It rained today!

- the initial 2mm of earth was damp, the rest as dry as a dustbowl! It also rained at the Chelsea Show, so a grey day that we all really wanted, but a bit more rain would be good. I started a sunmapping exercise yesterday - maybe that's what caused it!
A lovely idea in a show garden - a green roof with all lavender on it. The shed will be ideal - clear away undergrowth, get it renovated and converted, maybe with a skylight in it too. Must cut away some of the the sycamore branches though. ... Bryn says they have been pollarded and then growth has been from lower laterals.

Our first left hand bed on tier three now has Matucana Sweet Peas planted on its edge, under the netting 'ridge tent', after a colossal bindweed-removing operation. All knotted into the netting, of course, along with the dried stems of last year's. Various other weeds and masses of FMNs made the bed look really lusciously green, but all a big con! There's a lovely lemon balm in there though, and I'll plant Climbing French Beans on the other side of the netting, with a line of Radish inside I think. Although when it all grows up, maybe I wouldn't be able to harvest it, so will have to think of something else!
Note for next year is to cull some of the FMN early in the year...

The second bed has Autumn-fruiting Raspberries, also deeply festooned with bindweed. The strength of that plant - it has brought quite high stems (not cut back this year) down in arches, and then 'tied' them at the bottom. It's a painstaking job, cutting out the BW stem by stem, but it has to be done. Quite meditative especially as the blackbirds were singing away (about 6pm) and the sun making the edges of the leaves glow from the other side. A job for a few minutes each day, I think.
I must draw a plan of this, as a base map, and then think about where to put other veg. 
On the other side of the path, abundant soft fruit!!! Summer raspberries just coming into a succession of ripening (had some for pudding - delicious!) and the berries turn out to be a mix of blackcurrants, red currants and maybe some white. All bowing over the path, so I used a long & stout Yellow Bamboo stem (cut from the bed outside the kitchen window) to tie them back, and then tied in some of the fruiting spurs. Nettles joining the bindweed here, so a long-trousered & shoes job, I think, not one for tonight. There will be lots - talk to Helen again about a shared freezer.

Lammas pretending I'm not there

Plume finds another way in!

Lammas has been away all night & day, and just at bedtime she was there sitting on the top step... small glowy eyes and a slight smudge of white in the dark distance. 'No thanks I won't come in...' I put some food outside. I wonder if she was frightened away by a pale ginger cat who obviously has been ousted from the territory. Odd that Plume doesn't seem to mind - maybe she thinks it's a ghostly Lugh!

Yesterday I bought/rescued a Bougainvillea for the conservatory

First plantings

Ginger Lily

Two Green Bush courgettes! The Top Garden is a triangle with a mix of annual and perennial planting such as Ginger Lily, poking their spears through the dry earth, iris, things I don't recognise, and lovely bloodred wallflowers, just past their best. So today I took out as much forget-me-not as possible and cut off the seedheads of the wallflowers down to a new shoot, to get a second flowering. Herb Robert everywhere, so the smell when weeding was sharp; the sticky seedcases of the FMN stuck to my gloves - ah, that's one way of passing on the genes!

Courgettes

 Dry earth (no rain for what, 6 weeks?) so I dug a hole, watered well, popped the courgettes in (two small flowerbuds already) and built a little earthwall around each one, for holding the water. A spot of chicken manure in the little moat (wow, another sharp smell, it's been sitting in that tub for quite a while!) and then water in a circle around it. Having found a few more pointy things poking through, I've put a bit of stone next to each, to mark their location. And then edged the bed with more wallflowers - this time Violet Prince that I have grown from seed. They might flower this year, later, but I am hoping to get two years out of them.
Coming back down the stepped path, what a marvellous picture of the double-flowered pink roses - Paul's Himalayan Musk - climbing all over the Pergola, along with honeysuckle, jasmine, grapevine, clematis... how does the structure stay up?
And a bit later, soaking the working aches out in a hot bath, another new view - yew, clematis seedheads, another single pink rose, and something else that I don't recognise!

Moving in and moving out

 So many plants are waiting here for their own moving day that the previous owners are popping back to collect them in huge batches... such as the Epiphidiums hanging in the cool shade of the Pergola, having a little rest from the Conservatory's heat. Meanwhile my extra plants are on holiday at Lizi's awaiting their relocation. Sitting on my Patio are hardy geranium phaeum, acer trees in pots, trays of seedlings ready to find permanent homes... o, what bliss :-)

the garden

As we left, I took photos of the rooms at the old house... I haven't seen it looking like this ever really... when I moved in, there were two sorts of carpet in the ground floor receps, the kitchen was a tiny hole with a small workshop behind it, and the garden was a straight lawn & path & flowerbed edges. How small it now seems, maybe because it is empty.

dining end of the kitchen 

lovely light windows in lounge 

the deck...

New Boundaries

What a garden we have bought! There are so many angles from which to look at it, it looks like a different place from each one. Which way round do you walk - up the secret path to the shed and then break through the undergrowth by the Tree Peony? Straight up the steps to the top and turn and "wow"? When people come to do The Tour, where should we begin? At what point do we stop to pick up the cup of tea?

Palm to the sky

My palm is open to the sky, light coming through fronds and fingers, exotics and commoners all together, waiting for another's loving touch

Spring Equinox 2011

Drumstick Primula at The Garden House

Changing the clocks again this weekend, so we are  in between Spring Equinox (Super New Moon, apparently) and British Summer Time starting. We are also waiting to get the go ahead on moving house! The cats have been immunised, the removals men have quoted... our boundaries will be shifting...
Waiting also to get on with this blog!!

A very good place to start

It is beginning to look like Spring after all. 


This crocus says it all:

- enough warmth to encourage it to break through the soil

- enough light to draw out the petals

- rich humus to nourish the new growth.

A positive image for a new blog adventure that is going to be about describing new ground, encouraging opening up to possibilities and the future, nurturing, growing - imagination, collaboration, practicality and dreams.