If the light is right in the autumn and you are wandering around woodland stripes of light and shade will appear painting the woodland floor before you. Simply beautiful!
Category: light
Sometimes something happens that will remain with you for ever, a fleeting moment when Mother Nature shouts out, “Hey! Look at me! Check this out!”. She puts on a great show which disappears as quickly and silently as it appeared a short few moments previously.
While following one of our slow monthly ramblings around the Dorothy Clive Garden looking at what the garden had to offer especially for this month, we were, to say the least, waylaid by the weather.
As we walked slowly down the sloping path to the lower garden and the pool, we photographed the birches, trunks pale against the deep evergreen conifers behind them.
We looked over the hedge, the garden boundary, out and across to the countryside beyond. We saw that the light was changing rapidly and dramatically lighting up the countryside. A darkness crept over the approaching clouds which became the darkest blue-grey possible. Combined with the bright shafts of low November sunlight we were suddenly surrounded by the strangest weather we could ever remember.
The birches against their dark backgrounds lit up further. In a matter of seconds it was all magic surrounding us. The first two pics are the first pair prior to the light change, and the following three illustrate the changes those few moments in time produced.
Just look at the subtle changes in these three photos below taken just seconds apart. Look at the light on each tree and the reflection!
We will now share the changing scenes of a fleeting moment in time with you via a gallery of photos shown in the order I took them. Enjoy.
Things began to calm down as a dark cloud took over the sky once again and we enjoyed a final view from this lovely garden bench. It is strange to think that this this beautiful short passage of time which changed our view of trees and the garden in general will never be seen again. An unforgettable experience and an unrepeatable performance!
What a special moment, a moment we will never forget. In the short time this special lighting was putting on its special personalised show for us we were so excited and couldn’t stop pointing out special moments to share.
In my next post I will share the rest of our November visit to the Dorothy Clive Garden.
Sometimes the simplest of things are the most beautiful!
Take one twig!
Pink leaf petioles.
A single flower from the complex head of an Hydrangea sitting on a leaf.
I will be looking out for more such simple beauties and sharing them with you from now on. My new challenge for my Nikon lens!
This post will look at a small border in a Gloucestershire garden in a village at the bottom of Bredon Hill. It is a lovely garden, well designed and well cared with a calming atmosphere throughout. The gardeners and owners of the garden are my sister, Penny and her husband, Tony.
This little border in the front patch is a quarter circle in shape and covers only a couple of square metres but the choice of planting partners and artifacts together create a beautiful balanced feel.
The first photo covers the whole border in one shot which gives an indication of its size. The gravel mulch acts as a foil to enrich the colour palette, the bronzes, silvers and bronzes of the grasses and the rubies and purples of the sedums and diascias. The grasses also move and rustle in the lightest of breezes.
Diascia personata and Sedum Purple Emperor compliment each other beautifully.
Silken heads of soft grasses catch every iota of light and absorbs it to put themselves in the spotlights.
Well chosen sculptural pieces crafted in suitable materials enhance the plants rather than detract from them. The rust of the corten steel is the perfect material both its colour and texture which allow them to sit beautifully with the silky heads of the grasses flowing past them.
Clear water with a flat reflective surface borrows the colour of the sky and adds it to the composition. The simple contrast of foliage shape and structure of the plants in the bed works beautifully because of the limited number of different plants used.
To see the rest of the garden just check back on my post published in August 2013 called “A village garden with a difference,”
Back to my garden journal and we will look at my entries for September and see what our patch here at Avocet is up to. According to the weather reporters and meteorologists we should now be in Autumn but the garden is showing few signs of the expected seasonal changes.
I started by finding patches of colourful plantings and wrote, “September is a month when gardens can begin to look a little worn and frayed at the edges. We have made a huge effort over the last 4 or 5 years to ensure we have an interesting garden all year. Let us look and see if we have succeeded in making a good September garden. Here are a few shots of colourful patches throughout the borders.”
