Jane in a sweetie shop

The bulb catalogues have now all arrived so I have that "sweetie shop" time of choosing what I want for next spring. The problem is avoiding buying everything - I need to get a good spread of colours and flowering times and a mix of established favourites and new varieties.

It is important that I get the order in in the next week or so as otherwise varieties are often out of stock in the quality of bulb I want.

The job is made even more interesting this year as I have offered to provide the flowers for the Think Pink Ball which is at Oran Mor in Glasgow's Byers Road on 25th April 2008.

My favourite amongst the paintings that Christine McArthur did of my flowers last year was of a large bunch of pink tulips - each one a different shape and colour. My aim for the Think Pink flowers is to have spiralled bunches of as many pink varieties of tulips that I can get to flower at that time. I have marked up 25 varieties in my catalogues ranging from the elegant lily flowered "Mariette" to the bouffant peony tulip "Angelique".

As to non pink varieties - well I still have to decide. What is everyone's favourite tulip?

A suprise amongst the thistles

I am not the world's greatest weeder - somehow it just all gets away from me and I am stuck at this time of year saying "just where did all those thistles come from?", "How can we have so much couch grass?", "What would actually exterminate creeping buttercup?"

The garden goes from looking artily meadowish to being a great lump of unstoppable weeds (oh the garden club visiting in a fortnight will not be impressed).

However one advantage is this - look a self sown orchid - it is only a common orchid, we have then down in the damp field, but it has sown itself in a patch of briza maxima grass and looks suitably exotic.

This evening I have ordered our pigs - two piglets arrive a week today so tomorrow we shall have to get the patch of ground ready for them - the idea is that they will clear the ground so that we can plant willows and dogwoods in the autumn. I am very fond of pigs but shall have to remember not to get too fond of these ones

William Lobb

Despite the fact that they are the most asked for flower, I do not grow many roses. Our climate is really too damp and it is very difficult to grow roses commercially without using a lot of herbicides and fungicides. As Rosebie Morton of The Real Flower Company pointed out, brides don't want greenfly climbing out of their bouquets.

Last year however a 3 for 1 end of season offer came in from David Austin that was just too tempting and I plumped for 3 moss roses called William Lobb (named after the Cornish plant collector), planting them with the growth tied to a dome made from hazel so that they will become a flowery heap in the border. Eventually they will be 8' tall.

They have just begun to flower - the bluest dark pink I have ever seen with a lovely scent. They have been a joy since the oddly bumpy buds arrived.

I am doing flowers for a wedding on Sunday and hope to use some of these in the table decorations - if I can bear to part with them that is.

Flowers are very emotive things. I am always reminded of that at this time of year as the first sweet peas and sweet williams arrive in the shop and customers begin to reminisce about their grandparents gardens.

I too associate particular flowers with particular people - foxgloves, at their peak this week, I associate with my Australian friend Sue.

Sue moved with her family to stay in a cottage near our old house for the year of 1998 when her husband Phil worked on a job exchange. Sue is one of these people with a natural ease which makes everything that she does appear to be exactly the way it should be done.

She loves flowers but the exchange rate difference made Scotland a very expensive place to stay, particularly with 3 children. There was no room in her weekly budget for the flowers she was used to buying back in Melbourne. So she would pick cow parsley and foxgloves from the verge outside her house and arrange them in tall jugs in the kitchen. It looked wonderful, as it would.

I was very influenced by Sue- it was her who introduced me to Country Living Magazine and, more importantly, who showed me a more relaxed way to parent. She hates computers so I doubt she will read this.

Does anyone else have flowers that remind them of specific people?

The foxglove in the photo is a variety called "Elsie Kelsie", a sport of the native white foxglove with a very dark mark for the bees to see how to get into the flower.

Free Stuff - Fritillary seeds

The snakeshead fritillaries have now got ripe seedheads with lots of seed stacked inside - if anyone wants some free of charge let me know by e-mail snapdragonjane@yahoo.co.uk and then send a stamped addressed envelope to Jane Lindsey, Sunnyside, Gartacharn Road, Balfron Station, G63 0NH. Mark it with what you want as I'm a bit dippy.

