Wordless Wednesday - a tide of bark through a reef of lenticels

In which I wish government was more like taking on a new garden

I don’t ‘do’ politics normally – that’s SomeBeans’ bag. However, after a Minister visiting work yesterday, changes in HE funding, getting rid of EMAs and proposed changes in the running of the NHS (amongst many others), I was struck by the number and speed of changes taking place. SomeBeans suggests that less seemed to happen at the beginning of the Blair government in 1997 due to the in-fighting between Blair and Brown, rather than them taking a more considered approach to changes.

I understand why they do it –  I know that some changes must be made for economic reasons. But the big reason is that Ministers want to make a mark. No-one will take any notice of them if things just carry on. So they have their pet projects to implement as soon as possible. Some more bonkers than others – I won’t start a political rant. They want to be remembered.

I just wish that Ministers would take a little bit of notice of what a gardener should do when taking on a new garden. Live with it for a year – learn what it’s like from the inside. See what grows where, and what struggles. See where the sun shines brightest, and where there is gloom. See where a gentle hand can renovate, rather than where a pick axe and shovel can destroy. If changes need to be made, you’ll have lived with the garden and will see how to make those changes with the minimum of disruption. And the garden will respond all the better for your greater understanding of it.

As you can tell, I don’t really have the mind for politics.

End of term

It seems just a blink of an eye ago that I wrote this post about starting a garden design course. In fact it has been 17 weeks. Well, since then, the motley group of people on the course have:

• learnt about the importance of unity and other principles of garden design;
• tied ourselves up with base lines and offsets in the garden of very patient couple;
• grappled with design principles in a long, thin garden;
• wielded a scale rule as though we knew how to use it;
• shared a common terror of a humble ink pen and felt great when we produced our first inked lines;
• uncomprehendingly stared at plan designs wondering how on earth we could make them into elevations;
• gone back to infant school to learn how to colour in without going over the lines.

Our tutor has been a saint!

Monday is assignment hand in day. We have to hand in a base plan, site analysis, measurements, client brief, and coloured plan with elevations. I’ve spent so long staring at 1:100 scale drawings of the garden and trying to get a cohesive design that I never want to see the flippin’ garden again.

Current view from back door

Elevation

Elevation

The plan

I can’t wait to hand it in now, to get rid of it! I’m fed up of the sight of it, and I expect poor SomeBeans is, too. In a couple of weeks, the next course starts – a step up, and looking in detail at areas of design such as hard landscaping, construction details and plant portfolios. And another poor soul’s garden to design. Bring it on!

Wordless Wednesday – lichen

A bit of advertising: Design seminar

I don’t know if anyone is interested but thought I’d do a little bit of advertising, as it’s not on the College website, and I have been given a flyer:

Design and Landscape Industry Seminar

featuring garden and landscape designer Sarah Eberle and other key speakers who will focus on sustainability and new design trends and practices.

Saturday 19th February 2011

Reaseheath College, Nantwich, Cheshire, CW5 6DF

09:30 – 16:00 in the Lecture Theatre

General admission £50 (includes buffet lunch)

Students and Reaseheath graduates £30

Book before January 21st and save £10 off your ticket price

Supported by the Institute of Horticulture

A day for Landscapers, Designers and Industry Representatives focusing on sustainability and new design trends. Ideal for CPD.

Speakers:

Sarah Eberle – multi-award winning garden and landscape designer. Recognised for her contribution to the industry for nearly 30 years, Sarah will explain how her designs address issues posed by climate change and heightened client requirements for sustainable garden design.

A representative from Marshalls will discuss the company’s approach to the economic, environmental and social issues raised by sustainability and how these are influenced by clients, landscapers and manufacturers.

Angus Cunningham from Scotscape will discuss trends for green walls and other growing surfaces.

Hazel Frith from All-Turf will outline turf sculpture, wild flower meadows and technological developments in turf.

Card bookings: 01270 613242

Postal bookings: please make your cheque out to Reaseheath College and post to Louise Moss at the above address.

(Apologies for any spelling mistakes, but I have transcribed the information from the flyer so they are my typing mistakes!)

Wordless Wednesday - Attack of the zombie tree ferns

The best bit of the garden at the moment…

...is not the hellebore border, as there are no buds showing yet. Actually, hellebore border sounds rather grand. We have a border that has quite a few hellebores in it, but lots of other bits and pieces too, to hide the untidy leaves after the hellebores have done their thing.

...is not the snowdrops bravely flowering despite the cold, wet weather. We don't have any snowdrops (see previous post for reasons why).

...is not the lawn. After a month under heavy frost and/or snow, and a couple of months without mowing prior to that (due to more or less permanent wet weather), it looks a little bit under the weather.

...is not the front garden, which needs a very good tidy up, as I didn't get round to it before Christmas, due to the weather.

...is a dead stick.

I should explain. It was a Ricinus, until the frosts put paid to it. But now it’s a launch pad for a plethora of garden birds flying in to take advantage of the food we put out for them. Before they land on the feeders or on the ground, robins, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, dunnocks, the odd chaffinch and occasionally the nuthatch will alight to survey the scene. I’m glad I didn’t get round to tidying it up.

