Chelsea Flower Show 2012: finishing touches

Wandering round the Chelsea showground on the Sunday before the show opens, you are struck by the sense of focus, and attention to detail. Everywhere you look, particularly in the Great Pavilion, where the exhibitors are still building their stands, you will see expressions of intense concentration, as the nurserymen and women assess each stem, and the impact of each grouping of plants.

Outside in the show gardens, there is endless sweeping, and clipping, and tidying going on. Here's a behind-the-scenes view.

Work on the National Association of Flower Arranging Societies stand gets under way. As the saying goes, you ain't seen nothing yet.

An impromptu picnic. Many of the exhibitors bring their own food - it's quicker (and cheaper).

Decisions, decisions - mulling over the heliconias on the Barbados Horticultural Society stand.

Displays of narcissi for the Walkers Bulbs @ Taylors stand

A fabulous conflagration of lupins at Westcountry Nurseries. The yellow and purple one in the middle gives it that final zing, like a pilot light.

 Final preparations at the southern African-inspired garden for WaterAid

 L'Occitane's L'Immortelle garden. When they've finished the work, it just needs one more thing. Sunshine.

And finally, the hard-working members of the press, being entertained to tea and cake in the press tent after a long cold day by RHS director-general Sue Biggs. On the left, garden writer Val Bourne and on the right (with scarf), my colleague the lovely Anna Pavord.

Chelsea Flower Show 2012: the first glimpse

Andy Sturgeon's garden for M&G Investments, the sponsors of the show

The Sunday before the Chelsea Flower Show opens is traditionally the real, working press day, when journalists can be reasonably safe in assuming that they can view the gardens, perhaps talk to the exhibitors and take photographs without being knocked sideways by a camera crew or a flying celebrity.
Monday, the official press day, offers so many distractions in the way of champagne, celebrities and catching up with your mates, that it's sometimes difficult to know where to look first - are you going to check out the new rose on the David Austin stand, or check out Ringo Starr on the WaterAid garden?
Walking through the gates of the show for the first time each year is a very exciting moment. What will the gardens be like? I've usually seen the sketches, but I find it very difficult to predict from the drawing how the garden will look in real life.
Anyway, here are some of the main show gardens. It was a very cold day, with grey skies, and a raw wind. Apparently, according to the weather forecast, we're set for much better weather later in the week.

Cleve West's garden for Brewin Dolphin, the investment management company, who celebrate their 250th anniversary this year. 

Detail of Cleve's trademark planting - a soft, loose naturalistic effect, with jolts of colour from the red poppies.

Joe Swift's first Chelsea garden, for Homebase and the Teenage Cancer Trust.

I loved this garden - I love the combination of rust, bright green and grey. Copper and rust are difficult colours to get right in a garden - they can seem overbearing or even slightly gloomy.

To me, the there seemed to be a very good balance between the structure and the planting - for example, the monolithic wooden screens that frame the views of the garden, and the branches of the young plane tree. 

The addition of the plane tree helped the garden blend in to the Chelsea showground, merging seamlessly with the borrowed landscape of mature plane trees in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, where the show is held. 

Tom Hoblyn's garden for Arthritis Research UK. The planting here was inspired by Beth Chatto's dry garden in Essex., although the design reflects the formality of the great Italian Renaissance gardens

TV gardening presenter and plantswoman Carol Klein filming in the Arthritis Research garden  for the BBC's coverage of the show

Andy Sturgeon's garden for M&G investments. Another of my favourites, it featured a sculpture running through a formal canal, giving the effect of a stream of bubbles. The pattern is picked up in the walls/sculptures, and also reflects the shapes of the flowers. Like Joe Swift's garden, this is one that looked good from every single angle.

More bubbles .... 

... and a final flourish of Sturgeon bubbles

The garden designed by Sarah Price, one of the team working on the 2012 London Olympic Park  in east London, for the Daily Telegraph. It's an evocation of the British countryside - water, woodland and wild flowers.

