The Walled Garden blog

Spring at Great Dixter

2011-04-16T16:27:00.009Z

This week I went to see a garden that is weeks ahead of mine!! Being at Great Dixter reminded me what a huge difference there is between Sussex and the North; here we have trees just starting into leaf, there I saw a bluebell wood full out under hazel coppice. The journey back on the train was like seeing the progression of the seasons in reverse.

What a joy it was to visit Dixter. I felt so at ease there, so relaxed, lulled by the washes of colour, the unpretentious and happy mixture of bulbs, perennials, annuals, shrubs, trees, topiary, wood and stone. The tulips were at their best, here subtle combinations of purple with silver foliage of cardoons, there jazzy orange with blue. There is such a sense of playfulness and exuberance in the way it is planted, Christopher Lloyd's spirit infusing the place, yet not static like a historic garden that remains stuck in a planting plan and never changes.

I loved the use of aged, silvered wood, tall poles to support honeysuckles, or to grow clematis behind espaliered fruit trees as in this photo. The wooden staves have sagged and settled like a ship, split lenthways providing gaps that ladybirds can overwinter in, giving a rhythmn and patina to the dry wood.

I came home inspired and dissatisfied with my own garden at the same time!

Lovely Amdega summerhouse

2011-03-16T13:57:00.003Z

Our lovely Amdega summerhouse has been the perfect place to get out of the cold March winds at the tail end of a winter that just seems to have gone on and on... It is painted a soft, pebble grey, like the colour of collared dove's feathers, a colour that fits harmoniously with the plants around it; on one side is a collection of greyish hostas, on the other (not yet filled out) are pale yellows and blues from eryngiums, roseroot, coreopsis and an unusual lemon coloured clover.

The roof is made of cedar shingles, tightly fitting together, which age to a lichen grey. They give a lovely scent, woody and evocative, and the evening light comes slanting in from the west through the pretty windowpanes. I love the way the roof line flicks up gently at the eaves, a subtle piece of design. It is hand made from Western Red Cedar which is known for its durability and resistance to warping and shrinking - very necessary to cope with the sort of winter we have just come through! All in all, it is a thing of beauty as well as being a restful place to sit out of the wind.

For more pictures of Amdega summerhouses go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/59596608@N04/ and here is a press release from Amdega below -

PRESS RELEASE

Indoor living, outdoors

Handmade, cedar summerhouses from the world’s oldest supplier of bespoke conservatories

AMDEGA, the world’s oldest maker of conservatories and orangeries, launches new summerhouses for 2011.

Part of the quintessential country garden for generations, and more and more an urban retreat from the pace of city life, summerhouses are the perfect way to enjoy the outdoors whatever the season.

The new summerhouses from Amdega feature eleven different designs made to the highest standard, each with their own unique detailing that can be adapted for a variety of purposes including a tranquil home office, inspirational studio, gym, or even a den for the kids.

Split across two core ranges, ‘The Chelsea’ and ‘The Hampton,’ customers can choose the design, colour and size that reflects their own individual style and matches their home and way of life.

The ‘Chelsea’ range, the more luxuriant and traditional of the two, bears Amdega’s signature style with distinct features including high cedar shingled roofs with elegantly cambered eaves and original hand leaded lights made from individual panes of glass.

The ‘Hampton’ range offers more contemporary designs with functionality, ease of installation and durability at the forefront of their design. Each model offers clean, contemporary lines incorporating Georgian style window panes, cedar slatted roofs and double doors.

With a reputation built upon delivering the highest quality available in the marketplace, Amdega has chosen the finest materials, working closely with its in-house team of craftsmen, from joiners to glaziers, in the creation of the new products.

With this in mind, each of the new summerhouses are hand-crafted from Western Red cedar and other sustainable timbers, offering customers durability and protection against adverse weather conditions which can often lead other woods to shrink, warp or twist.

In line with the launch of Amdega summerhouses, the company is also launching a new website focused entirely on its summerhouse range.

Amdega summerhouses start from £2,760 and are available in a range of colours and decorative stains including Slate Green, Zinnia Red, Nigella Blue, Walnut, Mahogany and Maple (Amdega’s exclusive Botanical Colour Palette).

For more information on Amdega summerhouses please call 0800 980 0797 or visit
www.amdega-summerhouses.co.uk

Monty Don returns to Gardeners' World!

2010-12-09T13:19:00.003Z

I am just so delighted that Monty Don is returning to Gardeners' World! In the midst of all this snow misery it is such good news to me and to so many gardeners I know. It's not that I don't respect Toby Buckland's extensive knowledge (which knowledge I felt he was never allowed to really show by the programme makers) - he has worked in horticulture since leaving school and trained and supervised at Cambridge Botanic Garden. I just hated the falsly chatty, quick topic change, plant up a pot in 30 secs kind of programme that it happened to become just as Toby took over. But Monty Don's return must be because the Beeb now realise that they alientated so many gardeners with that style of programme and that Monty Don will bring back the viewing figures.

Monty Don is equal in my pantheon to Geoff Hamilton (whom I still miss). I pray that the producers won't devalue what he says by making him have to fit in with some cosy, cup-of-tea, jokey style. If they think that it appeals more to younger
viewers, I think they have that wrong. My daughter has her first allotment and has been watching Beechgrove Garden online rather than Gardeners' World. I would love to see more satisfying looks at gardens (ie not too quick a glimpse) and focus on different plants of the kind that Carol Klein has been doing. The most absorbing programmes in recent years have been the Gardeners' World Specials - Carol Klein's recent look at botany & science for example - and my favourite of all, Allotments presented by ..... Monty Don.

So thank you for cheering up my snowbound weeks and here's a picture of snow just to show that I really can't do any gardening!

Snow!

2010-12-02T12:05:00.003Z

With snow up to my knees, it looks like gardening will be on hold for a long time. Even last winter there wasn't such a depth of snow. Just look at the compost bins with their swags of white - and to the right - the spade which had been left stuck in the soil of the vegetable garden!

Garden art and bread

2010-11-21T11:48:00.003Z

I had a lovely comment from an anonymous person (thank you) on my last posting who offered a memory of being in Chesters Walled Garden amongst its amazing and tame wildlife. Memories of the garden live on in all sorts of different ways and from now until nearly Christmas you can see Kim Lewis's quite wonderful prints in the lovely setting of Allendale Bakery and Cafe. It's not really as if you need an excuse to visit this warm, cosy cafe on a winter's day with its fresh baking smells, bowls of home made soup and the best scones I have ever tasted. Kim's work looks so right in this setting and is being much admired.

The prints show 12 iconic plants from the walled garden, plants I chose to represent each of the four walls. I wrote 50 words of text to go with each (keeping to few words is harder than writing lots...) and we talked together about the plants natures, what they FELT like, what they meant to me, and Kim has got all this miraculously into her linocuts. This is the second airing for the exhibition after being seen at the Queen's Hall Arts centre in Hexham this summer. In addition to the prints of Chesters (which Kim entitled 'Sanctuary') she is showing a set of prints of lilies also very beautiful. You can read about the Bakery and its breadmaking courses at www.allendalebakery.com - there is lots of parking or you can park in the marketplace in Allendale and walk for one mile along the river to get to it. The footpath goes past the hollow into an old mine working where a stream issues out of the stone entrance. A great thing to do on a winter day.

An autumn trip to Scampston

2010-11-09T14:59:00.004Z

It's a three hour journey from Northumberland but recently I went down to see the walled garden at Scampston in Yorkshire - for the first time. Up til now I have been too busy working to be able to go but when my friend Jill suggested a trip, I jumped at the chance. Reminded how lovely it is at this time of the year by an article in Country Living, we set off, knowing that when we arrived we would also get a good cup of coffee - the restaurent has a reputation for its food. It didn't disappoint and there were files of press cuttings so we could read about the garden at the same time.

The recommended path around the garden takes you on a journey inside the walls but separated from the various compartments that it is divided into by a line of pleached trees. So we emerged at the far end to look into a garden of curving grasses. Having seen so many photographs of this, I had expected them to be taller and have more impact. We enjoyed the contrast though with the silent garden in the next enclosure, a large, sky-reflecting and serene pool, its surface glassy because it was a still day. The gardeners must have been in the middle of clipping the yew cylinders that are regularly planted in this green space because there were strange wooden structures that provided a template for the shapes. Hinged and made of curving wood they reminded me of whalebone corsets! Perhaps the gardeners were having a break, but the downed tools amplified the silence.

There is much to see at Scampston wihtin the high walls of the garden - cutting garden, vegetable garden, a delighful greenhouse that we could tantalisingly only look into from outside as it needs repair, long strips of perennial plantings backed by yew hedges, shrubby areas, undulating yew hedges and a viewing mound to see the patterns of it all. But the most anticipated was the Perennial Meadow and it was very lovely. From every angle there were different combinations of seedheads, grasses and exciting forms, and we ended up spending a long time just wandering around it taking in the planting details.

At one end of this stands a Katsura grove, a shimmering of autumn leaf colours from multi-stemmed Cercidophyllum trees and as the leaves die they give off a heady and evocative scent of burnt sugar. Its sensuality was enhanced by a great circle of grasses, the tall variety 'Transparent' waving over our heads. Lunch was simply delicious; I had a tremendous Ceasar salad, one of the best ever, beautifully put together and balanced. The long drive back over moor and dale was lit by evening sun so we didn't mind the travelling quite so much and it had been a good day.

2010-08-11T08:59:00.003Z

With Chesters Walled Garden now closed, I am concentrating more on my garden writing and there are several articles out at the moment; in Amateur Gardening is a piece on a remarkable garden at 10 Low Row, North Bitchburn, Co. Durham, which is open for the National Gardens Scheme, where 95% of the plants have been grown from seed or cuttings by Ann Pickering. In the current Northumbrian magazine is an article on Newbiggin House, where Daphne Scott-Harden has created an amazingly rich garden at 1,000 feet up - and in the previous issue of the magazine I wrote about the garden at Carrycoats Hall. This garden is open this coming Sunday when the annual Thockrington church fete is held there.

It's the only chance in the year to see this Northumbrian garden, a garden made in a wild and empty seeming landscape, typical of the uplands of this area. The trees that shelter it nestle in a slight dip in the land, so it is always a surprise to me to drive along the narrow road in the featureless moorland and see the house and its two walled gardens.
One has a very productive crop of vegetables and fruit, the other a country mix of flowers and vegetables with old fruit trees and box hedges. It's unpretentious and lovely, come about by a slow evolution and has a feeling of quiet seclusion.

Throckrington Church Fete is on August 15th starting at 2.30pm. There are teas, stalls, raffle, games, plants, and you can wander in the walled gardens, shrubbery, woodland walks and see the new perennial garden.

Chesters Walled Garden exhibition

2010-06-09T08:49:00.004Z

I have thought of several creative projects to celebrate the life of the garden rather than just let it peter out as it closes and one of these happened this week. The Queen's Hall arts centre in Hexham is hosting an exhibition of work inspired by Chesters Walled Garden, with artists, printmakers, photographers and a ceramic artist putting work into a wonderful mixed show. The preview was last week and these photos show just one aspect of it - a collaboration between me and my long time friend Kim Lewis, who is well known as author and illustrator of children's books. Kim entitled it 'Sanctuary'.

I chose 12 special plants to represent all the planting in the garden and selected 3 for each garden wall, north, south, east and west, writing a short piece of text, just 50 words to express what I felt about them and the memories that they hold. Kim then illustrated them in her delightful, expressive linocuts, each one getting to the essence of the plant's nature. We discussed them as she went along, so that they have exactly the right 'feel' for the plant's way of growing and the emotion that it evokes in me. Using a square format to echo the four walls of the garden, they are like arts and crafts tiles, very lovely and much admired at the preview.

A leaflet with all the text and prints on it, which Kim has called a 'keepsake', a lovely word, is on sale at the Queen's Hall for just £2, a price only possible because of the help from the printers, Alphaset Design in Chillingham Road, Newcastle. I wanted it to be a low cost so that as many people as possible bought it as a memory of the garden. http://www.newcastleprinters.com/

As well as Kim and my collaboration, there is work by Northumberland artists: Birtley Aris, Beryl Dixon, Karen Melvin, Brian Waters, Margot Waters, Tony Jolly, Janet Dickson, Eileen Heywood, Rosalind Reid, Mary-Ann Rogers, Jane Veitch and Rosie Villiers-Stuart. Photographers Simon Fraser and my son, Tom White, have also put work in and Jo Aris is exhibiting a series of meticulously made beads that she has fashioned from the soil of the garden collected from various places important to her. Like tribal artefacts they are laid out in a glass case alongside the memories book to which people are invited to contribute. Add to all this the memorabilia on display and it has resulted in a magical evocation of the garden. It runs until 3rd July.

End of an era

2010-05-02T15:35:00.002Z

It had to come sometime, but I have now handed in the keys to Chesters Walled Garden, and the door is closed. It was a lightly sunny morning and I had a last cup of tea, listening to the jubilant bird song and sitting on a large stone block by the hundred year old espalier apple trees. With no plants in lines in the sales area, the benches taken out and the signs down, it had a feeling of unreality for me, like a seaside resort in winter.

I have divided up and taken out a lot of plants, but much remains. What I can never substitute is the wonderful, crumbly soil, the product of two hundred years work and the vibrant, diverse and often surprising wildlife that I encountered every day - the wren landing on the visitors book in the shop, the stoat I met on a path in winter, the duck who led her ducklings into the sunken greenhouse, the pheasant chicks that so delighted the visitors. Irreplacable and precious.

What I take with me are the things that the garden has taught me and which I can now use to make a new (though private) garden, plus the knowledge I have gained from those 23 years that I can use in writing magazine articles and in my lectures and courses. The plan is that my new garden will open just for the National Gardens Scheme, when the blank canvas I am working on is good enough for people to look at. I shall carry on blogging and writing about the wildlife, gardens and joys of gardening in this special part of the world.

If you are able to come to Hexham, the Queen's Hall Arts Centre is having an exhibtion of the work of some of the artists who have been inspired by Chesters Walled Garden over the years - painters, printmakers, ceramic artists, photographers and more. This starts on May 29th and runs right the way through June. My contribution is a collaboration with the printmaker (and well known children's book illustrator) Kim Lewis; entitled 'Sanctuary' it is a series of 12 of Kim's very beautiful linocuts to accompany text that I have written about some of the iconic plants of the walled garden, the things that made it special. It would be lovely to have as many people as possible visit the exhibition, and there is a special Garden Memories book on display for which contributions are invited. Susie

A long winter and update at last!

