What a glorious week it’s been! We don’t usually have such Mediterranean weather! The usual thing for Britain, they say, is three sunny days and a thunderstorm! I had my breakfast on the halfway bench every morning up until Sunday when it grew chillier and started off overcast. That miserable morning I had my breakfast indoors and put gypsy jazz on my smart speaker. What’s been happening here is brilliant sunshine for breakfast, then alfresco elevenses, and sometimes lunch, when the sun moves round to the courtyard, after which it might become overcast and chilly but by mid afternoon the sun is blazing down again.
My trusty orange bucket has been doing sterling work, catching the cold water that would have been wasted when running the kitchen tap and the shower, waiting for the hot water to come through. Each bucketful fills a can for watering the crops and pots. I also have my three rainwater butts, at the back of the garage. The one catching the run-off from the garage roof is empty and awaits the next rainfall, eventually to be bailed out, topping up the other two butts and the various watering tubs around the garden.
I’ve never seen the hawthorn tree looking so beautiful and at its feet is the azalea, which has no right to look so colourful in a non-acid border. It has increased from the piece that got left behind when I moved the plant to a big tub filled with ericaceous compost to stand by the front door. This is only now coming into bud. Next to the azalea, equally dazzling, is the lemon balm foliage, which makes deliciously refreshing tea. The oriental poppies are a month behind, their fat, velvety buds promising at least two dozen big orange-red crêpe paper-like flowers. The peonies are out, though, and the delicate cuckoo flower is appearing throughout my No Mow May lawn.
The woodland garden is awash with the remaining Spanish bluebells, tall, elegant meadow buttercups, aquilegia and cow parsley, almost swamping the wild purple plum tree. The shrubby thyme, in the potager, is in flower and ox-eye daisies are mingling with the red valerian in the nectar bar, which makes a self-sown background to my kitchen garden in the side return.
I’m going to have to get on with pricking out this week. Batch 3 of my lettuces, my daughter’s basil and the morning glory seedlings are romping away on the spare room windowsill. There’s been quite a horticultural exchange this week: divisions of creeping campanula and periwinkle for Kathleen at the art group: she wanted something to grow in her strawberry pots, her strawberries having failed to thrive. Creeping campanula and periwinkle will grow anywhere. I’m also making cuttings of snow-in-summer for myself from the hanging basket and I’ll save a pot for Carol at the knitting group: I heard her say she’s looking for some. Watermark J gave me two tomato plants and a chilli. While she, her husband and I drank coffee in the courtyard she said she thought she’d seen a goldfinch at the feeding station: just a flash of gold from a wing bar. Jim texted that he & Chris had seen a pair of goldfinches and a pair of greenfinches in their garden. One of the greenfinches hit the window and left a feather behind, he said. They reappeared on the birdbath and one began feeding the other. I’ll be watching out for goldfinches when the perennial cornflowers go to seed in the front garden: the finches love them.
I’ve been enjoying the BBC’s coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show, full of sunshine, colour, wonderful design, beautiful plants and inspiration. I’m pleased to see how popular weeds have become. Wild flowers, I should say! The Harris Bugg Studio’s Horatio’s Garden won Best in Show and Chris Beardshaw, with his Myeloma UK – A Life Worth Living, won the People’s Choice award [photos: countrylife.co.uk]. One of the ideas that caught my eye (on the RSPCA garden, designed by Martyn Wilson) was an ornate metal lidded chest for storing sticks and logs. A hole for a hedgehog to enter was fashioned in the side and the crate could be used as a bench as well as a pretty-looking log pile. [photo: thenantwichnews.co.uk]
Not much gardening getting done but plenty of enjoyment and alfresco dining. On Sunday I had my breakfast of croissant and coffee whilst sitting on the bench half-way down the garden.
We’re well into May and the hawthorn tree in the fence border is in full bloom. All the aquilegias are coming out: purple, dusty pink – there’s even one of these growing through the gooseberry bush which is far too thorny for me to pull it out – and the almost black & white aquilegia Magpie. Although it has been glorious lately I haven’t put out the pelargoniums yet (flowers just visible in the hawthorn photo) in case of a late frost. Some days are very chilly with sea fret, so my clouts get cast off and put back on by turn. The old adage, ‘Cast ne’er a clout, till may be out’ always springs to mind but does it mean may as in hawthorn blossom or the month?
