Growing and using herbs at Blackden

We have just had a great weekend with some friends who live in France.  It is always a treat to see them, either here or in Provence.  Yesterday we went for lunch at Tyddyn Llan, a restaurant with rooms just outside Llandrillo further South and West into Wales.  It's a spectacular drive but there was no chance of seeing any of the marching range of the Clwydian hills or the beautiful hills at the head of the Vale of Clwyd up beyond Ruthin.  It was like driving into a wall of water.  The rain poured all day, drenched us as we sprinted from the car and threw itself at us in torrents as we drove home. The hills were spouting water in great gushes and falls of foaming brown.  Tyddyn Llan is a great place though with really exceptional food and gentle and discreet good service. You feel you could just settle down with good food and good company and while away a wet Sunday and that is what we did.

On Saturday we went to Blackden.  If you have read my blog for a while you might know about Blackden but I am going to tell you about it again anyway.   It is a place that can bear repetition!

Driving from here in North Wales to Blackden you leave the hills behind you and drop down to the lush Cheshire plain.  The stone or lime rendered houses give way to warm brick or sometimes to older,  black and white timbered buildings.

This is Little Morton Hall (and not my photograph as you can see), but it is perhaps the most spectacular example of black and white that I know locally.  You know you are in Cheshire without needing to read the road signs, now all in English instead of English and Welsh.   In such a short distance the landscape and buildings change completely.  Sheep here in Wales are replaced by dairy cows and the rolling hills become wide fields.  The farms are bigger and look prosperous and sleek.  In the middle of Cheshire and almost in the shadow of Jodrell Bank is Blackden.

Blackden is the home of Alan Garner, the writer, and his wife Griselda.  This is not sleek Cheshire, this is old, old Cheshire, older than imagining.  There are two houses here, Toad Hall on the left, where the Garners live, which is a medieval hall house, and the Old Medicine House on the right, once an apothecary's house and rescued by the Garners from demolition forty years ago in nearby Wrinehill.   It was taken down, piece by painstaking piece and  moved and rebuilt on this site.  But even these ancient houses are newcomers here.  The site itself has been in continuous occupation for ten thousand years.  You can't dig in the garden without turning over the past: Bronze and Iron age weapons and tools, musket balls from the Civil War in the 17th Century, shards of pottery maybe two hundred or two thousand years old.

The Old Medicine House now belongs to the Blackden Trust, set up by the Garners to preserve this site.  The trust runs inspirational courses and open days and exists to both protect and share Blackden.  Every year university students and others take part in an archaeological dig but you don't need to commit yourself for a fortnight, you can simply take a tour of the house and see some of the many beautiful, strange and ancient things that it contains or go on an open day to see what they do.  If you are within reach of mid Cheshire and at all interested in history, archaeology, literature or herbs, do go and see for yourself.  It is a place which defies description: beautiful, unsettling, peaceful and inspiring, a place where the past and the present push against each other and the air is thin.

If you are really interested in herbs you could come along to a course which I am running with Sue Hughes, Director of the Grosvenor Museum in Chester.    Sue will be talking about how herbs were used in medieval and Tudor times and giving a tour of the Old Medicine House in the morning.  Sue knows more about the history of the use of herbs than anyone I know!  In the afternoon I will be looking at the newly planted herb garden, helping you identify herbs, common and not so common, and talking about how to grow them, propagate them and use them today.  Griselda Garner and I have been madly propagating herbs for months - feverfew, woodruff, lemon balm, sweet cicely, hyssop and thyme.   All the herbs which will be for sale have come directly from Griselda's garden or my own.

So if you can get to Blackden on the 23rd June come and see.  Places will be limited because the whole day takes place in the Old Medicine House or out in the gardens but I know it will be a day which will stay with you for a long time, a day out of time, and if you grow or want to grow herbs, you will never look at them in quite the same light again.  If you are interested you can get in touch through the Blackden website or just let me know!

