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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.