2010-03-06T10:42:00.004Z

It has been a long time since I last blogged, I know, but I think that all those people who care about the garden will understand why it has been such a difficult time for me. And what a winter! So here at last is some news of what is happening at the walled garden.

After several weeks of digging up plants, I was helped by a wonderful team of volunteers in mid November to move them in a ragtag collection of boxes, trays and every available sack and bag to a temporary location. Thanks to the generosity of a local landowner, who not only has given my plants this refuge, but even had the ground rotavated and prepared, I was able to take specimens of many of my favourite plants and settle them in before the winter cold. It was just in the nick of time too, as I hadn't realised then that it would turn out to be the hardest winter for a long time. It started raining on November 17th and hardly stopped for a month making the ground really unworkable, then of course there was snow from late December onwards and many people up here were snowed in. Following that, a month of hard frosts and the ground undiggable for a different reason....

In January, the English Garden magazine published a five page article that I had written which was not only about my history at Chesters Walled Garden but about what it is to leave a garden, with its memories and associations held by the plants and the sense of place. It was a cathartic thing to write and is one of a number of artistic projects that help me and others to come to terms with the loss of this special place. In late May, the Queen's Hall arts centre in Hexham will have an exhibition for a month that brings together some of the artworks - paintings, prints, photographs and ceramics - created by artists in response to the garden over the years. It will also preview a collaboration that I am doing with the book illustrator and printmaker, Kim Lewis, called 'Sanctuary', a series of 12 linocuts and text of 12 plants that symobilise the garden and my feelings for it. In addition, there will be memorabilia and a chance for visitors to add to the Garden Memories Book.

Right now, I am embarking on a project to make a new garden which will only be open in a very limited way for charity .... but which at the moment is mud, stones, boulders, weeds and hasn't been cultivated for many years. Hard work and much preparation has to be done to get the ground ready for the plants to come back from their temporary storage but with the help of friends and volunteers, it will somehow get done!

Herbal ointments

2009-10-19T14:13:00.004Z

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

2009-10-03T18:45:00.003Z

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

2009-09-25T08:53:00.002Z

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

2009-09-14T16:19:00.003Z

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

2009-08-19T16:38:00.009Z

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

2009-07-31T17:45:00.005Z

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

2009-07-26T16:15:00.003Z

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.

The garden's future?

2009-07-08T16:32:00.004Z

It is so sad to be at this point after 23 years of working this wonderful, wonderful garden, day in day out, season by season, but the garden will have to close by May next year. This makes it the last time that anyone can see it in summer and autumn which is why I wanted to let everyone know and the response from the media has been hectic, a media storm albeit it regional. Headline of the Journal on Saturday (must be rare for a garden to take the front page, next to Andy Murray), filmed for BBC Look North on Saturday, live radio on Sunday and filmed for Look North again on Monday (in the pouring rain this time!). The garden has been busy with people coming to see, to give their commiserations, to enjoy it while they can and I have to face other people's sadness as well as my own.

My principal worry is where I can go from here, how to save plants that I have loved and nurtured for years and which tell stories of the people and places they have come from. To help others as well as myself, I have a book of 'Garden Memories' which anyone can contribute to in any form. The garden gives so much pleasure to so many people, has been written about worldwide, been in every national newspaper, most gardening magazines, in books and frequently on television. We have supplied thyme plants to Prince Charles, had visits from famous people, won awards, been in cookery programmes, you name it! The wildlife is amazing, the soil is unique, irreplacable, and the atmosphere that has been created is very special. I'm afraid that is all I can say for now at this stage but I just wanted to write something personal on my blog.... Susie

They've fledged!

2009-07-04T09:18:00.002Z

It would happen on a day when I wasn't in the garden but I've just heard that the great tit chicks have flown the nest, negotiating their way out of the cupboard! One was perched, cheepily, on the back of the bench in the greenhouse, another was on the vine and the third flew out of the door which I had left open last night as I was sure today would be the day (hunch correct). The parents were adept at coming and going through the grille above the glass but I thought this might be too much for the youngsters. What a relief after the panics (see previous blog entry) and all the toing and froing of visitors including a couple of coach parties. It's amazing what birds are capable of when they get used to having people around the whole time and although I shall miss seeing them nipping in and out of the cupboard when no-one was looking, I'm glad that they've made it!

Update on the great tit chicks

2009-06-26T19:06:00.002Z

I promised an update on the great tit nest so here it is.

When I checked the cupboard this morning I found that the catch had been moved by someone and, seeing one or two flies going in through the gap above the door, I feared the worst. I had to open the door to see what damage had been done and found a dead chick outside a very ragged, mossy nest on the shelf and three very subdued chicks tucked in a corner of the nest. Concerned that the parents had abandoned them to starve because of interference, I feel desperately sad.

Still I waited from a distance and after a while there was one of the great tits bringing food again, thank heavens! I felt such relief, having watched them for so many days. I'd decided not to put a sign on the cupboard saying 'do not open, birds nesting' because that would very likely make someone want to open it.... but apparently there was a family with a teenager late on Thursday & he had come in the shop and said 'did you know there was a dead chick in the cupboard?' to which the person who was working questioned 'you didn't open it did you?' which he denied ... but it would be the only way of knowing. Anyway, drama over for now, and the birds must be tougher or more used to people than I thought. I've now put some discreet but strong poly tunnel mending tape over the catch to make anyone think twice about opening it....

wait for the next installment...

Of peonies and quirky birds nests

2009-06-18T17:19:00.005Z

Just now the peonies are in bloom, sumptuous bowls of cupped petals with yellow stamen hearts and gorgeous foliage. There are some wonderful rich colours, deep, deep red, crimson, sugar pink, white and salmon and the wilder natured herbaceous plants flow in and around them (pretty Geranium asphodeloides for example, with its tracery of stems and stars of pink and white). The lady's mantle is at its absolute best, frothy green flowers lapping over the gravel of the paths, breaking up the edges to create instant informality. As soon as it starts to go over, I will be cutting it ruthlessly back to prevent self seeding and to bring on new foliage.

Everywhere our abundant wildlife can be seen, blackbirds and thrushes eating the cherries (happily sacrificed to them in return for all the good work they do), blackcaps singing in the walnut, newts lazing in the pond and in the greenhouse a nest of great tits ..... in the cupboard. The birds get so used to visitors that they become very tame - our bird feeder is a great place to get close to nuthatches. And every now and then a bird nests in a quirky place - wrens in an old compost heap, duck on top of one of the walls, pheasant right next to the path. This year it's a great tit that has nested in the old wooden cupboard and flies in through a gap above the door! You can hear the chicks cheeping inside and I darent put up a notice saying 'do not open door because of bird nest' because if I draw attention to it, someone may do just that. They nip in and out when people are not looking, even though there is lots of coming and going in the greenhouse. These are not brilliant pictures but I didn't want to disturb them too much.... I'll give an update when they fledge!

Scented clematis and gypsies on their way to Appleby Horse Fair

2009-06-03T17:13:00.006Z

I went over to the Lake District to see some gardening friends and the weather over there has been Mediterranean hot for some days. It has made some plants go over quickly and brought others out into flower, though watering has been a problem... not something normally associated with that area of the country! They have a beautiful clematis with a fabulous scent - Clematis montana wilsonii - that scrambles amongst shrubs below a tall retaining wall so that you stand at eye level with it and the scent wafts up to you. It's usually described as smelling of chocolate but I think it is spicy rather like sweet rocket.

Coming back through the village of Melmerby at the bottom of the Pennine escarpment, large numbers of gypsies and travellers were camped on the green, their horses tethered in the long grasses. It's a traditional stopping point after descending the long, twisting road from Hartside. The gypsies are on their way to the great Appleby Horse Fair, a place where families from all over the country can meet up and buy and sell horses amongst other things.

The main weekend of the Fair is always the first in June and this year Cumbria County Council have a series of school workshops and visits from Roma artists, storytellers etc. in the run up to the event. The Horse Fair is the largest in Britain and an amazing and vibrant event.

The garden comes second in Gardeners' World Magazine vote

2009-05-22T08:43:00.003Z

Fast forward to June and this picture sums up the atmosphere of the walled garden, a lazy summer evening with backlit profusion of the wild and the cultivated mixed together. The garden seems to strike a chord with people; earlier this week our postman of three years had to deliver a parcel and, finding the shop door closed, opened the magical, paint-peeling door in the high wall. He stood transfixed by the garden, bowled over by it, saying 'I never knew what was behind the wall'. I loved that, it was like the secret garden, the sudden discovery, the enchantment.

Anyway, here is how The Journal reported the news that the garden was voted 2nd in the north in Gardeners' World magazine.

Small garden is a big hit

A GARDEN in Northumberland that is dwarfed by North of England rivals has seen off the big boys in a national competition.

BBC Gardener’s World magazine ran a contest in which more than 6,000 people voted for their favourite garden in each region.

Of 28 gardens in the North, Chesters Walled Garden at Chollerford in Northumberland came second in the poll.

The two-acre, 18th Century garden on the line of Hadrian’s Wall was bettered only by the 56-acre RHS Harlow Carr Garden in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, which attracts 220,000 visitors a year.

In the top five, Chesters was chosen above Newby Hall in Ripon, North Yorkshire, which has 25 acres and 115,000 visitors, Liverpool University’s Ness Botanical Gardens at South Wirral with 64 acres and 100,000 visitors, and Castle Howard in North Yorkshire on 1,000 acres and 200,000 visitors.

Chesters also came above top Cumbrian gardens Levens Hall, Muncaster and Dalemain.

The Northumberland garden has been cared for by Susie White for the last 23 years.

Herbs are a major feature and it holds the national collections of marjoram, thyme and burnet.

Susie says: “I am chuffed to have done so well and amazed that we came above gardens of the size, quality and history of places like Castle Howard .

“Chesters is miniscule compared to some of the Northern gardens, which have big visitor databases through which people can be encouraged to vote.

“I think people feel relaxed here and have an affection for the garden.

“ I know that the garden touches a special place in people’s hearts because of its atmosphere, natural planting, with wild flowers among the rare perennials, wildlife and the scent of the herbs, and this is reflected in what gets written in the visitors’ book, but I was thrilled and surprised that so many people had voted for the garden as their favourite place.

“ As an example of the amazing wildlife, a wren came into the shop and stood on the visitors’ book.”

An annual bird count has been carried out once a month for 12 years by a local ornithologist and has just topped 70 different species.

“That is not bad for two acres and shows that what and how we plant is successful,” said Susie.

Walled garden bird count reaches 70 species!!

2009-05-07T17:23:00.003Z

The walled garden, as regular readers of this blog will know, has the most amazing wildlife, encouraged by the range of plants, nest sites, hollow walls, nectar plants and sheer fullness. For many years, ornithologist Alan Todd has conducted a regular bird count, chronicling the monthly occurrence of different species, a fascinating record. the number has been creeping up and has now topped 70 species!! He saw a crossbill in the late winter and that has added to the dynamic list which includes hawfinch, long tailed tit, green & greater spotted woodpeckers, flycatcher, brambling.... I won't list them all here but if you come to the garden, there is a laminated sheet of Excel in the shop showing which months the different birds have been recorded.

There have been oddities over the years: the mallard who decided to nest on top of the ivy covered wall, another mallard who let her ducklings drop down into a sunken greenhouse so we had to put a ramp in, the pheasant in my previous blog with her large brood amusing the visitors, a pheasant who laid eggs right next to the path by the pond (not many brains), the amazing site of 7 nuthatches on the feeder at once. What's in a number, really, but with the list stuck at 68 for a while, I was delighted when we suddenly made 70!

Harrogate Spring Flower Show

2009-04-25T15:53:00.006Z

The day after my trip to Harlow Carr (see previous posting) I went to the Harrogate Spring Flower Show, a visit I haven't been able to make for a few years because of being so busy running my own garden. After winter, it felt fabulous, all those
colours and scents, enthusiasm and contented looking crowds enjoying great weather. There was so much to see that I was there all day, six hours on my feet, so no wonder I got diverted at one point from the plants to buy a pair of shoes from my favourite company, El Natura Lista, a Spanish firm that make amazingly comfortable eco shoes, dyed used plant material. In the exhibition halls there were banks and banks of colour from tulips, daffs, agapanthus, pelargoniums, carnations, lilies, all blowsy and immaculately presented. But it was the softer plants that I really focused on, delicate woodland plants set off amongst moss, dry leaves and wood, and the sumptuous displays of vegetables too. A stand that particularly caught my attention was from Grow with Joe, a company from Leeds, who based their theme around India with a red fabrics and an image of the Taj Mahal in front of which rose tiers of garlic, chillies, aubergines, all full of colour. There was a definite trend towards edible produce, vegetable growing and even soft fruit - Rogers of Pickering, who also displayed bulbs (see photo) created a display of fruit bushes, rhubarb, strawberries, figs, quince, vines etc for the first time at a spring flower show in response to the enormous demand they have recently had for all types of fruit. If you want to read more about fruit and vegetables and the rest of the show, just copy & paste this link on The Journal website if you want to see what I wrote in the newspaper about the show.... http://www.journallive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-news/2009/04/24/harrogate-spring-flower-show-61634-23468045/

I thought there was some tat in the outside stands, obvious imports from China, naff garden figurines and a surprisingly small amount of eco products. I found a system for distributing rainwater round the garden, a producer of beautiful split oak & hazel panels, a seaweed fertiliser from Shetland and one or two other good quality and interesting products but I thought there might have been more. It was inside that really was a delight with stalls such as Nick Hamilton's from Barnsdale Gardens (the late Geoff Hamilton's son who now runs the garden with his wife, Sue). Others were the faultess display by the Alpine Garden Society, euphorbias by Goldensfield, grasses from Eversley Nursery, such variety and too much to squeeze into one blog. More on the Journal website and good luck to anyone going tomorrow when the plants are sold off in late afternoon!!

A spring visit to Harlow Carr garden

2009-04-24T11:33:00.006Z

On Thursday I joined a Press Briefing Day to the RHS Harlow Carr Garden near Harrogate that was arranged by the Garden Media Guild, a lovely spring day of sunshine and blue skies. I haven't been to the garden for a few years and there have been many developments; the old, small alpine house demolished and a new one built on rising ground looking down into the valley and the woods beyond. It's not quite open yet but we had an early look, the inside being artfully laid out with alpines nestling among rock and gravel beds, the outside ready to be planted with more alpines in two long raised borders. This view shows the new structure seen through the lattice of woven willowwork (Phil Bradley, a willow weaver has done many pieces for the garden including a very popular galleon and several arbours)

Down at the streamside, the planting is being redeveloped; some of the old repetitions are being replaced with more variety and the curious long line of benches all facing the same way like a beachside promenade has gone. It's such a fresh time of year, exemplified by these shuttlecock ferns and skunk cabbage, exuberant, green and lively. In the woodland behind, rhododendrons and camellias were flowering away, rising up against the blue sky. Glades have been opened up in the planting to encourage bats, leaves are left rather than cleared away, all in line with the
policy now of encouraging wildlife. Very few chemicals are used at Harlow Carr, none in the lawns (brilliant, I think!) which are considered green spaces, and 100 birds have been counted with a butterfly survey due to take place this year too.

