Gardens

Ladybirds In My Borders, Bees In My Bergamot

I’m back in the garden today. The old Africa album is taking a break. Although actually, thinking about days long past in Kenya has been a happy diversion from fidgeting about the lack of rain. Yet another month now with hardly enough to fill a watering can. But at least the days are much cooler and today quite overcast. In the meantime, the weather forecasting bods keep teasing and teasing, saying there will be rain two days hence, and then when we get there, ne’er a drop. Even my computer’s been joining in the game – a little message popping up saying ‘rainy days’ ahead. I now understand that ‘ahead’ is the operative word. And, of course, this being England, we can be fairly sure that one day we will receive a proper soaking.

Anyway, it’s not all bad news on the gardening front, so long as I keep up the regular watering. In fact the bergamot has scarcely needed any attention. For weeks now it has been a riot of bright purple heads. The leaves smell wonderful too, crushed between soily fingers. And as for the ~~white tailed bumbles~~ which, on closer inspection, are probably garden bumbles – talk about bee-lines. These days whole tribes of them are foraging among the curiously structured flowers.

I’m also very pleased to see a number of ladybirds in the garden, most numerously in the perennial cornflower (Centaurea). I’m puzzled as to why they are there, since I can’t see any aphid infestation, only ants. Unless they both ladybirds and ants preying on something too small for me to see.

Also spotted in the Centaurea are Common Carder bees, seen here with an incoming hoverfly:

And in the neighbouring Sunspot sunflower a Red-tailed bumble bee:

However, I am not so pleased this morning, to discover flea beetles on my Kabuki broccoli seedlings, planted out only two days ago. These tiny brassica-infesting bugs create a ‘scatter-shot’ appearance to all the leaves. Time to round up a few ladybirds and put them to work then. I’ve just read that they like flea beetles…

#SimplyRed Day 27

Six On Saturday ~ Still Waiting For Rain

The evening garden

This gardener is beginning to panic. After weeks of rainlessness, we’re now having a spike in temperatures – the peak today at 29 or 30 degrees, depending which weather forecast you consult. Thereafter, hopefully, we should feel a decline of several degrees, with finally a promise of rain next week.

But then we’ve had these promises several times over the last three months, with only one good downpour that yielded 8 watering cans’ worth from the shed water butt. And that was ages ago.

1. Hand watering is all very well, but it really only keeps plants ticking over. Or in the case of my onions and first sown carrots doesn’t. I pulled them up yesterday. They had simply stopped growing.

2. Also my single seed potato in a bucket had had enough by yesterday. This was one I couldn’t fit into my planting row, so I thought I’d trial it in a container. Stopping it from drying out was of course an issue. And the bucket itself was making it very hot. All the same, when I emptied it, I was quite impressed with this little haul.

The Rooster spuds in the ground are still holding their own for now, so I’m hoping for a reasonable harvest. We’ve eaten most of the Belle de Fontenay, and I’ve popped in a few peas where she’s left some space.

3. In the bean corner things are looking fairly hopeful. Beans respond well to mulching, and anyway make some of their own shade. I’d also prepared a compost filled trench for the runners in the winter. The dwarf borlotti beans, planted out in front, are also sheltering the runners’ roots. They don’t seem to mind being hot and are already forming pods. A slight error in labelling has resulted in some of the dwarf borlotti in the row requiring sticks, which is annoying. I have the taller variety growing up some trellis against next door’s garage – i.e. in the once horridly hypericum infested wall-bed on our boundary.

This year I have a real mix of runner bean varieties. For some reason I had problems getting any of my seeds to germinate well, new and not so new packets alike. I ended up re-sowing, and putting in a few Scarlet Emperor seedlings bought from the butcher’s to be going on with. My small row thus also has some white Moonlight, red Lady Di and one Painted Lady which has very pretty white and red flowers although they’re looking pink at the moment.

4. In the nonedible quarters, Penelope rose is still blooming hard, although the other roses have given up flowering now. I love her. She is like a wild rose, but with added flounces. And she smells delicious.

5. Also my favourite Morning Glories have begun to live up to their name and are putting on an early-day show. I’ve planted them out everywhere where there’s something to climb up, amongst the beans and sunflowers, up the trellis disguising the oil tank. Hopefully, if it does rain next week, they will really get going, and hopefully, too, keep flowering until the first frost as they did last year.

