Veg Plotting

A number of these signs have popped up around Chippenham lately, which are heartening to see. Since the Town Council took over management of the town's parks and open spaces, it's clear they want to manage them in quite a different way to when they were in the hands of the County Council. In this case, it turns out a number of open spaces across town are designated in the same way as this one I found in the Donkey Field when I walked home recently. There's a map which shows where they are, together with information on the new management policy for these areas and the other open spaces they manage. I love the Donkey Field at this time of the year as it billows with oodles of wild meadow cranesbill aka Geranium pratense   flowers* I was concerned they were dying out as nettles have out competed them strongly in recent years, so it's good to see they've made a comeback this year. A few years ago Wiltshire Wildlife Trust did a survey and proposed a management plan sp...

Let the Flood Resilient Garden's build commence! My friend  Naomi and the rest of the team are on site at Chelsea today, so now all the dreams and plans are set to become reality. I'm getting really excited as I'm working on the build just before the show! Hopefully there will be time to snap a few quick pics when I'm there so you can see what's happening. In the meantime we'll have to make do with the sketched design - as you can see there's a lot crammed into a small space. FloodRe - the garden's sponsor - have an interactive version on their website which allows you to explore the garden's features thoroughly - both in terms of the various habitats and planting - which are also chosen carefully to help with flood resilience, as well as the more engineering aspects to the design. As a result I'm currently pondering whether we can have some extra wide guttering installed on our house as we have real problems with overflows on an increasingly r...

I've spotted primroses popping up in many places on my walks this week and it's a welcome sight to see them. I found the pictured ones in Old Hardenhuish Lane on my way to Lidl* yesterday. They're in a patch on the edge of damp woodland next to Hardenhuish Brook and I've also seen them close to the River Avon right in the middle of Chippenham. They're a timely sighting as I'm thrilled to be working with FloodRe's The Flood Resilience Garden team in a small way during the run up to Chelsea Flower Show. I'll provide the written content for their Plant of the Week spot on the garden's Instagram account over the next few months. It just so happens the primrose is my first entry this week - you'll find snowdrop, birch and dogwood there already, as provided by Naomi , the garden's designer. My primrose finds show they're an excellent fit with the show garden's ethos which is to demonstrate simple choices in design and planting can help a...

  Part of Tom Massey's Resilient Garden at RHS Hampton Court I've been pondering VP Gardens a lot lately. Last year's drought conditions set me off initially, then our harsher than usual winter combined with this summer's flip and flop weather means the thinking continues. It's a huge topic which I freely admit I'm struggling to get my head around. Tom Massey's Resilient Garden  at Hampton Court recently  tackled this topic brilliantly and was a timely interlude which gave me much food for thought. There he encapsulated the detailed research he'd found which informed both his show garden and book of the same name. I think it's one of the most important show gardens I've ever seen. It's clear the way I garden needs to change so that I have my own resilient garden. I haven't worked out the exact details yet, but Tom's book plus a couple of others (see below), alongside the rainwater management handout from the show garden's  sponso...

My wild and woolly front lawn has just got a little woollier with the surprise addition of the above beauty. I spotted a strange looking spike emerging a couple of weeks ago and hoped it was what it's turned out to be: a lovely, lovely orchid. This one's a pyramidal orchid ( Anacamptis pyrimidalis ), which according to the link likes a milder climate and chalk or limestone grasslands. It also goes on to say that it's developed a liking for the more artificial kind of environment - such as beside roads and canals - so perhaps a front lawn on a limey clay soil is just the kind of place it likes to be nowadays. I'm delighted it's chosen my front garden! I've asked NAH to refrain from mowing the lawn for a while to enable it to set seed, though he's keen to mow the 'meadow' now No Mow May has finished. Perhaps we now have the perfect compromise, leave the front lawn so there's taller herbiage there with a lower back lawn to offer the shorter grass ...

Jean's lovely book looks perfectly at home in my Wild and Woolly Lawn - my original plan was to photograph some of the insects featured, but Covid means I've been watching and reading lots about them instead. It's been great to use the fab photos in this book as a  spotter's guide the past few days. The review bus has ambled down the lane and I'm delighted I'm the next stop on the blog tour for Jean Vernon's latest book Attracting Garden Pollinators . It's great to have a volume which covers all kinds of insect pollinators - as well as bees - as the importance of many of them is often overlooked for our gardens. In the opening chapters stuffed with fascinating insights we find: without wasps we wouldn't have any bees (they evolved from them); some bees nest in snail shells as well as thrushes liking to find them (the snails that is); and hoverflies are highly useful pollinators as well chomping away at those pesky aphids. Jean neatly shows how inte...

