october not in the garden

Happy Halloween. My shed is full of tender plants, scrambled in before the frosts this week, some of which have been hard. Autumn is on us:

Nuts from the Farmer's Market; cherry leaves in the weird new art garden by the Westgate; a Zinnia in a neighbour's allotment; apple chutney made from a friend's apples.

Ink caps on the tow path; the last of the Morning Glories; Inktober; wheat at an archaeobotany stand at the Science and Ideas festival.

Inktober continues; a cat in the fuchsias; Diwali wedding lights on Iffley Road; Virginia Creeper on the turn (but still surprisingly green for the end of October).

Garden-related selection from Instagram where I am @mrsjeremyday

inexorability of tree progress in the urban environment

 

 

a focal point for the big bed

It's always been a joke that it's my jungle; and that my jungle is massive. But this year for the first time the rain was so limited that the jungle seemed small and mean; did not flower; was crowded with every seasonal weed as they sensed weakness in the introduced plants, and moved in, busily and greenly, to take over.

I need a new perspective on the big bed, a focus that can be relied upon if the weather won't bring the flowers. Fortunately, I went to an art show this year that was full of great ideas in this area:

Idea 1: Statues



The obvious solution is a statue. My partner got quite excited by the idea of having a massive head or torso in the garden, something like a Frink or a Hirst. But I worry that may crowd out the flowers, I'd prefer something more vertical - not that that means I need to change artist of course. Try this Frink, that'd work, plenty of spaces to let the light through.

Idea 2: Columns




All-year round upright interest can be provided by columns. Columnar Cyprus are the normal solution here, but I don't trust my soil to keep them alive. I need something a bit more self-contained. White concrete will probably be less stressful and polluting than the rusty steel, but that does look lovely against the green foliage. Including teeth in the column may actually be possible; I could cast them from my denture.

Idea 3: Colourful Screens



Playmobil coloured perspex, lazer-cut painted wood, but either way, the sun can reach the plants here. The interest is in looking through the screen, and how this changes the plants around it. Pros: I might just be able to get everything I need from a local skip. Cons: it might just look like I raided a local skip.

Idea 4: Birds on Sticks



Tracey Emin's A moment without you is proper sculpture park art. Not quite enough bronze to tempt the scrappers, but enough to recall a sketch of a Roman Legionary banner, awkwardly drawn by a studious child. Beautiful. Also, as I hoard broomsticks (I'm always sure they'll come in useful, so I saw the dead broom heads off them and keep them in the corner of the garage) and own quite a lot of artificial birds (in some sort of attempt to connect with happy moments of my childhood probably) so could probably knock up some slightly cockeyed and sequinny spoofs of these in an afternoon.

Or I could just knuckle down and pull up the bindweed, tidy the planting, move the roses, put the miniature cherry in the middle, and call it a day, I guess.

Or maybe.....

counting the cost of 2018 part 2

Not everything hated 2018. Check out these two cheerful types:



The blue thing is one of my Tweedia seedlings (potted on into a pot a Lamium arrived in, which I didn't bother to de-label - the Lamium probably died under the bindweed, I've not checked yet) and those have all flowered and set seed this year, so the great Tweedia experiment can continue. With its slow growth habit, twitchy tenderness and sparse flowering, it's not exactly a gardener's favourite, but nothing has as stunning a sky blue, so I will persevere in teasing it into usefulness in my garden. Kniphofia (this variety, Timothy, is more of a lukewarm poker than a red hot poker) won't grow in my heavy soil but has a riot in the pots when the weather is warm.

But this loss stings: my Winter Savory died.



There were substantial losses and degradations along my culinary shelf (pots of herbs kept conveniently close to the kitchen).  Savory is an unfashionable seasoning, but one I don't like to be without (nowadays the internet provides, but I remember questing for it through Cowley Road's multifarious delicatessens with persistence and futility) and the fresh leaves of the winter herb - more pungent, greener, and with that proper savoury bang - are a pleasure and a joy in cocktails, fries and stews alike. I shall have to rebuy, but it's hard letting go of an old herb plant. They grow slowly when confined in a pot, and I've had this one for years. As you can see, I'll also have to replace that Thyme, but Thymes go every few years anyway, and there's always a new cultivar to try.

I've already spoken about the carnage wrought amongst my tender fuchsias by the late frosts, but let's round up what happened to the hardy ones:



That dead stem is - or rather was - Fuchsia Space Shuttle. It's fairly hardy in the border, but big, so I'd been dwarfing it in a pot. Which froze through, completely, for a week, killing it. That'll be a challenge to replace. All the other fuchsias sprinted straight to fruits - that's ultra-reliable Delta's Sarah there, exploring its berry producing potential. Fuchsia berries are edible, but taste like boarding school jam and do not have the same prettiness as the flowers, so I spent a lot of time picking off fuchsia fruits to restimulate flowering this year, with mixed success.

