Tag Archives: video

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.

Wendy Wasp

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On the west lawn at the Priory is a laburnum tree (L. anagyroides).  I’ve never been a big fan of laburnum; a small tree usually growing in suburban  front gardens that bursts into vivid yellow bloom in Spring – and then fades away again for the rest of the year.  But then I read ‘My Cousin Rachel’ and developed a little more respect for it.  (Incidentally, I’d say Philip was right and Rachel was evil.   No question.  If you’ve not read it, I’d urge you to do so and see what you think).

In half-hearted flower – Spring 2011

Anyway, the Priory laburnum.  It grows out of a bank, beneath the beech hedging, at a rather alarming angle. And for that reason alone (it doesn’t flower very impressively), I’m rather fond of it.
Look closely underneath the tree and you’ll notice that the lawn hasn’t been mown properly.  Good for nothing gardener, you might think.  And you’d be right – though for once I have an excuse.
There’s a wasp nest, you see.  As I discovered the other week when I mowed over it.  Suddenly there was a salvo, an eruption, an explosion of wasps about my head.  Being of a temperate and manly disposition, I shouted a word of warning to anyone who may have been in the vicinity and then strode quickly but calmly to one side (He shrieked like a twelve year old girl and trampled an elderly dog walker and toddler in his haste to get away – Ed).  I then had to wait two hours for the annoyed mown swarm to calm down so that I could gingerly retrieve the mower.  Remarkably, I didn’t get stung.
I’ve found by mowing around the nest we can live in waspish harmony.  A little bit of longer grass under the laburnum and hey, I don’t get hurt.  Good deal.
I’d always supposed that underground wasp nests were opportunistic affairs, you know an abandoned vole hole or a natural crack in the clay.  But then I took to studying the little yellow and black, needle-bottomed ones.  And …
… I could clearly see that they were carrying out crumbs of soil.  They might have inhabited an old hole but they were enlarging it.   Certainly the hole has been growing larger and larger …. what are they doing down there?  What are they making?  What are they building?  Perhaps it’s best not to know.
You don’t really get a sense of the waspishness of a wasp’s nest from these photos, so I’ve made a cinematographic presentation or, if you prefer, a video clip.  Wasn’t sure how to go about doing this (uploading and all)  so spent a very, very long time learning how to reformat, edit and the rest.  Don’t know whether it was worth the effort but I wanted to show the wasps in a way that photos simply can’t.  It was taken with my mobile phone – so the quality isn’t great.  Apologies.
Maybe I ought to slip in a big, lavish song and dance number next time?  Or a chariot race?  At least write a script; be nice to have some idea of what I was about to say.

And I got stung.  How one suffers for one’s art.