End of the Month Review July 2011

As all gardeners know gardening can be a bit of a mixed bag. This month's review highlights that.   I was going to concentrate on happenings in the kitchen garden in this month's review but I can't resist starting with the zig-zag part of the garden.

The view from upstairs shows that the garden has filled to the point I'm thinking about getting out the machete to hack a way through the jungle. The blue tiled table made by P and the Crocosmia "Lucifer" catch the eye.

 

Looking up the garden from the back door (Teazle cat and all) the sharp eyed among you will have noticed the pot in the right corner of the frame. Another tree?  Changes are afoot...

I love the effect of the grass stipa gigantea as it catches the sunlight and moves in the breeze. There were three of them in the original planting but two succumbed to harsh winters.

One of the highlights in the summer border is the lush foliage of melianthus major with its serrated glacous leaves. It has finally put on a bit of growth although it will never be as big (or flower) as it would in it's native South Africa.

The brick red flowers of the lily add a splash of deep colour. Lilies in pots are ideal for placing in various points round the garden.

 The mix of rhodohypoxsis has been flowering in this salt glazed pot all summer.

 I have gradually begun to introduce hardy geraniums and penstemons into the planting plan. Both provide colour and a wide choice of varieties. This hardy geranium came from a plant sale and was unnamed. The penstemon is Penstemon digitalis "Husker's Red". I think the two combine well.

 

Another combination that I really like is the Phormium tricolour,  the Heuchera "Purple Palace" the Tiarella and the Euphorbia rubra. The flowers of the tiarella and the heuchera are fairly insignificant in themselves but add a sparkle to the image.

Last but not least in this part of the garden is the Paulownia Tomentosa. It was grown from seed and is in it's second year. It would become a tree if I let it but that would be too big for the space so it shall probably be coppiced in future years. There are two others in the garden but they remain quite small. This must be the ideal spot for it, a warm south facing corner.

On to the productive garden.
I think may be a slight misnomer when it comes to the vegetables.

The fruit have given us a bumper crop. The strawberries are finally finished after weeks of fruiting. There's been an abundance of currants, gooseberries and the raspberries (although a slightly sickly looking) are cropping well.

 

In the vegetable border some of the heritage varieties have done well. The crimson broad beans gave the border some beautiful colour and some tasty young beans. The wonderfully named "Gravedigger" peas are sweet and in bountiful supply.  The courgettes, onions and some other root crops are doing well. Apart from the odd pigeon having a snack of the pea shoots these veg have been trouble free.

 Then we get to the potatoes and the cauliflowers....
 A touch of potato blight....

 

A bit of bolting...

We cut down the potato haulms and binned them. The actual crop doesn't seem to have been hit by blight. Time will tell.
And  the cauliflowers are being fed to the hens.
Other  vegetables and salad crops sown later in the season have also bolted. I think it's probably down to the weather and in particular, the lack of rain.

Looking on the bright side we still have sweetcorn, tomatoes, plums and apples to look forward to in the next couple of months.

Join in the end of month review at Helen's site and have a look at what is happening in everyone elses garden.

Pitmedden Gardens, Aberdeenshire

It was a dull, overcast day last weekend and I had a need to visit a garden (as you do). We have been to all the ones that were open in the area and P suggested that we go to Pitmedden in Aberdeenshire. My heart sank a bit as this garden has never been top of my list of gardens to visit. Visions of clipped box hedges and some very controlled gardening sprang to mind. I'm all in favour of a bit of topiary but it needs to combine with loose naturalistic planting to give it a bit of 'joie de vivre'. 

So putting on my optimistic hat, (let's have a look at it so at least I can say I've been there) we headed north.

It's another NTS (National Trust for Scotland) gardens. We are lucky to have quite a few. The centre-piece of this property is the Great Garden, three of the formal parterres were taken from designs possibly used in the gardens at the Palace of Holyrood in  Edinburgh in the 17th Century. Having read over the information sheet at lunch (lunch and coffee being a very necessary part of any trip) I discovered that the present day elaborate floral designs were recreated in the 1950's and there are five miles of box hedge. Five miles! That must take some clipping! I wonder if it's done by hand or with a machine?

The garden is built on three levels and it can't all be seen at once. The first bit is easy on the eye with clipped yew and a couple of March hares frolicking on the lawn.

A short walk takes you to the next level down, with more lawn, some sculpture, two small parterres and what looks like pleached limes. Very green but not very inspiring on it's own.

