. A better idea might be to buy one of those wireless doorbells, cover the receiver part in plastic wrap and bury it in your peanuts. A satisfying effect can be produced by pressing the ringer mid-feed. You can try a variety of ringtones.
I’m not sure, but what I came up with was cardoons and heuchera Palace Purple. The latter much despised, of course, but easy from seed. We have loved the result.
Now, at some point we visited Barnsley House, Rosemary Verey’s garden. Charles was much taken with the potager. Which is a fancy name for a veg garden made on very formal lines and designed to be attractive as well as functional. The paths at Barnsley House were far too narrow, so that you sort of tiptoed around, but we got the idea.
But sometimes, you do feel as if the garden gods are maybe a bit on your side. We visited a garden sculpture exhibition and found it! Octo, by Stuart Stockwell.
It’s stressful, you know, this conservation thing. You feel judged all the time – hence the counting of orchids, which varies wildly from year to year. If there are lots, you feel very worthy and chuffed. If not – a witless wildlife failure. It is stressful and worrying and just don’t believe a word of all that ‘gardening is good for your mental health stuff.
Then somehow, I do not know how, I discovered Ruth Stout. We had no internet, no Amazon, the local library was great but not so much for gardening. I used to trawl secondhand bookshops looking for affordable garden books and I must have found her book somewhere. She changed my life and made Veddw possible.
. I really had no idea what you had in mind, either. I think if I had, I’d have been freaked out. I don’t actually think you ever said “one day all this will be a garden”. I’d have thought you deranged.
And out of what felt to be the ruins of my life, I turned to an ambition to make another garden.
I love my garden, I do. It’s at the heart of my life. But just recently I’ve been drawn back and back to a windowsill with some sweet dwarf pelargoniums.
In the UK, right now, the horticultural world is about to drive us all mad with snowdrops. Pictures of. Articles about. Gardens with them. Anything people can think of to bash us over the head with snowdrops.
Recently we made a visit to Brecon. This is not far from us, in case anyone was getting over excited about the possibility that I might have been travelling again. It’s in Wales, in the Brecon Beacons, recently re-christened Bannau Brycheiniog.
Charles made a complaint recently when we were walking in the garden.
When I complained about him complaining he told me that it was good for me to have complaints about the planting.
I am discovering more and more often that it is important to have a great many seats in the garden. In fact there should probably be one every three feet or so.
But what does Chipping Campden have to offer gardeners in the middle of winter, besides cream teas and toasted teacakes? Well, it has Plants in Doorways for a start,
So, it’s good to be dogmatic and do the ‘put your garden to bed’ thing (, or equally, leave it all for the hoar frost (which never comes) – or the wee beasties who prefer it standing. (which are?)
But really, it’s rather more complicated.
If you look carefully at this wonderfully out of focus photo you can see the blight. We have fought it for years. All over the garden. And we have been removing it from all over the garden. This year, after a drought, we got much pouring rain and the worst blight we had ever seen.
I still love these two flowers together though. Maybe proving (rightly) that I know nothing of colour in gardens and understand even less.
Knowing we won’t live forever, (we have not had a nasty diagnosis) we’re thinking about what will happen to the house and garden when we die.
I am deciding which weeds I will choose to live with.
’m not sure why I originally wanted to make a garden. I started with a need to grow things, which grew and grew until I needed to leave London to find more garden space in the country
Here is the second part of Alison’s walk through the garden.
It’s still raining.
I invited a friend to walk the garden and give her responses on the way. Alison agreed and recorded her visit.
So after some rather futile years, losing as much as we planted, we made a radical decision: to keep the big old trees, which appear able to weather the wildlife.
Drone pictures are wonderfully versatile. They are not simply pictures from above but may give views of a garden from a variety of places.
In September friends of ours brought one of their tours to our garden. And one of their group, Vicki Scott, was, amazingly, inspired to write a poem about the garden. And here it is!
I get my camera out. I know photography has a bad press……
This was published in the RHS ‘The Garden’ and written by the then editor, Chris Young, in December 2012. A long time ago. It’s a good piece and when I found it again recently I realised I wanted it here
Here’s a celebration just of one flower, which is a total delight just now. Just for pleasure
Those of you kind enough to take an interest in Veddw Trials and Tribulations will no doubt have been having sleepless nights…
We finally wore him out. No more hedge cutting.
As you will have gathered by now, I am not a professional designer. Which means a great many things, one being that my plans often don’t seem to work.
How often would a plant grow cheerfully through things we (you?) desperately remove? And do plants actually enjoy being crowded? Do they like the company of ground elder? How will we ever find out?
Meanwhile I’m about to bore you with thoughts about growing ivy all over your house, just to avoid being controversial today.
I recently decided to buy Tim Richardson’s book, Sissinghurst, The Dream Garden. (Excellent book) And I did something I’d been meaning to do for a long time – I bought the eBook…
A big treat arrived for us today – Carolyn’s book, Adventures in Eden.
No art form can thrive without the serious discussion and dialogue which criticism offers: it raises standards, informs, educates and promotes intelligent debate. It is the very lifeblood of any high art.
We thought about it and it seemed possible……
I thought now it’s back to grey gloom you might like to see my pictures of Veddw in the snow from a few days ago.
These are all views of the Crescent Border through the year from the same place
The inhabitants of the Veddw that I can identify and learn something about seem to have begun their occupation here as squatters.
We needed a focal point…
Where to start? Well, it would be great to start at the begining – but who knows when and what that was? When was Veddw actually the presumed original, bedw?
“IF I WAS A GARDEN DESIGNER I would be a bit miffed by the fact that every list of iconic or outstanding contemporary gardens comprises special places which have, in most cases, been created by people who are not professional garden designers….”
Devauden: ‘The original Welsh version was “Dyfawden”/”Defawden” with its root in Medieval Welsh “defawd”, Modern Welsh “defod” (custom, manner, fashion”) ….. The meaning seems to me likely to be something like “land held by custom” or “land held by customary tenure”.’
“The programme makers were confronted with a key question: what on earth was there about Veddw that might inspire anyone?”
33 years old! So how are we celebrating, you ask?
We decided we wouldn’t open this year. So why not really make a mess????
So we are wondering about offering a bespoke visit for a maximum of two people.
But how could it be closer to the pleasure of wandering a garden with a friend?
Clearly we need to begin to discipline our approach to garden walking. And I think it may be possible.
Accustomed to scanty fare, inured to poverty, suffering occasionally from cold and hunger, and exposed to peculiar temptations…..
I thought I would cheer some of those people up a little with some schadenfreude, and tell of the latest garden disasters.
I wonder how many gardeners are shocked by the idea of two acres focused simply on one plant?
Small sample of hedges cut properly….
Are we missing something, focusing on fronts?
this is about preserving and honouring a very special history and remembering a rather particular man.
Veddw on the Candide app.
I once took a picture of the same view from one of our windows every month for a year and I liked seeing the changes which in the flesh meld into each other. So I did it again with one of my favourite views outside.
There is a scattering of delight in the garden just now, and has been for weeks. It’s a flower; a geranium:
The Burial
Just a quickie to say that we’re dead chuffed to have been voted one of the best three gardens in Wales
Gardeners very rarely really think about this, being more likely to recognise something simply as a bad plant, which must be got rid of.
We’re OPEN – on the 1st and third Sundays in July, August and September 2-5.
Sometimes (not by any means always) the rigid balance of symmetry is a bit dead for me.
What is biggest perhaps for me is that Gardens Illustrated turned this piece down
They’re here!
Rot and Repair: the story of spring…
Then we were watching Monty Don in Japan last night. (he was in Japan, we were by the fire at home)
Next question: do we like our hellebore flowers naked?
Help needed…..
So, we are currently looking at two rows of poles. And wondering whether to keep them…..
There have been some winners and losers this summer in the plant population, and not much to do with the weather…
I realised at some point that no-one else was going to be enjoying them. I took Charles to check. No. Not interesting.
How many of us love the outdoor housework known as weeding? Is this why we turn eagerly to the gardening pages every week – to discover what boring chores we should be tackling? Unfortunately, for many garden housework haters like myself, our efforts, or lack of, may be on very public display (unlike the state of our bathrooms, for example). The gardens to which we are all exposed in magazines, RHS shows and on television don’t help.
You’d expect one of my favourite gardens of anywhere to be a friend’s garden: partiality may be unavoidable. But my pleasure is based on more than that – this is just a truly good garden and it will be open, perhaps for the last time, in July this year.
And yes, Veddw is only half an hour away.
So, what’s so good? ….
I know all you really really want are pictures to look at. So here, celebrating our opening on the 3rd of June (Sunday afternoons 2-5 -our last year!) are some Veddw pictures….
What is the problem with railings, my good friends?? Please tell me.
“We’re wondering about doing a book, about Veddw, which will (if we can persuade a publisher) include some of the history of making it. We’re wondering if that would be interesting?”
“Well, not everyone was giving the talk their full attention…”
Hellebores. Those are the stars of the show at this time of year for me, all of them, seedlings, well bred ones, all of them. Especially in pots indoors – no bending!
“Useful for breaking up those clods of earth that do not break down in the frost as promised by lying garden writers. Or bashing the soil off the rootball of something you’ve dug up and want to dispose of. That sort of thing…”
“We went off to the local Builder’s Merchant and ordered some scaffolding boards, and the internet provided us with some threaded rods and nuts.”
“I love it when it’s faded a little and I add a refresher dose. Gradually a darker inky black spreads across the pool, reviving and restoring the drama all over again.
Why do gardeners visit gardens?
Do you visit art galleries and museums? Do you enjoy theatre and concerts? Hauser and Wirth – art gallery and Oudolf Gardens As a garden writer and garden maker I deeply regret that my audience for both appear to be almost exclusively gardeners. It is as if the works of painters and sculptors were only […]
I think it’s possible that such platforms are the future. At least for as long as blogs were, once.
“The question to ask is, ‘what is here that is true, that is underneath the superficial things? What is here that matters?”
Autobiography of a Garden is about the garden making, Pat’s life, the history of the land, the ideas, the art, the plants and the devouring deer.
But to dream, and perhaps more importantly, to innovate, we should inspire ourselves globally:
“Have issue. You were so adamant that you wouldn’t go to Chelsea again. Discuss, please”.
. And now, knowing we won’t live forever, we’re thinking about what will happen to the house and garden when we die.
The garden is actually interestingly old fashioned. It’s not just the bedding but the relentless inclusion of every garden cliché, however brilliantly executed.