Jude, Mrs Greenbench or The Undergardener, and I have created a talk entitled “The Year Round Garden” which we give to garden societies and other clubs such as WI groups and U3A groups. It is all about how we ensured our garden was good for every month of the year. Some of these groups also visit our garden at various times of year to have a look around. Giving these talks helps us focus on ensuring we continue to develop this ever evolving element of gardening and helps us appreciate every day and what our garden gives us on every individual day.
The three photos on these first September pages show very different patches of our garden.
Turning over the page we find a couple of my watercolour paintings of two very differently coloured and differently structured flowers blooming in our September garden, a Crocosmia and a Salvia.
I wrote “I mentioned Crocosmia “Okavango” in my August journal entries as one of our newly acquired plants. It is now between 3 and 4 feet tall and flowering beautifully.”
“The most unusual coloured flower in our September garden has to be Salvia uliginosa. Its ugly name is made up for by its beauty with strongly symmetrical flower clumps and a shade of china blue petals with darker brighter blues too.”
My next double page spread features those wonderful South African summer flowering bulbs, the Agapanthus. We have a large collection of these big blue or white spherical beauties.
“From late summer onwards through autumn and into winter, Agapanthus continue to give colour, shape, texture and architectural elegance to our “Beth Chatto Garden”. In September many are still flowering strongly but a few begin to produce their beautiful seedpods.”
Turning over to the next double page I feature two very differently coloured Mahonias and a beautiful delicate Clematis.
I wrote, “Twin Mahonias, one yellow, one red both bright and brilliant plants for later in the year.”
“Take two Mahonias”
Concerning the Clematis I wrote “I love flowers that hide some of their beauty like this Clematis. Turn it over and discover its speckles and spots of purple.”
“Turn me over!”
The next double page spread features one of my favourite hardy plant families, the Sedums. I included photos of some flowering in our garden now and a watercolour impression of our plants in flower.
“There are so many variations in foliage colour and flower size and colour We have several. Here are a few from our patch.”
Over the page we discover the first signs of the changing foliage colours – the early signs of Autumn.
“A really good garden plant has more than one period where it is a star in the borders. One shrub we grow, Ribes oderatum certainly fits this bill. We grow ours in the “Freda Garden”. In late winter it is covered in deliciously scented yellow flowers which later in the year turn into black berries. Now though it is the foliage which turns the eye as it turns from bright green to rich shades of red, from ruby to almost brown-mahogany.
Not many shrubs could boast this much foliage colour and variation before Autumn has even got going.”
Can you spot the colour co-ordinated banded snail on a leaf in the last picture of the Ribes leaf sequence?
“Dazzling Dahlias! The September show offs!”
“Spot the bee!”
Opposite the Dahlias I look at a much more delicate flower, that of Kirengeshoma palmata, otherwise known as Yellow Wax Bells.
“This is one of the most unusual looking flowers to adorn the garden this month. As the flowers drop their petals, beauty of a different sort appears.”
And that sees the end of my journal entries for September. Next visit to my garden journal will see us moving into Autumn and the changes in weather and light it brings with it. Will I be reporting on the special light and colours, the colours of fire and Autumn?
In late August we made one of our regular visits to the Dorothy Clive Gardens on the Shropshire and Staffordshire border to see how the garden was progressing. We chose a warm sunny day for our visit which gave strong contrasts and deep shadow for the trusty Nikon to deal with.
We expected to see lots of colour and much of it bright hot colours provided by flowering perennials as well as perhaps the first signs of late summer presenting a glimpse ahead to autumn, with seeds and berries beginning to show and some leaf colour on trees and shrubs.
There was most certainly no shortage of berries to discover shining brightly like jewels under a bright summer sun.
A few very unusual berries in both colour and shape, were displayed by deciduous Euonymous and Magnolia.
Seedheads were beginning to form on herbaceous perennial plants just as we thought we might find.
We enjoyed the range of colours that flowers provided in the borders and these were highlighted by the August sun riding high in the afternoon sky.
