A quick blast of colour

It’s that time of year when we’ve all had enough of winter, this year more so than most. We know spring is on its way, the birds are noticeably more vocal and the early flowers are out and are very welcome. But it’s still cold and grey, and for most of us, warmer weather and sunshine can’t come quickly enough.

I don’t know why, or if it’s just me, but I find it hard when my garden is mostly brown to imagine it full of the delights of colourful summer flowers. I know they will come again, it’s just a matter of patiently waiting, as humans have always done, for our part of the earth to once more turn its face to the heat of the sun.

Not even a pandemic can stop the seasons, but just to hurry things along a bit I find a quick blast of colour to be very therapeutic and enjoy a quick zip through a few photos taken in summers past.

It's in the genes...

Just like the plants in my borders or the birds in the trees, we all inherit characteristics from our parents, and I’d like to think that my daughter has inherited some of her creative ability from me.

I began my career thirty years ago from a hobby, building on the talents I had, studying and working hard to develop my knowledge and skill. At the age I was when I began my own business, now my daughter is developing her creative talents, in a different way to me, but with the same real passion for the natural world.

She gives new life to discarded objects and rethinks how we might use unwanted items. She recycles, upcycles and repurposes rusty old car parts, turns faded books into wallpaper and planters, makes unfashionable furniture into beautiful additions to a room, finds new uses to outdated fashion, and of course plants feature strongly.

Of course they do, it’s in the genes!

Roses in November

The last week of November, with a heavy dew and trailing mist hanging low over the river, as the sun warmed the morning I thought it would be a good day to have a look around my garden for fungi. It is their time to shine after all, but what struck me most, was just how many plants are still flowering away as if there were insects still on the wing to pollinate them, and there were. Besides small clouds of midges, a fat queen bumblebee was investigating a pile of compost, I guess looking for a place to hibernate, and my honey bees were busily coming in and out of the hive as if it were still early autumn and the first frost still weeks away.

Our climate is changing and the effects are showing in our gardens, but roses and geraniums flowering in November can’t be all that bad can they? Well yes, because there will be irreplaceable losses too.

My garden is dominated by an impressive old birch tree and birch are trees of cold countries, in Britain they’re already at the south end of their range and as our climate warms up there will be long periods of drought with which they will not cope.

Roses in November might look beautiful to us, but so do birch trees, I hate to think of losing one just to have the other.

When the sun shines

When the sun shines at the perfect angle of early autumn there is magic in the garden. We imagine this time of year to be all fire and flying sparks as the wind whips the leaves from their branches, but I love the gentle glow of soft light through transparent leaves. Summer’s colours are leaving us for another year, we should take time to enjoy them while we still can, but it’s not a sad farewell, they will be back next year.

The old apple tree

Outside the front door, over the path and border where the meadow lawn comes up closest to our house, is an old apple tree. I’m grateful to it for its beautiful spring blossom and juicy crisp apples and the flaking bark of its gnarled limbs must provide hiding spaces and shelter for numerous insects and other invertebrates because I sometimes catch sight of the greater spotted woodpecker on one of his visits when he hops up and down the branches poking his beak into the nooks and crannies as he searches for a meal.

There are much easier pickings in the feeders which hang from the branches, peanuts, fat balls, sunflower hearts and nyger seed which the goldfinches love. Out of the kitchen windows there is almost constant movement, blue, great, coal and long tailed tits are happy to join the goldfinches and share, but jackdaws and rooks being far too heavy swing precariously and knock everything to the floor where they’re joined by dunnocks and wood pigeons hoovering up the remains.

Occasionally I see all the birds scatter in panic as the guided missile that’s the sparrowhawk streaks through. He almost always misses, then preening to hide his embarrassment, sits for a while on a branch to recover his composure. Sadly, most birds treat me with the same mistrust and avoidance as the sparrowhawk, but there have been a few magic moments this summer when fledgling goldfinches have overshot the feeders and flown right inside through the open door, too young to have learned to be fearful, they have waited quietly for rescue.

Holding a tiny life in the palms of my hands is a very precious gift and one more reason to be thankful to the old apple tree.