6. And another success has been the sweet peas. Although the ones in the front garden are now beginning to fry round the edges, this despite the watering and mulching. Also, given my non-orderly manner of cultivation – randomly up an obelisk and a trellis, they have grown rather short stems. My dear Pa would have been aghast. He used to grow his in regimented tall-cane rows, with set watering intervals to ensure evenly spaced blooms along each dead straight stem. Then he would lovingly count them, five and six big flower heads, usually. And then he would snip a bunch of the best and take them off to his latest lady friend. Mother rarely got a look in when it came to sweet peas.

I’ve tried taking a photo of ours outside, but they don’t look their best. So here’s one of the several small vases we have about the house. Wall-to-wall sweet pea scent, a soothing antidote to moments of over-heatedness.

Six On Saturday Please visit our host Jim. Lots of interesting plants in his garden today.

Blown Away

The first opium poppies have bloomed their best, the bees done their work. Seed capsules are primed, the fancy skirts discarded, blown off on the breeze.

If I leave them, the pods will ripen until crisp and brown as walnut shells. The merest tap will have them shedding seed like shaking a salt cellar. And come next summer, they’ll be back again. Or maybe not. Poppies, I find, are a capricious lot. Love me while you can, they say.

#SimplyRed Day 4

Ladybirds ~ The Gardener’s Pest Controllers

Much like poppies, ladybirds come with instant eye-appeal. Who knows why: the shiny red wing cases that look like polished enamel; those striking black dots. From infancy I was anyway brought up with the notion of them: those lovely Ladybird children’s books so exciting to receive; cosy Ladybird cotton jumpers (items now known as sweatshirts) in bright primary colours. I had a red one, the colour of the ladybird. And a yellow one, the colour of this Golden Marguerite (Anthemis tinctora).

These days, as a more than grown up gardener, I mostly appreciate their appetite for aphids. They are at their most voracious during the larval stage, when they are distinctly creepy beasties: the minute Darth Vaders of insectdom:

https://www.field-studies-council.org/shop/publications/ladybird-larvae-guide/

So do not squash!

Some of their kind also eat scale insects and feed on mildew, a fact I’ve only just discovered as I’m writing this.

And another surprising find (to me anyway) that according to the Woodland Trust site there are 26 kinds of ladybird in the British Isles, with our gardens likely to be host to several species at any one time. I’ve only ever registered the existence of three or four types, including the Seven-Spot in the header photo. One of the commonest is an incomer from Asia – the Harlequin, which may be black with red spots or vice versa. It also eats aphids, but may at times predate on native ladybirds. Advice seems to be to let it alone. Trying to eradicate it might involve too much mis-identification of native species which have similar livery.

Looking now through my allotment photo archive, I’ve found I’ve snapped a Twenty-Two Spot ladybird. At least I think that’s what it is. It’s on a dahlia leaf and is one of the mildew eating varieties.

Seven-Spotters in action on an aphid colony

#SimplyRed Day 3 Becky has us all in clover today.

My Garden Supervisor: Robin Not So Red

Perhaps it’s the time of year, the courtship fine feathers and family raising done, but this robin’s breast looks to me more orange than red. I think it may be moulting time too. Some days when it pops into the garden, it looks as if it’s got out of its nest on the wrong side – feathers every which way. But then sloppy personal grooming doesn’t stop it from giving me hard looks, scrutinizing every gardening move in case worms and grubs are in the offing.

These days it is not so insistent and no longer perches on the nearest pot and cheeps until I make some attempt to provide. Not so many mouths to feed. So now, when it sees I’m only dead-heading or watering, it soon vanishes. Clearly it has other calls to make about the town.

#SimplyRed Day 2 Today on July Squares, Becky pays tribute to Cee whose inspiring photo challenges brought so many of us together. She is very much missed.

A Surprising Red Arrival

This opium poppy sprouted up suddenly between the blackcurrant bush and the compost bin, and this week it began to flower, just in time for Becky’s month of squares. Red is the theme, and square the format for the header photo.

The bees have fun with all the frills, burrowing in and out to gather pollen. I notice, too, there are more poppy plants coming on outside Graham’s shed so we’re in for a show from these showy volunteers.

