Category: Uncategorized

In July 2019, I went on a garden tour of Kent and Sussex organised by Brightwater Holidays.

Lullingstone Castle

This garden in the grounds of a historic family mansion in the Darent Valley was designed by Tom Hart Dyke who guided us around the garden. He is a modern day plant hunter who was kidnapped for 9 months by Colombian guerillas in 2000. During his captivity he had the idea for the World Garden of Plants, contained in a 2 acre walled garden, which seems much bigger. It is based on a map of the world and the beds representing countries and continents are filled with indigenous plants.

Tom has taken a lot of trouble to provide the right conditions for plants in different parts of the garden. For example, in the beds representing mainland Asia he imported acid soil to enable Rhododendrons to be planted. This was an inspirational and really unusual garden, which worked as a garden as well as a concept. There is also a ‘Hot and Spicy’ house and ‘Cloud Garden’ temperate house.

Tom was a fascinating guide and it was great to see the garden with the person who had created it.

Great Comp Garden

This 7 acre garden has many beautiful and rare shrubs and perennials, including a large collection of Salvias, and an Italian garden with ruins and statues. There is a large area of woodland with attractive specimen trees, magnolias, rhododendrons and azaleas. The herbaceous borders include a hot border and cool border.

 

Pashley Manor

This was one of my favourite gardens on the tour, a romantic English garden with an island in a moat, many statues and sculptures, roses and Wisteria sinensis covering the southwest front of the house.

There are many beautifully planted pots and urns around the garden. There is a small fruit orchard with medlars, quinces and plums, mulched around their roots with whole fleece from Pashley sheep. This traditional method of retaining moisture and preventing weed growth also allows lanolin and nitrogen to feed the trees, and provides nesting material for birds.

Great Dixter

I have visited this garden previously in September and really enjoyed it. This time I found it rather messy and overgrown with weeds often enveloping choice plants.

This was Christopher Lloyd’s home and garden for this whole life and he famously introduced contrasting colours and tropical planting to the garden. It includes topiary, a front meadow before the house, solar garden, wall garden, sunk garden and barn garden, upper and lower moats, exotic garden, orchard, long border, high garden and peacock topiary garden. There is also a large vegetable garden.

Sissinghurst

This was my favourite garden of the tour, famously created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. It includes a series of small romantic areas, with perfectly kept borders and beautiful colour combinations.

At the time of our visit, there was still a beautiful display of roses including Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’, ‘Fantin Latour’, ‘Boule de Neige’, ‘Albertine’, and ‘Paul’s Lemon Pillar’.

The atmosphere of the garden enclosed by the Elizabethan mansion in the early summer evening was hauntingly beautiful.

Scotney Castle

This is the garden of an Elizabethan style country house, built in 1837, with the ruin of a medieval moated manor house, Scotney Old Castle, on an island in a small lake. The ruined castle is draped with white wisteria, climbing roses, lilacs and vines and surrounded by borders with roses and herbaceous perennials.

The lake is surrounded by sloping, wooded gardens,  with rhododendrons, azaleas and kalmia.

Perch Hill

This is the garden of the garden writer and presenter Sarah Raven.

There is a large cutting garden where the central 4 beds are filled with hardy and half-hardy annuals and biennials, an Oast garden and front farmhouse garden. All the gardens represented Sarah’s inspiring and innovatory bold colour combinations.

Marchants Hardy Plants, Ripe, near Lewes

This small garden attached to the hardy plant nursery was beautifully designed to demonstrate their great range of herbaceous perennials and ornamental grasses.

 

 

 

In June this year I visited the garden at Chartreuse du Colombier, Paunat, Dordogne with my gardening club.

This privately owned garden surrounds an old monastery built originally in the 17th and 18th centuries, and has been open to the public since the spring of 2014. It has the label of ‘Jardin Remarquable’ awarded by the ministry of culture in February 2015.

 

This is a very attractive, romantic garden with some formal layouts but I came away from it with a memory of billowing plants within a structure rather than an overly formal garden.

The garden consists of the following elements:

the long walk and music pavilion

the dovecote enclosure

the vegetable garden (potager)

the entrance and stable courtyards

 

The long walk and music pavilion form the largest part of the garden, and include box parterres with forms of birds inspired by Magritte, Braque and Matisse, ‘erables de Montpellier (Acer monspessulanum), oaks and ashes, medlars, bulbs including narcissus, tulips and cardoons. Around the pavilion there are collections of Bourbon and Gallica roses.

