ROAMING FOR ROSES

In the process of going out to photograph roses, much else can happen. Hence this rather random post. But let’s start off in the Beech Borders, where ‘Isphahan’ perfumes the air. I promised a close-up of this rose, which starts off the purest of bright pinks before fading to a softer, paler but still lovely colour. For a few short weeks it is a winner.

Recent trips around the garden have varied from misty rain through darkening dusk and bright early morning sun – so forgive some inconsistencies!

Looking up the Beech Borders towards the beech which gives this area its name, and the bench from which one looks down on the lily pond. The last of our azaleas blooms in tandem with the roses.

Turning around from the above scene, yellow and pink water-lilies with ‘New Dawn’ making its way through a tree beyond.

Halfway up the Beech Borders. The pale rose in the centre is again ‘New Dawn’.

On a very different tangent, the large canna bed, replanted at the end of last summer, is coming into its own. I love the Roberto Burle Marx-ish tropical rhythms of the massed leaves, especially early in the summer; there are green, red-brown, yellow/green and pink/red-brown/green leaves in this composition. Beyond the lawn is the Lower Rosemary Border where the swathes of meadowmix annuals are just starting to flower. Hopefully there will be many more pics later in the summer. Meanwhile the first flower not a white alyssum (and rather photoshopped) is included below…. Beyond the meadowmix is the Rosemary Hedge with the Upper Rosemary Border showing above it – the white is a candelabra of yucca flowers, and beyond that again but not visible, the New Old Rose Garden which will feature anon.

Spot the spade – and the hopping logs in the Garden Celebrating an Imperfect Universe just beyond the cannas.

Textbook examples of plants benefitting from backlighting. This time spot the gable.

A precocious bright red canna already in flower – and more signs of a gardener at work – and below the first of those annuals!

Let us proceed to the New Old Rose Garden. Below is an overview.

More roses will be planted this summer, filling gaps and replacing those that did not survive transplantation. I’m quite pragmatic. Many roses will not be replaced; rather I will try new varieties, and duplicate those that have done well and I’ve been able to propagate myself. The only criteria is that they should be bushy old-type (thus often very modern) or interesting genuinely old varieties. And then the underplanting with perennials must proceed!

Photographed from within the Upper Rosemary Border, this shot looks across the Mothers’ Garden, hopefully to be planted with its roses within weeks.

Here Louis and Taubie sit picturing the Mothers’ Garden all planted up…

Here they are again, seen through the Aunty Corrie Rose which is undoubtedly my favourite with its glorious colour and scent – what a pity that it lasts for only a few short weeks!

Of course there are other roses too. Here is the unnamed rambler beginning this year to make a show around the window of the Ellensgate Garden.

And here is its parent – a seedling which grew through a myrtle bush in the lawn –unplanned, untameable, inappropriate and almost impossible to eradicate – and quite frankly I love the cussedness of this chance encounter. Beyond in the border grow a circle of five ‘Ballerina’ roses, one of the few features predating the makeover of this bed 5 or 6 years ago.

Open up the camera, and this is what you see – I am standing outside the gate to the Ellensgate Garden.

Down again to the border: directly above the pot in the above picture, here is a better shot than last week’s of ‘Cardinal Hume’ and his floozy –Lychnis calcedonica.

Further afield the  roses on Freddie’s Dam are looking lovely.

In fact much at Freddie’s Dam is looking lovely, and the first of the white hydrangeas are starting to flower.

And the Makou Dam is not looking too shabby either!

So let’s amble back up to the house, and take in the end of a perfect summer’s day from the stoep…

 

 

RARISH ROSES

Following on from last week’s post, ‘Mothertjie’ by the lily pond is going over but ‘New Dawn’ is on the ascendant. A most unusual sport in that it differs from its parent (from which it ‘sported’) by being repeat flowering, ‘New Dawn’ dates from 1930 and was the first plant ever to be patented. I should not have added that, for my next statement is that it is easily raised from cuttings and my original specimen was a gift from a friend.

