ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
We went midweek to visit Wildside garden at Buckland Monochorum. This garden, created by Keith Wiley with a great deal of inspiration from his late wife Ros, is as close as any garden I know to my idea of a perfect garden. It is packed full of good plants, all planted in a naturalistic way…
This week I was minded to run with a theme of yellow, but could only find five decent contenders and wanted to include at least one white. Yellow features strongly then but not exclusively. One.Crocosmia 'Paul's Best Yellow'. All is relative. Compared to Crocosmia 'Hellfire' at the bottom of the picture it is just about…
Back on the watering treadmill but who could complain about such glorious weather. The Dahlias are beginning to kick off, which in gardening terms is my yardstick for summer proper. Six for this week, easy peasy. OneHydrangea serrata 'Shojo'. This is on the edge of my shady area and gets very little direct sun though…
There seem to be a growing number of 'gardeners' who are happy to leave 'nature' to take its course in their gardens. They are happy, or at least prepared, to put up with the damage wrought by slugs and snails, want dandelions to be regarded as desirable wild flowers and eschew the use of any…
We had one of my sisters staying this week, so instead of sorting my saturday six on friday, they have been done this morning. It rained all night and the garden is drenched. It's drizzling still but hopefully will brighten up so we can do a bit of preening for tomorrow's opening, which yet again…
That's both the summer solstice and the calendar midpoint passed. Half way through Wimbledon too and the Brits are dropping like flies. Blight in some of my potatoes too. A very ordinary summer. Picking six things in the garden at this time of the year is about choosing what to put in, what to leave…
I have a garden full of plants and I’m forever taking pictures of them. They get dumped onto the computer in folders with the date of their dumping to identify them. Eventually I go through them and delete the ones I don’t want.Looking back through photos I took a year ago I don’t always know…
We opened, we survived, we open again tomorrow. I did a short blog about the experience, which was a good one. We have nine more openings, taking us to 22nd August, so we have to keep primping and preening until then. We both found the whole thing very tiring and were desperate to get to…
Wednesday at 2pm was the appointed time. It came and went without anyone appearing, which was a little unsettling. We had signed up to open our garden for the National Garden Scheme, persuaded by the local organizers who were keen to add some smaller and perhaps more relatable gardens to their local offer. Small gardens…
Next wednesday is our first opening for the NGS so I thought that rather than pick out six individual items I'd go with six viewpoints. When visiting gardens there are always going to be things that have just gone over and things that aren't quite open yet; the sense that last week or next week…