As part of the awareness of the needs of wildlife, the garden shelters have been clad with interesting materials. This was done by Matthew Wilson (see my previous blog) and this is an example - the sides filled in with timbers and stones amongst
which sedums and ferns have been planted, the roof is planted and a delightful detail is the wooden beam over the door, drilled with holes to encourage insects.

Green flowers and other garden gems

2009-04-08T09:04:00.004Z

April is a time when, instead of dramatic swathes of tall perennials, there are many beautiful little gems growing in the borders. It's a time for squatting down and looking closely at small plants, admiring their delicate form and colour. I love the curious green 'flowers' of Hacquetia epipactus, a plant that makes a neat clump with yellow flowers amongst lime-green bracts, endearing and unusual. It is grown in our West Wall border, facing east and cool in summer, with leaf mould and moisture.

Nearby companions are the lovely baby-pink, double primrose, 'Sue Jervis', a particular favourite of mine, the shapely bells of Fritillaria pyrenaica which is in bud right now and the serene purity of the extra double flowers of bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis 'Flore Pleno'.
This very beautiful plant has dark red twiggy looking rhizomes and you have to be careful to note where they are in winter so as not to dig them up. Flowers emerge before leaves but these too are attractive, having pretty, scalloped edges and a rather glaucous shade of green. A Japanese wineberry arches over these plants, held back against the wall, its bare stems covered in tiny, red prickles, lovely when the sun shines through them. Later in the season we eat its small, red fruits which are delicious with ice-cream!

Lucky Spot returns to Belsay - through the garden to see the stunning crystal horse

2009-03-28T17:00:00.004Z

This week I went to Belsay Hall for a local tourism meeting and we were given a preview of Stella McCartney's stunningly beautiful crystal horse 'Lucky Spot'. I saw it several times at Belsay in 2004; it was created specifically for the space in which it leaps, in the 14th century ruined castle and was made as part of 'Fashion at Belsay'. It was so much loved that English Heritage wanted to bring it back and it will be on show to the public from Easter.

We walked through first the Winter Garden with its white-stemmed birches, March flowering heaths, hellebores and rhodies, then along the twisting paths of the Quarry Garden, deep below the sandstone cliff faces of the quarry that provided stone for the Hall. Then to the squat, strong castle and up onto the first floor room where 'Lucky Spot' was lit by a high window, shattering multicoloured lights all over the stone walls through its many crystals. There are over 8,000 Swarovski crystals and we marvelled at how this delicate chandelier had been taken down, cleaned, packed away and then re-installed. As you walk slowly round it, it drifts in and out between solidity and transience, sometimes forming, sometimes dissolving and scattering rainbow patterns over the floor. Its on view from 10th April until spring 2010.

Spring pruning jobs

2009-03-27T09:18:00.002Z

In the north of England there are some pruning jobs that are best left til spring to protect the plants from cold weather and I usually carry these out towards the end of March. This week I pruned the hardy fuschias, Fuschia magellenica and its pretty white form, which makes large shrubs by the end of a season. They do best if all those woody stems are cut back hard to about eight inches so that all the growth is fresh each year and it then flowers very well in late summer. We also cut down all the Verbena bonariensis, (see previous posts) having left the stems on over winter to protect them. Rue is another plant that I have only just pruned back, cutting this down to about half its size at 18 inches, because it too can suffer up here in the north if cut back in the autumn. The same goes for the later flowering lavenders and these hedges have just been run over with the hedgetrimmers.

Yesterday we pruned our long line of buddleias, grown in the garden for the major attraction of massed butterflies as well as their heady scent. I always cut the buddleias back in the autumn to about five foot for a number of reasons; it tidies them up and prevents root rock if it is very windy, it stops them seeding all over the place and it means less to cart away in spring. I then prune them again in March. It may seem cruel but they grow fast and it means that when they do flower in late summer the blooms are at a good height for enjoying their colour, scent and butterfly visitors. If you leave buddleias unpruned, the flowers end up far too high above your head to be able to properly enjoy them.

You can see how it is done in this picture and with a bit of warm weather they will have disguised the woody stems very quickly with fresh foliage. The pruners are a new lightweight pair made by Oxo (I suppose they have gone logically from Good Grips kitchenware to ergonomic garden tools). Having gardened all my life, I am very aware of the importance of avoiding repetitive strain and am always looking for tools that are easy to use. Long handled pruners have all their weight on the end and after an hour of use can be pretty tiring, so these light handles are great. The hand grips are much more comfortable than my old pair and the blades easily sliced through the tough buddleia stems. I could then go over all the narrow stems with my trusty Felcos which I had serviced over the winter (they came back good as new!) and the whole buddleia hedge looks neat and tidy. It was a lovely sunny day, with the odd bumble bee in the chinodoxas and a comma butterfly in the greenhouse, brought out of hibernation by the heat through the glass.

Bird count tops 70! Garden opens tomorrow

2009-03-20T09:16:00.004Z

The garden opens for the season tomorrow so we are rushing round doing some last minute things to get ready - but there is still time for me to post on my blog and to include this lovely picture from yesterday of drifts of chinodoxas in the border in front of the old espalier apple tree. These pretty little blue flowers self seed amongst the herbaceous plants and spend the rest of the summer dormant whilst the borders fill out with greenery and flowers. Then when everything is just starting to emerge after winter, they are cheerfully there, spreading across the border and providing nectar for early bumble bees.

Each year the amazing bird count creeps up and with two new species recorded by Alan Todd over the winter, it has just topped 70!! One of the new birds was a crossbill which is exciting - I think it is quite incredible that a small piece of ground, given all the right conditions of shelter, nest sites, food and water, can attract such a range of birds. Birders bring your binoculars!

I have just cut down the Verbena bonariensis in the formal beds, saving this job til the last moment and leaving the dead sticks on all winter to protect them. Today I'll cut down the wall germander, rue and lavender - all left thankfully over the winter which turned out to be harder than the last few years. I find in Northumberland that these pruning jobs are best left til March, along with buddleias and hardy fuschias.

The greenhouse is full of young plants ready for sale and daffodils bloom under the glass. The rosemary 'Tuscan Blue' flowers prolifically next to the pale pink of nectarine flowers against the white wall. All just ready and poised waiting for visitors to come and enjoy.

A freezing walk to find a very rare lichen!

2009-03-08T18:26:00.014Z

This is a slight digression from the pampered confines of the walled garden to look
at what used to be known as one of the 'lower plants', that is lichens, liverworts, mosses and ferns. Today I joined a lichen walk organised by the Natural History Society of Northumbria to look for a very rare species that was last seen and photographed some 14 years ago. High up on the Allendale fells is a famous site, part of a triple SI, in a craggy limestone ravine in a bleakly beautiful landscape. You need permission of the landowner to visit as it is not access land. As we got out of our warm cars it began to snow, blown in striking wind into our faces as we set off on a long, uphill track. Brian Coppins had come down from the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh for this walk; he is senior lichenologist there, a past president of the British Lichen Society, and has been working on a new Lichen Flora for Britain. Also on the walk was Mike Sutcliffe, another leading expert, who works for Natural England and who has created a fabulous website of lichen photos, more of which later.

There are no records yet for some of the area we walked through, and there was much peering at the lichens on a typical sandstone, drystone wall - the sort of thing
people might easily walk past without a thought. It was seriously cold and as we started to descend into the ravine of Yew Crags on the Wellhope Burn, the snow was driving into my eyeballs like tiny splinters! I don't know why it should be called Yew Crags as there were no yew trees and it is a gorge rather than crags, but the limestone cliffs were unexpectedly dramatic. As well as being home to several rare types of lichen, there were two ferns, the green spleenwort and the hard shield fern. We stopped here for lunch and the snow came down prompting one of the members to tell us that the largest snowflake ever recorded was 38cms across and seen in Montana! When you really start looking, there is huge variety in the form and colours of these underrated plants - from the hairy, silver tresses growing on trees, the brittle miniature tree shapes of Cladonia portenosa, the favourite of model railway enthusiasts to the grey, orange or yellow of the rock hugging types.

Setting off down the gorge again we were hunting for the only place in England that
the rare Gyalecta ulmi grows. As it once grew on elm trees and all the elm trees have died, this sole survivor, the size of a handspan, has managed to live on the rockface but finding it among all the cliffs was the difficulty! It was eventually seen on the wrong side of the river and could only be seen close-to by getting wet feet or having wellies on... It formed a grey encrustation against the rock and someone irreverently commented that it looked like a handful of cement had been thrown against a wall! Luckily I was one of the two people wearing wellies and with one foot on either side of the burn and one hand supporting me against the rock, I was able to see it close to. It was too much to try and photograph at that angle, so this is the best picture I could manage from the safety of the other bank.

There are more beautiful lichens admittedly and I absolutely love Mike Sutcliffe's website, britishlichens.co.uk - you can scroll down his picture index which is laid
out in a grid of squares and be dazzled by the sheer decorative qualities of colour, shape and texture. For any artist, it is a fantastic resource for inspiration. I can imagine it being of use to textile artists, 'A' level and art school students, painters and printmakers. We left the gorge and climbed back up again, thankfully warming up with the uphill walk, and the sky cleared, the wide valley views leading the eye to patches of blue amongst clouds in the north. Someone commented that this was the most extreme of the Natural History Society's meetings, so if you want to join, their other events cannot be so cold! I lay in a hot bath with a cup of tea and looked at my 3 foot high bird's nest fern in its pot in the bathroom, glad that it was no longer called a 'lower plant'.

New Gardening with Matthew Wilson

2009-02-28T18:35:00.004Z

Having spent a hardworking Saturday morning in the walled garden it was a bit of a treat to be able to sit and listen to Matthew Wilson giving a lecture in Corbridge to some 400 people. Organised by the combined Corbridge, Stocksfield and Wylam gardening clubs, his talk had the same name as his book, New Gardening: How to Garden in a Changing Climate. Based on his practical experience as curator of RHS gardens Hyde Hall and Harlow Carr, as well as his private garden at home, Matthew's philosophy of gardening has become honed into harmony with the specific environment of a garden and its unique microclimate whilst growing plants that will thrive in its particular conditions. There were many zeitgeist aspects of his talk, all put into action in his time of running these two major gardens: recycling materials, making composts, gardening for wildlife, careful water use, naturalistic planting schemes. He has wanted to write this book for some ten years. In these days of disposable culture, he believes that gardeners have a rather different approach; one of skill, patience, learning and and a different way of looking at the world. He believes that in a recession, there can be a renewed interest in gardening, words that echo something my friend, historic garden specialist, Nick Owen said only a couple of weeks ago when he gave a lecture on Capability Brown during a snowstorm...

Matthew is a natural raconteur and had the audience laughing at his reminiscences. At one point he made everyone in the hall stand up and say "I love aphids" - it felt like some corporate training session, not that I've ever been on one, having been self-employed as a gardener all my life! Point being that without the prey, the predator such as lacewing or ladybird wouldn't succeed. I could add blue tit because they seem to love delicately picking aphids off plants in my garden. He urged everyone to buy local, a point I couldn't agree with more! It often amazes me that we get visitors from all over Britain but local people seem to forget that they have a specialist nursery nearby and will go miles to a huge garden centre.

Received wisdom was challenged; why take up tulip bulbs when, given the right, dry conditions, they will come up every year and, in his book, there are examples of sensible spades that are not back-breaking. Why on earth are the majority of spades and forks still based on mining tools with short handles designed to used kneeling down! Looking through New Gardening, there are plenty of very practical ideas with clear illustrations making it a good reference book. I particularly liked the log pile bench and the adapted shed which uses logs end on and ferns planted vertically in the crevices. Something I haven't seen before are 'rammed earth walls' for raised vegetable beds.

Many of the techniques that Matthew writes about I use in Chesters Walled Garden; not watering or fertilising, for example, so that the borders are self-supporting. I do, however, largely 'put the garden to bed' so that I can have a bit of a winter break, much needed after the season, though I leave the grasses standing (great for overwintering insects) and the teasels for the goldfinches. And that season is just about to begin again as we open on March 21st so although I had a welcome rest this afternoon at his lecture, it's back to work preparing the garden.....

Hadrian's Wall geology and a break from gardening

2009-02-18T18:14:00.005Z

The plants are changing so little at the moment, the snowdrops two weeks behind, the aconites barely opening because of lack of sun, so I thought I would post something about a day course I went on yesterday. Run by Hadrian's Wall Heritage, it was put on to give tourism businesses some insight into the area, so we met on a dull, low cloud day but at least it wasn't raining or snowing and it was relatively warm!

Led by geologist, Richard Holmes, we spent the day in a small area around the spectacular Walltown Crags, scene of past quarrying of the hard rock of the Whin Sill and a place where Hadrian's Wall does those dramatic undulations that make it so widely photographed. Here's my own photo to add to those legions (what an appropriate word) but of course it was a very dull, uninspiring day photographically. We learnt much about the geology of this wonderful part of Northumberland, the effect of the ice sheet, the glacial erratics it left behind, the sandwiched layers of sedimentary rocks and the use that they have been put to locally over the years. But the highlights for me were often the smaller things; the tiny holes, no larger than a 5p piece, in the Whin Sill that show were gases had made their way towards its top edge - and their word, vesicles, a good one for crosswords.

Particularly fascinating was being able to see the point at which the intrusive rock of the Whin Sill met the layer of sandstone in a shallow quarry feature on the north side of the Wall. This whole area below the crags is Access Land and a great
viewpoint from which to look up at the uplifting mass of columnar dolerite. Another good detail was the current bedding - as in the photograph - which shows where the deposits that created the sandstone where moved this way and that by an ancient sea. The connection with the garden is still there in some of the plants that I spotted as we walked about, wildflowers that have herbal properties or that I grow because I like them, but it was great to have someone else do the talking and impart their knowledge for once!

Myrtle in the snow & biodynamic gardening

2009-02-09T17:05:00.002Z

Yet more snow, which is why I haven't blogged for over a week. Looking back, my last post was full of new shoots and promise! The snow was a magical transformation to start with, becoming more and more of an interruption as it lingered, preventing garden work. In the picture you can see the east wall (west facing) which is ivy covered, a wonderful resource for all kinds of wildlife, to birds for nesting, to insects for nectar and shelter, with its flowers and berries a magnet for wasps, butterflies, bees and hover flies. The bench is a sunny place to sit, warm even in winter if the sun is out.