We were pleased to see that this garden’s Tetrapanax Rex was thriving having lost our specimen early in the year. One here was particularly beautiful with clean unmarked foliage.
Ferns also provided brilliant green foliage throughout the Dingle Garden, looking fresh beneath the tall mature trees and evergreen shrubs.
In the new Winter Woodland Garden we were fascinated by the way the gardeners were training the coloured stemmed willows. We will have to wait and see what the end result will look like.
We enjoy watching the changes to be seen in the many unusual specimen trees at Dorothy Clive and have always liked the look of this yellow barked Prunus, P. maackii “Amber Beauty”. We are really wondering at the moment whether this would be the ideal tree for a space we have at home which awaits a tree for autumn planting. Apart from its unusual bark colouring it has a graceful growth habit and a wonderful winter silhouette. For a Prunus it also has large leaves.
The light during this visit was so interesting whenever the sun beamed through the tree canopy. We particularly loved the way it put this Hydrangea in the spotlight.
It is always good to see promises of things that will be happening in the future and spotting them is an important part of any garden visit. Also it provides a most positive way of finishing my report on our august visit to this wonderful garden, a true favourite of ours. And as we have not featured the giant stag sculpture standing proudly at the top of the stream in the Dingle Garden here he is surrounded by lush greenery completely different to when we saw him in the starkness of the winter months.
The pool at the bottom edge of the garden at the lowest point in the garden reflected the blue sky and we enjoyed spotting the small shoals of young Rudd enjoying racing around below the white flowers of the Water Lily.
We really appreciated on this August day the scents and colours of the blooms in the Rose Garden.
Our next visit to our monthly garden for this year will be in September. We hope to see some hot colours in the herbaceous borders and perhaps a little colouring up of foliage on the many trees at Dorothy Clive.
Categories
My Garden Journal in August
My August entries in my Garden Journal 2016 see me beginning Volume Two. On the first page I look back to my original garden journal’s August entries.
“I made my first ever entries for our new garden in August 2003. We moved to “Avocet” our Plealey home on 8th August. I wrote, “The garden needs our love and attention after 6 years of neglect. It is a garden of straight lines and loneliness, lacking in wildlife and its inherent vitality. It lacks colour.” Things are very different now 13 years later. The garden is now full of wildlife, full of calming atmosphere and peace. It is a garden that attracts many visitors each year and people enjoy hearing our talks about it.”
Over the page I considered the way light in August changes the look of the garden.
“On bright days in August the garden looks very different depending on the time of day. When the sun is at its highest point in the sky the hot colours really burn and shadows deepen to jet black.
I then looked at Salvias and share photographs of some of those we are growing in our patch.
“Every few years I like to set myself a challenge in our Plealey garden. For the last few years I have been trying to master growing and keeping Aeoniums. This is coming along well now so for this summer my new challenge is to discover lots of beautiful varieties of Salvias and learn how to grow them well. We already have a large collection so the next part of this challenge will be over-wintering them. These three (in the photos below) show the vast range of colours available from the deepest blue, the brightest pink to the gentlest of yellows.”
On the opposite page I featured a selection of eight of the Salvias in flower in our patch in August. I have included a couple more here too for you to enjoy and to help us appreciate the variety we have.
I move on in my journal then to look at very special and very unusual perennial plant, a Diascia. On the page opposite I share a few of our new sculptural pieces in the garden.
“One plant that always attracts admiring glances is this pink gentle giant, an evergreen Diascia, which is called D. personata “Hopleys”. It is an exceptionally good garden performer, growing to a tall six feet and flowering from May to December in a good year.”
“We love sculpture in the garden and in our patch”Avocet” in Plealey we mostly choose metal or stoneware pieces as these enhance the planting rather that dominate. Recently we have added four new new iron work pieces, two based on seed heads – Clematis and Allium – plus a new bird bath.”
Here are three of them, the fourth appears later.
I then move on to one of the brightest of garden perennials to grace borders in the UK, the Crocosmias.
