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.

What is it about yellow . . .

I don't really like yellow flowers . . .I don't really plant them . . . so how come, when I went to select flowers for a gift bouquet, I came back with this?

Is it the odes to yellow I have been reading on various blogs? Is it the fabulous sunshiney days? Is it because I am making an effort to become a mellowy yellowy person?

Or can we just claim that this bouquet is orange?

The tulips are - for those who are interested - Texas Gold, a yellow parrot; Dordogne, an apricot with good long stems, Ballerina, orange lily tulip that smells of freesias but has weedy stems which need to be supported in an arrangement like this, and Gavota rust/burgundy with a yellow edge.

They made me feel happy - I hope the person who got the bouquet feels happy too.

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)

Shop - 27th April

We are very tulipy today - a medly of orange tulips, including the lily tulip Ballerina which smells like fresias, tall apricot "dordogne", deep purple "recreado", yellow parrot "texas gold" and the giganitically tall cream "purissima".

There are also baby moon narcissi and some anenomes, late hyacinths and love lies bleeding.

Here is Jasmine sunbathing and waiting for customers to pay her attention.

Tomorrow I shall be at Baldernock Garden Club's annual plant sale in Baldernock Church Hall, Balmore Road 11-1. There is usually a very good plant stall so I am taking my money. here are details of the garden club.

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

Tulips - how to stop them going bendy

One of the questions I get asked again and again is how to stop tulips going bendy in the vase. So here we go!

The bendiness is caused by 2 different things. A bendy stem is usually caused by an airlock in the stem, preventing the water from going right the way up. A bending over head is usually due to the tulip continuing to grow after it has been cut which along with the increasing weight of the head, leads it to bend over.

To cure the air lock - take your tulips, make sure the stems are bendy and lay them side by side, all heads level, on a piece of brown paper - them roll it into a tight straight parcel and bind it well with string - see photo.

Put the kettle on and pour an inch of boiling water into a mug, cut 1/2 and inch off the bottom of the stems and put them at a slight angle into the mug. You should see an air bubble come out of the bottom of the stem. Put them immediately into a vase of tepid water and wait 2 hours before unwrapping - they should be set in a straight position. This can be done both with tulips just bought and ones that have done that croquet hoop thing in the vase.

If you want to cure the twisting stem of the growing tulip (and I must say I like the elegant writhing of the parrot tulips) you can destroy the growing plate of the flower by repeatedly inserting a needle in and out of the stem, just below the flower. Seemingly people used to be employed just to do this in stately homes. The tendency of tulips to continue growing means that they didn't work well in the very ordered symmetrical arrangements of the C19th as within a couple of days they would be poking out an inch above the rest of the flowers.

Best Day Ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We opened for the season this morning at 10.30. We had customers arriving from 9.30, calling in on their way back from vegetable shopping at France Farm. From then until 4 it just didn't stop. I am overwhelmed with people's support. One lovely woman travelled all the way from Broxburn having seen us at the CL Fair.

I was worried as the hot weather (see never satisfied) brought on some of the tulips and all of the fritillaries too fast so the garden looks beautiful but they are too far out to sell. Also deer got in while I was at the Country Living Fair (who did leave that gate open?) and ate over 800 tulip bulbs in one fantastic feast.

From Wednesday I have been prowling the garden. Would there be any flowers to pick? Would there be any customers? Would anyone want what I have.

But Sally and I found that when we looked, there were rather a lot of flowers out there. We filled the buckets with them and then was a rush of making up and wrapping all day. We have NO FLOWERS left and the stall is a mess of snipped stems and stripped leaves.

I am exhausted but very, very happy. Tonight we drink gin!

The photo is of Carneval de Nice - a double tulip, masses of raspberry ripple leaves forming a ball of a flower. It looks great in pots but is very bad at reblooming the next year.

Seed sowing

Today has seen the beginning of our seed sowing. I used to sow seeds far too early - champing at the bit in February - forcing seeds to germinate and then having to nurse the seedlings through frosty March and April.

