The potatoes are in the ground (under fleece), sycamore seedlings are sprouting, primulas are brightening the borders, I have a hankering for a new rose (why??! Just think of blackspot), the full extent of moss in the lawn is unignorable, and fritillaries are flowering in the long grass.
It’s still very cold, but the snowdrops, early crocuses and winter aconites have been out for a while and I thought it was time to head into the garden again. My main task was pruning the soft fruit bushes, but I pottered a bit as well. By the end I had a pile of stuff for the green bin – some of which was too nice to be thrown away immediately.
More tidying, but only round the edges for the green bins are almost full again. Severe pruning (jasmine and honeysuckle first) will have to wait.
There’s a fine display of fungi at the bottom of the garden. I never know what type will come up where. The Penelope rose is blooming for a second time this year, and the days of the blueberry – along with its pot – are definitely numbered. It can have a stay of execution just as long as there are still blueberries (small as they are) to go on my breakfast muesli.
I’ve now got four cat deterrents; they snap at my ankles as I walk around the garden. I don’t know if they deter the cat but I haven’t seen any nasty evidence of it. If these deterrents don’t work the next step must be a Jack Russell!
The garden is heading into its autumn phase: I’ve dealt with only some of the long grass; the jasmine, so fragrant a couple of weeks ago, now looks tatty; colour is provided by ripening apples and the over-leggy rudbeckias; cyclamen are peeping through. There’s a fair bit to do, but the weather is unpropitious and both green bins are full to bursting until next bin day. The tattiness lives for another week.
I’ve got used to the buff-tailed bumblebees nesting under the garden shed; their entrance is directly under the threshold so I have to be careful not to inadvertently shut them in the shed. I didn’t particularly like reading online that they often nest in old rodent holes though: I’ve had quite enough of rats. Yesterday the flying ants hatched out of a little mound in the lawn that I had already scalped with the mower. Vegetables are netted against wood pigeons and soft fruit against everything. The pale ginger cat is a real nuisance: the lawn now has a scattering of squeezed lemons and coffee grinds in an attempt to deter it. And finally today I began to tidy the bottom of the garden against a low hum of buzzing. It eventually filtered through to me that I might be disturbing something. I checked – yes, I was: an underground nest of small, very yellow bees that didn’t seem too bothered by my presence.
Doh. How wrong can I be? They were wasps! I am only glad that they were in too mellow a mood to mind. Now I have the dilemma: to eradicate or to live with them?
In other news, the jasmine has never been so profuse (possibly because I neglected to cut it back last year). The small vegetable beds are quite haphazard: gooseberry sawfly has stripped the leaves and there is a poppy growing through the middle which I can’t bear to pull up. Teazles, hollyhocks and fennel are hiding behind the apple trees, and the garden is full of the scent of honeysuckle, lilies and jasmine.
Yesterday was so hot that I hid away in my hotel room until the evening. Today was cooler, but even so the Garden Museum seemed like a good place to visit. En route I passed the old headquarters of the London Fire Brigade (1937 E P Wheeler) with its wonderful reliefs by Gilbert Bayes.
The Garden Museum is planted in a deconsecrated church next to Lambeth Palace so there’s not much in the way of garden, but the displays were intermittently interesting. There is also a church tower to climb – which, of course, I did.
The current exhibition is about the country gardens of Bloomsbury women: Lady Ottoline Morrell and Garsington, Vanessa Bell and Charleston, Vita Sackville-West and Sissinghurst, and Virginia Woolf and Monk’s House. (Did their husbands have no say in the designs?) Anyway, it’s a hook on which to hang some nice works – Cezanne-style paintings by Mark Gertler and der Blaue Reiter-style paintings by Roger Fry. Oh, and more of Vanessa Bell’s blurry work. She certainly seems to be flavour of the month. My steal was the freestyle embroidery of Garsington in the moonlight by Marian Stoll. (My photo is rubbish, but I can’t find a better one online.)
Scattered amongst the vintage packets of seeds and videos about influential gardeners were some artists I’ve seen recently: Harold Gilman from York/Manchester and William Banks Fortescue from Southport. There was also a little nudge towards a future outing for me: Charles Jencks’s Crawick Multiverse. I hadn’t realised before that it’s possible to get there by train . . .
I returned to find that what was blooming two weeks ago now looks rather sad; the blue haze of forget-me-nots is now a tatty mess, so I’ve been ruthless there. The long grass is swaying with ox-eye daisies and for a moment I couldn’t find the central path to mow along. The potatoes have grown tremendously and foxgloves have shot up everywhere. There are no pears at all on either tree: I reckon the magpies must have got in under the netting. Gooseberry sawflies have practically stripped one plant of its leaves but – happily – the gooseberries themselves are fine. Vegetable seedlings have not grown as fast as I’d expected and I must plant courgettes and beans, even though the temperature is still fairly cool.
There’s no end to it!
Old Shoe Box 