The Constant Gardener

Bagging my salad list

2012-01-28T10:36:00.001Z

Gone are the days when we were satisfied with a limp lettuce leaf or two plonked on the plate.

Love them or loathe them, bagged supermarket salads have opened our eyes: we now know the delights of a salad full of colour and texture, with not only lettuces but also herbs, and a range of flavours from mild and sweet to spicy, peppery or bitter.

One of the many reasons I leapt at the chance to join VP's 52-week Salad Challenge is that I've never quite managed to organise things so that I have a good mix of salad ingredients to pick at any one time.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised I was looking for my perfect, home-grown supermarket bagged salad. Without the bags, without the chemicals, and without the carbon footprint.

But more than the environmental benefits, I want it to be more interesting than the actual ones you buy from the supermarket; more personalised than the salad seed mixes you can buy from the seed companies. One made just for me.

One problem: deciding what to grow. Well - where better to start compiling a shopping list than the ingredients list on that bag of supermarket salad currently languishing in the drawer at the bottom of the fridge.

At the moment, mine is a standard issue Florette Mixed (I like Florette as it’s one of the few brands which states where the ingredients are sourced – and that’s the UK, and Lincolnshire in particular, all year round, it seems. Why others are so coy about where their salads are from I've no idea. Could it be they're shipping it in from halfway around the world even though we can grow it here?)

Ingredients: Frisée lettuce (we know this as curly endive: it has a pleasantly bitter tang, and needs blanching), iceberg lettuce and radicchio which adds a splash of burgundy to the green. Right: that’s three on this list, although last time I tried to grow iceberg it refused to heart up.

Florette's Crispy adds lambs' lettuce to the list but omits the Iceberg. We buy both, can't remember which I prefer (maybe that should tell me something, though).

From the rest of their range I like the sound of 'Four Leaf Salad': that's Lettuce 'Can Can' (frilly, green, new one on me but widely available), lambs' lettuce, red butterhead (this one from T&M looks really good) and something they refer to as 'red multileaf' – I'm taking that to be a mix of red lettuce such as Lollo Rossa.

Let's try Essential Waitrose mixed salad: green Batavia, Apollo lettuce, red oak leaf and Lollo Rossa. Red oak leaf and Lollo Rossa are old friends and I’ll be glad to give them house room again. Batavia turns out to be another frilly-leaf lettuce type; and I think Apollo is only grown for commercial use as I can’t find it offered to gardeners. It’s a Romaine lettuce – a type I like anyway, so I’ll just have to find a substitute.

So far... so everyday though. I'm not really looking to grow a wide range of lettuces. I'm after something a bit more interesting. I'm after some herbs in my salads. And maybe some peppery zing.

Waitrose baby leaf herb salad mix: very vague about the lettuce content, but adds baby spinach, rocket, flat-leaf parsley and chives (interestingly, the mix states the proportions of salad leaves to herbs: it’s 78% salad leaves to 22% herbs. So a handful of herbs to every four of lettuce-type leaves then).

Other interesting bits from the Waitrose range include their Tenderleaf Salad: lamb's lettuce, pea tops and chard.

I had a hunt through other ranges, most of which we've tried at some point: Sainsbury's Herb Salad is Lollo Rossa, Cos lettuce, rocket, coriander and parsley (again with that 80/20 ratio of lettuce to herbs).

Then there's Steve's Leaves: relatively new in town but with a good and improving environmental policy. Pea Shoots and Baby Leaves is a 40/60 mix of pea shoots, and baby spinach and chard. Other mixes in the range include wasabi (now that should be interesting), and watercress.

But you know what? I think we can do better than all that.

I want to try some heritage lettuces, with their quirky flavours and splashed or ruched leaves. I want to throw in some oriental leaves: mizuna, peppery red mustard, maybe chrysanthemum greens. And oddities like samphire and New Zealand spinach.

I shall report back via these pages. Should be an interesting year!

Wordless Wednesday: Perfect

2012-01-25T13:44:00.000Z

Watch the birdie

2012-01-23T21:49:00.000Z

Pinecones (left) and terracotta pot (right)
Happy (cleaned-up) child (centre)

Our annual transmogrification into a nation of twitchers happens this Saturday and Sunday: it's the Big Garden Birdwatch, organised by the RSPB and just getting bigger... and bigger.

In fact, for over 30 years it's been the barometer of change, charting the effect of modern life on our most vulnerable garden friends.

Last year broke all the records again: over 600,000 people took part and spent an hour freezing their... ahem, noses off for an hour (remember the weather?) recording the birds which visited there.

This year, with a bit of luck, it'll all be a bit more balmy and as long as the rain stays off we'll have a much nicer time. I'm busy playing with some ponies on Saturday but am hoping to join in on Sunday.

Our triple-pinecone extravaganza
in all its gloopy glory

Our garden is these days surrounded by proper old-fashioned hedgerows on all sides - five-star habitat for birds - so I'm hoping that we'll be busy (a lot busier than the first time I tried it, anyway - that was a few years ago now but we were living in built-up Surrey suburbia at the time, the frost was thick on the ground and I nearly got hypothermia for the sake of one measly starling).

The RSPB encourages you to tempt the birds into your garden with lots of irresistible bird feed, baths and such like. And this gave me an idea.

I help out from time to time at the local youth club, which involves coming up with activities which the children might enjoy. So last week, we made bird feeders.

This has it all for kids: it's wondrously messy, so simple even the littlies could join in, and dead cheap (we made around 20 bird feeders for all of four quid). So this week, set aside a little time with the small people in your life, suspend your misgivings where grease combined with birdfeed and your kitchen surfaces are concerned, and get stuck in for the best Birdwatch ever.

You will need:
- a block of lard, at room temperature: we found that a third of a one pound block of lard was enough to do each bird feeder
- bird seed: around two 1kg bags did our 20 feeders with some left over
- assorted containers. We used:

small logs, no more than 10cm (4") diameter, hollowed out with a Forstener bit (that's a bit of a techie thing which will I hope mean something to blokes: the hubster told me how to spell it and I have absolutely no idea what he was on about)
pine cones (opened): ours were rather small, so we tied them into bunches of three, but if you've got larger cones they can be used singly
small terracotta plant pots
yoghurt pots

- string and scissors
- bowls
- plastic bags
- washing up liquid, for clearing up

1) Take your lard and with your hands, mush it up. This is a child's idea of heaven and an adult's idea of hell. But a messy child is a happy child, so take comfort in that expression of unbridled glee.
2) Tip a handful of birdseed into a bowl, and then mash the lard into it, mixing lard and birdseed well in together in a lovely greasy mushy splodge.
3) Adults, while this is happening, can be tying bits of string to whatever you're going to make the bird feeder out of. We found a few techniques which worked:

the logs needed a U-bend staple banged into the top: the 11-year-old boys took to this like ducks to water and at last found a youth club activity they could relate to. Loop the string through and you're done.
pine cones: put the pinecone upside down and loop the string around the fat end, weaving it under the open segments wherever possible.
terracotta plant pots: just poke the string through the drainage hole and tie in a loop over the top: the pot then hangs on its side (easy for birds to access)
yoghurt pots: poke a hole in the bottom (or in the side, if you want it to hang horizontally) and thread the string through. Then get a matchstick and tie the end of the string that's inside the pot around it. When you pull the string tight to hang the bird feeder, the matchstick holds it nicely in place.

4) Fill your bird feeder with the lard-and-birdseed mash. With pinecones, you'll need to work it into the cracks between the open segments: once you've finished it looks like a ball. The holes in the logs worked beautifully, filled to the brim with mush: yoghurt pots and plant pots were simplicity itself to fill. Cram as much in as possible and smooth it off.
5) Place your completed bird feeder on a plastic bag in the fridge for the lard to harden again.
6) Then hang from your chosen tree, get out your RSPB identification chart, sit back and enjoy your annual hour's birdwatching.

The Big Seed Giveaway

2012-01-20T09:22:00.000Z

Anyone want some seeds?

One of my new resolutions for this year is to get stricter with the number of seeds I sow. No - really. I will.

(At this point, probably best not to mention the fat envelope full of little packets of RHS seeds I found while clearing out which are just so mouthwateringly gorgeous I can't bear to let them go).

The thing is that every March I pull out the old floppy disc* box I use for keeping my seed packets in, and rifle through the section labelled - rather conventionally - 'March'.

This is where I stuff all the packets of seed I acquire during the year, just as somewhere to put them, really. Result: far too many seeds. And I mean far too many: this year I counted around 60 packets I know for sure I will not have time, space or if I'm honest inclination to grow.