Everything is coming out at once! In the courtyard garden, the green-leaved heuchera, often called coral bells, has sent up its flowering spikes: these are coral-coloured but the ones on my purple-leaved heucheras are white, or will be when they open. Potentilla sanguinea, with its scarlet buttercup-like flowers and its silvery, strawberry-like leaves, has started to bloom while the real meadow buttercup is popping up on my No-Mow-May lawn and in the fence border and woodland garden where it has seeded. On warm days I can detect the scent of the repeat-flowering lilac, syringa Josée, from the courtyard. Delicious!
Wild flowers just grow without any management, watering or staking. My type of plants! Here’s the buttercup again, in the woodland garden with cow parsley, tall and frothy with fern-like leaves. Red campion, which has bright pink flowers, rather than red, is quite a favourite, too and I leave it to mingle with its neighbours in the borders where it has self-sown. The ribwort plantain comes every year in the old meadow, the last survivor from a packet of seeds given to the guests, including my granddaughter, at a wedding. The photo I took the other day isn’t very clear so I’ve included last year’s from June, when the flowers were beginning to open.
The bearded irises are out around the laburnum stump along with all the other things that have sown themselves there and which I shall pull out later to ensure the iris rhizomes get the good baking from the sun that they need in order to flower. The perennial cornflowers, centaurea montana Sweet Sultan, originally from my mother’s garden, are in flower in the woodland, seemingly coping with the shadier conditions there, and also in the sunny front garden. I have chives in flower in the kitchen garden but these I planted around the Katy apple tree and they look lovely with the forget-me-nots, I think, but then forget-me-nots are my absolute favourite. Behind the ‘halfway’ bench, the choisya ternata is in bloom. I planted it there to turn the seating area into a scented bower! Its common name is Mexican orange blossom.
Another favourite wild flower is cardamine pratensis, commonly called the cuckoo flower because it comes out when the cuckoo starts to call. Here it has self-sown in the alpine garden but it’s been popping up in my beds and borders since April; I’m still waiting for it to appear in my lawn during ‘No Mow May’.
I don’t expect to hear the cuckoo. It’s a rarity for this garden. My garden records show the first time we heard it here: 19th May 1980 David woke me at 5am to hear a cuckoo! After that there were just a handful of mentions, with the last one being in 2012. Watermark J, however, is back from her holiday in France and has texted that whilst there, she not only heard a cuckoo but saw it, too! It was her first sighting. I’ve never seen one.
Hazel emailed me: Have spent a merry half hour watching the seagulls v jackdaws in your chimney – I wish you could see the fun, but you can maybe hear it! The jackdaws have the front right hand side pot – and were there before the seagulls. However Mrs SG is on the nest, but when Mr SG comes home to watch her lovingly, there’s this smaller black bird trying to get past him to the pot! JD is quite nifty, and tries ducking and diving, and eventually taunts him so much that Mr SG sets off in hot pursuit of JD, who cuts back and does a nose dive into the pot! If you see a JD with a squashed nose, you know where he lives!
I wondered what I’d been doing at the time Hazel was watching these antics because I don’t recall hearing the commotion. I was obviously engrossed in my own gardening activities and in a world of my own as my diary entry relates:
Thursday 18 May 2023
A warm, muggy day. Watered the house plants and repotted my echeverias, making cuttings and increasing my stock of orangey-pink-flowered ones which are my favourite. Pulled out the spent grape hyacinths at the front to fill the garden waste bin. Whilst doing a part-exchange of the fish pond water I got distracted by a flock of small twittering birds (couldn’t see what they were) and then a female sparrow hawk flew to the fence near the bottom of the garden. There are signs of recent sparrow hawk activity: three piles of feathers in the garden. The meadow buttercups, Sweet Sultan cornflowers and snow-in-summer are coming out. I’ve started harvesting my own lettuce leaves.
And here are my newly-potted echeverias on the landing windowsill. The greenery you can see through the ribbed glass is part of my kitchen garden which runs along the side return. It consists of crops growing in containers for me and self sown wild flowers for the butterflies & bees.
It was glorious on Sunday, once the sea fret had disappeared, so I had my morning coffee and my lunch in the courtyard garden.
The aquilegias are flowering, looking like the grannies’ bonnets that they are commonly called. This tall, reddish pink one has sown itself into the big courtyard pot. They are prolific self-seeders and hybridisers. Yellow & orange Welsh poppies are everywhere: great self-sowers, too. The late daffodil, narcissus poeticus Pheasant’s Eye, is flowering in the woodland garden. One got snapped off and is now in a vase. The weigela’s out in the courtyard, an oxalis in the front garden and lilac in the back.
