Vita Sackville-West’s Columns for The Observer

Posted in Garden writing, gardening, The Observer, Vita Sackville-West by buzzanniebee

I went to a very informative Gardening Club talk last week by Andrew Mikolajski entitled “The March Of The Women”.

I had heard of most of the female gardeners/garden designers/horticulturalists who Andrew spoke about (Gertrude Jekyll, Ellen Willmott, Vita Sackville-West, Margery Fish, Rosemary Verey and Beth Chatto); some were new to me (Norah Lindsay, Sylvia Crowe, Martha Schwartz and Isabelle Green all of whom from memory are from the other side of the pond) but what I came home thinking was it was time to get my three Vita Sackville-West “Observer” books down from the spare room bookshelves and start dipping into them more regularly.

Her weekly columns with “The Observer” were published over the course of fifteen years, from 1946 – 1961 and many of them are available in three books: “In Your Garden”, ” In Your Garden Again” and “More For Your Garden”. There are lots of reasons I like them. They are reproduced in a monthly Jan-Dec format so you can read what she wrote this exact same week in, say, 1954, giving you an insight into the weather, the way we gardened back then and her thoughts on horticultural matters which are still very relevant today. Each of the three books has charming additions to the newspaper columns. In the first volume for example, we find her views on a visit she made to Hidcote Manor, which was originally printed in The Journal of the RHS in 1949; there are also her thoughts on some 20 flowers which caught her particular fancy (from Abutilon Megapotamicum ~ the “curious Brazilian with the formidable name” – to Zinnias ~ which “look as though they have been cut out of bits of cardboard ingeniously glued together into the semblance of a flower”).

One of the most fascinating things, which she was not allowed to publish in the original “Observer” columns, was a list of nurserymen, seedsmen and purveyors of plants and horticultural paraphernalia. In her Foreword to the first volume, she says

…neither The Observer nor any other journal could have allowed the ‘free advertisement’ of publishing the names and addresses. It led to a formidable increase in my correspondence; I think two thousand enquiries arising out of one article was the record….I trust and believe I answered them all. If anyone was overlooked, I take this opportunity of offering an apology.

A few of the recommended firms she mentions are still with us today: R.C.Notcutt of Woodbridge, Suffolk, (“lilacs a speciality”) is now a large, nationwide garden centre; Thompson & Morgan, Sutton & Sons and Unwins are all still successful distributors of seeds and sundries. One which caught my eye under, ‘Fruit Trees – and Fruit In General’ was Laxton Bros, 63H, High Street, Bedford, which is now (thank you Google Maps) a Tesco Express. Vita’s recommendation for where to buy ‘Uncommon Vegetables’ is one Mrs Kathleen Hunter of Wheal Frances, Callestick, Truro, Cornwall. I wonder who lives there now. Interestingly Kathleen’s catalogue from the mid-50s shows up on Amazon, although it is currently unavailable. I wonder whether any of Mrs Hunter’s ancestors are still in the horticultural trade.

Vita wrote across many genres: poetry, biography, criticism, travel as well as fiction. Whether you are familiar with her output or not, her garden writing is often amusing, always informative, openly honest, and normally with an eye on the reader’s budget. Profligate, she was not.

So here is an example (apropos of nothing) which I read just this morning. From March 27th, 1955, she says of Phlox,

Some people love the scent of phlox: to me, it suggests pigsties, not that I dislike pigsties, being country-born, and well accustomed to them.

Vita was born at Knole, and whilst I don’t doubt for one minute she had come across pigsties, her description of being ‘country born’ is perhaps not your or my version.

Knole is in fact a country pile situated within Knole Park, a 1,000-acre park located immediately to the south-east of Sevenoaks in west Kent, some 25 miles from her beloved Sissinghurst. The house apparently ranks in the top five of England’s largest houses occupying a total of four acres. The House: four acres. Yes, you read that correctly. She was born there in 1892, grew up there, and here recounts a legend that it is a calendar house:

….its seven courtyards correspond to the days of the week, its fifty-two staircases to the weeks of the year, its three hundred and sixty-five rooms to the days of the year, but ‘I do not know that anyone has ever troubled to verify it.’

