Pedal to the Metal

Out of the gates & running like the wind.

It's #SixonSaturday time, guys.  Six things happening this week in my still-new garden.

Last week, it was all wait wait wait for the stars to find their proper alignment before big things could happen.

This week, everything's slipped into gear.  I do believe we took advantage of it.





1.  Shed update.

The potting shed arrived without instructions.  Several phone calls & a few emails later, they sent us a list written in what quite possibly was Middle English.  Ultimately, my budding relationship with the shed provider broke down & we were on our own.

Despite this, by Day 1, we got the floor in place.  As we stood admiring our work, I heard a noise & turned to find myself eye-to-eye with a DoodleFace on top of the wall.  Our Artful Dodger dog had unlatched 2 doors in the house & climbed the wall to share in our joy.

End of Day 2.

The end of Day 2 coincided with the end of the week & all 4 walls in place.  Just before dinner, the missing parts to our storage shed arrived, so next week it'll be duelling sheds for my Six.


2.  Securing the perimeter.

Our back garden has six levels to it.  We took the property on the condition that a 5' fence be erected around the first 3 levels to prevent the continued adventures of Mlle DoodleFace.

This wasn't done (thus the Doodle escape in #1), prompting a 3 week discussion about what constitutes 5'.  That disagreement ended with the consensus that 5' is in fact, 60".

New discussions have commenced over who owns the 4' fence between our property & our neighbours.  The neighbours have several shrubs & small trees along that fence, but there are places where a well oiled Doodle can slip through.

The first breach is next to a small, shady raised bed to the left of the back door, previously loaded down with BioBizz.  Shifting the bags uncovered debris from some long forgotten re-roofing.

Fern bed

Once the area's cleared, a woodwardia unigemmata fern will go in the far corner, & a gillenia trifoliata on the other side, with some smaller plants at the front of the bed.  As a temporary measure, I'll stab a few bamboo sticks next to the fence to fool Mlle DoodleFace into thinking it's 5' tall.

Yes, I'm a dreamer.


3.  Herb garden.

The bed on the other side of the steps gets plenty of sun.  Since the back door leads into the kitchen, this little bed's a great place for the herb garden.

Future herb garden.

Excavating the coping here initially caused a fright.  No bones, but the unveiling gave an impression that under the grass, the whole area'd been paved.  However, eventually the fork sunk up to its armpits in the soil, so herb garden, here we come.


4.  Keep your enemies closer.

When the Beast's snow melted, it showed the prevalence of ground elder in our new neighbourhood.  For such a neglected garden, ours has surprisingly very little.  The bit we do have seems to've originated from under the contested boundary fence.

My first experience with ground elder was 4 gardens ago when we lived in the 17th century priest's house. 

In spring, a triangular bed between a gravel path & an apple store turned yellow with aconite.  Once that died back, the ground elder came along, bloomed a white carpet, then got mowed down by the landlord's gardener.

Sounds very civilised except the ground elder, not content with its triangle, colonised all the beds in that garden.

The Doodle, the kerria, & the ground elder.

Considering the relatively short time we'll be here, I've decided to conserve energy by embracing our ground elder.  Or at least, maintaining a truce with it.

As luck would have it, the ground elder grows at a gap in the neighbours' side.  I dropped in a couple of kerria that I brought with me, thinking they're big & ugly enough to take on ground elder.  Even though they can be thugs, I'll probably stick in a few more to give the impression they're a hedge.

Hopefully, adding some bad tempered bamboo stakes here will deter a certain canine from absconding.


5.  The Pile.

If you remember, the site of our potting shed was previously occupied by a survivalist's shed.  I didn't mention at the time that The Pile occupied another part of that level.

The Pile.

The person who removed the survivalist shed wouldn't take The Pile because it consisted mostly of garden waste.  That undoubtedly makes sense to more knowledgeable persons that myself.  People who also understand badly written Middle English.

Because of this arcane rule, my pots've spent 3 weeks sitting on the lawn.  This week, a certified Pile Remover came, so the Great Pot Migration has begun.