As you can see, I’ve moved the feeding station from its courtyard position to the lilac tree and the house sparrows are taking advantage. The one at the feeder is a female and the one in the fan palm is male.
The butterflies have started to come out. This week I’ve seen cabbage white, orange-tip and holly blue. Jardin Jan sent in an excellent photo of the holly blue that alighted in her front garden. This species needs holly and ivy to complete its life cycle. She tells me that she has a holly and next door has ivy.
This week, there has been more compost-shovelling as I pricked out my second batch of lettuces. Some compost was mixed with vermiculite for sowing seeds, including my third batch of lettuce. I’m aiming to be self-sufficient again in salad leaves this summer. The first two batches are coming along nicely in the kitchen garden. So are the potatoes and the plum tomatoes, these last being protected by a cloche for the moment.
These three packets were given to me by Rose at the art group: she had lots of surplus seeds that had been free with gardening magazines and offered them round, putting the remaining packets in the library’s seed box to be sold for funds. I sowed some lettuce and morning glory in cell trays on the spare room window sill on Wednesday and they have already germinated. On the back of the morning glory packet it advised soaking the seeds overnight in tepid water, which I did. These are Heavenly Blue – my favourite – and I’m hoping to recreate the effect I had in 2009, when I grew it in the fake conservatory. David took the close-up of one of the flowers. The California poppies (eschscholzia) were sown outside so I’m still waiting for those to appear.
And now here is another garden-related short story from Dizzy Mavis:
Dizzy Mavis & Son
My son had started school. He’s the spit of his dad but maybe he’ll take after me in the imagination department. In his second year, the teacher set the class an essay. They had to write about their mum or their dad or anyone they knew. Billy wrote about me:
My Mum by Billy Carter
My mum is fairly fat. She has blue eyes and she rites storys. Sometimes when she is discracted the Terkish coffy boils dry.
I was so proud of him, and I loved what he’d written as a piece of writing, though I didn’t like the ‘fairly fat’ bit. The spelling would improve, I thought.
“You’re not fat, Diz,” said Jack. “It’s because Billy’s so skinny. You’re just right! I couldn’t get my arms round you if you were fat.”
He’s so lovely!
“I wanted to put turquoise for your eyes,” said Billy, “but the teacher wouldn’t spell it for me. She told me to put blue.”
Bless him! My eyes are blue but turquoise is much more interesting, isn’t it? I couldn’t have my boy’s imagination stultified by a dull teacher! Of course, it wouldn’t do to undermine her authority by saying that to Billy, would it? I just made a mental note to encourage, rather than stifle, his imagination. It had stood me in good stead over the years, after all!
We’d called our son after his dad. Confusing, since I called my husband, Jack. His real name was Will, of course. Quite early on I’d had asked him if I could call him Jack. It was the name I’d given him in my imagination when I’d first seen him at the Botanic Gardens and the first name that came into my head whenever I saw him, subsequently. I had to hunt around my mind for ‘Will’. He said I could, if he could call me Dizzy Mavis. I’d told him of my school nickname. This soon got shortened to Diz. Jack’s parents, who lived in Oakham, were delighted that we’d called our son William, after their boy. They were thrilled with their first grandson, and didn’t mind that we’d shortened his name to Billy.
“Billy suits him,” said Mrs Carter.
When Billy was nine, Jack gave him a little plot of ground in the back garden for his very own. He loved it and spent all his time digging and getting muddy. Saturday morning was when we’d go to town so that Billy could spend his pocket money.
“I want to buy some seeds,” he said.
“I’ve got plenty you can have,” I said. I was always getting free packets with the gardening magazines I used to buy and Jack often had spares for me too.
“Have you got any tree fern seeds?”
He’d been watching Gardeners’ World with me and this week’s programme had featured a tropical garden in Lincolnshire. How would a tree fern look in a plot one metre square, I wondered, but I wasn’t about to thwart Billy’s imagination.
“No, I haven’t, but let’s see what Dad says.”
“Tell you what,” said Jack. “We’ll go to the garden centre and have a look. They might have a tree fern in a pot.”
“Will I be able to buy it with my pocket money, Dad?” asked Billy.
“I shouldn’t think so. They’re quite expensive. You might have to let me buy it and you can pay me back a bit at a time. We’d have to get a small one and wait for it to grow.”