When the buds first break, they are almost black, giving a glimpse of the dark underskirts first. Later, when the flower opens, they are only visible if you stand on your head.

#SimplyRed Day One – Join Becky for her month of squares: painting July red, but in a good way.

The Changing Seasons: June 2025

My last post perhaps gave the impression that there’s little room for flowers in our small garden; that all my attention has been on growing stuff to eat. But not so. June has been wonderfully floriferous, especially in the border atop the terrace wall. And beneath it, while the geraniums, centaurea, foxgloves, valerian and St. Cecilia rose came to full bloom, Graham sat on a chair, suitably hatted, and methodically chipped off the failed and peeling plaster. Our builder, Alan, says he’ll come and re-do it in autumn. And while he’s here sort out the old back garden steps. The house improvements continue.

St. Cecilia rose, Ann Thomson geranium, Sherbet Fizz pot marigold

Looking from the top of the garden towards the kitchen door, the border runs between the far end of shed and the right hand path. It also includes two miniature apple trees planted back in the autumn. The rose, St. Cecilia, was languishing there when we moved in nearly two years ago, but she’s had a good feed and a hard prune, and this June has been flowering wonderfully. She may be a tad wishy-washy colour-wise, but she has an exquisitely delicate scent.

Self-sown foxgloves among the geraniums at the path end of the border

The garden peripheries have also bloomed over the last couple of weeks, surprising given our near total lack of rain for many weeks. In the northerly corner the medicinal herb, St. John’s Wort is now soaring into the apple tree. I grew it from seed donated by a supporter of the Bishop’s Castle Seed Bank. The seed packets sit in a tray at the Town Hall and are free, although donations are welcomed.

Also blooming for the first time is this dreamy perennial foxglove. It has a tendency to flop somewhat in warmer temperatures, and has been struggling in the dry soil under the big apple tree. Mulching with hot-bin compost helped. And some hand watering of course.

And another cool looking plant that’s just started to flower. A white mallow. She’s been in several spots around the garden, but is now in the rear westerly corner, behind the Rooster potatoes and in front of a very nice miniature crab apple tree. The moves seem to have left her unscathed:

At the front of the house we have two biggish square beds, created after removing ugly paving (recycled into shed base and new back garden steps), but they are very much a work in progress. In the southerly one, I have some currently very small shrubs growing on, a couple of escallonias and a cistus, and in the meantime there’s a mix of herbaceous perennials and annuals, cosmos and zinnias, filling the spaces.

I was missing my Evereste crab apple tree, and managed to find a miniature one. It’s planted in a small circular raised bed of corten steel which I’m expecting to rust. Around it are some assorted small plants, including a white rock rose and Santolini rosmarinifolia, which are evergreen, Salvia Salavatore, and a trailing plant, Oregano Kent Beauty (centre front). This last was a wonderful plant discovery courtesy of Jude at Cornwall in Colours. I’d never seen it before I saw it on her blog. It really seems to like our garden, so thank you, Jude.

In the background right, not yet flowering, are three alcalthaea – a cross between mallow and hollyhocks. They are apparently short-lived perennials, but we’ll see. Last year they grew very tall and had to be curtailed, but their peachy pale flowers were very pretty.

Plants apart, the main activity in June was having our drive dug up by Justin, Bishop’s Castle’s professional excavator sans pareil. He mostly had to use a pick, this because the exact location of our water main pipe was uncertain. And this was happening because we wanted our rusted hundred year old, cast iron water pipe replaced with a plastic one. To say this was one heavy duty task is an understatement. Order is restored, but the drive now needs to be resurfaced.

Out beyond the garden gate:

A week last Sunday in Bishop’s Castle we had midsummer celebrations in the form of a gathering of Morris dancing troupes, local and further flung. They started on Sunday morning with rousing performances and much drumming at the next door care home, after which they streamed up the road past the house to continue performing at the top of the town. Later when we tried to drive out of the town by our usual route, we found the road ahead full of dancers and musicians, and were advised that they might be there for some time and so would we mind making a detour. We didn’t. It was all good fun and surely makes a change from having multiple local roads closed for cable laying.

