The garden at Hampstead Lane has discovered ‘life’and is proclaiming its discovery in no uncertain manner. The deep bed which runs around the raised patio is positively rammed: heuchera fighting with geranium Rozannes, cotinus, the ponytail grasses, the acers, the roses, the corkscrew hazel, the achemilla, the erigerons – all desperate to be seen! The very desirable result of this is that there is NO space for any weeds. Having spent a year working for Heath Hands endlessly weeding the open beds at the Hill Garden and Golders Hill Park my ambition had been to plant so closely, and cover all visible soil with such a thick layer of bark, that no weed would get a look in – and it seems to have worked.
Apart from the aforementioned, standing proud and tall are my cardoon, a 10cm midget only six months ago…..
…and the maclaeya given to me by Sue Cane when I moved here. It spent a miserable 18 months sulking in a pot before finally finding a home in the big bed.
Both Sue and the lovely Clarissa Judd who advised me about the garden rave on endlessly about the maclaeya – its huge, round but intricately serrated leaves with their powdery silver undersides, its glorious yellow flowers….. I must admit that I wait to be convinced – the flowers are not yet out so maybe I will be. Meanwhile, it is making up for the time wasted in the pot and has already shot up to six foot plus and has spawned at least eight extra vigorous stems. So if it is allowed to stay I think it will need to be brought under firm control.
Even more ludicrously vigorous is the white buddleia which has rocketed up to nearly 10 foot but to date has produced not a single flower.
Much more giving, but I fear it may also turn into a bit of a thug, is the pink and white lavatera I fell for in Columbia Road a month or so ago.
With it large daisy like flowers with their deep pink centres it is currently a great addition to the bottom corner of the bed but I fear that if left to its own devices it could take over.
But enough of Hampstead Lane.
In the Hill Garden the Japanese dogwood was just stunning. A sizeable tree, its branches grow almost in layers and in flowering time each branch is almost entirely covered in what looks like open four petalled flowers each 15-20 centimetres across. In fact these are bracts and the flower is the rather insignificant small greeny-yellow ball in the middle of each set of bracts. These start off pure white but gradually turn deep pink as they mature. Someone suggested that they might turn pink as their pollen is removed by passing insects so as to alert others – in the same way that the horse chestnut candelabra turn from yellow to pink once their pollen has been removed. However, I have been unable to find eny evidence for that on the various gardening sites that mention them.
Very different if no less spectacular were these huge drifts of seakale that Sue and I found on a beach in Dorset. The young stems of the plants are a rare but delicious gourmet delight – these mature leaves are like leather.
And finally to another equally leathery surivor – horse tail, not to be confused with mare’s tail, a similar looking but purely aquatic plant. What I was dealing with below in the Golders Hill Park rosebed is horsetail, Equisetum – a plant that has been around for over 100 million years, so it sure knows how to hold its own.
Its secret is fast growing underground rhizomes or stems which send up, every couple of centimetres, upright fir tree like green shoots which can reach a considerable height but in the rose bed had made it to about a metre. As the RHS site says, ‘removing horsetail by hand is difficult. Although rhizomes growing near the surface can be forked out, deeper roots (which may go down as deep as 2m/7ft below the surface) will require a lot of excavation’. Depressingly they go on ‘shallow, occasional weeding is not effective and can make the problem worse, as the plant can regrow from any small pieces left behind’.
However, not to be put off I semi deep weeded it – pulling out most of the individual shoots’ roots and occasionally getting up a proper rhizome – but even that was jolly hard work. This section, half of a 3 metre x 3 metre bed, was the result of a good 2 1/2 hours work a week ago…
…but it took over two more hours of hard graft on Tuesday to clear the whole lot.
Not that I expect it to stay clear – although the RHS had added that ‘removing shoots as soon as they appear above the ground can reduce infestation if carried out over a number of years’ so there is some hope. Meanwhile the roses were very happy to have seen the light of day again and had thrown out new shoots within the week.
There’s nothing quite like a good garden!