To the left is a myrtle, Luma chequen, which in past winters I have always fleeced. Early on its life, I had it damaged by frost several times, each time having to prune it back so it could re-shoot; I never actually lost it but it curtailed its size. After several warm winters, it is now a large shrub, and this winter for the first time I decided to let it take its chance as it is really too big to easily wrap up! So of course it proves to be a harder winter than some, but so far it is ok.... It's on the edge of the Roman garden and when I take visitors round, I show them how its leaves smell sweet like bubble gum.

Our vegetable garden and cut flowers are grown by biodynamic methods, about which I have written before, and I recently came across a new blog which is written by the author of one of the books that we follow, In Tune with the Moon. You can find it at http://intunewithmoon.findhornpress.com/ (there's a link also on the right hand page of this blog) so it will be interesting to see how their garden fares over a season of growing.

'Fireglow' colour and more on the contorted hazel

2009-01-26T13:48:00.003Z

There's a bit of warmth in the sun today and the birds are responding with activity - blackbirds singing, goldfinches busy on the feeder, a wren darting about in and out of bushes, the lazy sound of pigeons crooning in the pines. Snowdrops and aconites are in flower, the first fresh leaves of wild garlic are pushing through the leaf litter in the woods and dark red hellebores are in fullsome bud. But one of the earliest herbaceous plants to push through the soil is Euphorbia griffithii 'Fireglow', looking jewelled when the light shines behind it, its overlapping leaves a mixture of soft jade green and vivid pink. There are several times in the year when you are repaid for allowing this vigorous plant into a border and now is one of them. The buds are joyful and a rich colour for January.

I had a comment from Merlotti on my last but one posting, requesting more information on the contorted hazel, so I am adding a postscript to that one. A long time ago I read a biography of that wonderful, generous gardener, E A Bowles, and one of the many things that stuck in my mind was his love of the eccentric plant. At his garden of Myddelton House, north of London, he enjoyed growing some of the oddities of the plant world in what he termed his 'lunatic asylum'. A hazel that was growing in an unusual way in a Gloucestshire hedge in the 1860's was noticed by a Victorian gardener, Canon Ellacombe, and knowing that its quirkiness would delight his friend, E A Bowles, he took cuttings and propagated it. This original plant is still growing at Myddelton House. In the early 20th century it became known as Harry Lauder's walking stick after the Scottish entertainer who had a twisted walking stick, but this name was attached some decades after it was first discovered.

Although it is relatively slow-growing, it can take up quite a bit of room when mature, technically up to 15ft high though most large specimens I have seen are usually about 8-10, and there needs to be enough room for its crazy, squiggling branches. It is sad, as with so many shrubs, when it is planted in too small a space, because it is a shame to prune the madness out of its shape just to make it fit. Because it is at its best in winter, the summer leaves not being very attractive, it can be planted with tall herbaceous plants in front that will grow up and hide it later - for example, fennel, cardoon, asters, joe pye weed or tall grasses. Hope this is the information you wanted, Merlotti - I got rather carried away!!

Winter colour - Rubus cockburnianus

2009-01-10T12:47:00.006Z

The powdery white stems of the immensely thorny Rubus cockburinanus really sing out vividly at this time of the year, contrasting dramatically with the still fresh green of the bamboo that stands next to them. With its dreadful suckering habit and vigorous root system, Rubus can be a big mistake if planted in the wrong place! It is worth growing for its winter stems if you can cope with having to dig out suckers when they venture too far and if you can put up with the lashing branches as you try to weed under it in summer!

A month ago, we donned the thickest gloves and, using long handled pruners, cut out all the old, dark stems - a tedious, scratchy job - but the reward is this lovely, clear, open framework where the stems crisscross like some natural trellis work. We took care not to rub off the white bloom that covers the red stems and makes them so visually interesting in early January.

There are buds in the snowdrops, flowers on the Mahonia x 'Charity' and sky blue flowers on the rosemary 'Tuscan Blue' in the greenhouse. The robins are happy when we rake up leaves and dart in and out quickly spotting the tiniest grubs. Some of the grasses are starting to shoot away at the base, the Miscanthus having thin pointed buds posied for takeoff, so things are already stirring in the garden.

Chesters Walled Garden as the year turns

2008-12-23T16:43:00.002Z

The solstice has passed and we've now had the shortest day; every day has a bit more daylight to the relief of gardeners!

Happy Christmas from Chesters Walled Garden!

The garden in winter - Contorted hazel

2008-12-06T19:48:00.002Z

Snow fell this week much earlier than the last few years, transforming the walled garden into a magical place, well, more magical than usual! All the topiary and hedges were outlined in white, changing the whole picture like a photographic negative. What really amused me were the footprints of pheasants on the snowy paths - parellel lines of three 'toes', so regular and going round in loop the loops in places that they reminded me of the patterns that used to be printed onto convicts clothes! What the pheasants do is not so amusing and every year they get bolder as the garden quietens without visitors - and it is when they start pecking and knocking over the plants for sale that I wish they weren't around!

There is so much shape in the garden, even with the herbaceous plants cut down, thanks to the underlying rythmns of paths, hedges, ponds, tree trunks, grasses and teasels. Every time I go near the latter, a little group of goldfinches flies out and settles in the eucalyptus until I go, when they can resume their search for seeds. The round pond looks very pretty with the concentric bricks around it edged in snow and next to it stands a good sized contorted hazel, Corylus avellana 'Contorta', which looks stunning at the moment. It is at its best in winter (in summer, the rather buckled leaves look a bit diseased) when you can really see its crazy squiggles.

Preparing the garden for winter

2008-11-21T09:08:00.003Z

It's now mid-November and the garden has been well prepared for winter. All the herbaceous perennials have been cut down, leaving the outline of beds traced by the box hedges and paths, the soil tidy and weeded and everything dormant for the next few months. The garden still has wonderful winter structure thanks to the hedges, the topiary and the tall grasses which are left standing. Teasels stand high, sheltered from the winds by the garden walls, and a feast for goldfinches who love their seeds. The shelter provided by the woods (tall sculptural beeches in particular) has its downside in the vast number of leaves that flood into the garden, covering the lawns and paths. We collect the leaves for leafmould which is then put on the vegetable garden and the National Collection of Sanguisorba. Some leaves are simply raked onto the shrub borders to make a deep, rich mulch.

In the greenhouse, everthing that isn't evergreen has also been cut back; lemon verbena, blackcurrant sage, passion flower, Rosa banksiae lutea, balm of gilead and other scented delights. I do this before the leaves drop so there is less clearing up to do. The grape vine has been pruned (see blog posting of Nov 07) and the rest of the grapes were put out for the blackbirds who cleared the lot away in a couple of days! They do love fruit. This picture is of the luscious bunches of dark grapes heaped on one of the tables for sale (www.gardart.co.uk) ready to go out for the birds. To the right is my original plant of Erigeron karvinskianus whose offspring have been sold in the nursery for some years and seedlings of which now survive outside in the garden.

Cutting back perennials

2008-11-02T15:38:00.004Z

The walled garden was closed for this season last Friday and will re-open next March which means a bit of time off for us; there will be moments of quiet and contemplation rather like a seaside resort that has been shut up for winter. The weather has been lucky for the last few weeks with mostly dry days and this has really helped in getting the garden 'put to bed'. Perennials in the borders have been cut down, seeds have been saved in paper bags, roses pruned back and all the comfrey harvested for the third time this year for the compost heap. Despite the usual guidance in books to leave four inches on perennial stems to protect the plants in the winter, I cut most plants hard back to the ground so it is easier to rake up leaves; this has never resulted in anything being lost as all the plants I treat this way are completely hardy. What is left untouched is more borderline - the fabulous beds of Verbena bonariensis (see last posting) as well as anything with a particularly lovely winter outline such as sea holly. Teasels are left standing for the goldfinches to feast on.

We had several frosts last week, the hardest being on Wed/Thurs night and it resulted in a magical transformation for a few short hours. These photos show the effects. Especially beautiful was the Heuchera 'Amber Wave' which has been much admired all season, growing in a large terracotta pot by the blue entrance gate. I also really liked the contrast between the cold, northern ice crystals and the hot Indian colours of the pot marigolds - Calendula 'Orange King' which was Gertrude Jekylls's favourite (see posting for 24th August showing how we grew the calendula as a companion plant to the runner beans). I will of course carry on blogging through the cold months as last year so you can see what the garden looks like even when it is closed to visitors. And you can see my photographs of wildlife and landscape on the BBC Autumnwatch Flickr group too.

The best autumn colour - and a toad with attitude!

2008-10-16T16:47:00.006Z

Lovely autumn days - what a contrast to the misery of a summer we have had - and there is still so much going on in the garden. The Verbena bonariensis beds are still flowering profusely, visitors are wowed by their sheer size and exuberance and the way that in such a mass they are entirely self-supporting. The sedums are also full out, though sadly we don't have the numbers of butterflies of previous years.I did, though, see this beautiful moth known as angle shades, Phlogophora meticulosa, when we were cutting down the long line of golden yarrow.

There was a lovely full page spread about the garden in The Mail on Sunday just over a week ago and the journalist, Martyn Cox, wrote about all the colour that is still in our garden at this time of the year, and especially mentioned the glorious verbena beds. We are selectively cutting down plants that have finished flowering and this accentuates the colour of the flowers that are blooming - vibrant purple asters, pale jewels of hardy fuschias, rich red rosehips, scintillating grasses, dainty cyclamen, huge cardoons and many others. When cutting back we find lots of toads - I know I posted a picture of a toad recently, but I particularly liked the attitude of this young toad which was hiding under some geraniums!

Mellow fruitfullness in a Northumberland walled garden

2008-09-23T18:48:00.006Z

The grapevine in the greenhouse is loaded with fat bunches of fruit, the grapes hanging all the way along the twisting stems just under the glass. They are best suited to winemaking although they are ok for eating (but have rather a lot of small pips and are a bit tart) - every year I offer them FREE to any winemaker who would like them. They are still up for grabs this year, if anyone would like them!! There are usually enough to fill two or three black bin liners. Pruned last year by my Spanish friend Francisco, (see blog post for 12th November 2007)the vine is looking good and it is a wonderful sight.

When I came into the walled garden this morning, the sun was breaking through a misty start, so emblematic of autumn, and I took this shot of the many layers of planting that you can see across the garden because of the gentle slope. Over the golden flat heads of yarrow and the Scots rose hedge, you can glimpse the huge beds of Verbena bonariensis - looking stunning - and the general fluffiness beyond of wild clematis, Clematis vitalba, with beyond that the trees of the parkland.

It's the start of cutting back time and we have to be so careful when delving into a thick, damp clump of geranium or Shasta daisies because of all the toads. This gorgeous, plump toad is just one of the reasons that the garden is an organic success with its own wonderful balance and equilibrium. There never is a pest that gets out of hand because there is always a predator looking for food. I love the bumpy warts on the toad's skin and it's bright eye! It's such a fulsome, lovely time of year.

A National Gardens Scheme garden on Windermere

2008-09-06T12:34:00.008Z

I've just spent a week in the Lake District, the weather often very wet but the area of the central fells beautiful as always. As well as walking, I couldn't resist going to see a garden, so, seeing that Lakeside Hotel at the bottom end of Windermere was open for the National Gardens Scheme, David and I went there on a wet morning. So often the gardens of hotels are unimaginative and full of routine planting and but this was a revelation! With a managing director who is a very keen gardener and a great gardening team of Martin Thompson and Richard Lucas, the gardens are full of ideas and good plants.

The front lawn which borders Windermere has been excitingly treated as a labyrinth. Once there is enough spring growth on the lawn, it is cut at a variety of heights with the actual design traced out with the mower blades on their lowest setting. These are changed each year and if you go on the hotel's website you can see some of the previous designs. I thought it was a really creative use of what would otherwise be a plain green space.

All around the lakeside terrace the planting is lush and full of scented plants; nicotiana, David Austin roses, philadelphus, lilac, jasmine, heliotrope, lemon balm and many others. The most unusual is a large shrub of Calycanthus occidentalis which has curious, reddish apple scented flowers.
The tables on the terrace (allowed to go a pleasing natural silver, not horribly stained with preservative as is often seen!) have terracotts pans full of mini-plantings of houseleeks and sedums. Large wooden planters at the front of the hotel are given height with wigwams of fresh willow allowed to sprout leaves and covered in the twisting swags of the gorgeous Rhodochiton atrosanguineus rising out of white dahlias and blue Salvia patens, a lovely combination.
Even the interior courtyard of the hotel is transformed with colourful painting on the walls and tropical feeling banana trees, pawlonia, creepers and eucalypts. It's the kind of area that in many hotels becomes a place for sticking the wheelie bins and trolleys, often a rather depressing back area that some unfortunate bedrooms look out on but not here! It has the atmosphere of a Mediterranean courtyard and the colour of the walls made it feel sunny even on a wet September day.

There is much to admire in the hotel's garden (planting of local heritage varieties of apple, scented pelargoniums in the conservatory, a wide variety of trees and shrubs) but the other really dynamic feature is this pretty little parterre. Looking at it with the backdrop of the 'country house' which has bedrooms with individual gardens, it just looks like an attractive assymetric design - until you realise that it is in fact a roof garden over the swimming pool. There is just 15cms of topsoil and a special drainage system and the clipped box beds are full of scented herbs. I hope it might inspire other hotels to realise just what potential there is for creating something really special.

Companion planting: growing runner beans with pot marigolds

2008-08-24T16:29:00.004Z

I can't help it but I have to mention the weather yet again! We've had all August's rainfall in the first two weeks of the month; the lawns are witness to this, growing more lushly and needing quicker cutting than I can ever remember. But despite all that, the garden looks wonderful, dreamy and hazy with golden seedheads on tall grasses, massed beds of Verbena bonariensis and swathes of perennials that are never staked but, being densely planted, have held each other up throughout it all. And there have been no outbreaks of pests or if there have, the natural balance of the garden has been able to compensate - blue tits speedily picking aphids from branches, ladybirds and hover fly larvae doing their bit in flower heads and thrushes pulverising snails on the brickwork!

One of the ways that we encourage this balance is by planting a wide range of different herbs and perennials, mixing plants up and allowing self-seeding or in the case of the vegetable garden, companion planting with pot marigolds. These vibrant double flowers, Calendula officinalis 'Orange King' were favourites of Gertrude Jekyll and I love their cheerful, bright Indian colours. Here you can see them grown in front of the runner beans which we are now harvesting - how delicious freshly picked runner beans are! We are growing a variety called 'Painted Lady' for its pretty bicoloured flowers in red and white, good enough to grow in a front garden.

