Gorgeous, graceful grasses

Ornamental grasses seem to divide opinion more than any other group of plants. Some people, myself included, love them for their grace and elegance, the way they catch the breeze and add colour and movement to the late summer and autumn garden.

Others view them as a passing fashion, or worse, as nothing more interesting than stray seedlings from the lawn to be ripped out with the creeping buttercup and bindweed.

They may be relative newcomers to our gardens but I firmly believe that their positive contribution is here to stay. Some designers like to use grasses in bold contemporary blocks of single species, some in prairie style mixtures with other late flowering North American plants, their natural bed fellows. In my own garden I like to experiment with plant combinations and I've found the diversity and versatility of grasses to be indispensable, they are simply brilliant garden plants.

The cascading copper and olive foliage of Anemanthele lessoniana tones beautifully in shade with the fern Dryopteris erythrosora or in sun with orange roses like 'Lady of Shallott' and makes a perfect backdrop to the sky blue geranium 'Rozanne'. As autumn approaches the tiny droplets of bronze flowers on long falling stems are perfect with Aster 'Monch' and Kniphofia 'Little Maid' or 'Bees Lemon'. 

Low growing with a dense arching habit it's perfect for covering difficult banks

For height without heaviness Miscanthus 'Morning Light' is just lovely. Upright and slightly arching at the tips with a fine white stripe through the light green leaves, it rises slowly over the summer to form a statuesque plant, perfect with Anemone 'Honorine Jobert; white Hydrangea quercifolia or Fuchsia 'Hawkshead, very refined and elegant.

As the year moves on and the colour in the garden begins to turn, grasses with good autumn hues shoot like flames around the skirts of fiery leaved shrubs and trees like Acer palmatum, Cotinus coggygria and Amelanchier lamarkii.   Imperata 'Rubra' has red tipped leaves all summer and many of the Panicums have brilliant red autumn foliage, spectacular when teamed with deep red Persicaria amplexicaulis 'Blackfield'.

If you're new to grasses and it's all year round versatility you're after then Stipa tenuissima is hard to beat, light and airy the foliage and long lasting wispy flowers float among so many perfect companions from geraniums and roses to lavender and Potentilla fruticosa cultivars, it's a brilliant grass for any garden style.

'Bee neighbourly'

Whenever I'm out in the garden I always feel the need to be doing something, pulling up bindweed, watering pots, rescuing a plant in the greenhouse from heat stroke, I do find it difficult to just sit.

But I must do try harder because it's in those quiet, still moments when we're just being not doing, that we actually appreciate just how much other activity there is. When we stop being busy ourselves and take notice of what's going on around us it's remarkable how industrious animals are and none more so it seems to me than the wild bees. They have to be I suppose to cram their life's work into just a few short weeks.

I'm paying more attention this year because I have a brilliant bee identification chart so now I can put names to them. Some which I'd always assumed to be just smaller bumble bees are actually solitary ones which as their names suggest don't live in colonies but lay their eggs in individual holes in walls, or in the ground like the tawny mining bees which I watched in the spring disappearing down cracks in the lawn's bare patches. They are the little ginger furry ones, white bottomed ones with the fluffy boleros I've discovered to be tree bumble bees and the black ones with bright orange bums are red tailed bumble bees. There are several with yellow stripes, but they'll have to slow down a bit before I can be confident enough to know whether I'm seeing a buff tailed or a white tailed or even a garden bumble bee!

I always feel much more of an affinity with something when I know what it's called, like being on first name terms with the neighbours, the more I know about the bees which share my garden with me the less likely I am to do something to upset them and just like any good neighbours we help each other out. I leave my lawn uncut so they have big patches of clover, birds foot trefoil and bush vetch in which to forage and from the densely packed fruit along the branches of the plum trees they were very busy pollinating for me this spring.

A very fair exchange, I do hope we stay on good terms now the runner beans are in flower!

Scentsational!

I have made a promise to myself that this year I will not squander the lovely long summer evenings inside, neither at my desk working nor in front of the tv, but be outside enjoying the daylight hours in my garden for as long as I possibly can and so far I'm sticking to it.

