Wordless Wednesday: World Cup Fever Hits Chickens

Garden Rebels

When I was a teenager, a boy told me that I was a rebel. I must have been doing something wondrously hair-raising at the time, like playing Karate Champ under the influence of half a bar of chocolate and a bag of chewy sweets, but the words struck a chord. I rather fancied myself as a rebel in spite of a gaping absence of anything to actually rebel against. If only I had gardened in my teens, I would have found conventions aplenty against which to mount a rebellion.

I have just moved into a new office and with me came 200 or so precious gardening books. As I lovingly arranged them on shelves, I reread excerpts (the probable cause of my lack of blog posts of late) and realised how laden with rules these tomes are; and what are rules for? Exactly. 

Of course, any act of rebellion against conventional wisdom has to be well thought through. It would be folly to fly in the face of centuries of experience without knowledge. Leaves might yellow and plants could die, or at the other extreme, invasive species might take over and run amok through our borders and beyond. But if we intelligently question accepted wisdom, we stand a chance of experiencing the wonderfully exhilarating buzz of rebellion whenever we veer away from best practice (provided that everything goes swimmingly).  

Gardeners are a rebellious bunch. Just think of Christopher Lloyd’s use of colour at Great Dixter or the green walls we see adorning the sides of shops and hotels. This fascination with questioning best practice or fine taste can result in exciting strides away from convention and is one of the reasons why gardening can be so interesting. If we were to garden for a hundred years, we would still not know everything and if we did, some adventurous gardener would soon break with tradition and we would have to reconsider what we thought we knew. 

Until recently, we were advised to place broken crocks at the bottom of our plant pots. Then those rebels at Which? Gardening questioned our plant pot heritage and trialled plants with and without crocks in their pots and guess what? Nothing terrible happened to their Million Bells Trailing Yellow plants without those magical crocks and to cut a long scientific story short, we are now advised not to pop crocks in pots. 

This places the rebels in the gardening community uncomfortably on the horns of a dilemma. It is all very well to say that no crocks is the new crocks, but in order to rebel, clarity is required. How can we fly in the face of convention when convention keeps changing its face? On a selfish note, I have no issues with crocks since I have used recycled polystyrene in pots for years. It may do little for my perched water table, but I like it because it is light and it fills big containers cheaply. I see no reason to change, which is potentially a problem in itself. Is this rebellion or a worrying new development? Perhaps I am not a rebel after all; I may simply have Belligerent Old Gardener Syndrome (BOGS). 



P.S. It is always exciting to learn about new ideas and I’m really interested to hear about how you break with gardening conventions. You never know, you may be saving a fellow gardener from BOGS.

and... 

We are seeing so many bees this summer! All the photos in this post were taken in the farmhouse garden where Geranium, Cirsium rivulare 'Atropurpureum', Knautia macedonica and even fading Allium hollandicum 'Purple Sensation' flowers are top bee magnets.  

I Wish I Could Be Like Monty Don

As sure as night follows day, the asparagus knife will go missing just as those succulent shoots are ready for harvesting. It spends much of its life lurking in the shed, making all who enter feel miserable about its lack of use and the associated lack of asparagus, then as soon as the cropping season is upon us, the knife goes AWOL. At this point, I ought to insert a photo of asparagus peeping enticingly through the soil, but having harvested it with a kitchen knife (again) and devoured it with the Easter egg hunt (again), you will have to make do with a quince. 

The Orchard at Le Grys Farm

I have a similar problem with seeds which should be sown in April (no, I don't eat them too). I spend the entire month of March looking at them and virtuously resisting the urge to sow them, then as soon as we hit April, all the packets of seeds go on a merry jaunt with the asparagus knife. This year, after two weeks of hide and seek, I have finally conceded defeat and am off to purchase new seeds today (along with another Easter egg hunt), after which the old seeds will leap out from behind a cushion or some other seed-concealing home furnishing, giggling wildly at my hapless attempts at finding them and squealing, “we were here all the time!”

'Stella' Cherry Blossom 

I know everything has its place, but herding it into its home can be a monumental effort involving massive quantities of self-restraint (a quality I appear to have mislaid along with the asparagus knife). I have seed containers arranged by the month à la Sarah Raven, but brand new shiny seed packets need to be read, admired, shuffled and chewed over, not filed away sensibly where I can actually find them. 

All March and no April

I wish I could be like Monty Don with his perfectly arranged shed filled with sharp secateurs and tidy trowels arranged in height order. Instead I have a pigsty (literally as well as figuratively) where the only things I can find with any regularity are roller blades and bicycles (neither of which appear to be of any use when cultivating a garden - although you may disagree).

Fritillaria meleagris in the orchard

So I have decided to give myself a Christmas present of an organised potting shed. No I haven’t won the lottery; the shed is an existing piggery and I shall attach hooks and well-positioned nails to create a home for all those myriad lost items. Then all I have to do is find the missing garden tools, hang them on their appointed brackets and use the reclaimed hide-and-seek-in-a-fluster time for actual gardening. 

