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

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!

Rhubarb, the first tarragon and cleaning out the pond

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.

Beautiful autumn garden, cutting back herbs and perennials

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.

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.

spring herbs

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.

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.

Pineapple sage

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.