The girl with kaleidescope eyes

Arley Hall and Gardens

A day off work, so, expecting the worst of weather having listened to the forecast, I decided on a trip to Arley Hall gardens, near Northwich in Cheshire. The rain mostly stayed away, and I managed to lower the average age of the garden visitors this afternoon by a few years. The gardens have been developed over 250 years and are made up of several discrete gardens as well as parkland and an arboretum. I've not visited that many gardens, so it was a real "Eureka" moment, standing at the end of an avenue or between a gate and seeing what people mean by creating a view in a garden.

The Fish Garden

The sundial circle, with view leading through the Ilex avenue to the walled garden

And I finally understand what a fantastic idea the ha-ha was.

Plants, of course, make a garden:

An artichoke in the kitchen garden. This garden area was full of cutting flowers as well as fruit and veg. It was nice to see that their kale had a bit of pigeon damage too.

A view down one herbaceous border

The shrub roses had mostly gone over, but the hips were round and red and nearly ripe.

Aeonium 'Zwartkop' complete with a few raindrops - luckily the rain stayed off.

Clematis heads in the Flag garden

Sculpture is something that I would like more of in our garden...

'Bulb' - a sculpture by Rachel Ramchurch. I enjoyed looking at different views through the hole in the sculpture.

This strange looking chap was in the walled garden, guarding the waterlily fountain with three colleagues.

The waterlily fountain in the walled garden.

Along with all the big views, and obvious statuary, it was also good to search out small and interesting details...

Not a very good photo but the cast iron pipework in the Vinery was good to see - proper engineering.

Moss on stone in the Rootree

Moss on one of the urns in the walled garden.

At the end of the Fish Garden were headstones in memories of pets, mostly horses. The originals were in faded stone but had been transcribed onto plaques.
Some were quite twee...

Others rather more graphic...

This devilish chap has an amazing view over the herbaceous border from the top of the Alcove. I couldn't get a decent photo of the whole of the herbaceous borders as there were quite a few people admiring the borders, but I did manage a few photos of flowers and beds.

Oh, there's a house there as well.

The plant sales area is very good - lots of interesting plants.

I'll have to visit more gardens - it has really given me a different perspective on views and on features. I may not have 8 acres, but even so, there are some ideas I can use.

Ted - slayer of Stipa

We had wondered why the Stipa tenuissimas in the border had become a bit flattened. Then we found out why...

Stipa and Achillea 'Terracotta'

"Target identified"

"Kill, kill, kill"

"Right, what else can I disembowel?"

Be sure to smell the flowers along the way. Well, most of them.

Emma over at Baklava Shed Coalition recently blogged about the Titan Arum flowering at Kew. It has, she suggests, the perfume of a 'fishbox'. This is to attract pollinating insects such as sweat bees. Perhaps not the sweet perfume you want to suffuse your garden on a warm, dry August evening (should we ever get one).

Having just been doing a little bit of pottering in the garden, I was reminded that other flowers, which are more likely to be found in the average British garden, can also have a bit of a stomach-churning smell to them. At least to me.

Calendulas (pot marigolds) are what made me think of this. I love their vibrant colours no matter what the weather throws at them and they have reliably self seeded since I sowed one packet five or six years ago. And I love photographing them. But when I deadhead them - yuk. A vague nausea rolls over me, and not in the sense of existential angst. Well, maybe a little bit.

Another plant which brings on this feeling is privet. The smell briefly reminds me of childhood and then starts to make me feel queasy. I try and hold my breath when walking past it when it's in flower.

Box allegedly smells of cat pee but I'm not daft enough to stick my nose anywhere near mine - our two cats do pee on it to mark their territory to marauding felines.

And lilies - I just can't face being cooped up in a room with cut lilies. At least in the garden I can stay upwind of them.

Are there any plant perfumes that make you hold your breath and hurry past?

Bring me a bedding plant crocodile, and make it snappy...

Planted by Dumfries and Galloway Council in the RHS/Ball Colegrave National Flower Bed competition (silver medal) at Tatton.

Natural design

Several gardens at Tatton had cultivars of Sanguisorba* in them, and they did look very good.

But what was even better was seeing a field of Great Burnet (Sanguisorba officinalis) in a hay meadow in the Lake District, blending beautifully with meadow cranesbill, birdsfoot trefoil, and a host of grasses.

