Tag Archives: Clematis

Finally

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The Priory is a grand, old Dame and I love her dearly.  But will she be rushed?  She will not; she’ll put on a show in her own good time – thank you very much.  Despite my whines that everybody else’s gardening blog was awash with pretty flower pictures, she blithely ignored me and pulled on yet another layer of green .  And then another layer (after all it gets cold down in this valley), with nary a flower in sight.

It is only in the past couple of weeks, that she has, at long last, languidly fluttered her verdant petticoats and given us a glimpse of her summer charms.

And so now (suddenly) there are flowers at the Priory (phew); here are some of them.

The south wall of the house has a dependable honeysuckle – covered in blooms and delicious to sniff.  And sniff again.

It requires little attention; just a light clip after flowering.  The scent is best experienced very early in the morning (or in the evening) – so if you get the chance, fill your lungs.

The one surviving tree peony flowered a week or so ago.  Two out of the three original little trees died last year.  They were old and had been strimmed (yep, true) in their poor blighted lives, so I’m quite surprised that they survived as long as they did.  This one has a big blousy flower which is always welcome.  But they last such a very short time (three or four days) that I shan’t be so very sad if this one gives up the ghost too.

I prefer the longer flowering herbaceous peonies …

… of which there are several; including this one up against the house (pre-dates my time so no name, I’m afraid).

Erysimum ‘Bowles Mauve’ is a fine stalwart, flowering all summer long though not always surviving the winter.  Luckily, cuttings take easily.  Isn’t the lichen covered wall lovely?  Least I think so.

I’ve planted fourteen clematis around the gardens, including …

… C. ‘Westerplatte’ and this beauty …

… Clematis koreana ‘Blue Eclipse.’   Perfect, delicate flowers that stutter on through to July after its first flush of flower in April/May (certainly the latter this year).

Because there was already a large bank of rhododendrons, I swallowed a bitter, lifelong aversion to the things and planted four more of them.  I’ve become a bit of a convert (as I have with so many plants which I used to dislike) and particularly wanted (and hunted down) the above; R. ‘Sappho.’

I’ve added many other shrubs to the gardens including the marvellous …

… Viburnum plicatum ‘Mariesii.’  Three years ago, I put in a small plant on the west lawn by the pond.  It has tripled in size and eventually, its many tiered form will be four metres across and ten feet high (bit of a metric and imperial mix there for you – I like to be even-handed).  Can’t wait – at maturity they are a stunning spectacle.

Alliums and nepeta dominate the long borders.  Gosh, isn’t it blue?  Though that will change as the season progresses.  Really it will.

And what I call the Eve bed (it has a standard Viburnum tinus ‘Eve Price’ centre) is shaping up nicely; what with its box edging and …

… heuchera in fill; the latter hasn’t completely filled the space yet.  (A young Kerria japonica is to the left).  The box hedge is new-ish and hasn’t yet been tightly clipped.

The rock border is plumping up nicely with Viburnum opulus ‘Roseum’ in flower (top left) and …

… aquilegias and silene all a-jumble.  Foxgloves will join the mix soon.

At the far end of the rock border are hostas …

… which I have salvaged from other parts of the garden and …

… planted here, where the soil is moist all summer (and boggy in winter).  They seem content.

Now that we’ve drifted away from flowers to those green petticoats, I have to mention the beech hedge.  The Priory is most certainly female but the beech is not.  He’s a great big …

lumbering, shaggy beast marching along the southern and western garden perimeter.  Having tugged on his summer overcoat …

… he does dominate the garden.  For which reason, I am so very grateful to the unknown person/persons who had the foresight to plant him.

In 2010, I planted a fifty foot double line of beech saplings (thirty odd plants) in front of the gate on the west lawn.  I’ve lost two of them so far but thankfully have a small stock of replacements to hand.  In time, they will shield the house from prying eyes out on the public footpath.

Out on the meadow, the 200 Camassia quamash which I planted in autumn 2010 have flowered.  Last year there were perhaps a dozen blooms but this year they have begun to make more of an impact in various small patches.

But there is always something in the garden to bring you back to earth with an uncomfortable bump.

One of a pair of standard hollies I planted by the house (with another V. roseum in the background).  One is hale and hearty and this one?  Well, it’s not.  Gardening, eh?  So very fulfilling and then the Gardening Gods turn around and slap you across the face.  Just to remind you who’s boss.

oooOOOooo

It is only too easy to frame and crop photographs to present the image one wishes to portray.  To counter that, I thought you might like to view a shortish video clip of part of the Priory gardens.  It hopefully will give you a better ‘feel’ for the place.  You might want to turn off the sound – I do drone on a bit, well a lot actually:

I’d like to hear what you think.  Not about the shakiness of the camera or the lamentable (lack of) script but whether the gardens are how you imagined them; especially those of you who may have read about the Priory for a while.  Is it how you imagined?  Bigger, smaller?  (Not that the clip shows all the grounds, by any means).  I make no secret of how I feel about the place but, as it gets so very few visitors, it would be interesting to get your views.