The dovecote enclosure includes clipped yew (Taxus baccata), a collection of peonies, topiaries of Portuguese laurel, Osmanthus burkwoodii, figs, hollyhocks, cistus, hemerocallis, and eremurus, as well as more roses.

The large vegetable garden includes a baroque fountain, espaliered fruit trees and square beds of ,vegetables, as well as the roses Jacqueline du Pre, Souvenir du Docteur Jamain, Indian Blush, Blush noisette ballerina. There are more yew topiaries, hollyhocks, rhubarb and artichokes, further roses, and statues of spring and summer dating from 1820.

 

The entrance and stable courtyards adjacent to the chartreuse include a parterre with espaliered apples, camellias, beech hedges and more roses including Marechal Niel and Madame Herbert Stevens.

 

 

If you are in the area, I would thoroughly recommend a visit to this garden which is close to Limeuil and Tremolat, and open between mid April and the beginning of October from Wednesday to Sunday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote a post in the spring about my plans for the potagers and new areas in the rest of the garden.

Once again this was a difficult year for leafy vegetables due to the high temperatures and dry conditions. Cauliflowers, broccoli, Swiss chard were not successful but I did have a constant supply of lettuces for 6 months. As with last year, Mediterranean vegetables did very well and I had hundreds of tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and French beans, as well as melons. I grew fennel for the first time here and although they were quite small, the fennel heads were good. As I anticipated in the spring, the broad beans were very good and cropped for several weeks.

 

Over the winter I am growing winter lettuces, endives, red chicory, spinach, chard, leeks, red and green kale and still have celeriac in the ground.

 

I finished planting the 2 new oval beds in the spring with many different grasses and herbaceous plants. They have been watered well and have established well despite the drought conditions. I was very pleased to have a colourful display throughout the summer.

I also made a small cut flower bed next to the potagers and have been picking Cosmos in different shades of pink and white, marigolds and a wild flower mix. I have picked at least 2 bunches of flowers for the house every week and even managed to fill a vase last week.

In the autumn I planted grasses around the pond, and I have also been planting bulbs- snakeshead Fritillaries and Narcissus around the 3 Betula trees, and many Narcissus, Alliums, Fritillaries, and Crocus in the front garden, including Saffron Crocuses in a pot. This month I am going to plant Tulips and more fritillaries.

During the winter I am planning to plant some more shrubs and herbaceous plants in the woodland border. I planted 2 new bamboos in the spring, after a tricky start they now seem to be growing well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Post written in April 2019

It’s typical April weather here, with several seasons in one day. I have just about mastered the art of rushing back to the house with everything that isn’t waterproof as soon as dark clouds appear on the horizon. The late tulips are still flowering, my 3 lilacs, which are pale lilac, white and deep purple, are flowering and the roses have just started. I am hoping that this year I won’t be visited by the deer who ate so many flowers and buds last year!

I have been busy planting Swiss chard, lettuces, cauliflowers and calabrese. I have lifted all the leeks and celeriac remaining from the winter crops, and have been making lots of soup. Broad beans have just started cropping and I think this is going to be the most successful year for them. This is surprising as it has been quite a dry winter and spring until now but perhaps the ground was just too sodden for them to grow properly last year.

I have also been buying plants for my 2 new oval beds and more plants to go around the pond. I have found it quite difficult to buy good herbaceous plants here in south west France, the nurseries and garden centres do not have a large stock. I am intending to visit a garden and nursery at St Avit St Nazaire, which is a village about 15 minutes from where I live, as it sounds interesting and independent nurseries often have much more unusual plants. I am looking for more grasses and late summer perennials, and some more pond plants, both water plants and marginal plants.

I have 4 large bags – known as ‘les big bags’ in France – sitting near my potagers, which were delivered about a month ago. 2 contain compost and 2 contain woodchip mulch. I have been busy spreading the compost around crops, fruit bushes and trees, and the mulch around the roses and lavender in the front garden. It is very good quality and I bought some compost from the same person 3 years ago.

I have planted 2 more Betula utilis near the pond, and have also had some Prunus caucasica planted around my hideous gas tank. I am hoping they will grow quickly!

The tongue orchid Serapias lingua and Serapis vomeracea have been putting in a fantastic display as always in the wilder part of the garden.

In south west France the roses flower in May and I will be visiting the Jardin de Boissonna, a famous rose garden,  at Balleysagues near Duras at some point during the month. I am also looking forward to a garden visit later in May to a garden east of Bergerac with my gardening club.

