Garden designers have to take account of time as well as shape, colour and texture. This is because the shape and size of a plant will change with the seasons and from year to year. What looks good this year may be horribly out of proportion the next. Interior designers don’t have this problem. If they put together a design for a room and choose a sofa, a rug and a table lamp they won’t find, a year down the line, that the sofa has doubled in size, the rug has changed colour and the lamp has withered away. Their design may become a victim of fashion or taste but that is all.
The problem of the effects of time are startlingly illustrated by my Grevillea Rosemarinifolia. This evergreen shrub is ten years old and has grown into a magnificent plant. It’s in flower from February to November, puts up with the nastiest winters and is as happy a performer as anything in the garden. And yet, it has to go. The problem is that it’s simply too good. It’s meant to grow to a maximum of 5 feet high and 5 feet wide- i.e. 25 square feet. In fact it’s grown to 10 feet in both directions- that’s 100 square feet, or 4 times it’s expected size. The Grevillea was supposed to take up a corner of the sunken garden but has ended up dominating it. The sofa has filled up the entire room and is destined for the skip.
Artichokes, like asparagus, sweetcorn and crumpets are one of those glorious foods which are perfect with butter- just butter and nothing else. We are now enjoying our first artichoke crop for two years, after missing out last year when the plants were cut back by the winter frosts. Why they escaped the cold this winter is a mystery.
Our enjoyment is all the more intense because of the enforced abstinence. One artichoke makes a satisfying main course. They couldn’t be easier to prepare- the heads just need to be dropped into boiling water and left to cook for 40 minutes. You need to melt plenty of butter because there needs to be enough to give the hearts a good dunk at the end. I’m a bit of a chav where butter is concerned and always use salted butter- for the simple reason that it’s tastier. One tip, which I always forget at the beginning of the season- always allow a minute or two for the artichoke and the butter to cool down before you start eating- otherwise you’ll burn the roof of your mouth.
Soft fruit needs lots and lots of rain and this year we’ve got it. The rain has already given us bumper crops of black currants and gooseberries- now its the turn of the raspberries. But we’ve had difficulty harvesting the crop because it’s no good trying to pick raspberries when it’s wet and there have been precious few dry spells. Margaret has borne the brunt of the picking because I tend to be out at work. Today the weather cleared just before lunch and Margaret ventured into the raspberry patch with her basket. Although the rain had stopped it was wet underfoot. There are four rows of raspberries in the fruit cage, each row separated by stone flags, which were put down to keep off the weeds. Because they are on a slope the paths can be treacherous in the wet. And so it proved- Margaret lost her footing, falling heavily and hurting her wrist. At first, it didn’t seem so bad and she carried on picking, but before long the pain hit home and she realised that something was seriously wrong. Ten hours and two hospitals later she returned home with her arm in plaster. She had broken three bones in her hand and two in her wrist. She said that the pain was the worst she had ever experienced, which is something coming from someone who has given birth to 6 children.
The day wasn’t entirely wasted- she managed not to spill the raspberries when she fell.
This is a new Dahlia and I’m really quite excited about it. We have grown it from seed and it appears to be a totally new variety- a tree dahlia cross. It’s much taller than most hybrids, growing on a single stem to more than five feet. The leaves are unusually large, some measuring ten inches in length. These are qualities which I think it has taken from a tree dahlia; but it has come to maturity much earlier than a tree dahlia would, and has a striking red flower whereas the flowers on tree dahlias tend to be pale blue or mauve and rather insignificant. This plant is vigorous, with 13 flower heads. It is also scented, so it may be crossed with red scented variety which Jack Gott developed two or three years ago when he worked here, and which has the preliminary name of Margaret Denby. I haven’t yet thought of a name for this new one, but it’s certainly one to watch.
The three ducks who spend the summer in our garden aren’t our pets exactly but we feel as if they might be. They are wild enough to fly south every winter (we don’t know where) but at the start of every spring they are back and they’re tame enough to swim beside me in the pond. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been keeping an eye on the female as she sits on her eggs in one of our strawberry houses in the kitchen garden. This is her second attempt to raise a family this year, see Newborn Ducklings at Yewbarrow House Part 2.
After breakfast this morning I went to check on her as usual and as I clambered the steps to the kitchen garden I came upon the sickening sight of a pile of feathers on the steps. It was unmistakably a pile of her feathers. And sure enough the nest was bare and 9 blue duck eggs had been abandoned.
How did our lovely faithful friend meet her fate? There are two prime suspects. The first is one of the badgers from the sett in the fern garden. The reason I’ve put a badger in the frame is that only the other day a friend described how she had seen a badger kill her chickens. The other suspect is the rather evil looking young cat in this photo, which I took not far from the scene of the crime. Which of the two is the culprit? We shall never know, but a clue may be found in the fact that as I moved closer to get a better photo of the cat it fixed its eye on the camera and the shutter jammed, something which has never happened before, and it was only 5 minutes later, after the cat had bolted, that I could get the camera to work again.