A Walk About The Priory

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All that heat and all that rain has allowed the grass to romp away.  It has been growing so quickly that ideally I should’ve been mowing it twice a week.
Some rain
But that simply isn’t possible given my time constraints (and indeed my energy constraints).  It does mean though that when I do mow it takes me far longer than usual.  There are more clippings to collect and empty
into the trailer and then more trips all the way out to the compost bins.  I’ve been so busy trying to keep on top of the mowing, I’ve barely had time to just stop and breathe and look about me.  Little time to walk about the gardens with my camera glued to my eye (not literally).  But over the past couple of weeks, I have managed to collect a few shots.

Badly placed beneath (and locked in a life or death struggle with) a winter flowering jasmine is this Rose Rosa Mundi.  It’s a very old variety (sixteenth century) with a delicious scent.  The fact that it doesn’t need spraying (which I never do anyway) is also hugely in its favour.

The Priory has an old rose tunnel and growing up it are half a dozen or so

of this very pretty and very nice smelling climbing rose/rambler.  Margaret, the farmer, kindly took a cutting of it to the Wych Cross nursery (a fantastic rose specialist in the Ashdown Forest).  But the jury is still out as to which variety it is.  If anyone knows its name, I’d be grateful. It only flowers once but it’s a great show.  And again no need to spray, ie it doesn’t suffer from rust or blackspot.

Along the tunnel, I’ve planted several clematis to augment the rose.  Here is Clematis ‘Wisley’.

and here, above a froth of Alchemila mollis flowers, is Clematis ‘Warszawska Nike’.

Lots going on in the kidney beds (Margaret’s fields beyond).

A day lily that survived the-years-of-neglect (variety unknown),

along with another survivor – persicaria,

with a yellow achillea behind

merging in with a real favourite of mine, Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’

and this Campanula lactiflora which is settling in well, in this its second season.  I think it is ‘Pritchard’s Variety’.

Verbena bonariensis never fails to do what is asked of it.  As long as you ask it to flower, that is.

Elsewhere, I’m really pleased that my Ligularia przewalskii has flowered for the first time, with arum lilies (Zantedeschia aethiopica) behind.

All these weeks later, the rose pictured in








Priory Picture Post # 1 is still flowering, with yellow Echinacea paradoxa flowering in the background.

Echinacea paradoxa

I grew these from seed last year – worth the wait.

This lily was sold to me as a white one.  So I was very disappointed when it turned out to be not very white at all.  But do you know what?  As I’ve watched it slowly throw up shoots, grow leaves, watched its flower buds swell and develop and then finally and triumphantly burst open in an orgy of orangeness … I still don’t like it.  Nah.  Not my cup of tea at all.  I’ll let it finish its orange business but then it’s off to the great lily pot in the sky with it.  Via the compost heap.
This lily did turn out true.  I grow it in a pot with tulips (shown in ‘Blooming Priory’).  Behind on the wall of the house is the only clematis growing in the garden when I started here.  Looks like Clematis jackmanii.
Planted along the edge of this path is Erigeon karvinskianus, Mexican fleabane.  It only went in last summer but should quickly self seed into more cracks in the paving.  I’ve already dug up some self-sown seedlings and put them elsewhere in the garden.  Behind the fleabane is bergenia (yawn – but looks a lot better if you cut off all the leaves in Spring.  This shows off the flowers better and rids you of all those horrible brown, tatty leaves) and behind that is yellow loosestrife (Lysimachia vulgaris).
Here is an idea I shamelessly and wantonly stole from a good friend of mine.  A frame of box hedging surrounds a ground cover of heuchera.  In the centre he had planted an olive, whereas I’ve put in a standard Viburnum tinus ‘Eve Price.’   Behind, planted in a small raised brick bed is campanula.  Fairly gaudy but sort of works; perhaps more so without the heuchera flowers.
A close up of the heuchera leaf (for Sara)

The heuchera was actually planted more for its intricate veined leaves than for its flower colour.

Agapanthus
Lots still happening in the garden then, but sometimes I think maybe there’s just too much happening. Too much going on.  Part of me (a small part admittedly) yearns for that first sharp frost and an end to mowing and staking and weeding and deadheading.  And instead, a start to bonfires, the raking up of leaves, the spreading of mulch and good honest digging, the chopping of logs, toasted crumpets, woolly hats and afternoon black and white films (‘Brief Encounter’ perhaps, or ‘Random Harvest’ again).  I know that’s wishing away Summer but plants often seem just a little too needy.  A little too demanding.  Or is that just me being a grumpy old curmudgeon?

"I’m So Excited ….

