Catharine Howard's Garden Blog

So, David Hockney it is over, but not quite.

Catharine Howard — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:05:20 +0000

Thousands of us stood and jostled in the grand rooms up the stair of the Royal Academy to see the rendering of our countryside by David Hockney. And returned home with eyes on stalks to stare at our surrounding woods and fields. To look at them anew without the mind overpowering the senses. I have walked since in swatches of colour that I might not have believed before and stopped and stared at unfurling leaves, shy flowers in ditches. Listened too to riotous babbling of streams.

‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate Woods‘ took up a room with almost daily impressions scratched on an ipad and then printed off and plastered round the walls of the largest room. It was from January to May in the coming.

Squeezed into the dark room, before the sketch books, where the camera was showing film footage of a car at snails pace capturing the verdant verges, the chalky stems of trees. Charted through all the seasons.

The verdict for me was slow down and see. Wait with bated breath for Action Week, when the may or hawthorn will unfurl. And then the summer will be here.

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On acid in a car park

Catharine Howard — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:46:21 +0000

Yellow has pushed its busy way forward the past few weeks: throwing its hair around and dancing in the fields as the rape seed flowers burst open. The fields are washed with the stuff which curtsies to and flirts with the perpetual gun metal of the sky. The orchestra would certainly be playing yellow cocktail music.

And there has been an outburst of repainting double lines on the roads round here but NOT the usual colour. Primrose yellow instead. I’m sure there must be good taste and rules of spectroscopy behind this but it looks rather wishy-washy, even apologetic.

For the truest yellows head to a well planted car park in a prosperous area. I was in one yesterday with quarter of an hour to spare and found the opportunity to stare into some incredible yellows down the acid end of the spectrum.

Some of it was new foliage. Yew and box break into new leaves with a searing greeny yellow. Almost edible is Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Tom Thumb’ for black leaves with zingy green leaflets. Philadelphus coronarius ‘Aureus’ rolls out a fanfare for sherbet lemon.

Epemidium, clothed the rest of year in a leaf pattern for a sporty dowager, shows a little bit of ankle, so to speak: acid in flowers tentatively rising above those leaves. But the plant that almost wrenches your head off is Euphorbia wulfenii. Clumps of these shook themselves at me, would not hold still, have clout by virtue of their size, dinosaur stems and bracts and incredible in your face acid.

Hallelujah yellow!

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Literary extract from The Great Gatsby

Catharine Howard — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:05:51 +0000

….”the lawn started at the beach and ran towards sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken up by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs wide apart on the front porch”.

Photo taken at Llandroc, Cornwall

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Tribute to an old shepherd’s hut

Catharine Howard — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:51:04 +0000

This shepherd’s hut was found rotting in a spinney with young trees thrusting their way through its rib cage. It must have been a pretty spry place to see the ewes through lambing. Warm as toast with the shutters pegged fast, the little cast iron stove pumping out heat. Hens cooped under the bench to give a supply of fresh eggs. A fairly roomy bed on a platform over the chassis.

Dragged into the wood and given over to a store shed for pheasant grain. The wheels were chewed down into the mud and the body of tongue and groove paneling wet as blotting paper under the tree drip. It gave a glimpse of life pre-car, telephone, electricity. The shepherd would leave the farm and live cut off until the lambing season was over. January and February under the tin roof out in the fields, well away from human company.

It was touch and go as to whether the hut could be brought out of the wood and down the hillock in one piece. It had been left to go and nearly had. A JCB forklift truck managed to pick it up and delivered it skewered-olive style down our drive. There the hut lived for a season under a giant tarpaulin. We drew breath for a renovation project that was knocked to the side by a house move.

And so the lovely old green and worn out hut was up for sale. A taker come to lunch, paid in cash and arranged for the hut to go to Studley Castle. A year has passed and I am guessing that by now the new lease of life has overtaken it. I am pretty sure he said the hut would be used on the shoot for lunches. But if we could have stopped it decaying, frozen it in the moment it parked up outside, that is how I would have preferred it. The

patina of age was on it: mouldy straw in the coop and a thick old beer bottle of two in a corner.

By the same token I love old sheds with a bit of the dishevel on them. Salt-rimed terracotta pots stacked up in an abandoned potting shed. These old things conjure the past in the way that new and shiny never can.

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A feast of spring buds

Catharine Howard — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 05:53:39 +0000

Forget the daffodils. The high-point of spring is the dancing buds and dazzle of early flowers on trees. Warm March and the wettest week of April that I can remember has brought out that flush of new leaf colour with pleated leaves unfolding and flowers bursting out in remarkable colour.

