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Striped Intruder
This must be the year of the hoverfly, with the garden alive with them every hour of daylight every day, their intensity increasing as the sun comes out. They seem particularly attracted to fennel, echinops and alliums.
There are so many different hoverflies around us, with Britain alone host to 276 species, and many so cleverly copying other insects that we are not aware that we are looking at hoverflies at all. The most obvious one is the yellow striped one, the Marmalade Hoverfly, seen in the photo which mimics a wasp. This is a clever move as wasps are rarely preyed upon by larger creatures, their yellow and black striped colour scheme acting as a warning.
The hoverfly sadly however did not reckon on human beings who kill them falling for their deceit and believing them to be wasps. They do however possess and deploy a “pretend” sting which gives a slight prick but no chemical to sting us.
The hoverflies we see most of in our gardens, the Marmalade Hoverfly, are attracted to plants that can give them both pollen and nectar as they are one of the few insects that are equipped to digest pollen. Apart from copying wasps some take the form of look-a-like bees, flies and some tiny ones have developed to look like gnats.
For organic gardeners hoverflies are true friends as their larvae eat aphids with as much relish as the larvae of Ladybirds, so we should be planting for them and providing shelter for them. On our lottie we plant Phaecelia and Sedums specially for them. We never see aphids on our plot. and similarly at home we select plants for insects in general but keep hoverflies, ladybirds and bees especially in mind.
Two contributions that hovers gift to the garden that are rarely attributed to them are that of champion pollinator and a brilliant indicator of biodiversity. Their presence is a sign of a garden with biodiversity in a healthy state. We should be pleased to have them in so many ways.
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Sunshine in the borders
Sometimes the simplest and most common of plants are the stars of the garden. This yellow Welsh Poppy, Meconopsis cambrica, comes to life in the low-angled rays of sunshine at the beginning and end of the day. Considered by many gardeners to be a weed because it happily and freely self-seeds wherever it is happy, this diminutive gem has the knack of placing itself brilliantly. We wouldn’t be without it.
- The Renaissance Garden
Today we visited the display gardens at David Austin Roses for an assault on our senses. The mixed scent of hundreds of roses hits you as you enter the garden from the nursery and shop. To begin with we lift each bloom to be smelt, each one delicious in its own way – some fruity, citrus in particular, some myrrh, some hinting at vanilla. Before long too much olfactory sensation means numbness of the nose!
But we just carry on letting our eyes take in the hugely varied colours and shapes of the blooms and foliage.
The display gardens feature a Renaissance Garden, a Victorian Garden and the Lion Garden all leading off from the Long Garden.
As we wander we notice most visitors have catalogues and are making lists of their desires, just as we did when we first moved to Avocet. Next step for them will be a tea break when they can get the list to manageable proportions. Today was a perfect day for choosing roses as there was a level of warmth and humidity under overcast skies that enhance the aromas and enrich colours.
When we were rose buying for our newly acquired garden at Plealey we bought mostly climbing versions of the New English Roses such as Falstaff, Shropshire Lad and Wenlock as we were trying to add the dimension of height to our back garden.
- Lady of Shalott
Today we went with a different agenda and a David Austin Voucher to spend. We were seeking a bright zingy rose to plant in the Hot Garden which currently seems too yellow. We decided on the rose, the Lady of Shalott, having been tempted by her orange-red buds which when open reveal a golden orange flower and a scent described as a blend of cloves and spiced apple.
All told a wonderful afternoon out – a good cup of coffee and a good rose to accompany us home.
We know botanists love to play around with plant names and recently there seem so many cases of this happening. Sometimes it seems to make sense, but why oh why did they change the plant family name of the umbels from “Umbellifer” to “Apiacea”? The original name reflected the character of these plants so well. They simply do look like umbrellas don’t they? Their inflorescences are usually scented and most definitely umbrella-shaped.
So many of this family we know as aids to our cookery – carrot, parsley, cumin, coriander, parsnip – a varied lot of vegetables and herbs. Just let some go to seed and watch them perform!
At Chelsea this year a flowering parsnip starred in Cleve West’s Gold Medal winning garden which was also rightly awarded “Best in Show”. He had dug it up from his allotment.
Today the brightest flowers in the back garden here are the fennel, its myriad minute acid yellow inflorescences held in umbrellas above the finest green lace of its foliage. Perhaps known best for its culinary value, it is also a brilliant border plant with its mouth-watering scent reminiscent of aniseed balls and its flocks of hoverflies in attendance. The magnetic attraction it holds for these insects make it a valuable garden companion – a living pesticide, for hoverflies and their larvae are predators of the highest calibre. Our fennel has self-seeded alongside the central path and is so large it looks down on its neighbour, a Mahonia japonica.
Another self-seeding umbel in our patch is the Cow Parsley. In the wild it appears as a thug growing in masses along roadsides where its sweetest of scents permeates our cars. However in the mixed garden border it certainly doesn’t deserve being served up with an asbo as one might imagine for it becomes a small delicate plant easily threatened by its neighbours. It seems to be that its smaller stature is due to this dislike of being crowded by neighbouring plants. It was interesting to see Monty Don showing Cow Parsley growing in his borders on Gardeners World a few weeks back.
