Right on cue

Golden Celebration, the last of the 'new' roses to bloom in the top garden, burst into flower overnight. Well, ok, just the one flower at the moment, but more to come I'm sure. There are also now a few blooms on the verbena, one dahlia flower and a cosmos for visitors to see along with all the other hardy favourites.

We've spent today making final preparations, signage, mowing, removing a few visible weeds (there are lots more,if you look closely which I hope visitors will forgive) and generally getting ourselves, and others, ready for the Open Gardens Day tomorrow.

The forecast is ok, a bit breezy, that's seaside gardens for you, but overall dry and even sunny at times. So now we've reached the '5.30 on Christmas Eve' moment, there's nothing more we can do except hope visitors come and we all have fun while raising money for a worthwhile local cause.
Look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

The Glory of the Garden

'Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made

By singing:-" Oh, how beautiful," and sitting in the shade

While better men than we go out and start their working lives

At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.'

So said Rudyard Kipling, some time ago (1911), when no doubt he was sitting in his lovely study at Batemans whilst better men were grubbing the weeds from his gravel paths. I have some empathy with those better men, having spent much of this morning on my knees, titivating the edges of our grass and turning over the soil in the borders to at least make our Sunday visitors think there's been some serious gardening going on. I was not alone today either, with David hard at work making sure the brick pathways are as level underfoot as possible, and our young friend John beavering away at path clearing at the eastern end of the plot. Youth and energy personified, John simply gets on with the task in hand, and in two good mornings of work has reinstated the old brick pathway from the back gate down the side of our garden. A feat neither David nor I could have hoped to have completed before the big day.

The garden itself is looking ok now, with lots of roses in bloom, including Princess Charlotte as seen above, one of the new aquisitions that I've been looking forward to blooming for a while. The iris sibirica have all but finished but have been replaced by lots of the foetidissima or 'stinking' iris, also pictured above. On a recent visit to a spectacular garden in Bladbean (open again on 19 August for NGS and most definitely worth visiting) I overheard a gentleman remark to his wife that these iris 'always look half dead to me'. Well sir, look again, the fine markings on the very pale blue, sometimes almost brown, petals, are so delicate and what's more, after the flowers come brilliant orange shiny berries in a sweetcorn like mass. A plant that's very much at home in seaside gardens and certainly nothing to do with my efforts, it's here because it wants to be.

The veg beds aren't flourishing nearly as well as the flower borders, but I haven't given up hope that we'll be eating some homegrown produce by the end of the summer. Also, the greenhouse plants are doing really really well with lots of tomatoes appearing on all the plants and even two courgettes nearly ready for picking.

So, just a couple of days left to do the final chores on the lists, including one last mow, get the plant sale table set up and then welcome our visitors - a lot we hope! Fingers permanently crossed that the weather stays as it is right now.

Lots of other people around the village are working hard to make this second Open Gardens Event go well. A very welcome addition to our 'garden attractions' will be photographs by my lifelong friend Melanie Chalk, which will be on show at the Chichester Memorial Hall during the event. Also there, Melanie and Michael will be on hand to serve tea or coffee and cake to any weary footsore garden visitors.

To give Rudyard Kipling the final word:

'So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray

For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!

And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away ! '

Less than a week now

With time pressing (it's only six days now until the event) I rose early this morning and was in the garden working by 7.30 a.m. A beautiful time to be in the garden on a lovely day as this one promises to be. Still mighty damp underfoot, but at least the weeds are easier to extract. With a 'to do' list as long as my arm I made a start but, as invariably happens in our garden, I became distracted by something else that needed to be done. Hence, here I am at the computer, having just about worn myself out moving a huge pile of cut off timber from the steps at the back of the house and bags of kindling to the garage in readiness for next winter. I was a Girl Guide, so I know the need to be prepared! I am rewarding myself with a cup of coffee before starting the second shift of the day.

The images above were taken a couple of days ago. The tomato is just one of quite a few now, on plants thriving in the greenhouse border. The courgette flower, on a plant in the raised veg bed. We've started eating our new potatoes and, as I dug up the plants to get at the potatoes, I filled in the resulting space with Turks Turban squash plants. Not a variety I've grown before, but chosen for its very appealing markings. We have flowers on our runner bean plants, and on the purple dwarf beans too but little else in the raised beds shows much sign of life yet.

