UK 2012 ISSUE 20

How many kinds of sweet flowers grow

In an English country garden?

We'll tell you now of some that we know

Those we miss you'll surely pardon

Daffodils, heart's ease and phlox

Meadowsweet and lady smocks

Gentian, lupin and tall hollyhocks

Roses, foxgloves, snowdrops, forget-me-nots

In an English country garden

This is the first stanza a a lovely little ditty that somehow is permanently stuck in my brain  . . . of course it does go on to talk about how many kinds of bugs and birds do you find in an English Country Garden and then there is scatological version dealing with what else you might find in an English County Garden.  That one you may want to "google", it's quite amusing.  

But why, you might ask am I blogging about gardens?  Quite simply because the English are mad, berserk, bonkers, obsessed, crazy stupid about their gardens and gardening.  Am I perhaps mad, berserk, bonkers, obsessed, crazy stupid about gardens and gardening? No, not really, but this overwhelming fascination that seems so very English does quite intrigue me.  

Things began in March when I observed the profusion of Daffodils planted both wild and cultivated by the road sides.  It's March, cold, nasty and grey outside, but the landscape is a blaze of yellow daffodils.  They can be found growing in the median of the M1, they grow up the embankments for overpass, along the side of lanes, and in oh so many front gardens.  They are everywhere and help to lift the doom and gloom of a rainy spring.  Even William Wordsworth wrote about them  . . . 

DAFFODILS  - WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills, 
When all at once I saw a crowd, 
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance, 
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

It does go on from there, but, perhaps it is time to stop or this will become poetry/daffodil blog and not a travel blog.  So it was, after being overwhelmed with daffodils I began collecting images of the plants and flowers in the front gardens in and around Groby.  As the bulbs finished the gardeners were out in force.  Every bed found it's owner taking up their faded blooms and introducing new bedding plants.  Suddenly the gardens were ablaze with numerous new and wonderful annuals . . . green was popping up all over.  If it were me, and left to my own devices those beautiful tulips, daffodils and hyacinths would be compost long before I found the time to dig them up and plant out something new and different.  

But then, again, I kinda get digging up your bulbs and putting something new and different in, even if I personally couldn't be bothered.  I admit to enjoying the changes that occur within a garden.  But, for the locals it doesn't seem to stop with taking out the spring bulbs in favour of something new.  As Spring moved toward Summer and Summer made its segue into Autumn the beds and landscape strips changed and morphed with each passing day.  One day you might find something bright and yellow but go back a few days later and it has all be replaced with red geraniums or blue pansies .  Never have I seen such a collection of peonies . Do you remember Mr. Wilson from the Dennis the Menace film?  Imagine a whole nation much like him, with a an overzealous passion for flowers and all things garden.  

Here, and by that I mean the USA, you become accustomed to people who pay little or no mind to their gardens.  Shrubs get overgrown and grasp at you as you pass by, the lawn and borders creep out in to the sidewalk and weeds grow rampant.  Not the case in England.  You don't see many front gardens left untended and even if no one is changing up the plantings on an ongoing basis they certainly aren't letting the weeds take over.  Despite the fact that there is a lot of hardscape in front of many of the homes, bricks and cement and the like, there is also a lot of grass.  Grass seems an easy enough thing to deal with.  You water it, you fertilise it, you mow it, right?  Well for starters, no one waters their grass, for that you can depend on Mother Nature.  And once you start having more than a few rain showers and a couple of hours of sunshine a day it GROWS, lush and thick and green.  As if tending to all those annuals, deadheading, pinching, picking and nurturing is not enough, now there is lawn to maintain.  I have never, not even in a Smith and Hawken store seen such an assortment  of implements used to maintain a lawn as I saw in my rambles around Groby.  Never mind mowers of various varieties, manual and powered.  The edging tools are a wonder to behold.  There are pokers to aerate, clippers to edge and half moon shaped doohickeys on the end of a stick for evening out the edges.  You even find nice, neat little troughs ploughed out between the lawn and the pavement.  Did you remember that a sidewalk is a pavement?  No effort seems to be  too much.  Nowhere is a  lawn  left to invade the garden beds or pavement, it shall remain right where it has been put.  These marvelous expanses of green are manicured and pampered, edged and trimmed.  No blade of grass is allowed out of place.  

As spring moved toward summer a progression of neighbors  with obviously too much time on their hands, power washed the bricks and other hardscape in their front gardens.  New sand was added to crevices between pavers and the baskets and pots that had once held bulbs were transformed with geraniums and nasturtiums.  As the days grew longer more and more people spent their evening hours puttering in their gardens.  A walk became a series of chats with those we met.  Isn't the weather grand, where do you buy the sand for the pavers, which is the best garden centre in the area.    The collection of all this invaluable information led to the necessity of emulating those around us and the bricks in Dad's front garden were power washed, the flower beds weeded and new sand was applied to the cracks in the bricks.  I did, however, draw the line at making a container garden to enhance the front step.  But in true British style Dad couldn't resist some petunias to add to the planters in the back yard.  