I'm equally happy doing something useful and productive like a stint digging in the veg patch or just pottering around looking which new flowers have opened and noticing as day by day the garden gently settles down from it's fresh spring flush into the soft fullness of early summer.

So well known by day, the garden changes into an unfamiliar and magical place as dusk gathers, the blackbirds which always seem to be the last birds to stop calling fall silent and the rooks and jackdaws pass over following the same flight path every night on their way home to roost.

As the natural light fades there's a chance to see bats flit silently but swiftly over the pond on the hunt for moths and as all the colours disappear, in monochrome, any white flowers glow as if artificially lit.

As vision become less certain we notice other sensations like the drop in temperature and a freshening breeze. Hearing becomes a bit more acute picking up the typical night time 'twoo' of a tawny owl and a sharp 'twit' answering call and the scents of the night garden are suddenly really noticeable.

There's the heavy sweet perfume of so many flowers, late bluebells, lilac, honeysuckle, wisteria and as June wears on roses pervade the air but to sniff the delights of many plants we need to rub the leaves to release their oils. Herbs like rosemary, thyme and sage evoke a succulent Sunday roast, Perovskia, Santolina and lavender are a reminder of a Greek island holiday. Mint has to be the freshest of all scents especially after rain, just like toothpaste, but for me the best of all the garden's many wonderful perfumes is yet to come. I'm looking forward to one of the highlights of high summer, walking into a warm greenhouse full of tomato plants, it's just scentsational!

Feeling right at home

From the number of people I see gazing into estate agents' windows, who like me are probably not in the market for another house move, I guess I'm not alone in being nosy about other people's homes. But I wonder how many are as interested as I am in the gardens surrounding them. It's rare to find the garden mentioned as a particular selling point and even rarer to see 'beautiful south facing garden' as I did recently. I think that the orientation of the garden is very important, but not long ago I saw a new client for the first time who had no idea which way her back garden faced and on showing her with a compass she was horrified to find it was north east, so surrounded by very tall buildings, only in mid summer would the sun shine directly into her garden.

For a sun worshipper or lavender lover this would have been a disaster but as it turned out that she didn't like to sit in the sun and her favourite plant was Alchemilla mollis then thankfully my visit ended well.

In most gardens, as the sun moves around it, we can move our spots to sit and benches strategically placed in a few locations not only give us different views but also the choice to be in light or shade.

Our plants unfortunately have to put up with what they've been given and all too often planting is a case of looking for a gap and sticking it in which at best only gives the poor plant a fifty/ fifty chance of survival. It's good for plant sales of course when we buy a replacement but it's entirely possible to avoid the guesswork and buy appropriate plants for the conditions we have and embrace the philosophy of putting the right plant in the right place.

The first rule of green fingers is to make an honest appraisal of our garden and consider which plant's tastes we might best accommodate, like lavender, thyme and sage from dry and sunny Provence, rhododenrons and camellias from the misty forests of Asia, grasses from the open prairies of America or should it be bluebells, wood anemones and wild garlic from under the opening canopy of a British woodland.

Although impulse buying plants is very tempting, for just a bit of consideration they really will repay our thoughtfulness and just as we do, they settle best, grow well and thrive where they feel most at home.

Therapy

I am writing this after one of those vanishingly rare Sundays when having enough time to spare to spend the best part of the day in the garden has coincided with the most glorious warm spring sunshine and it has been blissful.

It strikes me that if we all spent more time out in our gardens immersed in the rhythms of the seasons and the way that nature responds to it, watching and enjoying the plant and animal life that shares our gardens with us, then the world would be a much happier place. I've always thought that being close to nature is great therapy, good for body and soul and whatever ails them and it turns out that much research has been done on the subject and guess what, I was right all along and there are now specialist organisations set up to help us in our search for wellness.

Ecotherapy focusses on our connection with the natural environment and how through learning to care for it we can in turn learn to care for and nurture ourselves.

Thrive is a charity which helps people with physical disability or mental ill health through horticulture and gardening and Project Wild Thing aims to educate adults about the essential developmental needs of children though their relationship with nature.

