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| yup, that's what I call the lawn - flowering |
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| borage, bindweed, goosegrass ... |
I am a bad gardener, haphazard, erratic in attention, failing to follow trends & entirely lacking in that very English virtue of lawn worship. I have a typical London garden in a typical London terraced house, about 70 foot long and 20 foot wide. At the moment, there is a lot of borage, bindweed and brambles in it - there is some reason why South West London abounds in giant brambles, which I will track down. It is south-west facing, has a lot of sun particularly on one side with a brick wall, and the other side is dry shade where nothing but periwinkles and brambles want to grow. The soil is London clay, which could do with a lot of improvement. There were trees until a few years ago when fungus got them and I had them taken out. I'd dearly love a silver birch at the end of the garden with a camellia, which grow well around here.
I don't see my garden as another room on the house - I see it as part of nature, where I commune - and commit murder - with/on snails, slugs, woodlice, ants, bees, butterflies, mosquitos etc, not to mention the local foxes who see my garden as an adventure play ground if not a place to live. I have a pond purely because there are frogs, and because there are frogs, I don't have fish. I am fairly traditional as to what I plant - or abuse more like - and a resilient plant is a good plant.
The current dramatis personae include:
- a Perle d'Or rose, given to me by my brother years ago - its almost exactly what i don't like, as its orangey pinky in colour, untidy in flowering with smallish flowers - on the other hand, it is tough, it survives
- red hot pokers - currently in a pot, bought with some newspaper offer years ago and still surviving - they flower pink rather than red but that could, of course, be more to do with the denuded nature of the soil they are growing in
- a Gloire de Lyonnaise rose - from Peter Beales nursery, suffering in a pot and waiting to be transplanted in the autumn, and just pruned rather badly by the foxes the other night so not a lot left except one spike
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| A mighty borage root - as you can see, it broke off so there was still more, lurking ready to grow more borage any minute now |
This blog is about keeping me on track doing some gardening every week. My ambition is to have a garden I can have a barbeque in by September.
& just to add to the excitement, gardening has a certain dicing-with-dire-illness as I react very badly to mosquito bites so in theory I sbould only garden when thoroughly doused with insect repellent and wearing abundant clothing.
