Posts Tagged ‘winter’

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Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

The First Rhubarb

Rhubarb 2
Today is a red letter day, or rather a red rhubarb day- the day we get to eat the first fruit (or rather, vegetable) of the year. From today until the end of October I can be pretty confident that when I’m at home I’ll be able to eat something from the vegetable garden every day.

Last year I moaned that the rhubarb was a fortnight late and I blamed the lateness on the exceptionally hard winter. I must have been wrong, because this winter has been even harder but the rhubarb is on time, even a little earlier than usual. I think now that the determining factor must be the warmth of the spring.

There’s a variety called Timperley Early, which is recommended by one of the regulars at the Riverside Hotel as a reliable early cropper, and one of the best varieties to force. Every year at this time, when I’ve enjoyed the first of Margaret’s rhubarb pies I remind myself to plant some Timperley Early, so that I can enjoy it a month earlier. And every year I completely forget about it until the next year.

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Sunday, February 27th, 2011

Death in Springtime

Cordyline
Things are springing to life in the garden, but it’s time to think about death. In amongst the new growth there are signs of death everywhere after a brutal winter. We thought we were badly hit last year, but this winter has been far worse. The biggest casualties have been the cordylines (Cordyline australis, sometimes known as the Torbay Palm).The victims have for the most part been the younger plants, those less than ten years old. Most of the more mature ones seem to be OK and in fact we seem to have fared better than the rest of Grange, where even large ancient palms have been hit, especially along the promenade. But in fact it’s too soon to talk about death with these plants because there’s a good chance that they will regenerate from the base so that, all being well, what has been a rather plain single-stemmed palm will become a handsome multi-stemmed one.

The photo shows a healthy mature palm surrounded by stricken younger ones.

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Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

The Winter Fireside

Fireplace 2
“I put up a petition annually for as much snow, hail, frost or storm, of one kind or another
as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which
attend a winter fireside, candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea maker,
shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor whilst the wind and rain
are raging audibly without”.
Thomas de Quincey- Confessions of an English Opium-eater

One of the great pleasures of my Slow Life is an open fire. The colder it is outside the more blissful the fire. Of course the ideal is the inglenook blazing with logs but here at Yewbarrow House we have small fireplaces and I find that a mixture of logs and coal is best. The fireplaces here are placed beneath windows, which is an usual architectural feature, but one which works well and we get a good draw even though the flue has to bend sharply to reach the chimney which runs up the side of the window.

Some of my sharpest early memories are to do with coal fires- of fetching buckets of coal from the outhouse and putting the “slack” on the kitchen fire last thing at night, so that it would last until morning. Perhaps it’s those childhood memories which make an open fire so precious- whatever the reason it’s good to come home to a blazing fire on a frosty evening.

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Sunday, December 12th, 2010

Wagyus- Loving the Cumbrian Winter

Wagyus_in_Winter
When I did my research on the Wagyus in the province of Kobe in Japan I found them housed in barns in temperatures of more than 100 degrees fahrenheit. Each barn had three enormous fans whose purpose I thought was to cool down the animals until I was told by my Japanese hosts that they were there to blow away the stench of the ammonia, caused by the animal’s urine, which, were it not for the fans would be overpowering in the heat.

Conditions in Cumbria are completely different from those in Kobe. For a start, we have grass on which the cattle can feed- in Kobe they are given grain, which is imported from Canada or Australia (some carbon footprint!). In Kobe the cattle are kept in the barns year round, three to a stall, whereas ours have the freedom of the fells. They run free with the Highlanders, the Galloways and the Blue Greys, all of which are hardy and don’t need shelter whatever the weather. We didn’t know how the Wagyus would take to the great outdoors so I was pleased to see them thriving outside in the bleak midwinter. They have a barn in which they can shelter, but they seem happy to remain with their pals on the fells, whatever the weather.

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Friday, December 10th, 2010

The Bee’s Weather Forecast

Bee Hive
Which makes the better weather forecaster- a bee or the Met Office? Last year Gloria Havenband, an amateur beekeeper from Derbyshire, noticed that the entrances to her bee hives had been blocked with very dense beeswax, much thicker than is normal. Her bees, she said, had prepared impregnable defences against wind rain and snow- an unusually harsh winter must be on its way. Not at all, said the Met Office, we can expect a mild winter. We all know who was right.
This year, Mrs Havenband noticed that her bees had once again protected their hives with thick layers of beeswax. Once again, their powers of forecasting have proved to be much more reliable than the Met Office’s £30 million computer. Perhaps they should but a few bee hives on the roof of their computer room.

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Thursday, December 9th, 2010

The End of The Big Freeze

Japanese Pool in winter
This nipping air
Sent from the distant clime where winter wields
His icy scimitar

William Wordsworth

Yesterday the temperature on the road to the Damson Dene Hotel was minus 17.5 degrees; today it was plus 2. This remarkable turnaround was brought about simply because the wind changed direction from the icy east to the warm west. This is the first time the temperature here has been above zero for a fortnight.