No point in keeping all these spare seed packets: but what to do? They're all within date - some with 'sow-by' dates this year but most longer than that - and it seems such a waste just to chuck them out. Nearly all are pristine and unopened: some have lost their outer packets and therefore instructions, but I still know (because I've written it on the inner foil packets) the variety and sow-by date.

My usual fallback is to offload them at a seed swap, but I'm not planning to go to one this year: last year's was great but it was a bit of a hike, being in Wiltshire, and I haven't found one near enough to go to around here (yet). And besides, I've already got quite enough seed to sow to be getting on with for this year and - see resolution above - I really, honestly, truthfully don't need any more.

So I thought I'd just... well... give them away, in my own sort of seed swap without the swap bit.

Therefore, I hereby announce, in its inaugural year of what I suspect may become an annual event...

The CG Big Seed Giveaway for 2012

(rules (not many, I hope) follow the list)

Flowers:
(I'm having to be a bit coy about the exact varieties in some cases, so where I've only listed the name + colour, email me if you want the full details (see below))

Poppy (Papaver laciniatum) (pink) (2 packets available) - both taken
Hollyhock (two-tone mix) - taken
Godetia (pink) - taken
Foxglove (pink)
Foxglove (white with purple dots) - taken
Foxglove (compact, pink) - taken
Calendula (single, yellow)
Coreopsis grandiflora - taken
Antirrhinum dwarf mix
Phlox (mauve mix) - taken
Zinnia (striped mix) - taken
Californian poppy (double, mix) - taken
Salpiglossis (wine-red)
Cornflower (pink & white mix) - taken
Petunia (pink and white mix) - taken
Wildflower mix (for bees) - taken
Gaillardia (butter yellow) - taken

Vegetables:
Courgette (yellow variety) (2 packets available) - both taken
Chilli pepper 'Hot Cayenne' - taken
Chilli pepper (medium hot, red) - taken
Brussels sprout 'Evesham Special' - taken
Carrot (yellow variety) - taken
Carrot (white variety) - taken
Cabbage (green coleslaw type, autumn/winter variety) - taken
Cauliflower 'Aalsmeer' - taken
Tomato 'Moneymaker' - taken
Tomato (patio variety, cherry) - taken
Onion 'Long Red Florence' - taken
Onion 'Ailsa Craig' - taken

Seeds saved by me (NB I am a little erratic on the seed-saving side so viability can't be guaranteed, though it's quite likely: all the following are heritage varieties)

Martock beans (9 packets) - 3 taken
Squash 'Potimarron' (9 packets) - 6 taken
Climbing French bean 'George's' (9 packets) - 4 taken

Opened packets (still with plenty of seed in):
Cabbage 'Ruby Ball' - taken
Beetroot 'Chioggia' - taken
Bronze fennel - taken
Artichoke 'Purple Globe' - taken
Runner beans (no variety given as this was a seed swap acquisition) - taken

How to claim your free seeds:
- comment below giving the names of the seeds you want (if you have any questions about how this works, do just ask. Ditto re more information on any of the named varieties above - most of those named can be found on the interweb if you google)
- then send an email to sally dot nex at btinternet dot com confirming your request
- I'll send you an email back giving you my address
- send an SAE to me and I'll put the seeds in the envelope and post it back to you
- I'll update this post regularly giving details of what's gone and what's left
- the giveaway will last for a week, until 27 January: since this post will go wandering off down the blog, follow me on Twitter (@sallynex) for updates
- if you enjoy growing your seeds, please blog about them later in the year if you can!

Rules:
- no more than 10 packets of seed and no more than one packet of the same variety per person.
- after the week is up, I'll divvy up the remainder between those who have said they want more than 10 packets, so do indicate if you'd like to be part of this.
- first to place their order in the comments below gets the seed
- sorry but the offer is only open to UK respondents, otherwise I'll get clobbered by customs and those nice people who try to stop nasty diseases crossing borders on the backs of foreign seeds

*remember floppy discs? Mine were 3 1/2" and made a whirring noise when you put them in the computer: they seemed the ultimate in hi-techery at the time. The only thing I couldn't quite work out was why they were called floppy when they were so... well... un-floppy. All in all it was quite a relief when CDs and memory sticks came along and relieved me of having to think about it any more.

Wordless Wednesday: January rose

2012-01-18T09:37:00.000Z

(with credit to the hubster, who takes a mean photograph)

January flowers

2012-01-15T21:34:00.000Z

And now for probably the most peculiar January Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day post I shall ever write (I hope).

As all British gardeners are acutely aware, this has not been our usual chilly frost-bitten winter in Blighty. Normally we're just about poking around for the first nubs of snowdrops and crocuses edging warily through the earth to see if it's spring yet (it isn't).

We have our greenhouse heaters going at full blast, we have several layers on just to crunch up the drive (trying not to slip embarrassingly onto our backside in the process) the sun hasn't been seen since late October and we're generally a bit on the grumpy side.

We don't - generally speaking, and last year (and the north) excepted - even have any snow to make us feel all this misery has been worth it: it's usually alternating between cold and sodden, cold and frozen, cold and windy and drizzle (cold).

Not so the winter of 2011/12. We've been struggling to fall below double-digit temperatures at night: by day it's positively balmy. My garden is full of snowdrops: the crocuses are edging into flower. The roses and nasturtiums haven't stopped since September: even my Nicotiana mutabilis were still going strong until the first hard frost of the year struck just two days ago, on 13 January. Yes, you read right: the first frost of the year. I have never, ever had it frost-free for so long.

I am rewarded by more blooms in my garden than I have ever had before in January: the winter flowerers are overlapping with the spring flowerers and some of the summer flowerers which have refused to go to bed. Part of me loves it and is revelling in the spectacle, to say nothing of the warmth and the spring-like sunshine. And part of me is filled with dread at the havoc this will play when the true spring begins. Will we even have one, I wonder?

Valerian (Valeriana officinalis)

Alpine strawberry 'Baron von Solemacher'

Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis)

Skimmia japonica 'Rubella'

Rose: one of several we refer to as our 'grandma roses'

Pelargoniums still flowering in the terracotta pots on the patio

A host of golden daffodils on the hill

Even the lawn has daisies already...

And this hydrangea has forgotten to stop flowering

Leucojum vernum

Mahonia x media

Nasturtiums

Viburnum x bodnantense 'Dawn'

PS by way of a reminder of how very odd all this is: I stumbled across this picture today, taken of our garden almost exactly a year ago.

Thanks go as always to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day!

Have you seen this gooseberry?

2012-01-13T18:25:00.000Z

I love a good urban myth. A good rural myth is even better.

There is a gooseberry known as the Flintshire gooseberry. It is, rumour has it, a prolific cropper: it was born and bred in north-east Wales, around the Wrexham area, and if you ask anyone around there who knows fruit, they'll mention it with pride as their local gooseberry.

The trouble is, it may not even exist.

One man has been looking for this gooseberry, quite hard, since 2003, and still hasn't found it. He's Simon Farr, who runs the North East Wales Orchards Initiative, currently surveying and reviving ancient orchards in north-east Wales and neighbouring counties in England. Now even he admits he's beginning to wonder if it's a myth.

'We've gone through the old catalogues and looked in all sorts of places to find it,' he told me,' and there's not even a description.'

His orchards survey already has one high-profile success story when it comes to finding obscure fruit: the Denbigh Plum, first mentioned in 1785 and believed to be the only surviving native Welsh plum, was almost extinct a few years ago. Then its plight was highlighted by the project, and caught the attention of a chap called Ian Sturrock.

Ian has a good pedigree on saving rare fruit: he's responsible for rescuing the Bardsey Apple, the last tree of which was found growing on an island off the north coast of Wales. Much grafting later and you can even buy one to grow in your garden; and so it is with the Denbigh Plum. In fact so complete is this fruit's return from obscurity that it now has its own festival.

Not so the Flintshire gooseberry, though. Simon says almost everyone in the area can tell you about it: if it is a myth, it's certainly a persistent one. Some even remember having a Flintshire gooseberry in their gardens, or their parents' gardens. What's worse, all they can tell you is that it was a prolific cropper: no word about what it looked like, or even if it was a green or a purple variety.

Simon thinks it might just be a chance seedling from a wild gooseberry, found commonly in the hedgerows here: they're also reported growing further afield, too, in the Lake District and Northumberland.

