Summer chopping, first tomatoes, and being SEEN!
Hello friends!
I've been struck down with a mysterious bug that renders me nauseous in the extreme and unable to do much (I feel I should put NOT PREGNANT here...it really is a mystery - nobody seems to have any answers for me). Anyway, this has made life a bit of a struggle but here, for what it's worth, are my five minute forays this week:
Monday
The first tomatoes are showing themselves and growing rosy and I take a moment to find the reddest one and sample it while nobody is looking. Of course, it tastes more delicious than anything I've ever had before and I pat myself on the back for bothering to sow and grow these tumbling tomatoes in their hanging basket. It is heavy with (green) fruit, and so now it's a waiting game. I water every other day, and I have a back-up in the form of a rather brilliant ceramic plant spike, into which I upend a milk bottle full of water laced with tomato food. This eyesore is completely invisible and it's lovely to know it's there for my forgetful days (and there are many).
Tuesday
A window in the nausea and I dash out and pull out all the allium sphaerocephalon which have entirely gone over while I wasn't looking, their deep purple replaced by a ghostly grey. They are easy to remove with a little tugging, and I also take the opportunity to remove any flowering weeds as I go. My sweet-peas are over too (purely because I haven't kept up with the picking and watering) and I remove their twiggy supports and use them to shore up the stipa tenuissima which is flopping all over the lawn and preventing light from getting in. This stipa is planted beneath my three amelanchiers which dot my lawn, and the grass underneath the prostrate wafty wonder is yellow. Someone tells me to brush the ends with a tangle tamer to 'deflower' them - this is an excellent idea, and one which would no doubt render the stems lighter and less likely to flop over, but I don't have time right now. I mow quickly and shoddily and everything is suddenly lifted. Same as hoovering your floor. I keep saying it, but if you will just mow, everything else will fall into place behind that one act, and you'll have control of your garden again.
Wednesday
The days are long in the holidays. There is a constant need to stay one step ahead of busy children who want to do things with you. I've been doing pretty well with cup-cake cases, glue and sequins (don't ask) but there is a moment today when they all watch me deadheading the daisies and demand to join in. I give them each a pair of scissors and show them where to cut and six pots of daisies are deadheaded within a matter of minutes. This is not the way things usually go and I am pathetically grateful and surprised. I suppose the difference was that I let them do it... I would normally try and dissuade, distract...anything rather than having to put the work in of teaching. I don't know why I am so unwilling - perhaps it's the (not unfounded) fear of them losing interest and walking off because I bore them.
Thursday
I spend a lot of today getting into and out of central London. It is very hot and (naturally) I get lost. Make no mistake, I am London born and bred but my sense of direction is bonkersly bad. I'm just not someone who was born with any sense of where I am. This used to be such a problem that rather than get on the tube to St James's Park and get lost walking to school every day, I opted to board (nothing at all to do with getting to live in a large townhouse just behind Westminster Abbey...NOTHING AT ALL. This is simply to say that yes, I have a very bad problem with finding my way to places, and today was no exception. I had to get to a mews in Soho to meet an old friend. The GPS told me to enter one of those shops that sells knock-off bags and masks of Boris Johnson. I had to call and be directed. As per usual. BUT, something lovely happened friends! - in the midst of nausea and heat and not knowing where the hell I was, a beautiful woman tapped me on the shoulder - she could not have been more than twenty five and she said that she LOVED MY STYLE! (insert fireworks and popping champagne emojis here). Honestly could have cried, remembering, in the loveliest possible way, what a boost it is to be stopped and complemented and told you are SEEN. I had thought I was past caring, but perhaps it was just my brain being defensive, because it is rather shallow to want to be noticed for the way one looks. I don't think of myself as having reached that nirvana like state where I know and live a certain, fabulous STYLE, yet. I still feel like I'm sixteen and at sea with it all. So that was nice...but no gardening.
Friday
Today is all about rushing around finding passports and swimsuits and suncream and making sure we have medication and all the rest. Yes, we are going away tomorrow, I water all the pots thoroughly and leave instructions for my sweet au pair to do same. She has the entire house to herself for a whole entire week and I am unspeakably jealous of her. I get lots of lovely treats in my life but the ULTIMATE BLISS of being alone IN ONES OWN HOUSE for an extended period is not one of them. I have the daisy pots hooked up to a watering system (and see my blog post about this) and I will water all the houseplants thoroughly before I go. This holiday is always much-longed-for. It's one of those ones where we go to a resort and the children are taken on various adventures and I can sit and listen to books by the sea. I am truly hoping that this mystery illness will float off when I am there.
Before I go, I thought I'd put a little thing in about chopping your perennials. It's a really easy way to rejuvenate your garden in the summer months, as long as you take care to water afterwards. It's a little late to expect much, but you won't get NOTHING - definitely worth a go!
Summer chopping
If you have perennials in your garden and want to enjoy them looking alive and fresh, rather than brown and dead, then it’s time to get out there with the snippers. Firstly, and most drastic, inspect the crown of the plant for fresh new growth. You’ll notice this on cranesbill geraniums, Alchemilla, Dicentra, Nepeta, Thalictrum and Tradescantia amongst many others. Chop the dead stalks down as close to the ground as possible, taking care not to harm the emerging foliage. Rather less hectic, but equally useful in terms of pruning is to trim the tops off certain late summer stars, like asters, so that they really do shine come autumn. When you do this in May or early June, five or six inches off the top will help not only to delay flowering, but also to give you beautiful, floriferous, bushy specimens rather than sparse, gangly ones. For now it is actually worth dead-heading them individually if you are so inclined. Lastly, just chopping off spent flowers at their bases from plants like hostas, gaillardia stachys and alchemilla can be wonderfully transformative for the garden. Once again, the trick here is to use your own good sense, spotting fresh new growth or emerging side-shoots and using your snips to concentrate the plants’ energy into those areas. If in doubt, then you could always hedge your bets by cutting back the front half of a plant and seeing what happens - a method employed often by Tracy DiSabato-Aust, whose book The Well-Tended Perennial Garden is as near to exhaustive in this area as you could possibly wish for.
All the good things, as always
x Laetitia