Soon enough the daffodils gave way to bluebells in the wood.  The Dogwood and blackthorn began to bloom and the trees were a riot of blossoms.  It is rather awe inspiring to watch the shades of green change from pale yellow green, new and fresh to the robust shades of established growth.  It is something you miss entirely if you are not paying attention but if you take the time to observe the progression it is really very beautiful.  The hedgerows become are prolific with blossom and a drive along a country lane is a heady adventure of light and shadow, shape and texture, colour and smell.  Talk about England's "green and pleasant land".  

Planting out in the yard is not the only gardening enthusiasm exhibited in rural, and most likely all other areas of the country.  A surprising number or people have backyard greenhouses.  In a land of little sun and lots of rain and not a minor amount of snow or freezing weather, it becomes an invaluable tool in maintaining plants through the winter and getting new  things  established before planting them out.    By far the most extensive use of one of these glass houses is in the cultivation of tomatoes!  Naturally enough, the Church family, not to be outdone by the neighbours, acquired four tomato plants.

 I understand growing vegetable, you go to the nursery, pick out your seeds and seedlings, go home and stick them in the ground.  Perhaps you fertilise them, about once a week you water things (unless it gets too hot when you water them once a day) and before long, voila, fresh produce.  Actually I did forget one step when living in southern Oregon, you also must put up a fence or netting to keep the local deer out (aka bambi wars).  Who knew growing something in a greenhouse could be so much work.  Let's begin with the soil in the Midlands. I think the kindest description would be black clay.  It is either hard as, well, you get the picture, and impossible to wet or it is a damp, thick, stodgy, mass that sticks to every gardening implement used to prepare it for cultivation.    How Dad ever grew anything in the ground is beyond my comprehension.  We did manage to clear out whatever it was that was growing in the greenhouse beds and put the tomatoes in.   Visions of luscious red beefsteak tomatoes for slicing and little gold and yellow cherry tomatoes for salads danced in my head.  First obstacle surmounted, ground is cleared and dug over and there are happy little tomato plants sunning themselves in the warm environs of a glass house.  

Next task water, much as in sunny California, plants need to be watered.  It didn't take too much observation to realise that there was no spigot in the back forty where the greenhouse is located.  I noticed that when Dad tended the plants he dipped water out of the water butt that collected rain water off of the greenhouse and shed roof.  Water butts, which seem to becoming popular over here are to be found everywhere there is an eave, or a downspout or a sloped roof.  This seemed to me to be a rather  insubstantial and unreliable water source.  So, rather than drag a hose across the entire back yard we began with a  watering can which we filled at a tap. .  Not many days passed before the surface of the bed was covered in  a white scaly mass of mineral deposit.  Seems that Groby water isfull of minerals and they are prone to precipitate out, or perhaps more 

accurately evaporate, out of the tap water.  Small wonder Dad used the water butts.  And really, a concern about reliability, in a country where, generally speaking, a week doesn't go by with out some rainfall.  Yeah, you guessed in I became an advocate of dipping out of the water butt. 

Garden dug, tomatoes planted, water issues resolved, what next in the learning curve of greenhouse gardening.  Glass houses, particularly glass houses in cold weather climates, with an unreliable source of sunshine, get cold!  There may not have been a water faucet near the green house but there was an electrical supply and a heater.  As we prepared for bed and the temperature outside plummeted to tomato intolerable conditions, it was now necessary to turn the heater on and remember to go out in the morning to turn it off. And now what new and exciting variables were to present themselves in the raising a crop of tomatoes, something which I carelessly planted and pretty much ignored in a California environment.  

I don't know if this next little peccadillo is a particularly English phenomenon or if it is done elsewhere.  I had seen Dad do it before on the plants in our garden when he was visiting.  As  the plant grew and thrived (by my definition) he would go out and remove leaves and branching  shoots so that as time progressed it looked more like a tomato tree than a tomato bush.  The theory, the plant would put more energy in to producing and ripening tomatoes than growing green stuff.  So it was we had tall, lanky, spindly tomato plants, which looked totally incongruous but seemed to thrive and put on fruit.

Earlier I spoke about how it was necessary to heat the green house, well the converse is true.  Not unexpectedly, when the sun is out and the days are warm, greenhouses get hot.  Not just warm, but HOT, plant killing hot.  No more turning the heater on morning and night, now it became open the doors and raise the roof flap to allow the excess heat to escape on a daily basis.  I like to ignore my food when it is still in the ground growing and mostly I managed to do that as there were two men in the household who took more interest in the garden that I did.  

In the end we raised a fine crop of tomatoes, there was even enough to share with a neighbour who did not have a green house.  With the addition of a few basil and parsley plants we were set for summer salads filled with glorious home grown veggies.  Perhaps it was more work than I may have wanted to do but it did provide a reason to go outside and putter on  a daily basis.  

Next time out . . . allotments and garden centres.  I did tell you they were mad, berserk, bonkers, obsessed, crazy stupid about gardening didn't I?  

p.s. more pretty flower picture to come.