TAKING OWNERSHIP

‘Tis a while since I posted twice in a day! But important things have happened this weekend, and there is a decision I wish to record…

 First – here is The House that Jack Built, fast getting ready for the spring season. There is still a lot to be done to the garden so that it says more than ‘end of a long winter’ when visitors arrive – but we are getting there! And then there is The Big House…

 Last night I slept in the main bedroom for the first time – a week short of a year, Saturday to Saturday, since I first slept there when the vigil with my mother started. The Big House is becoming mine. And with it I feel myself unfurling like a spring magnolia. There is space to fill… It is a luxury I have not known since I sold my house in Johannesburg. But I love cosy, and did not miss space much, except that I also collect clutter. Then I moved into Trailertrash Cottage in January. Half the size of my cottage, and with a limited view, I soon felt claustrophobic, hemmed in by my endless generation of paper, living in my own detritus. I – and six dogs. And a winter which didn’t seem to end. 

Can you see why this afternoon’s walk did so much to lift my spirits? I write this in short sleeves in front of the open window at night, and I revel in my blossoms and my magnolias. Above is a double white purple-leaved plum – perhaps Prunus cerasus ‘Rhexii’, below is the common but beautiful crabapple, Malus floribunda, and below that one of my many bushes  – of various sizes, colours and flowering habit – of Magnolia x soulangiana. All photographed this afternoon.

 I said there is a decision to record. It was one of those flash insights that make you wonder why it took you so long to find. I’ve been planning guest parking for day visitors – expensive and inconvenient. I suddenly realised how to solve it, simply, with the minimum of levelling, with easier entry and departure and with more space, hidden away from the main garden… and then I realised that the entrance to the garden would then naturally be along the axis of the Rosemary Terrace – my most formal vista. Bring them in to the formal and the manicured, and then let them explore the natural. Aha! Excitement builds. And the grooming of the garden looks more and more like an adventure and everless like a chore!

A photostitched photo from 2006 – two pots flank the entrance from the front door axis on either side of me, and there is a high viburnum hedge behind me. At the far end of the lawn is the Italian pot surrounded by four abelia cubes. An ‘arch’ will be cut through the maples beyond it and a pergola will mark the new entrance from the car park which lies beyond the maples. This is the Rosemary Terrace, flanked by the Upper and Lower Rosemary Borders: the heart of my formal gardens.

 

WEEKLY PIC: AUGUST10 – WEEK 5

End August – and despite a (final?) cold spell during the week, spring moves in relentlessly. The poplars are silvery green with new leaf in the stand across the valley. The cutting, which continues the Beech Borders axis, is blue with hydrangeas in summer. I love the simplicity of this composition in all seasons.

 

Of all the many blossoms, Prunus nigra  is both one of the earliest and of the most beautiful. This particular strain is white with a touch of burgundy about the base of the petal to match the young leaves and calyxes. Spring seems to literally be shining forth from the darkness of winter here…

 

WEEKLY PIC: AUGUST10 – WEEK 4

 Here we are, well into week 4 of August. Cold blustery winter alternates with glorious sun; luckily the weekend and half-term  included a perfect Sunday and Monday, with friends over – my first guests in the Big House – for a braai (barbeque) on Sunday. Today is miserable, but yesterday was the turning point of the seasons: whilst working in the garden I was suddenly overwhelmed by the magic scent of earliest spring on the farm: Buddleja salvifolia, native on the farm, flowers in August and the first heat brings out the typical honey scent of buddleja, as potent as first love.  Buddleja salvifolia is one of the major affirmations that God exists, for the injection of promise of a brighter future that the scent carries is a truly religious experience.

