Garden Philosophy
9th March 2015
An early lesson to learn for any gardener is that it is not always therapeutic. For every success in gardening there is failure, and much is learnt by trial and error. At its worst it can be hard work and demoralising - and at its best, quite simply, joyful and rewarding.
Last year was not the best. A lot of time and money was spent on generating the borders and developing Dingly Dell, on carefully preparing the vegetable patch and sowing, planting and nurturing. Yet most of my efforts were, if not totally wasted, well, somewhat compromised. The first reason was a rather strange weather pattern; the second was some unwelcome visitors; and the third was a life-changing event.
Weather
No mortal can ever predict the weather. It is in the lap of the Gods. Long gone are the regular seasons of popular myth: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Rather, we often get a bit of spring in winter, a bit of winter in spring, a bit of summer in autumn and a bit of autumn in summer. Take last year: there was a week in early March where the temperatures soared. I remember walking round one of our local reservoirs in a T-shirt - the sunlight as strong and warm as on any English summer day. I enthusiastically started sowing peas directly into the ground, the soil nicely warmed for germination, only to have cold, wet, miserable weather descend for much of the next six weeks. The peas rotted. I sowed again in late April. They rotted again. I gave up and tried them in pots in the greenhouse only for many of them to be eaten by mice or slugs. The few that I managed to get in the ground as young plants struggled to put on any meaningful growth and rapidly fell prey to more slugs and snails, flourishing as they were in all the wet, warmish (but not warm enough) weather. Not forgetting that I garden at 1,000 feet above sea level with strong winds and an awkward facing garden surrounded by huge trees and steep hillsides. It is quite a battle, I can tell you. Of course, it doesn't help that I go away for five weeks at the end of July, just as anything that might have survived is coming to fruition. This year, because of the heat of July, I came home fully expecting to have a bumper crop of at least some things - only to find that Ian, who helps me with the garden, had been away in what turned out to be the hottest two weeks of the summer and that anything that was there had frazzled and dried up without watering. I do not have a water supply at the top of the garden and rely purely on lugging up watering cans. It is far from ideal.
It was for all these reasons that, a few years ago, I spent time, energy and money re-developing the puny and unproductive vegetable patch: I created raised beds to help manage the soil temperature, composition and nutrition; I built a dry stone wall around it to help contain warmth and protect from some of the harsher elements (frost, wind, etc); I cut back hedges and trees to create as much light as possible. In short, I did it all by the horticultural book - yet this much-loved patch still remains relatively unproductive. I have the greatest success with broad beans and runner beans and the wallflowers seem to like it. Sweet peas struggle, peas struggle, apples struggle, potatoes struggle (unless in a grow-bag), cabbages struggle. Leafy salads are reasonably successful if the slugs don't get them. I managed a reasonable clutch of shallots. Onions, leeks and carrots remain pitifully small. Garlic never seems to do a lot. Endless sowings of radish never germinated. Ditto beetroot. Rocket did ok and the raspberries that used to grow wildly in the grass before I developed the plot flourished too, though less so now they have all been moved.
In summary, I could say that last year, all I really got were some runner beans, some broad beans, a bit of salad, some redcurrants (but you have to grab these before the birds strip the plants bare) and wild blackberries, a few potatoes, a beetroot and some shallots. And the quantities I am discussing here are barely enough for more than a couple of family meals! Surprisingly, for a mediterranean plant, the lavendar did quite well while the sage rotted and the sweet peas and nigella basically didn't happen.
Weather
No mortal can ever predict the weather. It is in the lap of the Gods. Long gone are the regular seasons of popular myth: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Rather, we often get a bit of spring in winter, a bit of winter in spring, a bit of summer in autumn and a bit of autumn in summer. Take last year: there was a week in early March where the temperatures soared. I remember walking round one of our local reservoirs in a T-shirt - the sunlight as strong and warm as on any English summer day. I enthusiastically started sowing peas directly into the ground, the soil nicely warmed for germination, only to have cold, wet, miserable weather descend for much of the next six weeks. The peas rotted. I sowed again in late April. They rotted again. I gave up and tried them in pots in the greenhouse only for many of them to be eaten by mice or slugs. The few that I managed to get in the ground as young plants struggled to put on any meaningful growth and rapidly fell prey to more slugs and snails, flourishing as they were in all the wet, warmish (but not warm enough) weather. Not forgetting that I garden at 1,000 feet above sea level with strong winds and an awkward facing garden surrounded by huge trees and steep hillsides. It is quite a battle, I can tell you. Of course, it doesn't help that I go away for five weeks at the end of July, just as anything that might have survived is coming to fruition. This year, because of the heat of July, I came home fully expecting to have a bumper crop of at least some things - only to find that Ian, who helps me with the garden, had been away in what turned out to be the hottest two weeks of the summer and that anything that was there had frazzled and dried up without watering. I do not have a water supply at the top of the garden and rely purely on lugging up watering cans. It is far from ideal.