This year's tulips

I love tulips.  For a while in my gardening life I struggled to create the effects that I wanted until I had the blinding realisation that the problem was that I was not using enough of them.  Isn't it wonderful when the right answer is the exciting answer?  Now I buy in bulk.  I plant new ones in pots, some new ones in the ground and, when I can get my act together, some of the ones which were in last year's pots into the ground too.  This is the  counsel of perfection as usual and doesn't always happen.  In the autumn of 2010 I remembered in time to get quite a lot into the cutting garden.  Last year I lifted all my bulbs, failed to label them, left them to die down and failed to remember that they were hiding in a big pot in the kitchen garden. When I came across them in November when I was planting out my new ones I found that most of them had rotted or been eaten.  Some did go into the cutting garden and into beds in the kitchen garden if they looked to have any signs of life but it was not a distinguished performance on my part.

Despite that 2012 is being a fab year for tulips.  I ordered from Peter Nyssen last year and will certainly do so again.  The choice was vast, the prices were good and the bulbs when they came were firm and fat.  Having envied mountainear's fabulous pots a couple of years ago I adopted the technique she recommended of planting bulbs in pots in layers, very close together.  This produces a sumptuous effect which I love.

These are Cape Cod (apricot/yellow) with National Velvet (dark red) and Sapporo (creamy white).  There are three pots like that and I love them.

These pots are a bit less successful I think.  These have Cape Cod again with Red Shine (the tall red) and Cairo ( the bronze one).  I am not convinced that the bronze is the right contrast with the apricot/yellow but that is one of the risks of planting mixed pots.  You never know exactly what you are getting until it all comes up.

Ian prefers the more subtle combinations of two dark colours or the pots of a single colour.

These are Abu Hassan (mahogany with yellow edge) and Hermitage (orange flushed deep red).  This seemed quite a chancy combination when I planted them up but it has proved to be a winner.  It might have been a clash too far but it works beautifully I think.

I love them against the lime washed white of the bakehouse.

Hermitage was a new discovery, as was Abu Hassan, and I shall definitely grow both them again.  I do understand the beauty of the single variety in a pot -  I must do, I planted them up - but I also love the explosion of colour that comes from mixing them up.

In the side garden and in the cutting garden Ballerina has been beautiful.  Sometimes I play the game of "If you could have only one tulip what would it be?" and the pure bolt of colour and elegant shape of Ballerina  would make it very high on my list.  But then I get lost in catalogues or websites and know that I could never choose.

Hermitage also looks good in the ground.  It is a much shorter tulip than Ballerina and needs a place where it will not be viewed in the same glance as the colours are close enough to work but only with a gentle buffer of emerging foliage such as this peony's.  I like the bluey green, slightly glaucous foliage.

These are going over now in the cutting garden.  They are Monsella and they came up for a second showing having been left in the ground.  My past experience is that many tulips don't flower again but the stony soil here seems to suit them better than when I gardened on soft loam.

And by the cherry tree tulipa linifolia is coming up.   There just isn't enough of it.  I love it so much that I shall continue to try to get it to naturalize.

How dull the world would be without tulips.

Growing children

Have you noticed how many passionate gardeners (myself included) are women whose children are grown?  It is as if we transfer our nurturing tendencies from children to plants.  I am sure I have read this theory elsewhere and although it is an interesting idea I am not sure that I buy it.  I was not a natural earth mother and, passionately although I loved my children from babyhood, I got better at mothering as they grew older.  I spent twenty years of my life climbing the corporate ladder so I didn't feel a void in my life when my children left home which could only be filled by propagating dogwoods and dividing snowdrops.  Somehow the garden ran alongside a frantic work and family life, taking its place after the immediate and pressing demands of family but always a sanity saver, always giving me a place to breathe and dream and find myself again without the pinging of the blackberry and the incessant call of the mobile phone.

Up here now, with more time and the demands on me being overwhelmingly family ones, I find I am gardening differently.  I am learning how to strike cuttings and grow things from seed and to understand what will and will not thrive for me.  It takes particular attention.

For the last few days my elder daughter and her family have been staying.  It has been lovely to spend much concentrated time with her and with my younger grandson, now two and a half.  Last weekend we also had older grandson and his mum to stay and my son and daughter in law passing through to collect their dog and catch up with us all.  Next weekend older son is coming with his partner and older grandson is coming back again.  There is a lot of family around.  I love it.  I will also love the silence when they go but that is another story.  But I have been thinking a lot about the way both plants and children need attention.