It is a large, robust and easy climber which I have both growing into trees and twirling through a shrub border. A friend very successfully trained one I gave her into a well ordered trellis which it shares with a jasmine.

Outside The House that Jack Built the Hybrid Musk ‘Penelope’ and Portland ‘Jacques Cartier’ are all going fortissimo, backed by Clematis Montana. These too were grown from cuttings.

If we step back a little we notice not just how green everything has become, but also the two climbers in the fence below the water oak. They are ‘Felicite et Perpetue’ with accents on the 1st, 2nd and 5th e, very French… It was introduced in 1827 by the gardener to the Duke of Orleans. One more accented e there!

It too sported interestingly, although some sources claim it to be a seedling: ‘Little White Pet’ (which I’ve not found in South Africa) is a small repeat flowering shrub, whiter than the delicious red bud through pink to white of this beautiful rambler.

Moving on we pass the spot where I planted a number of Yuccas – I think Y.gloriosa, gathered as truncheons from a friend’s garden. Like magnolias, the flowers are fleshy and bruise easily and must be captured at just the right moment to display their full beauty.

I picked one from the huge candelabra and laid it down on the mown grass to photograph.

We turn up the Beech Borders where several pink roses, including huge arching bushes of ‘Isphahan’,  are gorgeously scented and appealing, although not at their best after days of soft rain. Details on this rose will have to follow.

Two roses I did manage to take detailed shots of – the first is ‘Mme Ernest Calvat’ who also featured in the previous post.

The second is one of the most beautiful of the striped roses, ‘Variegata di Bologna’, a Bourbon  which sported in 1909 from a rose called ‘Victor Emmanuel’; I can’t help wondering if there is a logical link between the Italian King and the Italian city  which these two roses are named after… Apparently it sometimes reverts to the solid dark violet of the old king. I shall keep an eye out.

I visit ‘Cardinal Hume’ which I have been meaning to photograph for days after telling about giving him to my cousin. He is rather squashed for such a high ranking cleric, by both the heavenly ‘Angels’ Fishing Rod’ (Diarama) and the rather more earthy, not to say brazen, Rose Campion or Lychnis Coronaria.  However she wears her glad rags with no less dignity than he his ecclesiastical purple, and they make a fine couple despite what ‘some people’ might say…

At the end of the walk I sat down on the seat below the spreading branches of the pin oak overlooking the Makou Dam and whilst I was on the phone I kept an eye on the fish rising and the dogs cavorting all around me.

Often these last days it has rained and photo opportunities were quick dashes out the door – or even through the windows. In the process The Ellensgate Garden – close to the house – received special attention.

In the foreground is ‘Maria Callas’, after nearly 50 years still one of the great pink Hybrid Teas, with ‘Bewitched’ growing inside the Ellensgate Garden. A rose with a cast iron constitution, it inherited much from  its parent, ‘Queen Elizabeth’, including its towering stature. Also growing  here, now in its second summer, is what I suspect to be the 1840s rambler ‘Russeliana’ which gives some repeat flowering. If it has a weakness it is a tendency for the flowers to age and die in the truss to a dull grey. I much prefer its more romantic name: ‘Souvenir de la Bataille de Marengo’, but I am pleased I don’t have to remember it by that name! The Nicotiana elata in the garden are, with the exception of one packet of ‘Limelight’ bought from Thompson & Morgan in the 90s, all descended from plants grown by a dear old friend, many years departed, in her garden in the 40s-70s; my mother always referred to them as ‘Mrs Swartses’ and they are by far the most valuable self-seeders in my gardens: easy, willing, and manageable with a colour range through white to deep plums, purples, reds and pinks, and an ability to chose their colours serendipitously to match or support nearby flowers…

It is too long since I photographed the Ellensgate Garden from the formal lounge, especially as it was designed to reflect the proportions of that room, with its windows as wide as the bay, and its width identical to the room’s, all aligned exactly. This photo proves yet again that the junipers which flank the start of the axis from the front door have grown too large, but I am scared of losing their graceful naturalness to hard pruning. Sooner or later I will have to take the plunge.

