A Humungous Green Leaf

Emma at A Nice Green Leaf had the brilliant idea of focusing on foliage instead of flowers on 30 June with a celebration entitled The Big Green Leaf. I love flowers, but I always fall harder for foliage. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's the result of gardening in London, which makes one so aware of year-round visual appeal, and contrasting shapes, and plants that screen you from the rest of the world, and things that do well in shade, such as ferns and Fatsia japonica. One of the great benefits of living in London, however, is that you can take advantage of the big-city greenhouse effect to grow things that might prove more challenging in the countryside. In my case, this has led to growing Even Bigger Green Leaves, such as hardy bananas (Musa basjoo) and Tetrapanax papyrifera. I protect the bananas in winter with fleece, but the tetrapanax is left to take its chance. I also have a couple of tree ferns, Dicksonia antarctica, but I don't wrap them up either. I leave any browned fronds on until I see the new growth, just to give them a bit of protection. Indeed, the trickiest plants in my garden are the Japanese maples, which don't like very dry conditions. In the summer of 2003 they really suffered, so last year's non-stop deluge from June to August was good news as far as they were concerned.

The spectacular leaves of Washingtonia filifera . It's growing in a pot, in a very sheltered position against a south-facing fence

Veg on Mars

Here is a news flash: apparently the soil on Mars is highly suitable for growing asparagus, according to the latest report from Nasa. The soil is mildly alkaline (with a PH of between 8 and 9), making it also good for turnips and green beans, but not so good for strawberries. I'm going to apply for my allotment right now.

A very good place to get Big Green Leaves

This week we made the annual pilgrimage to Architectural Plants who have two nurseries in West Sussex - one at Nuthurst, near Horsham, and one at Chichester. We always go to the Nuthurst one because it seems closer, though I suspect the Chichester branch is bigger. AP is my idea of a really, really good nursery. They are incredibly helpful, and generous with advice. They provide loads of information. Their plants look fabulously healthy. They care passionately about their plants, to the extent of being extremely scathing about people who don't treat them properly. (Don't worry, they're far too nice to be scathing to your face: these criticisms are delivered in the form of rants posted on the walls of the coffee shop for you to enjoy while you sip your free cup of tea.) The office and the 'lav' are designed to look like jungle pavilions, so wandering around the nursery is an aesthetic pleasure in itself. It was Architectural Plants who first put me in touch with Jake Hobson, who runs Niwaki and who has now written a book on Japanese pruning techniques. (I wanted to find someone who was brave enough to prune Pinus montezumae, and show me how to do it too.)

There's just one problem with plants that are architectural. They tend to be big, or grow up to be big, so it's best to be extremely disciplined when you visit AP, or you'll end up suffering from eyes-bigger-than-your-garden syndrome. Make a list and measure your space before you go, because I defy you to come back empty-handed, especially if you're addicted to topiary. Finally, a note for dry-shade or problem-corner sufferers: if you're going to the website or the nursery, check out Hebe parviflora angustifolia. It will turn the dry shade or the problem corner into a gorgeous mound of feathery green foliage. It even has flowers.

Tagged!

I've been tagged by Melissa at Garden Portraits. Thanks, Melissa, I was beginning to feel left out!

This is what you do:

* Link to the person who tagged you.
* Post the rules on the blog.
* Write six random things about yourself.
* Tag six people at the end of your post.
* Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
* Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Here are six random things about me:

I. I am named after a monk. My mother taught at Worth, which is a Benedictine boarding school, just after she graduated from art college. The head of the monastery was called Father Victor (later Abbot Victor, when Worth became an abbey). My mother loved Worth, which is a beautiful place deep in the Sussex countryside.

2. I have a twin sister, who is unidentical - so unidentical that, at a university reunion once, some people didn't even realise we knew each other, let alone were related. My twin is called Alexandra, but is always known as Sasha. She is older than me by half an hour and as the eldest, she was the one who was supposed to be Victoria. However, there was a bit of a kerfuffle during the baptism, because the priest felt that Victoria and Alexandra did not technically qualify as 'Christian' names (ie they're not the names of Catholic saints and they're not in the Bible). After a hasty discussion, my parents tagged on Anne and Mary, but during the panic, we were swapped over. I ended up as Victoria Anne and my sister is Alexandra Mary. So she's not only Sasha, but Sasha Masha. My parents went to Russia when we were six months old (babies? what babies?) on some sort of cultural exchange trip and that's where they got the idea for a pet name that I would be able to pronounce.

3. My earliest gardening memory is creating a little house in a tangle of collapsed wisteria at the end of our garden. (I think I was about 16 before I realised that most normal people train their wisteria up a wall.) As a child, I was a huge fan of Alison Uttley's Little Grey Rabbit books, and in my wisteria house, I used to pretend I was Little Grey Rabbit bustling about in the kitchen.

4. I'm not crazy about the colour blue. I love it on flowers, but not in my home, or on my clothes, or shoes, or sports kit, or in my kitchen or bathroom. Sadly, the rest of the world appears to believe that every woman loves blue. (This is beginning to sound like some sort of philosophical paradox: A. Does this make me not a woman? B. Or is the rest of the world wrong? I go for B. Every time.)