Snakeshead fritillaries like damp soil in either sun or shade - they will grow in grass but I would clear them patches of soil to get them started. Christopher Lloyd suggested growing them amongst Gunnera and other plants that are late into growth. I used to have some amongst the rhubarb for the same reason.

Balmy balmy weather

At last we have the warm balmy air that the half hardy annuals need to start growing.

This has been a very peculiar and rather difficult year as far as flower growing goes. The very hot April brought on tulips very fast and they flowered in a great lump of colour over two and a half weeks rather than 6. The very cold wet May delayed all the flowers that should have taken over from them an for a few weeks, until the alliums emerged we were scrabbling around for flowers to sell.

The seedlings I planted out a few weeks ago - cornflowers, cosmos, snapdragons, sunflowers - all seem to have stayed still until this week (unfortunately not something I could say about the weeds) but in the past 3 days of hot clammy weather they have doubled in size and finally look as if they might turn into proper plants.

I am turning into a proper farmer with my ability to complain about the weather whatever it is. Next year I wonder about starting the seedlings off under tunnel hoops until the weather warms. We really have such a short growing season here it may be the only way in a chilly spring. That said - I really don't want the cutting garden to look like a strawberry field with chenilles of plastic glinting in the sunshine.

This poppy is Papaver orientale "Manhattan", a stunner if ever there was one.

poppies - free to a good home

I have decided to get rid of these pale pink Oriental poppies - I want to be able to sell the darker, dusky pink "Manhattan" in bud without worrying that they will turn out to be a different colour when they come out in the vase.

So these 3 plants are free to a good home (buyer must uplift) - they would look beautiful in a border with catmints, artemesias and roses - one plant has more picotee edges than the other.

I got the original plants from Sue Bell at Floreat Plants but have lost the label so I can't remember the name.

Drop me a line - snapdragonjane@yahoo.co.uk if you fancy them - first come first served.

The weather today is fabulous - the first day that I have been able to garden in bare feet.

Testing lab

A large percentage of the flowers that I grow and sell are not the kind of flowers that are grown commercially as cut flowers. You will not find them in most florist shops, you cannot look them up in Alan Armitage's reference book on growing cut flowers. There are no DEFRA or USDA figures on yield, vase life or post-harvest treatment.

This is why I have my very low tech testing lab - a row of old glass bottles on the dining room mantlepiece. The site is typical of a house - not in full sun but open to the steam of the kitchen - the bottles are filled with plain tap water and the flowers get no special treatment bar searing where necessary.

For a flower to pass the test it has to last a week.

As I type this we have Gladiolus byzantium, (a small pink gladioli I first saw in the meadow at Great Dixter), Allium christophii; Briza media, (my favourite small grass), Briza maxima, (beautiful but a nightmare to pick); flag iris (which are just going to squeak it to a week I think), wild oats and a bright orange Iceland poppy.

It is an essential part of the process - to let the customer know how best to treat the flowers when they get them home. The gladioli for example will need a bit of flower food and a pinch of sugar in the water to give it the energy to open right up to the top of its spire.

The odd side effect is that this ever changing parade of individual bottles is quite my favourite thing in the house.

Poppies

Every year - at exactly this time - I write a post about poppies.

Every year - at exactly this time - I am overwhelmed by their beauty.

We live in a house that isn't exactly as I would like it to be - when we bought it, it was a typical 1980s farmers bungalow - built as an economical tied house with straight blocky lines, aluminium windows and hardboard doors. We are gradually changing it but it often feels, with our painted chipboard floors and complete lack of storage space, as if we are still a long way away.

The relevance of this to the poppies is this. I think the magic of having cut flowers in a house, and what separates them out from houseplants, is that they change from day to day. The doyennes of this are poppies and tulips and to my mind this makes them the very best of cut flowers.

