred shrub roses. 

We have been patching with a few new ones, mitigating against soil sickness as much as we can and intending to interplant with herbaceous - the tall Thalictrum ‘Black Stockings’. The old surviving roses will be pruned in February, the new introductions ‘tidied up’. 

 It’s well known gardening lore that any pruning of birch trees has to be done before the sap rises in February. To be frank, I used to think this excessively cautious but last year Andrew and I were standing under one of the birches discussing branch removal when we felt heavy drops of rain coming from a clear sky. And this before any cuts had been made. Thus we were introduced to the world of birch sap.  Turns out that you can actually buy it in bottles and some enterprising souls even tap for their own. Maples aren’t the only trees that can help to enhance your pancakes. 

 It seem odd that we have had birches for years and yet this flagrant dripping has never been felt/noticed before - just like all the years the car had been parked in the drive along from the oak tree and we were oblivious to the concept of mast years until the local mice took to jamming up the car’s  air intakes with stored acorns! 2025 was another mast year and when the car began to go into slow mode again we immediately put two and two together. Sure enough … 

 We are going to try installing mouse repelling devices under the bonnet to save on garage bills.

       Cleaning up foliage of evergreen/wintergreen perennial plants can be a tedious business. It’s relatively quick and easy with hellebores and ferns but with things like Libertia grandiflora it certainly has its longeurs. The tips of the leaves ‘burn’ and it is fiddly trying to remove the burnt ends in a way that produces a more elegant look than bluntly ‘chopped off’.            

 Similarly, with some types of Astelia and the variegated grass (sedge)Carex Fishers Form. Useful as this carex was to soften the edges of a line of low brick plinths, it was time consuming to renovate after a rough winter. Eventually, it seemed easier to sacrifice the winter evergreen effect for pristine spring foliage and so we replaced it with hemerocallis. We had some ‘American Legion’ that we’d taken out because, as a cultivar, it hadn’t proved an effective flowerer for us but its foliage was just the right height for round the plinths. Hemerocallis foliage appears early and seems quite resilient in the face of spring inclemencies. Hemerocallis ‘Joan Senior’ which we have in one of the driveway beds is semi-evergreen and the cold hasn’t daunted it at all.

 Libertia grandiflora is an invaluable accent plant - especially on a corner - and so the work of sprucing it up just has to be done.   

Libertia grandiflora in May.

  Wassailing : The above jobs are tedious, the routine housework of gardening, so an outlet for incipient rambunctiousness is clearly needed. The Vale of Evesham is just the place to find it. 

        It’s regrettable that we have no apple trees of our own to wassail. Should have planted some ( as with the Nordmann Christmas trees) when we first came here. There were pears and plums but no apples. Surprising really, when the UK is home to over 2,000 different varieties. Some estimates go even higher — up to 2,500 named varieties have been grown historically or are still cultivated today.  

        Apple growing has deep roots in Britain, dating back to the Romans and flourishing during the Victorian era with much regional specialisation, especially in South Western counties.          

But wherever they are, these old apple varieties frequently have entrancing names. The one that led Sir Isaac Newton to postulate the theory of gravity was called ‘Flower of Kent’. My personal favourite, however, is ‘Peasgood’s Nonsuch’ but ‘Herefordshire and Worcestershire Foxwhelp’ (old cider apples) and ‘Bloody Ploughman’ are up there. Some varieties that have been considered extinct have been found in old neglected gardens. The need for some serious wassailing to nurture such history is obvious.

      Max and Helen live in a cottage on a big estate a few miles away, and a couple of years ago the estate manager  introduced the idea of wassailing the estate’s orchards.

      Wassailing has pagan roots and it has been practised in Britain as far back as Anglo- Saxon times, with the aim of promoting a good harvest. It is a ritual in which apple trees are ‘awoken’, sometimes by pouring cider on their roots, then blessed, and any ‘evil spirits’ or ‘wights’ lurking in the orchards are warded off for another year. ‘Warding’ can be a noisy and eccentric business involving a procession of singers, dancers and bangers of pots and pans - all fuelled by plentiful quantities of cider. If you want relief from taking down decorations and disentangling tinsel from the vacuum cleaner’s brushes, there’s nothing like kicking up a hullabaloo in an orchard. And, it’s really taking off. There are half a dozen events around twelfth night in Herefordshire. I imagine there is similar in Somerset. If you are of a fastidious bent then taking your own wassail cup is probably recommended. 

      I enjoy thinking that these ancient rituals are being re-enacted and reinterpreted for our times. In a world where many of us live lives that are, for the most part, divorced from the land that sustains us, it always pays to be reminded that we are still subject to the vagaries of nature and its cycles. 

      Those of you who were curious enough to wade through a past piece of mine on plant consciousness may give a thought to the fact that the trees could actually respond favourably to the attention! If that is too big a stretch, there’s at least a comforting sense of historical continuity to be had. Such celebrations/ceremonies remind us of the ways people used to look to the land to see that good health, good community relations and good harvest were maintained in the year ahead.

         I’ll drink to that from my wassail cup. Good health to all!