These are just a few of the groups working to get us outside and back where we belong doing wonderful worthwhile work but how sad that there is a need for them when just outside our own back door there it is, the natural world which many of us have forgotten, or never learned, that we need to belong to.

Now in mid spring is the very best time to appreciate it, every day sees changes, plants are growing almost as we watch, new unfurling leaves are fresh and vivid green, the spring flowers are bursting open and all the animal life that depends on them is busy making the most of the increased light and warming temperature to feed up, find a mate and rear their young.

Now in the garden is the most positive and life affirming place we can possibly be. Why would anybody want to be anywhere else?

Spring has sprung!

I love March, it's one of my favourite months of the year, there's so much anticipation in the garden and as the level of light is rising life is responding to it. Bright and cheery daffodils shine out from borders, dainty little violets and primroses nestle into grassy banks and under trees where the first of the year's new fern leaves are preparing to unfurl are the glamorous flowers of hellebores.

There are so many exciting cultivars of Hellebore, cups of pristine white, frilly pale pink, deep and dusky shades of sultry purple, some are spotted and streaked and others the most delicate picotees, the edges of their petals washed with the lightest brush stroke of colour.

Where happily established they will promiscuously interbreed, their progeny adding yet more variety year after year.

One sunny days the first of the season's bees will be busily bumbling about foraging for food from early dandelions spangling the lawn underfoot and higher up from pussy willow catkins, gleaming silver against a blue sky and later in the month fat and golden with pollen. The first of the Prunus, the cherry family, are coming into flower, sloe are usually the first with plum following close behind. With flowers much smaller than the deservedly popular Japanese cherries sloe flowers form a haze of white so that the whole tree looks like a cloud, a lot like hawthorn from a distance but easy to differentiate, sloe flower on dark bare and leafless branches, hawthorn flower after the leaves have emerged.

In the pond the frogs are back, mild damp nights have them croaking noisily and the mornings bring shining blobs of black dotted jelly, usually in the shallows where the water will warm up more quickly in the sun and encourage algae to form, we're not so keen to see it but for growing tadpoles it will be a feast. As the birds turn up the volume the resident robin's beautiful melody warns others to keep away, this is his patch, while more sociable sparrows chatter in the hedge and the blackbirds sing out from their lookouts higher up in the trees.

This is a month to savour in the garden, despite the chill there's so much to enjoy, whatever the weather throws at us now spring has sprung, lets get out there and be part of the action.

Perfection

Yet another day of driving rain and blustery wind, but as just another in a long succession of them this winter I was determined today to actually get out in my own garden and trim off some of last years dead growth to see if there are any treasures lurking beneath. I'm not a tidy gardener and like to leave last year's foliage as shelter for tender new growth from hard frost but this is my first winter here and the temptation of revealing hidden treasure has been too much.
On a perfectly hideous day I have found perfection in the shape of exquisite hellebores and wonder that they retain such purity through all that the elements throw at them. But nature knows just what she's doing and leaves last year's tatty old leaves to protect the new blooms....until someone stupid comes along with secateurs....

'Getting into Shape'

How many new year resolutions revolve around coming to terms with the excesses of the festive season and deciding to get ourselves back into some sort of shape? Just as in the human form, most of us see a more shapely garden as a more attractive one and what better time to look over our own with a critical eye than now, when the flattering leaves and flowers are gone, the branches are laid bare and the stark bones of the garden are on full view. We often think that the shape of our garden is dictated by its boundary walls and fences but these can be so easily hidden or disguised with planting that in most gardens we can impose onto it the shape we would prefer. The flat spaces in the garden give us the shapes we see and the easiest and simplest one to manipulate is the lawn. For people who like formality and straight lines, a rectangular or square lawn kept neat and trim with a mowing edge of brick or stone might might appeal to their sense of order and reflected in the architecture of the surrounding buildings will look well groomed and perfectly at home in a village, town or city environment. For those who look out onto the curves of hillsides and the gentle shapes of nature, softer lines might be more appropriate and help place the garden in context. Think of a flower filled meadow with a mown path through, or a lawn sweeping lazily around a group of trees or deep border bending away out of sight to draw the eye to a distant view, a very inviting prospect even if the feet can only be drawn a few yards to a bench at the bottom of the garden. If the shapes we see in the garden flow together, onwards and outwards into the landscape, we can create a beautifully harmonious and restful space. Well that's the theory anyway. In reality getting the garden into shape can take quite a lot of hard work but it's all good exercise and a way that both we and the garden can enter into the new year in great shape!