Potted forest, garlic, & weight reduction.

All the garlic, Bast's weight reduction chamber, & about half the potted forest've been moved.  If I want my pears to cross pollinate this year, I better shake a leg & reunite them.


6.  Front garden.

I do have a front garden, but until this week it's been filled with pots, & latterly, shed parts.  This state of affairs causes anxiety in the tiny OAP fairy woman next door (who shouldn't be confused with the RtHL BossyBoots).  OAP fairy woman periodically emerges for updates & offers of tea.  She's relieved that work's begun to expand a bed.

At present, my plan incorporates This Thang growing under the window.  It looks like a passion flower to me, which is strange because it survived the Beast.  Could there be hardy passions at our new house?  Do hardy passions even exist outside works of fiction?

We shall see.

This Thang. 

The proposed occupants of the expanded bed include a spirea & some roses, all languishing in their pots.  The roses were grown from seeds found in a graveyard in Paris.  Hopefully I can propagate them, because it'll take nerves of steel to leave those babies behind.

There's also a peony that, with 2 of its mates, I dragged from the Angry Village (3 gardens ago).  The 2 mates grew happily in the very next garden, so were left there.  The last of the trio - wherever I've planted it, however much I've cossetted it - rewards me with peony pouts.  Maybe this bed'll put a blush in its blossom.

In the space beween the plants I brought with me & This Thang, I'll plant some of my colourful veg in lieu of garden flowers.  I'll let you know how the OAP fairy takes to them.

Well earned rest.

And that's our busy week.  It's felt good to make progress, limited though it may be.

Now that you & I've caught up, be sure to head over to The Propagator to see what he's been up to.  In his comments, you'll find links to all sorts of Six-on-Saturday folk hailing from 4 continents (at my last count).

Thanks for stopping by.  Hope to see you next week.

Falling in Love Again

When it comes to the garden, I've given my heart away too many times to contemplate monogamy.  This week, I look at what's currently active in the garden that also, somewhere along the way, captured my heart.

Earlier in the summer, goldenrod w/queen of the prairie.

1.  Goldenrod is that boy who's friends with your brother, the kid you grow up tripping over & treat like family, but never fancy.  Before I emigrated, goldenrod covered acres of field along my drive to work, putting on its yellow headdress at the height of summer.  A coupla months later, frost would outline every stem & seed head in breath-stopping beauty.

A few years after arriving here in the UK, the sudden sight of that unmistakable yellow gave me a different feeling.  Not acres, but 4 lonely plants in a neighbour's garden.  I'd never seen goldenrod in captivity before.  As it would happen, the very next place I lived had a huge flowerbed taken over by the stuff.  When I left there, this time I took some with me.

My late father called it wild mustard, the familiar name learned from his herbalist mother & said it in his gentle southern accent.  I never met my grandmother, a woman born in the 19th century, but she gives a 4 generational provenance between the mustard family & my own.  Goldenrod & me, we're two old friends reunited in this new & strange place.

Goldenrod as it looks now, w/o a hint of frost yet.

2.  One of my many UK homes had a flagstone area outside the back door.  Some stones had been removed at the far end to allow space for what, to me, was an extraordinarily exotic plant.  Because of its pink blooms, I called it the Gigantic Mauve Thing.  Makes no sense, but that's me in a nutshell.

After learning its Latin name, I called it Roger.  As is my habit, I lifted a few Roger rhyzomes each time I moved.  Then at my last place, taking a little bit of Roger would ruin the balance of his flowerbed, so I left him behind.

Once settled here, I enticed Roger's more handsome brother, Bronze Peacock, into my garden & planted him by the water feature.  Perhaps knowing my heart belonged to his brother, he frittered & frazzled & threatened to die, so I plucked him from the bog & stuck him in with the tomato plants.  No bloom this summer, but knowing I've left all thoughts of his brother behind, perhaps next year Peacock'll do better.