Our new roses continue to tease by showing lots of buds, but keeping their flowers still tightly furled. There are also buds on the verbena bonariensis and several of the dahlias and cosmos, both recently planted to fill in gaps in the long border. Fingers crossed that this little sunny interlude will continue as promised by the weathermen and the buds will burst forth just in time for Sunday, 12 o'clock!

'Gather ye rosebuds .....

while ye may, old time is still a flying. And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying'. (Herrick 1648).


Indeed, earlier today in the garden, I counted at least nine different rose bushes all 'smiling' in their own special way. From pure white, through white tinged with pink, pink flushed with orange, to pink in its own right and on to red, brighter red and the deepest of deep reds, all smiling in the morning sun.

Up to now I haven't really been into roses at all, thinking that they're more of a problem than a pleasure. All that black spot to watch for, the thorns, the lack of fragrance in modern ones etc etc. However, of late, it's come to me that they are really quite splendid plants to have in the garden and I realise, if a little late, how lucky we were to have roses still blooming through all the weeds and brambles, when we took over the garden some eight years ago. Most of those originals are still blooming. Last year I was particularly pleased with the salmon pink/orange rose that blooms in the garden at the back of the house and already this season it's flowering its heart out. The flowers have a delightful fragrance and make a charming cut flower to grace the dining table too.

My newly triggered interest in roses led me earlier in the year to buy five new, bare rooted plants from a well known rose grower. I followed all the instructions and gave them the correct dose of mycorrhizal fungi (I even weighed it out!) and rose fertilizer at planting. It paid off, we now have royalty visiting our garden in rose form, namely Princess Anne, featured above in the picture is a sweet shade of pink. A slightly prickly specimen (like its namesake?) but nonetheless welcome indeed to the mixed border. Harlow Carr, another pink one has also started to bloom, with clusters of smaller flowers and we await with anticipation the flowers from Princess Charlotte, Golden Celebration and New Dawn.

I now have a wish list of roses, well one anyway, Rhapsody in Blue, which I saw in a garden in Elham at the weekend. We were visiting their Garden Open Day for the NGS, and saw eight delightful gardens, and this rose was climbing over an obelisk in one of my favourites of all the gardens. Perhaps it's an age thing, but I found myself trying to drop off to sleep last night, planning where I could put such an obelisk, and one of those roses.
Answers on a postcard please!

Wee-eed

All jubileed out now it's time to focus on the big Open Gardens Event that is only about three weeks away. The recent nostalgia for all things 1950s and a picture I saw of Bill and Ben and their little friend got me thinking about weeds!

Friends in a botanical art class were recently tasked with making a picture of a weed plant; one chose to depict Forget-me-Nots in watercolour, another Pulmonaria. Now I consider both of these plants to be flowers to encourage rather than eliminate. I know forget-me-nots can be a bit overenthusiastic, but are glorious in their own way. But what then is a weed? Is it just a plant in the wrong place, or something more sinister? The Farmers Almanac of 1881 said "Weeds are little vices that beset plant life and are to be got rid of the best way we know how".

The principal little vice that besets my garden is Cleavers or, as I also know it, Sticky Willy. An inocuous looking little plant to start with, it shoots out yards and yards of sticky foliage in all directions and swamps everything given a chance. Very satisfying to pull out as the yards are gathered in, but much better not to have it in the first place. Couch grass is another pernicious devil that definitely besets areas of our bank in particular, thus have I spent much of this afternoon on my knees to avoid slipping downwards, trying to get as much of its roots out as possible. I will never clear it all. Then there's mares tails, so strong it will shoot through the tarmac on the pavements outside our front wall and a weed you can never get the whole root of out. But, the daddy of them all for underground spreading is Ground Elder, to be despised and loathed at all costs. I fear again that short of using something very toxic, which I'd rather not do, I shall never rid our plot completely All I can hope to do is manage it as best I can.

On the other hand there are those plants that fall into the weed category that I really don't mind; borage that grows so lusciously on the bank giving cover to the ground, producing beautiful bright blue flowers and nectar for lots of buzzy things, dandelions that also flourish in our soil and feed my friend's rabbit Gizmo and guinea pig Ted so well, and lastly the asters, probably not weeds in the accepted sense, but in our garden they multiply just as weeds do so I feel able to hoick out those plants that grow where I don't want them and move them along to the compost heap.

I shall carry on trying to get rid of as many unwanted weeds as possible before the big day but trust visitors will be kind and turn a blind eye if I fail to clear them all.