A new-to-us low-growing rose (Rosa ‘Fairy Queen’) is doing what we hoped alongside some lavender in a hot spot. Full sun, south facing, temperatures in the 30s for a few days, and it’s really happy. (Gave it a feed and a water and it has a decent depth of free-draining, calcareous soil.) Some flowers have faded to a paler pink.
Second year in, and these Acanthus mollis var. ‘Rue Leden’ from Sarah Raven are earning their keep in a difficult spot, which gets no direct sun. Some Geranium phaeum var. ‘Raven’ were great earlier in the year too (purple flowers perhaps not as stand-out as the white Acanthus) but I also need a little something else here, as Dicentra formosa var. ‘Bacchanal’ is unimpressed with this situation. It maybe didn’t like the long, cold May we had here in Oxfordshire.
I’m experiencing some success growing salad leaves in pots in the greenhouse. Land cress and winter purslane sown in August are providing us with regular tasty leaves. Sowings in September are coming along more slowly, but they are growing. I’ll try some more sowings on a monthly basis and see how they go.
I have some spinach started, to grow as much as it can before it is too cold for it, and then to be consumed as a cut-and-come-again crop in early spring next year.
Some herbs have been moved in and more will be, to keep a few fresh leaves available through the winter. The French tarragon pot has a meal’s worth of new growth at the moment (although it will not like it once it’s really cold); parsley is happy at the moment. Chives and mint can also apparently be kept going.
So I’m hopeful that the greenhouse will be able to provide a few fresh leaves, and the pleasure of harvesting them, throughout the winter.
I’ve just updated the Limestone Garden website with some useful new info on keeping Acanthus spinosus looking good in late summer and early autumn.
This vigorous plant grows with enthusiasm, looking happy, healthy and lush even while other plants wilt as the sunny summer days fail to provide any rain. By late August the tall flower spikes fall to the ground, and the lower layers of those lush leaves are looking distinctly yellowed. What is more, in our garden I can’t easily cut the grass without shredding them messily, so they have to be brought under control.
Therefore, the secateurs come out, all prostrate flowers spikes are removed at their base and a good lot of the bottom-most layers of straggly leaves are removed. They head for the compost, while the resident frog settles in again under the remaining leaves.
(Those white flowers next to the Acanthus are a white gaura (Gaura lindheimeri), which I grew from seed in 2014 from RHS seeds 14/57.)
West Dean is an art college in West Sussex in the south of England. The garden is absolutely an “exemplary garden” with a spirit of place and degree of excellence in gardening that left me wryly humbled, inspired and quite simply very, very impressed when I visited in May 2019. I had previously seen it celebrated for the Harold Peto-designed pergola and a rigorous approach to formative pruning. The authors of this extensively illustrated book were gardeners at West Dean from 1991 when they started renovating the place after storm damage had been cleared, until recently. The book is about how the garden was planned and run when the authors were gardeners there.
It is typical of the book that there is a much more precise description that is usually provided of the prevailing weather, light and soil conditions. Of relevance to Limestone Garden is the “alkaline soil” and the way that it is “exceptionally free-draining”, “a bonus in the winter…very prone to drought”. Even if you cannot get to West Dean, a look at the pictures in this book will reassure you that it is possible to have a wonderful garden on free-draining calcareous soil.
I think it cannot be known who planned the landscape around the house as it is not mentioned although it is described as a “designed landscape”. The first substantive chapter of the book broadly describes the planning process when the authors moved to West Dean, with a clear intention of providing helpful advice to others who might wish to plan a garden. Elements of their design are discussed and illustrated in subsequent chapters – framing, movement (an entire, beautifully illustrated and interesting chapter on their paths!), structures (including that Harold Peto pergola) and water. A chapter on soil again gives illustration of good practice including plenty of pictures of compost and manure! Chapters then include ‘under glass’, lawns, trees, shrubs, perennials and bulbs, the fruit garden and the productive garden; these latter two I found particularly interesting for their discussion of formative pruning of fruit trees (a striking feature of the gardens) and a note that as West Dean is an art college, the ‘productive’ garden is in fact managed to be beautiful rather than to maximise production.
I’m not sure how to describe the gardens without either using too many superlatives or failing to do them justice. The book explains some of the ‘secrets’ of their success, for instance that there was a deliberate consistency of materials (especially flint) in the garden and buildings, and I noticed that drifts of plants are also a striking and effective feature. All plants seem really healthy and properly cared for and everything is neat. Attention is paid to form and colour. There are a variety of shade and sunny areas and there is water. (At least, there was water while we were there. The book describes how the chalk stream (the River Lavant) dries up in the summer but the silt is cleared away to reveal the rather charming flint lining of the channel.) There are wild flower areas in the lawns. It really is a very good, well-managed garden, amply illustrated.
This book with its evidence of professionalism in the recent planning and running of a historic garden gives a strong insight into at least some of the basis for the striking cohesiveness and on-going excellence of the gardens at West Dean. It is not a how-to-do-it book but it provides inspiration (and even a reference for all that formative pruning).