Wild gooseberries are small, the size of marbles (the Plants for a Future database has them at 1cm diameter), and also rather hairy and can be sharp to the taste (though if you can find the plum red ones, they're much sweeter – if you beat the wasps to it).

There's a fair bit of debate over whether these hedgerow gooseberries are truly wild, or just garden escapees. There's no particular reason why Ribes uva-crispa shouldn't be a wilding: it grows perfectly well in most temperate woodland settings, and there's a long and honourable tradition of wild gooseberries in America, though they're different species: there's Ribes oxyacanthoides, the bristly wild gooseberry; R. cynosbati, the prickly gooseberry; and with no small relief R. hirtellum, which is merely a bit hairy.

And there is a wealth of common names for gooseberries – 26 of them, grossetts, feaberries, goosegogs... – which hints at a long history. They've been eaten since the 13^th century and grown in gardens since the 16^th century, although it was (isn't it always) the Victorians who really shook things up in the gooseberry world by breeding many of the best-loved varieties we grow today.

But those who argue that the hedgerow plants are from the garden point out that they weren't recorded in the wild till 1763 – long after it was grown in cultivation. And there's an argument that they aren't British native plants after all: the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) certainly takes this view, pointing out that the spread of the wild gooseberry has happened since they became popular in gardens. But you can always argue the toss on native status, especially in this case.

Anyway, back to the Flintshire gooseberry: poor Simon is still on the hunt for it, and regularly follows up leads such as the old market gardens in Rhyll said to have a healthy population of Flintshire gooseberries which turned out to be a fine but nonetheless inescapably English collection of old varieties.

So have you seen this gooseberry? If you think you might have it growing in your garden – the North East Wales Orchard Initiative would like to hear from you.

Wordless Wednesday: January strawberries

2012-01-11T12:37:00.000Z

A walk on the wild side: Gorse

2012-01-09T22:09:00.000Z

Ulex europaeus catching my eye in the morning sunlight

'It's just the sort of place,' he explained, 'for an Ambush.'

'What sort of bush?' whispered Pooh to Piglet. 'A gorse-bush?'

'My Dear Pooh,' said Owl in his superior way. 'Don't you know what an Ambush is?'

'Owl,' said Piglet, looking round at him severely. 'Pooh's whisper was a perfectly private whisper and there was no need - '

'An Ambush,' said Owl,' is a sort of Surprise.'

'So is a gorse-bush sometimes,' said Pooh.

Gorse is not a much-loved plant.

It is unremittingly prickly. In fact it has become a byword for all that is prickly in life. Winnie the Pooh's wariness on the subject of gorse-bushes came from a close encounter with one after his experiment with the bees failed spectacularly. And whenever the Famous Five needed a really good hiding place, there was always a handy gorse bush around (mysteriously and perhaps a little conveniently always hollow on the inside).

But for the last month my eye has been irresistibly caught every day as I walk the dogs by a vivid flash of yellow in the hedgerow. It stops you in your tracks: the only bright colour in a winter landscape of sepia brown and green.

I think it must have blown in from Exmoor, 40 miles to the west, as we're on a relatively gentle hillside of hazel hedgerows and sleepy sheep and it's the only gorse bush for miles.

West Country names belie a relationship between man and gorse bush as old as the hills it grows on. Another common name for the plant is furze, and place names like Furzey Island off the Dorset coast, Furzey Gardens in the New Forest, and the names of numerous farms, roads and houses reveal the plant's long history here (Furzey is also a common local surname in Somerset).

It was once almost indispensable. The fierce burning properties of gorse made it perfect fuel for fires hot enough to bake bricks: you're well advised not to grow gorse close to a house as it's prone to spontaneous combustion in a prolonged drought.

People made it into fearsome besom brooms to sweep chimneys and hung their clothes out to dry on it as it held them in place better than any clothes peg. It is a good strong dye, the flowers turning cloth yellow or green and the bark a smokey darker green, it's a medicine for jaundice, kidney stones and scarlet fever, and the flower buds make good caper substitutes. The flowers are edible and can be used in salads, steeped in boiling water for a tea, or turned into wine (recipe here: the Vikings are rumoured to have brewed a gorse beer, which may explain their generally atrocious behaviour).

It was also much used to keep witches away: the common confusion between gorse and broom comes from its ancient use as a broom to sweep curses and hexes away from the door of the house.

There are three native gorses: U. europaeus, U. gallii (found, as the name suggests, on Welsh mountainsides, and smaller than the common gorse); and U. minor, almost prostrate, flowering in autumn and found mainly in the New Forest. Gorse flowering alongside heather in great swathes across the moorlands is probably one of the most breathtaking of Britain's natural spectacles.

But - bright yellow splashes in hedgerows aside – it's not something you'd have in your garden, surely.

Well I'd just like to make a little plea for this old friend. If you have a coastal garden, or one where the soil is really, really poor, there are few plants which will thrive better. It makes a dense and thorough windbreak: and it'll keep any amount of burglars out.

And it is just wonderful for wildlife, particularly bees. As well as the main flourish in winter and early spring, it produces a few flowers sporadically all year round ('When gorse is out of blossom, kissing's out of fashion', the old saying goes), which bumblebees find irresistible. The flowers, incidentally, are as explosive as the seedpods: they go off like a cannon the moment the bee clambers on, pasting the poor insect with pollen.

There are cultivated forms: U. gallii 'Mizen' is prostrate and tiny, growing to just 30cm x 30cm, and there was once a useful-sounding U. europaeus 'Strictus' (sometimes 'Fastigiatus') which makes for a good low hedge, though it's no longer listed, sadly.

More commonly-found is Ulex europaeus 'Plenus' or sometimes 'Flore Pleno', compact and double and recommended by Christopher Lloyd who calls it 'a fine sight in spring' and says it has coconut-scented blooms (he's less keen on gorse when it comes to propagating the stuff: 'a painful operation best left to the nurseryman', he says).

La vraie echalote

2012-01-06T18:05:00.002Z

'Hative de Niort' shallots

Well. Just when you thought you were starting to know quite a lot, you realise you don't know a damn thing at at all.

I've been growing shallots for many years now. I like their ability to store for – well, pretty indefinitely, which makes them a good follow-on once the main crop of onions is over. And there's something rather pleasing about watching them grow and magically spread into that open palm of multiple bulbs.

But I've never been able to get that thing the chefs go on about – the whole shallot flavour thing. Some particularly picky chefs refuse to use anything else. All the shallots I'd grown were distinctly oniony: nothing to choose, in fact, between them and my regular onions.

Until... I grew French shallots.

'Hative de Niort' was the one that opened my eyes. I can't remember where I came across them: I was probably on the hunt for my more usual 'Golden Gourmet' or 'Red Sun'.

I have a weakness for any French vegetables as they are invariably exceptionally good to eat. Think 'Vitelotte' potatoes; 'Charentais' melons; 'Chantenay' carrots. Sometimes they're trickier to grow: but that's only because for the French taste is everything and if you can't grow it, well tant pis. And all the better for that, I say (though I defy anyone to produce a 'Marmande' beefsteak tomato with more edible flesh than blemishes).

Back to shallots, 'Hative de Niort' were a revelation. Such plumpness. Such flavour. By far, in fact by a country mile the best shallots I have ever, ever grown. And the flavour was everything they said a shallot should be: mild, subtle, definitely different from onions. Ah. So this is what they were on about.

I graduated from 'Hative de Niort' to 'Echalote Grise', which is just French for Grey Shallot. Doesn't sound very enticing, until you grow the actual shallot: again, plump, with a smoky sheen to the skin, richly flavoured and so silkily beautiful that other shallots simply curl up in embarrassment alongside.

Now I discover from my new favourite gardening blog, 'Au Potager' (written in English by an American garden writer from Indianapolis living in Paris and Normandy.... oh, do keep up) that there's a reason for this head-and-shoulders superiority.

And that reason is that until now, I haven't been growing shallots at all.

You see, the French shallot grows differently. If you buy a packet of shallot seeds, at least according to French growers, you aren't buying shallots at all.

(Don't mention this to the Dutch, who by and large are responsible for the seed-grown varieties. Though they are also behind standard-issue bargain-basement supermarket tomatoes, so that says it all, really).

I confess I've never gone to the trouble of growing shallots from seed: far too lazy when sets are available. But of course 'shallot' sets like the best-selling 'Golden Gourmet' are technically seed-raised.

And what about exhibition shallot growers, who make a point of raising their shallots from seed – longer growing season, better selection of varieties and less tendency to bolt, so you're more likely to end up with perfect shallots for sweeping the board at the village horticultural show. Except they aren't shallots.