With a new film due out in the UK in July, which concentrates on Vita’s love affair with Virginia Woolf, an increased spotlight will no doubt once again be on her, her writing, her fascinating life, as well her garden in Sissinghurst. For me, the short snippets of gardening expertise in these three books are beautifully written and charming. We are lucky to have them.

Annie Bee xxx

2Jul2018

The Unveiling of the Turf Stack

Posted in garden design, gardening, shed, soil health, turf stack, turves, white green and grey garden by buzzanniebee

The White, Green and Grey Garden is looking as if it has been in place for many years, but in fact is only 20 months old. I couldn’t be happier with it, although it is an ever-changing thing which can always be tinkered with and improved. I cast a beady eye over it most days, planning and scheming and am never 100% happy with what I see…. not least if a rogue has self-seeded which is not in the prescribed colour scheme.

One unsolicited, uninvited pink poppy…..

Last month I decided to take a look at my turf stack, which we made from all the grass we had to remove in order to make both beds. A turf stack is supposed to be laid grass-facing-grass in a stack of neat sandwiches. As you can see from the picture below, on the weekend we did the turf-removal, we were so shattered after using the machine to take it all up it I was happy to have it in any kind of system at all, so it was pretty much slung together willy-nilly in a straight-ish line.

Despite that, it has been gently rotting down for the 20 months under plastic and black weed control fabric. I have looked at it a couple of times over that period, but didn’t feel it was well-rotted enough to risk putting back onto the garden; the thought of reintroducing creeping buttercup and other nasties back into the garden made me very cautious indeed so I had to call on some often elusive patience…. This time though (mid-June 2018), despite it being rather dry under there (no doubt I should have soaked it prior to putting it under its duvet) it looked very promising.

Our kittens, Huck and Hero, guarding the turf stack, Autumn 2016

Luckily for me my nephew was staying for a few days; he plays rugby for Wales, so quite literally can’t be any fitter or stronger and was happy to lend a helping hand, so we unwrapped the entire stack to see what we were dealing with. I was slightly nervous of vermin/snakes etc, but other than a huge number of ants (which had built some impressive nests, but equally had helped to break the turves down), quite a few worms (there no doubt would have been more if it had been damper) plus 3 rather startled toads, there was nothing to worry about. The other bonus was that, due to the inclusion of some very woody roots (that area of the garden had, some decades ago, been home to an orchard, where I am told the local village children would sometimes come and play), there were also a few very impressive pockets of mycorrhizal fungi, which look like very thin white veins and are very good for soil health. I believe it aids plants in taking up beneficial nutrients. There is more info on it here.

Joe gallantly helped wheelbarrow the first third of the stack before he had to leave, but that got me started, and many hours later the entire stack had been redistributed into the cutting garden, and back onto the two borders, from whence it came. There were probably between 25 and 30 wheelbarrow-loads in total. Recycling at its best.

Some of it looked good enough to eat – rather like a luxurious chocolate cake.

I could practically hear the garden singing as I laid it on in a very thick mulch. The birds absolutely loved chucking it everywhere and eating the ants and fat ant eggs, and I felt like a bountiful patron. Amazingly when I originally drew up the plans for the White, Green and Grey Garden, I had thought seriously about putting all the turf in a skip. Thank goodness I came to my senses.

When turves break down, you end up with loam, which is essentially a perfect mixture of clay, sand and silt:

loam

ləʊm/

noun

a fertile soil of clay and sand containing humus.

GEOLOGY :a soil with roughly equal proportions of sand, silt, and clay.

A week or so later, the birds are still throwing it off the raised beds which make up the cutting garden, joyfully searching for any overlooked goodies. The toads have re-homed themselves somewhere, and the Dahlias, Cosmos, Sweet Peas, Asters and Dianthus in the cutting beds all look like they have had an injection of nourishment.