Surprise surprise!

Most of us like a surprise – well a nice one anyway – and having a garden means that we don't have to wait for a birthday or Christmas for something unexpected to pop up out of the undergrowth. Having a new garden means that I'm finding surprises all over the place, like an enormous day glow orange Kniphofia erupting out of an otherwise unexciting border and flowers out of season like Hellebores in September and Hamamelis sprouting their spidery little blooms in October, way too early. But mostly the treats have been lovely flowers I've not spotted until they unfurl. At the moment delicate little white Cyclamen are peeking out from under hedges, amazingly resilient in dry shade, pretty Schyzostylis have opened up like shining stars and Nerines too, surprisingly shocking pink above strappy dull dark green foliage. It's one thing to be surprised by a new garden but unlikely as it sounds, surprises can be planned for too, even in the most familiar garden. Bulbs planted in the gloom of a grey November are easy to forget about until they emerge in April or May full of the joys of spring even brighter and cheerier than they looked on the packet. Most of us will plant a few daffodils but what about something a bit more exciting, alliums are always striking, tall slender stems with perfect globes made up of masses of tiny, usually purple flowers and camassias are lovely too, spires of clear blue flowers like a cross between a red hot poker and a bluebell. A surprise doesn't have to be visual, wild garlic might be a small and delicate wild woodlander but the smell will knock you sideways and if you dare it's useable in the kitchen in salads and stir frys too. I'll be using all of them as well as turning the heat up for next spring with Tulips, sultry burgundy 'Ronaldo', flaming crimson 'Couleur Cardinal' and to pick out the purple tones in both, the soft lavender and apricot 'Malaika' which is a subtler variation of another favourite 'Princes Irene' an electric blend of deep purple and vivid orange, a real stunner. These aren't colour combinations I'd choose to live with all year but a burst of flamboyance and pizzazz after a dull dreary winter will be a very welcome surprise!

Work in progress.....

Most of us have a favourite thing in our garden which we wouldn't want to be without. For some this might be a neatly mown lawn or a beautiful fine leaved Acer and for me, my garden is not complete without open water. So after sketching at least a dozen permutations of layouts for a man with a digger to follow, my garden has a new baby. A pond has been born – well dug actually. I don't expect it will start to look anything special until the surrounding vegetation gets into growth next spring but I know with complete faith and conviction that it will start to fulfil its main functions straight away. The sky will come down into my garden, its changing colours and moods echoed by reflections in the pond's surface and birds finding water on a dry hillside will stop to drink and bathe. I'll look forward all winter to a summer of damsel and dragon flies and I know from experience that my confidence isn't misplaced. All living things need water and having had the good fortune to be in at the birth of a lot of garden ponds, I've seen how quickly they've been visited or colonised with water fleas upward in size to newts and grass snakes and for one very lucky man, an otter. A pond comes alive when it's planted. Breathing life into it, oxygenating plants hide under the surface quietly doing just that and marginals like Iris at the edges of the water take out excess nutrients and provide vertical stems for emerging insect larvae. With their roots in the darkest depths and their big flat leaves sheltering and shading whatever is beneath, the shining star shaped flowers are the crowning glory of water lilies. From humble beginnings as a waterproofed hole in the ground to a completely self sustaining environment, a pond is a vital habitat and a resource for so many animals and birds. Mine is as big as I can reasonably fit in but just a small one is still very worthwhile so if you don't yet have a favourite part of your garden that you wouldn't want to be without a pond could be perfect.

ps Children love water and poking about in a pond is a wonderful way to learn about nature but be safe, if there are little ones about then perhaps wait until they're a bit older.