L'échalote traditionnelle, or true shallot, however, propagates itself vegetatively, and – get this – doesn't ever set seed. And the flavour is therefore fully developed, rich, elegant, vastly superior.

Seed-grown shallots, on the other hand, are just mini-onions, with the same sharp taste. So that explains my disappointing 'Golden Gourmets' then. And you've got to ask yourself what is the point of that.

To tell the difference, look for the scar on the root plate: French shallots have a small flat rootless area where the offset came away from the parent. Also traditional shallots have two central cores when you cut the bulb open: seed-raised have just one.

So the hunt begins for as many French échalote traditionelle varieties as I can find. It's a short list:

Echalote Grise: said to have superior flavour even by French standards. I think 'Griselle' is the same thing

Hative de Niort: fatter, flatter bulbs: super, duper flavour
Jermor, Longor: recently-bred in France and 'Jersey' long types: inferior to the above but still good

If anyone else has found other varieties for me to try, do let me know.

Wordless Wednesday: Early

2012-01-04T08:34:00.000Z

Garden words: The January Review

2012-01-02T22:33:00.000Z

Wicked Bugs

Amy Stewart

There are some books that just make you go 'Well. I never knew that.' And then there are books which make you say it over and over again, to the point where you start bringing up random facts in conversation with friends and family, just to get them out of your head, and when those facts happen to be about small and often fearsome things with a lot of legs your friends and family quickly start looking at you a teensy bit oddly.

Did you know, for example, that British diplomat Charles Stoddart was condemned to spend four years being eaten alive by blood-sucking assassin bugs while held captive in an Uzbek bug pit in the mid-19^th century?

Or that there is a caterpillar in south America so venomous that if you happen to tread on them barefoot you suffer massive internal bleeding and organ failure? Or that the crew who sailed to America with Christopher Columbus were driven so mad by the chigoe flea, which buries itself under a toenail and lives out its life there, that they cut off their own toes to get rid of it?

Nope, nor me.

You will have guessed by now that 'Wicked Bugs' isn't, strictly speaking, a gardening book, but since we gardeners spend such a lot of our time either encouraging in 'good' bugs (ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies) or murdering 'bad' ones (aphids, caterpillars, whitefly, slugs: the list goes on... and on...) then a book about them can only be endlessly fascinating.

There is a section on garden pests which is... well... almost as interesting as the ones about sailors and armies (did you know some used to throw clay pots full of scorpions at advancing Roman troops, circa 200AD, by the way?) though it does suffer a little from a sudden outbreak of advice-giving. I did think the bit about aphids was horrifying though: apparently one female aphid is born already containing within her the beginnings of a 'daughter' who is herself already pregnant with a third generation. Wow. That explains a lot.

Others, though, like the terrifyingly efficient Colorado potato beetle, are given a section all their own, so dreadful are they. The Germans thought the US Army was waging biological warfare by dropping Colorado beetles on their heads from planes during the Second World War, you know.

And so Amy Stewart gambols on through tales and titbits so surprising, arresting and downright gut-churning that I have been glued to this book ever since I started on page one. I love her obvious delight in her subject and her ability to tell a good yarn; she has a talent for winkling out little snippets of unfeasibly extraordinary information and using it to grab you by the ears. I just wish I knew how she finds out this stuff.

Little niggles: this is an unremittingly American book, to which you have to adjust yourself and stop chuntering about early on. Sometimes that's a good thing: I've always loved the American ability to find an original turn of phrase (no clichés here).

But there's a general assumption that the reader's attention is wandering off all the time (surely impossible given the content of almost every page), so we've got silly little 'pull-quote' things repeating choice bits of a paragraph in a larger type, presumably to titivate the reader but which end up interrupting the flow. I trained myself to ignore them.

Otherwise, though, the book is a gorgeous little thing: I loved its styling as a battered field notebook, and the line drawings and etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs are simply exquisite and a master touch.

Amy already has a more plant-oriented book out, 'Wicked Plants', all about poisonous plants, and it's now on my must-have list. Incidentally. you can read a bit more about the book in Amy's own words on the BBC Gardening blog.

That was the year that was: 2011

2011-12-31T21:08:00.000Z

As regular readers know, one of my freelance hats is as one half of the news team for the RHS journal The Garden. That means I spend an awful lot of my time trying to find out what's going on.

And this year it's been pretty busy one by gardening standards. So in the great tradition of New Year's Eve nostalgia: here's a look back at an eventful 2011.

It was a good year for...

Cleve West: there was no getting away from him. First his ridiculously good garden at Chelsea scooped Best in Show, and as if that wasn't enough the man goes and writes a book that gets shortlisted for awards and all sorts. One can only hope he develops a tiddlywinks fetish next year to give everyone else a look-in.

Giant veg: It all started with pot leeks the size of bollards at the Tatton Flower Show and went on to see records toppling left right and centre, both at the National Vegetable Show – home of the newly-crowned world's biggest swede (37.29kg) – and in back gardens: the world's heaviest spud, at 3.8kg, was grown this year by amateur gardener Peter Glazebrook in Nottinghamshire.

Disease: phytophthora (both lateralis, currently working its way through the nation's Lawson's cypress trees, and ramorum, now responsible for wiping out millions of Japanese larch across the West Country), citrus longhorn beetle, oak processionary moth: the list of imported invaders is lengthening almost as fast as their relentless march across the UK. Luckily Kew has built a whopping state-of-the-art quarantine centre to try and stop them getting in in the first place; and the RHS is also building a new scientific research centre at Wisley to try and figure out how to tackle them once they've arrived. The fight-back starts here.

Clumsy gardeners, who can now rest easy in the sure knowledge that they will never do anything worse than the American gardener who managed to drive a pair of secateurs through his eye socket and into his skull, and still survived to tell the tale.

It was a bad year for...

Weather forecasters, who must have given up on comparing anything to 'normal' conditions now as it's so long since we've had anything that can remotely be described as normal. This year it was a spring that was more like summer, followed by an autumn-like summer and a summer-like autumn, too. Confused? So are your plants.

The Queen who can't find herself a gardener. Possibly something to do with the fact that she lives in SW1A – one of the country's most expensive postcodes – yet is offering a salary that would barely pay the rent.

First-year British botany students, who no longer exist. The 2011 academic year began with not a single undergraduate course offered in the subject of 'botany'; these days it's labelled 'plant science' and more often offered as a specialism within a wider biological sciences degree. It's telling that Kew hasn't taken on a single British botany – or even 'plant science' - graduate in five years.

David Cameron – well, yes, for all sorts of reasons. But also for revealing that he equates gardeners with street cleaners in his estimation of the worth of what we do. Cue every pressure group in the industry bearing down on him in justifiable wrath. Serves him right.

Elks, at least the one who got drunk on fermenting apple windfalls and woke up next morning to find itself dangling from a tree with no idea how it got there. And no doubt the mother of all hangovers.

Hatches...

The Olympic Park appeared out of a vast stretch of wasteland somewhere in the east of London to become perhaps the most talked-about green space ever. Sarah Price did her stuff, as did James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett and Hillier Nurseries, which grew 2,000 of the legions of Olympic trees.

The Chelsea Flower Show got its very own spin-off as the Chelsea Fringe was conceived – can't wait to see what it comes up with on its debut.

Britain's 'finest landscape garden' rose from the ashes in probably the most talked-about restoration of the year: the shiny new Wrest Park comes complete with French parterre, rose garden and an Italian Garden. And it ain't over yet: the American Garden is unveiled in 2013.

And a new, if slightly dubious sport was born as gardeners male and female competed to grow the most unbecoming moustache, raising over £20,000 for Movember in the process. Slugs were involved. That's all you need to know.

...matches...

Monty Don picked up his love affair with Gardeners' World again and stepped back into his battered Head Gardener boots; Alan Titchmarsh was back on our screens too with ITV's tentative foray into gardening programming, Love Your Garden; and the BBC's gardening team upped sticks and left for Bristol. 2012 will be the first time, I think in its history, that the BBC's green-fingered output hasn't come from Birmingham.

...and despatches:

Carol Klein's nursery in Devon closed its doors amid an unseemly row about trees and compost heaps.

The Blue Peter garden – and its capsule, not to be opened till 2029 – was grassed over after more than 30 years, ahead of a move to Salford that was meant to happen in time for the next series but has now been put on ice. We'll find out soon, I'd guess, whether the much-denied rumours that it's to be ditched altogether are true.