Now I sow only 6 weeks before the last frost (here that is Mid May) so that the seedlings will fill a 9 cm pot just at the right time to go straight out into the garden.

I sow most of my hardy and half hardy annuals into coir jiffy pellets - they are low in nutrients so ideal for seed germination. I line up the pellets in old wooden seedtrays (I bought a load of 1950s seed trays that came from an old nursery - I use most of them but some are available for sale) - 35 to a tray and then put them into a poly bag in the boiler cupboard until they germinate. After germination they go into the tunnel so that they can get a lot of light. If it is going to be frosty I cover them with fleece, but otherwise they get no coddling.

The main problem with the coir is that they dry out quickly - one of the reasons that I squeeze them into the seed trays rather than using wider spaced plastic trays they come with - so you have to be on hand with water a lot. This is also why I pot on - into 9cm pots - as soon as I can see roots.

Euan and the girls are in charge of the vegetable plots this year - so yesterday they got weeding.

Snakehead fritillaries

I have a particular soft spot for snakeshead fritillaries.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh's iconic watercolour of fritillaries was the best selling postcard at the Hunterian Art Gallery where I was a curator pre-flower growing. The watercolour is a fine, accurate botanical drawing with a tension between pure representation and the checkerboarding pattern which fits so well into Mackintosh's textile and furniture designs.

Inspired by the glamour of the flower it was the first bulb that I had the courage to plant in drifts - I bought 200 bulbs and put them into the small lawn in our first garden. Every single one bloomed, and if you lay down in the grass and blinkered out the flower and vegetable beds you could believe that you were in a meadow.

They were also the first flower that I sold - to a flower shop in Glasgow.

Snakehead fritillaries get their name, I suspect, from the way that the growing stem writhes around on the ground. Like the snowflakes I mentioned a couple of posts ago, they like damp conditions - ideally a spot which doesn't dry out too much in the summer. They colonise water meadows and are ideally suited to a patch of damp grass. I grow them in patches in the cutting borders and they are now self sowing with thin blades of new bulbs clustering round the parents. The only pest is pheasants - which love to eat the bulbs - but they will only do this before they start into growth so fine netting over the clump during the winter deters them.

Fritillaries make very good cut flowers - as long as you remember to dip the cut ends into boiling water for a couple of seconds and as long as you top up their vase regularly. They are the thirstiest flower I know.

I prefer then, one or two stems to a vase, on their own against the light. They are one of those flowers that repays careful study. I keep meaning to have a go at drawing them.

Tying up loose ends

I have finished making things for the CL Fair- I wish I could have made more but I have to stop sometime, I'm not doing that "taking a sewing basket along with me" thing.
I am now concentrating on all the things that make a stall look nice.
One of the things that I have been doing today is potting up some unusual spring bulbs.
In the autumn I planted trays and trays of spring bulbs in the hope of having lots to pot up now.

To be honest, it hasn't been a great success. Mice and the unremitting rain saw a lot of them off but there were some survivors.
The photo is of muscari latifolium - basically a grape hyacinth in a very deep blue with a beautiful spathe shaped leaf.
I always think that shape gives a kind of sinister glamour to a plant - I don't know why. The flower hangs around inside the leaf for a week or two then elongates and looks much more like a grape hyacinth.
Bix, our eldest cat, has been supervising the packing up.

Wonder cloches

Do you remember my putting cloches over my parsley plants in February?
I didn't have enough cloches for all the plants so I covered every second one in the row.

Here are the photographs of the difference in the plants.



The one under the cloche is lush, bright green, soft leaved and ready for picking.

The one without cover is tiny, its leaves went mushy in the frost, and it is yellow and poorly looking.


It will recover, both will be thriving by May. But for the moment the cloches are giving me enough fresh parsley for my cooking.

Those C18th dutchmen knew a thing or two about gardening.

Alternatives to cut flowers.

