Five essential plants for your low-maintenance terrace, LOL dolls, bop-its and donuts.
Hello friends!
How I love being back at my desk and writing my newsletter. I am slowly working through all your kind messages, like a very elderly tortoise. Thank you SO much for taking the time to write to me - it is a very great joy to hear your suggestions and comments and questions. It’s Saturday morning (I write this letter upside down, doing the first bit last) and the air is finally crisp, which is rather welcome for me, along with the blessed appearance of at least some rain in Australia. Here are my gardening five minute forays for this week:
Monday
I am supposed to be ‘resting’ my back. But some things are too tempting, and today it’s my urge to plant the trachelospermum jasiminoides that I want to scramble over my new(ish) pergola this year. I ordered these last year…I think they arrived in September…and yes, I just let them sit there, forlornly, for four months. Oh dear… I need to accept this about myself, just as I accept the fact that I will never, EVER put anything back in in its proper place. Not ever. I just won’t. So there. Do as I say, not as I do, and please plant things immediately rather then FOUR MONTHS after their purchase. okay? These are small specimens, because I cannot afford (or at least I FELT that I could not afford) large ones. And this plant is pretty slow-growing, so I’m in it for the long haul and I am hoping that leaving the poor things languishing for so long hasn’t set them back further, or made them sulk, just to spite me. I gingerly dig a hole and plant the first one. It’s much easier than I thought it would be. I dig another, and another and another until all the little darlings are planted. Then I feed them all. You shouldn’t really be feeding things at this time of year, especially as the weather is so mild, because it will encourage soft sappy growth which could then get utterly nuked by random, savage frost (which WILL come, ladies and gentlemen…probably in APRIL). But this is a special case, because the leaves have all gone an alarming shade of red, which is a message to me that the plants are malnourished. I feed them with a small amount of liquid seaweed and retreat indoors.
Tuesday
In a bid to spend less time deadheading and more time sunbathing this year, I am swapping blooms for ferns on my terrace. I have a LOT of ferns in my garden. Probably too many, and yet can I find one or two that I am willing to move into a pot? No I cannot. This is probably a cunning ruse that my brain is using to nudge me towards my lovely local nursery. It works. I go there, and buy MORE ferns. Again, there is the dilemma; do I want to go big for instant gratification, or save money and wait for splendour? The answer, it seems, is neither. I get two medium sized ferns for my two large pots and a hot chocolate. I open my hotbin composter (which I SWEAR I will blog about soon) as I need more compost to top up the two large containers before I plant the ferns. The compost is lovely, but it’s too sticky…this is my fault…I have been totally crap at putting enough ‘dry’ material in the bin along with the wet stuff; a problem which I hope I am remedying with my new approach to composting, which involves PRE-MIXING my kitchen waste with old egg boxes etc before it even touches the inside of the hotbin. Look, I get it…none of this will make sense or be interesting if you don’t own one of these bloody bins, so I’ll shut up now. The point is that I have to go an buy more compost because my home-made stuff is too sticky. Ugh. I plonk the ferns in their intended new homes without planting them just as the rain starts bucketing down. There is so much I want to do outside, and I am thwarted by wet weather and bad backs…RAIN AND PAIN, dear readers. Rain and Pain.
I go inside and water the houseplants, and then I give all their leaves a wipe and I feel instantly better.
Wednesday
I lure my children to the garden centre after school with the promise of hot chocolate and make them carry bags of compost home for me. Hurrah! Children are very short, but they are MUCH stronger than I give them credit for. The two smaller ones are still at an age where ‘carrying grownup things’ is a novelty. So I use them as two little packhorses and resolve to make use of them this way more often. In return, of course, I have to let them ‘help’ me to plant my ferns. I have a stern word with myself about not being selfish (because you see my IMMEDIATE reaction to that is to tell them to go and watch some telly and leave me alone). No, I am a good mother and let them join in. The smallest one takes a series of photos of me (see above) that make me laugh a lot…I mean honestly what IS important about ones mother’s HEAD??? The answer is nothing. Nothing at all. The ferns are at last in, and I’ve done it all without bending over even a tiny bit so my back is still okay. I’m calling the whole thing a gigantic win.