In late July I am going on a garden tour in Kent and East Sussex, which visits 9 gardens, including an evening visit to Sissinghurst, Sarah Raven’s garden at Perch Hill, and Christopher Lloyd’s garden at Great Dixter. I will be taking lots of photographs!

 

 

Happy New Year to my readers.

January is a time for planning changes and improvements to the garden. It’s often too cold (or wet) for much gardening, but it’s pleasant to sit indoors with good gardening books and seed and plant catalogues and do some blue sky thinking and planning. Having said that, here in SW France the weather has been cold but pleasant with clear blue skies and a lot of sunshine, so it has been possible to do a lot of walking in the countryside and some weeding and tidying up in the garden.

The pond

In the autumn of 2017 I had a pond dug in a corner of my garden, just beyond 2 oak trees which drape their branches close to the ground. I think they are marsh oaks, they are certainly in the wettest part of the garden. A couple of years ago I got a tree surgeon to cut off the lowest branches, so that the branches still trail down to the ground but it is possible to sit underneath the trees in the summer. It’s like sitting under a marquee, but one you can see out from, and is the coolest place in the house or garden in our hot summer months.

 

Beyond the trees and looking out of the garden, there is a view across vine fields and also into the small oak wood behind my house. This is the wildest part of the garden, so seemed a good place to site a wildlife pond.

The first year of the pond, 2018, I planted a few pond plants including 2 water lilies, various oxygenating plants, and some marginal plants in the shallow end of the pond and around the pond. I was very pleased to have visits from dragonflies and damselflies every day and wood pigeons and other birds dropping in for a drink. Some of the plants around the edge of the pond struggled in the very hot weather. This year I am hoping to incorporate some more home made compost or topsoil before more planting. I will be planting different grasses and flowering plants around the pond.

Woodland border

The woodland border close to the pond has good soil full of leafmould, but faces due west and is baked in the sun on summer afternoons. This limits the planting of many herbaceous plants, which find the summer conditions too drying. However shrubs and bamboos thrive in this border. I have bought 2 additional bamboo plants, one with green stems,(Phyllostachys aurea) and one with black stems, (Phyllostachys nigra) which I am ready to plant, now that I have purchased some bamboo barrier material to stop the roots from spreading too rapidly.

Tree group

 

Close to the pond there is an existing silver birch tree which looks rather sad on its own. I have bought 2 more trees ( Betula utilis ramifie) and am going to plant them with the other in a small group of 3, which I think will look attractive particularly in spring with species daffodils planted underneath.

I am also intending to plant Fritillaria meleagris in this area around and underneath the trees as they enjoy the heavy and marshy conditions.

Naturalistic beds

On 2 sides of the 2 large oak trees, I have had 2 oval beds dug by tractor, necessary on my heavy soil, where I will be planting grasses and tough herbaceous plants such as Echinacea and late summer perennials, which will hopefully thrive in the hot summers. At the moment I am thinking of having one bed with hot colours, yellows, reds and oranges, and the other with purples and deep reds. I will then have views from the trees of the wood, the pond, and 2 colourful perennial beds.

Cutting garden

I have also had dug a small cut flower bed next to my potagers (vegetable gardens). I have found it difficult to buy attractive cut flowers in the supermarkets in France so am hoping to grow some of my own from annual seeds. Again the soil will need improvement with compost or topsoil particularly before planting small plug plants or sowing seeds.

Greenhouse

It has always been one of my dreams to have a greenhouse, where I can raise plants from seeds and cuttings. At the moment I have a small planthouse on my terrace, but the capacity is not very big. As I live close to the Chateau de Gageac, I had to check whether I need planning permission for the greenhouse. Unfortunately the area of the garden where I want to put it, at the front next to the drive and close to the potagers, seems to suddenly have an underground spring which last summer was  becoming more active.

If I can sort out the location, I hope to get the greenhouse installed this year. It is too hot here in the summer to use a greenhouse, so it would mainly be used for overwintering plants and cuttings, and raising plants from seed in the spring.

 

 

There has been a long gap since my last entry, I have been trying to catch up with the garden following several months of rain and then very hot, dry weather.  I have also been busy with garden design work.

The rain in the winter and spring had many different results – the shrubs in the woodland border have benefitted greatly, the Pitttosporum tobira has practically doubled in size and the Buddleia had much bigger flowers than usual.  I had a great display of roses in May, unfortunately the deer also appreciated them and one deer in particular kept returning day after day to sample the latest blooms. It’s very unusual here to see a deer in the middle of the day. It eventually disappeared, perhaps an irate vigneron got tired of it eating the new growth on the vines. My hairdresser kindly kept a lot of hair for me, I put it in bags around the roses as it is meant to frighten the deer due to the human scent.