“Various Crocosmias feature throughout the patch and in August many come into their own, showing off their yellows, oranges and reds. We have dozens of different varieties. Here are a few ……….. “
Firstly the yellows ………….
…………………….. and then the oranges and reds.
Returning to the sculptural pieces we have recently added to our garden collection, I introduced another 5 pieces.
“Two new bird sculptures joined us too, one metal, a Wren, and one ceramic, a Blue Tit. The Blue Tit piece doubles up as a planter for some of our many Sempervivum, as does our chestnut shell sculpture.”
“A Begonia Rex adds colour, shape and texture to our stoneware Green Man planter, one of a pair.”
“The moon-gazing Hare.”
“We grow many different Echeveria in terra-cotta pots and pans in the Rill Garden and on our drive edge. These mostly have glaucous leaves and produce flowers of subtle blends of pink, salmon and orange. Recently we acquired a new variety with almost black succulent foliage, Echeveria “Black Prince”. Imagine our delight when it gave us these beautiful red flowers.”
“For this month I have decided to paint two delicately coloured flowers, a yellow Linaria dalmatica and the china blue climber and scrambler Clematis jouianiana.
On the opposite page I finish off my entries for August by looking at some of our newly acquired plants.
“We are always adding new plants to the garden at Avocet and indeed a few found their way in during August. Here is a selection ………. “
“New Honeysuckles to clamber up our new willow hurdles.”
“A white Physostegia to accompany our pink one.”
“Crocosmia “Okavango” and “Salvia leucantha “Eder”.
And there ends my journal entries for the month of August. Our next visit to look at it will be in September a month that the meteorological office places in autumn but us gardeners tag it onto summer – a much better and more accurate idea. We move into a much quieter period now as we have completed our NGS open days for this year and have received the last of our visiting groups.
We open our garden a few times a year both by appointment and full open days so I thought it would be interesting to wander around our patch just after a group left, taking photos as I went, thus giving a visitors’ eye view of our garden. The date was early August.
Salvias featured strongly as did clematis and roses. Colours in the garden were strong and lively, helped by the sunshine when it occasionally came out to play.
The added bonus of wildlife always delights our visitors. We will soon be hosting our final visit by a garden group for this year but we already have groups booked to come and share our Avocet patch with us in 2017.
I now invite you to come with me and my camera lens for a wander around our garden by navigating through this gallery. I hope you enjoy the journey. As usual click on the first photo and navigate with the arrows.
Categories
colours garden design garden furniture garden photography garden ponds garden pools garden wildlife gardening gardens gardens open to the public hardy perennials lakes light light quality ornamental trees and shrubs outdoor sculpture sculpture shrubs town gardens water garden water in the garden wildlife woodland
Winterbourne House Gardens – a city garden
You don’t very often find yourself travelling into the centre of a major city to find a beautiful garden but that is exactly what we had to do to find a garden that had been on our bucket list for years, Winterbourne House Gardens. We travelled along three motorways, the M54, the M6 and finally the A38M into Birmingham until we found the street we were looking for and just 600 yards down there we found the entrance to the garden. Putting up with the motorway journey and the city traffic was soon lost from our minds as the entrance was so welcoming and we knew we were in for a wonderful day.
Obviously we started our visit by obeying the sign above! The only downside of a visit to this garden is the tearoom being much too small for a wet and cold day. But the garden itself was a beauty with views, pathways and archways to invite us to explore further.
A botanical garden though is all about special plants and the way they are grown together. There were plenty for us to study at Winterbourne and to help take our minds off the dull skies and increasing threat of heavy showers.
Little features that draw the eye added extra points of interest to our wanderings.
An unexpected treat was found as we took a path through woodland, a shaded walk alongside a large lake. The light was very special there. Looking out over the lake we could see the skyscrapers of the city. This was the only time we were aware of our city centre location during our wanderings.
After enjoying our lakeside promenade we followed the winding path through the water gardens where the giant leaves of Gunneras and Dalmeras dominated and the wide ranging colours of Primulas added interest to the greens.
