Yesterday I wrote about green leaves and asked you to send your best green foliage combinations.
Here's my contribution: I hope you enjoy it. You can have the slight quiz value of trying to work out which genus is my "never say no" plant shopping weakness.
One thing: I'm posting my slideshow here. But so that all the shows to browse are together, please post your addresses as comments to the previous post. Or, add your URL when you comment: then your name will be clickable.
I didn't call this blog "A Nice Green Leaf" for nothing. Apart from my great admiration for the work and ethical message of Eric Carle, just like the Hungry Caterpillar, I absolutely love a nice green leaf.
Blue, red and pink in the garden (especially pink) can entertain me for a second, but looking at all the different greens I'm growing can almost hypnotise me into a greater state of calm. So when it came to Bloom Day this month, I felt a bit of regret that there was no room for my lovely green leaves in the show.
I know there are other people out there who'd love to share the great greenness of the world, so I'm asking you to join me on the halfway point of the year, 30 June, in posting A Big Green Leaf.
Either put up pictures of your best foliage combinations, wow us with your giantest leaf, or delight us with a technologically advanced slideshow showing the general verdancy of your plot. We don't mind. We just want to enjoy your greenery the same way you get to do every day.
When you have your post done, please put the details here in a comment, and I'll start organising to let other garden bloggers know that we are going to have this little event. Hopefully it'll be a fun way to address the balance a bit in favour of calm, collected, utterly
soothing, surprisingly varied, deliciously shady, photosynthetically-significant, beautiful green.
With the Solstice fast approaching I had to drive down to Somerset to see a man about a bit of Japanese topiary. Stonehenge was coned off with all visitors being funnelled into enormous car parks west of the site to try to impose some order on chaos, as people arrived to celebrate the arrival of the longest day.
Driving past the huge stones made me think of the book I'm reading at the moment. In The Morville Hours, Katherine Swift describes her careful watching of the movements of the sun through her garden:
"I didn't know yet what form the garden would take, but I had an atavistic desire for the extremes of midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset...
...I wanted the garden to reflect the sweep of the year, the lengthening and shortening of the shadows, the turning wheel of the stars. I wanted to mark where the midsummer sun rose and set - the azimuth, where the apparent orbit of the sun bisects the horizon - describing in the course of the day a great arc from the trees north-west of the school house right round to the barn north-west of the big chestnut."
Driving back from my topiary rendez-vous, I formed two resolutions for the post-solstice half of the year. Number one, try out some cloud-clipping. And number two, find a way of having a personal Stonehenge in my garden.
Swift got to know exactly where the sun would rise and set in her garden, by just being out there and seeing. She describes marking the point where the midwinter sun would rise, and then watching it inch back week by week.
All the rain might be a problem but in the long-term I definitely want to start thinking about how to create my very own garden temple to the sun. It's a really momentous day in the calendar, especially for gardeners and SAD sufferers. I think marking the day properly is something I ought to do, and I think the idea of doing it in your own garden - rather than having to drive to Stonehenge - is really lovely.
Has any one else got any grandiose Henge-building-type aspirations for 2008 Part II?
I got an email on Tuesday from Tim, a good friend of mine, which came with this image of a much-loved flower belonging to his grandma. The only problem is, she doesn't know what it is.
I have some sympathy with this. For a start, I didn't recognise this bizarre specimen myself. I guessed it was a monocot growing from a bulb, which rules out about three-quarters of the plant world; but that still left about 59,000 of them to wade through.
My luck came when I took a chance that Tim's grandma had bought something relatively common, which I just didn't recognise out of stupidity.
I picked up the nearest bulb catalogue (as I am classy, this was Avon Bulbs' autumn
offering) and by page 34 I had a firm identification, with Avon describing the flower as "extraordinary, composed of a plume of many purple strands giving a rather fluffy appearance. A slightly weird addition." Well at least they admit it.
