Snapdragon's garden

Bunking off

We have a bit of rough grass running down from the workshop to the wood, its about half an acre and we do nothing to it bar strim the broom a bit.  It is a great habitat for voles and we are rewarded by evenings watching swooping barn owls.

At this time of year though it turns into a glorious meadow full of pignut, buttercups and speedwell with a soft pink wash of sorrel seedheads.

On Friday afternoon, having worked hard at those weddings I bunked off for an hour, lay on my back in the long grass, kicked off my shoes and watched some of these drift overhead.

 I also tried to fend of the attentions of this monster

who took my lying down as invitation to jump on top of me and chew.

I am so glad that I took the time to appreciate the moment - for now we are back to grey skies and a chill in the air.  In Scotland this year you need to grab the sunshine when you can.  Perhaps a lesson for life!

Open

I think that my nervousness about having people able to visit the garden stems from a couple of years ago when a garden club (I won't mention which one) begged to visit as part of a tour.  I explained that the garden isn't a show garden, but they insisted that they were interested in flowers for cutting, not just pleasure gardens.

In the end I missed a play that Zoe was in to welcome them to the garden, I even made coffee and cake, and 90% of the rude, rude women didn't even get out of their minibus.  I was left fuming "never again".

But thats not really how we do things here, and I love welcoming people to the studio and garden, as long as they accept that its part of a working whole, not an airbrushed, titivated space.

So today we begin to open up again - Mondays and Thursdays in June and August and all week 11th-20th June.  I haven't bought in a lot of extra help, we are incredibly busy in the workshop at the moment, and it has to be take us as you find us.  Its far from pristine.

But there are some plants for sale,

The greenhouse has some bits and pieces in it for sale

The airstream is now a shop

 and people are very welcome to pop into the workshop and see where we make things.

and it you hunker down you can get photos like this!

The garden a week on

This Friday I am doing flowers for 2 weddings - both small, informal, relaxed weddings of laid back couples, but 2 weddings nonetheless.

I had been terribly worried, for the first time really, that we would not have enough flowers after last week's gales.

However nature is amazing.  There will be a lot of flower preening to do, removing damaged petals and peeling stuck leaf sheaves but we will get there.

These were taken this morning, just before I walked round (in the rain) with one of the brides to select flowers for her bouquet.

cirsium rivulare

camassia

primulas (that will look amazing after some judicious preening)

alliums that I'm hoping to use round stone pillars outside one venue.

and iris to hang in milk bottles from chairs in another.

We will get there . . . and the forecast is for the sun to shine on both weddings at the weekend.

Gales

Gales have hit Scotland.

We get a lot of gales in the winter but this time, with everything in full leaf, the damage is much much worse.

Our polytunnel

 which collapsed around Fiona - the winds were so strong that trays of plants we had potted for sale blew out of it.

Our orchard

my Dad gave me this greengage tree as its my favourite fruit.

Our flower beds

snapped at the base.

I'm not feeling too chipper this afternoon to say the least.

It is 10 days till we are supposedly opening up the studio and garden - 2/3 of the plants have been destroyed.

I'm not a fan of gales.

Garden photos from this week

Its been a funny old week for weather - torrential rain then steaming sunshine.

It has certainly brought the plants on and the garden is full of flowers.

These white bleeding hearts are gorgeous and cool looking in one of the beds - one of the few white flowers that seem unconcerned with the rain.

and these verbascum are blooming 5 weeks before they did last year

beating even the allium purple sensation which are almost at their peak

my favourite though is this white columbine with a blue flush to it (another white rain survivor) - looked at close up it seems to be almost made of porcelain.

In 2 and a half weeks . . .

We open the studio and the garden to the public.

which is why - of course - we decided to get the back lawn and the main path through the cutting garden ploughed up so we can reseed them.

Building work, diggers with seized brakes and taking out some leyandii trees had left us with what people politely called an "undulating lawn", but what was in reality an insurance nightmare trip hazard.

Hence the work.

But now I am panicking about the fact that the garden will be half mud and wondering whether we should have done it in 2 parts (at double the cost).

I am spending a lot of time in bits of the cutting garden where you can't see the mud

In 2 and a half weeks I shall have cordoned off a path through the mud and we shall be trying to distract visitors with beautiful plants for sale, sewing demos and the airstream shop.

Hellebores

I have an odd relationship with hellebores; if it weren't for the fact that they flower when nothing else in my garden does, I doubt that I would love them so much.

For hellebores really show up the flaws in my gardening style.

