September Garden Update
‘The garden, dear, it’s dead’
Freddie came back from a tour and said, 'The garden, dear, it's dead.' I said, 'What? Did you water it?' And Freddie said, 'Water it, dear?'
Tim Curry, on the garden he designed for Freddie Mercury
I was delighted recently to learn that Tim Curry (of Rocky Horror fame) is a great gardener and designer, known for his theatrically ornate garden at his home in the Hollywood Hills as well as those he designed for others. Of his own garden, he said: "The idea is organising nature not just into pleasing shapes, but also as a kind of spiritual resource". This is an idea that resonates with me as a gardener who is trying to create a space that is not only beautiful, but one that elicits an emotional response. ‘Emotional’ is one way of describing how I feel when grappling with a 70m hosepipe in a heatwave, which is why I gave up watering in mid-July when everything went from gamine to grotesque in the space of a week (though was secretly pleased to finally have something in common with Freddie Mercury, even if it is just bad gardening). After a certain point in the year I stop watering, because it seems increasingly unsustainable and because there’s more value in observing which plants do well in hot, dry summers. This year the standouts were the Eryngium planum cultivars, and Veronicastrum virginicum, which stayed upright with fresh green foliage all the way to the ground all summer. I’ll take a win where I can, just don’t talk to me about sweet peas.
We did take advantage of the dry weather to prune many of the plum trees and other stone fruits in the garden, which is best done in summer to avoid silverleaf which, being fungal, will be more active in damp conditions. It’s also meant that the hedges, which in a wet year can comfortably grow 40-50cms, have been much more languid and therefore easier to cut which we’ve now almost done. On a sleepless night I totted up almost a kilometer of hedging in the garden so cutting it is a mammoth job, but once done it provides a sharp foil for plants that are now sloping towards senescence, drawing everything together for one last hurrah. We’ve also been waging war on Campanula lactiflora which has spread like wildfire through the garden, creating a real problem for less robust plants. We’ve removed it almost entirely from several large borders now, so will be looking to inject some late summer and autumn interest into the big gaps it’s left behind.
Looking forward, we’ll continue collecting the windfalls. Some will be juiced and those that won’t store are now enjoyed by the pigs that recently moved on to the estate. We still need to summer prune the apples, so we’ll do that in the next couple of weeks along with the last bits of seed sowing and propagation of tender perennials. Once that’s all done we can start on the winter work in earnest, for which I’m well ready after such a hot summer!
Kate