One last pic: the living room is flooded with scent from the roses on the roll-top desk Louis picked this morning: Harmonie, Maria Callas, Bewitched and Oklahoma.

 

RANDOM ROSES

‘Tis the season of the rose… Many of mine are once flowering old-fashioned types, others are so tatty by the end of summer that they hardly have a leaf left. Mine is not the perfect climate for roses, and my adapt or die attitude does not make it easy for them. But after months in which I doubted the sanity of growing roses by the hundred, propagating them from seed and cuttings, owning shelves of books on them and generally being more than a little obsessive about them, I am once again overwhelmed…

Intoxicated by their scent, I am pleased I planted a dozen cutting grown Jacques Cartiers outside The Plett – a typically high-shouldered Portland which does brilliantly with me.

Despite having lost well over half the roses planted in the Anniversary Garden, it is still possible to take an impressive picture there – the deep gold is ‘South Africa’ (KORberbeni, marketed in other countries as ‘Golden Beauty’) The pale one is the David Austin rose ‘Molineaux’.

Then there are the two nameless roses I received from two favourite aunts who live 1400km apart. They are very similar, but definitely different. Both are heavily perfumed, tend to suckering and long whippy growth and are once-flowering. I would describe them as Centifolias of obvious Gallica parentage, but can do no better. Aunty Corrie, pictured above and below, is a rich fuchsia pink with a silvery sheen to the reverse of the petals, and it darkens to a lovely rich pink. In fact, the colour ‘old rose’ seems to have been invented for this rose.

Any help in identifying them will be hugely appreciated! Aunty May is a slightly smaller rose,  a little paler, with narrower petals and  less robust in growth, but she also darkens with age. Here she is below.

The next rose I can identify with certainty. She is Mme Ernest Carvat and was introduced to the world by the widow Schwartz in 1888 after sporting from Mme Isaac Pereire. Bourbon climbers, they are two of the most beautifully scented roses in the world. I have several of the darker pink Mme Isaac Pereires, having grown them from cuttings, but I lost my two original plants.

The next two I truly believe I grew from seed. The first I named ‘Mothertjie’, my pet name for my mom, adding the Afrikaans diminutive. It is a slightly remontant rambler and I grow it through a tree at the water lily pond. It featured in a recent post – here the photo is again.

And here the close-up – a pretty rose with textured pink on white colour and a creamy-yellow towards the centre.

The other seed raised rose intrigues me no end – especially as I can only assume it was seed-raised. It looks as though it will be a tall many stemmed shrub, although it might prefer to be a climber; it has reddish pink flowers and the new growth is beautifully dark. I will be watching it carefully for it might be a winner.

‘Penelope’ possibly the best of the Pemberton Musk roses, is another I have raised successfully from cuttings. Then I decided some years ago to plant The Mothers’ Garden with only ‘Penelope’ – and over two years struck not one cutting successfully! So now we have other plans there.

Growing away lustily in the New Old Rose Garden (read more here if you want to know how we came to move the roses) is Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’ – in fact I wish a few more of these roses would grow as well… this is their first full summer in their new site and we lost several more roses over winter, as well as seen several to be slow to get going after the winter.

Lastly we have one of the great curiosities of the rose world: Rosa moschata, the Musk Rose or Common Moss Rose, growing alongside Freddie’s Dam. Those are not thorns on the bud, but glands which when stroked release a musk-like fragrance. The flowers are beautifully and typically scented though.

Whilst in Johannesburg we spent many happy hours in my cousin’s garden where there are more beautiful and interesting roses than I’ve seen anywhere in South Africa. When we left she gave us 6 roses waiting to be planted. And when Louis refused to let me buy petrol I bought him 3 more at Ludwig’s. A double bargain for me, I’d say! Here they await planting, which happened today.

Oh – and I bought Rosa rubrifolia (syn R. glauca) for myself, having managed to get one I raised from imported seed to not die over 15 years… and I bought my cousin one too, as well as a Cardinal Hume which I consider to be one of the loveliest of roses. Rosa rubrifolia is my all-time favourite foliage plant – it stands in the foreground with its steel-blue leaves and wine-red stems and young growth.