To start with I am attracted most to the dark, inky versions - the ones which, if I was being honest, blend into the mud in the flower beds, so that you can't really see them.

This gorgeous bruise of a flower came with us from our last garden, but really doesn't show itself well in the garden at all. 

If I am being honest, although they are in the main beds, and are in many ways a lousy cut flower, I grow them to cut and admire in detail inside.

So I shall wait for a few weeks until the seeds begin to set and the flowers will last in water and cut them to arrange like this.

where I can put the vase high and look up into the flowers with the sun streaming through the petals.

Or I will play about with them like this

and wear flowers in my hair.

And meantime I shall ponder where in the garden I can move my hellebores so that they don't blend into the ground, hanging their heads.

If you love hellebores too there are some beautiful ethereal photographs of them by Gavin Kingcome on this website - I bought one for Isobel last year and she loved it - there are also very wonderful cards and other photos.  Do check them out.

Signs of life.

This year we want to be able to open the garden/airstream/workshop a bit more, to allow people to see what we do.

We haven't worked out the details yet - staffing and car parking continue to be worries - but an important part of the venture is to be able to sell plants.

So yesterday Fiona and I had a walk round to see which plants could be divided, what root cuttings could be taken, which seedlings transplanted.

Given that we are only just free of frozen ground (and certain areas of the garden remain solid today) I was amazed at how many plants are growing away lustily - this is a black form of cow parsley.

There was also fine growth on poppies, euphorbia, crambe and monarda.

It is really buoying.  We haven't made a final list yet, but these gorgeous dusky plum poppies are definitely going to be on it

As will the black stemmed cow parsley which is growing happily in pots in the tunnel from seedlings potted up last year.

Spring suddenly seems much nearer.

Shopping for seeds

Of course part of the lure of vegetable gardening is buying the seeds, reading through the seed catalogues, imagining the overflowing baskets of fresh picked produce.

It is sitting making lists,warm and dry in front of a woodburner.

A lot of people ask me where we buy our seeds, and I must admit that I tend to sit browsing through a rather chi-chi catalogue with beautiful soft focus photographs and note down the variety names.  Then I actually buy them from here.  Which is where my Dad has always bought his seeds.  No nonsense, great quality, pared down costs, family business.

I did a price comparison when I had finished - the £36.80's worth of seeds that I bought  from Wallis Seeds would have cost almost £200 had I been swayed by the photography and gloss and bought them from the pricy catalogue.

Back to the garden

Today I got back to working in the garden.

I don't mean back to it after the winter, if only it were that simple, no, I mean back to it after a break of a few years.

We moved here in 2003, having spent the previous year looking for something with land where I could create a cut flower garden.  Over the next couple of years I worked obsessively, laying out a garden that was pretty enough to feature in Country Living Magazine in 2005.  I worked over 40 hours a week outside, digging, planting, heaving stones, barrowing gravel - it was a beautiful, productive garden and I was really proud of my patch.

But then I began to get tired, I found long hours in the garden exhausting, I began to be unable to keep on top of it.  Visits to the doctor (where I felt foolish troubling them - for show me a mother of small children who is not tired) and hospitals eventually showed that my adrenal glands had stopped working, that I had an auto-immune condition called Addisons. I didn't respond to the normal medication and the next couple of years were spent doing tests and trying to work out what steroid tablets would work for me.

In that time I kept gardening - though my memory of it is largely of me sitting sobbing on gravel paths having pushed myself too far, while all around me weeds took over the beds.  The garden became a great source of guilt.

So, as soon as the sewing side of the business began to develop, I employed Fiona who works 20 hours a week and keeps it pretty much under control and looking pretty.  The photos here are all due to Fiona's work.

I have chosen flowers to grow, I have planned things out, I have harvested and arranged the flowers but I have not gardened in any meaningful sense for about 3 years.

I think that somewhere, deep in my mind, I had an idea that I became ill through too much gardening.  This year, all of this ridiculousness is going to change.  I am going to get my hands dirty.  I have decided to concentrate on vegetables - Fiona does a fabulous job with the flowers - and I spent this morning digging a long bed in the poly tunnel so that I can fill it with salad while the outside part of the garden dries out.

Writing this post makes me feel very vulnerable - it sounds so daft really.  Some people may feel that it sounds dishonest - I never mentioned gardening, but I never said that I wasn't either. 

However, it will perhaps explain why I am no longer trying to be all things to all people and why some things have to be delegated - even if that is annoying.