Huw Morgan, Author at Dig Delve – An online magazine about gardens, landscape, growing & making. - Page 15 of 45 Dig Delve – An online magazine about gardens, landscape, growing & making.

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For the first year since we have been here the cow parsley on the lane has stood standing on both sides. Previously the neighbouring farmer, who has the fields to the other side of the lane, has cut it on his side just after it starts flowering in the belief that it taints the milk. A sign of the times this year has been marked by this spring phenomenon having its liberty, for he has now converted to beef cattle. For the first time the lanes are unbroken, their lifeline spilling from the banks and continuously along the verges.

I enjoy the lacing of the lanes and the shadowy parts of our meadows where the cow parsley thrives, but I am not brave enough, as Fergus Garrett is at Great Dixter, to let it venture into the garden. At least not in its wild form, but I have invited the liquorice-leaved Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’ into the beds where it is brilliant for rising up early and covering for a discernible gap between spring and summer. The couple of weeks before and then during the Chelsea Flower Show when we suddenly find spring racing and then tipping into summer.

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The hungry gap has been shorter than usual this year, but we are still in the slim pickings phase of the new round of harvesting. The spring cabbages are over. The remainder of last season’s kales have all gone to flower, as have the beetroot, their gargantuan roots now tough and woody. We have eaten our fill and fill of chard. And so we have been watching very closely to see when the first of the real spring vegetables will appear.

From the Instagram feeds of restaurants and foodies you would think that late spring began in late February, since that was when the posts of asparagus, broad beans, peas, artichokes and even courgettes started appearing. At that time of year I just know that most of those vegetables will have come from the polytunnels of Spain, perhaps southern Italy or even further afield, and I always feel rather duped by the promise of early summer they make when in reality it is only now that those vegetables are starting to make an appearance in British gardens and farmer’s markets.

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It has been seven months since we began the process of healing the rawness around the newly excavated pond. It was early September, the optimum time to throw down the meadow seed, and the ground greened quickly to stabilise the slopes over the winter.

A pond at the bottom of a slope is not an easy thing to build and, by the time we had completed the work at the end of August, using the dry summer months for the dig, the weather was cooling and it was too late in the season to plant. So the pond lay waiting. An empty disk of sometimes silvery, sometimes inky-green water, reflecting the seasons as they came and went. In March we were surprised to see both frog and toad spawn, but despite our delight we were unsettled to see it without a haven as it drifted in March winds without an anchor or the shelter provided by planting. Life had begun against the odds.

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There is an exponential moment that happens at the beginning of May. A coming together of energy that is altogether bigger than anything we can garden. A bluebell wood hovering and luminous or the brilliant carpet of wild garlic that make the woods their own. It is a particular feeling to be part of this energy if you put the time aside to do so. To pause and feel the surge.

To achieve the same experience in a garden is something to strive for. A feeling of immersion where the sum of the parts is greater than the components. A generosity that stops you in your rush or diversions, because the very nature of the moment is that it will be fleeting, and probably just the once. The light falling a certain way, the particularities of the year or just chancing to be there when it all comes together.

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“A wallflower is someone with an introverted personality type who will attend parties and social gatherings, but will usually distance themselves from the crowd and actively avoid being in the limelight.” Not so the blaze that is burning in the pumpkin bed in the kitchen garden. Smouldering, velvety reds and fiery oranges, so sumptuous and at odds with the awakening of a British spring. With their unmistakable perfume, a warm, comforting sweetness of violets and cloves, the garden wallflowers are anything but.

Erysimum cheiri hails originally from Greece and the wallflower really gets its name from the ease with which it seeds into the crevices of buildings where it lives on apparently nothing. The species is mostly gold-flowered and you can see the flame in the plants that have been selected for the garden and have been adapted to garden culture. Mostly bedding in high Edwardian style for the wallflower comes with tulips.