“Like you & Mum are having to do with me!” smiled Billy.
“Exactly!”
Jack smiled as well. Identical smiles! When we got to the garden centre, Jack found a small Australian tree fern in a 2-litre pot for £30. Billy gave his Dad £2.50 towards it (half his weekly pocket money) and still had enough left to buy an ordinary fern which was bigger than the tree fern, then. I had a fatsia cutting for him back home so once he’d planted those three, he was well on his way to a mini jungle and was ecstatic. Jack, who still worked at the Botanic Gardens had some spare bedding plants for a bit of colour and soon Billy had put those into his patch as well. He watered his plot and snapped his handiwork on his phone.
“Come and wash your hands, Billy,” I called from the kitchen window. “It’s nearly time for tea.”
Later, he was looking up his plants online.
“Oh, Dad!”
“What is it?”
“Tree ferns like to be in the shade!”
“Well?”
“My garden’s in the sun!”
“Well, we’ll just have to plant something tall to shade the tree fern,” said Jack, and Billy brightened up.
“Yes, or maybe I can have a fence round my garden.”
“Would you like a fence?” asked Jack.
The next weekend, Jack was busy with Billy, making a fence round the tropical garden. And a gate, of course. It looked a bit odd, having a fenced off patch at one side of the lawn but, as Jack said, “It doesn’t matter what it looks like for now. At the moment, Billy is having a great time, learning about gardening and letting his imagination run riot.”
And I was all for that! Before they’d finished fencing in the plot, Jack had suggested enlarging the space to include some slabs and a bench so Billy could invite his mum in for a coffee. Billy thought that was a terrific idea. He’d paid off £5 of his tree fern debt. I wanted to let him off but Jack said he had to learn the value of money and he was right, wasn’t he? Billy was proud that he could pay for his own tree fern, in any case. He’d learnt that he must keep the trunk damp to replicate its conditions in the wild. Jack had told him that, with the fence, he wouldn’t have to wrap it for the winter and next spring he could cut off the previous year’s dead fronds and would see the new ones unfurling from the crown like little shepherds’ crooks.
The following weekend (£7.50 paid off) was spent in laying some slabs – spare ones that had been at the bottom of the garden, where there was also a bench that was dragged into service.
“We won’t cement the slabs in, in case of future redesigns,” said Jack. “Should be alright if we make sure they’re level and then the bench won’t be wobbly.”
Billy raced off to get the spirit level from the shed. The weekend after that (£10 paid off), Billy and his dad painted the fence black on the inside. Billy had discovered how wonderful plants looked against a black background. I don’t know who was more proud, Billy or me, when he led me to the bench in his tropical garden. Jack came out with a tray bearing two mugs of coffee and Billy’s plastic tumbler of fruit juice plus some biscuits.
“Mind your clothes, Mum!” Billy warned.
He’d made WET PAINT signs on pieces of cardboard torn from an old grocery box. What a treat it was to sit in Billy’s garden, all three of us squashed up on the bench and drinking the coffee he’d made and munching the biscuits!
“I’m not allowing glass in my garden in case it breaks,” said Billy, drinking his juice. “It’s dangerous!”
“Very wise,” said Jack.
And when a house sparrow hopped in through the open gate to peck at the biscuit crumbs we’d dropped, Billy said it had became a proper garden, now with its own wildlife! I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a giraffe amble in! Billy has got my imagination and his dad’s way with gardens. Perfect!
I hope I’m not speaking too soon but it’s been warmer this week. We do seem to get a couple of warm sunny days interspersed with rainy or cold days, however. I had my lunch and afternoon cup of tea under the parasol on Sunday, with a gardening session in between. It was a nice surprise because I woke to thick fog, and, despite the sunshine over my garden from lunch time, I could hear the fog horn in the afternoon so there must have been a sea fret by the coast.
Jardin Jan was also enjoying the sunshine, having transformed her tiny front garden on Saturday, with her husband’s help: digging out all the plants in the narrow border, potting up any that they wanted to keep and covering the bed and concrete path under the window with slate chippings. Two chairs were painted to match the folding table et voilà! Whenever the weather is conducive they can sit out with their books and drinks until their back garden has been made fit for purpose! She sent me her photographs.
