Discerning gardeners will always hear alarm bells when plant encyclopedias include words like “vigorous” and “suckering” in their descriptions.   And rightly so; such terms are usually extreme horticultural diplomacy – what they really mean is “beware, this plant has ambitions beyond the scale of your garden, it wants to take over the world”.

Kerria japonica (”Batchelors’ Buttons” is probably the most common of its common names) definitely falls into the “plant with caution” category.   Its a super plant – vigorous slender stems hold attractively toothed and veined deciduous mid-green leaves, and in late spring it’s clothed with loads of bright buttercup yellow flowers.   It’s up there with Forsythia in the spring colour charts.

The weeds have long since given up and moved out...

But you know there’s bad news coming don’t you?   And the bad news is that it’s not a plant that wants to share its space.  Put it in a spot that it likes (and that means almost anywhere) and it will spread, big time.   The picture shows a thicket in our front garden, planted as a single 3lt shrub only 3 years ago.   Its now covering an area maybe 2 mts x 2 mts, and advancing!

It’s very easy gardening, and if you have the right spot, we’d recommend it heartily.   It’s used extensively in amenity plantings (office block shrubberies, supermarket car parks etc) and is particularly good on banks where maintenance is difficult, because essentially, unless you’re worried about containing its spread, it’ll look after itself. It’s vigorous enough to out-compete weeds very promptly.

So if you have a “difficult” spot in your garden, Kerria japonica is likely to fill it nicely for you.   And in fact, although it grows like topsy, it isn’t difficult to control.   We’ll set about ours in late winter by going around the perimeter of the clump with a spade, and digging out the shoots which are exceeding the plants’ allotted space.   The suckers by which it spreads grow just below the soil surface, so it’s not difficult digging. Repeat every 2 or 3 years and this should keep it in check.

If you want to reduce the density of the thicket itself, prune the 2 – 3 year olds stems back to ground level, leaving just the newer (and frankly, more attractive) stems to flower. This greatly improves winter interest as the bare stems are attractive in their own right.

Down and out

We promised an “after” picture when we started project lumberjack in the side garden but as its not quite in an “after” state yet, this is by way of a “nearly there” picture.

As you’ll see from the photo, most of the trees have moved from vertical to horizontal, and the bits that aren’t suitable for the log burner (all the bits in the top photo) will soon be history, as we warm a winter day with a beast of a bonfire.

The big conifer in the “before” picture actually yielded very little useable fuel – conifers don’t make great fuel anyway, but we’re not going to waste it – and the second picture shows the logs from it that’ll go into store to season for next winter.
Most of the tree was thin branches, and these are destined for the bonfire.

Next years winter warmers

There are a few more small trees to fell before the clearance is complete (on the extreme left of the first photo) so we’ve got a day or two of good winter warming jobs to tackle in the next few days.

We were real townies when we moved here.   Nothing wrong with that of course;  if you’ve lived in towns all your life, there’s nothing else to be, but becoming country folk was not the smooth and seamless transition we’d planned – there were real surprises lurking in the rural idyll.

The most striking was probably the dark.   When you live in an urban area you’re never far from electric light.   Road safety engineers’ enthusiasm for flood lighting as much of the world as they can means that even if your bit of suburbia is only modestly illuminated, there will still be light pollution spilling in from somewhere nearby.   Even on the darkest nights there’ll be light enough to see by.

We’re not that far from civilisation here of course, and we can see the eerie orange glows of the Telford and Stafford conurbations on the horizon, but we are several miles from any significant lighting.   And on a cloudy winter night, you can’t see a thing.   Nothing.   Not even your hand in front of your face.   That’s country dark that is.   And until you get used to it, it’ll spook you.

Probably the second surprise was the wildlife.   We were expecting wildlife of course, but weren’t really prepared for the sheer volume, or its enthusiasm for sharing the house with us.    The scene was set on our first day when Nick rashly turned on the flourescent light in the garage at dusk, with the door open, and was promptly engulfed by a cloud of  the largest flying insects in Shropshire.    A Kamikaze dung beetle, a squadron of moths the size of small cars, and several thousand of their friends crowded in, while Nick hastily flicked off the light, and beat his way out.