I visited a garden in Essex under metallic skies. Driving down lanes through rape fields to get there, the searing yellow against the grey was an eye-full. Parked up, a deluge of a storm ripped itself open. The fury of Stravinsky was upon the place. Against that sky the sculptures of Ben Coode-Adams, dotted here and there, were just the right foil for the rush of the buds.

The trees – not just any old garden this but a connoisseur museum’ s worth of scarcity and rare value. Snapped so much with the camera that I dropped it, scribbled furiously the plant names but the hurrying of the season got to me as did the driving rain. The fever of spring was catching. The magnolia – I think it might be Magnolia Susan – has peeled itself of its furry rind on the flowers. The willow catkins looked frozen for a moment in their jitterbugging. And snapped just before heaving out improbably hefty leaves, the japanese form of the horse chestnut.

Like a good museum, the displays were pretty comprehensively labelled and so I can tell you that this is Aesculus turbinata. I love the fact that this genus was named for the Roman for edible acorn.

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I cannot speak a word of Turkish

Catharine Howard — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:13:58 +0000

but I know that these are the seeds of desire:

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Allotment newbie: the first few shakey steps

Catharine Howard — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:27:54 +0000

Cucumber seedlings are sulking on an east facing window sill and waiiting to go down to the allotment. From spring onions oiled to shimmer in their skins to the disco dress of Purple Haze carrots, I had over-ordered seed packets. With no where to sow so much, it was a stroke of luck to get the call from the Town Clerk. The beginning of April is the day for plot tenancies to be renewed. There are a few vacancies.

We have got 8a, half a plot and I’ve just sneaked down with the dog for a remeasurement. The neighbours look great, Sandy and Bob to the left and Ruby sharing the other half, in a furious hurry to get her potatoes in. Half looks like a lot. Paced out, it measures about 12 by 36 feet. Whoever has decamped and moved on has left us with some raspberry canes, the hub of a leek crop and a sizeable area down to strawberry plants. The weeds have cravenly crept in, particularly couch grass with its scything blades.

My experience is pretty limited on the vegetable growing front. Not so all around. Proof of years of expertise. Serried rows of onions, potatoes earthed up, rhubarb in mid force and orderly compost heaps. The old hands have yet to show themselves but it hasn’t really been the right weather as since Easter we have had too much rain.

Joy Larkcom’s “Grow your own Vegetables” is my at-the-elbow guide. “If the soil is sticking to your boots then it is too wet” – and I have left the guilty evidence of muddy footcasts in the neatly mown paths round the plots. The Tenancy Agreement allows for reasonable numbers of rabbits and hens and so Charles Boff’s furiously labour intensive regime “How to Grow and Produce your Own Food” is beside me for when I stray into livestock.

The productive ortaggio or vegetable garden spills over available land by the branch line from Arezzo to Terni. It is familiar to my sister in law who spends time in Italy every year. Her mother in law ploughs by tractor, bottles, pickles and distributes provender to the family. Our Sunday morning hoeing, drawing string lines and sowing was feeble by comparison. Also our bees are two counties in a hive in Sussex but the first faltering steps have been taken.

the tidiest plot of all

A friend and neighbour has agreed to split the plot and we got some work done before the forecasted rain set in. Weeding and forking over and the marking out o two beds of 48 inches wide with a narrow trodden path between the two. Plot work followed – levelling, light treading, raking to a tilth and making our drills.

A sowing of parsnips, beetroot, carrots, spring onions and beans was made. A random selection with a view to sowing little and often to avoid a glut. A beginning of order in the daunting sea of mud and weeds.

Now to plotting compost making, what else to grow, when to feed the soil, crop rotation. There is no time to regret the rule against allotment sheds. Where would we find the time to sit and drink tea and got lost inexorably in a view over an inland lake and a medieval castle?

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Tapping my innermost restraint at Beth Chatto gardens

Catharine Howard — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:09:30 +0000

I am at the gardens of Beth Chatto, just out of the whist and twiffle of the seaside ozone and beyond the breath of roaring Colchester. I haven’t been here for ages and it is quite simple: NO personal shopping is allowed at all. Today’s visit is simply to pick up some plants for a customer nearby and, perhaps to scribble down the name of some lovelies. The embargo is straight-forward. We have the rampage of out of control ground elder in our newish garden. A drought is upon us and the chickens and dog are kicking up a rumpus. An absolute NO to impulse plant buying. But I can make a list for autumn shopping.