There's so much to notice that is out in flower right now despite the fact that August is a difficult time to keep the garden looking dynamic. One of the hardest working plants I can think of is this low-growing Persicaria affine which spreads in flat mats across the paving slabs and breaks up the line of the gravel path. It's flowers just keep on and on, changing colour as they mature from palest pink, through deep pink to a swathy red. This means that you have all these colours at once on its spreading mass, and its attractive leaves will start to colour up too when the autumn comes. Our gravel paths are made from whinstone from a local quarry just three miles away - whinstone is what forms the rocky outcrops along which Hadrian's Wall loops and twists in much photographed undulations. The grey gravel is such a good foil for so many garden plants and hasn't had lots of miles to travel either!

Calendulas amongst the vegetables

2008-08-13T08:20:00.006Z

What dreadful wet weather we have been having! Yesterday I took a coach party from Floors Castle Garden Club round the garden and it was the first time ever that I had to abandon a guided tour (luckily very near the end) because the rain was coming down so hard! They were, however, cheerful and resilient and vowed to come back when the weather was better. Despite it all, the garden looks lovely.

In amongst the vegetables we grow a particularly good form of pot marigold (Calendula officinalis) called 'Orange King'. This was one of Gertrude Jekyll's favourite flowers and she often incorporated it into her designs - it can be seen for example in the little walled garden at Lindisfarne Castle up the beautiful Northumberland coast, a garden which I included in my book Gardens of Northumberland and the Borders. Calendulas make good companion plant which is why we grow it as well as for the brilliant colour it brings to the vegetable garden. Grown amongst tomatoes, it helps prevent whitefly and lined out with broad beans it's a deterrent to blackfly. Here we've picked the heads without stems and laid them in a blue bowl filled with water with one of the passion flowers from the greenhouse in the centre.

The birds have not being enjoying the wet weather either and I noticed this youngster looking rather bedraggled among the angelica leaves. It's a young stock dove and I love the soft grey colour of its feathers. Alan Todd who carries out a bird count here submits all the records to the British Trust for Ornithology - he has recorded 68 different species including some less common species such as hawfinch. Last week I saw a bird of prey that I think might have been a red kite but I cant be sure til it's confirmed (I didnt have my glasses on!). It's not that unlikely since red kites have been seen just a mile away so we'll have to see if it comes back. If you are a keen birder, come along and see what you can see!

Lilies are poisonous to cats

2008-07-30T15:50:00.004Z

I have some large terracotta pots at home which are planted with sumptuous lilies, all gloriously in flower at the moment and smelling incredibly heady in the late afternoon particularly. Last year we had such heavy downpours that they were spoiled very quickly; this year they are making a wonderful display. I thought I'd post my blog this week about lilies because so many people don't realise that they are very poisonous to cats. This is especially a problem with cut flowers - they might be left on a low table and brushed against by a cat or the flowers chewed. The pollen is so thick - not a good idea to get it on your clothes! and some people cut the stamens off for this reason - and cats may easily groom themselves and injest the pollen. This can cause renal failure, vomiting, blindness, paralysis and death. More details can be found on the Cats Protection website amongst others. I first came across this when I saw a press cutting about it, stuck up with drawing pins in a village noticeboard in Sawrey in the Lake District (near Beatrix Potter's house, Hill Top) by some public spirited cat loving person.

Sanguisorba Collection at Chesters Walled Garden

2008-07-09T08:04:00.002Z

High summer, though you wouldnt know it from the weather, and the Sanguisorba collection is out into flower. Some of the plants will be flowering well into autumn, some, such as salad burnet, are due to be cut back already - so for a long period there are always some plants within the collection in flower. They have had a bit of a battering from the wind and rain and are staked with rusted iron supports which hardly show. I love their flowing forms and mass of small flowerheads waving on long stems. In the foreground is Sanguisorba stipulata (which used to be called S. sitchensis), then Sanguisorba obtusa with its pink candyfloss flowers and behind that a variety of Sagnuisorba officinalis (the wild greater burnet) known as 'Martin's mulberry.'

The garden wildlife is amazing as usual. There is something interesting happening every day, and yesterday it was a young nuthatch that flew into the shop. It kept settling on the wooden beams and I had to turn out the lights to encourage it to fly out of the open door. Also yesterday, I saw the first hawker dragonfly in the garden, newly emerged. This is a bit later than last year (see my blog entry for June 07). Two greater spotted woodpeckers flew onto the nuts whilst some visitors had their backs turned and were choosing plants in the sales area - they were youngsters and less cautious than the adult woodpeckers who will wait until people are rather further away.

I went to photograph a local National Gardens Scheme garden yesterday morning - Cheeseburn Grange at Stamfordham - so that I can write it up for my piece in The Journal. New to the Scheme, it has been transformed from a wilderness over 15 years and I hadnt known what to expect. I was delighted by the garden and felt I could have spent much longer imbibing the atmosphere. For the full description go the Journal archives after next Saturday (icnewcastle.icnetwork.co.uk)

The Moon and Flowers

2008-06-23T08:06:00.008Z

Saturday was Midsummer's Day but who would have believed it! "Unseasonal" was how the weatherman put it, which was sad because so many people were looking forward to our special event in the garden. Nevertheless, lots of hardy folk turned up, even in the afternoon when it was steadily raining, and had picnics in the yurt in a resiliently British way.

It was the world premier of The Moon and Flowers, a collaboration between poet Linda France and sound recordist Chris Watson, which started as a seed of an idea when Linda visited the garden once a month on the day of the full moon for a complete year. The resulting cycle of poems reflect the seasonal changes in
the garden and much else besides - I can't do them justice by describing them, you need to come to the garden and here them relayed in the clematis-covered arbour where they can be heard for the next couple of months or buy the limited edition copy in the shop.

Chris Watson, world renowned sound recordist who has worked on numerous wildlife programmes, visited the garden with Linda during September's full moon, once at dawn and again at dusk the same day and recorded his soundscape of birdsong and natural noises. Linda said "It was magical. Chris has worked all over the world but, here, we were both almost awestruck. Being in this beautiful place seemed such a privilege." Last Saturday, Linda gave two live readings of the poems, followed by which was Chris's recording of her voice overlaying the birdsong.

The garden was serenely green and lovely in the rain and the readings took place in a beautiful yurt hand-made by Oran Villiers-Stuart (www.underwoodworkshop.co.uk) using local timber, larch, oak and ash. It was the perfect place to hear the poems and to listen to the evocative sound of a Northumbrian piper and, later, a cellist. The whole event was funded by our local arts centre, Queen's Hall in Hexham, and brilliantly brought together by Holly Clay. People came out from Newcastle for the day and we were amazed by just how many ignored the weather and came for what for me was the high point of the year.

Really sharp hand shears!

2008-06-15T13:11:00.003Z

At this time of the year there are so many jobs to do in the garden and I have discovered a really useful pair of single-handed hand shears that leave your left hand free to grab grass, long trails of clematis or whatever it is you are trying to cut back. They are also great for harvesting herbs such as this marjoram in the picture. Called Jakoti shears, they are imported by a family in Somerset, who were given a pair by a friend who bought them from a hardware shop on a Greek island. They found them to be so useful for all sorts of gardening jobs from topiary to lawn edging, that they bought them in to sell in Britain.

I like their bright red handles which are cheerful and not easily lost in some box hedge in the garden! They are also, very usefully, self-sharpening and we have now used them for some time in the walled garden and they are still as sharp as when we got them. They are also used for sheep shearing and you can see them in action on the website - www.handshears.co.uk - with a Greek farmer shearing his sheep in a video. It's a strangely lovely video to watch with the only sounds being the tinkling of sheep bells, the snip-snip of the shears and the occasional baa!

"A swarm of bees in June ...."

2008-05-31T20:30:00.008Z

I've just got back from the garden in late evening where we have been collecting a bee swarm that arrived in a rose bush this afternoon. Of course it just happened to be one of my favourite roses, rich, darkly scented, purple red, and to collect the bees some of the top growth would have to be cut off ... My son, Tom, who is a beekeeper (and has his own website of photographs at www.tomwhitephoto.co.uk) put our old straw skep on top of the rose branches where the swarm was clustering so that the bees would go up into it - they climb upwards naturally and into the dark skep balanced on the branch where the queen was. Left like that til dusk, the bees should all end up in the skep ready to be scooped up - a free prize to a beekeeper.

Using a smoker to encourage the bees to move up the branches, they carefully snipped bits off the rose until the ball of bees was hopefully mostly in the skep and then - this is the difficult bit - tipped the skep into a hessian sack. It's a dramatic moment when the combined buzzing of thousands of bees is heard! You always hope that somewhere in the mass, the queen is there. With the sack tied up (it has to be breathable so hessian is good) the bees were put in the landrover and taken off to a hive that Tom had prepared ready to take them. The old saying of 'a swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay, a swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon, a swarm of bees in July is not worth a fly' means that the earlier a swarm is collected the more valuable it is - well, to get one on May 31st is pretty good!

The other thing that has happened this week has been that is was week 4 of the Poetry Workshop run by poet Linda France. It has been wonderful to see the people on the course quietly taking in the garden in a very deep way - really looking and having the time to reflect (which I envy them as I am always looking for the next job to do!) This is a photograph of the group meeting up at the beginning of the morning.

The workshops are leading up to the event on Midsummer's Day, June 21st, when there will be the world premier of the collaboration between Linda France and world renowned sound recordist, Chris Watson (recently seen on Springwatch). Throughout the day there will be timed presentations of this extraordinary work with live presentations of Linda's beautiful cycle of poems that she wrote from visiting Chesters Walled Garden once a month on the day of the full moon for a calendar year. Chris recorded the sounds of the garden as the birds went to bed and work in the morning (4 am I think it was!). There will also be elderflower champagne, strawberries and music from Northumbrian piper, Sue Dunne. Look out for details on www.queenshall.co.uk.

Biodynamic compost at Brantwood

2008-05-14T19:45:00.005Z

Last Thursday we were in the Lake District at Brantwood, Ruskin's house on a hillside by Coniston Water, a garden that we love and have visited many times. Sally Beamish is the Head Gardener at Brantwood and they have just held the 2nd Northern Biodynamic Spring Conference there. As well as trialling biodynamic methods at the garden, the Conferance enabled Brantwood to become a conduit for linking hill shepherds, gardeners, farmers and anyone interested in biodynamic culture. Sally is following the 2008 Northern Hemisphere Astro Calendar of Brian Keats and Stefan Mager - we hadnt come across this one, using the Thun's calendar ourselves (see my other posts) but it did seem to have a nice clarity in its layout, a more pictorial approach.

The photo above is of Sally's compost heap which is in the pretty orchard below the house. It was more than twice as high when made and has sunk to this level, topped by sheep's wool and incorporating biodynamic preparations. Around the orchard are examples of the six major plants used in some of the preparations - yarrow, chamomile, nettle, dandelion, valerian and oak bark. We havent so far experimented with these preparations at Chesters Walled Garden but think we will in future to see how they work. Sally is doing an agricultural trial at Brantwood with chromatography soil testing to measure the effects from biodynamic preparations against untreated turf.

This picture is of the woven lattice fence in the herb garden at Brantwood, beautifully made of thin layers of locally harvested wood.

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.... and sweet cicely

2008-05-02T19:06:00.004Z

Our terracotta rhubarb forcer, handmade at The Potting Shed in Hexham, has produced some wonderful, delicate stems, vivid in colour, delicious in taste. We cook them with chunks of stem ginger, using a little of the ginger's sticky syrup, and a couple of large leaves of sweet cicely; its aniseed flavour and natural sweetening happen to grow at the perfect time to be used with the rhubarb. As a wildflower, sweet cicely grows particularly well in Northumberland because it likes the cool river banks and road verges, being the first umbellifer to flower in the spring. We have it on display in the main herb border, growing in the sun, though it does especially well in semi-shade.

The last few days of warmth have brought the garden on in a tremendous burst - it was just waiting for the end of the cold weather, poised in energy. I find it hard to believe that it happens so quickly, when I look at a verdant fern that I last saw (surely only a week ago) as tiny croziers. The daffodils and tulips are colouring the beds and this picture is of the centre of the formal beds which later will be a fuzz of acid green from lady's mantle.

The formal beds are planned not just for colour but to be attractive to insects from early spring to late autumn; tulips and daffodils followed by two different salvias, 'Blue Queen' and 'Rose Queen', and the lady's mantle, then Verbena bonariensis following for several months and Sedum spectabile as a final banquet. The formality contrasts nicely with the naturalistic planting of the rest of the garden and the lawns are a welcome green space to sit - or lie, as I found last year when seeing a man flat on his back, gazing up at the sky through the massed purple heads of the verbena!

An afternoon at Herterton House Garden

2008-04-24T08:32:00.004Z

As it was a wet afternoon, I went visiting some other nurseries and gardens north of here - Stanton Hall near Morpeth, Herterton House at Cambo and Wallington, the National Trust house and garden. Both Herterton and Wallington feature in my book Gardens of Northumberland and the Borders, both are particular favourites of mine and I have been going to them for many years.

Frank Lawley had just cut the topiary and hedges at Herterton House - yew, box and holly - and I marvelled at the clean lines, at his precision and eye. With the perennial plants only just starting to show, it is a wonderful example of the strength of shape and drama that a garden can have at this time of the year if there is good design. At Herterton, he and his wife Marjorie, have achieved a perfect balance between architecture and garden - walking into the Flower Garden (in the picture) there was an air of expectancy as of a stage set, ready for figures to emerge into it.

In summer the planting is breathtaking, the colour sense and layout with its fascinating old varieties of cottage plants really outstanding. Anyone who doesn't know this garden really must visit it as it is an excellent example of late twentieth century design, admired by many top gardeners including the late Christopher Lloyd. With its Physic Garden, Fancy garden (knot beds), gazebo, Topiary Garden and Flower Garden it has so much to delight. This picture of a detail of the hedging shows just how contemporary it is as well in its abstract shapes. Inspirational!

Biodynamic gardening at Chesters

2008-04-22T18:33:00.005Z

There has been a bit of a gap since my last blog because so little had changed in the garden - the cold weather has kept the plants in near suspended animation - but finally with the warmth of the last few days, things are moving. The Apeldoorn tulips, which have been in tight bud for three weeks, are gratefully opening and there is growth everywhere.