The top photo is of our living room - with a crock of poppies taken straight from the shop and plonked in the middle of the coffee table. Every time I go into the room it is the poppies I see, more have come out into full flower, some are just ready to burst, darker yellow amongst the bright mass of the open flowers. This somehow stops me noticing or minding so much the piles of junk that are scattered in corners, the discarded sweet wrapper on the settee. If the flowers didn't change so much they wouldn't be so distracting.


Poppies are also one of the most difficult flowers to sell. Most people's experience of poppies in a vase is picking some open red corn poppies on a walk and having them wilt and shed before they are even home. I often end up giving them away the first time and then people come back to buy more.

How to pick poppies - this works with all varieties bar opium poppies, the ones with the giant seedhead.
1. Put the kettle on
2. Pick in bud when you can see the coloured petals shining through, like the ones right at the left of this photo.
3. Put straight into a bucket of water.
4. Take into the house, cut to the length you want the finished flowers, pour 1" of just boiled water into a mug and put the stem ends into it. Count to 5.
5. Put straight into a vase of water and put somewhere cool for an hour.
6. Arrange. If you have to recut the stems sear them again.

They should last a week if you put the vase out of direct sunlight and away from strong draughts

Hanging baskets

I have never really made up hanging baskets - there was nowhere to hang them except in the tunnel while they had to be under cover and the thought of banging my head on them while I tended everything else didn't really appeal.

This year I made an exception and made up a few - largely to decorate the greenhouse and make it look generous and full. I went for large sized baskets with good compost and moisture retaining granules to make maintenance more possible. I planted them up in mid April and over the past 5 weeks they have really thrived and bulked up. Now they areready to fly the nest.

It is now the right time to put out summer bedding in Central Scotland - there is not such a drastic temperature swing between day and night and there is only a very slim chance of late frosts.

The hanging baskets have proved to be very useful as presents for men - this photo shows a basket delivered yesterday as a birthday present. It is an elegant mix of silver leaves and white and blue trailing plants. With deadheading and regular watering it should last until the autumn frosts.


These violas are at the door of the greenhouse - they cheer me up every time I pass them.

foraging for food

May in Scotland sees the hungry gap in the self sufficient calender - stored root vegetables are past their best and the peas and beans of June are not yet here. Unless you are going to survive on asparagus, rhubarb and baby salad leaves you are going to have to look outside the vegetable patch for sustenance.

As I've mentioned before we are much more gardeners for fun than gardeners for self sufficiency but I love the idea of foraging for food. Over the years I have tried to convince the family of the joys of pignuts and gorse buds. Over the years I have failed. There is a lot of digging and picking involved for very little and to be honest, if we were trying to live on it we would be dead.

However - nettles are a different story. We have a lot of nettles, we have an awful lot of nettles, and ten minutes picking gives us enough in the basket to make cream of nettle (mint and parsley) soup. A soup the children will actually eat. Mind you it is hardly self sufficient as it involves a deal of cream and a good chicken stock (and we don't kill our chickens).

As I took my lunch outside to photograph yesterday everyone was (quite justifiably) laughing hysterically. Euan thinks this blogging thing has got out of hand if I, a very greedy person, is putting aesthetics before eating.

A busy day

First a photo of some lavender sellers - Rebecca, Katherine and Sally - also helping were Zoe, Jan, Hannah and Esther. They made over £70 which is fabulous - and as it is ring - fenced money for the school grounds the children get to keep that feeling of achievement and ownership rather than it being part of the PTA pot. We shall be planting out the remaining plants as a lavender hedge - hopefully on Monday.

The plants all looked small in comparison to the artificially souped up plants of a garden centre - I'm sure that many plants bought because they were the school's plants - but I am also sure that they will find the plants outperform the larger garden centre plants in the end as they are used to the cold and haven't been fed a diet of junk food.

Yesterday was a packed day as I was also making up table flowers for a party - here they are crammed into a wooden trug, ready to be transported to Killearn.