This photo of the Ellensgate Garden with the mauve-pink rambler on the opposite side – another of my mystery plants – somehow didn’t make it into the story. And lastly, my little storm story. I add it in sympathy for the millions who suffered under Sandy, not just at the time, but who face the heart-  and back-breaking task of clearing up… we lost just two major branches off one of our oldest trees in a storm earlier this week and it was a mission to clear. How much worse is the process for all these people!

 

 

THE ROSE AND I–Part 4

What better way to overcome my mid-holiday inertia – after meeting deadlines at school and with our first edition of the magazine, before welcoming visitors staying in the cottages over Christmas – than with my on-going saga: Part 4 of THE ROSE AND I. More specifically: with this photograph of a rose reviving when I had come to think that there was little chance of this happening.

The rose in question is Cecile Brunner, ‘the sweetheart rose’, which bears its tiny hybrid tea shaped blooms on a tall and robust (in fact, it seems, indestructible) bush. At nearly 3m after being cut back for the transplanting in the New Old Rose Garden, this was the giant amongst the transplants. But I watched the green recede from its twigs as they shrivelled… all but two of them. Then one. And suddenly yesterday whilst inspecting the roses after a week of continuous rain, I found this twig covered in new leaves. Not only that –six or more young shoots had sprung from the thick grey main stem! Cecile Brunner had become the third rose to recover from what seemed certain death!

Rejuvenated by that discovery, I paged through the meagre pickings of the last weeks’ photos. There had simply been no time to indulge in photography. And here follows what I came up with for my final post for 2011. Above – Louis and Taubie, of whose relationship I am both jealous and proud, under the water oak at The House that Jack Built, with the last of Felicite et Perpetue’s blooms behind them. This was taken during the week he arrived in late November, when a quick afternoon walk was all he could savour of the new life on the farm. For the rest we were heads down in the office, working on the magazine. Soon you will be able to see the results – I will post on the magazine early in the new year.

At the waterlily pond New Dawn was spectacular this year, flowering fortissimo for weeks on end. She will flower all summer, although  not with such force. It must be six years since I planted a cutting to grow up into a young tree, and this year we saw a mature display. One of the decisions of the summer, a spectacular year for roses on the mountain, was that we should plant climbing roses in many more places.

Probably the biggest projectfor 2012 will be the Mothers’ Garden above the steps in the above photo, taken on another of our November walks. I first posted about that garden here, but it seems as though the design is changing from the original. Louis and I are looking forward to spending time working on the design together during the coming days. Oh, and if the stoep (verandah) is looking a little cluttered: it is. Superimposing two households does not happen overnight, especially when there are magazine deadlines to be met!

Christmas Eve – and with the deadlines met and guests in the cottages, we were dealing with set-in rain which left the bark of the big gum tree shining orange. Christmas lunch was supposed to be a picnic for 23 plus a tiny baby by the river. It was moved in plan B to The House that Jack Built where my cousin and her clan are staying… and then mercifully a plan C came into effect when some of the guests could not even reach the farm, and another cousin felt that the remnants of his flu should not be inflicted in an enclosed space on a six-month old. As the arrangement was that each family catered for themselves, it was quite simple for the party to break into three – and so there were only ‘us four oldies’ for Christmas…

On the whole we’ve not had good weather for visitors, although everyone who has stayed has enjoyed chilling and no-one has complained of the weather. Our most constant sunshine has been this soft (for a dahlia) yellow plant right in front of the stoep. It is one of several that survived from a tray of ‘annual dahlias’ some ten years ago, gradually taking on more typically dahlia qualities as their bulbs matured. I assume that the originals had been hormone treated to get them to flower as tiny tiny plants… any comments or further info, anyone?

But this is a rose post. Steph’s Rose is a seedling, one of two I grew myself and named and planted in honour of a very dear friend and colleague who died of a brain tumour several years ago. They too were moved to the New Old Rose Garden, as they are slight little plants, but just like Steph did, they put up a brave fight and flower enthusiastically and seem to appreciate their new home.