And then there were the rodents.    You get rodents in suburbia of course, but we must have led a charmed life because we’d never had a problem with them.   The rat bait we found in the loft, and under the floor boards, suggested we weren’t going to be leading the same charmed life here.    You soon get desensitized to it of course; after the first few dozen dead mice you stop squirming.  And you learn fast.   Mostly you learn that you need help, and if you can find someone that thinks catching mice is about the best fun in the world, so much the better. So we got a cat.   Cats really are the most impressive predators, and the cheapest and most enthusiastic employees you’ll ever recruit.

That's cold that is

But probably the oddest lesson of country life was the weather.   For the first several years that we lived here we watched the weather forecasts to check the overnight temperatures, and were consistently surprised that it was always colder here than the weather man had said it would be.   We started thinking we must be in some sort of weird microclimate – Newport, the coldest place in England, is just 4 miles away after all – but the weather man knew that, so why didn’t he take that into consideration in his forecasts?

The answer, which we were embarrassingly slow to catch on to, is that it is colder here than where most people live.   The weather forecasts are tailored for the majority of the population, who live in towns and cities, and we’re in the country!   Another country dweller must have complained to the Met Office, because their forecasters now make a special point of saying “these are temperatures for towns and cities, it’ll be several degrees cooler in rural areas”.

And so it is.  Our picture (all this preamble just to show you a picture of a thermometer!) shows last night’s low hovering around -11 degrees centigrade (the forecast was minus 6!).   And yes, those numbers have been written on by hand – it’s an old thermometer, and the print wasn’t as weather proof as it might have been, so we’ve had to give it a helping hand!

Next week’s weather is forecast to be equally cold, and the odds of a white Christmas have shortened considerably in the last few days, so it’s looking like it’s going to be a cold ‘un.   Time to dig out the winter woolies, and make the best of the wonderful variability of the Great British weather (whilst avoiding all thought of the balmy conditions our suburban friends might be enjoying).

But not as we know them …

Not being a retailer – in the sense that all we sell is plants – we don’t do Christmas, and we don’t sell Christmas trees.   But we do sell trees at Christmas (or thereabouts).

In addition to selling container grown trees throughout the year, we also sell bare root trees during their season, roughly November to March, and this means that our first delivery usually arrives in December.  So while other garden retailers are marshalling acres of Norway Spruce and Nordman Fir to brighten the nations front rooms, we’re sorting our way through piles of all shapes and sizes of trees to brighten our customers gardens.

Not your usual Christmas trees

We love trees, and our tree department is easily our fastest growing (ha!) area.  We’ve  just completed this years “tree department expansion plan” and created another 80 or so stations to accomodate extra tree stock.

Buying bare-root is a very economical way to get trees into your garden.  Because they are field grown they are much cheaper to produce (because they need much less TLC than their pot grown cousins) and because they don’t have huge pots of soil or compost permanently attached, their transport costs are much lower.

Anybody who arrives at the nursery outside the bare root season and either can’t find a tree they like, or wants one that’s larger, or cheaper, goes into the bare root book, and are then contacted in the autumn to see if we can sort something for them from our bare root suppliers.   Orders are processed “live” between November – March, although we try to consolidate deliveries into sensible batch sizes so we can offer the very best prices.

We’re very happy to be working in what might otherwise be the “off” season  of course, but it must be good for gardeners too – there’s little else to do in the garden in mid-winter and planting a tree is a wonderful excuse to get out there and do something.

Is global warming happening?    A good proportion of the scientific community seem to agree that it is, and a huge number of clever and important people currently gathered in Copenhagen will be wasting an awful lot of time and carbon if its not,  but the good old british public, veterans of more hysterical media reports than you can shake a stick at don’t seem to have been convinced (remember how we were all going to die from BSE, and how planes were going to fall from the sky as a  result of the millenium bug, and ….)

The problem is the weather.   It’s very difficult to draw the distinction between climate and weather.  And it’s even harder to try to do so when one of the agencies banging the climate change drum is the Met Office. Loved and derided in equal measure by forecast watchers across the land, their record of predicting what’s going to happen tomorrow is a bit flawed,  so you can understand a certain skepticism when they try to persuade us that they know whats going to happen over the next several decades.

And this is compounded by the fact that global warming is supposed to deliver hotter drier summers to the UK, and for the last 3 years we’ve had pretty much exactly the opposite.

To the climate scientists credit, and probably relief, we do seem to be experiencing 2 of the 3 weather patterns that global warming predicts – much longer and milder autumns, and warmer wetter winters.

Most of the winters we’ve seen since we moved here 13 years ago have been what you might expect;  perhaps less snow than the kids had hoped for, but certainly cold – we’ve recorded minus 16 in our potting shed (before hurriedly retreating indoors) – but the last few winters have been noticeably warmer, and most certainly wetter.

