Backyard haven

I have been away on some adventures for the last few weeks and it's high time I posted a bit about these experiences. I was lucky enough to spend two weeks in Brighton getting some very valuable work experience in the studio of designer Andy Sturgeon His work is high-end and of exceptional quality, right to the very last detail of landscaping and planting. I worked on planting plans, researched design elements and styles, and rapidly improved my computer drawing skills on Vectorworks. Last week I spent 5 wonderful days working in the gardens at Great Dixter in Sussex. But more about that in my next blog post. In between these two placements I spent a fabulous week camping with Jon in the Saas valley of Switzerland. A plant-free week? Err, no - we became alpine plant and meadow geeks and have thousands of photos to show for it. A few of those will make it into a blog post by the end of the week as the combinations and habitats really were inspirational.


And so this week I am just having a couple of days to gather my thoughts (and thousands of photos) at home before heading off to get more hands-on plant experience at Pioneer Plants, a nursery near Letchworth run by plantsman and writer John Hoyland along with Nick Downing. 





I thought I might start my run of posts by putting up my latest photos of our garden in N4. Despite being a neglected in our jaunt to Switzerland, some things are thriving and I thought you might like to see some fruits of our ladder allotment - cherry toms - and some flowers looking beautiful. I'm finding it's best to concentrate on our little backyard haven when there are riots happening just a couple of miles away!
 

Japanese anenomes - excellent for late summer colour particularly pinks, blues and white

Our climbing Rosa 'Penny Lane' has had a new lease of life since we removed the Ceonothus from its bed - the shrub was just too big for the space and the rose and perennials are all now breathing a sigh of relief! The Ceonothus has a new home in Jon's parents' garden and it seems to be doing well so far.

Nictotiana alata 'Lime Green' with a backdrop of magenta Cosmos. The trumpet flowers of this form of tobacco plant make a great company for many brightly coloured perennials

Bits and pieces - our garden, Chelsea and Hampton Court

I have emerged from project madness - this one was a primary school garden in Wimbledon and it has consumed my life for the last couple of weeks. We had to present our work at the school where it was judged by hundreds of 5-11 year olds! They don't hold back, that's for sure. Anyway, now I'm done and giving myself the morning off, I thought I would just put a few bits and pieces here that I've been meaning to add for a while.

  

Top - tumbling toms, middle - courgettes,
bottom - strawberries



First, I thought you might like to see the progress of the Ladder Allotment in our garden which I love! Everything is growing like mad and, so far, the slugs and snails don't seem to have figured out how to get in. I couldn't resist putting one of these in my school garden proposal.

Cosmos

A lovely surprise has been the Cosmos given to us my Jon's parents. We didn't have a clue what colour they were going to be and I was slightly worried about more pink. But, they are all a beautiful deep magenta colour and they look great - Cosmos has lovely fine foliage and flower like mad - they make great cut flowers. In our garden they are adding some really useful vertical colour as we're a bit lacking in later flowering tall perennials. A great Cosmos that we don't have is the alluringly named Chocolate Cosmos (Cosmos atrosanguineus) which have chocolately brown flowers. I'd buy the variety 'Chocamocha' just for the name!

Philippa and our handywork -
I think a bit survived unchanged!

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show was a few weeks ago now and seems long gone. But I'm fortunate to have a few plants from show in our garden, admittedly looking a little more modest there than they did there. I got the chance to help Ann-Marie Powell build the British Heart Foundation Garden which she designed to support the charity's Mending Broken Hearts appeal. It was a great experience to be there in the build-up to see the incredible amount of construction and manpower that goes into creating the show gardens. Here is my classmate Philippa stuffing some hostas, grasses (lots of bright green Hakonechloa) and ferns (you can see to the left of the picture my favourite, the red-tinged Dryopteris erythrosora)  between the giant red steps in Ann-Marie's garden - we like to think that we played a small part in how the garden finally looked!!

Here you can see a video tour of the finished garden on the BBC's Chelsea Flower Show website. It really was a striking garden with lush planting and a strong message.



I can't resist including a picture of Cleve West's garden
this planting was so inspiring



On the final day of Chelsea, there is a sell-off of plants by many gardens and stands. I was there that day because I was helping out again, this time on The Daily Telegraph Garden designd by Cleve West which won Best in Show (here's the video tour). Working in show week involves handing out information to the public, answering questions etc. You can imagine how popular this garden was because it had won the ultimate prize and was stunning. It was a lot of fun to do it and I am very glad I swotted up on the plants beforehand because it made it lot more rewarding when people asked searching questions!





Bright red spores on
the underside of D.erythrosa
foliage

Anyway, I made sure I headed over to the British Heart Foundation garden at the end of the day  to get some souvenirs. I could barely carry them all on the bus but it was worth it. So here we have one of the two Dryopteris erythrosa I grabbed sitting next to an Alchemilla mollis which I also popped in my bag for good measure (with a bit of added water to show how beautiful the droplets are on the leaves).