* The Latin name rolls round the mouth nicely, but actually means 'blood staunching'.

Tatton Park in the rain

Subtitle: getting stuck in the mud, so you don't have to...

This year, I've been lucky enough to go to Malvern Spring Show and Gardeners' World Live, and now Tatton, my local show.

As always, a mixed bag of show gardens (although I wish I had just one tenth of the imagination of the designers), but some of them really caught my imagination.

Some I wasn't so keen on...

Glyndwr's Vision (Silver-Gilt) - a bit 'bedding' (not that there's anything wrong with bedding - Tatton is well known for its national flower bed competition - photos of those at a later date).

Time (Silver) - when I saw it on the TV I thought I liked it but close up it didn't grip me at all. Not to mention the fact that the wood is splitting after only a few days of Cheshire rain.

Those I liked...

Revolution Order Versus Chaos (Silver) - gardens don't half have pretentious names, don't they? This one was a real zinger - it sang out through the rain, mud and murk.

Time and the Bell (Gold) - sounded nice in the breeze and I enjoyed the effect of the grass against the bamboo.

The Lunch Hour Garden (Silver) - not many places of work have such beautiful places to sit and eat your sandwiches!

Quilted Velvet (Gold): Not so much for the planting (despite three gardens, I still haven't been brainwashed into buying Quilted Velvet loo roll) but for the contouring of the plot.

'So 80's (Silver) - as the 1980's were my formative teenage years, I felt some kinship with the bright colours used for the hard landscaping (and the fact they were playing Heaven 17's '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang'). It looked bare on the TV, but outside of the neon flooring, there was lush, colour co-ordinated planting. Anyway, the '80s are back - just listen to some of the music in the charts nowadays.

Fibonaci Numbers in Nature (bronze) - I wasn't keen on a lot of this garden (not enough plants!) but I liked the tagliatelle at the back. Must be the devil's own job to weed bindweed from though.

Those I loved...

Cubed3 (Gold and best visionary garden). I loved this. Although it is very geometric, the tumbling cubes reminded me of the shattered rocks I'd seen the previous week in the Lake District, and it seemed full of energy.

Strictly Come Gardening (Gold). Rather twee name and concept but I loved the planting.

I may have accidentally bought a couple of plants...

Batteries recharged, muscles aching

After a very busy few weeks at work and Bill Cat going missing for five days (thankfully he turned up, with a nasty but entirely treatable infection in his leg), we have had a week away in the Lake District.

Wonderful views...

...except when we were inside clouds.

We think we reached the top of Bowfell and then Esk Pike - it was rather hard to tell, except for the fact that we stopped going up and started coming down again. Apparently, there are fantastic views of Scafell Pike, but we barely had a view of each other if SomeBeans got more than about ten paces ahead.

Today I had a trip to Tatton Park to finish off a relaxing (although rather rainy) week - report to come.

Sunshine

A goulash soup moment

It's the time of year for lots of soft fruit. We've had about 5kg of strawberries in recent weeks. They're now coming to an end, to be replaced by the raspberries from the thicket in the back garden.

Most of these are eaten fresh, but last week I made some strawberry sorbet and two lots of strawberry puree ready to be incorporated into Delia Smith's strawberry cheesecake ice-cream.

This afternoon's toiling over a hot stove has been with the blackcurrants. I harvested around 2kg from the bush in the back garden (rather incongruous in the middle of a herbaceous border, but who cares!). I've made blackcurrant jam - as per VP's post (see point no. 12), it has been rather hot today. I also made the blackcurrant base for blackcurrant gin sauce - we've been rather remiss in gin restocking so the most important ingredient will have to be added at a later date.

Which brings me to the title of the blog. A 'goulash soup moment' is code chez Mouffetard for the moment when you realise you've over-filled the blender. And the kitchen becomes decorated with what they delightfully call 'spatter' in CSI. As the name suggests, the first product to be artfully sprayed over the kitchen was goulash soup - I was attempting to recreate the lovely soup we have had in the Alps. I assume that the mountain restaurants don't normally scrape it off the walls before they serve it. We still find the occasional orange spot in odd places in the kitchen. Well, the orange has now been joined by a (luckily smaller) eruption of bright purple from the blackcurrant sauce.

I shall be glad when the soft fruit season is over.