I’ve been shovelling a lot of home-made compost this week and sharing it with my daughter as we potted on our seedling crops on Friday. She got her cucumber, aubergine, mangetouts and courgette planted, the last being put into a builder’s bucket with drainage holes (top left). It was the biggest spare tub I had but courgette plants do take up a lot of room, sprawling in all directions. To save space, they can be grown as climbers up a stout pole. We had a horticultural exchange: my compost for her spare mangetouts and spring onions which I planted in my kitchen garden tubs on Saturday in between watching the King’s Coronation unfold. It may have been raining in Westminster but, here, the day was ‘happy and glorious’! On Sunday I had a kitchen garden seed-sowing frenzy: parsley Giant of Italy, leaving the self-sown golden feverfew and aquilegia in the planter; rocket in another round planter beneath a square pot of winter savory and a small round one of sage cuttings; and radish in a trough; you can just see the tips of the silvery-leaved curry plant sticking up from the trough below. Curry plant smells delicious. I look forward to seeing the shoots of crops emerging amongst the weedlings in my home-made compost.
The hollies are coming into flower and my daughter is delighted that hers, a seedling potted up from my garden, has flowered for the first time and is a female. If the flowers are pollinated there will be red berries this year. I have both male and female trees in my garden and so have berries every year, providing fruit for the birds in winter. If you want to sex your holly flowers, here is a photograph I took in May 2009, with the male flowers on the left and the female ones on the right.
It’s been a week of finds! My long-lost, red-handled garden scissors resurfaced in the compost bin and my garden fork, missed on Friday, was rediscovered on Saturday. It was in plain sight all the time but had been wrongly filed! It is usually kept leaning against the winter honeysuckle, ready to break up or spread compost but I had leant it against the amelanchier tree and then forgotten about it.
Now that the forsythia is over and the peonies are about to flower, I’ve swapped the seasonal fakes on the kitchen window sill again. These paper peonies, replacing the fake forsythia stems, look quite realistic and won’t droop in the afternoon sunshine.
There are lots of incidental pleasures to be found in a garden. Whilst tidying up the long border I accidentally pulled off a flowering camassia stem with a handful of dead montbretia foliage so I saved it to open fully in a vase and to paint! A bit further down, I found a fallen twig that had lodged itself in the rosa glauca. It was covered in colourful lichen so I extricated it and took a photo. Somebody once told me that lichen grew when the air quality was good. Every time I put out an empty milk bottle at the moment I am delighting in the forget-me-nots that are flowering by the milk bottle caddy. Regular readers of my blog will know how much I love them, avoiding pulling them out from wherever they sow themselves. At the bottom of the garden, in the hosta pot, all five Golden Apeldoorn tulips are in flower and no sign of the hosta’s leaves being eaten, with the pot raised on a recycled Victorian chimney pot.
The long border is looking very neat and floriferous now, but on Thursday I nearly lost my phone in the undergrowth. I emptied the weeds and prunings a few at a time into the garden waste bin in case it had fallen into the tub trug and then I heard the distant alarm of my thirty-minute timer and tracked it down, thanks to its brightly-coloured back. Phew!
With the long border done (for now) my next job was David’s alpine garden which was looking unkempt, with overgrown pots and troughs, the smaller clay ones falling to bits after being damaged by frost. The only pleasing things to look at were the dwarf pine tree and the wedge-shaped planter containing yellow alyssum and sedum Cape Blanca.
I gave it a thorough make-over: something nice to look at from the bench, moving in my granddaughter’s bonsai horse chestnut from the courtyard, pulling out all the self-sown red-veined sorrel, clipping the cotton lavender bush and repotting a phlox subulata, about to flower. It had been in one of the frost-damaged pots. Next I made a start on weeding the long path. This job is relatively easy to do after there has been a lot of rain. I got quite a stretch done – the length of the woodland garden – before it was time for my tea break.
The lamb’s ears (stachys byzantina) cuttings have survived the sudden cold snap in the week. I’m growing them as a crop to share with my daughter: the leaves are tasty when fried. Meanwhile, in the potager, the Katy apple tree is full of blossom.
I shall be doing ‘No Mow May’ again this year and the first flower to open on the lawn is the daisy. I’ve been peering at the ground to see what other foliage I can see amongst the grass and apart from the sycamore grove which I would get if I never mowed again, I can look forward to clover, meadow cranesbill, selfheal, shining cranesbill, buttercups, cuckoo flower, dandelion, ground elder, more forget-me-nots, ragwort, and a raspberry that has sneaked in from the patch in the fence border.
Finally, here are the snaps I took of a woodpigeon with its chicks clamouring to be fed.
Granny Grubbypaws' Garden 