The recession killed off Stapeley Water Gardens in Cheshire, closing for good today, and put a huge question mark over the future of Trevarno in Cornwall which can't find a buyer. Staff find out in the next few weeks whether they've still got a job.

And Ventnor Botanic Garden is also awaiting its fate as the Isle of Wight County Council, bent on getting rid of its unwanted burden, decides which of two bidders will be taking it off their hands. Verdict in February.

And finally...

What's hot:
Forest gardening: and permaculture, and anything that involves growing food in among your other plants.
Foraging: getting food for free from all sorts of unlikely places, even the towpath of Regent's Canal. Though you can just stick to elderflowers and sloes if you want.

And what's not:
Peat: after many years of pontificating about the damage peat extraction was doing to the environment, the government finally committed, in a rather woolly way, to a voluntary deadline, whatever that is: 2020 sees peat-based composts disappear from garden centre shelves. We hope.

Meerkats. 'Nuff said.

Happy New Year!

Wordless Wednesday

2011-12-28T09:11:00.000Z

Seen in our local woodlands: no idea what type, but they were around 10" across, the size of side plates

Designing history

2011-12-15T21:42:00.000Z

Princess Beatrice's garden at Carisbrooke Castle:
Edwardian? Mediaeval? Or 21st century?

I’ve been wondering a bit lately about all these historic gardens we’re restoring.

I spend a hefty proportion of my days writing about garden restoration projects. We seem to be in a restoration frenzy: in the last two or three years alone we’ve seen Wrest Park rise from the ashes, the Elizabethangarden at Kenilworth Castle recreated, the Crystal Grotto atPainshill Park rescued from oblivion and Chiswick Park overhauled to within an inch of its life.

And that’s not even counting Hidcote, the Liverpool Garden Festival site, the Seafront Gardensat Felixstowe and Myddleton House, EA Bowles’s pad in Enfield, Middlesex.

I can’t prove it, but I'd be willing to bet we've restored more historic gardens in the last four or five years than at any point in the last 50.

A good time, then, to take a step back and really think about what we’re doing here.

Note the many different words we use for the restoration of a garden: recreation, revitalisation, reconstruction.... When we take a neglected garden and return it to something people will pay to come and see (and after all, that’s – at least partly – what it’s all about) – what, exactly, are we doing?

Ancient and modern: grass plats and mulberry trees

In a rather timely sort of way, the Professional Gardeners’ Guild held its annual seminar on Historic Buildings Parks and Gardens earlier this month, during which they considered this a lot more coherently than I can. They looked at the choices you make when you decide to restore a garden: do you restore them to a historic plan, perhaps the original design you’ve discovered at the back of some dusty cupboard in the Big House?

Or do you come up with a new design – perhaps echoing the style of the original garden, or evoking a historical reference but with a modern twist?

As it happens, I’ve been to visit one of each this year.

Hestercombe near Taunton in Somerset is a faithful restoration of what was there originally: and who can blame them. They had one of the most historically important landscapes in the country on their hands, including an iconic Jekyll-Lutyens design. They had lots of maps, documents, drawings, plans: so what you see now is pretty much an exact replica of what was there when each of the various parts of the garden was in its heyday. Double rills, terraces, pergolas and bedding in fancy formal layouts. Very beautiful; very late Victorian; very faithful.

Hestercombe: a truly faithful restoration

There is always, however, something of the museum about these gardens. I love Hestercombe, don’t get me wrong: and there’s something wonderful about being able to taste living history like this, to experience life as it must have been in the 19^th century (with added tea-shops).

But it is Victorian life preserved in aspic, and gardens are living, breathing things that above all change: perhaps the essence of the paradox that lies at the heart of garden restoration.

At the other extreme: when English Heritage decided they wanted to return what was essentially a small field within the walls of Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight back to its Edwardian incarnation as the privy garden used by Princess Beatrice, daughter of Queen Victoria, they decided against a restoration, in the classical sense. Instead, they brought in Chris Beardshaw to design what you might call an evocation of the original.

Berkheya purpurea - it just looks historic

It does use the layout you would have seen in the original early-20^th century garden, but the planting is noticeably modern. It does ‘reflect the feel and spirit of the period’, as the blurb says: there's something about Berkheya purpurea that always looks like it's been around a long time.

But superb colour combinations such as Agastache 'Black Adder', Sedum telephium 'Purple Emperor' and Geranium wlassovianum had the exciting, vibrant feel of 21^st-century planting. There were subtle references – a blue, red and gold colour scheme reflecting Princess Beatrice’s crest, for example – but it felt like a modern garden.

And that was odd, because it wasn’t. Actually I think this was further complicated by the fact that Princess Beatrice clearly had a penchant for the mediaeval: I suppose it was all those castle walls looming over her. So there are grass plats, and flowery meads, and spreading mulberry trees over seating areas. Very lovely, and a relaxing space to stroll around, but undeniably in the vaguely Mediaev-Eliza-Tudor mould. So not Edwardian at all, then.

Again – I don’t mean to give the impression I disliked the garden: actually, I loved it, especially the enclosed, intimate feeling. The big figs in planters didn’t work for me, leaving one side of the garden feeling rather unresolved, but that wasn’t really Chris’s fault as he was trying to avoid sending roots into the foundations of a 13^th-century building they discovered while creating the garden. By such compromises are history-riddled projects beset.

Sublime planting... though perhaps not what Princess Beatrice
would have seen. But does that matter?

But I felt that as a garden, it wasn’t really sure what it was. A celebration of Edwardian style and elegance? A modern take on the mediaeval tradition? Or a homage to a lady who lived in the early 20^th century but rather preferred the 12^th? Perhaps all those things.

It’s clearly possible to capture the spirit, or the essence of a garden: Chris himself is a past master at it, and has successfully converted bare plots at Chelsea into slices of Boveridge House in Dorset, Hidcote, and next year Furzey Gardens in Hampshire.

But when you take that to the actual place – the location of the original garden – you end up with something akin to pastiche, or at best a mildly uncomfortable dissonance.

The PGG seminar concluded that design, and designers, have an important part to play in garden restoration. But Lord Cavendish - who has I think a better solution by commissioning Kim Wilkie, of Orpheus fame, to build him an unashamedly 21^st century earthworks in the late 18^th century grounds of Holker Hall (opening next spring) – made the point that gardens these days are used differently now to how they were in the past.

And, he added, perhaps saying the unsayable, ‘Some gardens will be lost. But gardens are and should be ephemeral.’

Which puts a whole new slant on the question: should we be restoring gardens at all?

Tom Hoblyn at Chelsea

2011-11-28T17:56:00.001Z

I got an email the other day pointing out, very politely, that 'minimalism meets the Villa d'Este' isn't an entirely accurate way to describe Tom Hoblyn's Chelsea garden for first-time sponsors Arthritis Research UK. In fact the word 'minimalist' – as used in the Chelsea press launch the other day – wasn't to be taken literally at all.

Well, that's a relief. My mind was quite boggled with the idea that anything associated with the gloriously baroque Villa d'Este could be anything but a car crash of monumental proportions.

So to redress the balance, so to speak, I thought I'd do a quick close-up on what we can expect from Tom's garden next year.

In Tom's words: 'I have long harboured an obsession for the Italian Renaissance gardens. The fascinating theory of controlling nature, the divine proportions and perfect symmetry, majestically portrayed against decadent architecture, truly captures my imagination.'

It couldn't be Italianate if it didn't have vast and extraordinary water features: the Villa d'Este, of course, is home to the Hundred Fountains (and around 499 other water features), while the Villa Lante – another inspiration behind this garden – has chains, rills and a Fountain of the Deluge which is just as impressive as it sounds.

So there are three water features here, described as 'spectacular', among formal Mediterranean planting: and that's all I'm telling you. Actually – that's all they're telling me. I think we'll have to wait a month or two before there are any more details than that – but it's a big improvement on the minimalist thing.

Tom is a familiar – if self-effacing – presence at Chelsea, with a gold and two silver-gilt medals to his name: I adored his sinuous redwood sculpture for Foreign and Colonial Investments in 2009, even though the judges only thought it worthy of a silver (it lives on – it was recreated in a client's Suffolk garden after the show).

He's well known for his affinity with nature: his own garden is, in his own words 'unkempt', and it's telling that in his description of it he talks more about the wildlife and wildflowers than he does about the biodynamic veg garden or the 40 trained fruit trees and 'a few flower beds around the house' – stuffed, of course, with bits of old Chelsea gardens.