David has been sowing seeds for, according to the biodynamic calendar, today has been a leaf day. He follows the Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar 2008 of Maria and Matthias Thun and enjoys the discipline and rhythmn that it gives. The seeds he has been sowing are herbs grown for their leaves rather than flowers (a flower day would be better for calendulas, for example) so he has been filling plug trays with little groups of seed of basil, purple basil, parsley, salad burnet, bronze fennel and dill. A recent book that I got is called In Tune with the Moon 2008 published by the Findhorn Press and also has a day to day moon planting calendar but adds all sorts of other interesting areas - the best time for dentistry, hair cutting, bee keeping, aspects of animal husbandry, beer making and many other areas of life. Fascinating.

The greenhouse is crammed with young plants for sale full of vitality and the wonderfully scented herbs on the back wall are now bouncing back. Lemon verbena, balm of gilead, pineapple sage, passion flower etc. were all cut right back for the winter. There are delicate yellow flowers on the Rosa banksiae lutea, a plant that we could not grow outside, but which flourishes in the unheated greenhouse.

Early spring flowers in the walled garden

2008-04-03T16:40:00.008Z

We have had a lovely couple of days and the wildlife in the garden has responded with exhilaration. Sitting on the bench having our lunch we have watched thrushes, blue tits, great tits, blackbird and chaffinches merrily bathing, splashing and throwing jewelled water drops in the air. We could sense their relief that the days were warm in the way they revelled in the bathing. Ignoring all this completely, a knot of mating toads were croaking away, four males struggling around one poor female. Newts were ambling round about too and all this as we ate our sandwiches!

The tulips are opening - this one is a favourite, 'Scarlet Baby'. There are drifts of scillas and chinodoxas, the delicate yellow cups of Anenome ranunculoides, lovely lungworts, hellebores and the white woodland flowers of Pachyphragma macrophyllum.

At the base of the old magnolia is a pretty spread of my favourite lungwort, Pulmonaria 'Excalibur' which has silver leaves. It lightens the ground under the tree in summer and sets off the plant form sculpture which is by Dennis Kilgallon whose workshop is near us at Kirkharle.

The garden is looking very tidy now and we have had time to go carefully through the Thyme Bank, diligently picking out all the beech leaves, sycamore seeds and winter debris. At the same time, I've been clipping over some of the old flower heads that I missed last year - just last year's flowering tops, no more, as thyme hates being cut into the old wood. Some plants look a bit sad after all the cold, wet weather so I will have to wait and see how they fare, replanting where necessary. I've found a brilliant new tool to clip over the thymes, some one handed shears, rather like sheep shears, but amazingly sharp (and self-sharpening apparently). They are imported from Greece and are particularly useful because you can cut through very soft plant tops where secateurs often snag - the sort of job I might have to go and get a pair of scissors for. I even used them to slice through some frosted succulent leaves of agave! They can be found at www.handshears.co.uk and with their bright red handles, I won't be searching a border to see where I left them!

Lovely Easter weather...

2008-03-24T17:53:00.004Z

What an Easter weekend! There were forecasts of heavy snow in the North of England although the most we ever had at Chesters were flurries of snow showers, large soft feathery flakes that swept over the garden from time to time. Actually, Sunday was really quite a nice day though cold but this picture was taken today, Easter Monday, and shows the espalier apples through a veil of snow.
Working through the snow showers, we got quite a bit of garden work done - last Friday night's Gardeners' World had an interview with Fergus Garrett who has the garden team at Great Dixter steadily working through the rain regardless, with waterproofs and hats on, clearing the March leaves from under hedges and topiary. A little bit of strange weather doesn't stop us gardeners!

The pair of long tailed tits are still busy on the nut feeder, the female blackbird still following me closely round the garden. She is so tame that she came into the shop on Saturday and had to be lured out with some breadcrumbs (I told her they were particularly good being from biodynamically grown wheat from Gilchesters Organics but I think she liked them anyway). But visitors were probably amused to see me running round the garden, chasing the male pheasants out, because they are less wanted as they will scratch in the pots for sale. They stop doing it once there are lots of people about so .... roll on Spring!

Rhubarb, the first tarragon and cleaning out the pond

2008-03-08T13:13:00.003Z

The crowns of rhubarb are erupting with new, crinkled leaves, looking like some kind of alien life form, mysterious and rather sinister in close-up! But I am looking forward to eating the young, pink stems when we take up the old, terracotta rhubarb forcer. Rhubarb is delicious flavoured with sweet cicely, Myrrhis odorata, which is luckily in leaf at the same time. Its aniseed flavour helps to naturally sweeten sharp fruits (rhubarb is technically a vegetable) and means you don't have to add so much sugar.

We have just eaten the first tarragon of the season! Wonderful. The plant is grown in the greenhouse soil under a gravel mulch and is now some six inches high and full of flavour. We had it with chicken - the sauce made of creme fraiche, vermouth, a little mustard, garlic and finely chopped onion. Of course, I'm talking French tarragon here - the inferior Russian tarragon, though hardy, is really not worth cooking with. It is coarse and lacking in flavour and, spreading like mint, is a bit of a pest.

Yesterday I cleaned out the pond in the greenhouse, a rather smelly job! It is there to provide a haven for the frogs, our natural predators that patrol the plants for sale - a splash pool that they take advantage of in particular in summer when their heads are just visible above the surface. Using a bucket, I scooped out all the water and murk, running it through a sieve so I could rescue all the newts, frogs, snails and dragonfly larvae. Whilst these waited in another bucket, I washed all the gravel and empty water snail shells from the bottom by running a hosepipe into the sieve to clean it all. Then the pond weed was washed and I could refill the little pond - the water at the garden comes from a spring so there was no problem in using it. Lastly, I could release all the wildlife back into the pond and today the newts are lazily swimming about in their nice clean pond.

Snowdrops and snowflakes

2008-02-25T15:17:00.004Z

The woods around Chesters Walled Garden are full of snowdrops at the moment, great undulating sweeps of them stretching away amongst the bare trunks of beech trees. Within the walled garden itself there are more snowdrops, as well as some specials such as the gorgeous, large snowdrop, Galanthus plicatus. It's a pity that the cold, windy weather is stopping early bees from benefitting from all the bounty. Other plants are in flower: sky-blue Scillas, spotted Hellebores in varying shades of pink and deep maroon, fragrant Viburnum farreri, rosemary in the greenhouse, fat buds on the protected peach tree and out in the garden, the lovely pointed bells of snowflakes.

I love their vibrant green, less bluey than the leaves of snowdrops, and the little green points on their old fashioned-lampshade shaped flowers. These are spring snowflakes, Leucojum vernum, yet there are already some sporadic flowers on the taller, so named summer snowflake, Leucojum aestivum. A seemingly odd name this as it always flowers about March or April but it was named by Linnaeus for whom it bloomed much later in Sweden.

Gardens in other parts of the world have been delighting us on Sundays with Monty Don's Around the World in 60 Gardens series. The most memorable for me have been the ones that widen my concept of gardens - the floating gardens of South America, the organic vegetable plots on derelict land in Havana or great sweeps of prairie grasses. I found it particualry interesting that in the last programme, from America, the two gardens that I loved the most were the two most modern and yet at opposit ends of the design spectrum - James van Sweden's fenland meadow and the stunning Californian house and garden.

Reflections in February

2008-02-04T15:53:00.002Z

After what has been quite a battering from gales and snow, the garden on this early February day, looks calm and poised for growth. Even the suface of the ponds is still, reflecting the sky which has patches of blue. I love this dwarf scots pine which has a very beautiful form, graceful and rounded in shape; in a previous summer gale two years ago, it leant at an angle and I was worried that it would be lost but it seems to have kept the balance of its roots. There are three ponds, one round, one rectangular and a small pool in the greenhouse for the frogs to cool off in summer. Ponds are the single most effective way of enticing a wide variety of wildlife to the garden. The pool by the scots pine has a wooden ramp to help frogs and toads to get out and to save a hedgehog should one fall in.

All the grasses were cut down last week to allow the new growth to emerge (and to tidy it up after the gales!). The grass garden is pretty much at ground level now, a great contrast to its nine feet of height by autumn. The long flower spikes have been cut out of the Stipa gigantea by sliding the secateurs deep down amongst the fine leaves and then we took a rake to them, combing out all the loose dead leaves and debris that collects in the mound of foliage. The effect is always much better and it's really worth doing.

We are propagating lots of plants for sale as the crowns start to shoot away; lungwort, geum, geranium, euphorbia, epilobium, London Pride, sweet violet among others. The wild garlic is looking fresh and green, and the pheasants like to nibble the young shoots. We are splitting wild garlic and potting up it ready for when the garden is open again; made popular by chefs such as Antonio Carluccio, it makes a delicious soup, salad leaf, addition to a potato curry or a casserole and the smell in the woodland when it is full out is quite magical.

Winter aconites - the first flowers of the year

2008-01-21T16:13:00.000Z

My last post was a picture of Chesters Walled Garden under snow. Well, the snow went almost as quickly as it had arrived, followed by a week of weather so dull, wet and miserable that I didn't bother to take any photographs - and now we have a snowfall again! I went out with an umbrella to get a picture of these winter aconites, Eranthis hyemalis, cradled in soft snow, the umbrella necessary to keep the camera dry as it was still bleaching down. A meeting I had was cancelled because the rep couldn't get across country and there is news that the A68 is blocked, again.

Winter aconites are the first perennials to flower in the garden, with the snowdrops and snowflakes not far behind. Although these are already out 'down south', we are always a bit behind. I love the aconites bright green ruff and the particular quality of their yellow flowers. There are some yellows that I really don't like, the colour of Forsythia for one (this is just personal) but aconite yellow has quite a hint of green in it.

A catalogue came in the post today from Cotswold Garden Flowers, Bob Brown's nursery. I have always liked the fact that Bob has strongly held opinions (again entirely personal) and the catalogue gives each plant a score out of ten. He gives a high score to most of the Sanguisorbas, such as S. menziesii (gorgeous), with S. 'Tanna' scoring rather less. Out of my National Collection plants, I agree that it is less exuberant. But I notice he gives an 8 to a Forsythia! Maybe I'll have to check that one out....

Chesters under snow

2008-01-03T11:25:00.001Z

It's January 3rd and I took this picture of the garden under snow just half an hour ago; as I write this blog there is more snow falling outside the window. I love the strong lines of hedges and topiary outlined by the white, the self sown pampas grass on the left and the undulating branches of the walnut tree. A hungry robin followed me about, waiting to snatch up any grub that was disturbed by my boots amongst the leaves. We've raked up all the leaves off the lawn so that they don't spoil the grass and used them to refill the leafmould bin or to rot down into a thick mulch on the shrub border at the bottom of the walled garden. There are still some leaves on the gravel paths to rake up when the weather is right - the leafmould they will make will be used on the vegetable garden to enhance the soil structure. It's gorgeous stuff, crumbly, fibrous and rich red brown in colour.

The two trees that look really wonderful at this time of year are the mahogany coloured Prunus serrula, a Tibetan cherry, and the creamy barked Betula jacquemontiae. Visitors love to run their hands over the rich red bark of the cherry. The famous gardener E A Bowles is said to have polished his.

I don't think it needs polishing as the bark is so shiny anyway but I do wash the green algae off the birch tree before we re-open in March. At this time of the year though, the soft watercolour tones of the green have a subtle charm against the snow. Snow can be a mixed blessing; a light dusting like this transforms the winter garden, too much and shrubby herbs can be broken under its weight, box hedges damaged so I hope for moderation!

The Walled Garden in winter

2007-12-21T17:47:00.000Z

For the last week we have had nightly frosts and mornings bright with hoar outlining every twig, stem and seedhead. I open the heavy wooden door onto a magical world, mysterious and altered, silent and unmoving except for the birds clustering around the feeder. I kick up some of the frozen leaf litter, turning it over for the robins and blackbirds to find food; bramblings scratch about amongst the drier leaves under the tall beech trees. With the strange distorted shapes of tender shrubs under white fleece, it's a bit like Miss Haversham's dining room. This picture of the espalier trees in the misty light conveys some of that atmosphere. It's a moment in the garden that the public never see.

With no work possible, we had a walk by the river today to see if we could spot the otter again. A few days ago, it was there, its presence given away by the goosanders flying off and then by ripples ebbing out from the bank, dark semi-circles against the bright, pale water reflecting the late afternoon sky. We saw its smooth back as it curved out of the river for a moment, sleek with water before a long line of bubbles showed it swimming away across to the far bank. Today there was no otter, just two dippers bobbing together before diving into the freezing rapids to feed, and a lone goldeneye. We did see an odd sight though; two large salmon simultaneously leaping out of the water and virtually walking on their tails like dolphins for some ten feet before flopping back in again - was it a pike or an otter that had made them do this? I'd never seen that before.

The frosty weather looks set to continue and I am glad that I have the garden well put to bed, perennials cut down, dahlias and cardoons protected by a thick layer of straw and the borders looking amazingly tidy. We'll just have to wait and see if all the plants survive, having not had such a cold spell for several winters. It's a lovely time though for winter walks and I am enjoying what feels like a 'proper winter'.

Moon gardening at Chesters

2007-12-04T13:23:00.001Z

For my latest article in The Northumbrian magazine which is out this week, I have written about biodynamic gardening, a holistic system that we have used in Chesters Walled Garden's vegetable growing beds for the last two years. For organic gardeners, ‘moon gardening’ can be a natural development and I am noticing more and more references to it in magazines and papers - in The Independent last Saturday there was a piece about vineyards in the south of France producing red wines by this method. For the past two years, my husband, David, has grown all our vegetables this way, using as his guide The Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar by Maria and Matthias Thun. This yearly publication shows the optimum times for the whole seasonal gardening cycle, from sowing to harvesting, as well as pruning, maintenance and beekeeping. He finds that the discipline of sowing times is a real help to getting things done, a daily reminder of seeds to sow, plants to harvest or even the best time to cut the lawn with a view to less regrowth!

Last year a well known National Trust garden, Nymans in Sussex, used biodynamic growing for their extensive bedding. Thinking about the moon, I have added this beautiful image of the moon rising above the Chesters Walled Garden by Hexham artist, Brian Waters and it shows our espalier apple trees and the greenhouse. The Northumbrian has just celebrate its 100th isssue and 20 years of the magazine - www.thenorthumbrian.co.uk.

Garden Writers' Guild Awards Lunch in London

2007-11-19T15:24:00.001Z

Last week I was down in London for the annual Garden Writers' Guild Awards lunch at the Royal Lancaster Hotel by Hyde Park. It was a cold, sunny day to walk across the park; I had a late breakfast of crisp pain au chocolate sitting by a serene Serpentine watching coots, swans and Canada geese foraging in the calm water. Light glinted behind the fountains of the Italian garden and hoof marks in Rotten Row showed where horses had been exercised earlier in the morning.