Rodgersia reminds me of nights on the flagstone patio, waiting for the tawny owl to cry, of mornings watching the pheasants feed, of a time when I thought Good was bigger & stronger & more likely to happen than was Evil.

Rodgersia Bronze Peacock - when it's healthy, it is bronze.

3.  One of my moves took me to a smaller garden than before, overshadowed by my neighbour's love of trees (& dislike of pruning).  I confiscated the one small sunny area of lawn & put in a circular rose garden with lavender around the edges.  Starved for room, I plugged the spaces between lavender & roses with the creeping thyme I'd brought from my last place.

By the next summer, the thyme filled the empty gaps in the bed.  I'd sit on the lawn & pull the few struggling weeds from it, brushing up against the lavender as I worked.  Those three scents mingled, the creeping thyme & lavender with an afterthought of rose, it made me drunk with pleasure.  I'd often lay down in the grass next to my rose bed & breathe breathe breathe them all in.

Smell is as important as colour in my garden.  The trio of rose, lavender & creeping thyme is one I repeat over & over in every place I've lived since.  When I weed each of those subsequent beds, I remember that POW of the first time I fell in love with that smell.

Red lavender as it looks now, & white creeping thyme underneath.

4.  I used to live near Gertrude Bell's family home, Rounton Grange.  The house is long gone, but the area of the kitchen garden has been taken over by Dark Star Plants, a nursery that specialises in plants with dark foliage.

On one of my visits there, the seller said that they were prohibited from propagating a certain plant for 30 years so that the folk who developed it could make money first.  In my memory, that plant was this little black mondo.  We bought three of them.

Some time later, a friend came over to get plant ideas from my garden.  Based on what she said her design would be, I thought little black mondo would be a good choice.  While leading her over to check it out, I told her about how it wouldn't propagate so unfortunately, I couldn't give her any plants.  Yet there mondo grew with 5 babies sprouting out all around it.  That's the first time a plant ever called me a liar.  At least, to my face.  And yes, my friend got some of the babies.

On that day, little black mondo exposed the frailty of my memory, but also the delightful fictions it writes.  When I see mondo, I think of my friend, a remarkable adventurer.  I think about Gerturde Bell, who wouldn't've had the patience for me, but whom I admire nevertheless.  And I think of how rules & regulations can't stop life from being itself.

Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Niger' - Black mondo.

5.  Everyone should have one outlaw romance.  Mine actually grows in the empty lot next door.

From what I can see through the upstairs window (not that I'm snooping), the lot used to be an Edwardian garden, now gone to the foxes.  In addition to roses & fruit trees, it has several climbers scrambling the wall between the properties, attempting murder by strangulation of my potted shrubs & trees.  All summer, I waged merciless war against those climbers until the leaves turned colour & the Virginia creeper turned my head.

Its beautiful crimson calms me.  I have reckless thoughts of taking cuttings, of growing my own dashing creeper.  Then my potted shrubs & trees stage an intervention, after which I make some focaccia, open a bottle of wine & revisit a box set of Last Tango in Halifax.

My outlaw romance.

6.  Once, while foraging for dead plants to use as Halloween decorations, I found a hunchbacked shrub growing under some mature trees at the edge of a field.  Its seedpods looked like earrings made from dried blood drops, perfect for our Halloween party.

When none of my gardening friends could identify it, I assumed birds had facilitated its escape from a nearby Edwardian greenhouse ruin.  I tried growing the seeds, but no joy.  It took years to identify it as Himalayan honeysuckle.

That long ago Halloween party celebrated a short film collaboration by several of my women friends.  The various Himalayan honeysuckle incarnations since that first discovery, they've all connected me with the excitement of group creation, the shared experience of women, humanity's bloodchain spark in all of us.

Seedpods from Himalayan honeysuckle.

That brings us to the end of my garden's #SixonSaturday.  Be sure to drop by the instigator of this hashtag, for his Six.  In the comments to his blog, you'll find links to other gardeners' collections of Sixes.

There but for the Grace of God . . . street view of the Creep.