In between Chelseas he's regenerating the Grade II* listed Hillersdon House, a 'gardenesque' 19th-century Devon estate, and restoring 44 acres at Great Westwood, the Georgian former hunting lodge of Edward and Mrs Simpson in Hertfordshire (there's an Italianate garden there, too). It's telling that as well as hanging out with the aristocracy, he's also involved in a community project at a Hindu temple in West Bengal. You can follow his progress on all the above at his shiny new blog for The Guardian.

Chelsea 2012: A sneak peek

2011-11-23T22:01:00.001Z

Chris Beardshaw's Chelsea 2012 design recreates
Furzey Gardens in the New Forest

November is not, it must be said, a glamorous month. So it was a bit of welcome light relief to be reminded today at the launch of the RHS Chelsea FlowerShow 2012 that there is such a thing as May and flower shows and summer.

Next year's show looks like it's going to be a vintage edition: it's the 99^th Chelsea, and they still haven't stopped coming up with new ways of shaking it all up a bit.

There are 18 full-sized show gardens, around 15 small gardens (though most have yet to be finalised), 107 exhibitors in the Great Pavilion, fencing, caravans, Formula One motorcars and a demilitarised zone.

So without further ado, here are the highlights for Chelsea 2012:

Show gardens:

The rollcall of designers for next year's Chelsea reads like a who's who of gardening.

Sarah Price, rarely out of the headlines these days what with her 1/2-mile long garden for the 2012 Olympics Park, is designing her first solo Main Avenue garden for the Daily Telegraph (she did a City Garden in 2007 which won a silver medal). Can't wait to see her planting which is unfailingly dreamy.

Joe Swift is another first-timer, and long overdue, too: his design for Homebase has frames of cedar running through the garden on an angle, giving a double-framed view along and diagonally across the garden, with Prunus serrula and Cornus mas emphasising natural woodland-style planting.

Korean designer Jihae Hwang – memorable for winning best Artisan Garden with an exquisitely beautiful outdoor lavatory this year – is graduating to full show garden with a recreation of the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea; and Jo Thompson's first full-sized show garden has an Airstream caravan called Doris and a hammock: the ultimate staycation, and I can't help thinking the place you'll probably find most gardening hacks hanging out on press day (there are rumours of a fridge full of icecream and beer inside).

Andy Sturgeon's design for show sponsors M&G - though I have to say this doesn't remotely do it justice

Returning champions Andy Sturgeon and Cleve West are slugging it out for the honours: Andy has an exquisite sculpture of copper rings winding its way 'like an energy wave' through and around a central sunken pool (there are cleft rocks and monolithic walls involved); and Cleve is going for topiary in a big way. 'It's as good a time as any to let my sponsors know I've never done a formal garden before,' he said, with questionable wisdom. But don't worry: it's promising to be vintage Cleve nonetheless, with abstract stone sculptures and lovely herbaceous planting to set off all that yew.

Chris Beardshaw is back recreating a Hampshire garden cultivated by adult learners, and there's another welcome return from Arne Maynard, known and revered for his wonderfully sensitive, natural planting style, at Chelsea for the first time in 12 years.

Tom Hoblyn's design: minimalism meets the Villa d'Este

Tom Hoblyn is planning a minimalist garden inspired by the Villa d'Este – which sounds like a contradiction in terms if ever I heard one – and Nigel Dunnett is moving from rain gardens to dry meadows in the Blue Water Garden. There's also a sky-scraping sculptural tower from Laurie Chetwood and Patrick Collins, who seem to have cornered the market in superhumanly tall structures at Chelsea.

I would say something about the small gardens if I could, but there's not much information out there at the moment: all I know is that there's what they're calling a 'large artisan garden' (oh please return to calling them courtyard gardens, I do hate that name) by Japanese master Ishihara Kazayuki, and it'll be a recreation of a garden in Nagasaki 50 years ago. That alone is worth the trip to Ranelagh.

Great Pavilion:

The headline news here is that Edulis, my all-time favourite unusual edibles nursery, is at last making its debut at Chelsea. Be prepared to be wowed. Aeonium lovers need look no further than the Trewidden exhibit: also first-timers and bringing their collection of tender succulents with them including several new home-bred varieties.

There will be fencing displays at Hillier Nurseries, who also get the prize for worst pun of the year with their exhibit title 'Duel and the Crown' (it's the Queen's Diamond Jubilee... geddit?) And here's a snippet for Chelsea trivia fans: did you know that Ranelagh Gardens was the venue for fencing tournaments right up until the Second World War?

Other things to look out for:

Fresh Gardens: It could only be a matter of time. Conceptual gardens have been stealing the show at Hampton Court for years; they dipped a toe (successfully, mostly) into Tatton under the 'Visionary Gardens' label and now Chelsea has taken the plunge and commissioned some of these most risky and challenging of gardens (and renamed the category, again).

Mind you, they've chosen a past master of the art in the unfailingly exciting and thought-provoking Tony Smith, whose 'Green with...' garden looks very odd (as all his do on plan) and is said to evoke the 'human emotions of envy and desire'. The other one we were told about, 'Places for People' by Noel Farrer, looked frankly safe; though I'll be ready to be surprised on the day.

Sir Harry Veitch: Victorian nurseryman extraordinaire, and the owner of a truly enviable beard, celebrated by Plant Heritage this year

Pot art: little plant pots are being painted even as I write by the great and the good in the world of gardening, to auction in aid of the RHS Campaign for School Gardening.

Topiary: there is more. Not just Cleve's, and I believe a bit in Arne Maynard's, but a huge topiary sculpture in the Great Pavilion celebrating the Monaco Grand Prix, in the shape – you guessed it – of a Formula One racing car.

Roll on May, that's all I can say. Can't wait.

101 uses (well, 10) for a garden knife

2011-11-21T19:04:00.001Z

I do love my garden knife.

It's the one thing I wouldn't be without. It was probably the best freebie I've ever been given in all the years I've been a garden hack.

It looks exactly like the one in the picture. I can't even remember which particular press event it was: just that those nice people at Marshalls (and here's my chance - even if they have had to wait several years - to give them the mention they were no doubt after in exchange for the freebie) included one in a goody bag.

But I realised the other day that I very rarely actually use mine for proper gardening. I don't do much T-budding (for which you'd need a finer knife anyway); I find secateurs more useful for things like dead-heading; and I don't bother chipping seeds.

Gardening knives, I've discovered, aren't really for gardening at all. Oh no - they're much more useful than that, which is why I have mine in my pocket at all times. Here's what they are for:

cutting up little bits of string for tying in sweetpeas (and beans, and peas, and achocha)
hoicking those bits of hair and string and wool and stuff out of the brush on the vacuum cleaner
gouging dirt out from under your fingernails
acting as a stand-in screwdriver to undo the cross-head bolts on greenhouse staging
ditto to tighten up the arms of your glasses when they come loose
slitting open compost bags
cutting x-shaped holes through planting membranes and into the tops of grow bags
prising out mud from the treads of gardening boots
going armed against potential thugs on the Underground while convincing police you're just a batty middle-aged gardener

What do you use yours for?

Wordless Wednesday

2011-11-09T13:46:00.000Z

Eucalyptus gunnii bark in the Australian garden at the Walled Gardens of Cannington, Bridgwater, Somerset

La dolce vita

2011-11-03T18:42:00.007Z

Well hello again!

I’ve been off on my travels. It’s not very often I get abroad – the last time was circa 2009 – but what with the offer of some free accommodation, plus the serendipitous coincidence of two inset days right after half-term (meaning normal double-your-money school holiday flight prices didn’t apply) saw us jetting off to Sicily for a week.

All mentions of plants while in the company of my family are greeted with howls of protest, so I’ve learned from long experience to keep my mouth shut and botanise while simultaneously dodging suicidal Italian drivers and negotiating the tortuous streets of Sicily’s towns, littered on both sides with badly-parked cars as Sicily appears not to have noticed that there are such things as car parks.

I even had to ‘visit’ Syracuse’s botanic gardens – painfully tempting glimpsed through ornate metal railings – while hammering around in an incomprehensible guided tour of the city on a road train. I can’t help feeling it wasn’t entirely accidental that it was dark by the time I had a chance to go back to look round it properly.

What with plant identification at 30mph (70mph on long journeys into the island’s mountainous interior, always in the shadow of the ever-smoking Etna) and in silence, it’s perhaps not surprising that just two plants came to symbolise Sicily’s semi-tropical lush vegetation (palms, bougainvillea, hibiscus and of course lemon trees were everywhere).