It's citizen science week here at VP Gardens as I've signed up to take part in The Big Plastic Count which starts today. The aim of the count is to gather data from as many households as possible on how much and the kinds of plastic we throw away as part of our everyday lives. Around 150,000 households are said to be taking part, including myself and at least one of my friends. Once the results are in, the organisations involved will have a better picture of the scale of the problem we face here in the UK. They also will have better facts to take to government (both local and national) and the organisations who create or use the plastic - such as food companies - to lobby for alternative packaging solutions. Like with any project of this kind I'm sure the results will lead to further questions and the potential need to drill down further in the data. Whilst there are 19 categories of plastic in the survey, many of them are quite broad and only give an idea of numbers not ...

Some days just make your heart sing and Saturday was one of them. One of my WI friends arranged for us to walk to Calne along the old railway line  and laid on the perfect day for us to enjoy six miles of walking in the finest of company. Lockdown made this a familiar walk for us all. it's one of the few which takes you to a destination instead of around in a circle and has more of a sense of a journey as a result. Familiarity doesn't mean there aren't any surprises - we were delighted to find extensive bluebell woods either side of the track once we were close to the Bowood Estate . I thought I'd found all the local, walkable bluebell woods during the past two years, and I'm delighted to be proven wrong. There was plenty of wild garlic too - walks there during the rest of May are going to be quite pungent! May the month of May be as delightful for you, whatever's happening in your neck of the woods.

From my door to your home, I hope this time is as merry and bright as it can be under the current circumstances. This year's wreath is foraged greenery on a straw base with ornaments saved from previous ones. It's bearing up remarkably well after nearly 3 weeks despite no moss or oasis base to keep the foliage moist. New-to-me greenery used in this way are the Clematis 'Winter Beauty' I pulled from the pergola, plus lots of fragrant rosemary from a friend's garden. I spent a lovely morning at my neighbours recently where we all managed to create something beautiful for our front doors in aid of Dorothy House , a cause dear to her heart as they looked after her late husband so well. Enjoy the turning of the year towards the lighter days again and I'll see you in 2022!

One of my personal Lockdown challenges last month was to create a banner for International Women's Day (today) to illustrate a WI campaign which has meaning. Naturally, the most garden related one was the one I picked, especially as the 2009 campaign SOS for Honeybees originates from a Wiltshire WI. I've only recently come across the term craftivism , a gentler, more mindful way of making a point about an issue or to raise awareness of it. I'm particularly struck by the work of Sarah Corbett and her Craftivist Collective  and it was a couple of her talks plus the recent BBC4 documentary on the subject which inspired my own banner making. I was keen to show something more practical which anyone could go away and do, hence the central message about growing pollen-rich flowers in the garden. But which flowers are pollen-rich? This is a subject I plan to return to from time to time this year here on the blog as I look into the subject more. I made a good start last week for Mu...

This photo may not look that enticing but it's deceptive as it shows the start of a marvellous adventure I've had this year. It's the footpath which runs by the side of our house and marks the beginning of nearly all the walks I take locally. When I set myself the goal of walking 1,000 miles in 2020 my heart said yes and my head said no. It's a mind boggling number and even dividing it by 366 didn't make the target seem any easier. Could I really walk 2.73 or so miles every day ? The answer to that question is no, because I didn't walk every day... but on many of them I walked far in excess of my daily walk allowance. It took my head nearly three months to acknowledge that it might, just might be possible. Then in March NAH had his heart attack and Lockdown happened and amongst all the angst and sleepless nights walking kept me going. The simple act of putting one foot in front of the other helped calm my whirling mind. I deliberately parked my car in Bristol fa...

I cut a small posy of flowers for our kitchen on Sunday courtesy of the back lawn and keeping NAH away from it so we could have a #NoMowMay. I've talked about my Wild and Woolly Lawn before, and since then it's gone from strength to strength. I've enjoyed watching the large numbers of insects zooming around our garden this year* which I'm sure is the result of my relaxed attitude to the need for lawn perfection. As well as the flowers on the windowsill, there are plenty more where they came from outside, and so I took part in Plantlife's Every Flower Counts lawn survey yesterday. With the decrease in wildlife habitats, there is an increasing recognition our gardens can provide much needed havens for wild flowers, which in turn support a wide variety of insects and other fauna. Plantlife's survey aims to put a baseline figure on one aspect of this concept, by estimating how much our lawns can support honey bees when the grass is left to grow longer and t...

