I have always loved rhododendrons.  From an early age I remember playing hide and seek inside old specimens at Saville Gardens which was close to my family home.  The flowers are everything I like in a flower – blousey, exotic, bright but it is also the whole structure of the plant that delights me.  I should clarify that I am talking about mature specimens here not the neat dwarf tidy examples that are now prompted for the small garden or to grow in pots if you don’t have the right soil.  It is the strange peeling bark, the twisted and contorted branches, the large glossy leaves I  love.  As a small child they were magical to be in and my imagination has been caught ever since.

Recently I have had a longing to see some large rhododendrons again.  I have missed them since we moved here in 2000.  Although they will grow in this area and you see many examples, including one or two smaller ones in my own garden, I think I was looking for somewhere that would bring back the excitement and wonder I remember as a child.  I had read about the Dorothy Clive  Garden in Shropshire but its a 3 hour round trip and seemed a little far.  Then I remembered that Hergest Croft in Herefordshire had rhododendrons.  I peered at the photographs on their website and decided that this might be the place for me and only a 2 hour round trip.

Hergest Croft is the home of the current President of the RHS, Elizabeth Banks and unsurprisingly the horticulture is of a high level.  There is a wonderful rock and pool garden where masses of ferns were unfurling and all sorts of other delights but I knew the rhododendrons demanded a 20 minute walk out of the garden proper, across a field full of gamboling lambs and finally through  beech wood.  Hergest Croft whilst  being well-known isn’t that well visited.  I suppose it’s a bit of a trek for many people being on the English/Welsh borders and so I doubt there were more than 20 or 30 people visiting on Sunday afternoon and I only encountered one or two during my walk to Park Wood, where the rhodendrons were.

I passed through the beech wood (top photo) and the bright sunlight was illuminating the leaves giving a wonderful iridescent glow.  The birds sang and it was just me out exploring.  Then as my map indicated I was getting closer there were glimpses of bright colour high up in the tree canopy and I mean high.  I am no judge of size and distance but I would say 30ft at least in some cases.  This is somewhere where you have to look up above you as much as in front, to the sides and down.

As you enter the rhododendron area there is a large pool which is fed by a small stream trickling down the hillside.  The water then exits the pool by a small waterfall and continues down the side of the hill. So if you can imagine the silence only interrupted by bird song, running water and the occasional breeze through the trees.  At this point I felt quite overwhelmed, ridiculously so.  I felt transported back to the emotions I had experienced as a child.  Here I was surrounded by vast, giant, enormous rhododendrons, smothered in flowers – it was magical and the walk was certainly worthwhile.

If you have ever visited the Lost Garden of Heligan and been bowled over by the hidden valley where there are vast tree ferns and palms and you feel like you have stumbled on a lost world then this is similar except with rhododendrons.  The fanciful part of my nature wondered if what I was seeing was anything like the planthunters experienced when they discovered the rhododendrons in the mountains and valleys of China but then I heard a distant voice of another visitor and I was brought back to  the here and now.

The map takes you on a loop round the main rhododendron area on either side of the stream and you see gunnera emerging from its winter break, sunk cabbage with its yellow flowers just appearing under vast elephant ear like leaves.  The ground  is littered with fallen flowers but also with last year’s fallen leaves and in at least two areas these had decayed slowly and become leaf skeletons which was quite a strange site.

I took so many photographs and few, if any, do the wood justice or give a sense of the size and scale of the plants.  I don’t know how long ago they were planted but the current custodians are the third generation and I think I saw a plaque commemorating 100 years of the garden.

Sadly the heat of the day started to get to me and a cooling drink beckoned so I walked back through the shimmering beech wood, past the lambs who were frolicking this time and returned to the formal gardens.

You know you are in the formal gardens as you pass through a set of these rather superb wrought iron gates.  The tree behind them, an acer I think, was also lit by the sun and was being much photographed.  I could have gone on to visit the azalea glade but the flowers were only just opening and to be honest I didn’t want to dilute my rhododendron experience.  I did however visit the kitchen garden and orchard on my way to the car as I had really liked this part of the garden when I previously visited with Michelle (aka Veg Plotting) some years ago – we had decided it was as we imagined Mr McGregor’s veg garden to be.  This time early in the season it was the spring bulbs in the ancient orchard that stole the show and I will try to remember to show you those later on.

Suffice to say that I hankering to find some vast rhododendrons in order to relive my childhood memories has been satisfied.  I will be going back maybe later this year to see the acers in the Autumn but I will definitely be going back soon.

