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 Plants by post seems like a fairly crazy idea. Especially when 18 large grasses were ordered up in 2 litre pots. On delivery the box got heaved, upended into the shed outside and neglected for 10 days. No-one had remembered to mention the package in the shed and I stumbled across the box, returning tools in the gloaming one evening.
Not a promising beginning, but hurray for careful nurseries and the dormant season. When the lid was opened up, this is what the contents looked like. The grasses were unwrapped, each one in a hefty twist of newspaper. Not more than a spoonful of potting compost got spilled and they looked selected straight off the shelf. These are Miscanthus nepalensis a graceful gold tassled grass. Not one of those elephant sized large miscanthuses.
Continue reading Plants by post
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 not quite fly agaric Serried timber trees, broad trunked with fly agaric mushrooms poking through dead leaves. Why is this the popular image of a wood? Should we blame Racey Helps or Beatrix Potter? Apparently not. According to Oliver Rackham, (the historian of the English countryside) this woodland askew view is to be blamed on the “scientists and savants of the Enlightenment”.
And so to put things right in my own mind, at least, I took myself on a day out. Yesterday I went out into the hazel wood with Angus. Two woods in fact. Both ancient and under proper conservation management. Angus has taken them both on.
The first is owned by a foreign consortium who leave him to work the woods, apply for grants, liaise with the gamekeeper and pay for his time with the sale of firewood. The second wood is on a farm nearby. The farmer has turned over his acreage to conservation. Ponds have been cleaned of bramble and bullrush, corners of fields returned to meadow and strips of crops to yield birdseed planted in 8 of the fields. We walked up and sent a flurry of buntings into the sky.
Continue reading If you go into the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise
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 Banksy eat your heart out. Seen all over Arezzo
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 Almost but not quite. The image has been looming on the desktop and housewifery has hit the computer screen. Why are they there? Simply because over and over again the simplicity of this planting strikes me as perfect. Lovely it is that there is nothing other than birches.
Continue reading I have been sitting on Brita von Schoenaich’s birches for too long.
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Take a look at this and this: 
Dem bones. I stayed up way too late last night and surfed with saddo zeal amongst the gardening blogs. Take back saddo. Read, laughed, imbibed, learnt and went a little boss eyed. Got just a little hooked. Quite a few gardeners are posting fabulous images of their garden bones now that winter has taken away the perennial coffee froth.
In particular I was a virtual and envious visitor to the blog of Toni of Signature Gardens. Paving ordered and immaculate, roundy mounds all kept compact. A touch of the Zen garden prevails in this wonderful spruce space. My garden is light years away from this level of horticultural excellence.
Continue reading The garden skeleton is revealed to bitter tears
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 Look up into the hoary upper reaches of Platanus orientalis var. insularis. A doughty specimen from Crete. Tall as a house in Edinburgh Botanic Gardens.
Continue reading Plantaholic POST:
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 A Saturday stroll took us past St Pauls Cathedral and the tent village. It is looking permanent and not too uncomfortable. Free books and beanbags to sit on beckoned. An upright piano on a pallet and under awning suggested dancing and carousing later. The plane tree in the middle was celebrating with banners, baby bootees and Bob the builder’s hat. I have always loved planes for their elephant and moss mottling of trunks, peeling and sheding myriads of subtle colours, The leaves are soup plate size and the fruits are like christmas baubles. Catching the light against the blue sky, the tree looked as if it was celebrating a tibetan festival. But round the corner in Paternoster Square, the official christmas tree is having no such fun. Continue reading The very lonely Christmas tree
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 The blasted trunk, hit by lightening, stands it’s ground in the middle of a footpath. As a stately thing, the tree rules over young sweet chestnuts. Though dead as a dodo and sloughing away its lignified dead cells bit by by, it provides the ultimate wildlife habitat. A sculpture too, to be coveted for a large garden.
Continue reading This tree is so dead it is alive
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 This morning the shipping news, poetic as ever, sailed us into the wicked stripping winds of winter. I wasn’t encouraged to leap out of bed; lay thinking of trees taking a pounding. Beside me a copy of “Woodlands” by Oliver Rackham: an unputdownable piece of non fiction. As the wind denudes, my blog this month is going to stay with the trees.
Today, Ginkgo biloba, which my camera caught a week or two back by the water meadows at St Cross, Winchester. This tree starts out as a military upright thing. Probably an adaptation to making it in a crowded environment. It is the first mature specimen that I have ever seen and the branches are spreading out, curvaceous and upwards. The tree is dancing.
Continue reading I’m thinking about trees this month
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Plants by post seems like a fairly crazy idea. Especially when 18 large grasses were ordered up in 2 litre pots. On delivery the box got heaved, upended into the shed outside and neglected for 10 days. No-one had remembered to mention the package in the shed and I stumbled across the box, returning tools in the gloaming one evening.
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