25,000 Visitors

Imagine the scene. Last Bank Holiday Monday was fine and sunny. We had lots of visitors for our late spring open day to see eight dreamy arches in the Wisteria Walk draped in laburnum, wisterias, robinias and clematis, all underplanted with glorious purple alliums. Rose petal sponge, and lavender-lemon drizzle cake teas were being served on the lawn...all was well with the world.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves....when 25,000 visitors flew in from the north west and made a bee line for the orchard. It was Bedlam with bees buzzing everywhere amongst the orchard trees over exactly the route that all our visitors came in by, except now some were leaving by that same route! One of them said to me, better call a beekeeper. Simon happened to be passing and I relayed the message. He rushed inside...but how do you phone a beekeeeper????

118 500 did the trick.....yes I have several in Nottinghamshire! Shall I put you through? Yes please.......several seconds later the beekeeper answered....Simon explained that we had an open day here, and there was a swarm of bees in the orchard, maybe with just a hint of panic in his voice! The person at the other end of the phone giggled and she repeated Simon's comments, and there was much guffawing in the background. She then told him that she was the landlady of the Beekeeper Inn and wasnot a beekeeper at all!!!! No doubt the customers that day are still chortling!

So that avenue closed, but thanks to Google the Bedfordshire Beekeepers site soon emerged and after several attmepts to find someone at home, Simon manged to find a real beekeeper only three miles away at Milton Ernest....and fifteen minutes later a super man called Chris Lewis came to save our day!

He made Simon dress in a beekepers outfit and soon they were cutting down branches of the cherry tree where the bees had now settled. A large box was then held underneath the swarming 25,000 bees (Chris reckoned that was the figure) and with a sharp shake of the tree the swarm fell off and the box was left on the floor whiltst the bees settled.

Apparently late that evening they were already making honey!

A moveable House for Eeyore

I want to encourage children and mums and dads and grandparents, so that they can all have fun on an outing together in the garden. Simon and I are big fans of all Winnie the Pooh stories, so we thought we would make a Winnie the Pooh trail. We kept a lots of cuttings from the willows and cornus in late winter, ready to make Eeyore's new house.

Yesterday, Simon masterminded seven fence old posts to make the A frame and then I had the easy task of tacking on green and yellow stems. It doesnot look that dense a covering in the photos but then I didnot want it to be dark inside, just enough of a structure to make children want to explore.

Winnie came to see Eeyore in the evening and I think they were both very happy. They hatched a plan to invite all the 'other friends' to visit on Sunday and have a lovely picnic and games together.

English Bluebells

Late evening sunlight, shafting through a blue bell wood, must be one of the loveliest sights in England. A dreamy place to be especially at the end of a busy day. But made even more so by the route to and fro. For the meadows were full of ladysmock and two pure white swans performed a special flypast for us before swooping and curling down to the river.

spring flowers for pots and baskets

This is a wonderful time of year for spring colour in containers. Pots of cerise Parrot tulips, baskets of vivid blue muscari, and lots of different pots of daisies and violas are all looking wonderful in the spring sunshine. Evening light is particularly magical.

The Green Green Box of Home

The box is fast putting on new growth and looks so so green. In fact,unbelievably green. At the same time the hornbeam towers and hedge are just coming into leaf. The whole effect is an explosion of green. Spring green!

box blighty

Fifteen years ago we planted the box parterres in our formal garden. Over the last three years, sad signs of box blight have appeared in the upper portion and various attempts to conceal and replant have gradually failed. So last weekend we decided to remove about fifty plants and try and make good a repair at the beginning of one of the 'S' designs.

It was a huge task, but by the end of Sunday the job was complete with new membrane down, all concealed with gravel.

cottage garden shade

The Easter Weekend gave us chance to renew an area in our cottage garden which had become overgrown by a rampant evergreen honeysuckle climbing up a wooden arbour and from there into a laburnum. Indeed, it threatened the laburnum itself as well as all the other plants on an arbour, and all those trying to survive beneath the laburnum. An unusual arrow leaved ivy seemed to be the main survivor as ground cover along with some sweet cicely, aconites and sweet woodruff.

We cut down all twenty five feet of the rampaging evergreen honeysuckle and took it out by its roots. Then we reduced two other honeysuckles growing on the arbour to just a metre hoping they would regrow and, in time, once more provide a fragrant entrance to the cottage garden.We also thinned part of the laburnum and removed most of the ivy. The ground below was very very dry so we added two big loads of juicy, wormy, home made compost and now its ready for planting.