Fern and froth: Dryopteris
erythrosora and Alchemilla mollis

Vietnamese coriander

And just one more Chelsea souvenir plant (there were a couple of others stuffed in my bags too...) This is Vietnamese coriander or Rau Ram (Persicaria odorata) which can be used in cooking but just looks great with its maroon V-shaped marks on the leaves. It's a frost tender perennial herb and looked great planted at the front of the British Heart Foundation garden set against the bright red metal structure.

I thought I would add a couple of pictures of the garden our class is tending to at Hampton Court Palace. It is tucked away, off the main visitor route, and is in what was the Apprentices' Garden. We are growing a fairly random selection of fruit, vegetables and plants, and most of what we've planted has been propogated at home by the class. It's a bit tricky finding the time to get down to the garden to work on it but it is actually looking pretty good, not least because it is given some regular TLC by one of our tutors, Amanda.

So I'm going to leave it there and go and do some work! It's less than 3 weeks until the end of term and exams loom. Hampton Court Flower show is on 5th-11th July and I'll be helping out there too. Should be fun. Then 2 months 'off'... more on what I'll be doing in the holidays later.



Georgie and Amanda watering and hoeing respectively!





Philippa again, this time watering some veg.





We will grow food!

Easter holidays are over and I have lots of ideas of topics to blog about! The first is one that is very close to home: our very own Ladder Allotment. To be honest, we haven't really ventured into the world of Grow Your Own in our patio garden so far, apart from a few herbs. Our focus has been getting to grips with container gardening for flowering shrubs and perennials. But now we have no excuses because we're the proud owners of an elaborately named "4 Tier Lean to Ladder Allotment Plus" from The Ladder Allotment Company, a birthday present for my husband Jon from his parents Sue and Ron. 

When it arrived I wasn't sure what it was!! But here you can see what it looked like moments after its expert construction (which I understand was very easy indeed...)

Now we have started off the planting with a few strawberry plants and hopefully this will be the start of something very tasty!

We were inpsired in many ways when we visited RHS Wisley on Saturday and I was particularly excited when I spotted a little sign saying "donated by The Ladder Allotment Company" in the Teaching Garden. Here is what we can aspire to...

Not exactly sure what we're going to grow in the rest of our Ladder Allotment but I'll be sure to update on the progress. Certainly I'm optimistic that this is a really good way of growing in a limited patio space. It also adds some much needed vertical interest so I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Starting close to home

Where better to start my blog than in our own back yard at our flat in North London. It literally is a yard being entirely paved but we have created our own little haven there over the last two years. Gardening entirely using containers is a challenge and that's a whole other blog subject in itself! 

I just want to start with some uplifting pictures to show summer is on its way. In the last month our garden has burst into colour. I can pick out 3 plants which have really brought the garden to life so quickly in 2011 in combination with our various shrubs. (Credit to my husband Jon for all these photographs)

 

Daffodils. These are simply common daffodils (Narcissus pseudonarcissus)and they work so well because they are tall with big trumpets, rather than small and fussy. Even just a few containers of these are striking in our small garden - they've created a own 'mini-drift' which sets off the various shrubs etc behind.


Beat the squirrels!! Last year almost all our bulbs - snowdrops, daffodils, crocus - were eaten by squirrels. As you can see, we have cured the problem, at least when it comes to daffodils. Our secret was covering the containers with netting (the sort used for protecting veg) after planting, securing it with tent pegs. The beauty of using containers is that you can tuck them out of the way when they don't look great then bring them out when the time is right - that's exactly what we've done with our daffodils.

Lamprocapnos spectabilis (formerly Dicentra spectabilis),
common name Bleeding Heart

'Bleeding Heart': This perennial is beautiful, and ours have grown from from nothing to this in just a few weeks. They love the semi-shade that we have in our garden at this time of year. You can just about see some of our large wooden planters in the background which are a lot easier to manage than scores of smaller containers - though we still  have quite a few!


Lamprocapnos spectabilis 'alba'




This is a beautiful pure white cultivar of Bleeding Heart. When they have finished flowering, the foliage will gradually die down during mid-late summer.









Euphorbia: I'm coming to the conclusion that there is a Euphorbia for every occasion and they are rapidly becoming one of my favourite plants. As part of the course we are creating planting plans for all sorts of soil conditions and styles of garden, and I've managed to find a Euphorbia to fit almost every single one to provide evergreen structure. This one is Euphorbia 'Helena' and is in flower at the moment looking very lovely indeed.

 

Euphorbia 'Helena' with the golden leaves of Spirea japonica 'Goldflame' behind