And yesterday (Sunday) we treated ourselves to another local institution – climbing to the top of the town to visit the House on Crutches Museum. (I forgot to take a photo of the outside so click on the link to see it). We hadn’t been for two years, but it’s a wonderfully quirky collection, revealing many aspects of Bishop’s Castle history, in particular how it featured on the ancient drovers’ route out of Wales, a way of life and of making a living that survived some 800 years. At the top of the rickety stairs that we both managed to fall up, I stopped to take this view down the High Street: a sleepy Sunday in Bishop’s Castle.

Today as I write this, on the last day of June, we are having our hottest day so far this year, apparently 29 degrees C (84 degrees F) at 3 pm this afternoon at Shropshire’s weather station in Shawbury. Now at 6 pm it’s 26 degrees in the house, but there’s a pleasant breeze in the garden, as there has been all day. Tomorrow, temperatures begin to fall, and in fact by next Sunday it will be 12 – 15 degrees C, this according to YR the Norwegian Met Office, which is pretty good on UK weather. And this may also mark the beginning of rain. At last! Yesterday, we had a few sprinkles and the plants all stood up tall, as if expecting a good drench. They were duly teased.

And so I’ll round this up with a shot of the snapdragons that have flowered heroically all through June, and with not a drop of water from me. They are pretty much over now and making lots of seed. I think I’ll give them their heads. Next June I could have a whole bed of snapdragons. How wonderful would that be.

The Changing Seasons is hosted monthly by Brian at bushboys world and Ju-Lyn at Touring My Backyard. Please pay them a visit.

Six On Saturday ~ Produce!

As you can see, the ‘upstairs’ garden behind our house is really rather modest. And here, currently, and probably for the foreseeable future, chaos reigns; this courtesy of a gardener who still thinks her growing spaces comprise two seventy by 15 foot allotment plots plus the home garden with its adjacent stretch of ‘guerrilla gardened’ field over the back fence. Heigh ho! Those were the days when we lived beside Wenlock Edge.

Now, mostly settled in our new home, I do know I must cut my cultivating cloth according to the physical means of production. (The lawns, though, do seem to keep shrinking). Also this year there’s been the matter of watering through the mostly rainless months of spring and early summer. This has been quite hard work. (I know mulching is much of the answer, but my hot compost bin can only yield so much stuff, and so far it’s spread rather too thinly). And then there are birds and cats and insects to contend with which means everything edible has to be netted, which is not very attractive. So, as I say, chaos presently reigns, but with a few organised segments in between.

1.) The first of these to produce excitement in the Farrell household are the two short rows of potatoes. They were planted at the end of March, ten in each row. Even with little rain, and not much watering, the Belle de Fontenay have produced some lovely salad potatoes. (They’re also a main crop variety if left longer, but that’s unlikely to happen).

Behind them is a row of Rooster red spuds, also main crop. The plants have grown astonishingly tall, given the weather, while the Belle de Fontenay have flopped flat in front of them. I think the Rooster must have commandeered the downward flow of any available groundwater from the hill above.

2.) The next excitement this week was a bunch of carrots, and not a single sign of carrot root fly in any of them. I have attempted to protect the rows by growing them in a raised bed, between onions and covered with some fine mesh. Last year all my carrots were root-flied.

3.) We eat a lot of greens, and this year I’ve grown some different varieties of kale, including, pink frilly, Tuscan, and a crossed Tuscan and Daubenton’s perennial kale, the seed produced by a forest gardener on eBay. (There’s also some Swiss chard in the bunch below.) I know kale isn’t to everyone’s taste, and I’ve yet to try this, but I recently learned you can roast it till crispy. This involves ripping up the washed and dried leaves (without the stalks), tossing the pieces in oil, spreading them on a baking sheet and cooking for 15-20 minutes in a fairly hot oven. Sesame seeds and favourite spices along with sea salt and black may be added.

4.) Yesterday we ate our first homegrown courgette (zucchini), and very nice it was too, sliced and lightly browned in the fat from cooked lardons and then added to a salad.

I put the plant in beside the compost bin, a position that clearly is suiting it. I have some yellow courgettes coming on nearby.