We love to see sculpture in gardens so were delighted to spot these beautiful slate pieces inviting us to read their words. We were amazed to discover that one piece was based on a clock – beautiful!
So we discovered another garden that we enjoyed so much that we have added it to our favourite list. A great garden in a great city.
Categories
birds climbing plants colours flowering bulbs garden design garden photography garden ponds garden pools garden wildlife gardening gardens grasses hardy perennials house martins light light quality ornamental grasses ornamental trees and shrubs roses Shropshire shrubs spring bulbs spring gardening succulents swallows water in the garden wildlife
My Garden Journal in May
Just as I completed my journal for June I realised that I had not yet posted “My Garden Journal for May”, so here it is now for you to enjoy! The June journal report won’t be far behind!
Summer creeping in can only mean that our May garden is changing by the day. Exuberance in every border with things growing before your eyes. A month of excitement! I began my May entry in my garden journal by writing,
“May means exuberance! It is the month when our garden shows us the ability it has to surprise. It shows off its strength and its artistic talents. Growth is so rapid and colour so exciting, that we are aware of what our garden means to us and also aware of its power that Mother Nature possesses and uses with pride and to excess!”
I then turn to looking back at my original garden journey recording the first few years that we have lived and gardened at Avocet.
“Looking back in my garden journal that recorded the early years at Avocet, I read a paragraph that shows just how similar May is now.
“The garden is bursting with life – butterflies including Holly Blues, bees and so many birds. Suddenly the garden is alive with birds giving extra colour, sound and movement. There seems to be so many finches – Goldfinches, Chaffinches and Greenfinches. Swifts, Swallows and House Martins swoop overhead especially in the evening.”
Sadly though there are far fewer Swifts, Swallows and House Martins overhead. So many have not survived their long migrations. What does the future hold for these beautiful acrobats?”
Turning over the page of my journal and we see the next two pages feature Acers and Roses.
“Acers are one of the many stars of the May garden, a month when their foliage and stems are delicate and colourful.”
“May means Roses and by the middle of the month we have many buds and pioneer blooms. Reds and pinks dominate at the moment. Yellows and oranges are still to come.”
I moved on to look at one of the climbers we enjoy in our garden and at the grasses that have now started to grow rapidly.
“Think of climbers early in the summer garden and Clematis is the first plant to spring to mind.”
“Grasses are growing quickly now and the myriad shades of green move skyward in our borders.”
Turning over again and succulents are discussed. These are a recent interest and I have only been growing them and propagating them for a few years.
Succulent plants are an interest that has grown over the last few years. Beginning with Aeoniums and Echeverias I soon branched out.”
“Troughs of succulents grace the Rill Garden in May and on into October when the risk of frost mean that they retreat to the warmth of our greenhouse.”
When we turn over next we see that I talk of Hostas and in particular those growing in our Bog Garden. The bog garden is so full of life at the moment with plants growing appreciably by the day.
“Hostas are one of the more subtle of our garden favourites both their foliage and later in the year their flowers. The Bog Garden next to our Wildlife Pond and snuggled up to it is a place of rapid growth in May.”
White is not a colour I particularly appreciate in the garden and as a result I do not use it much.
“White is not my favourite colour in the garden. I particularly do not like white painted garden furniture or white painted fences, trellises or walls. We tend to paint our seats in ivory or cream which are much softer colours particularly on bright sunny days. Our fences we paint in browns and trellis work in gentle shades of green which acts as a great foil for our plants. I think this dislike of white is to do with our weather as it can work so well in other countries. Where flowers are concerned I appreciate them most in May when white can look good with the brightness of fresh foliage. Below are photos of a few particularly good white flowers, Viburnums, Cornus, white Bluebells, Iberis and Camassias. Some of these are the purest of white where others have gentle hints of colour. The Camassia has a green tint to it and the Iberis the gentlest hint of pink.”
As we leave May behind we can look forward to the longest day, the time when day and night share equal number of hours.
greenbenchramblings 