My Parents' Problem Patch

Two years ago, my parents had their garden completely redesigned. Some sections of the garden look lovely - there is a swathe of lavender in the middle of the garden, and the colour is gorgeous. The west-facing border has taken off so well that my mum probably has enough Alchemilla mollis to supply every garden in Nottinghamshire. However, some of the designer's ideas were, umm, bewildering, to say the least. Where Mum said she loved every colour of flowers except yellow, she now has a load of Euphorbia and the aforementioned Alchemilla. The ground underneath the lawn was not levelled properly, and it will never be able to double as an impromptu croquet lawn or putting green, as my grandfather's lawn used to.

We don't talk about the chamomile lawn. It used to be where the recliner now sits:


And in an east-facing border, we have a Camellia. As far as I remember, it's pretty much the only advice given on the label when you buy a Camellia: Don't plant in an east-facing border, and don't feed after midnight.

The east-facing border is a bit of a problem though. You can probably spot it from here - it's the ruddy great big copper beech tree. So it's shady, dry and really crappy soil. My mantra when talking to my mother has become "More manure, more manure, more manure", but it's clear that the plants need to be sorted a bit.


Doesn't look great, does it? The Cotinus hasn't grown at all in the two years it'd been in, nor, really, has the Mahonia. Fatsia japonica seems happy enough, as does the Buddleja, but there's a lot of miserable looking soil.

Both Rob and Victoria have made some suggestions. Sarcococca could be a winner, as could Brunnera - I think Mum would like some bigger shrubs though, to hide the fence a bit. I also mentioned Liriope muscari, and perhaps many of the plants listed on the Plants for Shade website, but she might prefer to hear it from you lot.

Any more ideas? I know what's in the books, but personal experiences are always something my mother takes notice of. They live just outside Nottingham, so it's pretty much USDA zone 8, and the house is on the south side of the garden.

With Fronds Like These Who Needs Anemones?

Just over two weeks ago, Hubster and I went over to visit Victoria, accompanied by Rob. There was an ulterior motive - the presence of two Big Strong Boys was requested to help move some pots, and one of those pots contained a Cycas revoluta that Victoria was giving to me.

We were also able to meet Mario and Luigi the kittens (who are as adorable as they look in the photos), and eat scones and clotted cream.

So here is Bastard III, resplendent in the garden:


Thank you so much, Victoria - it is a marvellous specimen, and looks very happy in between the Wollemi pine and Halocarpus bidwilli.

Signs Of Spring

What glorious weather! There are new young leaves on Liriodendron chinense:


There are buds on Magnolia x soulangeana:


There are flower buds on Acacia pravissima:


And new leaves on Grandpa's Geranium plants:


Even Podocarpus salignus is getting in on the act:


So it's a pity really that it's October and the frosts are going to nix all of that any week now...

A Reason To Be Cheerful

Watering the garden this evening, I noticed a small patch of green at the base of my presumably very dead Cunninghamia lanceolata, languishing in the ICU. I lifted up some of the brown needles, and saw new growth. I grabbed the secateurs and hacked back the dead bits to see this:


I'm so delighted that it's come back from the dead - I was sure it had carked it over the winter (although it should be able to cope with USDA Zone 7 type winters!). One thing that has surprised me is that it has grown up from the base. I don't remember where I read it, but I was under the impression that conifers did not regrow from the base (although angiosperms will, as my parents' knackered bay trees demonstrate).

Any of you have any examples of conifers regrowing from the base? Is it a lot more common than I realised?

Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin

Voltaire didn't write about allotments, but I bet he'd have been none too impressed with my own allotmenteering skills. I have neglected it terribly. It's in the grounds of Hubster's Quaker Meeting House. The plan was that I would tend it while Hubster was in Meeting, then come in for a cup of tea and a biscuit. Of course that only works if Hubster is a good Quaker and goes every week...

So, before we went on holiday to Cornwall, it looked like this:


Hubster went once the week after we got back (I can't remember why I didn't go to the allotment - maybe I was tutoring that Sunday morning), and said it was pretty much wild. It evidently stayed wild until I finally got back to it yesterday.

This is what it looked like two years ago before I did anything with it:


I didn't take any photos of it yesterday, but it looked even worse. The borage has evolved into a new species, Borago triffidus, and whilst I can just about see over the top of it, we could lose whole classes of schoolchildren in there.

The oddest thing is the disappearance of vegetables. I put in a bag of first earlies, a bag of main crop and some onion sets. There are no onions. I got maybe a dozen main crop potatoes. Fortunately my first earlies are quite a bumper haul:


I'm assuming that onions have been dug up and eaten by squirrels/pigeons, and that the main crops were irresistible to slugs. Suppose that's a consequence of abandoning the plants for four months!

One of the other Quakers suggested sowing spinach, so I think I'll be doing that in a couple of weeks' time. This coming Sunday, however, I have an awful lot of digging to do.