And yet, I can’t even get out of the carpark before lust has overcome me for this browsing line. Drool over the impossibility of this set up. No room for such a hedge or a eucyalyptus of such girth. Not in my garden. No customer looking for this effect. Camera, notebook and pencil at ready, poised for learning. Colours, leaf shapes, planting combinations. I am in hunter mode.

The plants tend to be neatly labelled, or failing that there is always a checklist to be had by walking the aisles in the nursery…and so I do. It is hell on the mental taste buds. These flowers are in such little pots. Surely I can sneak them past myself. In mind transported to the best gelateria in Piedmonte or to the vitrine of the local deli.

I hear a voice that reminds me of my upbringing. “Look but do not touch”. The escape is made with vows intact, but only just. Below march the four plants that nearly crumbled my resolve. They are in order: Narcissus bulbicodum ‘Citrina‘, Saxifraga dentata Vinca minor ‘La Greve’ and Anemone fulgida. Roll on autumn.

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The world’s best nurseries: series 3

Catharine Howard — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:50:56 +0000

Santa’s Grotto or elves? A very good way to write off a garden centre or nursery, or so I used to think. On the east coast of England the land is open and sandy and this makes for good growing ground – free draining and easy to work. Consequently there are quite a few nurseries and garden centres and one bitterly cold day last week, an open-eyed trawl round offered a morning’s entertainment.

First, let’s clear up the difference: a nursery grows its own stock, a garden centre makes no pretence of doing so. Nurseries buy in plenty of plants as well – plugs to grow on, shrubs by the pallet load from Holland. At the top end high spec glasshouses water, feed, heat plants. One grower up the road has 11 acres under glass. It is big business, fashions in colours are anticipated and future taste in plants predicted.

And so to four different establishments. Stopping first with the one that has the twinkliest of fairy light grottoes, a plethora of chimenias and seating and eating products. The nursery, or so it used to be, is well known. A family business on a par with Hiilliers down in Hampshire. Something has happened. Franchise operations litter the site: flexiplast conservatories on offer and garden design out of a large hut. The catering side of things is a-hum: punters hunched over steaming cups of coffee and squirly whirly cake. But trickle deep into the site and the place has run out of energy. The bird feeding tree is not being kept up to speed with fat balls, a flapping marquee has the feel of rollocking party aftermath. The garden of remembrance is hardly remembered. One my way out, I’m winked at by Lindt rabbits lining the shelves three deep.

A major rival sits up the hill. A big chain beckoning business on a roundabout. The car park is always full of cars and the building smells of school cooking. Infuriated by an earlier visit where an attempt to buy a waterproof yielded only a Halloween cape, I had written the place off. I park my prejudices for the day. Stands of plants are arranged to appeal with semi clad nymphs embedded in them. How the staff must have chortled as they set out this army of Minvervas and Dianas. The plants look good and I am lingering over raspberry canes in pink pots. Inside it gets even better: the whole grow your own area was handsomely kitted out – sacks of seed potatoes, pots and seed tray in every size. The whole glorious paraphernalia of gloves and hose lock attachments has me drooling. The gift corner seems to have shrunk and the the chef at the cafe changed.

Even the muzak had been dimmed.

Up the A12, after the last breath of man ruling nature exhausts itself with the caravans on the forecourt at Stratford St Andrews. After that we are deep rural. Fashionable weekenders on their way to Southwold can just nip off the main road to visit the Walled Garden. I hope they do as mine is the only car parked there. This is a proper nursery with the most magical of gardens reclaimed from a wilderness of brambles. The selection of shrubs are good and tender bedding are for sale in the greenhouses. A little bit of tasteful gnomery and bird boxes is set off by the most gorgeous collection of garden pots from Stafford. Strong old glazes and covetable shapes. They grow good plants here and know what they are talking about. No less than two people pop out of the heated gardeners hut to see whether I need any help.

Last stop, Woottens of Wenhaston, pretty much shrouded under plastic. A serious delicatessen nursery. Come here to sample and savour new plants. It’s home territory to me: I have even worked here. The owner has plant discernment and judgement. But today is not the day to visit, the wind tears at the polythene coverings, makes a noise like wretching. Turns me into a crazy horse. Retreating with the latest copy of Woottens Handbook of Plants, I’m off to do armchair gardening.

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Wordless Wednesday: Destruction

Catharine Howard — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:10:44 +0000

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