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It is two weeks since I last wrote and I have spent the majority of the intervening fortnight in bed with Covid. Hit harder than I had anticipated, the Easter weekend completely passed me by, my duvet clamped firmly over my head. When I finally surfaced on Thursday and ventured out into the garden the change was astounding. Growth everywhere and flowers bringing colour to the green in every direction. I didn’t have the energy to write a full piece this week and so yesterday I picked up my camera to record what immediately struck me in the newly sprung garden. This is an edited record of my first impressions as I stepped out of the house for the first time. At first I was transfixed by the pots just outside the back door, but finally I ventured further afield, blinking into the late afternoon sunshine to explore as much of the garden as I could easily reach.

Words & photographs: Huw Morgan

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The tide has turned and each day the wash of green becomes more intense. Down by the stream, in the woods the ground has already disappeared beneath a flood of wild garlic, nettle, dogs mercury, archangel, cow parsley and wood anemone. You feel the total newness of everything and understand that nothing will ever be this new again. Standing amidst this glowing green as the morning sun lights everything with an intense luminosity you feel simultaneously a sense of grounded calm alongside a persistent, restless energy. Seemingly connected to a primal woodland dwelling memory, the vitality of green makes you feel grounded, alert and alive.

Soon the canopy will close over, filtering green light to make an underwater world of the understorey. But right now the buds are only just breaking. Young leaves have avoided the recent frosts and unfurl to reveal themselves in all their soft vulnerability. Hazel, hornbeam, hawthorn, willow, elder and alder are all awakening, while the oak and the ash are still deciding whether we shall have a wet or dry summer. Ivy has a polished sheen of newness and wherever you look every shade of green is layered one on the other – leaf green, apple green, grass green, sap green, olive green, acid green, sage green, lime green, jade green, emerald green, blue green, chartreuse and citrine.

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The snake’s head fritillaries are early this year, rising up fast while it was still mild, but now witnessing the severity of these last few days of chill winds and freeze. Oblivious to the changeable weather and dancing on wire thin stems on the bank behind the house, they hover amongst an assembly of bulbs to celebrate this moment. Small flowered narcissus and Anemone blanda, Leucojum aestivum, Tulipa clusiana and Star of Bethlehem. I love them in the mix and it is a joyous reflection of change, but once you have seen Fritillaria meleagris naturalised in a wild meadow, you cannot help but think that their subtlety is better when they are in the company of other natives. Celandine, the first cowslips and the fresh new grass of the season.

Last autumn I took more ground so that the fritillaries could have their own place. Two projects on different time scales, but both in damper places that are more akin to the water meadows where you see them in the wild. The first, the more immediate, is on the spring-laden banks that feed the ditch, where a couple of years ago I moved the fence to give field back to this crease of wild wetland.

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Today’s is a very short piece, as events at home and work have allowed me very little time. I have been wanting to share this recipe for several weeks though and not doing so just wasn’t an option.

The recipe isn’t mine. It is by the London-based Ukrainian cook and food writer, Olia Hercules. Her family are in Ukraine and it has primarily been through following her impassioned and emotive Instagram feed that I owe my awareness and understanding of the events of the past month.

My admiration for her is unbounded. She has campaigned relentlessly. Spoken and written in the press. Raised funds personally and through her activism and doubtless been responsible for educating a huge number of people about the realities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. All this while being profoundly concerned about the wellbeing of her extended family, friends and fellow Ukrainians.

One of the ways in which she has been raising funds is through the Cook For Ukraine initiative, which she started with Russian food writer, Alissa Timoshkina. Funds raised through supper clubs, bake sales and pop ups are going to Unicef to help families and children affected by the conflict. To date they have raised nearly £325,000.

By cooking and sharing Ukrainian and Eastern European recipes the campaign aims to increase awareness of the humanitarian crisis and bring people together over a shared love of food and Ukrainian culture.