The Inelegant Gardener’s Almanac for 2011

 

January:

• Plant out the tulips that I failed to plant when they arrived. Purchase crowbar to push through frozen soil and wedge tulips into crevices. Desultorily fill in crevice with sodden soil, as excitement of bulb planting quickly wears off as I start to lose feeling in my fingers.
• Use newly purchased crowbar to try and prise last year’s parsnips out of the frozen ground. Parsnip lollypops could be the ‘next big thing’.
• Get over-excited with the seed catalogues, forgetting the avalanche of packets in the garage, bought in the autumn. Realise that the rush of excitement when buying seeds must be how normal women feel when they buy a pair of high-heeled shoes.
• Peer at feet, troll-shaped from many years of welly-wearing, fail to imagine them crushed into a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Buy more seeds.
• Order seed potatoes as I will have forgotten to have ordered them in the autumn.

February:

• Rue the fact that once again I failed to buy any snowdrops last year
• Sow parsnips, forgetting that they always fail to germinate as I have planted them too soon and the soil is too wet and cold.
• Panic when two deliveries of seed potatoes arrive, as I hadn’t forgotten to order them in autumn. I have enough potatoes to start up my own Spud-U-Like franchise.

March:

• Fail to remember to buy snowdrops in the green.
• Make plans to successional sow a range of veg for the allotment, to avoid gluts
• Sow parsnips, forgetting that they always fail to germinate as I have planted them too soon and the soil is too wet and cold.
• Try to finish harvesting and eating last year’s parsnips, which the hard, frozen ground has only just yielded. There appears to be a 7 day window between prising the parsnips out of the ground and the parsnips becoming heroically wooden. The recipe for parsnip cake comes out, and SomeBeans starts to look worried…
• Survey the relatively weed-free plot and think ‘Yes, we have finally conquered the horsetail, couch grass, docks, ground elder…’

April:

• Make mental note not to order lettuce seeds for the next three years, as over-excitement at seed buying time (see January) has led to enough lettuce seeds to supply Tesco (if Tesco were willing to take holey, slimey, slug-ridden lettuces).
• Forget mental note instantly.
• Remember that one year, all the courgette seeds that I planted died, so sow at least 10 courgette plants, to make sure one or two survive.
• Sow parsnips, forgetting that they always fail to germinate as I have planted them too soon and the soil is too wet and cold.
• Realise that the reason there were few weeds in March was because they hadn’t started growing then. They have now.

May

• Get parsnips to germinate!
• Remind myself of the importance of successional sowing, so that we get a regular supply of a range of veg.
• Become over-excited by all the different squash and pumpkin seeds, buy six different types, and plant all of the seeds
• In a vain attempt to keep the ground elder down, try using it as an ingredient – foraging and wild food is trendy, apparently. Realise that although the Romans may have brought ground elder to Britain to eat, a couple of thousand years of evolution of cooking ingredients means that we now longer have to eat this stuff. It’s nasty.

June

• Transplant a plethora of squash and pumpkin seedlings to the allotment. after all, they are still tiny, so won’t take up too much room
• Realise that the birds have found the ripe redcurrants and gooseberries before me. Yet again.
• In a frenzy of hoeing, chop off half of the onion and shallot tops. Oops.
• Forget to successional sow anything
• Rediscover the furry loveliness of the inside of a freshly picked broad bean pod.

July

• Realise that I have forgotten to successional sow. Again.
• Rediscover some poor, lanky sprout and cabbage seedlings languishing in the back of the greenhouse, where they have been since March. Hope that, despite the brassica equivalent of Chinese foot-binding, if I transplant them they will rally round and provide greenery for the Christmas table.

August

• Ahh, bulb catalogues. Time to order the little globes of anticipation. Vow to plant the bulbs as soon as they arrive
• Not waving but drowning under an avalanche of courgettes, as all of the plants I sowed in April survived, and it felt cruel to kill some of them.
• Give up on weeding. It only makes them angry. I wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.

September

• Hack bravely at the pumpkin patch, which is making a concerted effort to take over Cheshire. It resembles Audrey 2 from the Little Shop of Horrors.
• Bulb order arrives. I’ll just store them in the garage until I’ve got a little time to plant them
• Wonder why work colleagues run away from me when I stagger into the office weighed down with plastic bags full of courgettes and runner beans

October

• Drool over the newly arrived seed catalogues and buy things that look exciting, forgetting that there is often a reason why some veg are allotment stalwarts, and some don’t catch on. Like achocha.
• Become smug at the huge haul of pumpkins and squashes I have cultivated.
• Try to reassure self that the blood over the pumpkin, where I have tried to carve it for Halloween but ended up carving myself, will make it more scary to any visiting trick or treaters.

November

• Celebrate first (and last) ripe tomato shortly before the first frost.
• Think that the parsnips will taste better after the first frost, so delay harvesting any
• Realise that the excitement of pumpkin soup palls after the first few litres. And that was just with one pumpkin.
• Uneasily eye up the large pile of pumpkins in the conservatory.

December

• Having delayed harvesting parsnips, they are now frozen into the soil
• Rediscover the unplanted bulbs in the garage. Pretend I haven’t seen them
• Hibernate until the days start getting longer
• Think about all the garden jobs I failed to do properly in the year, and vow to do them differently next year. After all, only a fool would repeat the same mistakes, year after year…

Wordless Wednesday - I like it now it's gone

Merry Christmas

I hope that you get where you want to go; I hope that you stay warm; I hope that you have a happy Christmas and a happy and healthy new year.

In 2011, may your seeds germinate, your compost gently steam and your slugs take a long holiday somewhere else.

Merry Christmas!