Working from home…..on the garden

This spring and summer have certainly been different haven’t they, and for me very different from what I expected when we went into lockdown. I had thought that my work would really slow down, even dry up altogether and that I’d be spending a lot more time than usual in my own garden. I certainly wasn’t visiting clients for a few months and I’m still restricting site visits, but adding a remote consultation to the services I can offer has certainly been very well received. For many people it’s been the way for them to benefit from my years of experience and knowledge to help them develop their garden while they’ve been at home with the time to get to grips with it. Some have really got on with things and built their gardens themselves, and wonderful jobs they’ve made of them too!

Lockdown has been difficult for us all, but for me, its silver lining has been seeing how nature has thrived and responded to the changes we’ve had to make and the restrictions imposed which for a while kept us at home and off the roads and thereby reduced air pollution. Restricted management by local authorities allowed the grass verges to grow and with them the wildflowers which the insects feed on. With the insects available to feed their young, the birds have done better too, at least in my own garden I can see many more young of a range of species.

I won’t dare to hope that we have learned a lesson and will change the way we mismanage our green spaces and sadly gardens too, but nature’s had a bit of a break from us, and while we’ve spent more time in our gardens hopefully we will have become that little bit more aware of nature all around us, especially where it’s closest to us and where we can help it the most, in our gardens.

Here are some photos of my clients’ and community volunteers own hard work at different stages of development. and each very different in style. The traditional garden surrounded by trees will be wonderful for wildlife. The contemporary garden is only just planted so is in its infancy, but the planting is going to be really good for pollinating insects, and the community space is planted with permanent perennials but the ‘weeds’ which have seeded in between them are left to flower for us to enjoy and be of benefit insects and birds.

Variety, the spice of life

I’ve always been really lucky in my work, not only have I met some lovely people I would otherwise never know, but I’ve had the privilege of designing a wide variety of gardens of all types, shapes and sizes in settings varying from the tops of mountains to city centres, coastal cliff edges to riversides and pocket sized patches on new estates.

Each come with their own natural and man made constraints and opportunities. Some rural gardens have wonderful views but are completely open to howling winter winds, whereas urban ones might be warm and sheltered sun traps but they can feel closed in and are often overlooked. All of them are interesting in their own way, each offers its own unique character to work with and that’s before we include the tastes, desires and needs of the owners.

Sometimes I might only see the garden once (at the moment only in photographic or video form!) sometimes I will visit several times as the design process and then the build progresses. So imagine how much pleasure it is to receive a surprise photo from a past client to show me how their garden has grown and how they are now embellishing it in their own unique and personal way.

Here are a few photos I’ve recieved during lockdown, each garden so very different from the others and receiving each one has really made my day!




St James Square

I’ve passed a roundabout in my home town of Monmouth at least once a week for over thirty years, often grumbling to myself about the incongruous rectangles of carpet bedding, how out of place they looked, how inappropriate they were sitting askew to the road, deeply cut into the turf under a magnificent and much loved Catalpa tree. Apart from moaning to myself and to anyone who might listen, to my embarrassment all I did about it was moan until I became involved with the community project Nature Isn’t Neat. (For more on the project see blog 29th February 2020)

As we looked at maps of our town selecting areas which might be made more useful for pollinating insects, the place uppermost in my mind was St James Square and as soon as I asked if it could included, another person at the table, Vivien, representing Transition Monmouth signalled her agreement. Unknown to me changes to St James Square had been planned by Transition Monmouth and Monmouthshire County Council for a while, it was obvious I wasn’t on my own and I had my first real encounter with the power of community and local authority cooperation and willingness to get things done.

It transpired there were several of us just waiting for the opportunity to act on this, the officers from Monmouthshire County Council with the ability to sanction and make change were ready and willing to do so, really pleased to see an end to the time consuming annual planting and regular and pointless mowing and they welcomed the idea of sustainable and low maintenance pollinator friendly planting.

I drew up planting plans during the summer of last year and the plants were ordered by MCC’s operations manager for street services and by October we were all set to arrange volunteers to plant. But then it rained and as we all know the rain carried on coming, apart from a short break when MCC managed to board the edges and cover the grass in topsoil, until last week. It stopped on Friday when the plants were delivered to a nearby garden from where on Sunday our lovely local removal man moved them to the square with my husband and we could begin.

I placed all the plants on the ground in their pots exactly where they were to go, that way the volunteers knew just where to plant them, I gave strict instructions not to weed, the existing celandines and dandelions are very valuable to pollinators and are an integral part of the scheme.