Then in the evening it was a Guatemalan night in the village hall - hosted by Maria Casteel in aid of a nursery she is trying to set up in her native Guatemala. The company was great - many of the same faces as the fun day, but this time glammed up and without cake icing or chocolate fountain goo in their hair - the food was fantastic and our attempts at salsa dancing were very very sorry indeed.

Drymen Primary School Fair

I am very, very keen on getting children gardening, or at least getting their hands into the soil. I have a C19th belief that growing things is good for the soul and to this end I am working with Drymen Primary School's Eco board to raise funds for growing things in the school grounds.

Tomorrow there is a school fun day with lots of stalls, activities and a football tournament and the eco board shall be selling lavender plants - see above - which have been growing away in my polytunnel. The plants are still small but they are good sturdy wee plants and the ideal size for planting out as a hedge or patch as they will grow away quickly with minimal root disturbance.

Everyone is welcome at the funday - there will be homebaking and teas - it is not just a school thing.

So far the school's new raised beds have been planted with strawberries, peas and carrots. They still have one bed to plant and they still have to decide what to put in it. I love going down to help plant - the enthusiasm, particularly from the Primary 2s and 3s is fantastic.

A tunnel with a view . . .

The polythene has been on our tunnel for nearly four years and over the winter it began to show signs of wear and tear, which we duly patched with tape.

Last week however the gusty winds took the small holes and made them larger and larger.

On Monday I was potting up tomatoes anxiously watching a rip snake its way across the roof, unable to do anything about it, as even on ladders I can't physically reach.

Euan was out running errands but, as soon as he got back and saw my anguished face, he got up on the ladders and did a drastic cut and paste job, leaving the end bay completely poly-free but the rest of the tunnel intact.

So now we have a tunnel with a view - I can pot on seedlings and watch lambs gambolling in the fields across the glen. It is beautiful. We could repair the tunnel, but my feeling is that we should leave it for the summer - it always gets too hot in there in the sun anyway - a sort of open topped tunnel - I can move the plants gradually along the bench to harden off.

The first sweet - pea

I suspect that this flower is a bit of a fluke - I wouldn't expect the plants to flower until the end of May - but nevertheless, there it is, the first sweet pea of the year - a 3 flowered bloom on a Matucana plant.

This year Euan has built me 2 sweet pea supports out of alder branches he chopped in the wood (guess who got a chainsaw for his Christmas???). The supports are very beautiful - even without the sweet peas growing on them and give a height to the garden which is otherwise lacking at the moment.
They are much, much better than the cane structures I usually make which have a tendency to fall down in the September winds. I am hoping that these will stay for a good long while.

And then they were gone . . .

Because I plant such a wide range of tulips with differing flowering times I usually have flowers for 5-6 weeks.

Last year I did a school fair the equivalent of next weekend and had 12 different varieties blooming and some still to flower in the cutting garden.

This year with the warm sunny weather they have all flowered in one spectacular whoosh! and are now sold out.

The flower in the photograph is Blue parrot, misnamed really as it is much more purple than blue. It is an unusual colour, a bit like that bruised colour that you get in bearded irises (now that doesn't sound attractive at all and it is in reality gorgeous)

The alliums are beginning to flower to take over from the tulips - I just hope that there isn't too much of a gap.

Black stemmed cow parsley

It is glorious weather so this post will be short as there is a lot of weeding still to do and, now that we are almost into May, a lot of daylight to do it by.

This photo is of Anthriscus sylvestris "ravenswing", a black stemmed cow parsley recommended by Sarah Raven in her book The Bold and Brilliant Garden. It is a big improvement on the general cow parsley which covers the verges here. Now I love cow parsley - there is no finer sight than verges of cow parsley fluff with the last of the pink campion and a few bluebells - but it is not a garden plant.

Ravenswing has daintier flowers which seem to almost sparkle against the dark red leaves and stems. It does self sow but does it very gently (not something you could say of the wild cow parsley) and is a couple of weeks earlier into flower.