My vegetable garden did badly early in the summer and recovered later.  The heavy clay soil was constantly full of water and the roots of the small plants were unable to breathe or take up nutrients. I lost a lot of plants but had to replant more lettuces, chard, cauliflower, tomatoes, peppers and aubergines.  The irony then was that after 4 months of intense sun and no rain the ground became very hard to plant. After the difficult start, I had huge crops of Mediterranean vegetables, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, aubergines, courgettes, and melons.

In the early summer, I visited 2 gardens. The first was at the Chateau de la Mercerie in Charente, with the local Club de l’Amitie in Gardonne.  The Chateau was mainly interesting for the building, which is slowly being restored by the commune, and the beautiful setting. However they have also started to restore a rose, garden, I was puzzled by the names against the roses then realised they are the names of the people who have sponsored them rather then the names of the roses.Then I visited the Jardins d’Eyrignac with my local gardening club in Eymet.  These formal topiary gardens are in the Dordogne but some 2 hours from here.  They are one of the few French formal gardens still in existence, and date from the 17th century. The gardens were turned into romantic English style gardens in the 19th century, but restored by Gilles Sermadiras de Pouzois de Lite and his son Patrick from 1965 onwards.

 

The gardens are very green, with hornbeams, box, yew, cypresses and lawns. They consist of several garden rooms, including the hornbeam alley, avenue of vases and the green room, neo-Gothic arcades, the manor courtyard, the mirror (a 40m long pond), French parterre, white garden and olive tree garden.  There are also new gardens, a topiary farmyard, garden of water sources and flower meadows.  In the topiary gardens and the mirror gardens there is considerable Italian influence.

All the pruning of the garden is done by hand by the team of 6 gardeners.

I loved the atmosphere of the garden, the tranquillity and the beautiful setting in the dramatic landscape of the Perigord Noir in the eastern Dordogne. My favourite part of the garden was the white garden, full of many different white flowers in formal beds with ponds and fountains.  Including Petunia, Gaura lindheimeri, roses, Hibiscus ‘Diana’, Hydrangeas, Cleomes and Dahlias and bulbs in spring.

 

 

 

Dividing Irises

 

The irises I discovered in my garden between the country hedge and cut-back conifer have been waiting to be divided since last summer. Now at last the ground is soft enough to lift and replant them and it is no longer raining.  The gardening books tell you to cut between the tubers with a spade.  In fact I found the pieces came apart quite easily and replanted them, not  too deeply, the tubers need to be at ground level, in 5 or 6 different places in the front garden.  It will be exciting to see whether they flower this year, and what colour they are.

Pruning fruit trees

The majority of fruit trees in this garden I have planted myself, and they are trained shapes – some U-shaped cordons (apples and pears) and what I hope will be fan shaped apricot, nectarine, 2 cherries, 3 plums and a quince.  As fan-shaped trees are very expensive to buy, I bought bare root trees in November 2016 and am training them myself.  It’s early days but if it works, as they were only 8-10 euros each it will be a good saving on the 100-150 euros charged for older ready-trained trees.

They are all pruned in the summer, so the only fruit trees for winter pruning are the 2 small apple trees which were already in the garden.  Although I had about 20 fruit trees in my  garden and allotment in London, I have always found pruning fruit trees a challenge as they never quite look like the illustrations in the books! I tried to concentrate on cutting out dead and crossing growth, and creating an open bowl type shape.  Time will tell whether I did it properly!

Last year I had about 20 apples from one tree and none at all from the other.  I also had to tie on tiny fleece bags around each small fruit, as the previous year all my tiny apples disappeared overnight.  I suspect squirrels- as I have an oak wood behind my house there must be a lot of squirrels, although I have hardly ever seen them.  Of course they are red squirrels here, and very shy- most of mine are nearly black, as they are melanistic.

So different from the grey squirrels in my garden in London, which were so fearless they would practically break into the house in search of food!

Moving shrubs

In front of part of my front garden there is a large pyracantha hedge. It is fearsome to cut; it takes the people who cut it about a day and they are battling the sharpest thorns known to humankind. However the white flowers are very pretty in spring and the red berries in autumn keep the birds fed for weeks.  The hedge is so dense that many birds nest in there and at the moment the hedge is alive with their singing- perhaps nest building or establishing territories.