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and I just can’t hide it,
I’m about to lose control 
and I think I like it”

So now I know what the Pointer Sisters were so excited about.  Like me, they’d obviously realised that their Crambe cordifolia was about to flower for the first time.  I planted mine out last year, hoping against hope that it would flower then.  But it just sat there for weeks and weeks on end like a great, big sulky cabbage.  But this year, this year – oh yes.  Oh yes.  This year it’s going to do it.   I’m so excited.
Thanks to my good friend Andrew for introducing me to this spectacular plant a few years back.  We were walking through his garden of loveliness and I was brought to a halt by an enormous froth of flower.  In my face.  Imagine. Spellbinding and a serious must-have – if you’ve got the room.

There’s so much flowering at the Priory at the moment that I can’t possibly photograph it all (and do any work).

Geranium phaeum growing at the foot of the BIG wisteria
Though I have tried to capture a little of what’s happening.
Allium globemaster

In the long border, the alliums have taken over show-off duties from the tulips

and over in the kidney beds the Oriental poppies are putting on their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-show.  There are two there that survived the-years-of-neglect though I have twelve young Papaver bracteatum that I have grown from seed.  Should be able to plant these out soon and they’ll flower next year.

In the past week or so, I’ve planted a further three clematis taking the number in the garden up to about fifteen.  Here is Clematis westerplatte planted last year.

I’ve been simplifying some of the beds and moving plants around. Verbena bonariensis, for example has now been removed completely from one bed up against the house and replanted  into a new bed to augment some grasses.  Verbena bonariensis is a great plant but in a frantic effort to fill up empty spaces when I first started work at the priory,  I stuffed it pretty much everywhere.  And you can have too much of a good thing.  I had loads of extra plants from my own garden as it self seeds generously.  Sarah Raven, in her seed catalogue, states that it “gently self seeds”.  I think that that is rather (gently) understating its quiet determination to take over the world.

The flower meadow is beginning to look a little more like a meadow and a little less like a lawn that some good-for-nothing-gardener (ahem) can’t be bothered to mow properly.

I mow the paths through the longer meadow grass and flowers once a week using my beloved Hayter mower.  I do all the lawns with the Hayter.  It cuts all  stoically and without a fuss; level ground, rough ground and gives a great stripey effect to boot.  I can spend quite a lot of time quietly gazing at my Hayter.  Tapping a finger against my leg. Quite a long time indeed.

 

Anyhow, let’s move on.  Hot on the heels of the blackthorn blossom comes the hawthorn blossom or Mayflower; it’s just about in full spate.
The already established hornbeam to the left of the oak, centre
There are ten fruit trees planted in the meadow.  I put them in the year before last but they’re still pretty small.  There are four apple, two plum, two pear, one cherry and a quince.  And I do wish they’d get a move on.  Along with an already planted hornbeam they form a large ‘S’ along the length of the meadow.  The only time, to my knowledge, that deer got into the gardens they wreaked havoc amongst these young trees.  One, an Opal plum, was completely destroyed and had to be replaced and three others, the quince, the cherry and a Victoria plum, were all badly damaged.  The morning that I arrived at work and saw the devastation of  shredded branches, flayed stems and strips of bark flapping in the breeze was the only time in my life that my sympathy lay with the hunter rather than for Bambi or his Mum.  The garden is by no means deer proof but we now have post-and-rail fencing along the top of the steep river bank (see above, left) and I think the extra height has deterred them from returning via that route – at least.  Though they could easily enter in other parts of the garden.
March 2011
In an effort to deter them, I wire protected each of the young fruit trees for eighteen months or more.  But without sign of the deer returning and tiring of the ugliness of my wire tree coops, they’ve now been removed.
Occasionally, as I skip about the garden, something catches my eye that hasn’t got a big blousy flower or heady scent.  Just a simple beauty that stops me in my tracks.  I think the ash is a really underrated tree.  Handsome grey bark, handsome cut leaves and a tall, stately handsomeness.  So quite handsome then, really.
The reed mace is seeding freely and it’s latent young carried off by the wind. I fear I’m going to be clearing a lot of reed mace (and the spearwort I introduced) later in the year.
The old oak on the east pond has donned his fustian summer coat.  The swellings or burrs on the trunk are the result of repeated attempts by the tree to grow side branches.  These side branches die but the tree keeps on trying and over time the trunk swells.  Someone told me that cattle rubbing against the side of trees can cause the effect though it’d have to have been a flipping great beast to have caused the ones above.
Viburnum roseum over on the west lawn is putting on its way over the top spring display.  Very cheery though and well appreciated.
About the base of this old bird bath, I’ve planted a small box hedge and creeping thyme in the planting spaces in the paving.  Hoping that this year I’ll be able to give the box a little shape and form when I come to trim it.  It got ferociously attacked by rabbits when it first went in.  The garden is now rabbit free and rabbit proof so it’s coming along nicely.
I used to staunchly dislike rhododendron but have softened my stance on them and now welcome their great show at this time of year.  And that show is all the better this year as, unusually, it coincides with the hawthorn as a backdrop.

I couldn’t have dreamed up such a combination and I wonder whether I’ll see it again at the Priory.  Gaudy?  No doubt.  Too much?  Probably.  Do I like it?  Yep.


And so do the bees.