Nigel Dunnett's garden for the Royal Bank of Canada is designed to harvest and filter rainwater runoff. It's one of several gardens dealing with the theme of water (or lack thereof) at Chelsea this year. I loved the Turk's Cap lilies.

Diarmuid Gavin's Magical Garden for Westland Horticulture, an 80ft pyramid comprising seven floors, on which you can find a greenhouse, a rose garden, various seating areas, and a stainless steel flume through which you can come quickly down to earth again. I'm a big fan of Diarmuid, and I think this is a typically audacious design, but it's slightly let down by the planting - the bamboo which forms quite a lot of the green wall looks a bit sad, I think.

Jihae Hwang's Quiet Time: DMZ Forbidden Garden, which commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Korean conflict. It represents the vegetation that has grown up in the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea, and includes a watchtower. It's a fantastic concept, and beautifully done, but it suffers from its position in the show, which is right next to Diarmuid's pyramid (You can just see a corner of the pyramid on the left-hand side). This not only makes it difficult to photograph, but I walked past it several times, thinking it was just a dumping ground for the gardens being built around it. 

Arne Maynard's Laurent-Perrier Bicentenary Garden. There was huge excitement about the return of designer Arne Maynard to Chelsea this year. i was intrigued by his use of copper beech, which were common in big suburban gardens when I was a child, but which have fallen from favour - probably because of their size. Pleaching is a good way of incorporating them into a small, formal garden. 

Goodbye old shed, hello new sheds

Finally, I've got rid of our old shed. It belonged to the previous owners of our house, and I've always hated it. There, at last I can say it. I HATED IT!
Why did I hate it? First, it was an overlap (or weatherboard) shed, where the slats of wood that form the walls overlap each other. Or, as frequently happens, the slats of wood do not quite overlap each other, and allow gaps for ivy to push its way in, for mice to gain entry and for water to seep through.
Second, the door had warped/fallen out of position, so it wouldn't shut properly. This meant that water was coming in via the walls and the door.
Third, the acrylic windowpane had broken. This meant that water was coming in via the walls, the door and the window.
Fourth, the roof was leaking. This meant that water was coming in via the walls, the door, the window and the roof. It was pretty darned wet in there.
My new shed is a shiplap shed, which is constructed on tongue and groove basis. This is much stronger and more weather-proof. The window is pristine and uncracked, the roof is sound, the shed is snug, and it smells gorgeous. I might even put up some little lace curtains and move in.
The old shed was on a concrete base, which was good and bad news. Good, because it was a solid base, but bad because I would ideally have liked a bigger shed. However, I couldn't bear the thought of reorganising the entire end of the garden, so the new shed is a replacement 6 x4ft.
I've also had a garden storage shed installed, which is a bit smaller (4 x 3ft). My idea was that the mower would go in here, leaving the shed free for me to put my tools in. To my horror, the mower did not fit in the 4 x3 shed. (You know that O......M.......G....... feeling when you realise you have made a ghastly mistake of some sort? It lasted about 10 minutes.)
I finally worked out that I could keep the mower in the shed, and put my tools in the store cupboard. Simple!

Here's the door to the old shed, which I had tried to disguise by adorning with a homemade trellis of homegrown bamboo. It sort of worked in my head

Water stains inside the old shed. If I was a conceptual artist, I could probably have made a lot of money charging admission to this. I could have said it was a statement about the effect of water on our lives.

It didn't take long to clear out the old shed ...

I just had to dump the stuff here...

And here...

And clear this bit for the tool store...

Oh, and here's some more junk. Martin, who helps me with the garden, did a lot of it, thank goodness. He took quite a lot to the tip too, and I suspect more will go.

And here are the new sheds!

Not a single plant was harmed in the making of this post (or indeed the putting up of the sheds). I was very impressed. Huge thanks to Premier Sheds in Streatham for their work.

 Here's the little tool store.

