The Wellywoman Awards 2012 – Part One

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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’.

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Garden Tour – Derek Jarman’s Garden

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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.