Two and a half year old Joseph loves to sit on your knee and play with his cars on the kitchen table.  In a way you are not there, you are just a human chair, providing him with somewhere comfortable and warm and loving to sit.  And in another way you are completely essential.  He doesn't just want to be lifted up physically to the table.  He wants the feel of you, he wants your engagement.  He wants to tell you what he is doing: "Tractor going round.  Bus going to London.  Little dog get off bus.  Little dog go to sleep now.  Oh light come on!  Sun coming out.  Little dog get up for breakfast!"   He wants you to be with him and he flourishes under the light and warmth of your attention to him.  He is a sunny child, quick to laugh, quick to hug, happy too with his own company before coming back to the warmth of your lap for stories and games.

Older grandson Samuel is six now, whizzing out of the car for a hug and a kiss and bouncing with energy.  "How are you my love?"
"I am six now."
Out in the field with Joseph and the dog he is in his element, throwing sticks, hiding balls, telling the dog what to do and looking after his little cousin with surprising ease.  At one point he is running away from me to get the stick for the dog when he comes wheeling back and crashes into my legs for a hug.
"I love you Grandma."
I hug him back and smile at him "I love you too."
He is already running away again as he throws a cheeky grin over his shoulder at me.  "I know you do."
I love the fact that he is so confident in my love, an older version of the two year old's happy confidence.  And where does it all come from I wonder, this happy confidence?  It is in so many ways attention, the readiness to give a child time and attention while also drawing boundaries for them so they know where they fit in and that they are loved but not all powerful.

It is that attention that reminds me of growing things.  You need to water, you need to look, you need to take lids off propagators and mist your cuttings and close up the greenhouse at night.  When your life is too busy for all these things you may be able to have a garden outside your windows but you can't raise the next generation of plants.  And children, like plants, need the close attention, the rhythms and routines which could be boring were they not so necessary: mealtimes, playtimes, bathtimes, storytimes.  Happy, willing, close attention.

An annual wildflower meadow

This spring's big garden project, now that the barn is done, is the sowing of annual wildflowers in the area by the compost heaps and the fire site.  That makes it sound very utilitarian!  I hope the end result won't be.  I have tried to establish perennial wildflowers in the new orchard higher up the field.  A perennial meadow is a much harder task than I had understood when I started out.  The native daffodils are doing well and some of the spring flowers are fine, with primroses and cowslips establishing and a surprising burst of sweet rocket sitting at the edge of the skirts of the apple tree.  Last year we had ox eye daisies, yarrow, fox and cubs as well as meadow buttercup, plantain and some of the lovelier, finer grasses.  But the knapweed and the field scabious were single, solitary presences and there is clearly far too much of the lush, tough grasses like Yorkshire fog.  I have tried to sow yellow rattle to weaken the grass but my two seed trays full of the stuff  have produced only one plant.  The orchard is still beautiful and I persevere.

The new project is a different form of wildflower gardening all together.  This, I hope, will be a large area of annual wildflowers which will shimmer and dance with colour.  At the moment it is not:

The contractors who built the barn had to remove quite a bit of topsoil to create the hard standing in front of the building.  They spread it for me between the new hedge, just out of view to the left of the picture, and the native tree walk, looking like nothing much to the right.  David who works in the garden a day a week (and without whom the whole enterprise would turn to dust) raked it and today I spent three hours digging out the perennial weeds which had appeared since its raking.

It is both a mindnumbing and an oddly satisfying task: two barrowloads of dandelions and docks, now all piled up on a pallet in order to dry out sufficiently to be burnt.

Doesn't look much different for it!

I am sowing a mixture from pictorial meadows  The mixtures need a richer soil than the perennial meadow which might be a problem here where our soil is fertile enough but stony and in need of supplementing with compost and manure.  You might have seen the pictorial meadow mixes in use in the programmes by Sarah Raven on sowing wildflowers to encourage pollinating insects.   These have been running on the BBC earlier this spring.  If you are at all interested and didn't see the programmes they are worth watching if you can find them.  I am adding some of my own seed to the mix, using plants which have been growing successfully up here, principally a red papaver somniferum, some double purples and calendula.