Oh, the relief of having a shed with a door that shuts properly. Oh, the relief of having TWO sheds with doors that shut properly.
So, only one dilemma remains. To paint or not to paint? Everything else in my garden is now painted in a sort of greige - like a stone colour. The old shed was stained very dark brown, which was good in that it disappeared into the corner, but bad in that it looked a bit like a black hole.  (And that was just from the outside.)
At the moment, I'm quite enjoying the natural colour of the wood. But I might get a bit of trellis and cover the window, so it looks as if it has glazing bars. I can never resist the urge to tinker with things.
Oh, and put up the lace curtains.

Experimenting with Graham's dry shade solutions

When I heard that the latest book by my former colleague Graham Rice was on dry shade, I was intrigued. Dry shade is a problem that most gardeners encounter at one time or another, whether you have a small urban plot or a large country garden. There is always one tricky area in a rain shadow - caused by a wall, or a tree, or next door's shed or whatever.
I asked Graham to write a piece for the Independent Magazine about this universal problem (you can read it here) and, of course, I was keen to scrutinise the book itself.
There are three key pieces of advice. You can try each one individually, or you can combine them in a sort of belt-and-braces attack on the problem.
My particular problem area was on the left-hand side of my garden, towards the end. It faces north, and lies beneath a huge ash tree and an enormous eucalyptus (next door's). At the end of the garden is my rickety old shed, and in front of that is a very boring dark green holly, which drops its leaves all over the place (OUCH!). The holly was a sort of blob shape, which was useful in a way, because it hid the shed.
Because of the big trees, the soil was very dry. Some things would grow, but they'd always start to look a bit sad after a while. I had a trachelospermum in a large pot, which flowers every year, and a Fatshedera lizei on the fence (they grow anywhere), plus an evergreen clematis which does tend to get a bit stressed in summer. I'd like to show a "before" picture, but it was such a nondescript area, I've never really felt the urge to photograph it. You can get the idea from this photo, though. The bench marks the start of the border.

Graham's three key pieces of advice are these: add soil/organic matter; irrigate; and where necessary/possible, increase light by pruning low-growing branches.
The easiest way to add soil is to build a raised bed, or (in my case) use troughs. These days, thanks to the popularity of veg-growing, garden centres have a huge variety of troughs - wooden, plastic, collapsible, you name it. They're much bigger than conventional window boxes, which means you can get a decent amount of compost into them. I bought these two wooden ones, which were on special offer.

We're having so much rain here in the UK at the moment that I couldn't work up any enthusiasm for putting in an irrigation system. I'm too busy putting down roll-out tracks to protect the grass from my wellies. But I did decide to prune back the holly - effectively raising its crown. This had three benefits - it looked better, it let more light into the border, and it stopped the holly stabbing me in the backside every time I got the mower out of the shed.
I haven't finished pruning it, because the shed is being replaced this summer. This is also why I haven't quite finished the end of the border - there's no point doing it now if the shedmen are going to trample all over that corner in a few weeks' time.

I was very tempted to paint the wooden troughs to match my new bench, which is a colour called Honed Slate (It seems an odd name for paint used on a wooden bench, but never mind). It approximates to Cuprinol Garden Shades Muted Clay. However, I thought a light colour might be a bit intrusive, and would show every mud splash. So I painted them dark brown instead.

Planting up the troughs was easy - I had lots of things hanging about at the end of the garden looking for a home. Hostas, I find, will tolerate dry shade quite well, so long as they are planted in lots of organic matter, so they don't dry out too quickly. Maples, too, will do the same - and because this fence faces north, they get light, but very little direct sun, which is what they like.
Of course, with a trough you can mix your own compost. I added peat-free general purpose, well-rotted manure, and some ericaceous because the maples like that.

Already the troughs look quite well established (you can almost hear those hostas heave a sigh of relief. They'd been languishing next to the shed all winter). As a final touch, and to stop the containers and the bench getting too mud-splashed, I put down a mulch of pebbles beneath them. Here's Mario come to take a look at what's going on.