At the hotel, the room was buzzing and it was hard to hear oneself talk! There were over 450 writers, broadcasters, editors, publishers and photographers and awards were given for books, magazine articles, photography and tv programmes - a bit like the Oscars, we were only allowed to know the shortlist at the lunch with the winner in each category being announced by Chris Beardshaw. As MC he gave a serious plea for everyone to encourage youngsters to get into gardening, relating stories from his own childhood. At the Gardeners' World table there was Monty Don, Carol Klein and Joe Swift; TV Broadcast of the Year was won by the BBC for 'Grow Your Own Veg', the award accepted by producer Juliet Glaves and Carol Klein. Andrew Lawson won Photographer of the Year about which I was delighted because I love his garden photographs - they are full of integrity and feeling.

There were so many there that I never managed to meet up with the people I was hoping to see, such as Sandy Felton who had also travelled down from the north and runs this website - www.recklessgardener.co.uk. On it there are books for sale, news on new products, designers, gardens to visit etc. and like me she also writes a garden blog.

Walking back across the park in the gloaming, with a golden light creating a halo behind the Albert Memorial, was made even more atmospheric by the exotic screeches of the resident parakeets flying between the trees! It was a world away from the wide, quiet spaces of Northumberland.

Pruning the vine

2007-11-12T16:43:00.001Z

The greenhouse is looking beautifully tidy now that much of the foliage has been cut back; plants trained against the white wall have been pruned before their leaves dropped to save on clearing up work! It was a delightfully scented job, cutting the lemon verbena right back to its main stems, the balm of gilead to ground level (how I love its aromatic, antiseptic smelling leaves), reducing passion flower to its snaking vine, keeping the myrtles within bounds. Of the plants left unpruned, the pineapple sage is spared so that we can enjoy its vivid red flowers in deep winter - see blog photo from last winter.

A major job each year is pruning the huge grapevine which runs all the length of the greenhouse. There are always so many grapes that I let a home winemaker take them away. There's a photo of them on this interesting and constantly updated blog by Di Overton - designersblock.blogspot.com - along with others of the walled garden that she took this July. I usually do the pruning myself but this autumn I was helped by my Spanish friend Francisco who grew up on a vineyard near Valencia. It's wonderful to watch him confidently wielding the secateurs as he conducts a running commentary on what he is doing and the various Spanish words for different types of pruning cut, as many as Eskimo words for snow! There are 'cascales' the weaker, less promising side branches and 'munyones' the congested lumps of previous cuts - all ruthlessly pruned back to the main branches. The result is clean lines, regular spacing of the strongest spurs and a rather more vigorous pruning than I would have achieved.

Beautiful autumn garden, cutting back herbs and perennials

2007-10-24T08:35:00.001Z

It's been three weeks since my last blog posting because there is so much work to do in the garden at this time of the year. Although many people think of spring as the start of the season, to many professional gardeners, this is the beginning of the yearly cycle; it is now that plans for next year are laid, borders are dug and prepared whilst visualising the spring, plants are moved around and everything is done with the mind's eye on how it will look when the foliage re-emerges. We have been furiously cutting back and sorting out, putting the garden 'to bed' for the winter. Some plants are left standing - eryngiums so that frost can pick out their spiky shapes, teasels for flocks of goldfinches to feast on, Verbena bonariensis to protect it should the winter be hard, peonies until the leaves have turned completely brown and the goodness has gone back down into the tubers.

There are many beautiful moments; the sun slowly breaking through the mist behind the large white daisies of Chrysanthemum uliginosum (picture above), a sudden flurry of long tailed tits tumbling aerobatically through the magnolia, the sharp eyed, sad voiced, robin snatching tiny grubs from by my feet, scintillating drops of water on the drooping, golden heads of Stipa gigantea. The visitors who come at this time of the year tend to be gardeners themselves, without unreal expectations of an autumn garden, people who appreciate the quiet moments and the walled garden's atmosphere. One visitor fell asleep on a sunny bench in the afternoon, another wrote in the visitor's book 'died and gone to heaven'.

Some plants have already been cut back before; geraniums which were sheared after flowering and ladies mantle which was cut right back to its rough, brown crown in summer had put on beautiful, pristine leaves outlined in dewdrops. We now cut these back again so all the foliage can go on the compost heap. Many herbs are vigorously cut back; marjoram (I dont want thousands of marjoram seedlings everywhere!), chives, fennel, valerian, vervain, soapwort, all the herbaceous herbs leaving just the shrubby plants. Some early flowering lavenders were clipped over when their purple tops had faded, late flowering lavender being left til the spring.

We have now had a few nights of frost; the dahlias, runner beans and sweet peas have been hit and leaves are drifting off the trees. I am glad that this accelerates the dying back, so that the underlying structure of the garden is revealed once more, a necessary and welcome part of the cyclical rhythm of the walled garden.

Newts, toads and dragonflies

2007-09-27T08:51:00.000Z

There's lots of colour still in Chesters Walled Garden - tall stands of Michaelmas daisies, vivid pokeroot berries, great drifts of Verbena bonariensis and sedums, pretty grass seedheads and sumach turning brilliant red - so there is still work to do in the garden. On wet days, however, we work in the tunnels, cutting back perennials, tidying and top dressing and generally preparing the plants that are for sale for their winter rest. Picking up one of the pots I discovered this drowsy little newt underneath and took its photograph! We often find newts in the tunnels at this time of the year and the fact that no chemicals are used and the watering system comes on every now and then must make it an attractive and safe enviornment for them.

In the garden I found a lovely fat toad, snuggled sleepily down amongst geranium foliage where it had created a low hollow for itself. About the round pond, dragonflies are still restlessly darting, probing the bricks around the edge for places to lay eggs. There are now more butterflies than we have seen all year: red admirals, painted ladies, peacocks, small tortoiseshells. Having had such a poor summer for butterflies, it is a relief to see them in numbers. The robin is singing its thin autumn song and a scruffy blackbird follows me around, getting almost up to my feet in its search for worms and grubs that I disturb while cutting back.

Poyntzfield Herb Nursery, Echinacea and butterflies

2007-09-16T17:01:00.001Z

In my last post I wrote about the wonderful chives that originated at Poyntzfield Herb Nursery on the Black Isle not far from Inverness, and last week I was up there for a visit. This picture shows the garden in late summer glory with a mass of soapwort in the foreground. This useful but highly spreading herb can be used to make a mild cleanser, just the thing for fabrics that have been dyed with herbal dyestuffs. But remember it is almost worse than mint for being invasive! No wonder it easily spread from the laundries in America when it had been taken there by settlers for the washtubs.

I sat in the garden in glorious sunshine having a cup of purple sage tea with Duncan Ross who has run Poyntzfield for many years and built it up to have a huge catalogue of herbs available by post. Seeds were drying in boxes in a lean-to shed ready for next year's plants, labels were all stacked neatly in alphabetical order.

What amazed me in particular were the vast numbers of butterflies on all the plants -especially on the echinaceas, compact marjorams and this lovely Carline thistle. In common with reports I've heard from all over the country when visitors have come to Chesters Walled Garden, there has been a desperate drop in the butterfly population presumably due to the wet summer and Duncan said that their numbers were only up now in September - but it was a glorious sight, all the more so for being unusual this year.

Colourful AGM chives, marjorams and Joe Pye Weed

2007-08-19T15:48:00.002Z

Cutting back herbs half way through the season is a great way of having a second (or third) crop of fresh leaves to harvest as well as sometimes producing more flowers. The multicoloured rows in the chive bed were cut down over a month ago and are now looking colourful again. In the picture you can see ordinary chives Allium schoenoprasum at the back, with the rich pink of 'Pink Perfection' and the bright, large heads of 'Black Isle Blush' in the foreground. Both these excellent varieties originated at Poyntsfield on the Black Isle & received an Award of Garden Merit from the RHS. They look so attractive that they can be grown at the front of a flower border or used in combination with low grasses or silvery plants such as lambs ears.

The marjorams are in full flower right now, the plants in the National Collection grown in defined clumps for propagating and identification with a separate area where they are allowed to run riot and self seed in a very natural Mediterranean hillside kind of way.

A plant from a very different kind of terrain, Joe Pye Weed looks rather spectacular in late August and September. Growing wild in damp meadows (on the same sort of land as does our native meadowsweet) this gorgeous tall perennial is way above my head this year, revelling as it has done in the wet summer. Last year, it was a good three feet shorter! Nice to know something has done well out of all the rain. It's a plant that does fine in flower arrangements and lasts ok - I've just given some to one of our volunteers who has the month of August to do the flowers in a local church. Also good for attracting insects, this plant usually has masses of hover flies, bees and butterflies around it but butterflies seem to have been really badly hit by the weather and we've seen alarmingly few - even though the long buddleia hedges are full out. There's lots of late summer flowers out in the walled garden and at least there are plenty of bumble bees.

Roman herbs & astilbes

2007-08-02T16:06:00.001Z

The acanthus in the Roman garden looks wonderfully sculptural at this time of the year; hardly surprising then, that its leaves were the inspiration for the capitals on Corinthian columns. The tall flower heads are really very prickly, but the flowers dry well, keeping their colour without collapsing which can be unusual for white petals. Any that hang over the path get cut and put in the shop for flower arrangers to buy fresh or dried. The Roman garden is divided into four beds; two of culinary herbs, one of medicinal and one of sacred herbs, and it is in this last bed that the Acanthus is planted. Next to it is a large bush of myrtle, a plant long associated with love, sprigs of which are put into wedding bouquets. (Queen Victoria had myrtle in hers) Its young leaves when squeezed smell of bubble gum!

Also in the sacred herb bed is vervain which was dedicated to goddesses, firstly to Isis and then to Venus. Roman women would make small garlands of vervain (and also violets and lavender, both in our Roman garden) to lay on the household altar. We know it was used in Britain thanks to archaeological evidence - pollen grains were found during digs at Roman Silchester in Berkshire.

There is plenty I could write about our Roman garden and I'll concentrate on cooking herbs in a future blog. For now, let me show a picture of how the astilbe border looks right now. As the walled garden is south facing and free draining, the only place to put damp-loving plants is in the shade of the bottom wall. In a normal summer when the rest of the garden gets hot and dry, the astilbes can revel in the moist soil down there, alongside some of the hostas, but lack of rain has not exactly been a problem this year! The astilbes self-seed happily and I love their various shades of pink, from candyfloss to deep salmon mixed in with some whites. There was goats beard in this border just before the astilbes came into flower - Aruncus silvester - a lovely white fluffy effect, but I have cut all the flower stalks out now because when over they go a sad shade of brown. Early August is a time of massive cutting back all over the garden, to allow fresh foliage to come through and to stop too much self-seeding; some is wonderful and looks natural, too much can be too much - it's a careful juggling act!

Pheasant, rain, midge cream and ladies mantle!

2007-07-21T16:36:00.000Z

Our tame pheasant has now had a second brood and we hope she will be a bit better at mothering this lot; eleven chicks this time that run about crazily all over the lawn, then dash under her sheltering wings. It can be very comical watching them trying to get under her feathers with their legs sticking out. She follows the lawnmower closely, ready for any scattered grass seeds. Up in the air, the young kestrels tumble and cry, then hover over the parkland, whilst on the bird nuts, whole families of blue, great and coal tits are so involved in feeding that you can almost stand next to them.

The rain has done nothing to spoil the garden, in fact the plants are looking really lovely. Deliberately grown close together, all the perennials in the borders are self-supporting and nothing is staked. It all looks very full and natural and beautiful in the evening light if I take a group around. Amazingly, it hasnt rained on a single evening tour this year! Nor have the midges been bad, though we are always have plenty of 'Evening Balm' in the shop which is made in Scotland from organic ingredients.

This is the time for cutting back the first flush of growth; hardy geraniums, some centaureas, oriental poppies, lungworts and especially ladies mantle are cut hard back to create new fresh growth. I sometimes see gardeners have cut the flowered stems from ladies mantle but left the old leaves which I think ends up looking rather tatty. I cut the entire plant back so that all that is left is the brown 'core' and within just a week to ten days it is looking as it does early in the year - a mound of pretty scalloped leaves that hold jewelled water drops.

A great week for wildlife!

2007-06-26T08:55:00.000Z

Last Saturday we held an Organic Day at the walled garden, a day which was supported by Northumberland National Park and had a variety of lovely things going on - bird & bumble bee talks, marquees with garden gifts, music from a Northumbrian piper, tours of the organic vegetable garden, composting demonstrations and a signing of my new book A Sense of Herbs. It was a sunny afternoon and the garden was full of people enjoying the flower borders and peering into them to spot bumble bee species after an inspiring talk from one of the Park rangers. He was able to spot, within a few minutes of coming into the garden, all six common species of bumble bees as well as two species of cuckoo bumble bees (which like the bird take over the nests of other bees)

Things were going on in the pond too as several dragonflies emerged and dried their wings in the sun. This photograph is of a hawker, the largest species of dragonfly that frequents the garden ponds, having spent probably two years in its larval stage in the water. And up til now we have had 67 recorded species of birds but on Saturday morning, with opportune timing, Alan, the birder who compiles our list, saw a female cuckoo flying over which brings the total to 68!

2007-06-10T13:13:00.000Z

My latest book, entitled A Sense of Herbs, is now in the bookshops and I really love the cover that uses my son, Tom's photograph of chopped parsley cascading down into a blue bowl. The picture was technically quite difficult but has such a fresh, clean look and just makes you want to pick up and open the book. This book is the literary equivalent of low food miles! - commissioned by a local publisher (Ergo Press of Hexham), printed in Hexham, written and illustrated with my own line drawings directly from plants in Chesters Walled Garden and printed on recycled paper.

I've selected 28 of my favourite herbs and written about them from a very personal point of view - how I use them in the garden, enjoy them and cook with them, what stories and histories they have and how easy they are to grow. The book is endorsed by Stephen Anderton, the Times gardening correspondent and is selling well already.

The garden is looking wonderful right now in its summer ease, with painted lady butterflies shimmering over the borders and fledglings trying tentative flights across the lawns. Apart from the floppy Knautia macedonica, not a single plant in the borders is staked, thanks to the policy of growing everything close together, supporting each other and with little water loss from the soil when it doesn't rain. The thymes are in flower earlier than normal (some 3 weeks I reckon), the newly accepted National Collection of Sanguisorba (or burnet) starting to erupt in white, pink and burgundy bottlebrush flowers.