Where the stack had been, I was left with an area of unsightly bare soil. Why not use it to create a small bed for over-flow plants, experiments and sowing biennials?

I already had some weed membrane, so off I went to B&Q to buy the treated wood and the bark, and – while I was at it – black paint for the shed.

The interesting thing about painting something like a shed or barn black is how it seems to help the object “disappear”; you start to only see the green plants and blue sky, rather than the shed itself. I am thrilled with this new area.

Here is a recent photo of the white garden:

Now, what’s next …….

Annie Bee xxx

24Feb2018

A Spring Walk in Highgrove ~ February 2018

Posted in garden design, garden plan, gardening, Gardens of note, Gloucestershire, Highgrove, Highgrove House and Garden by buzzanniebee

Bee HQ seems to sit squarely in what feels like the epicentre of a huge number of great gardens and houses one can visit. We are surrounded by beautiful, notable gardens as well as a lot of NGS gardens open to the public which might otherwise not be seen.

So nipping over into Gloucestershire to take a guided tour of Highgrove’s garden seemed too good an opportunity to miss, so I booked two tickets for a Guided Spring Walk. I will add right now that Mr Bee who was due to accompany me (a staunch Republican, and my sometime Undergardener) decided to stay at home and weed the borders. I am kidding of course: chance would be a fine thing. He bailed on me, but I set off knowing I would be able to spend far more in the garden shop without him.

The 90 minute drive west was delightful, taking in the changing nature of the Cotswold stone colours as I headed towards Tetbury. I even drove past the Waitrose where local customers threw bread rolls at Camilla P-B, back in the day when she had been outed as The Other Woman. I would have spent longer in Tetbury as it looked charming, but I was following strict instructions from Highgrove regarding the timing of my arrival, and finding Highgrove itself was easier said than done, due to the complete lack of signage (for security reasons I assume).

Sadly the only rule for visitors is you are not allowed to take a mobile or a camera into the property. So this is all from memory, my note-taking and sketches, although there is a very nice book about the gardens if you feel the need to read up. It felt very peculiar not to be able to take photos, but the huge sign on arrival,

“YOU ARE NOW ENTERING AN OLD-FASHIONED ESTABLISHMENT”

left one in no doubt that this was a largely digital-free zone. To be wandering around, using one’s eye and memory (and notebook) felt like a challenge in this day and age.

The security wasn’t as tight as I had imagined, which makes me think HRH probably wasn’t in residence. The pot-holes which are currently blighting the UK winter roads continued up the drive, and there was rather a relaxed and unassuming feel to the entire operation they run there. It is fairly low-key and disarmingly informal. It struck me that for the Prince, Highgrove is the equivalent of us mere mortals having a weekend caravan, a she-shed, or (at most) a holiday cottage for the odd weekend get-away. The house itself (my guess is it has maybe 10-12 bedrooms) is not as big as you might imagine; mind you, when your normal residencies are a series of castles and palaces, arriving there must feel a bit like going camping for Mr & Mrs Mountbatten-Windsor.

Having said that, there are 12 gardeners in total, and the property extends to a huge acreage, much of it farmland. And whilst billed as “old-fashioned”, HRH has always been way ahead of the game on ecological/sustainability matters (more of which, including the reed-bed sewage system! you can read about here) , and if he does still talk to his plants (one of the Bees, when asked what he knew about Prince Charles said, “he talks to plants and has flappy ears”), the garden is a very good advert for doing just that. It is 100% organic and looks very good on it. My guess is we saw a fraction of the whole garden on the tour, but we certainly got a good feel for it, and were allowed surprisingly near the house. We were too polite to peer in the windows however tempted we were: how British!

