Missing Spring

          This could be taken two ways:  I miss Spring, the season, in that it really isn't here yet, or, I probably won't be around my home this year when Spring comes and thus will miss the start of the season.  I am meaning the second part here.  In the three plus years we have lived in this house, I have been diligently planting spring flowers.  The first year, in my misunderstanding of the British countryside and wildlife, I planted around 100 tulips, all of which made the local deer quite happy and me quite miserable because I ended up with 3 stalks and 2 tulip flowers at the end of it all.  While I was exclaiming proudly to my new neighbor, who had great experience in this matter, she informed me that the tulips would not see the light of day as the deer would eat them all.  Yep.  At least I had also planted daffodils and some lilies and those all grew and were lovely.

          So each year, I planted more and more daffodils and added crocus, more lilies, and anything else that looked like it might be unappetizing to deer (getting the lowdown from my neighbor).  I say, "I planted" as if I did the actual work but the house came with a gardener and I would get the bulbs and he would plant them where i said, "they would look good there, don't you think?".  Of course, he always agreed with me.  And more and more bulbs went into the ground.  

          As the house garden came already planted with some lovely rhododendrons, various grasses, some of which flower, some camellias, some fuchsia, some azaleas and a couple of lone rose bushes, my garden was looking more and more lovely each spring.  Plus there are plenty of different varieties of green bushes around and some red bushes, black bushes and other stuff that my gardener knows but I still have no clue.   Now I have to ask my gardener "Is there room" and I have not purchased any new bulbs for this year other than some tulips (yes 20 tulips - all in netted pots so no deer can eat them).

          So Spring comes, starts early, green shoots start coming through the ground, all over the garden, sometimes a bit early and then get covered with snow again, but they keep coming.  As we walked around the garden this weekend, I realized that almost all my daffodils have pushed through the ground.  The crocus are about to burst into bloom.  The rhododendrons  and camillas  and several other bushes have plenty of buds, and the roses are retaliating as well.   My garden is so dang beautiful when all these flowers bloom.  

          And then it hit me.  We are going on holiday soon - a slightly longer than usual holiday - actually leaving my daughter at home for once, instead of the other way around when she jaunts off to work in Africa and leaves us behind.  AND there is a very good chance that I will miss the blooming of the garden in a big way!   I am sure that everything will not bloom and die during the time we are gone but I am also fairly sure that most of the daffodils and crocuses will be up and well on their way to being gone by the time we return.   How sad for me!!!  

          Spring is such a joyous time here because it comes after such nasty winters, whether there was a lot of snow and rain or just cold weather.  Everyone here loves Spring.  You can hardly get into one of the local DYI stores or gardening stores because everyone is there getting ready for Spring.  When we lived in Houston, wasn't such a big deal.  There were flowers blooming all year-long so nobody was overly excited for Spring.  But HERE, it's a lovely occasion to celebrate the season, watch the glorious colors and plants come to life in your garden, shake off the winter doldrums, and start being outside a lot more.   I have fallen into this category of being delighted when spring arrives but this year I will be in the tropics, in a rainforest, and not staring at my garden, just delirious with joy at all my daffodils and crocuses and tulips and rhododendruns and such.  Not the best of planning on my part.   Well, luckily, we will probably be here for next year's spring as well.  I think I'd better go get some more bulbs.

Weekends at the DIY

Had to hit a DIY this weekend and for anyone who is really behind on the times, a DIY is Do It Yourself.  On occasion, it is so much easier to just repair something on your own rather than call a repair person or the landlord or whomever.  This may not be one of those occasions.  So we thought we had a quick repair where the upstairs pipe had broken off under the sink in one of the bedrooms.  This was not an under the sink plumbing that I have ever seen before but it seems to be fairly typical here as when we went into the DIY store, there were plenty of like parts to get and they seem to come in an "all in one" type replacement part.

What was amazing though is the number of people that were shopping the DIY.  OMG.  it was like Christmas sale week at the malls.  The lot was full, people were waiting for cars to move out of the way so they could park (although, it you went far enough out in the lot, there were some spaces).  Once inside, I was so thankful we were not going to the building section or the garden section as it seems like these sections were heaving with people as the Brits have decided that spring is here and they are busy working on their homes and gardens to fix up, spruce up, weather up, and/or maintain.  wow.  A whole lot of gardening and repairing going on across the nation, I'd say.  


Didn't take us too long to get what we needed even though we had a short list.  Took longer standing in the line to check out than it did to find everything we wanted.  But we managed.  

