We love living in the country, and we especially love springtime (did we mention that already?).   We love the rituals of the changing seasons, and get unreasonably excited when we see our first swallows, and hear the first cuckoo.

But our joy is wearing a bit thin this year as we worry that there may not be that many cuckoos around to herald future springtimes.   According to the BBC Wales website cuckoo numbers declined 37% between 1994 – 2007, and judging by the apparently solitary existence of our neighbourhood cuckoo, things really are getting tough out there in cuckoo land.

We heard our first cuckoo some weeks ago, and have been hearing him sporadically ever since.  But this week things have been hotting up, presumably as the poor chap gets more and more desperate to find a mate.   For the last several days our local bird has been calling pretty much continuously from dawn to dusk, enchanting us and visitors to the nursery, but apparently not charming any lady cuckoos.

You can have too much of a good thing of course, and while the cuckoo’s call is undoubtedly captivating, it can be, well, a bit intrusive when it starts at 4.30 am, and frankly, a bit monotonous after 5 or 6 hours.

It must be the same for the poor bird tho’ mustn’t it?   Imagine having a total vocabulary of just two syllables, and having a charm offensive consisting of nothing more than continually repeating them.  And then having to repeat them to the point that you get the ornithological equivalent of laryngitis – grim times indeed in cuckoo land.

Actually, we’re not sure whether our local bird is struggling, or just introducing a bit of contrived variety to relieve his own boredom.  Or perhaps he’s going for the sympathy vote…..but every so often, he loses it, and his normally sonorous “cuckoo” comes out as a wheezy “cu, cu, a, hooo”.   Or the second syllable comes in for a bit of improv croup, and we get “cuck, ah, ah, hoo”.

All we hope is that he finds a mate soon, and comes back next year….

Does this count as burgeoning?

We had the annual visit of one of our local gardening societies last Thursday evening, and this time, for the first time for a few years, the weather was kind.    In fact, absolutely wonderful.    A balmy evening, barely a hint of a breeze, and warm enough for nowt but t-shirts until well after dusk.   A band of happy people exploring the nursery, then being fed tea and biscuits in our getting-more-like-a-garden garden, sitting on chairs borrowed from our local village hall, and generally having a jolly old time.

We might have mentioned this before, but May is our favourite month.  The plants all look lovely, the nursery is stacked to the gunwales with spring stock, and when the sun shines, and the nursery is full of happy customers, its glorious.

While most gardening priorities at this time of year involve bedding plants, hanging baskets, and setting out tender vegetables, it’s also important to spare a thought for the perennial plants that will be delivering colour and interest to our borders later in the season.

In recent years it’s become popular to use the annual beano that is the Chelsea Flower Show as an alliterative reminder that it’s time to take the secateurs to the taller (and potentially floppier) late season flowers in the herbaceous border, and do the Chelsea Chop!

Short back and sides, sir ?

Tracy DiSabato-Aust managed to stretch this to a whole book, but for those of you who are more inclined to garden than read, here’s the Barlow’s Digest version of the technique.

To do the “chop” you remove the topmost few inches of growth (yes, all the flower buds!) from plants such as Sedum, Rudbeckia, Helenium, and Heliopsis, so that they’ll re-shoot from lower down their stems, and make squatter, more robust (and self supporting!) plants.   It will delay flowering by a couple of weeks, but that sacrifice is more than compensated by the fact that the plants won’t fall over, will not need staking , and will actually have more flowers.

Our picture shows 2 Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ in our garden, one chopped, one not (but soon will be!).    If you’ve never done it before, it’s definitely a grit your teeth, cruel to be kind sort of moment;  but you’ll have forgotten all that angst by September, and you won’t be looking at your borders wishing you’d spent more time staking and tying!

Spring in the tree aisles

It’s spring!

Leaves are unfurling, colours are zinging, the blossom looks lovely….we know this because we can see the tree aisles on the nursery from the house, and this is the view we get when we fling back the curtains each morning.

May is definitely the best month of the year!

We pride ourselves on the hardiness of our plants.   We are very careful to ensure that everything that makes it onto our sales benches is absolutely ready for the big outdoors, and we are very catholic in our plant selections, to the extent that many varieties of “hardy” plants simply don’t get onto our stock list.

Sometimes customers find this difficult to understand.   We had a conversation with a customer last weekend which went something like :

Customer :  “Do you have any Phormiums?”
Us : “No, we don’t find them reliably hardy”
Customer : (slightly quizzical) “Oh!?”  (and then with a hint of indignation) “I’ve had one in my garden for several years”
Us: “Maybe you have it in a warm spot…?”
Customer “Yes….it is quite sheltered….against a south facing wall….I wrap it with chicken wire, straw and fleece every winter…but last winter saw it off, so I want another!”

Of course we have no problem with this sort of gardening;  if you want a ”Mediterranean” garden, and are willing to go to those sorts of lengths to get one, that’s absolutely cool with us.   We just don’t like having to care for those sorts of plants on the nursery, or explaining to less knowledgeable customers that they’ll have to go to those sorts of lengths to keep their plants alive.

Gaura Ballerina Rose

But we also like to make sure our plant range is as wide as it can be, and we are constantly experimenting to see how maybe-marginally-hardy perennials behave with us.   As a result, our range includes one French lavender, one Osteospermum, one Ceanothus (and even that is under review following last winter!) and until now, no Gaura.

Gaura are always listed as perennials in the catalogues and encyclopedias, but the sage advice has been to treat them as annuals.   Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf refused them inclusion in their book Dream Plants for the Natural Garden with an explanatory  footnote describing them as “…wonderful…but you have to buy a new batch every year.”   And Gaura lindheimii, frankly, isn’t a very garden worthy plant.   It’s gawky habit, washed out pinky-white flowers, and tendency to develop (characteristic, normal, but rather unsettling) purple leaf spots meant it managed only a cameo appearance on our plant list a few years ago, and the genus has been off our radar ever since.

But the breeders have been busy!  A number of new cultivars have been launched in recent years, and tempted by some of the more lurid descriptions in the catalogues, we decided to try a batch last year.   And we like them!   The leaf spots have been bred out, but the colour has been retained, so you get a rather fetching clump of purple-green foliage, and in high summer they’re topped with lots and lots of pink butterfly flowers.   Prompt dead heading will get you a second flush of blooms a few weeks later.   And here comes the good bit – they appear to be really hardy!

The picture shows new growth on a plant that has overwintered in our back garden (there are 2 others, not in the picture, which look equally good).   We have a group of five in our (rather more exposed) front garden, which are also doing well.   Given the winter we’ve just experienced, we feel confident in declaring these guys well and truly hardy!

Our suspicion is that they may not be very long lived perennials (because the older varieties weren’t) but we’ll have to wait to see if the breeders have managed to eliminate those genes too.

In the meantime they’re looking like really garden worthy plants, so if you’ve been hankering after Gaura, but have been wary of their hardiness, have a go with these guys.