Suddenly summer

Apart from a couple of warm days in April, the weather so far these past months has been chilly.  Only a week or so ago I was putting on my winter jacket some days to work in the garden, against the cold northerly and easterly winds.  And suddenly it has turned into summer – sunny and very warm.  Not our usual Bank Holiday weekend weather! 

Right on cue, Rose ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ has put out its first flower (the less highly bred roses, the rugosa and the species ones, have been in flower for a couple of weeks).  The highlight on the patio is the (very old) azalea, ‘Rosebud’, which I had to prune severely a couple of years ago and which is an odd shape as a result, but it has recovered to the extent that it’s almost entirely covered in blooms.  When the flowers go over I’ll cut back some of the longer woody stems, as there’s good growth lower down; a nice feed wouldn’t do it any harm either!

Our neighbours' white clematis montana, on the wall between our gardens, has also burst into flower; it didn't seem to do much last year, but is making up for it this year.

Temperatures in the greenhouse have finally risen to over 10C at night, so the tomatoes have been moved in there; they were becoming rather tall on the house windowsills.  The dahlias have been hardened off and are just waiting to be put in the big pots once the tulips have died back and are lifted.  Other plants are also being hardened off before being planted out; the summer climbing beans, which had germinated in the propagator and had a couple of warm days outdoors, have gone into their bed today, with a frame ready to support them.  The frame looks rather wonky, but it is in fact quite a bit more stable than some that I’ve built in the past!

A wonky-looking frame

The warmth has brought out a lot of insects, which the birds are enjoying catching.  A sparrow was spotted today in pursuit of a hummingbird hawkmoth.  I’ve seen a few white butterflies which might be the ones that lay their eggs on brassicas, so my cabbage and kale seedlings will need to be protected when they leave the cold frame; but at least one, feeding on the sweet rocket, turned out to be a female orange-tip, with its lovely green underwing markings.  A dull brown butterfly seen today was, to my surprise, a painted lady – very faded and battered, an early migrant from southern Europe and north Africa; I’m not sure I’ve seen one so early in the year before as they take a little time to get here from the south.

Female orange-tip butterfly

And on one of the doronicum plants I found a lovely scarlet tiger moth caterpillar, curled up in the shade; it would be nice to see it as a fully grown moth!

Scarlet tiger moth caterpillar

The windowbox

 

Not a pretty sight

The windowbox is looking very sad.  It happens every year around this time; the winter display is past, but I don’t yet have enough of a summer display to replace it with.

The recent dry spell (with minimal watering by me), coupled with my forgetting to keep the violas dead-headed, has taken its toll on the planting.  The bulbs (snowdrops, which did well, and Narcissus ‘Tete-a-tete’, which didn’t make a great show) have now died back, and the little pulmonarias are rather faded; the violas (which did really quite well until recently, considering they were only self-seedlings scavenged from around the garden) are now petering out.  There’s a little rosemary plant but it’s so small it’s barely noticeable.  All in all, it’s not a pretty sight.

I try to resist buying bedding plants; they can be lovely, but growing them uses a lot of water and electricity, and ultimately they’re destined for the compost heap at the end of the season.  I much prefer using plants of my own raising, usually a mix of small shrubs and perennials grown from cuttings, like the rosemary, and some seed-grown annuals.  The cuttings are mostly for foliage and structure, while the annuals generally provide the flowers.  But because I don’t heat the greenhouse and start seed-sowing late, in mid-May the annuals are still tiny and not ready to be planted out.

Some of the aquilegias

As with the violas, there is the possibility of scouring the garden for material; however there isn’t much that’s suitable, ie the right sort of size with decent flowers in bloom now.  I have a lovely set of aquilegias, grown from seed collected from some of my best bicolours a couple of years back and bedded out in spare soil behind the raspberries; they are now in flower for the first time and look really good, but they’re much too tall for a windowbox.  Most are pink, purple or blue with white inners, but there’s a gorgeous tall near-black one which I’ve earmarked to keep.  Some will go in a more suitable place later in the year, while others will be potted up for next year’s village plant sale.  At the other end of the height scale, my little Geranium renardii, which I planted out at the edge of the old herb bed, are also now in flower, but I’m not minded to move them as they’re happiest where they are, in dry soil in sun.  There are plenty of doronicums, but they don’t always transplant well and will go out of flower before too long.

Geranium renardii

I do have a few annuals ready, sown last autumn, but not really suitable for a windowbox, either because they’re too tall (corncockle) or too leggy (the blue salvia, which I forgot to pinch out to keep bushy).  Of the spring sowings, I have some Cosmos ‘Xanthos’ coming along, but they haven’t germinated well (and were initially grazed off by slugs or snails) and are still too small to be of much use yet; other tinies are lobelia (still to be hardened off), echium and a second sowing of the blue salvias.  It will be several weeks before any of them make a good showing, let alone flower. 

So, cuttings: well, I have purple sage, which always makes a good statement, and likewise green sage, southernwood and some lavender; a few of those could be used but again, none of them are large and are likely to get a bit lost in a mixed planting.  Ditto the rosemary.  I do have the fuchsia which goes in every year, and eventually flowers nicely, so that’s a possibility.

The pink felicia

My best bet, I think, is the dreaded pink felicia.  The plant acting as a filler in the pot with Tulip ‘Doll’s Minuet’ has now come into flower, and would fit the bill.  The tulips are past and, as they’re not a variety to keep for another year, can be dug up and binned and the felicia repurposed, perhaps with some of the white osteospermum, of which I potted up some pieces in the autumn for filling out big pots.  The felicia's flowers are small and would make little impact, but they could be replaced in a few weeks time by annuals, once they’ve grown to flowering size.  I fear, though, that the windowbox won’t look very interesting for a while yet!