So what did I take note of? Despite it being smaller than I thought (and I have read the book), it is by normal standards pretty big, so everything is done on a large-scale. No single bags of compost or mulch for His Royal Highness from Tetbury B&Q. So for example, while you or I might think planting 80 snowdrop bulbs in one go an industrial project worthy of note in the local paper, just last year alone 40,000 were planted at Highgrove, and heavens, they looked magnificent, mingling in with the cyclamen.

Mid-February is perhaps not the most popular time to visit, but (as you might remember) I have a deep fascination with structure, and winter is the best time to appreciate it. The other bonus was that it was certainly “peak snowdrop” ~ they couldn’t have been prettier. In a week or two, the daffs will be out, but too much yellow in a garden, even in the spring, makes me nervous. What was not in evidence in late winter was the famous wild-flower meadow, which I would absolutely love to see in full swing. Apparently the Guild of Scythe Cutters come and in and give it its most important cut. I can’t say they would probably be available to come and do my wild-flower meadow cutting (such as it is).

I noticed that much of the hedging, particularly in the less formal areas of the garden (further away from the house) is mixed, so there is a lovely tapestry of native species, intermingling ~ it’s very pretty, and importantly, good for wildlife. Another idea I liked very much is the way several ‘windows’ have been cut out of the formal yew hedges, allowing visual vistas to open up. Also, one small stretch of hedging was laid out in a ‘crinkle-cranke’ manner, thereby allowing some attractive planting in the curves.

Daphnes: it seems there is no such thing as too many and the scent was good, despite it being a bitterly cold day. Some are evergreen which gets a very big tick from me. The national collection of Hostas are at Highgrove; again, nothing to see in Feb, but I imagine they are lovely, running throughout the various ‘garden rooms’.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is taken very seriously in the garden. Little homemade fences, willow hoops to keep the riff-raff to the paths, logs used to edge drives, were things you and I could also do. Using historically, architecturally important stonework which has been lying about for centuries to make a beautiful wall might well be beyond us, as might be the other myriad of structures such as the thatched tree-house, which wasn’t that much smaller than my first house I bought in Kent in 1986…. Presumably as well, there is plenty of material lying around for jobs like staking – no green plastic plant supports for our future King.

Using foraged pine-cones to mulch around a shrub in a pot looks charming. Interestingly, there is an amazing collection of terracotta urns, some of them HUGE, and I was surprised they were left out over winter; our guide explained that they are filled with wood-chips, which acts as an insulator apparently. A good tip.

I was very interested to know whether there have been issues with Box Blight. We have it at Bee HQ, and my master-plan to ignore it, hope for the best, treat with fungicide (which may be helping, but it is unlikely), and occasionally raise a prayer to the Goddess of Gardening (Dionysus?) does appear to work. At Highgrove they have taken a somewhat more targeted approach: they have ripped out the box parterre completely and have replanted with Euonymus japonicus ‘Green Rocket’, which has slightly larger, darker green leaves than box but looks very good to me. Interestingly the Box further afield, and used as part of the mixed hedging, looked perfectly healthy.

What else went down in my notes? The use of what I call Crinkly Ivy (possibly Hedera helix ‘Ivalace’); slinging down a handful of alpine grit on the soil to mark where perennials will come up (in this case, Delphiniums); and finally, as I am thinking very seriously about keeping bees, Highgrove’s decision to keep Welsh Black Bees (which hail from Anglesey), which are apparently rather more hardy and resilient than other species – I will have to do some research into that. HRH’s chooks looked flippin’ delighted to be living at Highgrove, and their coop was as upmarket as you would expect from the next in line to the throne.

And what of my shopping trip? The little shop had a few lovely things, and I stocked up on plenty of delights I don’t need but which caught my eye, including an attractive little double-flowered Primula, which will look nice when it blooms. The cafe was excellent and the gluten free fare was delicious.

All in all, another very successful Annie Bee Gardening Adventure, and a few lovely ideas and memories to take home.

NB: all profits from Highgrove go to Prince Charles’s charitable foundation; even the most rampant Republicans should be happy to hear that.