In an ideal world, come the summer, it might look like this:

I wonder if it will?

An updated day in the life of...

I wake up.  The light is streaming in because we never shut our curtains up here.  It is half past six and I turn over and drift back to sleep.  After years and years of dawn starts with small children and work and commuting, is there a greater luxury?

As usual Ian must have got up without waking me because when I wake again it is a quarter to eight and he is not in the bed.  From downstairs I hear the sound of him in the kitchen.  He will have already made tea and porridge for his father and now the kettle is boiling again and he is making a cup of tea for me.  Double luxury!

It is quiet here.  On a school morning faintly from the farm next door will come the sound of mothers calling and car doors slamming.  The cockerel might be heard crowing from the kitchen garden.  But there is no traffic, there are no trains or planes, just birds squabbling on the feeders and the cat calling meekly yet insistently for more food (not birds!).

Breakfast is pretty much always eggs.  I love eggs and we have so many of our own it would be foolish not to take advantage: boiled, poached or scrambled, with deep yellow yolks and so fresh they poach perfectly every time.  I can't start the day without three cups of incredibly weak tea.  You might ask whether I could manage with one cup of tea with some colour in it but I like my weedy tea, drunk from an Emma Bridgewater mug.  Why does a particular mug matter I wonder?  The shape of these and the colours are so satisfying.

The day whizzes by in a blur of jobs.  In spring I start by going down to the greenhouse, checking which seeds are showing, watering, taking lids off propagators, just looking at my plants.  I never used to be able to raise things from seed and have only been at all successful in the last year or so.  I didn't  realise how closely you need to watch your seeds.  Every day visits are good, twice is ideal.

Then there is the ordinary domestic round: bread to be made, washing to be done, laundry to be sorted.  At this time of year the garden keeps shouting at you when you go inside.  Weed me, it calls, you know you want to.  If I don't spend a couple of days a week in the garden in spring everything disappears under a tide of dandelions, creeping buttercup and Good King Henry.

By mid morning I might go down to our local village to buy my father in law a newspaper and put some letters in the post.  It is only a mile and a half away but it is a very steep three quarters of a mile down our hill and just as steep up on the other side.  On the rare days when we feel we have time to walk, it will take two hours to do the round trip, including the shopping time.  Jumping in the car, the whole trip takes about twenty five minutes.  One of the things I love about having my children's dogs to stay (and this week we have my son's black labrador for the week) is that it makes me more inclined to walk and, by combining walking the dog with going shopping, slows me down, puts the rhythm of life back to the rhythm of walking feet.  There are bluebells just coming into flower now by the paths and stitchwort showing its white simple stars.

Lunch.  Earlier than I would choose to suit the earlier rising of Ian and his father.  Lunch usually involves home made bread and ham from our local shop, or cheese, or, if you are me and trying to eat less cheese in the hope of losing a bit of weight, hummus.  We eat our meals at the table now to suit my father in law but sometimes I take mine outside.  If it is warm enough I sit on a bench in the sun.  If the sun is shining and a breeze is blowing I take my lunch and a book to the cedar greenhouse and sit in the surprising warmth all by myself.

What happens in the afternoon? It is a mystery: emails, work things, organising and family things, more gardening.  If it is a Monday or a Thursday we take my father in law down to the village for his meetings with  his new friends where he plays Bingo and tells his stories.  They have been very welcoming.  How many people are making new friends at ninety three?

The afternoon rushes to a close.  We eat early again.  I am learning how to extend the limited repertoire of what I can cook for my father in law.  For quite a while I tried to make only food I knew he would like.  He loves his food and meal times are the highlight of his day so presenting him with strange, foreign food seemed unkind.  Eventually the relentlessness of meat and two veg cooking began to drive me nuts.  I love cooking.  I love recipe books and making something interesting and thinking about it and stirring and tasting and adjusting.  Very recently I have started to try to produce a day or so in a fortnight when I cook something which is a pleasure to cook.  Sometimes I give it to him too and he eats it without complaint (but then he would!).  Sometimes I make him something different.  Food is such a big part of our lives, ours and his.  How hard to get it right.  When Ian and I first married and brought two families together I remember very vividly that cooking a roast dinner was one of the ways you could make everyone happy when interests and history and family traditions would all conspire to set people running along different lines of expectation.

