The Wellywoman Awards 2012 – Part One

Tags

Burgon and Ball, Daucus carota 'Black Knight', Derek Jarman, Dungeness Nature Reserve, felco secateurs, greenhouse, Lia and Juliet's supper club, tayberry

With winter approaching it’s a good time to look back and reflect on the year that has passed and, as the award season is starting, I thought I’d introduce the inaugural Wellywoman awards. Courtesy of Wellyman and his rediscovered model making skills I have the ‘Golden Wellies’ which I’ll award for those garden related greats of 2012 and, in homage to the Golden Raspberries that go to the year’s worst films, I bring you the ‘Golden Snail’ awards. It was going to be the ‘Golden Slugs’ but modelling a slug and making it actually distinguishable from, well, a blob of modelling clay proved a little difficult.

So it gives me great pleasure to announce, in no particular order, the recipients of the first ‘Golden Wellies’.

Daucus carota ‘Black Knight’

My flower of the year has to be Daucus carota ‘Black Knight’. In itself, it’s not the showiest of blooms and the tricky growing conditions this year meant it took a while to get going but once it did flower it just kept on going right into November. The plummy-pink coloured umbel flowers of this variety of carrot looked so good in arrangements and they lasted up to 2 weeks when cut.

This was the first proper year for my tayberry fruiting. Although I made the mistake of buying the thorn covered variety which has made it interesting and painful when training into some semblance of a structure, its fruits have more than made up for any scratches. A combined flavour of blackberry and raspberry and a long fruiting season have made this a great addition to the plot.

The humble pea gets my nod for an award. This is the first year I have grown them. I’ve always wondered what was the point when frozen peas are so good but nothing on the veg patch this year could beat the sweetness of freshly picked peas eaten raw. They are top on my list of crops to grow in 2013.

My favourite TV gardening programme of the year had to be Sarah Raven’s Bees, Butterflies and Blooms. The series followed Sarah as she tried to change perceptions about community planting schemes for the benefit of locals and wildlife. It was fascinating, informative and, at times, infuriating (it appears some would rather having plain old, boring grass than a beautiful flower studded meadow).

This was the year I discovered the delights of squashes. The plural there is really rather stretching it. I grew Uchiki kuri and the weather conspired to make this not the best of years to be trying to grow squash for the first time.  I didn’t, at one point, think I was going to get anything at all from the plants so I was delighted when I spotted two yellow fruit forming. It was a bit of a race against the lower temperatures and lack of sunshine to see whether they would actually ripen in time. In the end, one grew to a really significant size and turned a beautiful deep orange colour, the other ripened but didn’t grow very much. It was a squash version of Little and Large. Despite the low yield I’ve been bitten by the squash bug, so I’m hoping I can fit some more varieties into my planting plan for next year.

The tool of the year has to go to my Burgon and Ball flower snips. I was lucky enough to receive a pair this time last year to review on my blog but November wasn’t the best time of year to put them through their paces. I didn’t think anything could replace my Felco secateurs but I used my snips all year-long. They can cut through surprisingly thick stems and are lighter and smaller than my secateurs so I tended to favour them. The one problem is their green coloured handles. I’m not sure how much time I wasted this year hunting for them after I’d put them down somewhere. I think some coloured tape around the handles may be applied this winter.

Derek Jarman’s garden

Despite the weather I did get the chance to visit some beautiful gardens. After years of wanting to go to some of the iconic gardens of East Sussex and Kent we finally got around to visiting them. My favourite was Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness. The simplest and possibly least typical garden it had immense charm and was set in a stunningly bleak location. The plants that thrived here seemed all the more precious because they were growing in such a hostile environment. For me it showed that the need to grow is an innate response to our environment and that even when faced with such unlikely growing conditions the desire to create beauty using plants was too strong to resist.

The amazing food at Lia and Juliet’s Supper Club deserves one of my ‘Golden Wellies’. I was new to the concept of supper clubs when we went along in June but what really drew me to this one was the celebration of fruit and vegetables and seasonality. Keen allotmenteers, Lia and Juliet wanted to showcase the produce they grew and make it a real event. With tea-lights lining the path to the front door, fairy lighting in the back garden and a verandah for pre-dinner drinks the scene was set for a great night. Not only was the food great but so was the company. In fact we loved it so much we went back again in October.