Summer's End

Summer's end comes every year with inevitable regularity, a part of the world's natural rhythm, and full as always in equal measure with sadness and exquisite beauty. In the garden the lowering light softly illuminates those gentle colours which the intense midsummer sun bleached out. Powder blue asters contrast with the first of the soft buttery golds and russets of the turning leaves and seed heads are forming at the tips of the swaying stems of ornamental grasses preparing to feed the winter's migrant birds. In the fruit garden – or in my case, in the hedge along the drive – the plums are turning a luscious smoky purple and the apples are reddening up to ripeness. This is the time when summer's shades of green slowly start to turn, one leaf at a time, a hint of yellow here and a flush of orange there until there's no avoiding it, summer is on its way out. We aren't the only ones to notice, swallows and house martins are lining up along the phone wires making ready to leave as the quantity of insect food declines and in the cooler mornings orb web spiders are suddenly noticeable on garden shrubs and hedgerows sitting patiently in the centre of their intricately woven traps. September is a time of change in the garden just as it is in the fields and woods around. Not yet quite autumn but no longer really summer, it's a time when pickings of fruit and vegetables are reaching their peak and it's time too for us to appreciate the garden for what it is, our own part of the glorious natural world, not really under our control at all but subject to the turning earth, changing levels of daylight and falling temperatures. Besides the asters, the other typical flowers of the season sedums are coming into flower too, our native stonecrop is one with yellow flowers but cultivated forms include some with deep purple leaves like Sedum 'Purple Emperor', most are pinkish or white and there are some varieties with names that make me smile like 'Stewed Rhubarb Mountain' and 'Red Cauli'. One of my favourites flowering now is Caryopteris, a scrubby little shrub we forget about until this time of year when it becomes worthy of a place in any sunny garden, it's vivid flowers a perfect reflection of a cloudless blue September sky.

Creating a buzz

As the summer progresses this new garden of mine continues to reveal more of its many secrets. Not all of them are welcome though, the borders are riddled with field bindweed and there's an ancient rusting concrete mixer securely cemented into the roots of an old tree, unfortunately they look equally difficult to remove! But the discoveries when they've come have mostly been exciting ones, two of the best have been a twayblade and a pyramidal orchid peeping out amongst the waving grasses of the unmown lawn and in their number and diversity the bumblebees have been a very welcome surprise. Droning heavily between the flowers, I've watched which ones they prefer to visit and it's the vetch, catmint and the tall purple flax which seem to be favourites. It's no coincidence that the colour and shape of their flowers are similar and being closely spaced along the stems there is less distance for the bees to fly for the amount of pollen gathered and nectar drunk. Such heavy bodies for such small wings to carry, they must need a lot of fuel to stay airborne. The low hum of bumblebees and their slow methodical passage between the flowers is the perfect companion to a warm, sunny summer's afternoon in the garden. We can do nothing to ensure warmth or sunshine but we can encourage the bees with a safe insecticide free environment and reliable supply of food for them during the months when they most need it, from March to September. Keeping flowers blooming through late summer is a trick Buddleja excel at especially if we dead head them regularly. There are people who don't like Buddleja because they're common and will grow anywhere, but I think that's a good thing. Easy to please and prolific flowerers they're brilliant insect plants and although some of them are real whoppers, if you think you just don't have the space to accommodate one, there are now some new compact varieties available. Buddleja 'Buzz Lavander', 'Buzz Magenta' and 'Buzz Ivory' are the colours to choose from and if you can't make up your mind which one you like best there's also 'Multicolor' which has flower spikes of purple, orange and pink all together at the same time. Now that I have a bigger garden and for the sake of the bees I might just go mad, splash out and have one of each!

Patience is a virtue.