It is that time of year when I begin to get a lot of phonecalls from people wanting to order flowers as gifts. The sun is shining, snowdrops and daffodils are in all the verges and people feel that I should be open again.

It is very flattering. It is great to know that people miss the business while we are closed. But it is just not possible to make up bouquets of flowers from my garden at this time of year.

Yes - I could probably grow early daffodils but it wouldn't be worth it - the early forms don't have a good vase life and they aren't bulky enough to make a good bouquet. Also, even when we have the glamorous, long lasting, beautifully scented narcissi at the van in April, people will not pay money for daffodils.

I sometimes despair of the way that what people expect has been formed by the cut flower industry. In the C19th cut flowers were not generally available from January-March and instead potted plants were used to decorate interiors. In fact, the C19th used a lot more potted plants -plants like primroses and harebells - in temporary flowery arrangements.

If I do ever extend my season to take in February and March it will be this example I will follow - trying to persuade people to order potted bulbs instead of flowers. In fact, I do continue to do this a bit all year and the photo is of a lovely sturdy aged zinc plante that I delivered today. It is full of the narcissi Soleil d'Or.

I continue to blog on the Country Living Site - very slow and bulky - entries can be read here

What is it about black flowers?

Why is it that I love black flowers so much? To be honest it is very difficult to make them fit into the garden design - they really need to be surrounded by lots of light coloured foliage - lime greens or silvers - which make them stand out. I have to look at them with blinkers on - marvelling at them like a planstman and not worrying about things on either side.

Yet every year I seem to acquire more and more black flowers - this stunning hellebore came from Floreat Plants, now sadly defunct. Sue sold me a lot of her stock plants when she was closing and this is the first year that it has flowered. It is gorgeous - especially with the sun shining through the petals - but I haven't found the right place for it yet.

At the moment it is in one of the long herbaceous borders and is really the only thing flowering there - visually it would look good against the silver of an artemesia but that wouldn't work in terms of habitat. I think that I need to find something leafy and lime green that likes shade and is full, fluffy and pristine in February/March.

Or perhaps I should move it in the autumn and make a woodland area with snowdrops and pulmonaria - but even those don't have a lightness which will lift the colour.

Or I could - as I tend to with all the black flowers - cut it and bring it into the house.

Sweetpeas

One of my jobs this week will be to pot up the sweetpea seedlings.
Temperatures in the tunnel are over 10 degrees for much of the day so the seedlings are beginning to grow again and will benefit from a bit more room I grow my sweetpeas in Rootrainers which encourage long healthy root runs. Rootrainers are basically black plastic cells which come flat packed with a hinge at the base - you fold them up and fit them into a plastic tray which gives you approximately 32 planting spaces. They spaces are much longer and narrower than plant pots and have grooved sides which guide the roots into going straight down. There is not a base to the cells, so when the roots emerge at the bottom they are air pruned (die off at the tips). This in turn sends a message back up to the plant to send out more roots.

You get the seedlings out by unhinging the cells so that there is minimal disturbance.

I find that the roottrainers are amazing things - it is very tempting to keep unfolding the cells just to see how the roots are doing.

But now the cells are full of roots and it is time to pot them on into large 2 litre rose pots - then with a bit of sunshine they should romp away. The top photo was taken outside last May.

Signs of spring

While many fellow bloggers are celebrating their first snow of the season, I am rejoicing in the first signs of spring.

It is a much better day today in so many ways, the sun is shining and I have finished off a whole heap of half finished hearts and bags and boxed them up.

The reason that I am celebrating though is that my hares are back.

My computer is on a table facing out over a small smooth green hill, it is the terminal morain of Loch Lomond, a marker of where the loch came up to in the ice age. Now it is the morning habitat of the brown hares.

Every morning from now until April I shall be able to check my morning e-mails while hare watching. Come March they will spend hours boxing - this morning they were simply chasing each other around.

Hares and buzzards, are now the essence of the spring to me.

I wasn't quick enough to get a photo of the hares this morning so it is a basket of half finished lavender hearts with their labels ready to be stitched on.