Thursday
I have a few more tulip bulbs left to plant (the ones that I actually managed to get in last year are already peeking their way out of the soil). I put them into another empty terrace pot and cover with soil, and then a cloche. Finally all the bulbs are in and if my body would let me, I’d do a celebratory dance about it. I always put tulips in pots as well as in the flowerbeds. I like to have them close to me, and I enjoy the colours so much, but after these three or four pots of tulips have gone over as I mentioned last week, I’ll be going green on the terrace in a bid to get things a bit lower maintenance. This has mainly come about because when I feel wonky, I start to feel upset about small things, like gone-over flowers that need deadheading, so instead of asking myself how I wanted things to look, I changed the question, and asked myself how I wanted to FEEL. The answer was PEACEFUL. And the way towards that is permanent, evergreen stuff that requires next to zero input from me.
Here are five plants I have on my terrace right now, that fulfil this brief
Agapanthus - glorious evergreen strappy leaves and stunning star-like exploding flowers in late summer. You can read all about agapanthus care in this blog post I did some time ago.
Ferns - you could literally spend your life learning about different ferns; what’s so rewarding is the multitude of textures and shapes you can get. Evergreen ones are a good option, especially on a terrace (see this post for my favourite evergreen ferns) and they look utterly splendiferous in containers.
Papyrus - a bit left field, but I am a complete papyrus addict after adopting one small pot from a neighbour and dumping it in my very shallow pool. You don’t necessarily need a pond or pool - my granny used to grow papyrus indoors in a pot - she just kept them wet at all times. I’ve experimented with fancy varieties but they’ve all been too fussy and died on me. So stick to ordinary Cyperus papyrus. It’s supposed to be tender and might die back in a bad winter but otherwise evergreen. Oh, and it looks MAJESTIC in a pot.
Pelargonium - I cannot tell you how easy and fuss-free and ABUNDANT a scented pelargonium is for a pot on your terrace. I am hopelessly slovenly about keeping them happy, so mine don’t flower as prolifically as they would if I were more attentive to their needs, but I really don’t care. The leaves are a tumbling, cascading waterfall of love and again, I often leave them out all winter. (I know I am in London, and that makes things a bit warmer etc). Taking cuttings is really easy. And do listen to this podcast I did with Andrew and Heather Godard-Key from Fibrex nurseries for the total lowdown on caring for them.
Houseleeks - If you haven’t got a lovely shallow pan of houseleeks (sempervivum) on a table on your terrace then WHO EVEN ARE YOU? They are the easiest things to keep going and yes, after a bit they go brown around the edges and you have to do a bit of grooming and re-application of tiny pea-gravel (which makes them look utterly glorious) but it’s all worth it, especially if they decide you are the ONE for them and start sprouting sproglets. Here’s the lowdown on sempervivums.
The other feeling I wanted, was a sort of enclosed cosiness. Inspired, I created a mood board for the terrace which you can find here, but if you can’t be bothered to click, then suffice to say, I think I’ll be investing in a dicksonia (tree fern) in the near future, although I *may* have to write another book in order to afford the size I want.
Friday
My tasks for today read as follows:
“Newsletter. LOL doll and bopit. Donuts. Tree surgeon”
The tree surgeon note is a last resort really, because I have been slowly but surely removing the water shoots (shoots that appear from latent buds after a tree has come under stress) from my poor, badly-pruned apple tree, bit by bit over the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately my old-lady, creaky back status now means that I can’t do any more, and the window of opportunity, while the tree is denuded of leaves, is small, so today I rang a tree person. They weren’t actually in (they were up a tree) but I left a message. The doll is a long-promised bribe which has now been called in by my youngest who has done a truly fabulous job of staying in her own bed (which I’m rather sad about but still) and the ludicrous bop-it game is to make it fair to the middle child who has ALWAYS stayed in his own bed WITHOUT bribery, and the donuts are for a large group of ten year old girls who will appear in about an hour and stay all afternoon, being funny and fabulous and singing at the tops of their lungs and then they will eat spaghetti and jump on the trampoline and I will feel obliterated when they are here and bereft when they have gone.
All the good things, always
x Laetitia