Much to my, and especially my husband’s surprise, the planting was done in the day. The volunteer planters worked in shifts, two or three at a time to enable a healthy two metre ‘social distancing’ space between them and although none of them are professionals, some with little planting experience, one only eleven years old, and one completely nonplussed about the lack of ‘weeding’, they were all brilliant.

Heartfelt thanks to everyone involved, from MCC, Mark, Nigel and Jonathan, from Transition Monmouth , Vivien who knows exactly how to get things done and does them, Alison from the RDP and Nature Isn’t Neat, Peter, also from Transition Monmouth, Clare and Charles from Monmouth Green Spaces, Karen from Rotary Community Champions, Mike for the transport, Anna, my kind neighbours Bob and Jim and Tandy, a lovely young lady who saw people planting and wanted to help.

It doesn’t look much yet, but believe me it will be wonderful.

Ps If you’re wondering why the soil went on top of the grass, the tree roots are very shallow and so we couldn’t disturb them by removing it. As the soil excloudes light the grass will die off slowly and add humous to the soil.








Nature Isn't Neat

The buds are bursting, the frogs are back and laying mountains of spawn, the birds are pairing up and that’s all wonderful, but unfortunately every gardener fed up with a winter cooped up indoors is out there, green fingers itching to tidy up the garden and rip out all the emerging weeds.

I’m as keen as anyone to be in my garden but I won’t be weeding, I’ll be appreciating all those native plants we love to hate, the weeds.

‘Nature Isn’t Neat’ is the very pertinent title of a pollinator project being trialled in Monmouth by Monmouthshire County Council together with the Town Council, Monmouthshire Meadows, Bee Friendly Monmouthshire and other groups before it’s rolled out across the whole county.

Its aim is to encourage us all to be less tidy, live and let live and recognise our native plants as the vital food source they are for our pollinating insects. Without them much of the food we take for granted would just not exist and eventually neither would we.

Not that we should ditch all our ornamental plants, far from it. Calaminta nepeta, Helenium autumnale and Geranium ‘Rozanne’ were found during research to be the top three flowering plants for visits from pollinators, but they don’t attract the same diversity of different pollinators as our native flora does. *

In my garden the golden heads of dandelions shine like mini suns from the grass, bush vetch is a favourite of several bee species as it scrambles through borders and it looks stunning with Salvia ‘Caradonna’. Wild fennel in flower is loved by hoverflies and stands majestically all winter with the tall grasses. Wild carrot romps around my meadow lawn covered in tiny pollen beetles and sometimes a ghostly crab spider perfectly camouflaged by its flat white umbel of flowers in wait for an unsuspecting bee or butterfly.

By creating a safe and forage filled garden for pollinators we’re welcoming their predators too and the birds which will happily make a meal of them all. A functioning ecosystem full of flowers and full of life, now that’s what I call a garden!


*Rosie Rollings and Dave Goulson – Quantifying the attractiveness of garden flowers for pollinators.


Living walls, nature's way

Getting plants to grow well on a vertical surface is a specialist job and companies whose speciality it is have researched and experimented for years to achieve a balance of framework, substrate type, species mix, feeding and irrigation. With expense and effort the results can look absolutely stunning, who wouldn’t rather look at a living assembly of perfect plants than a bare wall.

Well, the people who prefer an artificial plastic equivalent I guess, but we won’t go there, suffice to say I would never suggest its use in a domestic or any other type of garden, never, ever, no way!

What I would suggest though is that we look at how mother nature deals with our vertical surfaces. Where there’s enough moisture, shade and most importantly lack of human interference, she does a cracking job. Under trees or overhanging vegetation, facing north where light levels are lower and where rain is reliably frequent, mosses, lichens and ferns can create beautiful textural forms in every shade of green.

We do grumble about the weather here in Wales, but all this wet does have its compensations.



Whatever the weather

Determined to take some time out in my garden this weekend I spent yesterday in waterproofs huddled in the shelter of a big beech hedge which proved that it is, as the books say, the best windbreak.

How welcome then to see a few rays of sunshine this afternoon after weeks of wet, but it’s been mild wet mostly so there’s movement in the garden already, buds are breaking and I definitely heard a marked change in the birdsong that was such a joy I wanted to sing with them.