It was for all these reasons that, a few years ago, I spent time, energy and money re-developing the puny and unproductive vegetable patch: I created raised beds to help manage the soil temperature, composition and nutrition; I built a dry stone wall around it to help contain warmth and protect from some of the harsher elements (frost, wind, etc); I cut back hedges and trees to create as much light as possible. In short, I did it all by the horticultural book - yet this much-loved patch still remains relatively unproductive. I have the greatest success with broad beans and runner beans and the wallflowers seem to like it. Sweet peas struggle, peas struggle, apples struggle, potatoes struggle (unless in a grow-bag), cabbages struggle. Leafy salads are reasonably successful if the slugs don't get them. I managed a reasonable clutch of shallots. Onions, leeks and carrots remain pitifully small. Garlic never seems to do a lot. Endless sowings of radish never germinated. Ditto beetroot. Rocket did ok and the raspberries that used to grow wildly in the grass before I developed the plot flourished too, though less so now they have all been moved.
In summary, I could say that last year, all I really got were some runner beans, some broad beans, a bit of salad, some redcurrants (but you have to grab these before the birds strip the plants bare) and wild blackberries, a few potatoes, a beetroot and some shallots. And the quantities I am discussing here are barely enough for more than a couple of family meals! Surprisingly, for a mediterranean plant, the lavendar did quite well while the sage rotted and the sweet peas and nigella basically didn't happen.
You can imagine my inner despair, therefore, when I visited a friend who has just moved into the most amazing manor house in Oxfordshire complete with enormous walled vegetable garden which would once have fed the whole village, and two inherited full-time gardeners to tend the patch. She doesn't lift a finger and gets more vegetables of gigantic proportions on a daily basis than I could ever imagine in my wildest dreams. Quite depressing really. As I cooed over the enormous size of her carrots and beetroot and parsnips, I chatted with her gardener and took a crumb of comfort from the fact that he confirmed it had been 'a very strange year'. He was complaining how hard it had been to cultivate things this year - but I would still have given anything for his carrots, beetroots and parsnips which looked like Gulliver compared to my pathetic (actually, non-existant) Lilliputian offerings. I took little solace from coming home with a bag full of giant carrots, beetroots and parsnips and an amazingly beautiful collection of healthy gourds (they had so many they didn't know what to do with them even having shoved them in every nook and cranny of the voluminous house for Hallowe'en).
Further demoralised, I chatted to Ian about it all as well as another friend who has been producing armfuls of lovely veg on his High Peak plot for years (but unlike mine his is south facing on a slope - perfect). Both men confirmed too that 'it had been a very strange year' and that production had been poor.
Unwelcome Visitors and a Life-Changing Event
My objective last year was to regenerate some borders which were getting a little tired and understocked and to create some winter interest. Ian had worked like a Trojan adding home-produced compost and leaf-mould to the borders and I had fun coming up with a planting plan and choosing the plants. During Spring and early summer we had also been putting in all sorts of flowers and shrubs to enhance the Dell. I had taken a trip to Bodnant Gardens in Wales to get some inspiration around rhododendron and azalea time and had come back with a bootful of plants they were selling in their garden centre. It struck me that what would grow there should also like my conditions as they were not dissimilar in terms of terrain and climate (albeit in a micro version). So I bought bog-loving candelabra primulas to plant next to the stream, together with more ferns, grasses, marsh marigolds, arum lilies and euphorbias. Ian had picked up a number of azalias and some rhodis at market which also went into the Dell. My overactive imagination was taking over now and I had a vision of this woodland wonderland! We put in forsythias in appropriate gaps elsewhere around the garden together with some brooms, viburnums, dwarf conifers, acers, wallflowers, lavenders, agapanthus, pieris and all manner of other things. To cheer up the bare soil beneath some trees and hedges we under-planted with daffodils and snowdrops (which I had dug up and divided from the Dell). I also went to a plant fair at Adlington Hall in Cheshire and bought another whole load of perennials to ensure the herbaceous border was full of colour and interest. In short, we planted a lot of new plants!
I remember showing my mother-in-law around the garden in early November, proud of what we'd achieved and pleased it was still looking so interesting and fresh even at that time of year, especially as the last border we renovated had been planted up with lots of things for winter interest which included evergreens and grasses. So you can imagine my dismay when, a week later, when I was down in the South of England with my father critically ill in hospital, that I received a phonecall from a friend to tell me that we had a dead cow on the lawn! In other circumstances this might actually have seemed rather funny - but instead it was a horribly symbolic omen of what lay ahead for my father who in fact never made it out of hospital. Worse still, in fact the entire herd of cows (13 it turned out) had got into the garden while we were all away (the children being looked after by friends) and had wreaked havoc. They had broken down walls and gone down the banks into Dingly Dell; they had eaten all the beautiful aged ivy off the boundary walls, smashed pots carefully planted up by Ian, they had lain in all the shrubbery, they had shat EVERYWHERE and the lawn looked like a ploughed field. What they hadn't eaten they had tugged at and pulled up. But the fatal mistake was chewing away at my fastigiate taxus baccata (Yew, by any other name, and deadly poisonous). So I then had a heffer staggering around the garden, trashing even more stuff, and foaming at the mouth before keeling over in front of the summer house where he still was, stiff-legged, when my friend had brought the girls home to get some clean underwear! You couldn't write the script really. The farmer had had to devise a rope and pulley mechanism over a tree branch to get the dead beast off the lawn and out of the garden and his uncle (my neighbour) had then spent many laborious hours with him trying to clear up some of the mess. By the time I got back at the weekend it was still a very sorry sight and Ian and I walked round, incredulously, logging the extent of the damage. It took hours of Ian's time to try and sort things out - as I had neither the will or the time as I was rather spiritually and physically broken by everything that was going on with my father. It was even sadder that my garden was my spiritual haven (especially as I was, at the time, so out of love with my house) and just when I needed it most it was simply adding to my overarching gloom and depression.