 But it is not the buddleja I write of today (I’m saving it for a Wildflower Wednesday post tomorrow, I hope) but the Sweet Violets – Viola odorata. I remember them growing under the roses outside my bedroom window as a kid – green and perfect, in full flower, together with the roses… not quite possible I guess; not when I look at these, flowering their hearts out among last summer’s hydrangea detritus and their own frosted leaves in the very week in which we are pruning the roses. But I found them on Sunday behind the house, too late to work into a salad or a table posy (truth is we ate off our laps in the sun around the fire) so I could only show them to my guests in situ, most magical of all anyway.

 

AUGUST10 – WEEK1

After the lack of colour in my post on winter (see here) I had to prove to you that my garden is not devoid of flowers! There are several azaleas in bloom and I took some good shots. But the flower that always surprises me (and delights the bees) with its total lack of regard for late winter cold, is Rosemary. It is possibly the most widely used plant in my garden, as there are several hedges of it, both formal and informal, and they are now coming into full flower.

 Here is one, forming an informal barrier up against a low brushwood fence which separates the meadow in front of The House that Jack Built from the Cottage Garden. It was here that I took these close ups, in gloriously warm winter sunlight; I shall share  even closer close-ups, for I love the promise of the little buds shielding a succession of perfect blue flowers. And I love the way that Rosemary never blooms ostentatiously, but richly rewards close inspection!

 

Mauves and orange and late winter warmth…

A beautiful Sunday on the veranda at my parents’ house; a glorious roast leg of lamb for lunch, and afterwards my mother’s first ever perambulation around the garden in a wheelchair; she is 80, has been diabetic for 45 years and of late has become frail. ‘Broos’ we say in Afrikaans, which also translates as fragile and vulnerable. After fighting against the idea of a wheelchair for ages, she quite looked forward to the ride, and was amused by the word perambulation. (Did you know that pram, as in a baby’s pushcart, is a contraction of this word?) Out on the veranda she could admire the combination up against the house of the earliest of the diaramas, D. gracile, with its silvery-white bracts and soft mauve flowers against the orange Aloe saponaria which has been flowering since autumn.

Diarama  (hairbells, fairybells, wandflowers or most poetically: fairies’ fishing rods) is one of the most beautiful of our indigenous flowers, and D. gracile is endemic to our area. It is a shorter and more solid plant than most, carrying its flowers on shorter and more upright wands and it is the first to flower. The bracts appear silvery in the sunlight and combine exquisitely with the soft mauve flowers. But the zing comes from the contrasting Aloe saponaria flowers! They are one of the few aloes that can survive our bitter winter nights unscathed. They multiply gleefully from the root and flower cheerfully for months on end.

So out we went, round the back of the house where the steps are shallow, and for the first time this visit she saw the primulas growing where they will – seeding in cracks one doesn’t even realise exist. She looked and looked as I practiced small manoeuvres with the wheelchair and the dogs looked on in exasperation at this new, slow form of going for a walk.  

It always amazes me that we battle so to grow most primulas in South Africa – in fact many are quite impossible, disliking our harsh springs, but in late winter P. malacoides puts on a brilliant show, spreading as it wishes. Once you’ve planted it, it is there for ever. I remember one plant that somehow found its way to the steps to my classroom. Four years later there were so many that I allowed the girls to pick them on their way into class!

Out onto the drive we went, and past the first azalaes. Confidently my mother declared the white ones her favourite these days, musing on the days when the pinks, or mauves, or reds took her fancy first…

Down we went past the flowering quinces (japonica, or Chaenomeles speciosa). They were of the first shrubs we planted when we started gardening here in the early 80s;  a red, a white and a spectacular small crimson one (perhaps ‘Atrococcinea’). To our delight the mix produced an offspring across the road, to where  one of the beautiful but bitter yellow fruit must have rolled. It is apple-blossom pink. We stopped to admire it and to reminisce about the first time we noticed its blossoms. Subsequently one year I grew a large number of seedlings from here and planted two hedges on either side of the Anniversary Garden from them. Some are rampant, some beautiful, some non-descript. Turning seedlings into hedges is not a good idea at the best of times, but I love the haphazardness of it all.