Apart from the Helleborus, incredibly beautiful but oddly blowsey for the season, most of the flowers are small, a bit spidery and seemingly insignificant but I love them for their delicacy and such surprisingly strong perfume. Just one Sarcococca in full bloom is enough to scent the air for yards around itself and if I hadn’t been on hands and knees to get the most intense nose full I wouldn’t have spotted the tiny Viola peeping through the carpet of leaves.

Most winter flowers are easy to grow, their demands of us are different, our enjoyment of them depends on our engagement with the garden and our interest in its plants and for me that’s a pleasure whatever the weather.

Winter Flower Power

Late winter teases with the promise of spring. To concentrate the effects of flower colour and scent, gather winter flowering species close together within view of a window or by a path for a brisk and uplifting walk in the garden. In mild spells foraging queen bumble bees will be very grateful too having a shorter distance to fly between flowers as they search for pollen and nectar among Helleborus and Crocus. Underplant with early Narcissus and Galanthus for extra flower power..

Favourite winter flowers besides Helleborus and Crocus are Hamamelis and Sarcococca and the bomb proof Viburnum tinus.

The Holly and the Ivy ......

As we endure the shortest and darkest days of midwinter, light and life are as precious to us as they have always been and just as we do now, our ancestors down the ages brought living evergreen foliage into their dwellings.

In Pagan times the winter solstice was referred to as Yule and celebrated as a time of renewal and regeneration with holly and ivy brought inside for protection, immortality and resurrection. A reminder to us that the bitter depths and darkness of winter must have felt to them like a form of death. The Romans were a much cheerier bunch who, apart from the odd sacrifice, celebrated Saturnalia with a party, feasting and decorating their god Saturn with holly wreathes. Christianity saw these traditions in relationship to its own beliefs and gave us Christmas, our interpretation of our natural surroundings changes as our knowledge of it increases and now we understand the dark days of the winter solstice in scientific terms as our earth spins around the sun and our part of the world is furthest from it giving us shorter days and longer nights.

But our ties to our history, the natural world and the landscape around us are still deeply embedded in tradition and for whatever reason we feel might be right for us now, we still like to have holly and ivy in our homes along with mistletoe and the Christmas tree to lighten and brighten the mood of mid winter.

These native evergreen species are vital to our wildlife too, holly berries are attractive and unmissable to birds as well as us but unexpectedly it’s holly’s tiny white flowers which we hardly notice, along with ivy flowers, which provide the food of the holly blue butterfly larvae. I’m sure none of us give them a second thought until that early summer day when we see those beautiful blue butterflies they have become flitting over the garden.

Ivy flowers in autumn when sources of pollen and nectar are drying up and are a magnet to insects of many kinds including ivy bees which are dependant on them. The berries are dark green and mature in late winter when other brighter berries are gone so are a wonderful resource for hungry birds. Contrary to popular belief ivy does no harm to its host tree but provides shelter and food to at least fifty wild species, a plant to respect and treasure not condemn.

For most of the year holly and ivy go largely unnoticed in our gardens, a deep green glossy leaved backdrop as happy in a shady corner as in full sun. Indispensable to our gardens’ wildlife for food and shelter and with zero air miles right now the freshest possible cut foliage to decorate our homes, celebrate the season and stay warm and dry indoors looking forward to next year’s first holly blue butterfly.





Autumn

Shorter days, ripe fruits and turning leaves. Orb web spiders waiting patiently for a meal in the dead centre of their dew jewelled webs. Mornings when the Wye is cloaked by a slowly rising veil of mist and there’s a definite nip in the air. Fungi are popping up in unexpected places and nature’s colours are on fire.

Summer birds are heading off on long migrations and hedgehogs and bats are hunkering down to spend the coldest months asleep in hibernation. The next generation of many insects are biding their time as eggs or pupae and the seeds of this year’s wild flowers lie dormant under their duvet of fallen leaves until woken into life by the return next year of warmer weather and longer days.

I used to think of autumn as a sad time, the opposite of spring, as endings rather than beginnings for life, but in our gardens as in the whole of nature there are no endings or beginnings, just ebbs and flows in the cycle of life dictated by the turning earth.