This is Duet, looking even gawkier than she normally does on a bush that nearly didn’t survive the transplant, but a beautiful pink none the less. With her is a canna which survived from remnants when the ground was cleared, and which, unlike most cannas, makes an excellent foil for the roses with its soft colouring and bronzy foliage. It will be encouraged and divided, the first conscious (if accidental!) underplanting in the New Old Rose Garden…

In looking for an archive pic ( having run out of recent pics with which to end the year) the word ‘underplanted’ reminded me of this one from the heyday of the Rondel Garden. I published it to Mooseys with the following caption back in 2006: The garden was not designed to be looked at through the fence but this shot works! Mutabilis centre back, Genl Gallieni to its right. Rugosas and Hydrangya serrata underplanted with Tradescantia virginiana and the self-sown spurge (Euphorbia polychroma) However I would like to end on something more festive and so – here is a bouquet to the change-over of the years. May 2012 be a good one for us all! Cheers!

 

CELEBRATING WITH MRS OAKLEY FISCHER

I walked into the office an hour late this morning. I decided that tidying-up would be a priority – but only after I had posted to my blog. I fired up my computer and the internet instantly came alive. Life is good.

You see – on Monday, at some expense to install it, we went onto wireless broadbandish internet, which we need to run the business. And yesterday we signed off the first edition of the magazine, which is looking good. And of course it is already a week since my teaching career was over.

But the joy to share on my blog this morning was the realisation during the week that one of the sturdy roses that survived transplanting was my beloved Mrs Oakley Fisher. And I took this picture on Wednesday to share with you.

 

THE ROSE AND I – Part 3

As I write this, the house is ready for the arrival of Louis: cupboards cleared, and space for his furniture. By the time I publish it, he will be here. Strange then that the Rondel Garden, tribute to and resting place of Francois, should feature so strongly at this moment. But then; in preparing for Louis’ arrival, I came across a photo album of the official unveiling of the Rondel Garden, when several of Francois’s friends attended, and Louis is there – as my partner. It was October 1996, 33  months after Francois’s  death. Louis knew Francois – quite well in fact, which made it easier to be successor to that larger than life personality. Sometime  in late 1995 I was laying out a garden for someone. He ‘introduced’ me to his neighbour – Louis, with whom I had lost contact, but knew had moved. The rest is history. (And history, and history – but we will not go into that here.)

Since there is a lot of nostalgia about these posts, here then are photos from that time; the top photo looks across the rock under which Francois’s ashes are buried; the photo above shows us all drinking a toast to Francois – and below is a unique photo, most likely the only ever taken, of the three of us together

The grey-haired lady in pink on the left of the second photo is Aunty May. She came up from Grahamstown for the unveiling, and for many years we holidayed with her at her house at the coast. From her Grahamstown garden comes the Aunty May Rose – one I have been trying to identify ever since (see the details of my attempts here) – but without success. Here it is again, photographed this spring. Can anyone help?

Interestingly, I have a very similar unidentified rose – the Aunty Corrie Rose, this time from a biological aunt, and it comes from her garden only a few kilometres from Sequoia. Here it is, flowering in the New Old Rose Garden: sumptuous and scented, two glorious roses, and each with a very special story attached!

 

THE ROSE AND I–Part 2

I begin this post with a picture from Gwen Fagan’s book Roses at the Cape of Good Hope. It is not a rose I have, but one I want; for Francois’s mother always remembered it fondly in her garden. And I dedicate it to my friend Diana of Elephants Eye, who grows it in her garden in Porterville, where I still hope one day to see it…

Let me now try to show you my roses with some sort of plan. Since I referred in the previous post to the roses from the Rondel Garden being moved to the New Old Rose Garden, this is perhaps a good place to start. We transplanted 125 roses from the Rondel and elsewhere into this garden, as well as 75 cuttings and seedlings from bags. I think no more than ten did not survive; of them several were pretty terminal to begin with… One rose I had thought dead, yesterday sported a shoot from near the base. I will not give up on the others just yet…

Star of the show is undoubtedly ‘Mutabilis’ which hardly knew it had been moved. Added to that, we  planted several cuttings as well. This easy and lovely rose, which is seldom without its butterfly blooms, combined with the mass of single roses we planted near it, will always be ready to welcome visitors as they enter the garden. The bubble fountain at the entrance can be seen to the left of the above picture.