5.) Also in last night’s salad were the first of the field beans. These are a variety of broad (fava) bean, grown mostly in the UK as animal feed or as a green manure, ploughed back in the soil before producing beans. This, I feel, is a lost opportunity. The plants grow four or five feet and taller, while the beans themselves are little bigger than peas. But then the plants are prolific, and so ideal if you haven’t a large enough space to grow their bigger cousins. My field bean plot is around a square metre/yard.

They have anyway, become something of a summer staple in the Farrell household. Picked at the right moment they are deliciously tender and can work as a rather good imitation of guacamole. If they get over-ripe and a bit floury, they make excellent soup and refried beans. The downside is they are fiddly to pod. But then the mass of little pods is good fodder for the hot compost bin, as is all the vegetation (chopped up) when the plants are done.

6.) Last but not least on the garden foraging front are the marigolds (Calendula officionalis). I use them in herbal tea. They contain all sorts of therapeutic properties, known and made use of for a couple of thousand years. But mostly I add the petals to salads, taking care not to include any passing hoverfly. This particular variety is called Sherbet Fizz. We also have lots of self-seeded bright orange and yellow ones from last year’s crop. I love them all. They have to be one of the most heartening of flowers. Simply to gaze on them lifts the spirits.

Six on Saturday: Please call on Jim. There’s always lots to look at and discover in his Cornish garden.

Garden Treasures: The Salvaged And The Self-Seeded

Well, this was a big surprise last week, and a very lovely one too. It is the unexpected outcome of a little rescue job performed over a year ago, not long after we’d moved into The Gables. Back then, in the August of 2023, I was making a start on de-jungling various flower beds and found some rhizome fragments swamped by phygelius and euonymus and assorted weedy thugs. They had small spikes of green and white leaves and I thought they might be Japanese iris so I replanted them in a cleared corner and pretty much forgot about them. They certainly didn’t do anything last summer, and when I looked at them early this spring I decided that they weren’t likely to either.

So it just goes to show what can happen when you’re not paying attention.

The spot where they’re growing is fairly sheltered, between Graham’s shed, a blackcurrant bush, the path and the hot composting bin. They are also being encroached on by some super-charged perennial helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ (more of which in a moment). And here’s the puzzle.

When I first spotted the opening iris I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. It looked exactly like the wild yellow flag that grows in and near ponds and marshes. The only difference appeared to be the green stripy leaves. Some internet sleuthing was thus required, and this soon revealed that the iris was indeed a variegated cultivar of the wild form. But how come? There is no standing water in its vicinity. Until last week we’ve been many weeks without rain, and on sunny days, out of the wind, it’s been quite hot, leaving other herbaceous plants in parched beds.

Then I considered the size of the neighbouring helianthus clump. The first shoots are waist high already and the leaves huge. I then began to wonder if the hot compost bin has been having a hand in things. It does make a quantity of liquid gloop which, if I haven’t drained it, dribbles onto the path and onto the flower bed (?). Also the soil there is largely unimproved and thus dark and heavy; slow to dry out where the shed shades it.

Hm. Who knows? I’m just hoping that the iris will decide to stay. There are signs that the plant with the flowering stem is beginning to clump up. The smaller cuttings, in amongst a spreading geranium and rudbeckia, are also beginning to look promising. And now we’ve installed a nearby water butt, I’ve no excuse not monitor watering requirements.

All the same, all the gardening sites do call the variegated yellow flag a wetland plant, and also warn that it, too, can develop thuggish tendencies. A watching brief then.

I rescued this geranium phaeum album early last summer. I discovered it behind the compost bin, lurking mostly under the fence with next door’s garden. It’s now growing under the apple tree at the bottom of the garden, though it’s a spot prone to drying out. It’s doing better in an open sunny border along with geranium Anne Thomson. Damp shadiness is supposed to suit it best.

The recent downpours have bruised many of the geranium faces, but the rescued clumps of Johnson’s Blue (I think that’s what they are) have been putting on a good show and pleasing the bees.

Here they are with this year’s number one self-seeders: white foxgloves. They are everywhere about the garden, although there was no sign of white ones over the last two summers. I love their cool and stately demeanour.

And at the hotter end of the colour palette, in the front garden we have a row of snapdragons, self-seeded along the wall in a remarkably orderly fashion. Anyone would think I’d put them there.

They glow in late afternoon sunshine.