Various hellebores, aquilega, foxgloves, lily of the valley, geraniums and ferns will all be happy here, so I plan to split many of these plants from other areas of the garden or retrieve seedlings. Its always fun having a new area to plant up and over the next two weeks I should have filled the gaps although I might leave one or two just in case there are any special delights to buy at Malvern Show!

Mothering Sunday treat

Jonathan and Sarah came home for Mothering Sunday and we invited Hannah Miles and her mum and Mike, and friends John and Jane for afternoon tea.....who ever thought that people don't eat sandwiches, scones, and cakes any more! The simnel cake was a throw back to my childhood when it was alawys a tradition at Easter or Mothering Sunday to have a fruit cake filled with layers of marzipan and then decorated with primrose and maybe violets. Well this time I soaked the fruit in tea for a few hours, then made a marzipan mixture adding violet liqueur, and hey presto it was delicious. We had great fun....a real tea time sharing treat.

Violets

Violets are one of my favourite flowers at this time of year; tiny but so sweetly scented and lovely for flavouring jelly, roulades, vinegars etc. I have had great fun preserving some. It will be interesting to see whether the blue or white have the better flavour. But look at the blog below and just see the vinegar change colour after one day.

Violet vinegar

Some violets are blue, others are white, steeped in a light vinegar you can enjoy the flavour right through the year. Mix with a little oil and you have a dressing fit for a banquet.

Dusky delights from a memorable garden

I am in the middle of one of my favourite jobs; creating the planting plan for a client's new garden! An oval green oak arbour is to be a major features, and as it mellows with age it will turn a silvery grey.

I have a vision of claret vines scrambling up the pillars and over the top; large, dusky, dark, velvety leaves turning crimson in the autumn; and all the while, stunning with sunlight shafting through the gaps and backlighting the leaves. Peachy, apricot roses such as A Shropshire Lad might provide contrast inbetween them.

For extra special interest, the double Clematis called 'Mary Rose' Clematis viticella flora plena, will clamber up as well.........such softness, almost indescribable colouring somewhere between blue and purple. We have grown it here at Stevington for a number of years. But at Wollerton Old Hall in Shropshire www.wollertonoldhallgarden.com I saw it in early July eighteen months ago, trained over a low oak structure fence. I was mesmerised.

The silvery oak and dusky flowers was a partnership made in heaven. The garden's owner Lesley Jenkins, has a wonderful painterly eye. I hope I can capture this combination again; on the arbour. Its certainly worth a try.

Drawing emotion from Hokusai

I imagine that when the Japanese artist, Hokusai carefully crafted his Great Wave off Kanagawa as a woodcut in the 1830s, little did he think that a garden designer in Western Europe would try to capture the emotion in the image. For me the cresting seedheads of the miscanthus are like the foaming waves breaking into claws and having planted very tall miscanthus on either side of a grass path, it feels like walking through a giant wave, each side tossing and turning in the breeze.

In the second woodblock shown here called Fuji Seen From the Sea, dated 1834, the tension is shown through the fine lines which create the force of the wave. I think calamagrostis and miscanthus stems echo this linear force and I love to draw the comparison between his art and our style of gardening. Yesterday's cull (see blog below) bought a joy of its own....destructive yes, but working with these beautiful stems was a pleasure in itself.

Annual Cut of Grass

It was certainly breezy yesterday as we started our annual cut of our Hokusai Grasses. It was so sad to do it as the garden still looked fantastic, just as it had for the last six months since the miscanthus started to flower. But cut it we must or else it would never regenerate as we want it to.

I put on my gloves, roped the grasses, and then Simon used the hedgetrimmer to slice them off. We carried them away, and in between sleet storms we cleaned the gravel, as best we could, of all the debris.

Now we look forward to the new growth emerging over the next few weeks. By May/June the blue salvias which line the edge will be in flower, so will the calamagrostis and stipas. The various miscanthus including the two giants 'Goliath' and 'Professor Richard Hansen', as well as 'Silber Feder' and shorter 'Flamingo' will start to flower in September.

This sort of gardening is like a wonderful crescendo.....waiting expectantly for the high point; I love it at every stage but from Saturday to Sunday there was certainly a dramatic change!

Snowdrop Magnet

Snowdrops appear so fragile, elegant, clean, pure and yet have braved the coldest of wintry weathers. No wonder we love them.