If there's a valuable lesson we can all learn from our gardens, it's that the natural world will not be rushed, cajoled or bullied. Things happen in nature's own sweet time when the season and weather are right. No amount of wishing this year made any difference to the sluggish start to spring but then when it did arrive all that momentum and energy seemed to be condensed into a couple of weeks and then suddenly spring had been passed by and summer had arrived. And weren't we ready for it! Not just us either, the birds and bees too, to say nothing of the plants. The vegetable seeds I waited until April to sow sat in the cold frame and sulked for weeks, refusing point blank to germinate, so in desperation I sowed some more at the end of May and in two days they were away, their little shoots uncurling in the unaccustomed sunshine. Now that I have the luxury of a lovely cedar wood greenhouse the young plants have five star accommodation, relishing the warmth while the resident rabbits eye them up, noses pressed to the glass. My new garden and I are just getting to know one another and I have a lot to learn about its character which a mile and a steady climb uphill make so very different from my old one. Already I see evidence of a much more free draining soil in great swathes of red and white valerian, rows of perfect lavender and pinks in the formal borders and in the lawn lots more vetch and far fewer buttercups than my heavy damp clay had me used to. Eager as I am to get stuck in, clear the vegetable patch, dig a pond and move plants around, I know that in the long term for the sake of my back and our budding relationship I should hold back, bide my time and allow my garden to reveal itself to me over the seasons. It won't be easy but after all patience is a virtue so I'll do my best to try and cultivate that too.

New house - new garden

Well I hardly dare put pen to paper - or finger to keyboard - for the risk of putting the mockers on a not yet secure purchase, but after six months in the desperately bleak wilderness of renting we've found a new house and most importantly a new garden. Hooray! The house is actually a bungalow, not chosen I hasten to add because of advancing years and decrepitude, but because it just felt right. It's been renovated with care and attention to detail, it has a lovely view and that rarity, a garden with a soul. Because it's not been tended for a couple of years, there's been no restraining hand preventing self seeding of promiscuous little plants like hellebores and granny's bonnets which have romped around and made themselves at home all over the place. Spreading into patches which have forgotten whether they're meant to be border or lawn these ornamental opportunists and 'weeds' like fox and cubs and self heal have inspired me to hope that there might be a chance of a reasonable little meadow instead of a lawn and the current owners are so obliging that they've agreed to abandon having the man with the mower come in and actual let the grass grow for me to better see what might be there. What nice people! For now there are no photos but if all goes according to plan and the move goes ahead (my fingers and toes are crossed so that should help) within a month or so there will be. Any moment I can steal from working hours will be spent examining the minutiae of every seedling or beginning the clearing of a large and very brambly vegetable patch. Whatever it is I might be doing in my new garden one's thing's for sure - it will be sheer bliss!

April Showers

'Though April showers may come your way, they bring the flowers that bloom in May …..' Well that's the theory anyway, but as our weather patterns respond to changing climatic conditions and flooding or draught becomes an all too regular occurrance for some parts of the country, seasonal certainties seem to be a thing of the past, lessons from history rather than geography. The 'rain cycle' is another one towns and cities have started to rethink. Once it was simple, rain fell onto the earth to be soaked up by forests or slowly infiltrate its way through the ground into streams and rivers to the sea to be returned by evaporation to the clouds, to fall once again as rain and snow. Now so much land is built over with impermeable roads, driveways, and the roofs of so many buildings and channelled from there directly into storm drains, that in heavy rain a deluge rushes directly into and overwhelming our rivers. As flood plains throughout the county were built on pushing the problem further down stream, more of us have felt the devastating effects. If all this sounds depressingly familiar don't despair, there's no need to wait for officialdom to catch on, it is possible for us to use our homes and gardens to alleviate part of the problem ourselves. The roof is a good place to start, a flat or gently sloping one may be perfect for a green roof, planted with Sedums or similar draught tolerant species in a suitable substrate it will absorb some of the rain falling onto it and allow the rest to leave more slowly. By adding a diverter to the downpipe or an ornamental 'rain chain', excess water can be stored in a butt or underground reservoir for use when the draught arrives, or my favourite, piped directly into a pond and from there to a garden soak away, ditch or swale. Gravel, a permeable and relatively inexpensive surfacing also allows the water to drain away more naturally and of course any type of planting in the garden will take up some of the rain falling onto it. Best of all I think are trees, the earth's natural covering. Stabilizing banks and preventing water run off, giving us shade and shelter, providing homes for wildlife and in April giving us some of the most spectacular flowers of the year.

