Greening up

Clematis 'Guernsey Cream'

It seems like only a few weeks ago that I was looking at the garden and thinking how messy and unattractive  it looked. The borders needed weeding and winter debris needed clearing away. That was Easter. But now here we are at the end of May and it's amazing how quickly everything has grown. The garden looks completely different. Plants have filled out and are jostling for space. The main thing is that it all looks so green and fresh.The colour at the moment is from aquilegias, mainly blue, but some pink, yellow euphorbias, more blue from bluebells, forget me not, brunnera and centurea.  The lupins have lots of buds and will soon be in flower. The flowers that I am enjoying the most this week are the alliums which I bought at a plant sale a few weeks ago and are now in flower and towering above the other plants in the border.

I have a clematis which I love called 'Guernsey Cream'. I'm not good with clematis and this one took a few years to get established. It's a little bit squashed between two shrubs but it scrambles amongst them quite happily. My star plant is a peony which I found when I took on my allotment 2 years ago. It was growing in a pot and I recognised it by the leaves, I brought it home and planted it in the front garden. It has flowered for the first time this year and I am enjoying watching it gradually unfurl its petals.

Warton Hall

 Last week Richard and I went out to visit  Warton Hall an NGS garden  a couple of miles out of Lytham and on the edge of  the village of Warton. This is the first year it's been opened for the NGS. I'd seen it in the booklet and heard the owner being interviewed on local radio a few days earlier and thought it sounded interesting.

We entered through a little gate and followed the path through a woodland area carpeted with bluebells. It was a feast for the eyes, a haze of purple blue and creamy white flower heads and  feathery foliage of cow parsley. There was a sculpture trail through the woodland walk with pieces of art displayed by various artists. Some of the sculptures were easy to see, but others were not and we kept pointing them out to each other.  The sculptures were made of different materials.  The first ones we came across were some ceramic glass flowers arranged under trees, a big ornate metal circle structure and a group of white parasols high up in the trees.

 

 Then there were items which the owner had found on her travels, like a metal bedstead placed amongst the trees or a wooden window frame fixed between two trees to frame a view.

 

 But there were also natural sculptures made out of twigs, branches, grass etc.We had to keep our eyes open to spot some things, like the twig mobiles with hanging ceramic glass icicles, or the ceramic ladybirds fixed onto tree trunks.

 

 I loved the fairy house--the hole in the tree trunk reached by a tiny, delicate ceramic glass ladder and the 'do not disturb' sign.

We found a stick man made out of a big branch, I thought the grandchildren would have loved it. In the centre of the woods was a big tipi with straw bales inside for children to sit on at story telling times.

We came a cross a big orange metal crab which looked like it was made out of some sort of agricultural machinery, a bright blue boat, a wheelbarrow wearing wellingtons and many more strange and interesting things.

As we wandered along the path we occasionally caught a glimpse of the hall through the trees and we could see that the woods skirted the massive lawn in front of the house.  In the centre of the lawn was a huge 400 year old weeping hornbeam tree. Under the hornbeam was a life size metal horse sculpture.  On close inspection we could see that it was made out of horseshoes, spanners and all sorts of metal items--very impressive, especially the price of £11,000!

 Nearer to the house was a little garden with a pond and a vegetable garden. In the conservatory was the shop where you could buy the art work (if you could afford it!).

This garden is not a plantsman's garden and anyone going to see interesting planting would be disappointed. The gardens were very natural with the bluebells, cow parsley and  ponds in the woods.  It was the bluebells and the sculptures which made the garden so interesting. There were things which made us smile or laugh and things which took our breath away.  It was nothing like I had imagined, but much better.

 The garden is open again in July for the Lytham Arts Festival. I'm sure it will be worth another visit.

Our pond and bog garden

Our wildlife pond and bog garden at the allotment is looking really good now. Over the last few weeks I have been gradually planting around the pond and in the boggy area next to it. It really is very squelchy around the pond, I think we chose the right place for it.