The roll-out paths are from Primrose and I've left mine in two bits. They are described as "instant" roll-out paths. This is a slight exaggeration. It took me quite a while to put mine together - they don't arrive as a roll-out path (which is what I thought), but as a box of slats, which are then fixed together with plastic pegs. You need very strong hands - and if you haven't got very strong hands, you need a hammer, a pair of pliers, several cups of tea, an extensive vocabulary of swear words and something entertaining to watch on telly afterwards while you calm down.
HOWEVER. They are very, very good at protecting the lawn - you can leave them down for days and the lawn doesn't go yellow. Brilliant if you're having a party, or you're going backwards and forwards across the same bit of grass.

The day I forgot to breathe

It was a fairly normal week here in Victoria's Backyard - training on new production system for work, going to hear Alan Titchmarsh and friends talking about garden visiting at the Garden Museum, doing the supermarket run, the washing, the gardening, staying up late to watch UK local elections coverage, getting up early to watch yet more UK elections coverage, going to work to cover UK elections, staying late because of gremlins in the London mayoral count, going to choir practice this morning, setting off for the Crocus open day ...
And then I hit the buffers.
My neighbour Ruth was driving us to Crocus, which is at Windlesham in Surrey about an hour from us, and before we'd got very far, I started to feel incredibly faint. I came out in a cold sweat, I felt nauseous, I had chest pains, my legs were shaking, my toes had pins and needles. I think it was a panic attack.
I've had one before, and was most insulted when the doctor told me what it was. "Excuse ME," I said indignantly, "I don't DO panic attacks!"
The doctor patiently explained that you didn't actually have to be consciously panicking in order to have a panic attack. They can strike at random - sometimes even when you're looking forward to something. It's the body's way of saying: "Enough, already!" in response to too much work, or stress, or excitement.
Here's the thing. I like to fit a lot into my life. I like to take advantage of the opportunities I have to meet people, go places, experience things. I think that's a healthy approach to life.
But I have also become aware that I find it difficult to switch off. If I'm honest, I feel slightly guilty about saying no to things, or sitting around "doing nothing". (In other words, relaxing.) I've got past the stage where I wait for someone else to give me permission to rest (I'm not that pathetic), but I don't always remember to tell myself to take five.
I feel a bit ashamed that, even at my advanced age, I still haven't worked out how to have a life, while also having a rest.
"Do you have a busy week next week, can you take some time off?" asked Ruth, as I clambered out of the car to gulp some fresh air for the umpteenth time while we made our painful way home.
"I'll be fine," I said, "I'm not in on Monday, and Tuesday is a really easy day - I'll do a couple of hours at work, then I've got to go to the London Press Club awards ceremony in Knightsbridge at lunchtime, and then I've got choir dress rehearsal at 4pm, followed by the performance at 7pm [We're doing the Messiah]."
"That's your idea of an easy day?" said Ruth. "Yeah," I said. "Bit of a skive, really."
Ruth, who is a former television producer and knows all about the work/life balance, just gave me The Look.

Bluebells and the great British 'drought'

You've probably read in the papers, or seen on the TV news, that Britain is experiencing a drought at the moment, and seven water authorities have instigated a hosepipe ban. What does this mean for British gardeners?
Well, it means we're experiencing constant rain. As I write this, there are flood warnings right across the UK, with the worst expected to be in the South-west. It's been raining for most of April, and the rain is set to continue into May. Hmm. Funny kind of drought.
The water companies say that, despite all this precipitation, it will take more than a few weeks of rain to replenish the supplies of groundwater. The rain, they say, is good, but most of it will evaporate or run off. I say we need to take a very close look at how we manage water in this country.
In typical fashion, your average stoical Brit is turning the whole thing into a joke. (This could be because it is a joke.) "What drought?" is the usual greeting as two sodden passers-by meet.
Today is expected to be recorded as the wettest day of the year so far, so naturally it was the ideal time (in the Alice in Wonderland world that is drought-stricken Britain) to visit the bluebell woods of south-east England.
Every year, I vow to visit a bluebell wood. Every year, I fail to do so. So this year, I booked myself on a tour with Janine Wookey that took in Emmetts Garden in Kent, Great and Little Earls Wood in Surrey, and Nymans - one of the most beautiful gardens in England - which is in West Sussex.