Choices

March is not a good month for a garden designer to be without her own garden. Temporarily renting someone else's home and gardenless, I'm an outsider, excluded from all this month's pent up momentum of plant and animal life. Just waiting for the weather to warm up a bit and the days to lengthen and with a seasonal release of energy they'll all be off as if at the bang of the starter's gun. Green shoots bursting through the soil racing upwards towards the light and birds darting through the trees displaying to potential partners, desperate to start nesting. Bumble bees intent on a early start to the year droning heavily between the crocus flowers and my favourite harbingers of spring, the frogs, croaking all night and then frenziedly at it all day. The natural activity in my garden was as important to me and is now just as much missed as the planned seasonal events like seed sowing and planting first early potatoes. It's not been a long time in years but there's been a huge cultural change from my dad's time as a gardener. He still followed the Victorian empire's attitude to nature of conquer and subdue, kindness itself to people he was a lovely man, but when it came to the garden he ruled with an iron fist. Any seedling daring to pop up out of its designated row would be ruthlessly beheaded by the hoe, insects were all considered to be pests and sprayed rigorously and birds, all thought to be 'after the raspberries', were very unwelcome. Starlings were his pet hate because there were 'just too many of them'. He wasn't alone of course, that was just how things were in his day but in mine we are learning from those terrible mistakes. Starling numbers are now down sixty six percent from my dad's 'too many' of the nineteen eighties and last year's RSPB garden birdwatch recorded them in fewer than half our gardens and I don't think it's hard to work out one reason why. Their staple food is leather jackets and many gardeners still thoughtlessly spray their lawns to kill them. Herbicides, pesticides and insecticides are all very readily available in every garden centre but we don't have to buy them. While the government still dithers over whether or not to ban nicotinoid insecticides we can all make our own personal choices and while I don't have a garden of my own I would love to think that there are other people out there gardening for wildlife. I do hope so.

New Year - New Garden

Every January I gaze adoringly at seed catalogues and like a child in a sweet shop, seduced by the colour and variety of the photographs, I always order far too many packets of seeds. If it’s not quite a case of ‘eyes bigger than my belly’, I know I definitely have ideas above my station as in the depths of a bare and leafless winter I seem to conveniently forget just how full my garden already is and imagine I have much more space for new things than I really do. This year though things will be quite different, I have to restrain myself and not give in to temptation, fingers crossed this house is sold and very soon we’ll be moving on and for a while, not long I hope, I will have no garden of my own at all. But it’s a means to an end and when it does come the next garden I am determined will be bigger and offer much more scope for growing the things I don’t have the space for here. More vegetables and fruit, more trees and dare I even hope for it, a meadow or at least a place to create a very small one. On a shelf of a bookcase in my office is my most treasured possession, a box of seeds gathered in hope and optimism over this last year of plants I shall be sad to leave behind. Marsh mallow, white campion, Primula florindae, wild carrot, meadowsweet, an unnamed buttercup relative which came from Great Dixter and many more. All plants of low lying damp ground and not knowing where the next garden will be I don’t know if these will be the types of plants which will flourish there. I’ll be sad to be without these old friends but if the new garden comes with different growing conditions it will also bring new and exciting opportunities. Wherever it is it will tell me itself what it wants to grow, not in so many words but with its aspect, position and soil and it might be the chance, as with all home moves, to make new friends, plant as well as human. Just like us, plants have their own preferences for where they live and we can learn the basics from books but it’s only when we put thought into choosing the right plants for the places we have, watching them grow and understanding their needs that we can develop a lasting relationship with them. Like all relationships there’s give and take and as all gardeners know, the ones we have with our own piece of the earth might sometimes mean cold hands and feet, nettle stings and thorn scratches, but on a lovely summers day with a gentle breeze, the scent of the flowers and the song of the birds there really is no other place like it.

Obsessed or what!

