Gladioli have been out of fashion for as long as I can remember. They got a reputation for being too showy and Dame Edna put paid to any hopes of a revival. But I love them and in January I ordered a large batch for a show garden at Tatton which, in the end, didn’t happen. So at short notice I needed to find a home for 400 gladioli. I planted about half of them here at Yewbarrow House, putting some among the large leaved Canna Musifolia (musifolia means “banana-leaved, so they are huge). This created a very effective display as the flowers of the gladioli seemed to belong to the cannas, causing many a visitor to do a double take. The other 200 plants I used at the Damson Dene hotel, planting them along the border of the Dahlia garden, where they look stunning. The gladioli have been in flower for a good two months (no doubt helped by the gloomy weather) which is fabulous value.
Posts Tagged ‘Yewbarrow House’
Monday, September 6th, 2010
English Apples – Supermarket Shame
Anthony Davison is a fifth generation farmer, whose website, Big Barn, promotes farmer’s markets and local suppliers. He has pointed out that English apples are available in 1,050 of his outlets, but haven’t yet made their way into any of the big three supermarkets. Of course, those supermarkets are busy selling apples by the lorry-load, but they are all imported, all absolutely uniform and all suffering the deleterious effects of being stored for far too long. No doubt the PR departments of the big supermarkets will continue to maintain that they sell local produce, but for the most part that is a lie. Everyone who shops in supermarkets at the expense of local suppliers is helping to support that lie.
Here at Yewbarrow House we have been picking apples for several weeks now and Margaret baked our first blackberry and apple pie on 19th August. Delicious it was too. If we are picking apples so far north, I’m sure that the orchards of Kent will be harvesting theirs too. If supermarkets really did support local producers, they would be selling them.
Sunday, September 5th, 2010
National Gardens Scheme Open Day
At our last Open Day, in August, we were over-run with visitors, which caused traffic congestion, leading to rows with exasperated motorists and, after an old gentleman had collapsed in our kitchen garden, a prolonged drama involving three “First Responders” who arrived in separate cars and an ambulance which couldn’t get through. Today, in comparison, we had a dream day. 346 visitors came, with the good sense not to arrive all at once; the weather was fine but not too hot and we raised a very handsome £1,781 for the NGS. I spend the day with a bucket and secateurs, dead-heading and tidying up, but mainly chatting amiably to the visitors, and doing my best to answer their questions. Margaret has the hellish job of serving endless teas, helped by her friend Joyce and our eldest daughter Jo. Meanwhile our youngest, Sara, is in charge of the bottom gate, helped by Matt, and our middle daughter Georgie looks after the top gate and the plant stall, helped today by another young volunteer, Chelsea. These girls have worked patiently in all weathers all day for all four of our open days this year, without a single word of complaint, which has made their old dad very proud.
The photo is of Sara and two of her friends on an earlier day putting on an impromptu ‘synchronised swimming’ show for astonished visitors in the Orangery.
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
The Leatherwood
In terms of flowers per square inch nothing beat the Leatherwood (Eucryphia). When they are in full flower they are stunning, with their pure white flowers standing out against the dark green leaves. If the weather is hot the flowers will turn brown quickly but in a cool, overcast August like this one, they will survive for a good fortnight. The flowers always seem to be covered in wasps but, strangely, never bees. The best variety is Eucryphia x nymanensis, of which we, greedily, have four in this garden. Two are in the shade and they tend to burst into flower a week or two after the others and keep their flowers for longer.
Monday, August 30th, 2010
Jack’s Black Magic
Jack Gott, the Dahlia guru, who so generously named his stunning new “petite” Dahlia after his colleague’s baby daughter (see yesterday’s posting) has developed another stunner, pictured here. We have named it “Yewbarrow Black”. Black is the Holy Grail for plant breeders, because a true black is difficult to achieve. Most “blacks” are in fact deep purples or reds. This Dahlia is exceptionally dark. The most popular dark-leafed Dahlia is the Bishop of Llandaff, which we grow here, together with other dark-leafed varieties. These plants are hybrids, which don’t come true from seed, the corollary of which is that the seed will often produce a completely new plant. Here at Yewbarrow House we have dozens of different varieties of Dahlias growing side by side, which bees and insects spend the summer busily cross-pollinating. Jack Gott has patiently collected the seed, watched it germinate and brought on the new plants in the trial beds behind the potting shed. This has produced some stunners, including the darkly exotic “Yewbarrow Black”.
Friday, August 27th, 2010
Box Blight- Is there a cure?
This shocking photo shows the awful state of the box hedging in our kitchen garden. We only put it in ten years ago and very handsome it looked too, but now it has succumbed to box blight and we are in the middle of the heart breaking and back breaking job of digging it all out. Of the several hundred plants only about three dozen are unaffected, and these we have potted up in the hope we can save them. Box blight is said to be incurable, but I was given a ray of hope today in a chance conversation with Margaret Robinson of The Mammoth Onion. She said that she had been faced with a similar problem with some box hedging which had been planted by her grandfather many years before- she took the very radical step of cutting the plants off at the base and the plants grew back healthily after a couple of years. She had been given the idea after seeing a lavender grower on Jersey cutting his plants to the base and when she queried whether he was being too brutal was told that that was the best way to encourage fresh growth. This advice has come too late for most of our hedging, but we are going to try it out on the rest.
Friday, August 6th, 2010
Raspberry Picking- A Family Affair
Raspberries are very good at concealing themselves behind leaves, which is why raspberry picking is best done en famille so that there are pickers of differing heights who can spot the berries from every angle. This year the crop would have been excellent if the weather hadn’t become so wet just as they started to ripen, sand we have lost at least a third of the crop because of mould. We have used most of the raspberries in summer puddings this year, and there isn’t much left over for making jam, but this doesn’t really matter as we made 265 jars last year and there’s still plenty left.
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
Three sets of twins
When Moreen Cunliffe booked a garden tour with cream teas for 42 people I thought it was the usual
horticultural event and I gave them the full treatment, complete with botanical names in Latin. These gardening groups usually consist of ladies of a certain age and tonight I was a little surprised to see quite a few children and even a babe in arms. There were also quite a few glazed faces and not one of those awkward questions trying to trip me up. It was only after they had had their cream teas that I found out that they were in fact a group of family and friends celebrating Moreen’s 40th wedding anniversary. In fact it was a joint celebration between Moreen and her twin sister Eileen, who had got married on the same day. And Eileen’s husband Nick was also a twin. This picture shows the two sets of twins, together with their grandsons, Charlie and Harry, also twins.