Back home, the repair that looked so easy and uncomplicated for a plumbing repair did not work.  Something is wrong with the picture as the easy part would not screw into the part that is left behind.  My hubby worked and worked and worked on it until he had stripped the threads in the PVC pipe.  Back to the hardware store for another piece of plumbing kit that was exactly what we had previously purchased and lo and behold, hubby could not make it work either!  Dang, two 5.99 pound parts, both stripped now and both not going where they should and my sink still not fixed.  double dang.  How odd.  And how funny.  My hubby can fix things and do a good job sometimes but on occasion, his engineering and computer brain takes over and he keeps trying for a "re-boot" when a re-boot won't do.  such was the case here.  So now we have three sets of plumbing parts that don't work, but we probably can't ever throw them away just in case we can use them elsewhere, a sink that still doesn't work, and a lovely Friday in the DIY along with the rest of England. 

Death and Destruction in the Garden

Death and Destruction in the Garden

            I love my English Garden.  It has numerous plants in it I haven’t even identified yet and they delight me when they suddenly bloom at odd times during the year.  Also, I have spent a good deal of time in the garden putting in new plants and working on the old ones and doing general gardening type things, EXCEPT the weed pulling and cutting grass and raking leaves which I hate and for which we have a gardener.  Love my gardener too as he lets me know which plants are weeds and should be removed or when to put in bulbs of one kind or another.  That said, be advised that I have a very dark brown thumb, almost black, in that in other locations we have lived, my garden has never prospered or done well and I am very good at killing things, like the very plants that are now blooming voraciously.  Now that this dark secret about me is out in the open, my English garden seems to forgive my dark brown thumb and things grow in spite of it so another reason to love it.

            Last week I found some dahlias on sale at the local nursery and couldn’t resist getting a 6 pack and sticking them wherever I could find an empty spot.  They were doing quite well last week in their new homes.  However, this week, it looks as if war has been declared on them.  Every blossom was gone and every leaf eaten clean away.  I have a green stick with smaller green sticks sprouting out of in in each place where previously there was a nice dahlia blossom.  And the destruction did not appear to be limited to the one species.  Some of my lilies looked to have some munch marks on them and the potato vine.  As I walker further around my house, I could see the hop plant had a few signs of destruction too.  Some killers stalk my garden.

            I have the means and technology and money to spring for the best to get rid of   these monsters of death.  Normally, I like to live and let live but when it comes to my garden, I am going to blast away the slugs and snails that come to feast on my hard work.  It’s not easy keeping things alive with a dark brown thumb and I don’t need the help to kill something.  I’m sure that the slugs and snails have a purpose but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.  So out comes the slug killer and I sprinkled it around my plants yesterday while evilly thinking of death to the guerrillas.

            YUCK.  I am the dispenser of death to these slugs but I don’t want to see it.  I am faint of heart when it comes to the actual visual effect.  I want to kill in the darkness and have them tidily slither away to die in a dark corner and fertilize my garden.  So I was less than delighted when I came home from dropping my husband off at work and found two huge banana slugs (not sure what they are called here but they are big and evil looking and nasty looking and BIG and slimy and nasty) that had crawled out of the garden and onto the brick wall, probably hoping to evade death and destruction by escaping the pellets of poison.  It was too late for them though and they were busy releasing their slime on my brick wall as they crawled to their death.  It is their death curse to release as much slime as possible.  Ugh.  Several of their smaller cousins were there too.  Take that to me they seemed to be saying!  Kill us but we will slime to the final end!  I managed to scoop them all onto a paper and stomped them to ensure their immediate death.  I didn’t want them to suffer long agonizing death throes.  I am not a monster after all. 

            The deed is done.  I put out more slug killer in case I missed a spot.  But now my brick wall is slimed and I have no clue how to get it off of the bricks.  The slime seems almost permanently adhered to the bricks and it’s thick and gooey and just all around ugly.  I am not touching it at all.  This is England, after all.  It will rain a lot this week or next and hopefully Mother Nature will forgive me for slaying some of her noxious creatures and clean my brick wall for me.

            The war continues I know.  Some will escape and come back for the next round of munching on my precious plants.  The scents must call to them and they probably come marching up from the golf course and the woods to the lure of my plants.  I’ll get them though.  I’ll get them.

I've Lost My Bee

I’ve Lost My Bee L

            Every morning when I go out to the garden to do the peanut thing and bird feeder and fish feeder and such, I check on certain plants.  I know you are supposed to pick off the dead blooms on a lot of plants so they will keep putting their energy into making new blooms.  So I was always stopping by my fuchsia and picking off the dead blooms.  Every day there was a huge bee that would fly up from around the bottom of the plant to see what I was doing messing with his blooms.  After all, he is making honey and doing grand things like that and I’m just taking away his pretty things.