Annie Bee xx

30Jul2017

The Making of the White Garden ~ 5. Adding Grey

Posted in garden design, gardening, Grey plants, white garden by buzzanniebee

There have been many takes on colour-schemed gardens. But white gardens are perhaps the most difficult to pull off – or at least I think so! Often thought of as simply the colour of light, white is most often used in gardens to dot light around, highlighting other colours and brightening up darker areas. Technically it is an achromatic colour ~ that is a colour without a hue. Used en masse white works best against dark, enclosing hedges (of Yew or Buxus perhaps, or in my case, beech). Interestingly Vita Sackville-West referred to her famous (the most famous?) white garden at Sissinghurst both her “pale garden” as well as a “green, grey, white and silver garden”. Whether white is a colour or not, in terms of plants, there are many shades of white and it does to be fairly open-minded. Pale creams, pale yellows, pink tinges, the blue flowers of a Hosta – are they welcome?

On Gardeners’ World this week, Mat Reece, Head Gardener at the 10-acre private garden Malverleys in Hampshire said that when an unwanted colour pops up in their white garden, it is like having a nasty mark on a pristine white shirt. I have ended up moving a few creamy-yellow Wallflowers which were frankly too coloured. The odd rogue self-seeded scarlet poppies have also been given very short shrift.

I have found that it is A) hard to stick with white, pure white and nothing but the white and B) softer and more interesting with other colours allowed to act as a foil to the white. Grey (and silver) and green are the most obvious choices and these seem to add depth to the two borders – so which grey plants have I included in this first summer?

I have found that Senicio cineraria ‘Silver Dust’ (which I grew from seed in vast quantities) has proved invaluable. I have also enjoyed using Eryngium giganteum ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’ (so-called because Miss Ellen Willmott, apparently never went anywhere without a pocketful of seeds of that particular Eryngium which she would liberally throw about in other people’s borders). The evergreen dwarf shrub, Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ is also a key grey plant in my scheme. The felty Stachys byzantina ‘Silver Carpet’ will make an appearance next year and I will also add some Hostas which have a grey leaf (this year I just went for Hosta ‘Francee fortunei which is green and white) – well, I say grey, but they technically have a blue-ish tinge. Hosta ‘Babbling Brook’ would do nicely.

The photos below show the cineraria; Eryngium, Stachys, Hosta and Artemisia.

I planted several pots with white Lilium regale, underplanted with cineraria, ready to dot them around the borders as some of the other annuals start to die back or look scruffy. Already, here towards the end of July, my White Ensign sweet peas, which have been spectacular (lovely long stems so very good for cutting) are beginning to go over and will leave unsightly gaps in August before the white Asters and Anemones start their moment in the sun.

Sun? We haven’t had much of that of late, but one lives in hope. I am known for fussing about lack of anything – rain, sunshine, chocolate….. As a gardener, lack of rain seems worse to me than lack of sun, but both end up driving me mad!

Do let me know if you have any favourite white or grey plants. A fellow blogger who I enjoy reading, Jenny Williams, suggested the following white plants, which work well for her: Geranium sanguineum ‘Album’; Hesperis matronalis (Sweet Rocket) ‘White’; the Japanese Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’ and Narcissus ‘Thalia’, all of which I will try out as the garden develops.

In fact, as the weather is rubbish and a storm is due to blow in this afternoon I might as well go to the Garden Centre right now.

Happy gardening, friends.

Annie Bee xx

14Jul2017

The Making of the White Garden ~ 3. Which Plants Where?

Posted in garden design, garden plan, gardening, white garden by buzzanniebee

Having sorted out the space for the new White Garden (parts 1&2 here) the task of researching appropriate plants was the next step.