The general problem of the mystery plant spreads wider than this, though. There's nothing more frustrating to me than a garden where desirable plants remain unlabelled - though Typing on the Void's Pete Free completely disagrees. And elsewhere in the blogosphere, authors wrestle with the time-honoured problem of no longer knowing quite exactly what it is that they originally planted.
I don't know what to do about the mystery plants in my garden. The names of two roses I always used to remember seem to have recently gone the way of the fairies, and the plants I bought at Beth Chatto's in May without bothering to label (there you have to Do It Yourself: like at IKEA, it keeps the prices down) are left similarly nameless.
My only solution is to do what Tim did: use the internet to email a picture to someone who might know what you are on about.
*For those longing to buy the slightly weird plant, it's Muscari comosum plumosum. And please feel free to give yourself about 100 bonus points if you knew what it was without help. I take my hat off to you.
I am starting to love Joe Swift. Every time he appears on Gardeners' World lately I start thinking "Oh, what a nice face he has." Everyone knows that is just girl code for I want to kiss him.
Partly it's to do with the drubbing he got over the allotment he's started: I am a total sucker for the underdog in any given situation, especially if it's horticultural - I couldn't believe the level of vitriol aimed at poor old Joe. I also love the way he talks; he has one of those accents which couldn't be from anywhere but North London, swerving dangerously between educated Islington and market-trader-Hackney within the space of one sentence.
In additional evidence for his lovability, I would encourage the court to accept in evidence the fact that he got his wife and kids (yes readers, there's no future in this amour foudre) down the allotment. There's nothing like a man who is fond of his children to make women go all gooey.
However, I am going to have to draw the line at the patio garden he started making last night on Gardeners' World. Oh my god! We said patio garden, Joe, not pub garden. First he put a jasmine in a pot with some random lavenders round the bottom, then made the grossest windowboxes ever - they were nice to start with, although a bit on the large side. But then he
painted them faux medieval browny-black and put them on curly iron supports. Sigh. Still, it had to go wrong somewhere.
There's nothing better on a hot day than gardening. Except maybe sitting in a chair under a tree and reading about gardening.
I whiled away at least an hour yesterday afternoon with The Morville Hours, a great and beautiful book which crosses all kinds of genre boundaries, mixing ecclesiology with garden history, autobiography with the history of the English landscape.
I bought it on recommendation after I dropped in to see one of London's finest gardening booksellers, Jane McMorland Hunter, who is in charge of choosing the gardening stock for Crockatt & Powell's new shop on the Fulham Road.
If you live nearby, or even if you don't, go and have a look at their brilliant selection: not just of gardening books, but also art, cookery and obscure Czech novels. It's a shop that's run by the kind of booksellers you could spend hours talking to, chewing over old favourites and new
delights. It attracts devoted customers: Alberto Manguel does his book-shopping there, and he lives in France!
However Jane is not just a bookseller, she's also the author of the extremely likeable Tiny Garden (pictured). Crockatt & Powell has its own tiny (but very, very elegant) garden
behind the shop, for those wishing to buy a copy and then read it in a suitably tiny setting.
And if you could, like me, spend all day talking about gardening books, the anonymous and very cheeky Garden Monkey has started a blog devoted just to that subject. Perhaps you detest Bob Flowerdew or adore Beth Chatto: here's the place to express your views. With all this reading to get done, I'll be amazed if I ever get round to the weeding.
In April I blogged about Bloom Day, a feat of extreme international coordination as garden bloggers the globe over get together on a single day of the month to show off what's looking good in their domestic patches.
Obviously, here in the Northern Hemisphere we are feeling particularly
happy with ourselves at the moment, as gardens are looking great. So
this month I've made the effort to take part - remarkably time consuming and
slightly disappointing (for me) to look at. You can read further about
the steep learning curve elsewhere: in the meantime, I'll advise you to seek out some of the other garden bloggers who really know how to make June go with a bang.
PS: Today is actually Bloomsday too - the day Ulysses is set. Come on! The perfect time to decide to read the big bugger.
