Veg Plotting

When we moved here just over 10 years ago, the first 'vision' I had for my garden was masses of daffodils . It was the day after we'd moved in - on a cold, bleak February day - when I found out the steep bank at the side front of the house wasn't the responsibility of the local council, but was ours. As I watched the builders install the fence at the bottom of the slope to divide our lands, all I could see in my mind's eye was yellow. Later - in November - I took my first baby steps towards making the garden my own, by planting 3 large sacks of daffodils on that slope in the pouring rain. Their burst of brightness the next year was sufficient reward for my soaking. Since then, I've literally poured bulbs into every corner of the garden: a thousand snowdrops bought in the green by NAH as a birthday present; various Alliums to add fireworks in May through July; Convallaria for scent in the woodland area; and Dahlias to remember childhood happy times as my dad o...

Click to enlarge image if needed. Paired photos from top to bottom: Top - The usual kind of modern housing estate front garden; Middle - my version of it from the side and above; Bottom - common design issues: drain covers and extra parking spaces Regular readers will know that I very rarely show my front garden here on the interweb. That's because I don't really want to reveal exactly where I live in Chippenham. However, for this month's Garden Bloggers' Design Workshop I've cast caution to the four winds and roped in a few of my neighbours to help out too. Our house is 10 years old and sited on a fairly typical modern housing estate. This means the gardens are small, especially the front ones. The minimalistic planting provided by the builders tends to be just like the top two pictures: a minute patch of lawn surrounded by a hedge of something tough like Lonicera nitida, or side boundaries comprising a single species like the pictured Rose of Sharon ( ...

Brunnera 'Jack Frost' - a spectacular introduction to my shady border in 2008 Say the word shade to a gardener and you're likely to get a long face and a pitying look in return. Yes, the planting palette can be a little tricky in a shaded situation, but it doesn't mean that the border can't look spectacular. I've still to get it totally right, but I treat shade as an opportunity to have a different look to part of my garden. And in the height of summer, a shady spot can be rather a relief can't it? I have 2 shaded areas as both the front and back of the house is bordered by public land, which has a native hedgerow and trees planted along its entire length. This gives us privacy of course, but it does mean my Eastern facing borders are shaded for much of the day. The trees are deciduous, so at least there's a fair amount of constant light in late autumn through to late spring. I garden on a clay soil (and in Zone 8), so at least moisture isn...

In contrast to last month's pets theme, Gardening Gone Wild's design feature for this month is Wildlife in the Garden . Whilst I didn't deliberately design a 'wildlife garden' per se when we moved here, the needs of wildlife was one of the things I did keep in mind. After all, I wanted a garden of year-round interest myself and by thinking about that, it only takes a small step for it to mean a year-round interest for birds, insects and other beasties too - my favourite visitors are the bats in the summer. As a result I've chosen many flowers loved by insects, especially bees and butterflies - eschewing double formed varieties of plants such as Echinacea as these aren't so attractive to them. Berried shrubs and trees mean food in the winter for birds - we currently have 37 species as regular visitors or spotted nearby - not bad and the list has steadily increased year on year. My main philosophy however, has been to ensure the garden is attractive to the s...

... Felines in the Garden I'm doubling up on a couple of my regular memes this week, to tell you a little more about Skimble and Jess and the role they play in my gardening. As you may have noticed, I call them my 'garden helpers': that's because as soon as I start to do anything in the garden, such as weeding or digging, they're always there, shoving their noses into anything that's going on, trying to lend a paw and generally approving anything I do, particularly if it means they can thoroughly get in the way. Whilst it usually ends with me, gently pushing them to one side and shouting 'gerrrrroff!', I do enjoy their company in the garden. They certainly take more interest in my activities than NAH does! There's plenty of advice around about pets and gardening, but I have to confess I haven't read much of it. My garden's design didn't really take them into account, because when we made it they weren't here and their predecessor was...