On Saturday June 23rd we are having an Organic Open Day when entry to the garden is FREE OF CHARGE and there are lots of things happening within the walls - talks on organic growing, attracting birds to the garden, bumble bee recognition, compost making demonstrations, music from a Northumbrian piper and a marquee full of garden gifts from social enterprises, local artists and charitable workshops - fairly traded, ethically sourced and environmentally friendly. Added to this will be the official launch of my new book with a book signing. I hope as many of you as can will make it - it should be a lovely day!

2007-05-22T08:50:00.000Z

Every year a pheasant raises a large brood of chicks in the garden; although this is not particularly popular with the gardeners - dust bathing amongst vegetable seeds is a nuisance! - it is always a hit with the visitors. Many people have been photographing her and her wandering, chirping collection of mottled chicks as they dive in and out of the borders. They are quite comical as they crash land off low stone walls or bump into each other. Yesterday I decided to take my own photographs for my blog so this is her appropriately looking out from amongst the foliage of Aster 'Star of Chesters'.

I next tried to photograph the chicks - not an easy task as they are constantly rushing about! I managed with the one you can see on the right and was taking this, aware that by my elbow was another chick... as I pressed the button I felt a fierce flutter of wings and a sparrowhawk snatched the other chick from right next to me in a precise movement and flew off to the yew tree. She had been so entirely focused on grabbing the chick that the sparrowhawk seemed to have completely ignored me, even though her wings almost brushed my arm. This single mindedness doesn't surprise me as I had a similar experience some years ago when a sparrowhawk took a baby wren from right in front of me.

The Thyme Bank is in flower early this year - almost by a month - and many other plants seem to be flowering before their foliage has achieved its usual height. The garden looks wonderful though and as we are growing more and more late perennials, I don't worry about it running out of steam. Particular delights are the double Ranunculus aconitifolius known as Fair Maids of France, the many alliums and nectaroscordums, the multicoloured rows of chives including 'Pink Perfection' and 'Black Isle Blush', the fresh yellow of perfoliate alexanders and the first flush of hardy geraniums. We have an Organic Day planned for Saturday June 23rd, with free entry to the garden to celebrate organic growing and wildlife - more on this in my next blog...

spring herbs

2007-05-07T08:17:00.000Z

This is such a wonderfully fresh time in the garden with so many herbs looking brightly coloured in their new foliage. Golden varieties such as golden lemon balm and marjoram will lose that intense colour when they start to put on flower spikes, so I value them most at the moment. The lemon balm seen here is growing at the base of one of the old espalier apple trees, its gnarled, tightly pruned spurs starting to put on palest pink flowers. Golden balm makes a pool of brilliant colour at the base of the tree, alongside vibrant yellow Welsh poppies and the equally glowing tops of the perfoliate alexanders, Smyrnium perfoliatum. I first bought this self seeder from the Chelsea Physic Garden years ago and I love its yellow green bracts mixed with the blue flowers on the lower branches of a rosemary bush. Blue and yellow is a perfect spring colour combination.

The tulips have been much admired, not just my favourite red Apeldoorn, but the large drifts of yellow and red striped tulips that were a mistake! I ordered something completely different but visitors have liked them so much that I even had someone mentioning them on the phone from Glasgow. They are planted in the sandy soil of an old greenhouse base where later I hope the newly laid out fox tail lilies will send up their elegant flower spikes amidst the delicate daisies of Erigeron karvinskianus. I say 'hope' because nothing is ever guarenteed in gardening, the weather and the wildlife all playing an unexpected part.

Speaking of wildlife, the thrushes have been feeding newly fledged young all over the garden - I think there are three separate familes and everwhere I go I can hear the tap-tapping of brittle snail shells being pounded against brickwork. The long tailed tits that are nesting deep in a bamboo come out and do aerobatics amongst the tall curving plumes of a pampas grass. I took round a party of 37 from a horticultural society and the long tailed tits put on an excellent performance on cue. Next Sunday, the garden is open for the National Gardens Scheme and the entrance money for the day goes to this excellent charity.

2007-04-07T08:49:00.000Z

With the warm weather, the plants are springing away, comma butterflies are on the wing and the garden is busy with birds finding places to nest. I watched a pair of long tailed tits, their beaks holding curving pheasants feathers, disappear into the depths of a bamboo. They have nested here before and I hope they stay again and are not put off by all the garden activity.

Toads have been mating in the Mediterannean Pond, their long necklaces of spawn now twist through the water weeds and frogs are in the little pond in the greenhouse. There are newts in the round pond as well.

The sinister looking plant above is the Japanese Belladonna, Scopolia carniolica. A toxic plant, it contains alkaloids similar to Deadly Nightshade and induces a state of sleep which is similar to normal sleep. It was used at the beginning of the twentieth century in combination with morphine in a preparation known as Twilight Sleep. As a type of anaesthesia it was discontinued as the mortality rate was high!

2007-03-14T17:30:00.000Z

This is such a busy time of year in the walled garden with so much to do getting it ready for visitors and propagating plants for sale. The picture shows part of the wooden, white painted greenhouse, daffodils blooming under the glass and rows of young herbs enjoying this week's sunshine. Original Victorian cast iron grilles make a decorative walkway, the little green leaves of mind-your-own-business growing up between their fretwork. Against the white wall, the pink-flowered nectarine is in bloom, buds are about to burst on the yellow Rosa banksiae and the heavenly rosemary 'Tuscan Blue' is covered in rich blue flowers.

Sitting having a lunch break, we are aware of the great variety of bird song. The old walls, ivy, shrubs and roses provide numerous nest sites and every day there is some little incident that I cherish; today it was having to encourage a robin to leave the tunnel before I lowered the netting, yesterday watching a goldcrest picking its jerky way along the espalier apples just a yard away from me.

I spent the afternoon cutting down the Verbena bonariensis in the two large formal beds. It was a wonderful fuzz of purple in late summer and autumn, much admired by visitors who had not seen it grown en masse before. I am so used to the idea that it might not survive up here in Northumberland, that I leave it until now to prune it back, but after such a mild winter, I wonder if I should actually bother to give it special treatment and cut it down with all the other perennials in the autumn. It does seed itself freely so I will no doubt have lots of seedlings to transplant into the borders if there are any gaps. I keep the large herbaceous borders cram full of ebullience; this helps to keep the soil moist and gives the naturalistic planting for which the garden is known.

2007-02-16T14:35:00.001Z

The light shining through the Miscanthus in the grass garden looked quite ethereal earlier this week, so it was with mixed feelings that I cut it down to make way for this years growth. This is the time of year when there is much tidying up to do in readiness for visitors coming back to the garden in March. With such a mild winter, some of the herbaceous plants have not died back. Lungworts are flowering already, the hellebores hang their dusky maroon heads and the giant snowdrops, Galanthus plicatus, are the purest white. A ladybird was walking amongst the dead leaves, woken by a warm day on Tuesday.

Each year, Alan Todd, a local birdwatcher carries out a bird count which is displayed in the shop. It shows what birds have been seen in each month and is a fascinating record. This winter he has spotted up to a dozen brambling (or maybe more) feeding amongst the beech leaves and flying over the garden. As they have been uncommon this winter in Northumberland, word got around and a few birders have visited Chesters to tick them off their year list! He was particularly excited to see a Hawfinch (the 1st record at Chesters) sitting in a beech tree near the shop and preening itself for about 20 minutes in the drizzle. This is quite an unusual bird and is described in my bird book as 'extremely wary' so it is not that easy to see despite its huge beak and head. With all the leaf raking (this is the downside of the sheltering woodland), I have been followed around by two robins and a female blackbird, quite the tamest blackbird I have ever known who comes right up to my feet. There's never a day in this garden without something of interest when it comes to wildlfie.

I submitted my new book to the publisher, Ergo Press, along with the drawings I have made of the herbs and work has already begun on the layout. It will hopefully be out in early April if all goes to plan. It was good being able to write it from a personal point of view, drawing on the things I have learnt over the many years of gardening here. The cover looks wonderful with Tom's studio picture of parsley falling into a bowl. It will be out in time for Easter at least; between now and then is lots of hard work in the garden!

winter aconites and snowdrops

2007-01-25T10:51:00.001Z

Winter aconites are flowering in the garden and have done since the first week in January; I had thought this was rather early but looking at my gardening notes for 1993 I found that they were also out then. Snowdrops are in flower too, but this week of cold weather will hold them back a bit. I am glad of the frosty nights which are a natural part of winter but also glad that I had watched the forecast and thoroughly fleeced the fig and myrtles in the walled garden.

The nuts and seeds are crowded with birds getting food to keep the cold at bay; blue, great and coal tits, robin and dunnock foraging underneath and the splendid vivid colours of greater spotted woodpecker and goldfinch. A bird count is updated each year and is on display in the shop, showing what birds frequent the garden in each month. The teasels are left standing as long as possible for the goldfinches to extract their seeds (the downside is the plethora of teasel seedlings in the borders!) but I cut those down after the last gales had battered them about. The paths are littered with rose hips brought down in the high winds - a beautiful sight, their brilliant orange-red shapes jewelling the grey of the gravel paths. I am keeping a close eye on the tulip beds to make sure the bulbs are not dug up by pheasants again this year. They do so much damage with their large feet and claws, knocking over plants in their pots in the sales area and scratching around. Once we are open and there are visitors in the garden, most of the pheasants move off although there is always one each year that raises a brood of chicks, much to the delight of the visitors!

A new year in the garden

2007-01-04T15:20:00.000Z

After the gales of New Year's Eve (bad enough to force cancellation of Edinburgh's Hogmany fireworks and Newcastle's too), it was with some trepidation that I walked around the walled garden to see if there was any damage. Luckily the only thing was that the fleece that had protected the fig had been torn off and shredded on a nearby rose bush! As a gardener, the one thing I hate above all else is a gale. I cut down the tall teasels, their seeds now eaten by the goldfinches or scattered by the wind and decided that the next job will be to cut down the grass garden to make way for the new shoots. Bulbs are springing up all over the place - snowdrops, Iris reticulata, daffs, snowflakes and the tightly curled fists of winter aconites. The pineapple sage is still flowering exotically in the greenhouse, a jug full of it having been on the kitchen table on Christmas Day. (See blog posting of 11Dec) It's a strange season, with ceanothus and hebes in flower alongside the more expected, scented blooms of Mahonia 'Charity'.

I have started work on a new herb book commissioned by local Ergo press of Hexham. It will be a down to earth guide to growing and eating the most popular herbs and Tom has taken the front cover image. He has just created his own website - www.tomwhitephoto.co.uk - and many of the dazzling images of wildlife and nature were taken in Chesters Walled Garden, from blue tits bathing in the pools to leaves under frost. His blog was mentioned in the letters page of the Independent a few weekends back and that inspired him to go further and make a website too. With the short days, it is good to have time to study seed catalogues, write herb articles and plan for the coming year.

Pineapple sage

2006-12-11T13:22:00.001Z

The pineapple sage is in full flower in the greenhouse, unseen by visitors now that the garden is closed for winter. Its vivid red is almost fluorescent against the white back wall, its flowers on stems that reach way above my head. Its luscious flowers bloom even on Christmas Day, when every other plant in the unheated greenhouse has been cut hard back - passion flowers, asarina, campsis radicans, lemon verbena - all taken back to their main stems. Pineapple sage is not a plant for a small pot! If it is grown in a pot at all, it needs the largest size you can give it, and is happiest when growing directly in the greenhouse soil. The slightly hairy leaves have a delicate fruity scent and can be used in making puddings, the flowers used to decorate salads at a time of the year when there is not much colour. I think that is why I value it so much; an intense, dynamic red shining out in the cold winter light.

After so much rain we had a walk down by the Tyne to see the river in its height. The footpath was gone under a swirling, foaming mass of water. There was an air of danger as we watched the river speeding along, swollen and restless, making sea waves and with a furious noise. None of the usual birds were there - it was too fast for goosander, mallard, moorhen or kingfisher. Just one woodpecker announced its prescense with its single, harsh call - its always such a giveaway - a glory to watch with its flash of red against the peeling grey white of a silver birch - an echo of the red flowers on the pineapple sage.

Gardens of Northumberland and the Borders

2006-12-04T17:38:00.000Z

My sixth gardening book has just been published and Simon Fraser and I have been busy this week with book signings in local bookshops - one is planned for Sunday 10th at the National Trust garden, Wallington. There have been two full page spreads about it in the Journal and the Hexham Courant (see their website), liberally illustrated with some of Simon's pictures. I spent a year researching the book, seeing the gardens throughout the seasons to get a full understanding of each of them, and it is very exciting to see the finished product. This has been the twentieth anniversary of my garden and it has been a very busy time, so I sometimes wonder how it all got fitted in.

I had wanted to write this book for several years and it was such a delight to do. Being able to visit these great gardens, often when they were closed to the public was a dream - Manderston's vast Edwardian elegance on a brilliant, sunny-sky day, Little Sparta's complex, literary associations, Bide-a-Wee's plantsman's quarry garden and Lindisfarne's island haven. I really enjoyed meeting the Head Gardeners and comparing notes about what plants we could grow with our differing amounts of shelter - there is so much to learn from each other - especially Billy Crozier at Floors Castle garden who has worked there for 50 years. His single season borders are absolutely spectacular, the autumn 'hot' border a dazzling combination of rich reds, purples, oranges, yellows, all vibrant autumn colours. Seeing Simon's photographs now in the middle of winter reminds me of what gardening is all about.

A windy week in early December

2006-12-04T16:46:00.000Z

Hearing the high winds in the night, I felt anxious about how the garden was faring - so it was with a little trepidation that I turned the heavy, old-fashioned key in the door to the walled garden. The gales were still battering the tall beech trees around the garden, but there was a calmer atmosphere within the sheltering walls. I walked round to check everything and, apart from some fleece detaching itself and getting snagged in a rose bush, there was no damage to the plants. Having had a mature laburnum tree knocked down last year, I was relieved there were no problems now; over the twenty years I have been running the garden, I have definitely noticed the worsening winds in the last few years, which I personally connect with global warming. The fleece had been protecting a fig tree - another sign that things are changing, as I would not have been able to grow this outside in Northumberland, with or without fleece, in past years.

Mistle thrushes have been making a racket with their throaty, rattling cries as they pick luscious red berries out of the yew trees. It has been a fantastic autumn for fruits of all kinds, the espalier apple trees laden, rose hips making vibrant arching shapes and hazel nuts in the hedgerows providing plenty for the red squirrels. There have always been reds in the woods at Chesters and we sometimes even see them in the garden - one autumn day, a red squirrel curled up on the lawn to sleep in the weakening sunshine. My son, Thomas, is doing the Foundation Degree course in Photography at Newcastle College and wanting to specialise in wildlife photography and this is his photograph, taken this week, of a red squirrel.