A death in the garden

In last week’s post I quoted from Ecclesiastes about there being ‘a time to die’; and this week I’m looking at the latest death in the garden.  The apple trees are mostly in full flower – the cooking apple tree later than the cordons, which started flowering a couple of weeks ago – but the little eating apple tree, which has been declining gradually over the last few years, is now very definitely Dead.

Cooking apple tree - alive and in flower

Eating apple tree - quite dead

It’s not quite clear what the problem is (or was).  It and the cooker were planted by the previous owners of the garden, presumably at much the same time, but the little tree never really thrived and rarely fruited well.  Was it planted on the site of a previous apple tree (never a good idea)?  The bark has been shredded by woodpeckers, which would have hastened its demise, but the woodpeckers must have had a reason to do that (they haven’t wreaked the same destruction on the cooker or the plum tree); presumably they were finding some sort of insects in the bark, which might have been the root cause of the problem.  For the past couple of years the tree has really only been a place to hang the bird feeders, and even in death it might fulfil that function for a few more years before it rots away (or we lose patience and cut it down).  And since the RSPB is now advising that we shouldn’t feed birds in the summer, perhaps even that won’t be necessary all the time.

A good long time ago we visited Andrew and Bryony Lawson’s garden in Charlbury when it was open for the National Garden Scheme, and they had suffered the loss of an apple tree, in a prominent position in the garden, just before the opening day.  Their solution to this potential eyesore had been to paint the dead tree bright blue and make a focal point of it, and everyone said how unusual and wonderful it looked.  We’re considering doing something similar, although the state of the bark might make that impracticable.  And however wonderful a blue tree might look in a colourful flower bed, as a stand-alone feature in the middle of a lawn it might be a bit odd.  Decision still to be taken (and I suspect it will be put off indefinitely).

Possibly a death postponed is that of the big hellebore (is it argutifolius?  I can never remember) in the front garden.  It didn't flower this winter - and poorly the winter before that - and looked as though one of the nasty hellebore diseases had got it.  I cut off the leaves and disposed of them in the council green waste bin, but the other day I noticed a few new (healthy-looking, at least for the moment) leaves coming through.  We'll see.

Meanwhile the posh hellebore that dried out while we were away has been a poor-looking thing.  I repotted its shrivelled remains carefully and have been keeping them nicely watered – the weather has been very dry for a few weeks, with a cold drying wind much of the time – and I see that there is now the tiniest green shoot at the base of the stem.  So all may be well.

The pink pot

The wind knocked the tulips, now mostly faded, about a bit.  I’ve been pleased with them this year.  The ‘pink pot’ of ‘Margarita’, ‘Foxtrot’ and (dark purple) ‘Ronaldo’, with an exuberant underplanting of forget-me-nots, worked very well indeed; ‘Ronaldo’ was a little short, and later than the others (it is now the only variety in the pot still standing), but provided good contrast.  I really liked ‘Margarita’, a fine tall early tulip with a broad base and a strong pink colour - and scented to boot! - and smaller ‘Foxtrot’ was a good complement.  I had really wanted my old favourite ‘Angelique’, but none of the suppliers seemed to be stocking it any more.  I have one bulb of ‘Angelique’ planted out down at the bottom of the veg patch, where it is overrun by the lily-of-the-valley and goosegrass, and a couple planted last year in the patio bed, and am struck by the difference between them; the older bulb is a good strong pink-and-white, while the newer bulbs are very washed-out in colour.  I wonder if the strain has deteriorated over the years, and bulb merchants are now moving to other varieties?

The older 'Angelique'

The other big pot, down by the summerhouse, has Sarah Raven’s Ginger Snap collection, and is doing very well indeed, even despite the wind.  It’s a colour combination that I wouldn’t have put together myself, and although the darker tulips haven't been much in evidence (only one ‘Negrita Parrot’ came up - and the flowerhead snapped off very quickly! - and not too many ‘Queen of Night’), they serve to offset the mixed tawny orange and pinkish tones in the others (‘Cairo’, ‘Ridgedale’ and ‘Time Out’), not all of which I might have chosen individually.  As a mix, I would grow them again.

Ginger snap mix

Back on the patio, the pot of ‘Doll’s Minuet’ was less successful; the blooms didn’t last too long, and the underplanting with the pink felicia was too mimsy.

Now that the patio tulips are over, the main event there currently is the wisteria, which is in full flow, giving both colour and scent to the garden.

The wisteria

As mentioned above, the RSPB has modified its advice on bird feeding because of trichomonosis, the pigeon-borne disease that has decimated the finch population among others.  We used to have good numbers of chaffinches and greenfinches here, but in recent years they have been in decline.  I’ve been pleased to see a pair of each of them coming to the patio to drink, and have been more careful about changing the drinking water than in the past, in the hope of reducing the infection risk (there is no chance of keeping the pigeons away).  Apart from a few crumbs (which the sparrows and dunnocks clear up quickly), and the last few old cooking apples for the blackbirds, I’ve also reduced the food offerings; the other birds are around (the blackcap was singing at the bottom of the garden the other day) but not coming for food, which presumably they can find out in the fields and hedgerows around here.  Both the blackbirds and the great tits (the current residents in the nestbox) are feeding youngsters.