From not so marvellous to blooming marvellous

9 July 2010

Down at the bottom of the garden, with its back wall to my vegetable patch there stands Juniper Lodge. It’s a wooden play house that was bought for me and John when we were kids. It has housed many a secret society meeting and now houses the garden furniture and a bevy of (probably rabid, fanged) spiders.

At the front and side of the hut there is a little flower bed that had gradually become less and less spectacular, the clay soil thick with the roots of plants it had killed in a previous season. All that survived around the little pond in a copper cauldron, other than my alpine mint and azalea, were scraggy bits of campanula, violets, feverfew and creeping Jenny. The soil was so hard that it was next to impossible to plant anything new in it.

In late July last year I decided to finally do something about the flower bed. I dug out a few inches of the terrible clay and piled it high with all the weeds and rubbish in a garden rubbish sack. I bought a couple of sacks of new top soil and dug it in, mixing up with the patch of reasonable soil I’d left at the side of Juniper Lodge. Suddenly my soil was a beautiful soft dark brown mass, no longer sickly grey rubble.

I’m not a huge fan of bedding plants, or perhaps more accurately, I’m not a huge fan of having to plant bedding plants every year, so I found some pretty perennials: knautia, phlox, helenium, scabiosa and white catananche. This summer, as everything was growing beautifully a couple of big poppies arrived too, seeded down from wherever, which I left to flower.

The knautia (pronounced “naughtier”) was crazy; the tag had given its approximate height as 90cm, but mine shot up way beyond that and swayed about with pretty pink flowers on the end of the stems. As I’ve deadheaded the finished blooms I’ve collected the seed heads in a paper bag, letting them dry out ready to be used in the bird seed I want to make. I’m just hoping that this paper bag won’t suddenly vaporise like the sunflower seed head I’d been saving did last year. Maybe the sparrows came indoors and took it? After all, they polished off the wheat before I was prepared to let them.

With the knautia mostly over the cornflowers (catananche) and phlox are now flowering, a beautiful mix of pink and white. Those colours are incidentally also a source of intrigue to me at the moment in a different subject. We received an email from Lauren last night, who will be hosting Come Dine With Me tomorrow evening. We’ve not been given any clue as to the menu, but if we could “wear something pink and white, that would be marvellous”.

Posted in: garden, photos

Comments

2 Responses to “From not so marvellous to blooming marvellous”

bonnie
10th July 2010 @ 4:54 am

“Creeping Jenny” is a terrible name. It makes Jenny sound like a stalker. Jenny’s gonna be pissed.

[Reply]
Lula
14th July 2010 @ 9:16 pm

That first picture of the flowers gave me the most awesome feeling, like I just saw Brad Pitt naked or something! Yay Flowers!

[Reply]