It also doesn't seem to have the rank smell of cow parsley when cut and looks beautiful in a vase mixed with black and white columbines like "Magpie" and "Guinness".

I am looking at wild flowers a lot this week - one of the things that we want to do is create a couple of meadow patches here - one in front of the house will be flagrantly based on the entrance to Great Dixter and I will use all sorts of things there to try and create that million flowers type tapestry effect. The other will be in the sloping field and I want to be much more careful there.

I read a lot of books about wildflower meadows over the winter and found that I should really be trying to get very, very local seed to create my patch - the general seed mixes are seemingly not ideal as they bring in slightly different genetic pools into the area. This is seemingly the case even if they are British or even Scottish mixes.

I want to do this properly so I am now collecting seed from an area of 5 miles around the house - we grew some hawksbit last year and I have some baby primroses in plugs. I have my eye on campion and water avens in the lane which should have seed next month.

It will be slow - no quick fix of buying a bag of damp meadow mix - but I think we can take our time. (Euan will laugh at this as I am the most ridiculously impatient person)

Sweetpeas

There are certain things that I like cooking - mayonnaise, sour dough bread, handmade pasta - that I think appeal to me simply because few other people do them from scratch. At the moment I have a pig's head simmering on the stove to make brawn. All these things are straightforward and easy, and only time consuming if you are not already at home.

I am a bit like that about the things I grow as well - I like the straightforward things that no-one else bothers with doing. The flowers that I get the most pleasure from growing are sweet peas - and I suspect that a lot of that is because I sow the seeds in the autumn, overwinter them and am then planting out great plants in 2 litre pots in April, rather than the rather weedy plants available in the garden centre.

By popular demand (Claire) I have a limited number of pots for sale tomorrow at the van- they are 2 plants to a 2 litre pot, £3.50 or 3 pots for £9.

First come first served.

My ideal May meal - fresh eggs from our chickens, home made mayonnaise, salad from the garden and (perhaps) some asparagus from my patch with a bunch of the first sweet peas on the table.

Rain. . . .

We have been having the very best kind of rain - gentle even warm rain that smells sweet and sinks right down to the roots of the plants. The garden is growing at a fantastic rate - both plants that should be there and weeds that shouldn't - I swear you can see the leaves extending by the hour.

I love working outside in this kind of rain - you can't feel yourself getting wet and the earth smells wonderful.

We don't water plants here - well they get watered in when they are first planted and again after 5 days if there has been no rain, but after that, not a drop. My theory is that they get better root systems if they have to make an effort to get water and that they encounter more nutrients in the soil.

Having said that, it is not that hard a test as we are a wet part of the country - but we had the same heatwave as everyone else last summer and the flowers didn't droop or mildew.

Euan is busy designing a system of siphons and water barrels to take rainwater from the house and greenhouse roofs to various points in the garden, tunnel and field. Soon I hope to not need the hose at all.

The photo is of a self seeded Cerinthe major.

Planting dahlias

I meant to do this post earlier in the year to encourage people to buy dahlia tubers - but then we sold out of them at the CL fair and I forgot until today when I planted up my own tubers.



Dahlia tubers look like mis-shaped potatoes grouped by strings around a central stalk. Every tuber must have a piece of stalk or it will not grow.




The shoots will develop at the join between the hangy down bits and the stem.

Plant the tuber with the stem uppermost into a large pot of ordinary potting compost.

Fill up the pot but leave the top of the stem above the surface of the compost.

Water well and put somewhere warm. I have put mine on a heated mat in the tunnel but on a smaller scale anywhere warm will work. If you put them into the dark make sure you check for sprouts every day or they will become weak and lanky.

Within a couple of weeks shoots will begin to develop. Only when this happens should you begin to water. Keep the plants inside until the frosts have passed and then gradually get them used to outside temperatures by letting them be outside for increasing periods of time