The purple-black foliage cultivar “Ravenswing” is a real asset to any garden and its delicacy of stature and colour live comfortably alongside many neighbours. Ours look particularly good early on in the summer with another “apiacea” family members Astrantia “Hadspens Blood” and “Ruby Wedding”.
Now I must go and find out why the family of umbrella-like plants are now called “apiacea”.
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First tomatoes
- A few Gardeners Delight ready to pick.
It is a poor year for my tomatoes. The plants look very healthy, deep green leaves free of blemish but few flowers and not all have set fruit. The first to ripen are the Gardeners Delight looking like shining red marbles. Few of the other varieties have any colour on the fruit.
The peppers – sweet, cayenne and chilli – are much better. They have plenty of fruit developing both in the greenhouse and outdoors.
The cucumbers – my usual failures – are also setting fruit better than the tomatoes.
I need to look at my tomato growing technique, as something is letting me down.
The tomatoes, peppers and cucumber are all grown in Vital Earth Organic Peat-free compost and fed with my own comfrey feed with the addition of regular foliar feeds of seaweed liquid.
I underplant them with French Marigold so the plants are free of White Fly.
- The cucumber are just setting fruit behind their golden yellow blooms.
So, where are things going wrong. Perhaps the tomato flowers are simply not being pollinated.
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A basket of fruit
- All in a day’s picking.
Is fruit picking the most enjoyable part of gardening? It is so satisfying getting sticky and sweet-smelling hands and defying the wasps who are after you. Just look at today’s produce – golden plums with red and green gooseberries. The huge green goosegogs are from a self-seeded bush in a shrub border at home, the tiny red ones from the allotment. How is it that the pampered bush produces berries half the size of the neglected bush? Simply another case of mother Nature knowing best I guess!
The chucks get any bruised or over-ripe fruit. They watch intently as we harvest and get wildly excited if we approach their run, ready for the race to the plum. The Sussex hen usually quiet and reserved becomes a thing possessed, a hen on steroids, the olympic 100m champion of hens. she gets to the plum as it lands and disappears deep into the Buddleia bush growing in the pen. The others see but a streak of white and black plumage and miss out yet again.
Meanwhile, we return to the kitchen for a bowl of ultra-fresh rose-tinted yellow plums topped off with ice-cream and fromage frais. We allow the freezer to look after some for the winter and for jam and chutney brewing.
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Cheeky Sparrows
What is it with House Sparrows? We all know now of the terrible plight of this “cheeky chappy”, the “cockney sparrer”, or as we called them as kids in Gloucestershire, “spaggies”. Their population has dropped drastically, in town and country. A year ago we were missing their constant chirpy chatter here in our Avocet garden as in the six years we had lived here they all but disappeared. We decided that we might reverse the trend a little by putting up a box for them – the real thing, a sparrow terrace with 3 nesting spaces. They had occasionally in the past pushed a pair of great tits out of one of their boxes so we put one of those metal plates with a small hole over the original hole and nearby nailed up the new “for sparrows only” box. The box was on the fence in the side garden opposite our kitchen window so we could watch for developments.
The old box with its new metal hole was grabbed early in the year by a pair of blue tits who took up residence in January and fought off all other prospective squatters. The house sparrows completely ignored their new box except occasionally using it as a perch or toilet. However we soon discovered a pair evicting great tits from a tit box in the back garden. The fight continued for weeks with nesting material being added in turn by the sparrows and the tits. The sparrows won in the end and have now raised a healthy and noisy brood. They are now sitting on the second batch of eggs.
But no sign of activity in the specially provided sparrow terrace – unless of course you count the blue tit family in residence in the end terrace!
A warm humid day brings out the best scent in the garden and roses are often considered the best blooms for sweet scents. But not all roses perform, with many hybrid teas completely without odour. When we began our garden in Plealey we wanted the best and most varied scented blooms so all our roses are New English varieties bred by David Austin. Luckily his nursery and trial grounds are not far away. The display gardens are amazing and give you the chance to fully experience the sight and scent of each variety. So chosing roses for our garden is so easy. We simply take a half hour drive, wander around the roses sniffing the blooms as we go and then make our final choice over a cup of tea served in cups decorated with paintings of roses of course.
We now enjoy here in our patch at Avocet “A Shropshire Lad”, “Falstaff”, “Teasing Georgia”, “Graham Thomas” and “Wenlock”. We grow them close to paths – close enough to enjoy their scents but not so close that we suffer from their thorns.
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Crested Chucks
- Camera shy Fenton Blue
My flock of chucks is back up to eight with the addition of a Fenton Blue and a Fenton Rose. These are hybrids bred from Cream Legbars which are very flighty birds. My two tend to live in the trees in their run watching their flock comrades below them. They are normally very nosy birds but show them a camera and they disappear. Hence so far this is the one and only photo I have. But I shall keep trying.
We hope to get eggs from them in a month or so. they come into lay a few weeks later than most hybrids but the eggs should be worth waiting for – they lay blue ones!
They are beautiful birds, the blue having a salmon chest contrasting with the blue/grey of the rest of her feathers whereas the rose is a lovely mottled rose red.
greenbenchramblings 