In other news, I finally made it to Victoria's open garden yesterday afternoon. It looks even more gorgeous in real life than it does in her photos. And even Hubster was happy - he proclaimed the carrot cake the best in the world and was seriously considering another slice (the first one was massive!).


My crappy phone camera did not do this border justice. But I think it was my favourite part of the garden - the combination of reds, maroons, purples and oranges was bright, bold and damn sexy. As you know, I don't really do flowers in Jurassic Park, but I do have a massive soft spot for dahlias.

So two gardens yesterday, at opposite ends of the care-and-attention-given-by-the-owner spectrum. And mine languishing somewhere in between...

Reasons To Be Cheerful

The great thing about a garden is that, even when you have lost plants (or bits of plants), and when you're feeling very pessimistic about the world in general, and wondering where you're going and why you're in this handcart, there is something to cheer and inspire. Bastard the Cycad is still in recovery, but Bastard II has decided, almost as a means of comforting me, to start a flush:


And despite being written off as a winter loss, Doodia media is alive. I did buy another one, but presumably you can never have too many Doodias...


I have lots and lots of Pelargonium cuttings taking root, ready to brighten up my new lab, which I move into on Monday:


And as well as some Chlorophytum pups that I've finally potted on, having got my GCSE students in 2009 to make them root to demonstrate asexual reproduction, I have my parrot plant (Impatiens niamniamensis) cuttings doing well:


Despite growing all these plants, I'm really not that confident at propagation. Dividing I'm fine with, and I've done that so many times with ferns to give chunks away. But cuttings, and - heavens! - sowing seeds brings me out in a cold sweat immediately followed by a deep sense of shame for my lack of confidence. So I know that Impatiens and Pelargonium are about the easiest genera to propagate evah!!, but it's impressive for me anyway.

Needless Vandalism And Destruction

You've probably all been watching the images of riots, looting and criminal damage. It was shameful and disgusting to watch. Hubster and I joined in with the Ealing cleanup on Tuesday - we couldn't just sit back and do nothing. It was a reminder that there are people in this country (and no doubt around the world) who manage to be materialistic and greedy while putting no value on belongings.

I wouldn't dream of comparing damage to my plants to the losses faced by the poor families I've seen on the news. I would give up my whole garden without a second thought for the sake of my own family. And yet the sense of perspective didn't make this any easier to deal with on Monday night:


This was Bastard the Cycad. Less than a month ago he started flushing, and by the time we went away this time last week for my brother's wedding, he had a good six inches of growth. I came back to find all his fronds snapped off and laid in the pot next to him.

I tried to think whether it was a strong gust of wind, or an animal. But wind would have sent the broken pieces across the garden, and an animal would have eaten the bits (hopefully getting the staggers afterwards). The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced this was human. We have guys who work next door to us, but they are lovely friendly chaps who know how much my garden means to me, and I am sure that if one of them had knocked Bastard accidentally, they would have said something. So I'm discounting them.

Which means I'm led back to our nasty new neighbours and their builders, and I reckon this time it was deliberate. The fronds were put back in the pot. But because I was away I have no means of proving this. I just feel gutted that I'd spent all this time nursing Bastard back from near death, and now he won't have this lovely full flush of seven fronds that he was growing. If he's lucky we'll have two full ones.

I'm fed up of people who vandalise other people's property. I hate these builders, and the criminal tenants employing them. I'm disgusted by the far, far worse destruction and wrecking of people's lives that has gone on in the past week. And I'm angry because I am absolutely powerless to do anything about it.

Death From Above

People who have kept up with the saga of us, our landlord and all manner of dubious prospective tenants for the flats above us via Twitter will be aware of this. Cutting a very long story short, we have some dodgy builders in the upstairs flat who will think nothing of working from 7:45am to 9:00pm, hammering loudly and incessantly the whole time. They may well be putting in internal walls (illegally, as it's a listed building and no planning permission has been sought), and they're sticking a new back door on at the top of the fire escape.

On Thursday they dropped their drill. Into Jurassic Park. Hubster saw one of them come down the steps, reach in and pick it up, and go back upstairs. Then he went outside to check on my plants.


That used to be Euphorbia characias "Black Pearl". I doubt it is anymore. There are a few things about which I am incredibly protective. My family, my gecko, my students, and my plants. Not only did the builder smash the plant, but he did not own up to it. If he had tapped on the back door (which is almost always open when we're in) and said "I'm really sorry, I dropped the drill and it smashed the plant" then we could have had a civil conversation about it.

But ask any one of my students, and they'll say that not owning up to things is one way to really piss me off. So by the time I had got together the pieces, I was seething with rage. I absolutely screamed at the builders, all of whom denied it, until one of them said he'd dropped the drill "so I think maybe it was me". YOU THINK??? Hubster, by this point, was more concerned for the safety of the builders than he was for my distress.