Buckland, Jim & Wain, Sarah (2018) At West Dean. The creation of an exemplary garden. London: White Lion ISBN 978-0-7112-3892-3 RRP UK£40, US$60, CAN$78
https://www.westdean.org.uk/gardens
We have been here almost 10 years and started pretty much with a blank canvass of 2 lawns, and when we started digging it was clear the soil was very poor, and worse! We are on good old Oxford clay but it is also quite stony.
Once the 2 gardens were set out, one the kitchen garden and the other lawn/shrubbery/flower garden, we had one big load of manure to spread about and dig in. As we have chickens, over the years they have contributed considerably to improving the soil, but every year we still add bag fulls of manure in some form or another so we can grow pretty much anything. Acid lovers, like acers, I grow in pots. Hydrangeas are happy in the ground, but of course will only be pink, not blue because of the soil here.
However, this year all this added soil improver had not been enough to stop our ground turning into concrete with cracks that you could get your hand down. Everything started off very promising but once we got towards the end of July the garden really started to shut down. No amount of watering could really keep up against the heat so we concentrated on keeping the pots, greenhouse and some of the veg watered. We have a number of water butts around the garden which lasted about 2 weeks and we are on a water meter so it became very restricting the amount of tap water we ran off.
Lavender, Phlomis, Sisyrinchium, perennial geraniums, Centaurea, Achillea, Alchemilla mollis, Eryngium, Cistus, Echinops, all tolerated the heat but didn’t flower for very long. Hollyhocks stopped flowering half way up their stems, and after the first flush of roses, they stopped flowering completely. Crocosmia leaves dried up and there are very few flower heads. Euphorbia ‘Fireglow’ died off completely, even though I was watering it. Centranthus, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the heat and carried on regardless, as did Aquilegia.
The well established shrubs survived ok. Some hydrangeas wilted a bit so I ran the hose on them and they rallied. Unfortunately our Magnolia stellata gave up, which I am very sad about.
Interestingly, now we have had some rain and lower temperatures, one of our roses is a mass of buds so that is pleasing and some of the ground cover plants are starting to recover.
The fig tree has gone bonkers and produced masses of figs. Now all we need is the sunshine to ripen them!!!!!!
from Jennie Moss, August 2018
I have a few of the non-invasive species of Cotoneaster and last week I gave one of them a good pruning to clear some ground. The cuttings sat around for a while in the heat (it’s been hot all summer) and then got rained on a couple of days ago. Then I decided to shred them. Mmmm, what a delicious and really quite strong smell of almonds from those bruised and shredded stems and leaves…yum…hang on…my Agatha Christie knowledge tells me that could be cyanide…
A quick search later reveals that Cotoneaster contain cyanogenic glycosides (see e.g. The Poison Diaries). That means chemicals in the plant that can produce cyanide. Usually these are at low concentrations and toxic effects only occur if large amounts are eaten (such as by an unfortunate llama reported in a veterinary journal (Grüss & Priymenko, 2009)). Of the leaves, bark or fruit of some species, the leaves have been found to have the greatest concentration (Tidwell et al., 1970). However after all that sun we’ve had, my herbs are very tasty at the moment – maybe the Cotoneaster has more cyanogenic glycosides than usual, that have started converting to cyanide in the damp of their waste heap? I stopped sniffing and stopped shredding and washed my hands, but the compost heap where I’d put some shredded material might take a little while to recover.
References
Grüss, Aurelie & Priymenko, Nathalie (2009) Cotoneaster sp. poisoning in a llama (Lama glama) Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation 21, 247-249. Retrieved from SagePub.com on 17Aug2018
Robert H. Tidwell, Beal, J., Dhanooprasad G. Patel, Tye, A., & Patil, P. (1970). A Study of the Cyanogenetic Content and Toxicity of the Fruit of Selected Species of Cotoneaster. Economic Botany 24(1), 47-50. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4253108 on 17Aug2018
This book is about Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson gardening at Sissinghurst, with numerous quotes from Vita’s writing (for the Observer newspaper in the 1940s and ’50s) set in context by Sarah Raven’s text and knowledge of the garden in the present day. Sissinghurst has I believe the original ‘white garden’ which was Vita Sackville-West’s design, and has been attracting visitors since it was first opened to the public in the late 1930s. It is now in the care of the National Trust. Sarah Raven is well-known as a gardening TV presenter, writer and nursery-owner (the blurb also mentions teacher): she has a family connection to Sissinghurst through her husband, and has lived there and evidently knows it well. Sissinghurst is not on alkaline soil but there are quotations in which Vita Sackville-West mentioned that a particular plant would tolerate lime. I enjoyed this book both to read through and as a resource for gardening ideas. A longer review is available on my ‘Limestone Garden‘ website.
Usually Hypericum ‘Hidcote’ would have vivid yellow flowers through July and August. It’s a garden stalwart, widely sold and grown. But we’re getting day after day in the high 20s and low 30s centigrade, with no rain, and the garden is beginning to suffer. The grass is crispy brown (ok, not so unusual) and so are the Hypericum flowers. This isn’t something that has finished flowering: it seems to have been dried up and ‘preserved’ in full bloom. The shrub is in semi-shade.
I have made a new website which has the start of lots of info about books and plants and gardening on limestone. It’d be lovely if you’d like to visit! Even better if you tell me about your favourate gardening books, or plants!
Limestone Garden 