I spent some time looking up which plants would be good for growing in very moist conditions and realised that I had quite a few suitable plants in my own garden which I could lift and divide to take to the allotment.

I've planted some hostas around the edges of the pond. I'm not sure how much wet hostas like, but if they survive then they should look really good softening the edges where the stones are. The boggy ground is a sort of triangle shape and here I've planted a rodgersia in the corner with astilbes in front. The astilbes suffered a bit of frost damage when it was really cold last week but they seem to be recovering now. In another corner is a meadowsweet. Also planted are some blue irises and I salvaged some of the yellow flag irises which had completely taken over when we first moved on to the allotment. I shall have to keep them under control now. There are two types of grasses, a carex elata aurea and another which I have had in my garden for years but I don't know the name of. I found a ragged robin plant at my local garden centre which was described as a bog garden plant and at the plant fair last Sunday I bought a pale yellow trollius. The label said grow in soil which never dries out. That seemed to fit the description of our soil.

In the pond I put a marsh marigold, a blue iris, a grass and a water forget me not. There are also a couple of underwater plants. I would like to put a floating plant in, most water lilies would be too big for our little tin bath pond, but there are some varieties which I know are suitable for small ponds, so I will keep looking.

So that was a lot of plants but for very little cost as most of them came from my own garden. It's looking very good now and should be even better once the plants are established and in flower.

The good news is we have some tadpoles in the pond which we rescued after finding them in the drain at the top of the plot.  They must have come down the pipe which drains the water from the plot above us.  I hope they like their new home, it is a much safer place.  The duck you see in the photo, is a rescue duck, we  found it in the mud at the bottom of the old pond. It seems to be very happy in its new home.

 

Plant Fair and open gardens

At the weekend Richard and I took some time off from the allotment to visit a Plant and Garden Fair at Browsholme Hall near Clitheroe.  It's an annual event which Helen and I went to last year at this time but didn't get to see all of the gardens.  So this year we were determined to stay longer and see as much of the gardens as we could.

The first priority though was to look at the plant stalls outside and the artisan stalls in the barn. I bought a trollius plant for the bog garden at the allotment, a lovely coppery pink geum called Leonard's Variety and an allium. In the barn were various craft and food stalls, but the one which caught my attention was the lady selling her own British grown flowers.  There were some lovely hand tied bunches and I just had to have one.  It's given me ideas for my own flower growing  in the garden and allotment.

Having spent too much money, we left the plant stalls behind and started off along the garden path. There was a a lot of water  running through the grounds and our first area to look at was a stream area with a bridge, little waterfalls and a pond.  Any water features are of great interest to us at the moment as we have just built a wildlife pond and bog area on the allotment.  I was interested in the planting around the stream and pond. Although it is early in the year yet for much to be in flower, I could see new growth emerging and recognised rodgersia, irises, primula.

The stream went off across the fields and we continued along the path which led towards a woodland area and a big lake (more water).

We walked around the lake stopping to look in the boathouse. 

We didn't have time to wander into the woods, so after walking around the lake we headed back towards the house.  Next to the house is a formal garden area with box edged beds and a fish pond.

 Up some well worn steps and we came to a row of trees which had red bark and some interesting gnarled trunks and branches.  They looked very old.

Browsholme Hall is having another open garden day and plant fair on 5th July for the
National Gardens Scheme, so if you are in the area it's worth a visit.

Making progress

 

We've had some really back breaking work to do on plot 8 in the last couple of weeks. The conifer tree which was causing us some concern finally came down with help from Richard and one or two allotment neighbours.  The only damage was in the pond where an iris stalk got a bit bent but it seems to have recovered now. Just in the nick of  time I removed my precious marsh marigold and the duck which we had found in the mud at the bottom of the old pond.

So with that problem sorted it was back to work on filling in the old pond with rubble and clearing the area of weeds

It took a lot of rubble to fill it.

You can now start to see where the new growhouse is going to be. This area will soon be filled with gravel. This time last last year this area was full of weeds. There's lots more still to be done but it's beginning to look much better.