Apple blossom

A few nails in a wall isn’t a major DIY project and once I start moving things into their new homes, old friends such as the long-lost loppers will hopefully come out from their hibernation behind the stack of tangled spring rakes. So why isn't this an Easter present? The truth is that I have more pressing business to attend to this weekend. There are seeds to sow; plants to plant; and a whole lot of chocolate to find.

Wishing you a very happy Easter. 


P.S. My humblest apologies if you are happily sowing your beans this weekend and humming a certain Jam song with David Watts replaced by Monty Don. It's small consolation I know, but the song is reeling round my head as I type. 

Wordless Wednesday: The Very Best Thing About Springtime? 'Tis The Season To Eat Crumble Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

The Post About a Post Post

Gardeners like to experiment in their gardens, so if a gardener stumbles into the blogosphere, it stands to reason that before long the blogging gardener will start to experiment there too. 

My attempt at a blogging gardener's experiment is to try guest blogging and I have just had a guest post published at the Thompson & Morgan blog about one of my favourite high value, low cost plants. http://blog.thompson-morgan.com/your-stories/high-value-low-cost-plants-cerinthe-major-purpurascens/

I wasn't paid to do it, or even offered a packet of seeds. I just wanted to tell people about this amazing plant. I know it's a cheek, but I would be ever so grateful if you would be kind enough to click on the link and make a comment so I don't look completely like Sarah-No-Mates. Thank you! I will be back here tomorrow celebrating the best thing about spring.

Holey Clogs, the Garden Museum and a Day Out with Matthew Biggs

One Mothering Sunday not many moons ago, my children asked me what I would like to do to celebrate my special day. “You can do anything,” they said and my eyes lit up as images of me clad in a maternal swooshing skirt and skipping hand in hand with my beloved brood of smiling, plant-loving children through swathes
of daffs passed joyfully through my idealistic mind “...except visit a garden.”
I clattered inelegantly back to earth and landed with an ungraceful thud.

The girls skipping through the daffs (yes, they were bribed)

I reminisce dewy-eyed on the good old days, when all I had to do was suggest a trip to a beach which just happened to be in close proximity to a garden I wanted to see and they would clamber unwittingly into the car, trailing their buckets and spades behind them. Over the years they have grown wise to my pathetic ploys and I am subjected to trial by teenager if I so much as utter the words “day out”.

Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost' in the farmhouse garden

The wiser the children grow; the more creative I must become. Days out with dual interests work well, so long as my hidden horticultural agenda remains undiscovered. Many zoos have superb gardens; and do you think I would have driven my offspring all the way to Legoland had I not harboured a burning desire to ogle the landscaping? So you can imagine my excitement on hearing about an exhibition exploring the relationship between fashion and garden design at the Garden Museum in London. All I had to do was conceal any reference to gardens and I would have my day out. 

Bergenia 'Silberlicht' in the farmhouse garden

It is a fascinating exhibition, spanning centuries of design from the use of botanically accurate images of flowers on clothing during the 1600s to Valentino’s spring/summer 2013 couture collection. Apart from the jaw-droppingly beautiful clothes, I particularly enjoyed a collection of paintings featuring gardeners at work. Gardeners were once such a source of pride that they were painted. Imagine! I would certainly need some new clothes if I were to be captured on canvas doing my mulching. 

My least holey clogs after years of mulching

This leads me to one of the questions raised by the exhibition. "How did people dress to garden, or to visit gardens?" The 18th century landscape movement may have given rise to a new style of dressing, which eventually developed into the outdoor clothing we see in glossy magazines, but I am not altogether convinced that this stylish ideal holds much relevance for real gardeners with brittle nails and that half moon sun strip around the midriff which never seems to fade. In any case, we know what we wear to garden these days, as we have already chewed over the issue of gardening clothes here: 
http://thegardeningshoe.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/swishing-for-gardeners-and-garlic-bath.html

Crocus tommasinianus proving its value to wildlife
 in the farmhouse garden

When it comes to visiting gardens, twenty-first century style choices can be astonishingly diverse and bewilderingly unpredictable. For example, there was a time when I might visit a garden sporting beach clothes accessorised by sand, seaside buckets and spades. These days however, I might dress as if I were on the verge of accompanying my teenage children to a music festival, but got lost en route and found myself visiting a garden. Ahem.

P.S.  Update on the children... After the initial horror of finding themselves duped yet again into a garden-based day out, they relaxed and enjoyed the exhibition. The level of forgiveness will be assessed on Mothering Sunday later this month. You never know, they might be reading this and decide (completely without any hinting from me at all) to treat me to a day out with Matthew Biggs.
http://www.gardenmuseum.org.uk/page/mothers-day-in-the-garden-with-mathew-biggs-30-03-14 

Information about the Fashion and Gardens Exhibition can be found on The Garden Museum website:  http://www.gardenmuseum.org.uk/page/fashion-and-gardens

Wordless Wednesday: What Is Your Favourite Glut?