Look under the drying remains of many summer perennials and even now you’ll see a new crown of leaves just waiting, but don’t think that the old growth is no longer needed. Resist the urge to be tidy, the old leaves are protecting the new from the worst of winter’s cold, they still have a part to play in the lives of the plants and in the lives of the small creatures using them as a winter home.

Our native plants and animals work perfectly together, if they didn’t evolution would have weeded them out long ago. Garden in harmony with nature, look, learn and most of all enjoy our gardens’ most vibrant season, autumn.






Learing to share

It was a pleasure for me to open my garden this year as part of Monmouth Bee Festival, to share some of the joy it gives me and to see visitors’ interest in a wilder way of gardening.

Usually my only companions are the birds and bees. Goldfinches take their nyger seed breakfast as I eat my morning muesli on the bench by the front door and a teatime cuppa by the pond is usually accompanied by courting wood pigeons.

Because I garden for nature and share my space willingly with it I have been rewarded with visits from lots of species. First the early rising queen bumble bees, then tawny and ashy mining bees, red tailed mason bees and lots of tiny solitary bees I can’t yet put a name to.

Butterflies seemed to arrive later this year, there were a few common blues and red admirals but lots of ringlets, painted ladies and meadow browns, due I think to my long grass and wild flower lawn. An elephant hawk moth was a nice surprise sitting like a bright pink exotic flower on a seedling pepper plant in the greenhouse.

Nightly visits from hedgehogs have been a treat, often two or three young ones together, they must be creatures of habit to be often in position as night falls, ready and waiting for their dog food dinner.

I’m delighted to be able to share my garden with the animals I love to see but unlike most gardeners I’m also happy to share with slugs, snails, greenfly, caterpillars, spiders, wasps and any other creatures which like to call it home because I know they are an indispensable part of its ecosystem.

A few nibbled leaves are of no consequence to me but to the little caterpillars which munched through them they are the sustenance needed to complete their life cycle and become an adult moth or butterfly or perhaps a nutritious snack for a bird or night flying bat.

Sharing is a skill we acquire as children but when it comes to the natural world, as adults we seem to have forgotten everything we knew. In the grip of the 6th mass extinction of life on earth, we have no choice now, to survive ourselves we have to learn to share.




When everything comes together....

No matter how many gardens I’ve designed, to go back to see the finished result is always a thrill. When the owners taste, the home the garden surrounds and the landscape in which they sit come together and are as pleasing as this then I’m a very happy designer.

Summer colour


It’s summer at last and time to relax, the garden is at its best and flowers of every shape and size fill our borders in as many colours as we could wish for, and the majority of us do wish for maximum colour above all else.

Some want eye popping vibrancy others more subtle muted shades, we all have our favourites, but what about the rest of our gardens inhabitants, how do they see the colour of the flowers around them and does colour actually matter to them too?


Our pet dogs and cats see colours differently to us and each other. It’s thought that dogs definitely see blue and yellow well but red is rather dull and cats don’t see colour as well as dogs, but they see both much better than we do in low light, it’s all to do with the number of rods and cones in their eyes. It all makes sense if we think of them as the hunters they originally were.


But what about the animals most closely attuned to flowers, whose lives actually depend on them and which the flowers themselves have evolved to attract.


Insects with their compound eyes see a different wavelength of light to humans, they see the ultra violet end of the spectrum too. Bees’ preference is for purple, blue, white and yellow flowers but what they see is not the flat colour we do. To attract and guide them in to the working part of the flower where the plant needs them to go in order to be pollinated, they see what we describe as honey guides, ultra violet streaks, spots, bulls eyes and concentric radial patterns. Their reward is in a good feed of nectar but along the way, following the path so vividly laid out, they pick up pollen which as long as it’s the same species, will fertilize the next flower they visit.

It’s a system of mutual benefit, vital to the survival of both plants and insects and has worked perfectly for millions of years. For our gardens to continue to flower and for us to benefit from it’s beauty and colour we must allow nature to work the way it does best, after all who among us would want to see a summer without the colour of flowers?










Part of the solution

We gardeners like to fool ourselves that we make the decisions over what thrives in our gardens and what doesn’t, but in reality nature calls the shots. As gardeners we learn from experience as well as good advice, but we can be very slow on the uptake sometimes repeating the same mistakes and although a few poorly plants won’t be the end of the world, the way some of us cling stubbornly to the use of insecticides and herbicides actually might well be.