Some golden wellies have to go to the newly installed greenhouse. It was a pain to build and was responsible for a fair degree of swearing and although it’s not really the time of year to start using it to its full potential, I love it. There are already several seed trays of hardy annuals in there, some salad leaves and herbs. Roll on spring.

And finally, my last ‘Golden Wellies’ of 2012 go to my fellow garden bloggers and tweeters. They are too many of you to mention individually but you’re great. You inform, inspire and amuse. I’m looking forward to reading about the highs and lows of 2013.

Read my next post to see who and what will receive a ‘Golden Snail’.

Advertisement

Bringing You The Dribber

Tags

Christmas present, Derek Jarman, Dribber, Hen and Hammock, stocking filler for gardeners, sustainability

Hen and Hammock dribber

One of the side effects of having a blog is the emails I sometimes receive. There are ones I don’t even bother opening, generally with words such as Viagra in them. There was a request to use a photo from my post on Derek Jarman’s garden for a Hungarian art magazine which was featuring an article on artists and their gardens. And then, occasionally, I’m asked to review products. Generally I turn down these offers. I’ve no desire for the blog to become an advertising ground for other companies. There’s also the problem with the ethics of a company. My blog is a very personal thing and I don’t like the idea of being linked to products that may damage the environment or with companies I know little about. I don’t like to stray too far from the themes of gardening, the environment and the countryside but you’d be surprised at the companies that contact me. There was talk on twitter a few weeks ago amongst garden bloggers about who had received emails from a PR company asking them to blog about the wonders of Velcro. Is Velcro that useful to gardeners? I recently was sent an offer of writing about AGA cleaning products. Firstly, I’m not sure of the relevance of AGA cleaning products to the people who read my blog and secondly, I’m not sure how I can review AGA cleaning products without an AGA.

This is all a rather long-winded way of saying that occasionally I will get asked to review something that intrigues me, is actually relevant and I really like the sound of the company behind the product. And this is how I happen to have come across the Dribber. Designed by the team at Hen and Hammock the idea was to combine several tasks in one tool. Measuring 20cm long the dribber is designed to fit standard and half-sized seed trays and allows you to drill lines for seed sowing, dib holes for individual seeds and then tamp down the surface of the compost.

I have to admit I’m not much of a gadget girl as my kitchen cupboards will attest. I’m not an asparagus steamer or pasta maker type of person and this follows into the garden. Generally, this is because of a lack of space to store all these tools and once you’ve managed to function without them for so long why bother accumulating more stuff but I do like the idea of a product that multi-tasks.

The dribber is beautifully made in Shropshire. The wood is oak, grown sustainably but, unfortunately, imported from America. But as Andrew, from Hen and Hammock, points out there is very little sustainable oak grown here in the UK. Perhaps if we managed our woodland more effectively we would be able to exploit them more successfully as a sustainable resource.

Wooden tools always feel so nice to handle. There’s a warmth to the wood that you don’t get with metal or plastic and there’s a feeling that this is a product that will last. Like the old tools you can see in the potting shed at Heligan, quality tools like this feel like they’ll be around for a long time.

When it comes to seed sowing I tend to be a bit haphazard. My RHS tutor would shudder at that sentence. Trying to grow all of my plants for the allotment using one windowsill means that I have to maximise the space I have and this includes in the trays and pots when I sow. I tend to split seed trays up into 3 or 4 sections and start off 3 or 4 different varieties rather than devoting one tray to one type of plant. I also sow quite closely together and then prick out and plant on quickly. The spacing of the dribber is quite generous compared to what I would normally do, but there is also the ability to use it as a drill. There aren’t any seeds that I need to sow at the moment but I did do a dummy run in the shed a few days ago and it does what it says and is nice to use. With my new greenhouse and the ability to have a potting bench now, rather than using the floor outside my shed, I plan to be much more organised and methodical about my seed sowing and this tool will certainly be well used come the spring.

It’s the quality of the dribber, its sustainable credentials and it’s mulit-tasking that really are its selling points, in my opinion, and it is something that would make a great stocking filler for a gardening friend or family member. The price of £8.50, I think, is reasonable for such a well made piece and shows that British-made, sustainable products don’t have to be expensive.