Eventually they asked me how much it was, and I plucked £15 out of the air. Perhaps a little more than it would normally cost from a garden centre, but I'm happy enough to factor in a replacement pot, compost and the several stiff margaritas I needed to calm down. However, I'd bought it from Burncoose Nurseries on holiday in Cornwall this year, so if that proved to be the only place selling it then delivery charges alone would be £13. I don't think "Black Pearl" is too unusual a variety, but it's not really the right time of year to buy euphorbias as they're all finishing up their flowering (I deadheaded "Robbiae" today). The plant itself may not be lost - I shall repot it and put it in the ICU to see if I can breathe some life back into it.

One thing I did manage to impress on them is that they were jolly lucky the drill did not fall a couple of feet in either direction. Whilst the guy who appeared to be in charge seemed to have more money on him than we have in our bank account, I don't think they'd appreciate replacing what is now a 1.5m tall Wollemia nobilis, or Encephalartos princeps (could I even get another one of them?). And I doubt replacing my £300 fountain is in their budget either.

Jamie Oliver And Peat-Based Compost

I enjoy a good Jamie Oliver-bashing, I do. I restrained myself when his Dream School took over the airwaves for all too long, but many others didn't. Not content with trying to tell me how to teach "kidz wot da system's let dahn innit", he now wants to tell me how to grow my own vegetables, and he wants me to use his compost to do so.


Firstly it's a bit over-priced, compared to what I pay for New Horizon at the garden centre. With any luck it'll simply attract the idiots at the bottom of the economic food chain in that case. But worse is the composition of the compost:


That's well over 50% (maybe getting on for 60%) peat in the fruit and vegetable growbag.


Same with the potato compost. At a time when the pressure should be (and is?) on compost manufacturers to reduce the amount of peat in their products, Jamie Oliver goes right in with more than 50% peat.

Why do I have a problem with this? Well, firstly, I'm a leftie pinko tree-hugger. I like our unique habitats. I like the endemic species of the highland and lowland peat bogs. I'd quite like them to hang around for a few million years more, until they naturally die out. I like how peat bogs are excellent carbon sinks, and how we'd be even more screwed in terms of anthropogenic global warming than we already are. Read Mark Diacono's piece for the Telegraph. See what Mr Corduroy himself, Monty Don was saying back in 2002:

Every time you use a peat-based compost in the garden, you are deliberately participating in the destruction of a non-renewable environment that sustains some of our most beautiful plant and animal life. No garden on this earth is worth that.

Whatever you think about his presenting of Gardeners' World, there is no doubt that Monty has no trouble with the yield of crops from his kitchen garden. Perhaps it's all the different compost recipes Monty uses for the plants with specific requirements.

Which brings me to my second point: peat-free composts are outperforming peat-based composts. They first did so in 2010, when Which? published their annual compost survey. They did so again this year, according to Hort Week, including my favourite, New Horizon. When I don't use my own compost, I buy a couple of bags of New Horizon. Does my garden look like it's suffering for the lack of peat?


Homebase have really disappointed in this regard. A few years ago they published a paper outlining their commitment to reducing peat in their compost sales. Their target was:

To ensure that by the end of 2009, 90% (by volume) of the growing media and soil conditioners sold by Homebase are peat free.

How can they possibly still aim for that target given that they're selling Jamie Oliver's peat-based compost? I note that there was no peat-related target on the 2009 corporate responsibility report, but it returned in the 2009/2010 targets:

Achieve at least 60% peat-free growing media by end 2009/10 and at least 65% by end 2010/11

Well, that's a bit of back-peddling and a half. It's also not clear whether this is by volume sold, by number of products available, or indeed by popularity contest. I'd love to know how Homebase are squaring their targets with their introduction of a new high peat content product, but this certainly discourages me from shopping there full stop (we were only there to buy a new toilet seat - I cannot remember when I last bought gardening products from there).

And in the meantime, perhaps Jamie Oliver could stop trying to tell me how to teach and how to garden? I promise, that if he goes back to just cooking stuff, I won't tell him how to do it properly.

Bastard Lives

I truly thought that Bastard the Cycad had carked it over the winter. All his fronds were yellow and crispy, and he looked very sorry for himself. But you should never write off a cycad, so he was moved to the ICU and put in a bucket of water. A few weeks ago, there were signs of life:


Two weeks later, we are well and truly in a flush!


That's probably a good 3cm in 15 days. He's in a pretty sunny spot now, and he's still sitting in a bucket of water. I'm not moving him until the fronds have fully formed, as movement would result in some twisting of the fronds. I really must investigate the physiology of this more. Angiosperms grow to the light, but conifers don't seem to have much of a phototropic response - I didn't need to turn my Sequoia seedlings on the windowsill. I don't know whether conifers aetiolate either (I've seen it in cycads, ferns and of course angiosperms).

It looks like I might get as many as half a dozen fronds off Bastard, so I will try to post regular updates on his progress.