The first is the prickly pear cactus – Opuntia ficus-indica – which grew wild along the roadsides, bubbling up in great thickets taller than your head, tumbling over supermarket carparks and encroaching on the beach.

They were in season while we were there, every flat green paddle topped with fat bright red fruit, so we tried a few: you peel them (first cutting off the painfully prickle-filled end plate) to find succulent red flesh studded with black seeds. Apparently these seeds are edible, though I found they were hard as bullets so we painstakingly picked them out to end up with a red mush which tasted of watermelon, though not quite as sweet. Pleasant, but not that remarkable.

The second plant which will always remind me of Sicily is a conifer, much to my amazement since I usually associate them with utter boredom and mind-numbingly difficult plant idents. Nothing boring about this one: the branches were tipped with fans of upward-facing branches, the whole tall conical structure topped with diminishing fans on the main trunk which swayed in the wind. It was so graceful, so exquisitely architectural that it completely won me over.

They were everywhere: right outside the flat we were staying in, and on the other side of the road, and another one beyond that, soaring into the sky and marching across the landscape like elegant sentinels. Unfortunately I haven’t the foggiest idea what they might be.

So: here’s your starter for ten. Using the frankly rubbish pictures on this page (taken on my phone, since I forgot to take my camera on holiday - a seasoned traveller I am not) - can anyone help me identify my mystery conifer? And then tell me where I can get one so it can become the first conifer I have ever deliberately planted instead of chopping down?

A virtual prickly pear juice smoothie to the sender of the first correct answer.

Thank you.

October flowers

2011-10-17T20:10:00.007+01:00

Well I seem to be late for everything this month. And so it is with the unmissable Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens, which for some time now I have been using as a way of stepping back and looking, properly at the garden and where it is in the year (instead of just seeing the usual tick-list of jobs that became urgent last week).

I blame a certain lethargy brought on by the impending frosts. And the recent demise of Slide.com, which was my way of indulging in loads of photos without the guilt of having to inflict them on anyone unless they wanted to sit through them all.

So I'm afraid this month you'll have to look at all my photos, one by one: either that, or log off right now and go do something more improving instead.

Since it's undeniably autumn now - the swishing sound as I walk becoming less and less easy to ignore, or indeed wilfully deny - I'll start not with flowers but with berries, filling my garden gradually from the yellow buttons of Sorbus 'Joseph Rock' to hips and cotoneaster berries and the little jewel-like Tomato 'Hundreds and Thousands' tumbling over the tubs on my patio.

I'm not too keen on the cotoneaster, as it self-seeds everywhere, but at this time of year you can't help but like it.

There are always lots of wildlings in my garden - and several are having a second flush at the moment.

Some aren't strictly wildings but sort of naturalised garden plants: the Anemone x japonica 'Honorine Jobert' is going mad in the front garden and will have to be sorted out at some point. Not now though.

The hardy fuchsia is another one in its prime right now: hard to think I'm going to have to get rid of it this year (too big, too old, too shady).

In fact the fuchsias generally are looking pretty good right now.

Also in this part of the garden are - or rather were - the scented-leaf pelargoniums; though I spent part of today digging them up and tucking them away in the greenhouse ahead of the Big Freeze.

It's been a good year for the annuals: and a good thing too, as I'm still in my first season so stuck to seed-raised flowers to see me through while I waited to see what came up in my new garden.

The cosmos in particular have been fabulous: flowering madly since about the end of June and still going strong.

But there have been two annual stars which have really stolen the show. The first is my bronze fennel: a lovely foil for other plants while they have their summer spell in the spotlight, but now a fireworks display of golden yellow.

And equally tall and airy, the Nicotiana mutabilis are dancing through the border on their wiry stems of pink and white, charming, dainty and adorable.

So adorable have they been, in fact, that I'm going to follow some advice Chris Ireland-Jones gave me on my recent visit to Avon Bulbs and try to overwinter them in the greenhouse. He says if you can cut them back hard, pot them up and bring them in, they have a head start on the season next year. Twice this display will be quite, quite ravishing. Can't wait.

Not-quite-the-end of the month view: September

2011-10-07T09:05:00.000+01:00

Well, heck, I'm only a week late for the End of Month View (hosted, some time ago now, by Helen, aka The Patient Gardener). And who can blame me for clinging onto September: it has been a remarkably warm and balmy one. And it's looking pretty dicey for October, so if it's all the same to you I'll linger for a while longer in the twilight zone between summer and autumn.

It's not, however, been an altogether sunny picture in my garden: particularly my front garden. You see we've had an amusing time this summer almost completely rebuilding our house.

A relatively straightforward project, to replace the blown cement render with lovely stone-house-friendly lime render, turned into something altogether more fundamental when we discovered that the cement render was actually holding the outer wall in place.

The whole process has involved large holes appearing here and there (and I mean large: we could stand up in the one in the end wall), the rebuilding of the entire end wall plus a chimney stack and the reinstatement of the top of the wall at the front, which turned out not to be there any more.

And most upsettingly for the garden, it also meant we've had scaffolding right round the house since around July. The builders were commendably sensitive and didn't plonk scaffolding poles onto prize plants: but there is lime on everything, and because I haven't been able to access the area the bit of progress I had been making has gone backwards.

So this winter's project (one of them: the fruit cage is also going in this winter, but that's another story) is to get this little lot back in order again.

First job is to remove the more rampant plants here. There's a self-sown cotoneaster bent on taking my stone wall down with it, and a large stump that needs to come out.

Also getting seriously out of control are some more welcome plants: a fine clump of small-flowered asters, a species I think though I haven't yet been able to identify them with any sort of confidence. There are masses of white Anemone japonica 'Honorine Jobert'; the snow-in-summer (Cerastium tomentosum) has galloped gaily over everything; and there's tons of self-seeded valerian in every nook and cranny, too.

Some of these I shall just move; the valerian will go (there's plenty elsewhere in the garden; I do love it, but not to the exclusion of everything else). And I'm afraid the Cerastium is just a bit too bedding for me; it's going.

There is a dilemma, in the shape of a large and stately hardy fuchsia in the middle of the whole thing. It's massive; it's in the wrong place; but it's a fine plant. I can't see I'll be able to move it without wrecking it wholesale; my preferred option at the moment is to take some cuttings and start again, with the statutory mourning period required for the sad but necessary passing of such beauties.

And replacing it all? Well: part of it is already assigned. I have my corner of scented geraniums, underplanted with blankets of Strawberry 'Baron von Solemacher'. I have an olive tree to replace the horrible cotoneaster in the corner, to arch gracefully and elegantly over the semi-oval of chamomile lawn which will replace the scraggy grass and even scraggier roses which inexplicably occupy the only flat bit. And the thyme collection dotted around another side is coming on nicely.

And once the other planting areas are cleared and as I want them, I have herbs dancing through my dreams: medicinal echinacea and stately angelica, prostrate rosemary dripping over the old stone wall and hummocks of sage ringed with dancing spheres of silvery-pink chive flowers.

I have a yen to grow mandragora root, liquorice and blood-red veined sorrel, fenugreek and cumin, capers and orach, mint (sunk in pots) of every shape, size and flavour, vervain for tea and sweet cicely for sweetening my rhubarb.

In fact I'm sure I'll run out of space long before I've run out of herbs I want to grow. At the moment, I'm just thinking how different what I see out my window looks in comparison to the vision I have in my head: but then gardens are the stuff that dreams are made on. And besides, the scaffolding came down this week. Time to get out the spade and turn those dreams into reality...

Of garden hoses and organisation

2011-09-25T09:30:00.003+01:00

At the beginning of this year, I had the biggest rats-nest of garden hoses I have ever accumulated.

So enormous was it that the tap had disappeared beneath it. So ratty and nesty I couldn't figure out where the end of the hose I needed was, and even if I had been able to locate it, extracting it with any hope of actually watering something with it would have tied the knots still tighter.

This was partly an accident of history: our last garden required two hoses joined together, especially if we wanted to top up the pond at the other end (yes, I know, you're supposed to use rainwater: but this ignores the unavoidable fact that ponds only need topping up when water butts are empty).

And I also had an allotment: 70ft long, with another 70ft or so to go between the gate and the tap. This demanded the mother of all hoses: in fact so big was my allotment mega-hose it needed two hosereels to hold it all. Luckily, it being an allotment, a certain amount of shabby chic allowed, so I was able to leave it out most of the time.