The name – complete: Rosa chinensis mutabilis  – suits the rose admirably, for the apricot buds open and fade to straw, before become infused with red which grows darker as the flower ages. The mutation is amazing, and the mix of colours is at all stages pleasing.

I grouped most of the single flowering hybrid teas from the 1920s  which formed the hedge around the Rondel nearby. There were four roses, grouped in fours all the way around the Rondel Garden. I refer to them, and there are photos of all four, in the post I pointed you at in my previous entry. (Here it is again.) Of them my favourite, but also the least robust, was Mrs Oakley Fischer. She has not survived at all it seems, nor did Dainty Bess and I can only hope that I will be able to replace them: of the four only Dainty Bess with its unique dusty pink flower and maroon stamens and stigmas is still listed in Ludwig’s Gauteng catalogue.

One bush at least of Golden Wings (above) survived and is looking robust. Although robust is a term that should be reserved for the Irish: almost all the survivors, and in rude good health they are too, turned out to be Irish Elegance.

These aptly named flowers are delicately and subtly infused with salmon  and pink on a lemon yellow base – the colours I recall Peace to have been before  it became so pale…

Let us stay with the single roses, although the next two featured previously as the first of the transplants to flower. They are the feathery-leaved species rose (eliciting comment long after the fleeting flowers have passed) Rosa hugonis, the first to flower with small and delicate lemon yellow blooms and Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’, with blooms of a unique glowing red.

One last comment for this post: under the Mutabilis I planted a selection of Phygelius hybrids, as their colours mirror exactly the colours of this rose. I still need to contort myself to get both into a frame – but I remember the days when we had to do that to get two trees to give the effect of autumn, so I believe in time to come the effect will be spectacular!

 

 

THE ROSE AND I – Part 1

Let me introduce you: Yours Truly – aged one year and possibly some days, posed with my birthday presents: one of those pyramids of ever smaller brightly-coloured do-nuts you pack onto a shaft and Lorna, the teddy-bear. I named him after one of my aunts. My mom is no longer there to ask how long after getting him this happened. I was not yet talking on my birthday. Notice, however, that it is ‘Peace’ I am holding, not the presents. I wonder if that was posed. If Lorna and the colourful do-nuts are vivid in my memory, that rose is seared. In fact, so is every flower in that garden. I still dream of them as they were then, especially ‘Peace’, meeting me squarely eye to eye. No wonder I find ‘Peace’ a little pale today…  If I think of being in the garden with my mom, she is busy with the roses. Dead-heading, it must be, for the nasturtiums are in full flower beneath the roses. And pruning in winter, dressed in red-brown crimplene slacks (to be worn at home only) and an old green jersey which kept getting caught on the thorns, causing her to curse gently to herself.

Fifteen years later, during our last summer in this garden before we moved to a larger house, I sat with a bud of ‘Peace’ in a vase before me as I studied for my 9th grade exam and watched it swell and unfurl, marvelling for the first time with adult eyes at the complexity and delicacy of its structure and the way soft pinks, yellows and creams flowed through its colouring. That is about the time Lorna was finally pensioned from the family store of ‘toys for visiting kids’ – He was bald, earless and – I guess – unloved. But a fine bear in his day.

The next house never had the garden of the first, although there were over thirty fruit trees and vines and the greater part of the garden was an orchid rather than a garden. But I remember choosing several roses with my mother, some bare-rooted from the supermarket  – which means I just-just remember the pre-plastic era in gardening! We have to skip twenty years though to get to the above photo. It was only once Francois and I had moved back to Johannesburg that I started gardening seriously. My biggest project was the rose garden at our house in Greenside, where we started almost from scratch in a badly neglected garden. Next to the red gate in the back wall  I planted ‘Peace’. At this point Francois was already losing his final battle against cancer, which took his life four months later.

