Dirt Divas Gardening: Design and the Paralysis of Choice

Dirt Divas Gardening: Design and the Paralysis of Choice

Wonderful Winter Garden

Oh dear, rain, rain, rain. And so no gardening here today. Apart from an occasional dash for more coal for the stoves, the garden stays beyond the glass. Still, things there are moving fast. Already the the first daffs are out - a variety appositely called February Gold, not too showy a yellow, but very welcome. Closer to the glass, a row of pots of deep violet anemones are doing their theatrical stuff, further away the first of the hepaticas are a lot more modest, but lots more thrilling. The violet blue of the forms of H. transsilvanica are just gorgeous, as are forms like the large pale 'Ballardii', and the anemone-flowered 'Ada Scott' (I'm busy saving up for some of the new Japanese wonders.)

Further away, the hamamelis is fading above dozens of hellebore variants, punctuated by the startling white of the snowdrops, the yellow eranthis (greeny yellow in the rare double form). Further way still, and almost most lovely of all, the shrubby honeysuckle, Lonicera fragrantissima.

This is a fine thing, even though the flowers aren't spectacular - pale yellow, in pairs at the end of branchlets. What makes it very special is the delicious perfume that get me and the bees going on warm afternoons. Here, in the Scottish borders, there's a good plant, two metres high, and as much across, against the wall of the ruined cottage at the end of the garden. But I've just seen it looking far more magnificent, and used in a completely different way.

That day there was no rain, but mist and the last of a thinnish layer of snow. I wasn't at all keen to go garden visiting, but would have missed something special. Hodsock Priory, near Blyth, in Derbyshire, England, only opens its gardens at this time of year. Odder still, it opens on the strength of a single species (well, perhaps two or three). The snowdrops.

Beyond the medieval gatehouse, and beyond the frozen late, the splendid woodland garden does indeed have million upon million of snowdrops in flower. And if you get half-frozen wandering through them, there is also, at the end of the walk, a generous log fire to warm you up. But it was the garden inside the ancient moats, dry except for a stream, that enchanted us most. It's planted as a full-on winter garden, and is absolutely splendid.

Though the moats and the frozen lake give the garden its deepest structure, two shrubs are used to make some really splendid hedges that give it the rest. The first hedge that caught us up, envious and delighted, was made, of course, of the Lonicera. Many of its leaves are lost here by February, and so it makes an open, rather lax, winter hedge. At Hodsock, it must be roughly clipped just after flowering, so that there's plenty of time for new branchlets to grow. The flowers make a light veil over the entire hedge surface, and scent the surrounding air.



Incidentally, as with more conventional hedging loniceras, cuttings root with abandon. Even the sprigs you cut for the vase throw out roots in a few weeks, though transplant with care as the roots are brittle. Once you have one plant, you are only a few years away from having a whole hedge. Here, I think about something similar along the lane that runs down to the fields behind one of the high walls that screens my garden. It would add much more to the village than the dull cotoneasters and brambles currently there.

Alas, the other hedge at Hodsock I can't duplicate. A good freeze in the Scottish borders kills the plant that makes it to the ground, after which the plant regenerates with great caution. Sarcococcas are lovely things to have at this time of year. As with the lonicera, the flowers are not much to look at. Best, use a lens to see quite what is going on. It's the males that give what show there is, and not with the petals (reduced to pinkish scales), but the prominent anthers. These are four per flower, with long white fleshy filaments, curving outwards in graceful arcs. Close inspection reveals a few tiny vase-shaped female flowers, each with a pair of graceful recurved horns.

Each bunch of flowers, pinkish before the anthers are fully expanded, show excellently against the narrow glossy green foliage (the common name for the genus is 'Sweet Box'), each leaf with a pinkish central vein.

I only discovered the perfume by accident; a bought plant languished for rather a while in its pot, and one winter I brought it indoors to see how it was doing. The few flowers suddenly filled the garden room with delight, the smell somewhere between the common honey smell of early spring (like that of snowdrops), and the sharper whiff of heliotrope and vanilla. Very nice, and, unlike the winter flowering viburnums, less liable to choke you with sweet rankness.

My one was Sarcocca hookeriana 'Digyna', and though it gets to a metre high in the London garden of my pal, here it barely reaches 30cm between hard winters. That's a major disadvantage of the high hills. If you want something more fragrant still, look for Sarcocca ruscifolia (though that doesn't seem to be quite so easily found as the other). If you want something really small, perhaps as a neat border shrub for a winter parterre, then try S. confusa, which remains at about a foot high, and really needs planting by at least the half dozen to make much impact.



And of the others amongst Hodsock's delights, more later. Though perhaps you can help us? Hodsock boast a small grove of the tree in picture three. We didn't know what it was - an acer probably, rather than a big cornus. Any ideas? We have to have it!!

Hodsock Priory Gardens - www.snowdrops.co.uk

©david stuart 2007

turning the garden around

Gosh, two perfect late January days. The gift of a pruning saw has made the tangle quake. Sawdust flew, and suddenly there was room to move, and, at last light. Some good bonfires too. And all of a sudden, the garden seemed to need a new direction. The apple crop last season was so good, and I had such fun with them, I'm determined to do what I've not done for nearly twenty years - go kitchen garden mad. I'm clearing out a shade border at the far end of the garden, where the shade is cast by a high stone wall. I've dumped some big clumps of Helleborus orientalis seedlings into a tiny strip of ground called 'the wood' (beautiful H. orientalis variants are seriously lovely, but dingy ones are seriously dingy), and burnt, root by root, a Carex that's run amok. Saved are the clumps of double snowdrops. More bonfires for the ivy that i've begun to strip from the stone. Well, some of it will become cuttings - it's a splendid variety with big green and scarcely lobed leaves called, I think, Bowle's Heart.

So what will grow (and fruit) in fairly permanent shade? Well, I plan to plant six blackcurrant bushes. They won't crop quite as well as they could, but enough to give plenty jams and liqueurs. Yum. Also, the wall should easily support some sort of netting to keep the birds away. And underneath the currants. Well, I'm rescuing some pink-flowered hepaticas now engulfed by a thuggish epimedium, and they should do well down there.

But I've also some seedlings raised from a few plants elsewhere here of a white fruited alpine strawberry, which would give a fruiting understory, flower prettily once the hepaticas are over, and flummox the birds....

www.david-stuart.co.uk