We started with Emmetts, built by Frederick Lubbock in 1890 as a family home high on the Kentish Weald. The garden slopes down to a deep valley, where bluebells, which like a moist, shady, undisturbed  place in which to grow, carpet the lower slopes.

Although bluebells don't particularly like hot, dry conditions, they don't like to be totally bereft of light either. Deciduous woodland is their idea of heaven. Mine too.

The view from Emmetts, across to Bough Beech reservoir. I should imagine it's spectacular on a clear day. It's not bad on a rainy day either.

There are other things to see at Emmetts apart from bluebells. I particularly like this way of growing tulips, where instead of having one variety only, or perhaps two toning colours, you have this random effect. It looks like a tin of sweeties, although I'm not sure how you would lift the tulips. (Apparently the badgers do quite a good job of lifting them at Emmetts.) I think it would work just as well in a border, though.

The colours of the spring foliage have been spectacular this year, helped by the stormy weather which provides an ever-changing lighting effect.

The monster trunk at the front of the picture above is Genista aetnensis, and behind is the young copper foliage of a maple.

I'm quite happy with the lime-green of young birch or beech leaves as a contrast to a misty sea of bluebells, but I had to admit that these coral-coloured azaleas looked superb.

Great and Little Earls Wood, just 20 minutes away by coach, is managed by the Woodland Trust, and admission is free. Here the bluebells were punctuated by the flowers of the wood anemone, Anemone nemorosa. 

 I am not going to offer any apologies for showing you so many pictures of bluebells. The bluebell season is a "moment", like the first cherry blossom in Japan, when you just have to stand and pay homage to this wildflower phenomenon, even if you have rain dripping down your face.

 After squelching through the bluebells, we had lunch at the pub over the road. No, we didn't eat oak leaves, but the food was very good.

From Surrey, we headed further west to Nymans, in the village of Handcross. I've always loved Nymans - Craig and I went there the day after we got married, and we used to take the children there when they were small, so it has quite sentimental memories for me. It was the first time I'd been back since Craig died.
Luckily, Janine had laid on a tour of the woodlands there, so I didn't have time to mope. We were swept off by Michael and Don, two of the volunteers who help manage the woods, who gave us a guided tour, provided all sorts of information and lent an arm to those of us who were slipping and sliding about in the mud. (You get a lot of mud when there is a drought in the UK.)
Nymans used to be the home of the Messel family, including Anne Messel, later Countess of Rosse, the mother of Lord Snowdon. Don told us that he used to be Lady Rosse's dentist, and she would only consent to be examined after he had consumed two sherries. His examination was somewhat incommoded, apparently, by her refusal to remove her headscarf.

 I always think of this as quintessential West Sussex scenery: a view of rolling hills and majestic trees

Wild violets growing in the grass beneath the oaks

Five minutes at Nymans is enough to turn anyone into a tree hugger. Just look at these leaves

And beneath them, the woodland moss, Polystichum formosum

See that water running down the hill? That's a little stream. You get them in the UK, apparently, when there's a "drought". (OK, OK, enough with the drought jokes.)

Not only bluebells, but primroses!

 And a beautiful little Asplenium scolopendrium growing at the foot of a ruined wall.

This cloud-pruning is both charming and eccentric. I love the way the new growth on the box seems to glow at this time of year.
Despite the rain, I had a wonderful day out. It was so relaxing not to have to drive, or to act as a sheepdog, or make all the decisions about where to go, what/where to eat and so on. My fellow passengers were a very jolly bunch and I really enjoyed sitting chatting over a glass of wine in the pub, or gossiping on the journey back while Chris the driver negotiated the motorway traffic jams.
Thank you, Janine!