Some two years earlier he gave me this book: Gwen Fagan’s Roses at the Cape of Good Hope, and thus started our last great shared passion: the Old Roses. I tell the story, and how it led to the Rondel Garden where his ashes lie, in my post from July 2010: MY RONDEL GARDEN – or: To let go or To hold on?

Here is a page from the book, and below is the ‘General Gallieni’ rose referred to on the page – grown from a cutting taken from the original planted in the Rondel Garden. The original is one of about 10% of the roses which did not survive being transplanted into The New Old Rose Garden, which I have mentioned often over the past three months. (Which in turn should indicate to you that the decision taken after the post referred to in the above link was to let go…) So taking further cuttings becomes a necessity.

There then is an introduction. During the next few posts I will often refer to my roses, and especially the Old Roses, which are scarce in South Africa, but a great passion of mine!

 

END OCTOBER=SUMMER ROSES

This ought to be a photo essay, or better still a detailed post telling all about the unusual and often historic roses in my gardens beginning to bloom with all their might now, but there simply is no time. So all I will do is tease you with this shot, which would have been the first in the post: The Hybrid Tea  rose ‘Bewitched’ in the Ellensgate Garden. Soon (hopefully) the rest will follow…

 

In need of TLC

I awake in the middle of the night, without reason, and gradually descend into an anxiety attack, something which happens to me much less often than it ought to. So I get up and write this.

 

A visitor to my garden, someone I know and would have thought to  – literally and figuratively – understand the bigger picture, told me during the week that my garden was in need of TLC. I looked at her blankly. “There are pots with nothing in them,” she explained. I looked her in the eye, struck her off my list, and said flatly before moving on: “What you see is what you get.”

The pots do not have nothing in them. They have weeds. Which ironically makes them a lot emptier. And the dustbin lid which for eight years covered the dustbin reservoir beneath the water spout, still lingers longingly from a prime position. At the end of the festival week it is still there, although she did not mention it. What you see, lady, is what you get.

What I see is the opposite of her statement. When I popped home from school unexpectedly midweek I saw four people sitting on the bottom end of the big lawn, weeding out my beloved yellow gazanias from the turf. Lucas, my foreman, is a much neater person than I am, and clearly he is working towards having a perfect lawn. The fact that I would consider strimming the grass up against the wall on  the Rosemary Terrace of higher priority is not important. Truth be told, there is a whole team giving the garden TLC. And when one considers that no matter how you argue things, most of them earn a pittance and are pleased for a job, their TLC is to be very highly prized.

Breath deeply.

The Ouhout Forest is the most natural and possibly the most beautiful part of the garden. Self-sown trees and grasses, all in their natural environment. But even here a judicious pruning out (again) of dead branches and twigs will be an improvement. We will get there.

During autumn Lucas planted up a corner of raw earth at the recently completed Croft Cottage. I wondered if it would survive the winter. Last week the first ever visitors were greeted by a charming display of red, blue and lilac annuals and perennials. There’s TLC for you.

 

The first roses are blooming in the New Old Rose Garden, to where my staff transplanted 125 out-of-ground roses and some 75 bagged seedlings and cuttings in late winter. There’s TLC for you. (They are, for the record and the curious, ‘Pink Grootendorst’, a rugosa as the thorny twigs show, and Rosa hugonis, always the first to bloom.)

Whilst we installed and fine-tuned the irrigation system, they watered all these roses daily with a hand-held hose. At least 90% will survive the move. There’s TLC for you.

They have managed the edge of the Makou Dam – so unobtrusively that I barely notice a difference, so well that for the first time in several years I saw not one, but five Iris sibirica in bloom this spring. I thought we had lost them! There’s TLC for you…

And so it is  to my staff  I dedicate this photo of Mateczka, my closest garden-walk companion, an unfurling tree fern, Cyathea dregei, and a Siberian Iris. And to you, lady, with all my love (take a deep breath): a basket of raspberries !