            I learned last week at Highgrove gardens that there are brown bees and black bees.  I think we are supposed to want the black bees as they are hardier, sting less often, and are not the bees that are endangered.  Supposedly the bees in the United States that are disappearing are the brown bees.  I hope I don’t have it backwards.  Think I’ll need to look it up again. 

            Anyway, I thought I would check the next morning to see if my fuchsia bee was a black bee or brown bee.  He wasn’t there!  It was the first time in over 2 weeks that he had not come flying up to see me and check out what I was doing.  OK, maybe I was there at a bad time for him and he was off checking on little bees or something.  Next day, nada.  Next day, zilch.  Next day, un uh.  Are you getting the picture?  It has been a week now and I haven’t seen my bee in all that time.  Drat.  Is there something wrong with my fuchsia that he doesn’t like it anymore?  Can a bee suck all the goodness out of a flower and then move on and not come back?  Do bees find new areas of interest and get tired of the same old plant?  OR has he just gone through his life cycle?  Apparently he could have reached the end and I will never know what he was.  I miss him.  Think he was teaching me not to be afraid of bees and he had not finished his instruction yet.  Maybe one of his relatives will come and finish the course.

A Visit to Highgrove Gardens

A Visit to Charles at Highgrove

June 14, 2012

            Early this year I saw an article that advertised that Highgrove, the home of HRH Charles, the Prince of Wales (one of his homes) would be open for tours of the garden.  I immediately tracked down the times and dates and such on the internet and saw that you could have a champagne tea at the end of your garden tour.   We must have looked up to see where Highgrove was at the time we ordered the tickets but today, we had forgotten and were a bit dismayed to see it was almost a 2 hour drive away from us.  OH well, the chance to see a Royal Garden is very enticing and a champagne tea afterwards.  Goodie. 

            My husband only works ½ day but luckily I call him to remind him it is time to leave to pick me up.  I am looking in vain through the information sent to me which states very clearly that I would have detailed directions to get there but all I found was a postal code.  At least the GPS knew it must be a single address because it didn’t ask me for a house number.  We set off and we were within the view of the checkered flag on our Sat Nav but we were early and the instructions definitely said don’t arrive more than 10 minutes early because they had limited parking so we pulled into a side parking off the road and ate a packed lunch.  Our tea was several hours away.

            We got back on the road to still be a bit early when we realized that the GPS was telling us to turn into the front drive of Highgrove which was blocked off with cones.  Further down the road was an entrance but absolutely nothing to tell us if it was the right place or not.  We circled past that entrance several times before decided it had to be it and we were right as we were now in a short queue with a policeman checking our tickets and our identification.  He directs us to the parking lot where our tickets and identification is checked again and then we park and go into the Orchard House where we will begin our tour. 

            We get to see a video of Charles first as he tells us how he came to own Highgrove and viewed its potential as a wonderful place for a garden and with the help of travels and gardeners and ideas and such, it has grown into a wonderful place for sustainability and organic farming and gardening.  He also pushed his charities a bit and then let us get on to the part of visiting the garden.  Much to my disappointment, he wasn’t actually there to greet us.  Well, I expect no one told him that I was going to be there today so he had staying in London or elsewhere on business. 

            John was our guide and took us out into the parking lot to give us some more background on the garden before we went into the first section.  He never gave us a lot of plant names or pointed out this plant or that one rather more than the huge ones or if someone asked but rather spent a lot of time explaining how one section of the garden had come to be and what it was before.  He was interesting and I did enjoy his stories.

            The gardens themselves were wonderful.  A lot of them look overgrown but they aren’t really, they are full and lush and pretty with a lot of the flower plants already gone but getting ready for the summer plants to bloom.  The garden had a lot of different “garden within a garden”  areas separated by old stone walls or yew trees and shrubs planted and cut into fantastic shapes which included a huge snail, a huge frog and a squirrel.  There were things all over the garden to see besides plants as well.  Huge urns and vases, stone work, sculptures, tree houses, the stumpery, fountains and more.  I liked the stumpery the best.  It was an area where stumps have been left and used to support other stumps and plants and it probably is very spooky in the winter when there isn’t any greenery but now, it was quite lovely and I’d like to have my own stumpery.

            The only problem with the tour was no photography allowed.  I can understand that they need to protect the Prince and I can also understand that if people were allowed to take photos, they would be in the garden forever.  Still, it was a big disappointment not to have any photographic remembrances to the tour.