On we went… stopped to pick a sprig of witchhazel, to discuss the nemesias which deserve a post of their own, the new growth on the roses and aphids and their absense (thankfully!) We looked at the changes I made during the winter to the Big Lawn, simplifying the upper edge and removing three of the five circular beds cut into it by our late great gardener, Phineas Magoale, who did so much to establish the garden. We looked at the young sweetpeas, planted where he had always done, and remembered how proud he used to be of them. Then we turned  back and up the avenue between the Sequoia trees past more azaleas and two beautiful camellias, stopping and studying plants that have become friends in the years since they were planted: the Scilla natalensis, wild off the farm, beginning to shoot; the rose-scented pelargonium, always the worse for frost at this time of year; also from wild stock on the farm the Aristea galpinii,  with the promise of their glorious blue stars only just beginning to show through the leaves although last week in Tzaneen’s sub-tropical climate I saw them in full bloom… then back around the house and another threshold crossed as she sank into her familiar, comfortable chair near the fire.

 

It’s so schitzo

Spring - especially the early part - tends to be a bit schizo around here. It is the traditional tourist season, as we are known for our azaleas and blossoms on the mountain, but it tends to be all-colour-and-no-green. It is in fact my least favourite season. Which doesn't stop me from going totally overboard with my camera as though I was a tourist and not the rather sceptical observer of spring's excesses... this pic captures the strange combination of winter and colour that I speak of...

 

Spring is in the air

Crab-apples (Malus floribunda) are of the first blossoms to test the air. A few start opening early August if it is warmish. At this time I wish for cold. Spring can be the cruellest month in South Africa. T.S. Elliott would like it here. August and September can bring harsh heat before the spring rains start - usually in mid- October. That is the biggest difference between us and most temperate climates: spring so often starts off as a stressful time for plant and human. August is the suicide month, often windy and desolate. So far so good this year: good (best ever) winter rain; cool to cold weather; little wind.

 

Weekly pic: August week 3

There was never any doubt: Buddleja salvifolia would be my mid-August subject. As we reach the magic moment when the world starts to waken, the typical honeyed Buddleja scent wafts on the air; the warmer, the stronger it is. If kept trimmed every alternate year the foliage is lovely and the shrub effective. The flowers can kindly be described as a soft grey with a yellowish eye. A small percentage are whitish or even mauvish or blueish, but don't expect brightly beautiful. Its chief attraction is the deliriously summery smell which hits you unexpectedly, even on cold days like today. It is an endemic pioneer shrub on our mountain and will protect second generation growth like Halaria lucida (tree fuchsia) from the frost.

 

Berberis julianae

Berberis julianae is very similar to B. darwinii: the latter has darker flowers on longer stalks, so that they clearly form hanging bells. B. julianae flowers slightly earlier for me, which seems to be the opposite of what the books say. But plants can't read, and don't always follow instructions anyway. Although the tiny flowers are striking, it is the way they combine with the small percentage of leaves which turn red that really lifts this evergreen shrub into a class of its own. Furthermore there is a shiny healthy quality to the shrub in all seasons - and its thorns make it good for security. All in all Berberis offers a great range of species - low-maintenance, yet appearing well-groomed.

 

Hamamelis (Witch Hazel)

Witch Hazel is a scented, winter-flowering shrub with strangely attractive ribbony flowers in yellow and sometimes orange. Mine I grew from imported seed - they are the only ones I know of in South Africa. The best examples are named cultivars, but I'm pretty happy with my seed-grown shrubs! They have large rounded leaves which colour a good yellow in autumn. In total I have about 12 examples; some were accidentaly planted with some seed-grown lime trees (Tilia) in a hedge. Their leaves are very similar. It took two years before I realised some of my limes were producing ribbony winter flowers! I've kept the combo - it appeals to my sense of mixing the formal and informal, the controlled and the spontaneous, and so far they have kept pace with the limes - which will be trimmed into a hedge anyway.