Although the main roads have been clear there has been such a sense of drama in all the news bulletins that most people have been afraid to travel and the Lake District has had very few visitors, which is a pity because they have missed seeing the countryside at its most beautiful. This is how Paul Simons, who writes on the weather in the Times, describes it:

“As if by magic, a winter wonderland has appeared. Every tree, fence and blade of grass looks as if it has been sprayed with icing sugar, glittering and sparkling in the winter sunshine. This is a frost, but no ordinary frost. It is called rime, and appears as a thick coat of white crystals in exceptionally cold weather. And if the wind blows, the rime forms thick streaks on the side of a tree or any other object facing the direction of the wind, making it look like icy spears bursting out”

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Sunday, November 28th, 2010

Winter Spectaculars-Part 2 Pampas Grass

Pampas Grass
Eric Robson may be the sharpest wit on the radio, but he’s a bit of a snob. I mean a gardening snob of course- I’m sure he’s not the sort of person to wince if he hears someone using the word toilet. But he does wince when he sees Pampas Grass (Cortaderia selloana) growing in someone’s garden, which must make any drive through suburbia a painful experience for him. He was very condescending on Gardener’s Question Time to a poor woman who asked how to control her clump of Pampas Grass. He said that Pampas Grass belonged on the pampas, not in a garden. His prejudice arises, no doubt, because Pampas Grass is seen so often in suburban gardens, usually too large for the site.
But in the right place, where it doesn’t get too big for it’s boots, it is the most magnificent of grasses. The Victorians loved it and so do I. The majestic plumes appear in the autumn, just when everything else is starting to die down and, weather permitting, they will last until the spring.

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Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Winter Spectaculars- Part 1- The Tree Fern

Tree Ferns in winter
Some gardens are spectacular for two months and dreary for the rest of the year. I couldn’t abide that. Others are good in summer but desolate in winter. Not a good idea. When I began to design the garden at Yewbarrow House I was determined to avoid these traps. To my mind a garden should look good all year round. Moreover, in winter time the garden should look good when viewed from the house as the chances are that when the weather is cold you are going to be looking at the garden from the warmth inside.

With these principles in mind I’ve tried to ensure that each of the windows which look out onto the garden has a good year-round aspect. The fern garden was designed to be viewed from the room which we call the “quiet room”, which is where I do all my work and where I read, and where no TV or music or kids are allowed. Most ferns die down in winter, but Tree Ferns (Dicksonia Antarctica) retain their fronds, which is why I’ve given pride of place to the tree ferns. They are under a canopy of trees, as they would be in their native New Zealand, except that here the canopy is of Yew rather than Eucalyptus. The canopy gives adequate protection from frost so they don’t need wrapping and can look good right through the winter, however cold or snowy it gets.

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Friday, November 19th, 2010

Surprising Survivors Part 11- Cordyline Australis

Cordyline Australis
A series of heavy frosts, such as we experienced last winter, will cut down a young Cordyline Australis . But it’s very difficult to finish them off altogether. What happens is that a single stemmed tree will rejuvenate from the base and become multi-stemmed. This is what has happened to all the Corylines at the Damson Dene Hotel They were cut right back in February and then started to resprout in July. The photo is of a multi-stemmed Cordyline on the promenade in Grange. This plant was a 12ft palm tree with a single trunk in 1996. In the spring of 1997, after a bad winter with 2 feet of snow the tree appeared to be dead. But it grew back with an astonishing 21 trunks. Over the years some of those trunks have been snapped off, usually be small boys swinging on them, but new trunks always re-emerge from the base. This very exotic palm is one of the great survivors, even in our climate.

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Sunday, November 14th, 2010

Putting the Dahlias to Bed

Dahlias in store
This is the time of year when all the gardening columns are giving advice about shutting the garden down for the winter. One burning question is- do we ned to go to the trouble of lifting dahlias and storing them indoors? If you’ve got only a few choice specimens you’d be mad not to lift them, as the effort is minimal and once they’re inside they don’t need any attention until the spring, not even watering and you can be confident that they’ll be free from harm. But when, like me, you have hundreds, it’s a major chore and there’s a big temptation to leave them in the ground and take the risk. But the danger isn’t just from frost- in our garden there are mice, squirrels, moles and badgers to contend with, as well as the danger of the tubers rotting away in water logged soil. And even if they survive the pests, the frosts and the damp the plants will be slow to emerge and unlikely to flower before July. So for us the effort is worth it- and if we put the tubers in the cold frame in March we can take plenty of cuttings and get them planted out with some already in bloom by the end of May. As this photo shows, they have some rather splendid quarters in which to while away the winter.

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