However, my priority was to get some bulbs planted in the autumn for a blast of spring colour. So before I got down to doing the homework, I bought about 30 bulbs of 2 varieties of Allium: ‘Mount Everest’ (which can be slightly more difficult to grow than the more common purple varieties) and Allium Karataviense ‘Ivory Cream’ which is lower growing and, despite the name, annoyingly came up slightly pink. For now, it can stay, but I am learning that a few plants which have “ivory” in the name have a tendency to have either a yellow (or even pinkish) blush. How fussy one should be when building a white, green and grey garden is a good question ~ the jury is out. I also planted 2 Camassias (‘Semiplena’) and the (again) alarmingly yellow Wallflower ‘Ivory White’. These all went in at the end of September 2016. A week or so later I added 2 ‘Iceberg’ roses, and started to postcrete in a few timber structures which were left over from an unwanted fence. I am terribly keen on vertical structures in any garden and I wanted to learn how to concrete. The hardest part was keeping 2 curious kittens off the newly laid, wet concrete!

Over the next couple of months I took the risky decision to also plant up some shrubs, most of which survived despite some very sharp frosts (-9C) in our first winter at the property. I wanted a good lot of evergreen structure in both borders and to that end chose the following, mostly in twos or threes:

Sarcococca confusa; Choisya ternata ‘White Dazzler’; Daphne ‘Eternal Fragrance’; Fatsia Japonica ‘Spider’s Web; Salvia ‘Schneehugel’; Phormium tenax; Skimmia ‘Kew Garden’ and Hellebore ‘White Beauty’ + ‘Molly’s White’; Buddleja ‘White Profusion’ and Ilex Crenata, which I tried to cloud-prune, thereby almost losing them. They held on and are now thriving, but the cloud-pruning mid-winter almost killed them! A couple of Hydrangeas, one of the Fatsias and a Philadelphus sadly didn’t make it through the winter and have now been replaced (Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ from cuttings).

My choices were made using a vast array of books in my library as well as seed and plant catalogues and various websites. I made copious lists, noted measurements of the eventual height and width and checked hardiness. The next job was to autumn sow some seeds: Sweet Pea ‘White Ensign’; Nigella ‘Albion Green Pod; Papaver (Poppy) ‘Swansdowne’; Hollyhock ‘Halo White’ and Antirrhinum (Snapdragon) ‘White Giant’. Keeping these alive and thriving over winter in the unheated greenhouse during several lengthy periods of severe frost was quite a task, but with fleece and hope, they mostly thrived. Sowing in the autumn gives you a bit of a head-start in the spring ~ with luck, by the time the last frosts are over, your strong (pinched out and potted on) plants are eager to get their roots down into the warming soil.

These plans show the bare bones of the evergreens, as it looked after the first few plants had gone in.

These 3 pics show some of my notes on possible plants, organised by Evergreen Structure, Summer and Anything Goes (not very helpful in the long-run).

Of the things I sowed, the Snapdragons, Poppies (below), Hollyhocks and Sweet Peas have all been spectacular. I am letting them all self-seed copiously, as well as spreading their love further afield in the rest of the garden.

Next time I will show where we are with the White Garden now, mid-summer of its first year and how to add grey into the mix.

Annie Bee x

3Jul2017

The Making of the White Garden ~ 2. Farewell Parterre

Posted in garden design, garden plan, gardening, white garden by buzzanniebee

This post follows the first of my blogs on how the White Garden came into being.

There is that old saying,

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans

Plans: they are all very well, but when you are a novice, fitting a garden plan onto a lovely, fresh, white piece of A3 is asking for trouble. If only life were that simple! It took me months and a visit from my BF to accept just how wonky my back garden is; however long I watched it and however straight I wished it to be, it simply wouldn’t budge. It is as curved as a crescent moon. Or, perhaps more appropriately, a scythe. A parterre simply would not work ~ cheerio symmetry and four Weeping Pears.

A slow rethink and a new sheet of A3 and I arrived at this (below) and even this one doesn’t do the bendy nature of the beast justice:

What did this new garden have going for it? Well, three lines of hedging (Copper Beech and Photinia) into which could nestle two new large, square borders for starters and a lovely, promising aspect, which is more or less due north/south. A few concerns: it sits fairly high up, so is quite exposed and I had no idea what I might find on removing the vast quantity of turf.