I have been completely immersed in gardening this weekend and its been wonderful.  The sun has shone and now on Sunday evening I have pleasantly achy limbs.

I have been busy planting out plants that were waiting on the patio in the new border.  Tree peony (label lost its waiting so long), Paeonia lectiflora ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, two Ashwood hellebores, Hamamelia xintermedia ‘Aphrodite’, half a dozen dahlias and I also relocated a Cephalaria gigantea which was shoehorned into the old narrow top of the wall border.  I am going to have to keep a careful eye on them and water and feed carefully to help them recover from the trauma.  I still have some chrysanthemums to add as well as lots of annuals to fill gaps.  The other issue is that the small plants that were at the front of the old border are now near the back of the new one.  I am in a dilemma whether to move them now or leave them be and move them in the Autumn which I think might be kinder.

New big border

As a diversion I also had a meeting at lunchtime about the summer horticultural show at my local club which I am helping with.  I am now stewarding the flower entry judge but apparently I’m not allowed to give hints about my own entries.

Today I went for a little more gentle gardening and spent several hours potting up seedlings, I planted the first hanging basket and completely repotted my pelargoniums.  Instead of just topping up the compost in the pots, I completely emptied the pot and replaced the compost.  Its been a few years since they were originally potted up so I thought this would do them good plus I could  use the old compost on the new border.  The pelargoniums have been put out along the gravel steps and on the top of the wall.  My son, on returning for a weekend away, said he thought quite Mediterranean – well the sun was shining for a change.

The bare path at the top of the steps is the workshop site which is changing rapidly – it’s quite scary.

Finally this afternoon I treated myself to an excursion to the far side of Herefordshire, just over an hour away, to visit Hergest Croft.  I have had a desire to see rhododendrons for a few weeks, they take me back to my childhood, and I knew that Hergest Croft had a collection.  My trip was very worthwhile but I will save that for another post.

Finally I will finish with a photograph of the bog garden which has thrived on the cooler and damper conditions that we have had so far this year.  It’s all very lush and the Rheum (or maybe its a Rodgersia) seems to be getting out of hand and popping up everywhere so I may have to edit that at some point.

View from my favourite step

This is written in response to the latest prompt from the Grow Write Guild - the theme is what your garden sounds like. If you click on the link on the bird names you will hear what I hear.

For me the optimum gardening time is early evening when everyone else is busy with dinner, going out whatever.  At this time it seems I have the neighbourhood to myself – no lawnmowers, no strimmers, no children playing.

I sit quietly on the bottom step, my favourite place and listen.

The air is dominated by the strident high-pitched whistling song of the blackbird.  He warbles in a variety of notes and if you listen very carefully you can hear another blackbird answering him.  Such a hard sound to describe but its one I love and could listen to all evening.

Behind it is the softer trill of robins, we are visited by at least two on a daily basis and they have such sweet voices.  Gentle and reassuring not as demanding and strident as the blackbird.  Between them the air is full of sound.  If you close your eyes and relax it is almost deafening.

But now there is another sound, this time a man-made one, the soft but persistent drone of a car travelling along the nearby road on its way up the hills.  It is muffled and pushed to the background by the birds – nature winning out over man.

The blackbird and robin are occasionally joined by other birds I can’t recognise possibly thrush, starling, blue and great tit – all visit the garden regularly.  The one I do recognise is the dull coo of the wood pigeon accompanied by its clumsy flapping around the large prunus tree I sit under.  For me this is a sound I associated with an evening in the garden – soft, repetitive and familiar, almost hypnotic.

Other sounds sometimes pierce the bird song – the slam of a car door, the bark of a dog, the squawk of my near neighbours chicken and sometimes the call of a cuckoo but the birds always win.

This is my favourite soundtrack to the garden, its personal, private and very special.

Just to prove that my first Creative Thursday post wasn’t a one hit wonder here is another project finished.  This is the first thing I have crocheted that isn’t a granny square or a scarf.  Admittedly it is made up of rectangles so there is no shaping required – something I am yet to try.  The strap was entertaining as you crochet a tube going round and round and round, it grew rapidly like a mad snake and entertained the cat immensely.  I am also rather proud of the little flower on the front which I thought was going to be very hard but turned out to be simple.