5. I am qualified to teach piano, but I never have. The mere thought of having to teach anyone anything makes me want to lie down in a darkened room. My daughter says this is probably very good news for the world's music pupils.

6. I've spent nearly half my life in Scotland. I support Scotland at football and rugby, but England at cricket. Seems only fair.

Stacy at Florida Backyard

Kate at The Manic Gardener

Mrs Be at Carrots and Kids

Rach at The Big Sofa

Marie at Cote Jardin

Jo at The Impecunious Gardener

What's your gardening soundtrack?

Cleve West once remarked in his Urban Gardener column for The Independent that it was very difficult to find music that made a good soundtrack for gardening. When I read this, my first instinct was to disagree, but then I thought about it, and I realised that he might be right. Listening to music while you're LOOKING at a garden (while watching a television programme, for example) is a very different thing to listening to music while you're WORKING in a gardening.
I hadn't realised, before I read Cleve's column, that I very rarely choose to listen to music in the garden. For a start, there are so many other noises going on: birdsong, the sound of water from the pond, the rustle of the trees in the wind. To introduce music into that seems almost like an intrusion. For me, gardening is as much about trying to achieve a tranquil interior, or mental, space (hah!) as it is about trying to achieve a calm oasis outside. Most popular or rock music doesn't really fit with that, since it tends to be too emotional. In the same way, the great romantic composers such as Brahms or Tchaikowsky or even Beethoven are too distracting. Even the English composers who are always associated with celebrating the countryside, such as Vaughan Williams, or Delius, aren't suitable either, I find, as they make me want to sit down and gaze, rather than get on and grub about.

The garden this morning. Soundtrack: Birdsong, by The Greenfinches, feat. Blackbird and Robin

However, my daughter often practises while I'm gardening, so I do hear music drifting out from the living room. And I've discovered that for me, the ideal gardening soundtrack is Bach, particularly the preludes and fugues. There's something about a Bach fugue; the way he sets out the theme, then interweaves it in such an intricate web of counterpoint you think the pianist's fingers are going to tie themselves in knots, then brings it all to a beautifully satisfying resolution. It somehow suits gardening, particularly fiddly jobs such as tying in climbers, or trimming lawn edges, or fishing blanketweed out of the pond, or pruning the bamboo (the sort of jobs I do all the time). For the record, if you'll excuse the pun, my favourites are Prelude and Fugue No 9 in E and No 17 in A flat from Book I of the 48 Preludes and Fugues, and No 7 in E flat and No 14 in F sharp minor from Book II. I found a recording of the F sharp minor and you can listen to it below.
What's your gardening soundtrack? I'd love to know.


SeeqPod - Playable Search

At home with Helen Yemm (and Zoe)

Last Saturday, I met one of my gardening heroines. Helen Yemm is one of my favourite garden writers, not least because of her slightly acerbic tone. (I remember one item in her column, about where to get Felco secateurs serviced or sharpened: readers were adjured to cut out the information straight away and put it in a safe place, so that she would not be inundated with letters from idiots requesting a repeat of the information.) In the uncertain world of gardening, I tend to warm towards people who seem to know exactly what they're doing, and I need to read Helen's column every Saturday before going out into my own garden in much the same way that other people need to have a cup of coffee before they go to work. She always looks so self-possessed and business-like in her pictures or on the television, as if one glance from over the top of her spectacles could rout a clump of bindweed or send snails running for cover.
I hope she won't mind if I destroy this illusion by saying that in the flesh, she looks much younger, she's very glamorous and charming, and she's an extremely entertaining speaker. It's not just people she charms, either: she has the birds in her garden literally eating out of her hand.
The theme of Helen's talk (held to raise money for the National Gardens Scheme) was downsizing. She told us how she had had to move from Ketleys, the most amazing place that included a gravel garden, a vegetable garden, a woodland garden, and an orchard, to a complete wreck. She then explained how she had transformed the wreck into a miniature idyll, using the expertise she had acquired in her previous garden. It's always impressive when someone takes a garden by the scruff of the neck and transforms it, but in such traumatic circumstances, it's nothing short of heroic. Helen didn't go into great detail about why she had to move, but I must confess, my hand itched to give her ex a good slap.


The evening ended with a glass of wine and a wander round Helen's new garden, now burgeoning with hardy geraniums, grasses, libertia, sysirinchium and roses, among many other things. The garden wraps itself round the house, with a lawned area at the front, a pond at the side in full view of Helen's study and herbaceous borders that extend to a gravel garden at the end. It's my favourite kind of garden, with paths and winding routes that lead you on to explore further, and you can read more about it in this month's (July) issue of The English Garden, or in the series that Helen is writing for Gardeners' World magazine. You can also see more pictures on Helen's blog (see link in the column on the right).
There was one final surprise. Zoë introduced herself! She'd been at the talk too. It was lovely to meet her, not least because it was great to have someone to chatter to about the garden. (My husband had come with me, but he's not really a plantaholic.) The world of garden bloggers is a strange one: suddenly you seem to be cybersoulmates with a host of people around the world. So it was rather nice to discover when you meet a fellow garden blogger that yes, they do seem like an old friend, and you could quite happily spend all day talking to them.