The  Eryngium leapt over the central terrace wall into the lawn many moons ago. NAH's threat to 'mow the meadow'*, as he calls the wild and woolly lawn , prompted me to cut back the emerging flower heads to make his job a little easier. Instead of composting them as I usually do, I decided they would make an interesting green bouquet for the house. It looks like they last quite well in the vase, a week at least. Green allium seed heads made a long lasting bouquet in my Flowers for Mum project last year. It meant she had flowers (in the widest sense) in her room whilst I was on holiday. I'm definitely warming to the green bouquet concept. I rather like the effect of these architectural stems (and one of the new filters on my editing software), what do you think? Original photo for comparison * = of course if it was a real meadow, he could leave it until much later in the year 😉

Christmas wreaths are increasingly common feature on front doors in my corner of the world, and to make your own is a popular workshop ( here's my attempt from a couple of years ago  - I made something similar on Saturday). I think this simple arrangement of Aucuba japonica and red Cornus stems tied together with ribbon is an equally effective seasonal welcome. It's an easy idea to source and copy using festive looking greenery and stems foraged from your own garden or nearby. The doorway hails from Holt and it isn't the first time this delightful Wiltshire village has featured in my Unusual Gardens strand. I found an equally beguiling Statue nearby in 2014.

It's Apple Day tomorrow and what a bumper crop we have chez VP Gardens and on the allotment this year. Today's post comes as a slightly premature celebration as we have family matters to attend to over the weekend. We enjoy fruit juice as a weekly treat on Sundays with our roast dinner, so it was a natural step to invest in a juicer. I swithered between this and an apple press, and in the end I plumped for a juicer as it's cheaper and fulfils our immediate needs. I did have a daydream about pressing oodles of juice for a full year's supply, but practical matters such as pasteurisation and storage swiftly brought me back to reality. I'm enjoying the process immensely and it's a great way of using up loads of apples, especially any windfalls where only the damaged or bruised bits should be left out. It takes around 12 of them to produce enough juice to fill 2 glasses. Our season started off last month with single variety 'Scrumptious' and I'm ...

I've often wondered whether a visit to GLEE would be worthwhile, so the call for blogger ambassadors at the event was a welcome opportunity. Was the trek up the NEC worth it? You bet - with jazz hands, an energetic dance routine, and knobs on. GLEE is huge. There are 4 halls stuffed with 550 exhibitors showing all kinds of wares aimed at the garden retail industry. Naturally buyers are the key audience for this event, and as a result I feared bloggers wouldn't be made welcome. Happily that fear was unfounded, from the moment I presented my entrance ticket right up to closing time. How to make sense of what's going on? Preparation is key. The GLEE website was an essential pre-read with lots of temptation, then I added some key headings I wanted to explore, such as 'funky pots' and The Great Green Wall Hunt . Finally I added some of my personal garden projects for next year, to see what the industry has to offer. Even with that little lot to get through, I so...

I don't know who leapt the furthest, me or the frog I found in the garden on Sunday. I was tidying a quiet corner of the garden and this beautiful sight was my reward, once I'd got over the surprise! It got me thinking, I don't have a pond at VP Gardens , but frogs do seem to like it here. There's a stream nearby which helps, so what am I doing right to encourage them? This article from The Guardian has some pointers. Apparently frogs spend two years on land before they breed and they love lots of leaf litter and log piles to hide in. These places are also a good source of favourite food such as slugs. I have plenty of leaf litter courtesy of the trees nearby and my ' compost direct' policy, plus I've hidden a number of small log piles in quiet corners. Shady areas and the clay soil probably help as parts of the garden remain damp even in exceptionally dry weather. I've since realised I had an improvised pond in the shape of a small tub trug tu...

Small tortoiseshell butterfly on valerian ( Centranthus ruber )   I'm grateful to the company that offered me an expensive designer butterfly feeder recently because it led me to review how many butterfly friendly plants I could grow in my garden for the same money. The answer is loads and I'm happy to say not only do I have most of them already, they also feed a wider range of these delightful visitors. It was also a timely reminder to grab a cup of coffee and spend a relaxing 15 minutes in the garden counting butterflies for this year's Big Butterfly Count , which runs until this Sunday (6th August 2017). For this year's count, I paid particular attention to which plants were in the butterflies' favour. They were: Perennial cornflower, Centaurea montana Globe thistle, Echinops ritro Perennial wallflower, Erysimum 'Bowles Mauve' Phlox paniculata (they seem to prefer the white over the pink flowers) Ice plant, Sedum spectabile (NB now ren...

My favourite find so far - part of Edgware Road station (Bakerloo line) on Marylebone Road. The wall was installed to help reduce PM10 air pollution and is being monitored by Imperial College.   It's a while since I announced I was embarking on a Great Green Wall Hunt . It's been great fun and is still a work in progress. When I started I thought I'd just look at living walls , i.e. the stop-you-in-your-tracks installations like the one I saw at the Athenaeum Hotel last year. However, I soon realised that would ignore numerous other examples of green walls that are of value - look out for a post on the types of green wall coming soon. I've uncovered a whole host of benefits attributed to green walls along the way, worthy of a post to itself too. Meanwhile, here's a brief summary of my findings thus far... Main picture: Inside Anthropologie on Regent Street. Top to Bottom: Double Tree by Hilton Hotel; Mermaid Theatre, Blackfriars; and St Mary's H...