That's winter wet that is

Our picture is of the field behind the nursery, and shows what seems to be becoming an annual winter event – an impromptu pool.   It’s not a short term flood either – once it fills up, winter rains keep it topped up and it remains for months;  a couple of swans moved in for the duration a couple of winters ago.   And this is most definitely a recent phenomenon – we can’t remember the field flooding at all for the first decade that we lived here.

Similarly, our last few autumns have been very long and mild – we’ve gardened well beyond what would conventionally be the end of the season, so there does seem to be something afoot with the weather.

What we need now is a run of hot dry summers to add to the longer autumns and wetter winters, so our weather experience fully reflects the experts’ climate predictions.

Alternatively, the fickle british weather might deliver us a “normal” winter this year, and then the climate scientists will have a real mountain to climb.

Well, we think it’s M. sinensis – it could be M. strictus – they are very similar, and are allegedly well mixed up in the trade;  we think ours is M. sinensis, but it doesn’t really have the arching stems that it’s supposed to, so we have our doubts.

We don’t really like grasses – we love their form and the architectural interest they add to a border, we love their texture and the way they sway in the breeze, we love their almost year-long interest and that they look stunning frosted in a winter garden….but we can’t stand the way they seed themselves around.

Look, no seeds!

Some plants are prolific seeders;  foxgloves, campanulas, verbenas and many others all carpet our borders with thousands of tiny seedlings each year.   But they’re easily controlled – one swipe of the hoe and they’re done for.   Grass seedlings are so much more robust;  even if you catch them really young they’re fantastically resilient, and we find only thorough hand weeding will keep them under control.   Unfortunately, we don’t have an army of under-gardeners we can task with this, so ornamental grasses mostly get designed out of our garden.

With one exception of course.   M. s. ‘zebrinus’ is an extraordinary plant.   The conventional husbandry is to cut the old growth down to the ground in late winter;  new growth then appears in the spring, but is clear green.   It grows for several months, and then, just as you’re thinking you’ll need to pull it out because it must have reverted, the yellow stripes appear.   Not only on new growth as you might expect, but along the full length of the foliage (which by this time will be 2 – 3 feet tall).

From  mid-summer until autumn you’ll enjoy an increasingly bold clump of lovely, vigorous, yellow-striped foliage.   Flowers appear in the autumn, and last right through winter, but (and this is the clever bit, at least for the grass seed phobic) the flowers are either sterile, or simply so late that they never develop viable seeds.   We’ve searched many reference sources but can’t find a definitive answer to this, but either way you don’t get seeds, and that means no pesky seedlings!

So there we have it – the best of all possible worlds;  lovely architectural plants, probably the most interesting foliage of any grass, modestly sized so it’ll fit most gardens (there’s a lot of HUGE grasses out there!) almost year round interest, and….no weeding!

Louise, and Bassenthwaite from Carl Side - it's much wetter than it looks! Thank goodness for Goretex.

We don’t get away from the nursery as often as we ought, and when we do it’s got to be in the off-season which makes UK breaks a bit of a gamble weather wise….but it doesn’t matter!

We work outdoors most of the time of course so we’re used to pretty much anything the British climate can throw at us, and we can bore for hours on the merits of different types of outdoor clothing, so coping with inclement weather is second nature.

Which is a good job really, because probably our favorite short break destination is the Lake District, and it always rains there!   (Actually, Nick’s introduction to the Lakes was a school trip in the summer of 1968 when it didn’t rain at all for a fortnight, but we’ve never even managed 3 consecutive  dry days there since!).

Rain rarely shows up well in photographs, and this picture is no exception – the rain (almost sleet) was coming up the valley horizontally, and it took 36 hours to dry out some of our clothing.   Little did we know at the time, but the weather we saw was but a minor precursor for what was to come – the Bassenthwaite valley was where much of the rain fell that caused the recent disasterous cumbrian floods.   But Louise is still smiling – it’s being there that matters;  good weather is better, but the change of scene, and simply being away from home is what counts.   And if you want to walk in the countryside, especially at anything much higher than sea level, then the weather is just another feature to wonder at.

In truth, the weather at Barlow Nurseries is sometimes no better – there is nothing between us and the Irish Sea (only ‘The Cheshire Gap’) so when a nor’westerly is blowing, we get it full force.   Both plants and people are fully hardened off here!