Whether it’s due to the autumn sun showing them off to particuarlly fine effect, or to the inescapbable truth that almost everything else in the borders is either starting to look a little tired, or has turned to mush, October has been a month when ornamental grasses have reigned supreme in the garden.
Friday 31 October 2014
Ornamental grasses
Labels:
cake,
calamagrostis,
cortaderia,
deschampsia,
grasses,
miscanthus,
panicum,
pennisetum,
Wisley
Thursday 23 October 2014
Neighbourhood watch
“We can offer you a cup of tea in a bit,” said Roger, his eyes twinkling as his wife, Elizabeth, finished his sentence. “But I’m afraid if it comes to a drone attack or a CIA sniper, you’re on your own!”. We were standing in their front garden, discussing a phone conversation Roger had just had with one of their neighbours.
Labels:
Men with Beards
Friday 17 October 2014
Sussex Prairie Gardens
It was the big daises that did it. My spur-of-the-moment acquisition of a car boot full of jolly flowers (which you can read about here) had started a minor obsession, and I spent much of September day-dreaming about late season perennials. It’s one thing to start small, buying a few plants of a handful of varieties – this can have quite a transformative effect on a garden in late summer, and one of the most exciting aspects about these plants is that many welcome division, so that in time you can increase your stock, fill your borders and still probably have enough to give away to friends. So I’ve nothing whatsoever against starting small; I can be patient when it comes to my own garden. But that didn’t mean I was without a hankering to see what someone else had had the opportunity to do with perennial planting en masse – great swathes of identical flowers, interwoven with drifts of complementary forms and textures, with generous clumps of ornamental grasses for good measure. Such was the picture in my head, and so I took myself off to Sussex Prairie Gardens, about an hours drive away.
Friday 10 October 2014
October showers
A brief interlude between downpours in the woodland garden |
This thing – this annoyance we feel during showery weather – comes down to a problem of perception. We consider this weather changeable. But what if it isn’t? We see it shifting back and forth from one state to another. Perhaps instead, it’s in a fixed state of being, and that state is...changeable. If we’re discomforted by the unpredictability of the weather, will we be less so if we predict it will be unpredictable? Rather like the current season, neither quite summer nor yet autumn, we are in transition, somewhere in between, and that is how it is. That, as with most things in life, is how it usually is – somewhere between two things. You’d think we’d get used to it.
Strong winds, sudden downpours and some minor inconvenience with clothing. It’s a small price to pay for the sight of the clouds scudding across the sun and the kind of chill, damp freshness in the air I’ve been longing for all year. And even while these thoughts occur to me, I’m forced to take cover in the land rover from a sudden downpour of particularly biblical fury, rain streaming down my coat and boots and pooling in the footwell. Through the fogged up windscreen, I see a fox loping across the garden, unconcerned, perfectly dressed for the weather. I watch it disappear through the hedgerow into the fields, with something approaching envy.
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