Magnolia Elizabeth

Magnolias are always a bit of a gamble in our climate;  their flowers are fried by sub-zero temperatures, but emerge long before the danger of frost has passed.   So every year we find ourselves holding our breath while they flower, in the hope that the weather remains frost free long enough for us to enjoy their display.

It’s been a good season for them this year.  They’ve been flowering in gardens around here for several weeks, and the weather has been remarkably benign.    The earliest flowerers are getting towards the end of their display without a single frost-browned petal.

And the later flowerers are hoping they’ll enjoy the same balmy conditions.

Our picture shows a newly emerged flower on one of the Magnolia Elizabeth we have on our sales area, which we’re hoping will be flowering frost-free for the next several weeks.

M. Elizabeth was introduced in 1977, and was a chance seedling from a cross between M. denudata and M. acuminata at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, New York.   It’s primrose yellow flowers set it apart from the more typical white and pink colourways in the magnolia family, and its slightly later flowering season gives it a better chance of avoiding frost damage.   It will grow (eventually) to maybe 30 feet tall, so it needs a bit of space – but it will be quite a spectacle in flower won’t it!

World's largest oxslip?

Other than being careful not to decapitate it with the hoe, we’ve done nothing to this oxslip (Primula elatior). We didn’t even plant it – the seed must have arrived in some compost we used to mulch under our beech hedge a few years ago. And it’s sown itself in probably the least hospitable spot in the garden (if you’re an oxslip anyway) – south facing, baking hot sun in summer, and on very poor, free draining sandy soil.

Which just goes to show how fickle plants can be – give them what the encyclopedias tell you is ideal conditions, and they should thrive – but sometimes they’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head, and thrive anyway.

All’s well with the world … Gardener’s World is back on the telly, and after a couple of years in the wilderness, it’s back where it ought to be – in the presenters own garden.

Monty Don is not everyone’s favourite gardening presenter, but his return to the helm of the country’s flagship gardening programme does seem to demonstrate that  the internet may have brought a new democracy to the way that decisions are made at the BBC.

The beeb’s attempts to modernise Gardeners World over the last couple of series have been pretty much universally lambasted, but the loudest, and most sustained critical chorus has surely been that on the corporations own message boards, where posters have roundly condemned virtually all aspects of the show over the last two years.

As a result, the (very expensive) garden created especially for the series (on a former rugby pitch in Birmingham) has been abandoned, 2 of the presenters have departed, and the programme has returned to its roots with a single presenter working from his own garden, and other items being contributed by other presenters from other locations.

A very substantial and costly change, in what appears to be a response to feedback from the (really very few) viewers who bother to post on the BBC’s gardening message boards.

And having started to listen to its viewers, the producers seem intent on continuing to do so – in the first episode last night, we had Monty showing us around his garden, and making the point that the flower borders were a central feature (many of the fears expressed about his return to the show concerned his image as a veg man, and that ornamental horticulture would not get enough coverage).

He also explained how his clipped box balls had been grown from his own cuttings (they would have cost a fortune to buy) and that his box hedging had been bought cheap from a newspaper ad, and that his avenue of pleached lime trees had only cost 50p each (20 years ago!) – all we suspect intended to address another message board worry that Monty might be a bit of a gentleman gardener, and not in touch with normal gardens, and normal budgets.

And he even tried to mend a few bridges with the horticulture industry (who he upset when he mentioned in a recent  interview that he hadn’t bought anything from a garden centre for 15 years) by explaining that although he was sowing his beetroot seeds in his own home made compost, he sometimes bought compost (no, really!) and it didn’t really matter to do so.   Nearly an olive branch to garden centres.

So, democracy works, feedback rules, producers reduced to putty in the hands of the message boarders.   What will they change next?

The hellebores just outside our back door have eliminated any room for doubt that we’re well into the headlong charge towards spring……

Helleborus Pink Lady

Hibernating’s all very well, but you can have too much of a good thing;  and so we’ve yawned, stretched, poked our heads outdoors, stumbled into the light, and realised that Spring is just around the corner.
Time enough to count the cost of winter losses next week – for now, we’re revelling in the reassurance that the seasons are on the move, and things are coming back to life.

Our Hellebore White Lady is flowering - from seed sown maybe 5 years ago - worth the wait!

Our winter salads are showing signs of life (we haven't grown these outdoors before; they must have been named by the same optimistic marketing man who named winter pansies. They're clearly not going to do owt until the spring).

And of course you can't blog at this time of year without a picture of some snowdrops. We looked for these a couple of weeks ago, and wondered whether we'd dreamt that we had them in the garden - there wasn't a sign. And here they are now, in full bloom.

The nursery opens for business on March 1st (officially at least – the “early adopters” have been in already) and we’re busily prinking and preening ready for the new season. More trees this year; more shrubs (especially specimen sizes) and an even wider range of perennials. Bring it on!

Still no chance of anything approaching gardening or horticulture going on around here, so we’re diverting ourselves by recording the extraordinary landscapes hereabouts. All the photos below were taken from the nursery today, but we drove between Newport and Market Drayton this afternoon, and the county was looking much the same everywhere. Surreal, but staggeringly beautiful.

Bird feeding station

There are loads of ornamental crab apples lining the tree aisles in garden centres around the country (and here!).   And they’re popular with good reason – lovely spring blossom, glorious autumn colours, and fruit that lasts well beyond leaf fall to give good winter interest.

The one in our photo is in our front garden, and pre-dates our time here – its label is long gone,so we don’t know which variety it is, but it does everything it’s supposed to, and we’re very happy to have it.

Right now it’s doing its winter larder act – the blackbirds are still busy stripping the holly berries (clearly a tastier treat than crabs) but in a week or two they’ll move onto these, and the trees’ final seasonal task will be complete.

That’s the usual routine anyway – a year or two ago a flock of redwings got in first, and stripped the tree bare in a matter of minutes.

According to the RSPB, 685,000 Redwings visit the UK each winter (and we have a resident Blackbird population of 10 – 15 million*) so maybe we ought to plant a few more trees!

* clearly estimating bird populations is a less exact science than you might imagine!

For the record, scenes from the coldest day we’ve known…..

Very, very cold!

Just a few days after recording a near record overnight low temperature, the record looks to have been broken – our thermomenter shows something around -17c for last nights low.

You can see that the temperature when the photo was taken, at about 08.45 this morning, had only crept a couple of degrees higher, to maybe -15c!

The garden this morning is a real winter wonderland – everything is covered in as thick a hoar frost as we’ve ever seen.   The bad news of course is that it’s rather too cold to make it a place you want to linger!

Another inch or so of snow fell overnight, so now we have 2 – 3″ of lovely powdery white stuff to kick through – but absolutely no chance of any gardening taking place!

So we have time to wonder at the icicles you get from a corrugated iron roof….

Freeze thaw, freeze thaw...

And time to worry about our leeks. We’ve never grown leeks before; all the books will tell you that they’re perfectly winter hardy, so we’re counting on them being right!

The few that we harvested before the arctic weather set in were delicious, so we’re hoping that like sprouts (allegedly) the flavour improves after a bit of frost!

They look hardy don't they??