So what do you take from all that? Well, you could just give up. Or - you could affirm that you shall not be beaten, turn up your collar to the wind and go out and try all over again. Until about a week ago I was in the first camp. Then, as the first warmer spring sun started to come through the other day, I felt my morale rising like the sap and vowed to get out there and have another go. And with that attitude, I fed the birds and got to work on sowing some seeds...
Further demoralised, I chatted to Ian about it all as well as another friend who has been producing armfuls of lovely veg on his High Peak plot for years (but unlike mine his is south facing on a slope - perfect). Both men confirmed too that 'it had been a very strange year' and that production had been poor.
Unwelcome Visitors and a Life-Changing Event
My objective last year was to regenerate some borders which were getting a little tired and understocked and to create some winter interest. Ian had worked like a Trojan adding home-produced compost and leaf-mould to the borders and I had fun coming up with a planting plan and choosing the plants. During Spring and early summer we had also been putting in all sorts of flowers and shrubs to enhance the Dell. I had taken a trip to Bodnant Gardens in Wales to get some inspiration around rhododendron and azalea time and had come back with a bootful of plants they were selling in their garden centre. It struck me that what would grow there should also like my conditions as they were not dissimilar in terms of terrain and climate (albeit in a micro version). So I bought bog-loving candelabra primulas to plant next to the stream, together with more ferns, grasses, marsh marigolds, arum lilies and euphorbias. Ian had picked up a number of azalias and some rhodis at market which also went into the Dell. My overactive imagination was taking over now and I had a vision of this woodland wonderland! We put in forsythias in appropriate gaps elsewhere around the garden together with some brooms, viburnums, dwarf conifers, acers, wallflowers, lavenders, agapanthus, pieris and all manner of other things. To cheer up the bare soil beneath some trees and hedges we under-planted with daffodils and snowdrops (which I had dug up and divided from the Dell). I also went to a plant fair at Adlington Hall in Cheshire and bought another whole load of perennials to ensure the herbaceous border was full of colour and interest. In short, we planted a lot of new plants!
I remember showing my mother-in-law around the garden in early November, proud of what we'd achieved and pleased it was still looking so interesting and fresh even at that time of year, especially as the last border we renovated had been planted up with lots of things for winter interest which included evergreens and grasses. So you can imagine my dismay when, a week later, when I was down in the South of England with my father critically ill in hospital, that I received a phonecall from a friend to tell me that we had a dead cow on the lawn! In other circumstances this might actually have seemed rather funny - but instead it was a horribly symbolic omen of what lay ahead for my father who in fact never made it out of hospital. Worse still, in fact the entire herd of cows (13 it turned out) had got into the garden while we were all away (the children being looked after by friends) and had wreaked havoc. They had broken down walls and gone down the banks into Dingly Dell; they had eaten all the beautiful aged ivy off the boundary walls, smashed pots carefully planted up by Ian, they had lain in all the shrubbery, they had shat EVERYWHERE and the lawn looked like a ploughed field. What they hadn't eaten they had tugged at and pulled up. But the fatal mistake was chewing away at my fastigiate taxus baccata (Yew, by any other name, and deadly poisonous). So I then had a heffer staggering around the garden, trashing even more stuff, and foaming at the mouth before keeling over in front of the summer house where he still was, stiff-legged, when my friend had brought the girls home to get some clean underwear! You couldn't write the script really. The farmer had had to devise a rope and pulley mechanism over a tree branch to get the dead beast off the lawn and out of the garden and his uncle (my neighbour) had then spent many laborious hours with him trying to clear up some of the mess. By the time I got back at the weekend it was still a very sorry sight and Ian and I walked round, incredulously, logging the extent of the damage. It took hours of Ian's time to try and sort things out - as I had neither the will or the time as I was rather spiritually and physically broken by everything that was going on with my father. It was even sadder that my garden was my spiritual haven (especially as I was, at the time, so out of love with my house) and just when I needed it most it was simply adding to my overarching gloom and depression.
So what do you take from all that? Well, you could just give up. Or - you could affirm that you shall not be beaten, turn up your collar to the wind and go out and try all over again. Until about a week ago I was in the first camp. Then, as the first warmer spring sun started to come through the other day, I felt my morale rising like the sap and vowed to get out there and have another go. And with that attitude, I fed the birds and got to work on sowing some seeds...
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