Throughout May we had profusions of columbines, mostly pink and dark mauve. They are actually too much of good thing on the self-seeding front, and I spend much time rooting seedlings out of the vegetable beds. But then amongst them were two plants of delicate lavender, each with a different ‘frock’, one by the green house, and another in the far corner behind an apple tree. They are over now. But I know where they are.

Six On Saturday Please visit host Jim’s lovely garden – so many treats to be found there.

It’s All Birds And Bees In Our ‘Castle’ Garden

Well, they do say an Englishman’s home is his castle. And for this English woman, this stronghold must obviously include the garden. At least I like to think the garden is my domain; my own small fiefdom.

The wildlife, of course, has other notions. This mama blackbird, for instance, is quite sure my purpose in life is to provide her with fresh feeding stations. As soon as I begin work in the garden she’s there, poised to snatch a worm or grub. If I do not provide quickly enough, she fixes me with that beady eye, and starts her own digging. This has led to us falling out somewhat. I’ve had to net all my vegetable beds to stop her rooting out my seedlings.

But she did keep me company while I cleared the boundary wall with our neighbour’s garage. It was a horrendous job, hacking out ingrowing and overgrowing hypericum (Rose of Sharon) that years ago had been planted along the top of the wall, and since turned itself into a stretch of brutal anti-tank wire, while inviting Spanish bluebells, ash trees and willow herb to join in the fray.

I’d been tackling the job on and off since last summer. But now it’s done.

I’ve planted the road end with a couple of trailing blackberries designed for hanging baskets and also some foxgloves which had grown themselves in the back garden. As for the rest, for this year I’m thinking of putting in various kales and perhaps courgettes; nothing permanent in other words. I’ve discovered that hypericum shoots and roots from the tiniest scrap of itself, so it will probably take a few seasons to clear the bed.

Meanwhile mama blackbird has been well fed, and the feeding clearly paying off. Two days ago, while planting a hornbeam sapling to fill a gap in our rear hedge of horrors, I had the sense of being watched. When I peered into the tangle of privet, holly and sycamore, there she was, sitting still as stone, on a very neat nest, looking straight back at me. I left her in peace.

As blackbirds go, I suspect she is rather elderly. Her tail feathers look more than a touch bedraggled. But she has us weighed up as non-threatening entities, choosing to nest right by the path that we use all the time. She is not afraid to leave it either, when she sees me with a spade. Yesterday, when I was unearthing some ash tree saplings further down the hedge, she was right there, just in time to gobble up a big juicy worm.

Male blackbirds don’t do nest duty, but I’m assuming this is papa. He’s taken to singing sweetly in the hawthorn tree just over the hedge. He shows up when I’m digging too, but not if mama is around. (She sees him off). He actually comes very close and tweets at me, if I’m not providing worms.

Earlier in the year it was the robin who would come nagging as soon as I set foot in the garden. He/she was especially pleased with operation dig-out-compost-bin, but now is perhaps too busy with egg minding to be around so much.

Other birdlife, as in pigeons, I’m not so pleased to see. They’re another reason for having netting all over the vegetable plots, though it doesn’t stop them from nibbling through the fine mesh if the plants grow too close to the edge. They like spinach, brassicas, chard, chicory, beetroot leaves, lettuce, young field bean leaves and lemon sorrel.

The garden is very much ‘a first draft’; there’s much to sort out (tidy) and much trial and error (given the lack of an actual plan). Next week a paling fence will start going up around the perimeter (from behind the greenhouse and round). It won’t be too tall but will create a boundary for fresh planting which might help focus this gardener’s mind.

For now we are enjoying the apple blossom, and especially the little tree which is flourishing between the compost bins, one open, one hot. I think it’s a Crispin. The black hot bin is not a pretty sight, but the mass of flowers is lovely and, in a spot of warmish afternoon sun, is alive with bee hum. Just look at the pollen sacs on the bees’ legs.

And there’s not only apple blossom. On the terrace wall we have tulips. They are presently looking rather glamorous:

So: spring is here in the Farrell domain aka Castle (also the locals’ name for the town), and in moments when the wind drops and you stand in the sun where the air is less frigid, it feels like it too. Cheers, fellow gardeners! Happy planting!

Six on Saturday: blackbirds, robins, bird defences, apple blossom, bees and tulips

copyrithg 2025 Tish Farrell