            Our last stop before the tea was the carpet garden which was patterned after Turkish rugs from inside the house with a small fountain that spilled water into channels that ran between the plants.  It was set up for the 2001 Chelsea Garden Show.  I don’t recall seeing anything that lovely at the garden show this year.

            By now, it was drizzling on us so we were glad to get out of the rain and into the Orchard Room for our Champagne Tea.  We were sitting with a gentleman for the Netherlands who comes over to visit gardens for a week to 10 days every year and often visits the same gardens at different times of the year to see them in the different seasons.

            We get our ½ glass of champagne.  I have learned already that a champagne tea always seems to mean just ½ glass of champagne.  They never come around and give you any more champagne but we did get two pots of tea, one for our Holland friend and one for me and a pot of coffee for my husband.  Our tea also consisted of finger sandwiches, about 4 apiece and a scone apiece and some candies.  All were delicious but we couldn’t manage to finish all the sandwiches or candies. 

            Still raining so we took a little time to look in the gift shop.  There were some lovely gardening things in there plus some great teapots and wine glasses and of course some of Highgrove's own wines and jams and chutneys.  There were some plants for sale as well but we ended up with a very pretty blue glass water jar and a couple of lovely wine glasses as all of our glasses are mismatched and ordinary.  Now we have two nice ones.

            Time to go.  The parking lot is almost empty and the only one remaining on duty is the policeman at the gate who opens it to let us out.  It is pouring rain by now so we get a long drive home in the rain.

            Very nice visit and a nice day even if we didn’t get to see Charles and didn’t get invited into the house.  It’s a lovely garden and I would certainly go again.

Deer and Tulips

The English people I know love their gardens, for the most part.  They take a lot of time and expense to lavish care on the gardens (we just know them as "yards").  Most gardens are quite lovely too once it gets warm enough to start the trees growing again and the flowers blooming.  That's one reason I think they like the gardens so much, because the growing season is short and when a garden finally blooms, it's glorious!

I definitely have a nice enough rental house with a very nice garden that I also want to lavish some time and effort on it.  It is a learning curve though.  Last autumn, I hit the nurseries and found the daffodils and tulip bulbs for sale along with some flowering bulbs I'd never heard of before.  SO I got a small bunch of daffodil and tulip bulbs and got them into the ground before winter.  

By spring, of course I had forgotten what I planted and where!  After all, at best, I am a half hearted part time dark green to black thumb person.  But come January, all the nurseries, garden stores, discount plant places and such start bombarding you with incredible offers for bulbs, hanging baskets, trees, fruit trees, shrubs, grass, pots and greenhouses and everything imaginable for the garden.  Generally speaking - I want it all in my garden!  I want a riot of color!  I want fruit, I want nice smells, I want butterflies and nice bees!  (OH, mushroom logs too!) so I start getting some bulbs and fruit trees (dwarf ones of course, my garden isn't THAT big)  

By February and March, many people have large swatches of daffodils growing and other early bulbs.  Not me.  I managed to put mine in a secluded spot so they don't come up until late March.  At least they came up.  And as dirt and rocks and pots and plants and bulbs and trees are delivered, I start putting it in the garden.  However, even as I am busy puttering around and planting my dwarf fruit trees in containers, here comes a freeze!  My gardener (the rental house comes with a gardener who is supposed to take care of the lawn and leaves in fall and weeds and such) tells me that we could get freezing nights well into MAY!  I must pay attention to the weather and when it is going to be especially cold at night, I must bring in my dwarf trees that are small enough to sit in the conservatory and cover the rest of the vulnerable plants outside with this gauzy stuff that is supposed to protect it from frosts and makes the other dwarf trees in bigger pots look like triangular sails (and the pots do tend to move around on the deck if the wind is strong enough).  And some of my bulbs, I can't even plant until May because they don't like the cold at all.  wow.  what a difference from living in Houston where everything had to be planted by January and was dead by March from the heat!

Now back to the title of my article.  Right after I had planted my daffodils and tulips, I was talking to my next door neighbor who informed me that she never plants tulips because the deer eat them.  Yes, she was absolutely right!  As I am busy planting some anemones and freesias and other bulbs yesterday, I noticed my tulips.  I have some nice leaves and some nice stems nicely nipped off close to the ground!  NOT A SINGLE TULIP LEFT!  I feed the squirrels and birds and hopefully the badger someday and hedgehogs but didn't really want to feed the deer all of my tulips.  Next year, more daffodils, zero tulips.