ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
It's the end of month 8, which seems a particularly appropriate to pause momentarily and take stock of how the garden has performed this year. The growing season has all but run its course for the year, there’s now a slow run into winter, eking out the flowers by dead heading and enjoying a few…
I took a few pictures yesterday but didn't write this on Friday evening as I usually do, so I went out again this morning with the sun just high enough to catch a few things in the garden. There's a whiff of winding down, flowers going over, foliage starting to look tatty. Most of the…
Our first season of opening under the NGS finishes tomorrow, not a moment too soon both from the angle that the garden is slowly starting to collapse under its own weight and that we have had enough now and want our garden back. If we do it again next year we will open less often.It…
While there are still lots of plants to choose from for inclusion in a saturday six, the garden as a whole is beginning to look a bit ragged around the edges. When things have finished for the season, they either sit there looking finished or get cut down leaving a gap. It's getting late for…
Eight months ago I spread the compost from my heaps onto my allotment and resolved not to make any more. I would simply shred everything that came my way and spread it back on the ground. I wrote a blog about it at the time. It seemed a slightly radical course to take and I…
How quickly these weeks roll around, with little enough sense of anything getting done. I seem to spend my days being busy but have nothing to show for it. At the moment it's raining so I have an excuse. Six on Saturday is a good filler of time when it's wet. Our host, the Propagator,…
I don't propagate plants from cuttings on a massive scale and most of what I do is of easy to root subjects. I have a Vitopod propagator which gives me a suitable environment for a wide range of subjects and I have been using Melcourt Sylvagrow multipurpose compost as my propagation medium. Not everything I…
Wildside Garden, at Buckland Monochorum in Devon, is the creation of plantsman Keith Wiley and his late wife Ros. I am very lucky that it is almost on my doorstep but I've still only managed to visit it four or five times since it first opened. We went again last week, the 28th July and…
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…
garden ruminations 