Evening.  My father in law watches his own television.  We perhaps watch more than we used to.  I am not sure.  Mostly we read and blog and read blogs if you are me, and do other forms of computer based things if you are Ian.  The phone rings often with parents and children and siblings on the other end.  There is yoga and Welsh class.  Now that the evenings are longer there is the delight of walking up the hill and along the ridge.  This week there is a black dog sleeping on her bean bag and sourdough bread coming out of the oven, smelling wonderful and tasting better.

Night.  The fire is burning.  The lamps would be low if they could be but they are not oil lamps, they are low energy  bulbs.  I am thinking about daffodils for next year and what to feed my family and friends who are coming over the next days and weeks.   It should be time for bed but I am likely to get my second wind.  I am reading Beth Chatto and gardening with bob dylan.    I am on my second glass of wine.  I must go to bed.  Tomorrow there is weeding to be done.

March end of month view

This year's phenomenal March temperatures have brought the garden rushing on apace.  Last year April was the sunny month and March was cold and windy.  Last year's side garden looked like this:

This year, partly from sunshine and to a lesser extent from planting, it looks like this:

OK, I know I am cheating with the larger photograph but the combination of hellebores, daffodils, tulips and a lot more foliage than usual is really furnishing the ground in the most satisfactory way.

The hellebore flowers are gently changing from pink and white to the palest green as they go over, so slowly, so elegantly.

But look the other way and you can see the day lilies thrusting up, the new alliums beginning to mass, hardy geraniums putting on foliage, the new pheasant grass fountaining up pleasingly in pink and green (thank you Karen) and the peonies with so much growth I have even started to stake them.  At this point I feel like a proper gardener.  I know you should stake.  Every year I vow that this will be the year I crack it and every year I find I have left it too late and things are flopping all over the place.  This year I have done some!  Not all of it, that would be a step too far, but I have had a go with the metal rings I bought years ago and rarely use and with some hazel twigs from our own hazels.  The hazel twigs are surrounding the oriental poppies which I love but which invariably move from stately gorgeousness to louche sprawling the moment I turn my back.  This year it may be better.  Let's see.

The bed across the back of the side garden is glowing with daffodils, primroses and the goldgreen foliage of aquilegias with pulmonaria Diana Clare providing a deep blue contrast at the front.

Out in the little orchard the Tenby daffodils are going over but the Thalia are flowering.  Tenby are sturdy, ealry little daffodils with their glaucous leaves and upright yellow trumpets standing bravely against the wind.  Thalia are later, slighter and more delicate.

There are cowslips too and the little Shropshire damson tree is flowering against a background of blowing white washing.

That was last week when the sun shone as warm as June.  This week is cold and grey and rain is at last filling the water butts.  The sunshine was glorious but it wasn't quite natural for this time of year so although I miss the warmth on my back I don't mind too much the sound of rain dripping into the newly installed water tanks taking rainwater off the roof of the workshop.

The native tree walk is beginning to take off a bit

with the hellebores and pulmonaria from Dobby (thank you Jane!) starting to settle in.  They will be glorious in a year or two when they really fill the space.

The sunny bank was sunny.  It misses the little quince tree which finally gave up this winter but the new crab apple should be a good replacement when it has grown to fill out the space.  Gardening in the country is easy at this time of year when you can borrow unthinkingly from the land around you.  On the right of this picture the blackthorn is flowering in a delicate froth of white.  Nothing at all to do with me but probably the most beautiful thing of all.

Here is the kitchen garden.  Nothing is really happening in it yet which has much to do with the kitchen beyond the new growth of chives at the end of the mint bed.  There are things in the greenhouse growing away but the newly arrived cold would give them a considerable shock so they will stay where they are for the time being.

Thanks as always to Helen for hosting the end of month views.  Still a great idea!