We moved in to the house at the end of April 2016 and it was in August that I finally set about marking out the plot. With the help of my two practically minded and mathematically competent sons, we decided on the dimensions and paced it out. Pegging it out with string made it seem very real and I was sure this was the right answer. Son No.2 came up with the brilliant idea of introducing a curve (now fondly known as “The Bill Curve”). Still more time was spent thinking (an under-rated part of planning) prior to starting the excavation. We toyed with the idea of hiring a digger and some skips (No.1 son and I both fancied the idea of a digger!) but, for various logistical reason, ended up hiring a turf cutter for a weekend. The turves (vast quantities) have all been saved and are slowly rotting down and will be added back onto the garden in 18 months or so.

The turf-cutting weekend was September 19th 2016, with a view to having the two beds ready for planting some spring-flowering bulbs in mid-autumn. It was a cold and drizzly experience, but we ploughed on, No.1 son and I, with a little help from the kittens. The turf-cutter was a big old beast of a thing to manoeuvre in the damp conditions, and if you weren’t careful, you could easily over-step the pegged lines. However, after a full day’s work the basic outline of the north and south borders were there and the turf-stacking had begun.

And what of the soil? Well, on the whole it is fairly good, apart from the remnants of a kids’ sand-pit and some hefty roots from the old orchard. The critical thing was to get as much of the grass and weeds out early on, otherwise I could see years of remedial weeding ahead of me. And nobody wants that.

The next blog will detail the plant lists and my final choices of bulbs, shrubs, perennials, grasses and annuals.

Annie Bee xx

26Jun2017

The Making of the White Garden ~ 1. The Plan

Posted in garden design, garden plan, gardening, white garden by buzzanniebee

Since the relocation of Bee HQ to a small village in north Oxfordshire, (is it the Cotswolds? ~ no, not quite but we can see it from here) I have spent a great deal of time on and in my new garden. The last time we moved house, at the turn of the new millennium, we didn’t have the knowledge or the skills to design the garden ourselves, so employed a landscape garden designer. This time round I have just enough know-how, chutzpah and creativity to test myself and boy! am I having fun. I am now spending the majority of my time in the place that gives me the most pleasure: the garden.

The ‘bones’ of this garden (which is just under an acre in total) are exquisite. Clearly somebody with a good eye for structure, dimension and form planted heaps of simple but useful yew, copper beech and box hedging, a few good shrubs (repeated throughout the garden), a handful of hardy perennials, some classic topiary and half a dozen espaliered fruit trees. The lines are clean, the proportions are just right and the borders, such as they are, are small but of reasonable depth. Apart from a bit of tinkering, I have left all that largely alone, other than pruning, trimming and general maintenance. The soil still needs a lot of organic matter adding, but that will happen over the next few years, and beyond.

On first seeing the garden, in January of 2016, I was struck by the opportunity to do something bold with a fairly large expanse of lawn at the back of the house. A sales brochure from 1874 calls the house a “gentleman’s farmhouse”; it was built at the very end of the 1700s. The brochure also talks of “a large piece of highly productive garden ground and lawn”. Neighbours have said that a few decades ago, there was an orchard on the area in question and the village children used it as a playground. Presumably in the mists of time, it may have had farm animals on and around it. Certainly the soil is generally fairly good at the back. Unlike the front of the house, which is quite manicured and designed, we found a rather dull and under-utilised space ~ perfect for a new project; it felt like the owners who made all the design decisions at the front simply ran out of steam. I must admit now that even before we had exchanged contracts on the house, I was already planning what I grandly referred to as my parterre. I even did some initial drawings.

