I haven't looked at my astrological charts for some time, but I imagine if I did they'd say something about a time of instability, upheaval and change. My absence from the blog over the past few weeks is a reflection of this. Firstly we've moved house, only a few streets from our old home, but that doesn't lessen the amount of stuff buried and lost in packing boxes and, secondly, our migration back across the Branch Hill allotments from Scarlett's plot to Mary's.
The resulted feeling is one of being uprooted. I'm sad to leave our small garden in Queens Crescent. It's 4 years old now and is just becoming a 'garden' - the plants have finally put down their roots (just as we pull up ours) and found their space. It always
takes time for that to happen, unlike at flower shows, where the plants look like crowds of rush-hour commuters huddled together on platforms, waiting for a train to take them on to somewhere else.
It is half a small garden really - divided into two. One half for each flat. Wooden stairs lead from our back door down to two low beds on either side of a black limestone path densely planted with purple spotted orchids (a prolific seeding form of dactaloriza majalis I found in a garden in Hampshire) growing through tufts of black and green ophiopgon (o.planipicarpus nigrescens and o. japonicus nippon) beyond that there is a Chinese Judas tree (cercis chinensis 'avondale') its bare winter wood covered in cerise pink buds. It has grown into the most beautiful of shapes, as if pruned by expert hands in the most ancient of Kyoto gardens. Underneath there are a few unusual forms of anemone nemorosa, found while photographing the genus for a plant profile.
A wisteria creeping over the wall from next door overhangs them both and is one of my favourite plants in the garden (though it's technically not in our garden at all). The border at the end is made up of plants given to me by Christopher Lloyd and Fergus Garret on a visit to Great Dixter.
They were planting up their tropical garden at the time, and filled my car with a luscious jungle of plants I'd have never chosen for myself, but not knowing what to do with them, I ended up planting them en mass in one border. My natural inclination is toward the woodland plants of spring and early summer, but toward the end of summer - when normally the garden would look like a spent force - this border breaks into a grand symphony of giant leaves and exuberant flowers for which I have become ever grateful.
Two years ago we built a raised bed from green oak timbers, and filled it with an open leaf mouldy soil for woodland treats....but the squirrel finds it easy digging and likes anything planted there, he seems to live on a diet of expensive lily bulbs. And when he's cleared a suitable patch ....about the size of a litter tray, next-door's cats move in.
It's been a disappointment this year. I was starting to plan a national collection of ferociously spiky New Zealand umbellifers called aciphyllas to see if I could hold the mammals at bay.
However in one corner of the raised bed there there is a success, a downy silver chelianthes fern from California. I've always struggled to grow it, or rather, always succeeded in killing it, but finally it found a place it was happy, warm and sunny but with a cool damp place for its roots to run (just how it grow in the mountains with its roots sheltering from the heat under cool damp rocks).
Lastly, there's a swamp magnolia, magnolia virginiana that I bought from Peter Chappell at Spinners Nursery in the New Forest. It is a spindly evergreen tree with glaucous leaves (the underside of which is silver) it hasn't flowered as yet and I guess I'll never see it now or get to smell it's sweet flowers.
I am still looking forward, but I think I'm also grieving for the loss of Ruth's plot last October and the wonderful garden we made there. It's funny how attached you can get to a small piece of land.