Both ex garden hoses (disconnected from each other by now) plus the allotment hose were stacked hopefully by the garden tap behind the house on moving day. And that's where they stayed, completely baffling my attempts to organise them and as the record-breaking drought of April 2011 kicked in, reducing all my poor gasping patio plants to the occasional watering can full when I could spare them from dousing the greenhouse.

About the same time, an email dropped into my inbox from a nice man offering me a free hose reel to try out in the comfort of my own home, if I should be inclined to write about it in return.

Luckily, it didn't seem to put him off when I told him that if it didn't work, or isn't quite right, or I didn't like something, I reserved the right to say so. And within a week a very large package arrived on our doorstep: by this time it hadn't rained for about five weeks, so it wasn't a moment too soon.

The hosereel in question is the Hozelock Autoreel: a megalith of a hose reel if ever there was one, and I spent the tail end of that drought-ridden spring testing it to the limit. I tugged it from one end of the garden to the other, mercilessly dragging it to its 40m limit. I left it out for the puppies to chew; flapped the hinged wall bracket back and forth relentlessly; took it out and put it away again more times than I can remember.

I had a damn good try at breaking the autowind stop mechanism, too: this is like a spring catch which only works as you pull the hose out. So you pull the hose to a certain length, and when you let it go, it catches so the hose is held at (more or less) the length you've chosen. Pull it again, and the catch comes off, allowing the hose to spring back automatically to the start.

But though I verged on the irresponsible with the way I let the hose whack back to the catch, it hasn't broken yet. This is one tough customer: it needs to be, with the way I treat my garden gear, and I've been pleasantly surprised by what it will put up with. Besides, anything that puts itself away is a winner in my book.

Niggles: such a behemoth of a creature needs a Proper Bloke to fit it to the wall. I'm pretty handy with a drill and some screws when required, but even I had to come over all girly and get the hubster to do it.

He said something obscure about a template being needed to screw the back plate onto the wall straight: not entirely sure what he was on about, but then it probably means more to perfectionist carpenters than slapdash gardeners.

And you need two people to lock the hose in place if you don't want to use the catch mechanism described above. There is a locking switch on the main casing (see picture left), but you'd need someone to stand by the lock to turn it when you get to the point you want the hose to stay: if you let go the hose to run back and fix it with the lock, it gaily sprints along by your side, racing you back to the start as that auto-wind kicks in. Maybe I was missing something, but this was one of the few design features I couldn't see the point of.

I'm not too keen on the bright green thing it's got going on, either: why on earth does Hozelock have to choose such utterly garden-unfriendly, plasticky colours for its brand livery? Nobody, I can assure you, would choose the garden hose as a focal point, however wonderful it might be to use. Fortunately mine's tucked away nicely out of sight behind the house so that doesn't matter.

But these are small complaints: my shiny new hose has entirely revolutionised my watering life. I love that it's on a hinge, so you can pull it two ways: ideal for me, when the same hose has to be threaded along both directions of a narrow passageway.

The hose itself is as tough and beefy as the casing. It's satisfyingly heavy, so it doesn't kink and lies where you put it unlike most hoses, which have an annoying habit of flipping across your prize dahlias as you're watering.

Nor does it disappear back into the casing: a sturdy business-like ball (see second picture) strapped to the hosepipe just behind the end takes care of that. This reel is full of sensible, practical design ideas like this: it's the tidiest, most well-organised thing in my garden.

My poor chaotic old green, red and yellow hoses - all three of them - have been made entirely redundant and have been put out to grass in the garage while I decide what to do with them. If anyone out there fancies a few hours unknotting hosepipes, they're yours.

Avon calling

2011-09-20T09:02:00.006+01:00

One of the slightly more unexpected side-effects of my move to Somerset last year has been that I find myself at the heart of what seems to be an area with a gravitational pull for outstanding nurseries.

Bulb beds carved from a field but full of treasure
Desert to Jungle, Kelways in the Somerset Levels, the walled gardens of heritage vegmeisters Pennard Plants and Hewitt-Coopers of carnivorous plant fame are all within half an hour's drive. Jekka McVicar is a bit further up the M5, and Joy Michaud and her chillies are a short hop down towards the Dorset coast.

The dahlia bed: every possible variety (and that dark-petalled one)
Any of these would be a pilgrimage for me. But the one I was most thrilled to find as a near neighbour is Avon Bulbs.

I make a beeline for Avon every time I arrive in a floral marquee. I don't think I've ever come away from their stand without discovering a new treasure to squirrel away in my list of plants I must grow one day: they have unwavering and exquisitely good taste in plants.

Mathiasella bupleuroides 'Green Dream'
So last weekend they became the first of my pilgrimages, largely because they generously opened their doors for a rare open day in aid of Friends of African Nursing (a small but tirelessly energetic charity doing marvellous work training African nurses in better hygiene practices: look them up, and help them if you can).

Knee high Kniphofia 'Light of the World'
Owner Chris Ireland-Jones and his family started Avon in 1990, in a middlingly derelict 7-acre former dairy farm in South Petherton (a stone's throw from Margery Fish's garden at East Lambrook Manor - told you I was in a good gardening area).

Dahlia coccinea var palmeri
They're exclusively mail order (apart from voracious visitors like our group last weekend) and make 2/3 of their annual income between early September and mid November. I was tempted to ask Chris why he wasn't in a shed somewhere feverishly packing bulbs instead of wasting time with us lot, but I suspect he was quite happy to have a break.

Chelsea is the lodestone for the whole of the nursery's year. They have three chilling sheds with which they time the bulbs to flower in that last week in May. His description of the routine for tulips - lift in March, bring in to 2-3°C to stop them growing, when the weather forecast says cold, you move them outside to keep them green, as soon as the temperature rises you bring them in again... well, it had me tired just thinking about it.

Nerine x bowdenii 'Zeal Giant'
The stock beds are long, thin strips cut out of a field, punctuated with high wall-like hedges to absorb the wind. It kept reminding me of my old allotment; except here the crops are bulbs, bulking up in great blocks of foliage and flower.

Actaea simplex 'Brunette'
Most of course were getting ready to die back for the winter (if they hadn't already); but there were some wonderful late summer bulbs still in glorious bloom. Eucomis, dahlia, camassias, kniphofia and some sultry Actaea simplex ‘Brunette’: a lesson for anyone who thinks bulbs are just for spring.

Eucomis pallida en masse
We had an absorbing and hugely enjoyable day, made all the more so by Chris’s affable and knowledgeable company. I’m afraid I disgraced myself by failing dismally to stay with the group and do as I was told; well, who in their right mind would walk past a bed brimming with dahlias, including a glimpse of one spidery dark one which was ravishingly lovely, and not stop?

So: without further ado, here’s the list of plants which caught my eye and tempted me off the beaten track.

Nerine x bowdenii ‘Zeal Giant’: the most in-yer-face nerine I’ve ever seen. Lipstick pink and huge.

Dahlia coccinea var palmeri: towering tall but airy and graceful, dancing with clear orange flowers.

Eucomis pallida: thick, upright spires of cream over strappy green leaves, tall and imposing

Eucomis villosa: shorter, at 2ft, and scented: the pale flower has a button-like darker centre

Kniphofia ‘Light of the World’: the tiniest, daintiest red-hot poker, little more than a foot high

Mathiasella bupleuroides ‘Green Dream’: no flowers now, but worth it just for the handsome foliage

Dahlia ‘Dark Desire’: jumped out at me from the dahlia bed: slim near-black petals and a buttery eye

Actaea simplex ‘Brunette’: spires of dreamy white over deeply-toothed leaves of deepest purple.

September flowers

2011-09-15T12:04:00.003+01:00

There are some bad things about September. The light, for one thing: after a summer of shutting in the chickens just before I go to bed (so that's 10pm ish), we're now down to just-after-supper (around 7.30 or so). That's the end of evening gardening, then.

But there are good things about September, too. I adore autumn; it's my favourite season after spring. I love the anticipation as the trees begin turning ahead of next month's pyrotechnic display. And even the slight nip in the air is refreshing without - yet - carrying a tang of anxiety about frost.

But most of all I love that my garden comes back to life after the exhaustion of August. So much is in second bloom, and even the soldiers who have been marching on in stalwart fashion right through since June seem to perk up a bit and put an extra spring in their step.

So for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted as ever by Carol at May Dreams Gardens, here are some of the many, many flowers putting a smile on my face whenever I go in the garden at the moment.