 Beyond this is a low hedge and a drop to the next level down. The sight looking over the hedge quite took my breath away. Intricately patterned box hedge all immaculately cut and densely filled with brightly coloured bedding plants. It definitely made an impact!

Photographs don't do the garden justice but can give a flavour of the symmetry and the patterns in the four blocks of parterre. The bedding plants and the pink sedums seem absolutely the right plants to have chosen to go with the box. Latin features in the parterre and relates to one of the previous owner's coat of arms.  I just about managed to photograph the well known saying "Tempus fugit" (Time flies).

 The strict symmetry of the box is softened by the large herbaceous borders on two sides of the garden backed by cordon apple trees. Seemingly there are 80 varieties and if you're an apple addict you can buy some of the fruit  in the month of September.

It was very tempting with so much symmetry to take photos in straight lines along an axis. The eye is focused on the lines. What might have been more interesting was to go slightly to one side and take the photos from a more unexpected angle. But as you can see I didn't think about that until later.

I was surprised by how drawn I was to this garden and it's geometric planting. I even jokingly talked about doing away with the long vegetable border at home and making our own mini parterre. But sanity prevailed. It takes me long enough to trim two balls of box never mind five miles of it!

A Prickly Customer

  I'm always drawn to prickly plants with their dramatic, architectural features. Many are in my preferred blue/pink/purple colour range. Not all their flowers and leaves are spiky with jagged, steely bracts. Some are much more feathery and soft. But the effect is the same and all are great additions to  the summer border.

Most thistles are greatly beloved by bees and other pollinators.

Cirsium rivulare 'Atropurpureum' delights in boggy conditions or heavy clay soil. It's surprising that it does so well in our predominantly sandy soil. It grows to about 4ft tall, and has plum-coloured flowers and leaves that are  serrated but hardly prickly at all.
Unfortunately Cirsium is sterile so it needs to be propagated by division. It seems a waste of the copious amounts of fluffy seeds it produces.

The globe thistle, Echinops ritro, is a tough herbaceous perennial that also forms large clumps and has a great presence in the herbaceous border. The head of the globe thistle is spectacular in bud and looks as though it is made of steel. This is a plant we have grown in the past but it always got attacked by aphids and the leaves became contorted and ugly. But we may try it again in this garden.

The next prickly speciman is the eryngium or sea holly. It isn't a thistle at all but an umbellifer. The name eryngium is derived from the Greek, meaning a plant used to cure indigestion.
One favourite in particular is Eryngium Giganteum. It  has very sharp steely bracts and an almost luminous silvery appearance. This plant is a biennial and self seeds all around the border.

This plant is also known as Miss Willmott's Ghost, because it always appeared two years after the celebrated Edwardian gardener Ellen Willmott  had surreptitiously sprinkled seeds in gardens she visited.
I scattered some seeds around last year in the true Miss Willmot tradition and am looking forward to Eryngium giganteum putting in an appearance next year.

Common Teazle (dipsacus sylvestris) used to be used for medicinal purposes and for carding wool. It's another  biennial with very spiky stems and  conical flowers.  I grew several from seed last year to plant out at the back of the border to provide some height and drama. They are a great plant for butterflies and also for Gold Finches which enjoy the seeds over the winter. One fascinating feature of the teazle is that the lilac and white flowers bloom in a circular pattern around the flower head starting in the middle and opening up and down simultaneously.

 

Lastly is the tallest of them all, the giant cotton thistle, Onopordum acanthium. They grow to at least 10ft and often 15ft, with a spread of 5ft. But they are among the most dramatic garden plants, with huge grey leaves coated with a milky down, fringed with sharp spikes and great candelabras of flowering stems. It is biennial and another self seeder. This tall thistle need staking or will topple over in windy conditions.

Other facts that you may not know about Thistles:

The thistle is also the national emblem of Scotland.......
In Winnie-the-Pooh, it is Eeyore's favourite food...
There are two famous poems about Thistles : one by Ted Hughes called "Thistles" and the other by Hugh MacDiarmid called "A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle"

Love Bugs

Love is in the air.
At this time of year we've been aware of a lot of activity by orange/red beetles on flower heads of cow parsley, hogweed and ragwort when out walking the dog.

The beetle is known as the common soldier beetle Rhagonycha fulva and is only seen in it’s adult form at this time of year.

It’s rare to see this beetle on it’s own as in this photo

More often they are seen as mating pairs, earning them the nickname of 'bonking beetles'.
 So here they are, having fun....

And again....

And again....

 And again....

And they seem to manage to eat at the same time....