Below, you can see my (very) rough drawing of how it looked in the January, followed by a photo (looking north-ish) which should give you an idea of the blank canvas. The two lines of fastigiate yews made no sense to me at all and they were removed (and resold and therefore reused) within a week of us moving in. The white A3 plan below that is a very simple sketch of the ‘parterre’ idea and I was bold enough to include a plant list. At that stage, the idea of it being a white (+ green + grey) garden hadn’t occurred to me.

What did happen when we moved in at the end of April 2016, was that I planted up a cutting garden (look out for a separate blog post to come) and spent several months deciding whether the parterre idea could work. Taking that time to decide ended up being an excellent decision. So how does it look right now, in June of its first year?

$Annie Bee\s white garden south border$

More soon ……..

Annie Bee x

10Mar2017

Making A Cheap, Recycled Compost Bin

Posted in compost, compost bin, gardening, homemade, pallets, projects, recycled compost bin by buzzanniebee

My latest homemade project here at Bee HQ is a compost bin. When I googled “compost bin made from recycled wooden pallets” there were 1.7m suggestions, so you might ask, why add one more? Well, I hope you will find this simple and clear.

I have an 8-9 step guide below, and, in case you worry it is difficult and time-consuming, I found it surprisingly easy to make, bearing in mind I am a very amateurish DIY-er. How wrong could it go?

First up, find yourself a kindly local company willing to let you have the pallets. You need four, roughly the same size and shape. Some pallets (which tend to be painted bright red or blue) are not to be recycled; they belong to the company who own them, CHEP, who are very clear on the subject:

CHEP equipment cannot legally be bought, modified, exchanged for non-CHEP equipment, sold, or otherwise disposed of. Unauthorised appropriation, use or disposal of CHEP equipment is strictly prohibited.

However, there are many other pallets around, and I have never been turned away when I have asked for them from companies where I am a customer (thanks Hillier Garden Centre, Wickes and Topps Tiles). Indeed, they seemed happy for me to have them, especially when I explained why I wanted them. Obviously you need to be able to transport them (they fit in the back of our trusty Volvo with the seats down) and, while rather unwieldy, are not too heavy.

I did read a handful of the million or so internet articles and forums, and was slightly concerned that some of the pallets are stamped MB which means they have been treated with methyl bromide, which is a pesticide. One article said to avoid using them if you are going to be then putting the compost you make onto crops (which I won’t). All the other articles I read (The Telegraph, Guardian and Gardeners World) didn’t mention it at all. In the end I made an executive decision to not worry about it. Also, sorting through the pallets searching for the stamps (many not easily visible) made me look pretty damn fussy. I reckon life is a little too short and delaying making the compost bin (and therefore the compost – which is a fairly long process anyway) seemed a bit silly and counter-productive. More to the point, I just wanted to get on with it. Patience is not my middle name….

Four pallets later, I started the project by getting some chicken wire from the shed and pegged it out onto the area I had chosen for the compost bin. This is to prevent vermin from burrowing and tunneling into the compost from the bottom.

Next step is to get the first two, then three, pallets roughly into the right place and tie them together with some wire once you are happy they are about right.

Stand back. Admire. Have a cup of tea.

At this point our one-year-old Maine Coon, Huck, decided I needed some ‘help’.

Get a saw and cut the fourth pallet in half.

Get a drill, some screws, a hammer and some nails and secure the entire structure together.

This is the only part where another pair of hands is welcome, and I luckily had my nephew staying who was able and willing. You want this bit of the compost bin to open so you can fork your waste in from the wheelbarrow. You could have the entire fourth pallet opening in this way of course. Initially I used some small hinges, but realised the weight of the ‘gate’ required more substantial ironmongery.

An alternative to a hook would be some farmer’s twine but this looks elegant ….. for a recycled compost bin.

All done. Now the far more difficult business of making good compost begins. And more to the point, one compost bay in isolation is not ideal, so I will need to add at least one other pallet-structure to this first one. However, I can wait for a few months before I need to go scouting for more pallets. This is what I will be aiming for: