Gardens

Incy Wincy Wenlock Crab Spider For Ark: Macro Monday

The flower is a wild corn cockle, and in real life it’s around an inch across, or two and a bit centimetres in alternative dimensions. The spider is utterly minute then, and the smallest I have spotted so far in the Farrell garden on Sheinton Street. In fact I only started noticing this species at all after Ark at A Tale Unfolds introduced me to the ones in his Johannesburg garden. Please check out his blog for more of his astonishing garden photos, though be warned – some of his close up arachnid shots might give spiderphobes a turn.

Also please visit Jude at her Macro Monday slot for more wonderful work. She’s featuring geraniums whose intricate beauty we perhaps do not appreciate enough.

Now here’s a less macro shot of the spider though it’s still larger than real life: hard to spot it beside the dewdrops:

And It’s Another Bee And Poppy Photo…

The opium poppies that have been growing behind our sheds (aka the old privies) are on their last gasp now – one or two blooms amongst a phalanx of seed heads. But there’s still plenty of bee forage along the fence – pale mauve spires of spearmint, purple tufts of wild knapweed, the oregano coming into flower.

And there’s also much to entice them inside the garden.

These ornamental strawberry plants have colonized the gravel path. I might have to move them at the end of the summer. They definitely have world domination in mind. And although they make tasty Alpine type strawberry fruits, the blackbirds always seem to get to them first.

Purple Toadflax is another bee favourite, and it also grows itself around the garden.

And finally, here we have a bee in clover, wings all of a dazzle in the midday sun:

Now for some really good close-up photography, please buzz off to Jude’s Macro Monday

Traces Of The Past ~ The 330-Year-Old Hedge

It’s hard to imagine that this gigantic bastion of ancient yew trees began three centuries ago as a formal terrace row, each tree cut into a neat, small cone or obelisk. Back then in the 1680s, when these trees were first planted, the taste in grand garden design was for the linear and geometric, following the French notion of strict plant control.

A hundred years later it was all change. In keeping with the new romantic landscape style of English gardening, the yews were allowed to grow as they pleased. The aim was to create vistas of idealized nature.

But this more liberal attitude did not last either. Around the time of the yews’ two-hundredth birthdays, Victorian garden men armed with sickles and step ladders intervened, and began creating this arboreal rampart of free-form topiary. Both fascinating and overbearing, I feel. The gardeners apparently hung onto to their ladders with one hand, while pruning and shaping with the other.

Today, the effect is still maintained by National Trust gardeners, now using electric hedge trimmers. Every year four of them start work in late August, and keep on trimming until mid-November – three months’ toil.

The yews are to be seen at one of the National Trust’s outstanding properties – Powis Castle, near Welshpool in Powys, just over the border from Shropshire. We called in there on our way home from our recent stay on the Mawddach Estuary in mid Wales. I’m afraid that on this occasion it was more for a good cup of coffee than for culture.

The castle dates from around 1200 when it was the stronghold of the last Welsh princes of Powys. In the sixteenth century ownership passed to the English Herbert family who acquired the title Earl of Powis. Indeed, they appeared to have acquired it on three separate occasions through history until the title eventually stuck fast to the family.

One of the Herbert daughters married the son of Clive of India (Robert Clive 1725-1774) – he who plundered the subcontinent under the auspices of the British East India Company. The Clive fortune paid for repair and development of the castle, and Robert Clive’s collection of valuable arts works gathered during his India days are on display there. You can tell I have very mixed feelings about this. But scruples aside, the house is well worth seeing and it contains many treasures.

The garden, though, is the best part. The setting is magnificent, with stunning views of the Welsh borderland. A whole day (and indeed several days at different seasons) could be spent exploring the many layered terraces, the lawns and woodland walks. The planting is on an epic scale with many unusual herbaceous varieties deployed. Specialist garden history talks are also available, and when energy flags (and as intimated earlier) there’s a good restaurant-tea room for re-charging purposes. Although to be on the safe, take your own picnic as well. It’s a long way from the grand lawn to the courtyard refreshment station.

Please visit Paula at Lost in Translation for more traces of the past. This theme is going to be regular every-other-month challenge on her blog, which is good news. Thank you, Paula. I have lots more traces in my archive.

Hang On To Your Hats, Girls! Windily Wordless Wednesday

Opium Poppies caught out on a blustery day.

My Wenlock Summer Garden

For her June Sunday Garden Challenge, Jude asks us to show her what summer means to us. So here are a few views of our garden on Sheinton Street. I should say straight away that I don’t give it the attention it deserves, and that daily I abandon it as I walk through and out the back gate and across the field to the allotment.

The plot is long and thin, following the width of the cottage, and on three different levels, which I don’t make enough of. For one thing, I know it must be possible to have beautiful plants growing somewhere within it all the year round if only I would sit down and do some proper planning and research.

Instead I tinker here and there, and let the garden do a lot of its own gardening. This includes encouraging the self-sown foxgloves, and the wonderfully scented purple, mauve and white Dame’s-violet (Hesperis matronalis) seen in the photo behind the foxglove, both of which follow on from the clouds of self-sown columbines. My garden, then, comes into its own only in summer, and otherwise can look rather dreary. But while it’s here, it’s wonderful – total cottage garden exuberance and chaos.

Welcome to my garden.

Oriental Poppy, crab spider and Dame’s-violets

Wild corn cockle (bottom right), foxgloves, purple toadflax; variegated lemon balm, oregano and golden marjoram in between, and the coppery foliage of Smoke Bush (Cotinus) in the background.

Columbine break-out

See How Her Garden Glows ~ Thursday’s Special

Here at our house on Sheinton Street – also spelled Shineton at the other end of the road, we try to live up to our location with as much shining and glowing as we can muster. This year the yellow tulips have certainly done their stuff, but now they are gone, and we’re waiting on the oriental poppies to keep the glow going.

Thursday’s Special: Glow

Please visit Paula to vote on last week’s park entries, and to add to this week’s glow

Tulip Time

I can see why 17th century Dutch merchants worked themselves into a fever over tulip bulbs. The flowers are never static. Even when captured in a vase they change shape and shade throughout the day. I think the colours here complement Cee’s stunning bearded iris, so please visit her at:

Cee’s flower of the day

Scattered Leaf And Light At Croft Castle ~ Spring Happening

Yesterday our Thursday outing took intrepid Farrell Safaris over the Shropshire border and into Hereford. Our destination was Croft Castle in the wonderfully named village of Yarpole. The house is a castellated fifteenth to eighteenth century fantasy with magnificent turrets (only for show) –the whole set in glorious parkland of veteran trees. The present house replaced an 11th century castle, and the Croft family who occupied it then, continued to preside over this corner of England for nearly a thousand years. All is now in the care of the National Trust. And if anyone reading this intends to visit, then take a good tree book. And also your walking shoes as there are several long walks including one to the Iron Age hillfort of Croft Ambrey.

I’ll post more about Croft another time. For now I’m trying to keep on theme with Paula’s Thursday’s Special. This week it is ‘scattered’ so please pop over there for more renditions.

Now for a scattering of tulips in the walled garden:

And oh well, I know you really wanted to see the Castle, so here it is framed by the branches of a very ancient conifer. There’s some good cloud-scatter too.

Trying Not To Dig The Plot And 30 Minutes Of Weird Weather

On a very dull Tuesday afternoon I thought I’d brave the cold wind and walk across the field to the allotment. On went the woolly hat, quilted coat (over three layers) and the wellies.

Unsurprisingly I had the allotment to myself – not another mad gardener in sight. I set about emptying one of the compost bins, and spreading the contents (a hand’s width deep) over a metre wide stretch of ground that had been cleared of over-wintering sprouts and broccoli. It seemed a good day to do it, and I was glad I had prised myself from the house.

This year I’m experimenting with the ‘no dig’ system of cultivation, so apart from tweaking out one or two noxious weeds, I resisted the temptation to get out my favourite spade. The objective is to cover the soil with enough interesting organic matter to excite the worms in the soil below. They then do the digging, and other soil-friendly organisms get going too so that, hopefully, the later seasons’ crops – cabbages and sweet corn – can be planted out on the much improved, and better nourished ground.

I was thus in the middle of this very absorbing activity when someone upstairs switched off the lights and I turned to find a tempest sneaking up on me.

Yikes! By the time I had scooted across the plot to the shelter of my polytunnel, we were having a small, but very concentrated snow and hail blizzard. It was far too stormy to think of making for home. Instead, I pottered about in my tunnel sowing some purple Brussels sprouts seeds in modules, while trying to remain hopeful that this truly was a passing squall and not the heavens falling in as the heavyweight clouds suggested.

I forgot to record the actual blizzard that followed, so here are some Précoce de Louviers pointy spring cabbages that are growing most happily in the tunnel.

When I stuck my nose out of the tunnel some twenty minutes later, this was the view over Much Wenlock:

By which time it was too late, and the ground too wet to go back to compost spreading. As I walked home across the allotment, I watched strange, but less threatening clouds gather over the hills:

And when I stepped through the hedge into the wheat field behind our house, the sky looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth: snowstorm, what snowstorm?

Clearly the figment of a delusional, non-digging gardener then:

Bumble Bee Bliss & A Change In The Weather

April and it’s all change. On Saturday I was whinging about the snow that had invaded our early morning landscape. By Sunday we were sitting coatless on Benthall Hall’s tea room terrace, and consuming carrot cake and hot chocolate with the sun on our faces. It was February when were last there, and grey and stormy, with no possibility of sitting outside. Now we were in danger of overheating with a nice grey hen pootling around our feet, and the air filled with bee-hum. Later, when we ambled around the gardens, we came upon these newly opened rhododendron flowers and a very happy bumble bee. To say it was gorging itself is an understatement. Up to its armpits in pollen it was. Food at last. Bzzzzzzz.

Check in at Cee’s Flower of the Day for more floral displays.

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge