Look! I Have Back Garden Back
plus some lovely invisible things and some poems, two by Theodore Roethke
Builders have gone. Windows done. Brick path laid. Gravel down. Come into the garden, Maud, as Tennyson said.
What a happy day when Groundworks Man (He Who Can Totally Fill A Big Skip With Concrete Rubble in A Day) packed his cement mixer and, much as I like him, went home.
Things had been stuck here for a while. Last month, while I was engaged elsewhere, Groundworks Man had got busy with other, bigger, jobs and, in the middle of the biggest upheaval Back Garden has known since we moved in and I demolished the enormous Koi Carp pond, we had to wait for a break in his schedule.
It has seemed a long wait. June passed with hardly any Back Garden gardening. I just about clambered through the rubble to deadhead the roses, but not being able to open the shed gave me an unintended no mow June as well as no mow May. The grass didn’t grow much, though, because the lawn was covered in the stuff - tables, chairs, pots, barrows, and the inanimate (as opposed to the animate) lounger - everything which used to sit on the white concrete slabs.
But that’s all over now. Now there is only the mowing, which I did this morning, and the delicious future: the rethinking and the new planting. Because suddenly I have three new beds to fill. Was ever Gardener so happy?
Front Garden is looking, as Groundworks Man said of Back Garden, when he called round to plan the brickwork, ‘very full.’
‘Very full, isn’t it, Jane, very full indeed.’ (He does talk a bit like a character in Dickens, with his own peculiar forms of expression).
Despite no mow June and the rest of the ungardened jumble around us, I thought he meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one.
Now this Hot Border is full, as GWM would say, I am beginning to establish what garden designers call ‘rhythm’. Repeats, in other words. They aren’t quite visible in the photograph, but I am developing repeats of Salvia ‘Royal Bumble’, Salvia Nemorosa 'Caradonna', and the upright pillar of grass that is Panicum Virgatum ‘Northwind’. In another year or two those repeats should have grown to good sizes and I’ll need to move things around to fit with them.
I want to add more of that fallen Santolina, too. The combination of the green of stem and leaf and the primrose yellow of the tiny button flowers is deeply refreshing. But it is the pattern of those flowers against the green ground that I love. Something of the same effect you get from Erigeron Karvinskianus - small flowerheads in starry profusion. I think mine is Santolina rosmarinifolia subsp. rosmarinifolia 'Primrose Gem'
But there is another Santolina which is very similar: Santolina pinnata subsp neapolitana ‘Edward Bowles’ . Mine might be that. On the Beth Chatto site it tells me that ‘Primrose Gem’ is only about 40cm in height, whereas ‘Bowles’ might be 70cm. Mine is - you guessed - about 55cms. Whichever, it is I adore it, and it is one of my favourites in the garden right now, even if it can’t stand up. For that, I blame my West Kirby sand.
I dug down in that border with the narrowest of border spades last week, planting the Heliopsis ‘bleeding Heart’ I bought at Wollerton Old Hall Garden. The top was slightly dust and dry, which is normal here in summer, but a spade down and it was still as dry as bone dust, and a spade and a half down, still dry, dry, dry. I have mulched this bed for several years with spent mushroom compost and the like. Yes, it began as sand - we are 1000 feet from the Estuary shore. When the fox dug her putative den, hless than a metre deep, she dug out pure golden beach sand. But my mulching has raised that bed, over years by 30-50 cms. There should be organic matter there, holding some water. But it didn’t look as if that had happened. I need farmyard manure, I need horse-muck.
But never mind what I need, I want to celebrate what I’ve got. What’s good?