The biggest dilemma I had was whether the felt the bag.  I had originally been enticed by the pattern in the Art of Crochet because of the prospect of having a go at felting but the wool, Twilleys Freedom, was so pretty and created a wonderful texture that to felt it seemed a pity.  Having recently discovered Ravelry I put my toe in the water and asked for advice.  I was promptly advised that felting would make it stronger and less like to tear so in for a penny in for a pound.  The felting was simple you just pop it on a hot wash with detergent, no conditioner, and include some old rough towels (or someone advised trainers).  I washed the tension square first to see what the effect would be.  It turned out OK so I threw caution to the wind and went for it.

I have to say that I think the result is great.  The fabric is definitely more solid and you feel it is unlikely to tear.  Sewing it up was simple although it took a few practices before I remembered how to do blanket stitch and I have to say I don’t think my finishing off inside the bag is as good as I would have liked but we live and learn.

Next up is a knitted short-sleeved summer cardigan.  I have my doubts since I haven’t knitted for a year and the last thing I knitted went horribly wrong a lot so I gave up.  Having a pile of wool sitting left over from this project and after yet more advice on Ravelry I found a pattern which looks straightforward and should work for the yarn I have.  My only slight anxiety is that I am used to knitting patterns designed for the wool I am using.  I am assured that I just need to do  tension square and adjust needle sizes and all will be well.  We shall see.  I also suspect that I will decide that I prefer crocheting to knitting.  It is so much easier especially when it goes wrong, no dropped stitches.

I will let you know how the cardigan goes – oh and that yarn is red too.  There seems to be a bit of a theme developing.

Note: Creative Thursday isn’t a meme, it’s just the heading I am using for various non-gardening projects I am doing and posting about – on a Thursday!

What a difference a month makes. I can now tell its a Horse Chestnut tree

For more monthly photos check out Katarina’s blog Roses and Stuff

I was asked a while ago to review a new innovation for plant watering, needless to say since I received the purerain handheld gun it has rained.  However the other week the temperatures briefly warmed up and I gave it a whirl.

The concept behind the innovation is to aerate tap water.  Why? I hear you ask do I want to do this.  Rain water contains oxygen, apparently gathered as th raindrops fall through the air and this helps the plants to extract nutrients more effectively.  Plants are dependant on air and water in their cells to help them work.  In fact only this week I was reading a magazine article where the author, Bob Flowerdew, commented that watering pots with tap water wasn’t as good as rain water as it contained less air.  However, whilst many of us have water butts during a dry spell these often don’t have sufficient capacity to fulfil all our needs and if you are like me you tend to connect the hose to the outside tap through habit.

The way that the purerain system aerates the water is by colliding the fast moving water against a curved surface. This works in the same way as a weir or waterfall aerates a river. After the water has been aerated it then moves forward and out of the holes at the front of the Gun. Due to all the mains pressure being lost on impact the water doesn’t leave the gun with as much power as it would with a normal gun so you need to be close to the plants you are watering. There is an option with a long handle which I would recommend if you, like me, tend to use the hose to water plants that are difficult to reach such as hanging baskets and the back of the border. I have to admit to being somewhat sceptical about how much air you can generate in this way.  However, when we tried it out the other weekend it was quite amazing how frothy the water was and clear that it was very oxygenated.

I haven’t done any trials to see if the oxygenated water promotes better growth or not but the manufacturers claim that leafy plants will grow up to 30% larger plus because they are taking up nutrients better there is less need for fertilisers and pesticides.

I think that if you are someone who likes a gizmo and do a lot of watering using tap water then this would be worth looking at.  The prices are reasonable and you can locate a stockist through the purerain website www.PureRain.co.uk

I think this weekend’s gardening can be described as wet, windy, muddy with brief intervals in the greenhouse.

The big project has powered forward with the last of the turf being lifted.  This last bit was used to square off the front garden lawn and also to replace a large bare path on the grass path.  Whilst my son was turf lifting I had the job of rescuing and replanting the plants I wanted to keep from the left hand side of the slope.   This was quite tricky as the plants on the slope are all late summer perennials and so identifying which was which aster or helianthus was a challenge.  I did know that I wanted to get rid of the Helianthus Lemon Queen which dominated the slope last year, as well as a day lily which only looked good when the foliage appeared in spring, some Luzula nivea which only the cat likes and a large Achillea grandiflora which was threatening to take over.  Once these were removed it was a case of working across the slope that is going and transplanting the plants I wanted into the gaps the other plants had made.  The bulb leafs were just as challenging to identify with no flowers – at one point I thought I was digging up some blind daffodils only to discover that it was in fact an eremurus.  I tried them on the slope two years ago and they never flowered so they are getting a second chance in the new border.