For the last year a five ton lump of rock has been sitting forlornly underneath the stone arch in my garden. People have wondered whether it was a piece of abstract art. If it was, its message would have been so dull it would have been worthy of the Turner prize.
But today visitors to my garden (it’s one of our Yellow Book open days) have been treated to the sight of the block of stone coming to life. Alan Ward, who has done so much amazing work in the garden making sculptures out of the limestone rocks, is turning the stone into his version of Leda and the Swan. This video shows Alan’s intense concentration as he chips away at the stone with his chisel. Each part of Leda’s body requires a day’s work. Today 250 visitors have had the pleasure of seeing him perfecting her right breast.
June has been rather cold and damp, perfectly normal weather, in other words, for the start of summer. The rain has been good for the soft fruits but the cold has been disastrous for the flower garden. We’ve had an excellent crop of blackcurrants and gooseberries. On the other hand, the seedlings which we planted for cutting flowers at the beginning of May have hardly moved at all. I reckon we’re about a month behindhand and the only flowers I’ve been able to take to the hotels have been carnations. This slideshow, of photos taken in the garden during June, is much less colourful than we would expect at this time of the year.
I did a double take when I glanced at the magazine photos of our sunken garden as it was in 2003. Surely, I thought, the Chusan palms can’t have grown THAT much. Back then they were stubbly little things, no more than 4ft tall. Now they are at least 12 feet. That’s a foot a year. Some going.
Chusan palms are hardy anywhere in England, but they seem particularly suited to this part of the north west. A sign of just how hardy they are can be seen at the Newby Bridge Hotel, where I planted two of them in 1997. The climate there, at the southern tip of Lake Windermere is much colder and much wetter than it is here in Grange, but both are perfectly happy.
The ground around my Chusan Palms (Trachycarpus Fortuneii) is now spattered with yellow seeds which have fallen from the flowers. Some of these will germinate and its a comforting thought that they may, in my lifetime, grow into substantial trees- quite a different story from the Sago palms about which I wrote last week – Cycad Seeds
Cycads are sexy trees. Unusually, they are either male or female, with the males producing very phallic-like cones and the females bearing seeds. This photo is of a female Cycad in our orangery, which has just produced seeds, which resemble furry orange eggs. If you shake the seed pods you can hear the seed rattling inside.
This particular Cycad (Cycas Revoluta, also known as the Sago Palm, although it isn’t a palm) is one of several which we used to keep outside, in the Gravel Garden. But they can’t really cope with our cold wet weather and after a few winters outside they began to look very sad. When the Orangery was built, we brought them inside and after a year of warmth they began to recover. Now they’re in perfect health.
Cyads grow very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and although in their native Japan they will grow to a height of several metres and will develop multiple stems, they never grow to full maturity in this country. Is it, then, worthwhile planting the seed? Well, if by chance the seed were to germinate, there is no chance of it growing to more than two or three feet in height in my lifetime. It may become a fully developed tree by the time my grandchildren (who aren’t born yet) reach middle age. In that case there’s no time to waste- let’s get that seed planted.
After Crug Farm’s triumph at Chelsea, another of our plant suppliers, Cath’s Garden Plants, has won a Gold and “Best in Show”- this time at the RHS “Gardener’s World Live”. Cath’s Garden Plants are just up the road from us, at Sizergh, on the outskirts of Kendal. In the old days they were known as Heaves Nursery and were a specialist wholesale nursery. They supplied a good proportion of our perennials when we were first getting started 11 years ago. At that time their prices were so reasonable that we wondered how they could do it. I think its fair to say that if it hadn’t been for the good value they offered we wouldn’t have been able to afford to stock the garden. Quality will out- they now have a retail side and prices have caught up- but they are still bloody good value- and, as we now know, the best in the country to boot.
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials Thoreau
The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food and extend them to life in general. Here in the Lake District where I live with my wife and three daughters, we have a garden where we grow our own food. We know full well that this is an inefficient and expensive way of organising our lives but we do it because we enjoy it and because it forces us to eat healthily and in season. It is slow, because gardening is all about patience.
The principles of Slow Food are "good, clean and fair" - 'good' means that the food should be of good quality, 'clean' means that it should be free of pesticides or harmful chemicals, 'fair' means that when you buy from a farmer, you pay him a decent price. Supermarkets and the large chain stores routinely break all these principles, which is why we, as a family, don't use them. Slow food means also taking the time and trouble to cook the food yourself and to take pleasure in eating it with your family and friends. I like the idea of extending the principles of Slow Food to life in general with the aim of achieving a good work/life balance.
This blog of my Slow Life is mainly about my garden in the Lake District, but also about my hotels, where I earn my living, and about the occasional forays, which my Slow Life allows, into the worlds of design, music and local affairs.
There's also quite a lot in this blog about Japan and the Japanese. This is because I admire their way of life and the fact that the Japanese, more than any other nation, are trying to embrace the Slow Life, even to the extent of having Slow Cities.