Gardening Gone Wild 's (GGW) design theme is all about plant labelling and records this month and last time I wrote about my own tagging and record keeping. This post's about my experiences from volunteering at the National Trust's (NT) HQ in Swindon . The guy I do the voluntary work for is the NT's plant curator, meaning he's responsible for ensuring there's a good methodology in place for labelling and record keeping its hundreds of thousands of plants in the 200-odd gardens in its care, and also for looking after the Trust's plant database. Until now, the recommended way has been to label major trees and shrubs with small, unobtrusive aluminium tags like the ones shown above. I've found quite a few of these whilst trawling through the Trust's gardening archive boxes - each tag I find represents a dead plant. I've also found long 'labels lists' i.e. lists of plants a Head Gardener (HG) sends to HQ, so that interpretive labels...

Gardening Gone Wild 's design topic for this month asks how we label our gardens and keep our records. As my garden is small and not open to the public, I don't have any labels in my garden at all. I used to occasionally put out the labels which came with my purchases in my previous gardens, particularly for plants which die down or were in the seasonal pots, but found the plastic soon became brittle and broke up, not to mention how awful they looked in the first place. Gone was the plant's ID and the useful information found on the label. Record keeping was nil. A different solution was needed. When I started my current garden in 2000, it was the first time I was a plant planner rather than a plant plonker. I'd been reading every gardening magazine and scrap of information I could find on plants for a year before we decided on the garden's design, so I was pretty sure of which ones I'd include. However, the garden was my largest so far and had so many levels a...

When I first looked at August's Design Workshop subject, I didn't think I had much to offer as my garden isn't subdivided into a number of rooms. We only have a couple of small pieces of trellis plus a small pergola and I haven't been that successful so far in finding the right plants to drape over them. However, one morning I was having coffee in the garden to mull over things for the day and it struck me I do have some examples to offer you where I'm using plants as screens to disguise some of the garden's problem areas. I wrote about my poor conifers last week. They've not only been planted to frame the view down to the bottom of the garden, but to also block a sight line from the bedroom windows of the house behind us. If the trees weren't there, our favourite spot on the patio for coffee and meals taken outdoors would be overlooked. It's one of the reasons why I'm having to think carefully about their replacement. Our house came complete w...

Thanks to everyone who commented on my Garden Whimsy piece at the weekend. Happily you were positive so I needn't have worried about what I showed you but as Niels quite rightly said about Pig pig pig , to each his own and I think that certainly is the case with that most polemical item of garden whimsy, the garden gnome. Some think they're an icon of England . You either love them or hate them. I fall into the latter category, but I had a colleague at work who not only collected them, she positively went out of her way to find new ones. I spent quite a few of our business meetings after her confession actively trying to erase this fact from my mind, otherwise our time together would not have been so productive. It was quite a distraction for a while. I don't know whether garden gnomes are so prevalent in non-UK gardens, but here they can be prolific. Most people who buy them don't seem to stop at one. Often their first purchase will be the classic gnome with a fi...

Maisy and Daisy amongst the Ash leaves - November 2007 My dictionary defines whimsy as self-conscious semi-humorous sentimentality. And I feel a little self-conscious today in presenting some of the more whimsical features of my garden. After all, what makes me laugh will probably be judged by some others as pointless tat, kitsch and in bad taste. See also my previous post on Garden Centre Kitsch for some examples - whilst these certainly amused me, I haven't added any of them to my collection. It's this big! A whim is defined as a sudden impulse or thought and all the whimsical features in my garden are testament to that. Unlike most of my garden's other features (excepting plants, and we all have impulse bought at least one for our garden haven't we?), no thought or plan went into the purchase of these objects. They simply made me stop and giggle (or think), then buy them. Here's a small selection of some of the objects that form the finishing touches in my gard...

Click on the collage to see a larger image if wanted Clockwise from top left: 1. Looking East 2. Circle & brick detail 3. Looking West 4. Wall top detail 5. House brick colours 6. Edging detail 7. Central steps up to patio 8. Wall top & edging detail 9. Central steps entrance pillar detail + accessories At the end of last month I discovered Gardening Gone Wild and their Garden Bloggers' Design Workshop . I've been meaning to introduce our garden's design to you for a while and this month's theme of Porches, Decks and Patios is a good place to start. I haven't really shown you our main patio before, though there have been some glimpses - the most recent was my introductory piece for this month's Garden Bloggers' Blooms Day , featuring one of our patio benches. I thought I'd share with you some of the thought processes that went into the final product. We moved here in 1999 to a complete blank canvas as the house was newly built. All we had was ...