and other things I have discovered
Describing the changes in the garden over the course of the year
If you are an insect the main flower right now is ivy. Pale green and packed with nectar, providing a late supper for everybody getting ready to hibernate.
The hedgerows are groaning with hazel nuts. A chance to wear your fingers to the bone picking nuts to make stodgy nut roasts. Or maybe roast something else and leave them for the dormice? Hazelnuts are their favourite food.
The Grapevine has been picking fights all summer. Throttling nearby plants, doubling in size overnight and chucking sour grapes all over the place.
This is an Honesty plant, with its paper thin seed pods glowing in the sunshine. Also known as ‘Silver Dollar’ it’s a symbol of sincerity and prosperity.
The Fuchsia bush is heavy with flowers.
Famous as an antiseptic, a symbol of love and devotion and guaranteed to cause relaxation. Today the bushes hum with the noise of bee traffic. Every local hive has sent an army to scoop up the nectar while it’s there.
All of a sudden those early summer elder flowers are berries, groaning with antioxidants. I should make syrup, but flocks of greedy starlings get there first. What is an antioxidant anyway? Google says it is an invisible thing that cures everything and comes free in red wine and berries. Berries are free if you get them off hedges or quite pricey if you prefer blue ones imported from America.
August arrives and the sunflowers come marching in. Seedlings become giants overnight, apparently having a competition to see who can grow fastest before bursting into flower. Thousands of sunflower seeds will come next. Maybe I could dry them for chicken food?
Sweet Peas are easy to grow and fill the air with scent. We have a new flower to distribute around the house, in case visitors come and don’t like our smell. Except we don’t have visitors any more. I picked them anyway, filled the house with heavy stinking bunches and immediately triggered an asthma attack. I do this every year. It generally takes 45 minutes to remember they cause potentially deadly wheezing.
Rain at last. A whole day of fat, noisy rain. Bouncing off hard soil and soaking dusty leaves until they sparkle. Almost as exciting as snow. I took photos of raindrops on grateful plants and and felt poetic. ‘Diamond drops on leaves’, and maybe ‘no longer will I sneeze’ sounded good.
This Mallow weed is usually pulled up for the offence of ‘covering the path’. This year I let it stay and now it’s a flowering bush. The chickens love lurking in it, sniffing out ants or something.
Here come the bottlebrush flowers. This Australian bush is a symbol of laughter and joy. There is not much of that from the Australians I know. They should be here by now. Laughter and joy it was, when the garden was full of friends and family from far flung places.
Suddenly there are ripe raspberries in random places. A chance to stock the freezer and feel smug about ‘Living off the Land’. In other departments self-sufficiency is not on track.
Light research has revealed that all plants have medicinal properties. Google says that honeysuckle is good for everything from dysentery to brain swelling. But the berries are poisonous, so don’t try to cure your brain swelling by eating them. It won’t end well.
The name comes from the Latin word valere, meaning ’to be strong’. Valerian likes burrowing into crumbly walls and splitting them apart. So I follow it around, pulling it up, and it follows me around, growing back again, faster than I can move.
The shabby old sage is flowering and splendid. It is the last remnant of a herb garden, planted long ago in a fit of enthusiasm. It is one thing to plant a herb garden and a whole other thing to remember where you planted it, let alone weeding, watering and knowing what to do with the herbs that survive. That is the trouble with new projects.
This wall is supposed to be covered with lovingly tended alpine plants.
Elderflower bushes grow fast and take a lot of chopping down. Now the flowers have arrived and it is time to think about making elderflower cordial.
This blog is a place for showing what the garden gets up to, the chickens who live in it, and random thoughts, usually triggered by chickens or plants.
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This is the last bright forget me not. The rest are dropping seeds on fading bluebells. Clearing them away is like packing up Christmas decorations. The explosion of colour, that made every corner look special, is coming to an end.