We’ve had a cousin staying with us recently. Not one of those you feel obliged to invite and hope they won’t accept, but a welcome guest, good company and an excuse for putting work on the back burner for a few days and having a bit of time out. We have a lot in common including only ever wearing comfy shoes, watching Merlin on TV and a love of the chained library in Hereford Cathedral (well worth a visit) and have both had a career in horticulture, but hers has been in practical down and dirty hands on gardening, whereas mine has been in clean finger nailed, warm and cosy in an office, design. A conversation we’ve had where I described my living room as being decorated in ‘metal’ colours left her with the sort of expression on her face that told me, albeit kindly, that I’m quite deranged. I know that most normal people don’t obsess about colour combinations like designers do but then we aren’t really that normal. I once painted an arbour to tone with the blue tits which were the most common avian visitors to the feeder hanging from it, even the colour of the pencil I pick up in the morning is dictated by the colour of the clothes I happen to be wearing on the day and this time of year things go from bad to worse with the arrival of Christmas cards. I don’t think everybody can be this picky about their positioning around the house but I have to have them arranged in rooms where their colours tone best with the décor and each year I live in hope that the latest fashion in cards will favour ice bound snowdrops or polar bears – the kitchen is mainly white, or three richly dressed kings – to go with the gold in the ‘metal’ living room. Robins are always popular with my relatives and along with the compulsory jolly Santas cause a bit of on issue for me because I have very little red anywhere in the house. You can see that my cousin does have a point but to me this behaviour isn’t odd, it’s all to do with an appreciation of my surroundings and colour is of course only one aspect of it, which makes placing Christmas cards even more complex when you think as well about their shapes and proportions. These must be considered by putting the long thin ones on furniture of similar proportions and square ones with decorations like candles of the same shape. I know I’m more than a bit odd but it does make for an interesting life. To look at the things I live with and analyse how they relate to their surroundings uses the same skills I employ to see the potential in every garden I design so to me it’s essential. It can be very time consuming though, especially at Christmas, thinking of which it's about time I bought some cards....now what colour is my cousin's living room...

A wall is a wall....isn't it?

I've been worrying of late that my designs might be getting a bit 'samey'. You see the thing is that prospective clients see photos on my website and have to like them before they give me a call, if they like the photos of other designers' gardens better then of course they will ring them instead. So I try to show a variety of garden styles, I hope I'm versatile enough to design to suit any client's tastes and this week I have returned to see two gardens I've designed over the past couple of years and I'm very relieved to see that they are not at all samey ... ... except that they both use walls ... you see they are designed for their owners who are very different people with very different tastes...

Snails!

I’ve never been one to dwell on failure. Ever the optimist I’ve continued to sow French beans since June in the hope that we’d get a dry spell and therefore fewer molluscs to munch on their tender young shoots. Although I’ve managed to reduce slug numbers in my garden using Nemaslug, the snails have just laughed in my face at copper tape and beer traps, as defeated, the French beans have gone the way of the runner beans, spinach, rocket and courgettes, all reduced to leafless stalks. Apart from carrots which the snails don’t seem to fancy much, the only veggies growing in my garden are the ones hermetically sealed inside a cold frame and I don’t think there will be much of a harvest there as everything is fighting for space with the tomatoes whose home it was originally meant to be. Anything I get from it to eat however is an improvement on the quince, plum and damson trees which all scored a big fat zero for fruit due I’m sure to the cold wet weather and lack of pollinators when they were flowering. But am I down hearted ? No of course not, I can’t do anything about the weather and I won’t poison the snails with pellets, if they’re eaten by a bird then that will be poisoned in turn, so I just collect them and put them out in the open for any local thrushes which might have escaped such a deadly fate and in doing so I’ve discovered that not all snails are the villains I previously thought them to be. The common garden snails Helix aspersa, are the ones which I find by the dozen enjoying their vegetable dinner during my torch lit bed time patrols, but I never see any of the smaller banded snails then, Cepaea nemoralis and Cepaea hortensis. I often spot these hiding under mint leaves or clinging to the stems of grasses during the day and in taking more of an interest and looking at them more closely I’ve found them to be really quite beautiful. No two are the same and even in my small garden there is a wide variety in their markings. Some are very strongly striped with thick bands of dark brown, some with finer stripes and some so light in colour that they’re almost translucent. Looking for information about them online, I’ve found that the variations in stripes and colours are due to responses to location, climate and the big reduction in the numbers of predators, namely thrushes (back to the reason I don’t use slug pellets). In short this is evolution taking place in my garden and now I know they’re not responsible for devastating my beans I’m very happy to leave these little snails alone and allow them to evolve at their own very steady pace.

For more information about banded snails go to www.evolutionmegalab.org