I also like the ethos behind Hen and Hammock. A small independent company, their belief is that it is possible to have nice products for our homes and gardens that are long-lasting, made sustainably and in a way that doesn’t damage the planet. They also donate 10% of profits to non-profit organisations every year. They have a great range of products not just for the garden. Perhaps one of my favourite features about their website is the ‘meet the producers’ page. So many of the goods we buy nowadays are mass-produced by anonymous people somewhere. OK, most of us don’t have time to research where everything we buy comes from and their environmental credentials, but a company like Hen and hammock does that for you. For instance, there is Ken, a carpenter, who collects waste wood from local builders and makes traditional wooden seed trays or Damien, the last garden riddle maker in the UK who crafts beautiful garden tools from beech wood.

For more information and to see a great range of products which might inspire you, with Christmas coming, take a look at Hen and Hammock’s website.

Garden Tour – Derek Jarman’s Garden

Tags

Derek Jarman, Dungeness Nature Reserve, Prospect Cottage, RSPB Dungeness

Derek Jarman’s Garden – Prospect Cottage

Prospect Cottage and its garden on the shingle spit of Dungeness in Kent could not have been more of a contrast to the previous three gardens we had visited on our holiday. Pashley Manor, Great Dixter and Sissinghurst all artfully conjured up what most of us would think of as true English gardens; roses in abundance, herbaceous borders, topiary and the use of formal lines to contrast with the softness of the planting, all surrounding beautiful old buildings. My own taste in garden style is exactly that of these three gardens, probably more the wildness of Christpher Lloyd’s planting at Great Dixter but on a much, much smaller scale and as much as I loved visiting them you can have too much of a good thing. Prospect Cottage provided the refreshing, stimulating change that was needed.

Driftwood sculptures and planting in shingle

The garden surrounding Prospect Cottage was created by the film director Derek Jarman. He moved to the little tarred black fisherman’s cottage with it’s distinctive yellow window frames in the mid 1980s and created a garden in what seems an impossible place. He died in 1994 but nearly 20 years later his garden still attracts people to Dungeness’s unusual and bleak landscape.

The shingle spit of Dungeness has been created over thousands of years. Now a nature reserve it juts out into the English Channel. This flat and exposed piece of land is starkly different to the green rolling hills and farmland only several miles away. Bleak, and seemingly barren, it is hard to image anything or anyone would want to make this their home. In summer the sun beats down with little in the way of shade to provide respite and with nothing between it and the sea the winds rip through here with a regularity that gives the place a weather beaten look. The only other place we’ve felt more windswept was the Isles of Scilly. With such a flat landscape the sky feels huge and it takes on a different presence. Clouds scud across at a pace and you get a real feeling of being close to the elements. This scene is dominated by the looming buildings of the nuclear power station. A blot on the landscape to many it certainly adds to a sense of otherworldliness that makes Dungeness feel so unique. And yet, despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, this strange place is not desolate and lifeless, far from it.

Ox-eye daisies and valerian

There are over 100 houses at Dungeness. Some were created over 100 years ago from railway carriages, others are wooden huts like Prospect Cottage. It was to here that Jarman retreated when he discovered he was HIV positive. Around the cottage, in the shingle, he started to create a garden. All around Dungeness there are plants, growing in this seemingly inhospitable place they thrive, adapted to the salt-laden winds and the calcareous soil. Species such as the horned poppy, sea kale, woody nightshade and valerian appear through the shingle. These little plants hunkered down and battered by the elements inspired Derek Jarman. He added to the natives already growing encouraging more of them and experimenting with other plants to see if they too could cope with the conditions. He discovered that Californian poppies, lavender and santolina were all happy there. Collecting driftwood, bits of metal and rope and large pebbles that washed up on the shore he created sculptures and focal points which gave the garden some height. He also created patterns in the shingle such as concentric circles, a little like in Japanese gardens, where they rake gravel to symbolise water.