Even my "wet bed" (which is pretty much on the spring line) had a dry year. Look at the rust on the withered crocosmia, a plant which should be able to tolerate nigh-everything.



That final picture is from a plant new this year which will not be coming back. It never found any available water in the bed (the wet bed, ha ha) and so it limped on for months, essentially drinking the cold tap-water I put over everything regularly. That leaf damage is what you get when a plant tries to live like that, and is essentially why, some years, you just are not able to water enough.

reflections on tomatoes

My tomatoes are still crowding the greenhouse. I probably should take them down (er, about two weeks ago) but this October the sun and bright and warm has been stretching on, and my tomatoes are still going and going which may be because I never got round to stopping them of course).

You stop tomatoes because fruit has no chance of setting and/or ripening late in the year, but I've found that although smaller, the fruit retains a good flavour, even if you strip it off a dead plant. Green fruits of any size will ripen if put indoors in an earthenware bowl, as long as there's one ripe fruit in the bowl, so after the fruits come down I thread them through bowls, letting the ripen each other, using them as they ripen. I've still been eating tomatoes at Christmas in some years.



I got to this through experimentation, which is helpful for the backgardener, because your terroir, light levels, air-flow etc. will both be quite unique and not necessarily very alterable (my neighbour's trees, for example, aren't an alterable factor). This year's experiments have been quite minimal, but I did hang banana skins in the greenhouse to kick-start ripening, and I think that helped get around my lack of sun; I also took a pruning approach, removing shoots to encourage air-flow and pollinators rather than firmly removing side-shoots... and got more flowers but fewer, smaller fruit. You win some, you lose some.

Experimenting with tomatoes is deliciously easy. They germinate cheerfully, grow mutably and tolerate all manner of exotic abuse. The CRISPR kiddies have been mucking around with tomatoes with predictably exotic results, pink tomatoes, seedless tomatoes.

Aren't they beautiful? Blue ought to be possible, too. I've grown heritage varieties that are quite rich shades of purple (there are heritage pinks too, though none quite as Barbie as these). The fruit bowl of the future is coming, and it's coloured like rainbow unicorns.

counting the cost of 2018 part 1

I bought a beautiful Red Witch Hazel from a gardening show. But it was in a pot, and like several other things in my garden was optimistic about last year's early and unseasonably warm spring, and then destroyed by winter's sting in the tail; a week at about -1, reduced to -10 by wind chill. I waited for it to recover. It didn't recover.



Marigolds can cope with any conditions, of course - but this frantic flower-head resprout suggests that they had a very hard summer this year. Not much survived in the way of marigolds this year; only a couple in pots where the main plant died. Too much water competition from the other plants.



The grub that has been eating my Service Bush for almost two years now came to a sticky end, unable to exit its flight hole. Honestly, I'm not sure if that's the beetle or a parasitic wasp in the end, but either way it didn't survive. When I took this problem (at an earlier stage) to a gardening forum the best suggestion I got was "a full coppice, if practical", but I'm letting nature take its course. As ever, the Service Bush is way ahead of me and has already started a sort of emergency back-up resprout from its bole, anticipating the possibility that this isn't recoverable damage (it certainly had a bit of a rough year with pretty much no fresh growth).



Lots of plants that could get away with not flowering gave it a miss or well well down on flower this year. Of the few that did appear, I got used to water-marked and water-damaged petals from cold tap water. This geranium is normally quite busy. This year; one flower spike.



No Himalayan poppies this year. The two smaller plants fell prey to dandelions growing apparently in the same hole as them. A neat herbicidal trick if the invading weed can manage it, as when you take out the dandelion you can't avoid damaging the poppy too and you can't get all the dandelion, and guess which plant bounces back better... this is the "big, healthy plant". It did very badly this year. I don't know if it'll be back next year. My hopes aren't high.



These withered fronds are part of the the ruins of my tree fern. I wrapped it. I tried to keep it wet enough not to die, but dry enough not to freeze. Nothing helped in the teeth of that brutal late-spring cold snap we suffered. The growth plate died, leaving a steadily withering halo of dying fronds which I observed and watered sadly all summer, but it wasn't coming back. I'll shortly decant the dead stump from its last-chance bucket into some kind of final resting place in the garden. It's quite sculptural, in its own "oops I died" kind of way.



Finally, to the Rhododendron. This is its third or fourth crop of flowers, in late July. The flowers flushed, withered, dropped and were replaced by more flowers continuously all summer. There was never a good bush full of flowers at any stage, the best it managed was one or two fit blooms on a bush that mostly looked like this. Hopefully this wasn't a panic-and-give-up move. Next spring will tell.

tiny round wharf gardens