Spring pruning jobs

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.

Myrtle in the snow & biodynamic gardening

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.

The best autumn colour - and a toad with attitude!

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!

Poyntzfield Herb Nursery, Echinacea and butterflies

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

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.