Herbal ointments

One of the things that visitors say they will miss from our shop when the garden closes is the range of herbal creams that we have sold for the past nine years. Made in Scotland, with simple, unpretentious labelling and organic, straightforward ingredients, they will be missed by me too. So I thought I would let everyone know where they can still get them, especially as Jacqui who makes them, has just had her own website made.

We've always found the calendula ointment great for sunburn. Petals of Calendula officinalis - see picture - are steeped in sunflower oil and mixed with beeswax, lavender oil and benzoin (which is also a natural ingredient) ... and that's all. There's a comfrey ointment too - it's a light green colour from the comfrey leaves, and the midge ointment has always sold well when I took groups round in the evening! Not only was it effective at repelling midges (tested in Scotland! but due to some rules has to be called Summer Evening Balm), but it smells delicious, a mixture of lavender, thyme, citronella and peppermint oils in aloe vera.

Jacqui's website is www.organicaj.co.uk and there are lots of other products to buy as well as our favourites.

Delicious baked tomatoes

There are so many tomatoes at the moment that we have them baked several times a week and they are just wonderful. David has grown our favourite variety, the small and sweet 'Gardener's Delight', plump little tomatoes on long tresses. We have them baked in the oven to a recipe from Monty Don's book 'Fork to Fork', a much thumbed book in our kitchen which has recently been reissued. I shall really miss them when they are finished but at the moment they have been producing for ages and I just don't get bored with them. At lunchtime, we pick them, hot with sun, straight from the vine.

The garden is amazing for butterflies at the moment. Fallen plums on the grass are being feasted on by red admirals who obviously know a thing or two about grog. You can smell the tinge of alcohol as you walk by! They are so laid back that it takes them a while to lift from the ground, then some 20 or 30 take to the air. They are all over the asters too, loads of them, followed by visitors with cameras!

Late season colour

I had to put in this picture of the dahlia and cosmos bed because it is looking so colourful at the moment - a last dash of exoticism before the first frosts. With the nearby beds of sweet peas (my favourite is 'Cupani') and double orange pot marigolds (Miss Jekyll's favourite, see previous blog posting), this part of the garden looks wonderful at the moment.

At Chesters Walled Garden we have a series of square, box-edged beds and one of these is given up to dahlias and cosmos. All the dahlias were grown from seed this spring and are a variety known as ‘Bishop’s children’. This produces a glorious mix of heady, hot colours; red, rich pink, yellow, burnt orange and apricot. It is surprisingly easy to grow dahlias from seed each year; the results are some unexpected colours but that in itself is fun. This particular seed mix has all the gorgeous dark, purple black foliage of ‘Bishop of Llandalf’.

Miss Jekyll appears in Whalton Manor Garden

Yesterday I went to Whalton Manor Garden to see a 'theatrical dance production' which was inspired by the house, garden and people who have lived or worked there. I didn't really know what to expect so went along without any preconceptions and was delighted by what was a magical performance. Numbers were strictly limited out of necessity because the dance moved between one part of the garden and another, the small 'audience' moving with them. The production was directed by Cinzia Hardy who lives locally and who initially asked the sculptor Julia Barton to install her three 'phyto-forms', metal sculptures that have growing plants which I last saw when she exhibited them at Levens Hall in Cumbria, the famous and ancient topiary garden. Taking the sculptures as inspiration (their forms influenced the design of the costumes) and weaving in the story of Gertrude Jekyll's association with Whalton Manor, the piece evolved to be something very special to the place itself.

Whalton Manor dates back to the 17th century and was altered by Sir Edwin Lutyens - this of course is where Gertrude Jekyll comes in and between them they laid out 3 acres of gardens. Her sunken rose garden doesn't exist any more but we could imagine it during the dance production because it's site was pegged out on the lawn. Various characters from the history of the house appeared or danced, threading their way through the separate garden areas, dancing under trees, stepping out of giant picture frames, retracing the steps of the site of the former ballroom, with music from a rustic band led by a green clad man who embodied the spirit of the garden. There was even a horse ridden by the present owner of the Manor, Penny Norton, who rode between bucolic dancers under the parkland trees and then cantered off in a graceful arc.

It felt like we were glimpsing another world, becoming part of a shifting film set. It had echoes of Alice in Wonderland and the Draughtsmans Contract as well as the history of Miss Jekyll's association with the garden. There was something very gentle and charming about the hour long performance and, with the plan that it might tour in the future, there will hopefully be other opportunities to see it.

A very special walnut tree

I received a very special gift the other day from a Dutch nurseryman, Ton Friesen, who visited Chesters Walled Garden last summer. We have a rather fine walnut tree in the garden which amongst other things I will be very sad to leave, but Ton has given me a tree for the future, a walnut that he has bred which produces nuts very early on in its life. We had to wait 20 years for the tree in the walled garden to start producing nuts!

At Ton's nursery, they graft walnut cultivars bred especially for the Dutch and north German climate and so they are probably suitable for northern England too. Their website lists an amazing 33 cultivars of Juglans regia alone. Ton sent me one of their hardier plants, a tree which is grafted and that amazingly takes only two or three years to bear its first nuts. This cultivar is named after the daughter of his friend and colleague, Cess Barnewald and is called Juglans regia 'Chiara'. I met Chiara when she came here with her parents a couple of weeks ago and we all spent a happy hour wandering about the garden. Ton's website is at www.smallekamp.nl and he is currently working on an English version of it.

Although we have abundant wildlife at the garden as any follower of my blog will know, one thing we don't often see is a grasshopper. When I was a child there were grasshoppers everywhere in the long grass on the edges of our garden and I loved watching them rubbing their back legs together as they clung to grass stalks. Even on walks I see very few nowadays, so I was very happy to see this one sitting on our old roller. If anyone knows what species it is, I'd like to know!

A handful of pheasant chicks

Pheasants are not the cleverest of birds and, as usual, this is a tale of maternal incompetance. Every year a female pheasant (a different one each time, of course) lays eggs in the garden, somewhere hidden in a border despite all the visitors, (that bit is clever), hatches out a large brood and then proceeds to lose most of them. One year a pheasant hen led them to the pond and three drowned, another let them get scattered all over the lawn attracting the attention of the sparrowhawk and more than once they have been left on the wrong side of a wall. (See previous blogs May & July 07)

That's what happened this year again; the pheasant, having reared up the young in the garden, flew over the bottom gate and expected her brood to somehow rejoin her. Some had made it and others hadnt! It was a visitor who alerted me to their predicament, and her Australian friend, Christine Harris, managed to photograph three of the chicks hopelessly trying to squeeze through the wire on the gate. I scooped up all three at once (see Christine's second photograph) and popped them over the gate with the mother who was clucking every now and then from under a fuschia. All's well that ends well, this time....

Pot marigold, the wonderful Calendula officinalis

I wrote in an earlier blog about how I lost an entire line of pink lavender in the late winter (except for 4 plants). I deliberately hadn't pruned the old flowers off last year to give the plants more protection in the winter, but even so, the frosts that we had in the late winter were enough to kill all the lavenders. Making a virtue of a necessity, We replanted the space with a long line of that wonderful healing herb, pot marigold or Calendula officinalis, thinking it would look good with the different tone of yellow from the golden yarrow. I'd given a week's worth of work experience to a lad from the Queen Elizabeth High School in Hexham and showed him how to lay out the seedlings in a staggered double row, seedlings which had all self sown from a previous lot of marigolds that I had let grow by the side of the drive. In the vegetable garden we grow Gertrude Jekyll's favourite marigold, 'Golden King', as a companion plant for beans and other veg, but these paler, buttery flowers are also very lovely.