Californian poppies and valerian

He used flint stones to mark out planting areas giving this part of Dungeness a sense of definition and distinctness. Perhaps one of the most striking features to the visitor’s eye is the lack of boundaries. There are no fences, hedges or walls separating the cottages and the houses themselves have a feeling of being unintended, almost like they blew in on the wind but I love how Jarman used the bits and pieces he found lying around to define the space around him.

Prospect Cottage is now privately owned and the garden is not actually open to the public but it is possible to view it from the road right in front where you can get a perfectly good view of the garden. Tempting as it was to wander through the garden and around to the back with no boundaries there to stop you, we didn’t, remaining by the road and respecting the owners privacy. Apparently there used to be a group of bonsai sloe trees several inches tall but each spreading about a foot which would fruit and flower. I don’t know whether they are still there or not but the gardens seem to have changed little from when Jarman was still alive so I have little reason to doubt there isn’t still a magical little bonsai forest on Dungeness.

Flint edged borders and flowers

We visited one evening with the sun setting and parked up. A hare, only the second time we’d seen one, bounded past and marsh harriers and hobbies flew over head. It’s strange really that the garden we visited for free and only briefly, that was tiny in comparison to the others on the tour and that had such a limited number of plants is perhaps the garden I will remember most fondly. The oasis in the shingle.

There is a fascinating book about the garden at Prospect Cottage if you would like to read more about Derek Jarman and his creation.

Getting Back

Tags

Derek Jarman, Great Dixter, Pashley Manor, Perch Hill, Sarah Raven, Sissinghurst Castle

Great Dixter Oast Houses

A feeling of trepidation always accompanies a return from holiday. Wellyman worries whether the house will still be standing, I, on the other hand wonder what state the garden and allotment will be in. We have just come back from a week in East Sussex and, miraculously, bearing in mind what a shocking summer this is turning out to be, had good weather and the only rain was at night. It appears the south-east of Wales hasn’t faired so well if the height of the River Wye is anything to go by. As we drove past it on our return its churning, chocolately brown water flowing rapidly downstream told us there had been a lot of rain and the unseasonal strong and gusty winds made me wonder how the plants had coped.

Stunning poppy at Pashley Manor

It is incredible the difference a week can make and certainly all the rain has meant the garden looks incredibly lush. Those plants not reliant on warmth are growing at a pace, those hoping for something warmer are looking positively weedy in comparison. It’s on days like today that I love the fact we have no lawn. I hated being greeted by the foot high grass that made the garden that looked lovingly tendered before the holiday look like something the local farmer would like to get his hands on when we returned. There’s nothing like returning from holiday and suddenly feeling overwhelmed by the chores that will need to be done, at least lawn mowing is one less task for the Welly household.

Sissinghurst and the white garden

After a much needed cup of tea, some unpacking and food we wandered up to the plot. Considering the buffeting it is taking it is looking remarkably good. There’ll be bucket loads of flowers to pick tomorrow, plenty of strawberries and our first broad beans and peas. Some annual asters don’t look well and the topsy-turvy weather means I might have a gap of several weeks with few flowers, whilst I wait for the later flowering plants to bloom. The broad beans, peas and climbing beans have all struggled with the wind. My plot is quite exposed to the prevailing south-westerly wind and it is quite a challenge to keep everything upright. The broad beans are certainly going to need some remedial staking work tomorrow. The courgettes are sulking, it really isn’t warm enough for them. Still, I feel I can breathe a sigh of relief now.

Derek Jarman’s Garden

For years now we had been saying we wanted to visit Sissinghurst Castle Gardens and Great Dixter and so this year we booked a week on the Sussex coast with the plan to tour the gardens of that county and its neighbour Kent and it’s from there that we’ve just returned. It turned into a bit of a garden fest with Pashley Manor, Perch Hill and Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness, along with several nurseries all visited in our whistle-stop trip. Often when you have wanted to visit much lauded places it is the unexpected that captures your imagination the most. There were many highs; roses at their best, beautiful wildflowers growing along the coast, my first sighting of a bee orchid, some gardening book bargain purchases and a few lows; the inability of visitor attractions to provide tasty, reasonably priced food and being bitten by some marauding insects that have certainly left their mark on my legs. I’ll post about the gardens we saw over the next week but for now there is a pile of washing waiting and an early night before a day on the plot, picking produce.