The Plant Snob

I was reading an archive article in the Independent by the excellent Anna Pavord on How to be a Plant Snob.  It made me pause and think for a bit.

A plant snob? Moi?
The article mentions the three phases of gardening And  I began to wonder what phase could I be in? I'm certainly past the "plant any thing I've been given and be grateful"stage. Even if it has acid yellow flowers and tries to stage a coup d'etat in the border.

And I must admit to going through a very snobby phase of compiling a wish list based on the show gardens at Chelsea. Thankfully common sense and finance dictated that I move on from there. Dicksonia Antartica, ( Dairmuid Gavin)  Melianthus Major ( Chris beardshaw) and Cirsium Rivulare (Who could forget seeing them in the Piet Oudolf/Arne Maynard Show gardens a few years back?) are reminders of that time.

Anna Pavord's article was written in 1997 and she named Cerinthe major purpurescens her plant of the year. It has been grown faithfully in our garden from seed every year for almost as long. If I had a  £1 for every time a visitor asked what it was and carefully scribbled down the name or better still got me to do it,  I would be on the way to buying a cloud tree or two (see Tom Stuart Smith's Best in Show Garden at Chelsea in 2008).

So I must be in the third phase (well, just about) Plants that find a place in our garden do so for several reasons:
• They must have interesting flowers (preferably single for bees and butterflies) and foliage
• Spread gently or form clumps in a sedate fashion
• Suit the conditions (apart from the above mentioned Dicksonia and Melianthus Major which get the necessary TLC)
• Fits in with the general planting scheme, in terms of size, colour and structure.

I do know there are some plants that I don't like and some styles of gardening that don't appeal.  In the first instance Aucuba japonica Spotted Laurel springs to mind, even as some gardeners try to persuade us of its finer points! Pop over and see what Chris at Garden Thinnings has to say about it.

St Cyrus Nature Reserve

 The St Cyrus Nature Reserve lives a few miles north of where we live. It has one of the most varied stretches of coastline in North-east Scotland, consisting of sand dunes, species rich grassland, river estuary and cliffs.

The natural barriers of inland cliffs and a seaward ridge of sand dunes protect the St Cyrus grasslands from the ravages of the weather, creating a small strip of warmth nestled on the North East coast. It is a refuge for a great variety of plants, insects and birds. It is a favourite place for dog walkers, walkers and twittchers alike. The beach is popular with families in the summer. Dogs are welcome but have to be kept at heel or on a lead until they get to the beach.

The beach is reached over a wooden bridge with viewing points over the grasslands and sand dunes.
 

 Traditional salmon fishing with nets was still carried from St Cyrus beach until about two years ago. (you can see the nets on my post about Lunan Bay) Two ice houses that used to provide ice for packing salmon before transporting to market can still be seen. One had now been turned into a private dwelling.

We usually head for the beach so that the dog can have a run.

 The beach viewed from the rocks (and caves) at the far end.

We often used to walk along the paths at the top of the cliffs and down to the beach from there but erosion has made this more difficult. The view from the top is spectacular.

The andesite cliffs, made of lava from a volcano which was active 395 million years ago. The grasslands are sheltered from the south westerly winds by the cliffs and the easterly winds by the sand dunes. Wild flowers thrive in the warmer drier conditions.

You may be able to pick out the finger of rock in the above photo. We had been visiting St Cyrus for a while before we noticed it. The shadow behind and the yellow lichen on the top helps it to stand out.

 

There are over 65 species of breeding birds  at St Cyrus during the summer; some that live here all year round and some that travel great distances to breed on the reserve.
The variety of habitats on the reserve encourages a range of birds from dunnocks and stonechats in the gorse bushes to skylarks and meadow pipits in the dunes. Sedge warblers and reed buntings nest in the reedbeds while the fulmars and peregrines live on the cliffs.
There are also special bird boxes put up for the swallows and housemartins which fly in for the summer

A special feature of the reserve between April and August is the songs of the skylark.They make their nests on the ground so part of the reserve is closed off during the breeding season to prevent disturbance by humans and dogs.

There is an abundance of wildflowers. There are also  some moths and butterflies, but these do seem  scarcer than in the past. Here are some of the ones we saw...

A Common Blue on a campanula

 Campanula glomerata  Clustered Bellflower

Ameria maritima Thrift

Echium vulgare Viper's bugloss

Vicia cracca Tufted Vetch

Campanula  Rotndifolia Harebell

Towards the end of the walk there are a few fields that are sown with wild flowers every year. This year there are grasses mixed with daisies. It is a stunning sight.