The blossom on the step-over apples is about to open

My son’s next step was to remove the dry stone wall my Dad had built some years ago to hold up the slope.  We were impressed at what a good job he had done and how big the Malvern stone was once we had dragged it out from under the earth.  There is now a large pile of stone which we will use to landscape around the workshop and to do a better job of edging the new steps.  A substantial amount of top soil was removed and put onto the new border which after some racking and leveling will be ready for planting up next weekend.  There is still lots of soil and even more clay to be removed but that is now a job for bank holiday weekend.

Molopospermum peloponnesiacum

Our  efforts were frequently interrupted by the rain so I used this time as an opportunity to dive into the greenhouse and catch up with pricking out seedlings and sowing yet more seeds.  Several packets of various primulas have been sown, probably a little late, but they are in the cool greenhouse so hopefully they will get a chance to germinate before the temperatures  go up.  I pricked out violas, nicotiana, geraniums and Centaurea ‘Aloha Blanca’.  The Dahlia tubers are sprouting well with one batch far ahead of the others.  I think this is because they benefitted from some direct sunshine in the top of the coldframe whilst the others were under the greenhouse benches.

With another quick visit to the Malvern Spring show to collect plants I am feeling a little gardened out.

I’m no longer much of a fan of showgardens and tend to gravitate to the nurseries and floral marquee more.  However, I thought I would have a quick look to see what was on offer this year.  Malvern has always been one of the shows where new designers can stretch their wings and have a go at doing a show garden.

In my humble and inexpert view the gardens have a tendency to be fairly safe and what you would expect but then Malvern, in my opinion, is a show for plant buyers and has an excellent reputation for the number and variety of nurseries at the show and therefore it doesn’t really need to try to attract crowds with the promise of weird and wacky designs – that is the remit of Hampton Court Flower Show.

I only had time for a quick run round, plus the press and television crews were in the way, and so this post is very  much based on a fleeting glimpse

The two photographs above are of the garden that really quite my eye and made me stop in my tracks and I believe it received a Gold award.  It is designed by Villaggio Verde a fairly local company that specialises in olive trees and other mediterranean plants.  The garden is part of a set of gardens all celebrating the Tour de France and represents a cafe in the South of France where professional cyclists have stopped for 100 years.  I liked the non-fussy planting especially around the beehives and it felt to me a fair and realistic representation where the designer hadn’t got too carried out.

Another planting that appealed to me was in the garden called, A Return to the Med designed by The Garden Design House.  I liked the textures of the planting and also the detail in the pebble pathing.  I would like to replicate this pebble pathing on my patio although I suspect it would take me ages to do and may just send me mad so this will be an idea I file away again for yet another year.

The two photographs above show the planting in a garden entitled, Single Track Mind, designed by Teresa Rham of Groundesigns;  another garden in the Tour de France group.  The intention of the garden is to represent the mental challenges faced by the road racing cyclist.  I have to confess that I never really get the deeper meanings of these show gardens but again I was attracted to the planting.  The mixtures of textures and shades of green in the photograph above and the darker shades, again in flowers and foliage, in the top photograph.  Of course we have to remember that the plants are planted far closer together than any of us would in our gardens and this is typical for showgardens where there is a pathological fear of earth showing; honestly, they can get marked down on it!

Finally, this garden appealed to me – A Room for a View designed by Alchemy Gardens.  I suspect that I am attracted to both this garden and the very top one as they are completely different to mine.  Something that I could never have in my own garden and so far more interesting to me than the cottage/woodland style gardens.  I also suspect that there is an element of escapism in them, taking us to somewhere warm, and in the case of the Alchemy Garden, tropical which couldn’t be much further removed from the cold, damp and windy show ground yesterday.

Whilst these gardens are not as unattainable for the average gardener as the showgardens at RHS Chelsea Flower Show they are still something that few of us would replicate in our gardens.  However, the pundits always like to say that the average gardener can get inspiration from showgardens so what  inspiration did I get from these?  As I have said I like the pebble pathing in the Return to the Med garden and the understated green textures of the Single Track Mind garden is food for thought when planting a border where you want interest besides relying on flowers.  The Cafe garden demonstrates the impact planting en masse can have and as for the last garden again the good foliage combinations are shown but really for me I just want to paddle my feet in the pool, who needs inspiration!!