We’ve waged war on the natural world we are part of for so long now that many of us believe that the weaponry so readily available in any garden centre is necessary to good gardening. We couldn’t be more wrong.


We dig out every dandelion, essential food for bees and other pollinators, as mere ‘weeds’. As we wield the strimmer, hoe or poison spray how many of us stop to wonder what will happen when the insects are gone, for going they are and with frightening speed.


Over UK farmland alone butterfly species fell by 58% between 2000 and 2009, worldwide 80% of insect biomass has disappeared over the last 25 years. For many of us if we think about the figures at all it is to worry about the pollination of our own food, but what about that of birds, hedgehogs, foxes, badgers, even fish. Without insects our ecology will collapse, but only if we let it.


Enlightened County and Town Councils are changing the way they manage and plant our public spaces and displays and as individuals if we have a garden then we too can play our part.

We must stop thinking of insects as ‘pests’, they are an essential part of the natural world.

We must stop calling our native plant species ‘weeds’, they have flowers rich in pollen and nectar on which insects depend.

Every garden should have a tree, they are the largest plants with the most flowers.

Let’s leave areas of grass to grow long and even a little untidy for insects to overwinter, nature isn’t neat and neither should our gardens be.


Most importantly we must stop poisoning our gardens and the life they are home to, We might think that we can’t halt global insect extinction alone, but if we all stop being part of the problem, we all become part of the solution.



The Almanac

My daughter’s gift to me of this year’s almanac took me right back to my early childhood and memories of my grandpa for whom his almanac was a constant companion. I might not need to know the tide times at Dover or when the sun will set in Inverness or Padstow but guessing that we are roughly a quarter of the way up the country I can work out that by the end of this month it will be light by seven and not dark again until just before eight, that’s over twelve hours of daylight, what a cheery thought!


If I manage to organise myself I have at my fingertips the dates I need to sow, plant seedling and harvest according to the phases of the moon, I have a reminder to look out for hedgehogs coming out of hibernation and as I look for activity from my beehives I am told that this month the queens will be busy laying eggs to replace the workers lost over winter.


Of course now we have any information we might need at the click of a mouse, but not so my grandpa for whom this little book was his bible. Over my lifetime we have lost our close ties to nature’s calendar and I have been reading my almanac with a mix of curiosity, nostalgia and a sense of hope. No matter how much technology changes our way of life our precious planet will continue to turn and whether we humans are still here, or have become extinct through our own greed and stupidity, March will always be the time when the hours of darkness and light equalise and nature responds.

In the bleak midwinter ....


Our midwinter gardens play a waiting game, autumn’s leaves cover the bare soil with a protective mulch and underneath the fallen seeds of next year’s generation of plants are patiently biding their time.

In my garden the young hedgehog I tried to fatten up with a nightly feed, should I hope, be tucked up safe and sound sleeping the cold dark days away snuggled in his duvet of dry grass and leaves behind a pile of logs and under the shelter of a big old hedge.

My honey bees are warm and dry in their hives and although I can’t see them I’m confident that the tawny mining bees are safely hibernating in their vertical shafts under my meadow lawn.

Only the birds seem active now as they forage for the fuel to keep their little bodies warm enough to survive the long cold nights. Gold finches are daily visitors to my garden and the niger seed seems to be a magnet for them so the least I can do is keep the feeders topped up and a bowl of fresh water full in case the pond should freeze over.

I’m so pleased at least they look to be thriving but I haven’t seen a thrush or a green finch for months and I know, as we all do, that nature is in need of help.

Our planet has lost 60% of its wild life since the 1970s and their habitats which we have destroyed, teeming wetlands, mile up mile of hedgerows and countless acres of wild flower meadows can never be replaced by our gardens, but each one has the potential to be home, shelter and source of food for numerous insects, mammals, amphibians and birds.

Together our gardens cover an area larger than all our national parks put together so the potential to benefit wildlife is huge.

We depend for our own survival on the natural world so the very least we can do is to give back where we can and our gardens are the perfect place to begin. This winter if we all plant just one tree, buy seeds of flowers for pollinators, take all the pesticides to the tip, leave an area untouched for wildlife and most of all resolve to do much better by our natural world next year.

Christmas is a time for giving, so lets give a gift to nature that really matters, the chance to have a future.