Anything planted less than 3 metres from the hedge seems to do very badly – especially after a dry summer like last year.  I have just moved a rose which I planted too close to the hedge.  I was also going to move an existing Cotinus coggygria (smoke bush) which has never done very well there, but it seems to have died over the winter. I will look at it again in a couple of weeks, if you scrape the bark  there are some green stems, showing life, but it is not producing buds or leaves.

Birds

I always get interesting winter visitors in this garden. I have always had a lot  of bird feeders and in London I was part of the RSPB London House Sparrow Project which aimed to increase the number of successfully fledged house sparrows by feeding live mealworms during the breeding period. It was interesting having a fridge full of live mealworms, but I grew to recognise ‘chirping males’ (the alpha males of the house sparrow world) and loved to see the fledglings being fed.

Here I have had up to 40 different species of birds in  the garden, sometimes just for a few days or weeks. As well as bramblings and siskins this winter, I have had a lot of hawfinches, up to 12 at a time. In the UK they are normally only found in Scotland, but they are more widespread this year. I understand that it has been very cold further north in their usual winter areas in Scandinavia, and they have moved further south in Europe.

Pruning Cornus and other winter stems

Plants which are grown for their winter stem colour need to be hard pruned at the end of winter, so that they produce good coloured new growth. These include Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’ (red) and Cornus sericea ‘Flaviramea’ (yellow) which I have in my garden. The red Cornus in  particular has lovely variegated leaves in summer. The yellow Cornus is planted with a yellow evergreen grass, Hakenechloa macra ‘Aureola’ and Mahonia aquifolium which has scented yellow winter flowers.

The hard pruning should start after the first 2 to 3 years, to allow the plants to establish and I have decided to leave mine to their third year. It’s great to have the shining colours standing out against the dark background of the oak wood. Once they are pruned, you can use the stems in decorations.

 

After what seems like months of rain and cold weather, today was at last a sunny day with no wind. Everything needs doing at once, but having finished pruning the roses and hydrangeas, I decided to spend some time tidying up  the beds and pots around the terrace behind the house. There is a herb bed at the side, I cut back some dead pieces of sage, took out a dead tarragon plant and cut back the lemon verbena – it always grows back strongly and makes a lovely airy plant giving height to the bed. Also it’s good for tea and flavouring desserts.

Next I removed dead annual plants and weeds from the terracotta pots.

There is a long bed running along the outside edge of the terrace, the terrace is elevated giving great views of the Dordogne valley.  At the other side of the terrace from the herb bed is a short bed with one hydrangea and some lavender plants. This hydrangea has really suffered in the recent hot summers and I think there may be pipes below it, meaning there is not much room for roots.  The lavenders are also past their best and I may renew this bed completely.  However, it is lovely to see the bees, butterflies and elephant hawkmoths in the lavender when you’re sitting at the table.

Gaura lindheimeri ‘Whirling Butterflies’

The long bed below the terrace has 6 pink hydrangeas, and originally when I moved in 4 years ago, 2 salvias, one being Hot Lips, the other a red one, and some white and pink Gaura lindheimeri. The Gaura is a great plant which tolerates hot dry weather and winter wet.

Penstemon ‘Sour Grapes’

Anyone who thinks plants can’t travel should see this bed.  The Gaura plants have travelled down to the side of the swimming pool, the red Salvia has died, and ‘Hot Lips’ is struggling, I think due to the droughts in the last 2 summers, despite watering.  However, mysteriously, a red hot poker (Kniphofia) and a very healthy Penstemon, possibly ‘Sour Grapes’, have appeared.  Clearly quite a lot of plants have been planted here and some of them have been dormant until the Gaura and Salvias gave them more space.

Salvia ‘Hotlips’

I cut back the Salvia and will fertilise it, hooping it will make new growth, and then cut back the dead herbaceous growth on the Gauras down to ground level.

I have had a similar surprise at the side of the house, where the big mixed country hedge to the adjacent vinefield was cut back last year, as was a low spreading conifer at the side of the front garden, to reveal a clump of Irises, which must have been hidden there for years.  Unfortunately I didn’t see them flower, so don’t know what colour they are.  The ground went from being much too hard and dry to move them, to much too wet and boggy, so I am going to have to  split them up and move them to other locations jin the garden now, before it gets too hard again! The correct time to do this would have been after flowering in the summer. However I think somebody said that the right time to do something in the garden is when you have time to do it!