In The Bosky, the little wooded, hedged, area on the other side of Hot Border,
I planted the lovely Geranium, Geranium nodosum 'Silverwood', but I planted it - why? - behind the Daphne next to the bench, so it is more or less invisible unless you are sitting on the bench, looking for it. In the dim light of The Bosky, ‘Silverwood’s’ apple green leaves have a refreshing tang, and the abundant and well-spaced pearly white flowers, with the thinnest of gray green stripes, seem made of bridal silk. I haven’t tried to propagate it - why not, when I love it so much and would like to spread it about the cool dim Bosky border? Perhaps because, as The Hardy Geranium Nursery tells me - and maybe I knew this before I googled it - ‘nodosums can be slow to establish and take a while to put down roots’.
I think it has been there about three, maybe four years and so I will try to divide it, now it is established. But meanwhile, I’ve planted six double white Busy Lizzy bedders to try to give a similar small white splash amongst the green. They are no ‘Silverwood’ but I think they are Good in The Garden.
Top Row: the leaves of Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’, a fine grey colour and Lamium ‘White Nancy’ looking fresh after a midsummer cut back; Geranium nodosum ‘Silverwood’ packed into a secret spot between Daphne and Griselinia; closer look at the Busy Lizzies.
Bottom Row: Seeing it at a bit of a distance and a close up of the Silverwood flower.
I often write thoughts or fragments of poems on my iphone while gardening. Here’s one about white and green.
Resting Thought White in green is light in dark. The lumens glow, the leaf unfolds, The flower shines, the branch and bark Shape structure that the lightwave holds To breathe: rest here, senses, inhale; The green is deep and will not fail.
Before I thought of putting my own note in, I was looking for a poem about white flowers and came across this fact about the US poet, Theodore Roethke.
Born in Saginaw, Michigan, his father was a German immigrant who owned and ran a 25-acre greenhouse.
That interested me because there are some good poems by Roethke about plants or gardening (alongside many other things. Seek him out at the Poetry Foundation) and that little fact helps me see why. Here are two of his best known poems.
If you are a person who thinks, with Bart Simpson, ‘Poetry! kill me now…’ don’t think of them as poetry, think of them as passing bits of thought or memory, said aloud. You don’t have to be looking for any of those blinking ‘themes’. No, none of that. Don’t be trying to identify any examination-speak ‘images’. Just listen to Mr Roethke, then go about your day. I’ll read them for you.
Child on Top of a Greenhouse The wind billowing out the seat of my britches, My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty, The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers, Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight, A few white clouds all rushing eastward, A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses, And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!
Cuttings Sticks-in-a-drowse over sugary loam, Their intricate stem-fur dries; But still the delicate slips keep coaxing up water; The small cells bulge; One nub of growth Nudges a sand-crumb loose, Pokes through a musty sheath Its pale tendrilous horn.
Looks splendid. 😊
Your gardens is looking lush Jane, I wish mine, or rather what I’ve done at mum’s, was looking as green as my envy. After a new driveway left only room for a two feet deep border around two sides, I filled it with bags of topsoil and compost and bonemeal and planted two Griselinia, Ceanothus Concha, a holly with red berries, a eucalyptus, a small Photonua Red Robin and another Ceanothus variety (I think) as well as some petunia and fuschia in a big pot. It looks a mess. I’m so disappointed for mum. I clearly chose the wrong things. Thus is the second summer and the Griselinia have hardly budged, the holly hates it and looks bedraggled and forlorn. The Ceanothus has arched far forward like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and I don’t know how to correct its strong, unyielding arms, the eucalyptus looks boring and is covered in tiny spider mites, the photinia is slow growing and has holes in the leaves and the other non arching type of Ceanothus looks unattractive and spindly. Oh and a second set of petunias to replace the first ones that were covered in aphids and ants are now - covered in aphids and ants. The dish soap and water mix I sprayed on them just bleached the colour out. So the object ie privacy from the road and attractive evergreens to cheer up the flagged parking has been defeated. Any suggestions what on earth to do Jane? I want rid of the holly and I’m tempted to rip out the eucalyptus. I’ve got a potted hydrangea Annabelle I was going to put in and wonder what mature, reliable, hardy evergreens I could plant instead. Euonynus? Your garden is the stuff dreams are made on, mine is a midsummer nightmare.