This recipe is incredibly timely. Nettles, wild sorrel and wild garlic are all now growing in profusion in the fields and woods around us. Foraging the amount required for this recipe is the work of a half hour or so and a great activity to do with friends or family. The root vegetables and alliums are all still in store after the winter, while the fresh green herbs are growing plentifully in our polytunnel.

In however small a way, foraging in the fields for the wild herbs in the quiet of the morning to the sound of birdsong and cooking the recipe to the letter of Olia’s instructions definitely brought me closer to an appreciation of the Ukrainian way life of that is currently being threatened so critically. It is through understanding this common humanity that we appreciate our own freedoms and understand how important it is to speak out when others are at risk of losing theirs.

INGREDIENTS

2 tbsp rapeseed or olive oil
1 onion, peeled and cut into 1cm dice
2 carrots, scrubbed and cut into 1cm dice
1 small celeriac, peeled and cut into 1cm dice
3 celery sticks, cut into 1cm dice
1 leek, white part only, trimmed and cut into 1cm dice
3 big garlic cloves, peeled
1 bay leaf
Salt and black pepper
6 baby potatoes
100g sorrel, sliced
75g young nettle tops (the top few leaves on each stem)
50g wild garlic leaves, sliced (flowers kept for garnish)
3 spring onions, thinly sliced
A handful of chopped dill
A handful of chopped parsley
Creme fraiche, to serve (optional)

METHOD

Pour the oil into a cast-iron casserole set over a medium-high heat. Once the oil is sizzling, add the onion, carrots, celeriac, celery and leek, and saute, stirring from time to time, for about five minutes: you want them to become caramelised in parts, but not scorched. (If the pan feels too crowded, fry the vegetables in batches.) Add the garlic and cook, still stirring, for about two minutes, until fragrant and starting to colour.

Add two and a half litres of cold water and the bay leaf, season lightly with salt and bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook, partially covered, for about 40 minutes.

Add the potatoes whole and cook for 10 minutes, or until they are soft, then add the sorrel, nettles and wild garlic and take off the heat. Taste the soup and add more salt if needed.

Put a potato in each soup bowl and lightly crush it with a spoon. Ladle over the broth,then sprinkle with the wild garlic flowers (if using), spring onions and herbs. Serve with a dollop of creme fraiche, if you like, and a good grinding of pepper.

Words: Huw Morgan | Recipe: Olia Hercules from Summer Kitchens | Photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 26 March 2022

Where just a fortnight ago time felt like it was still in hand, spring stirrings are now telling us otherwise. Green in the hawthorn hedges reminds me that I still have the remains of bare root whips that have yet to be found a home. Flower buds fattening on the pears might well need protection and at ground level there is activity everywhere. Bittercress rearing to flower to seed another generation and shoots on the peonies already scarlet and glistening with the vigour of the new season. All change and no holding back now.

We are pushing to finish the mulching, combing the beds one last time for weeds and seedlings that might go unnoticed once the mulch goes down. The rash of Digitalis ferruginea, which has germinated in the last fortnight will be stifled by the mulch, but we will apply it only thinly or not at all where we want them to replace the older generation. The Great Dixter team call this ‘intelligent mulching’ which always seems like such a good way of engaging with what you do and don’t want when applying this protective eiderdown.

Hairy bittercress (*Cardamine hirsuta*) seedlings

The first sightings of self-sown Beth’s poppy and eschscholzia are a good litmus and we start to sow other hardy annuals as soon as we see them. Larkspur, Love-in-a-Mist and Shirley poppies are sown directly, disturbing the ground where we want them and making sure they retain enough headspace to grow sufficiently strong to be able to run up to flower without being outcompeted by neighbours. We sow plugs of Orlaya grandiflora, Ammi majus and Ammi visnaga so that they can be introduced into any unplanned gaps that might appear. These are started off in the polytunnel where we also have plugs of early vegetables that appreciate the start of early warmth. Salad, chard, slow to germinate parsley and pots of dwarf French beans to steal a march on open sowings in the garden.

Triggered by the shift in the season and a growing feeling of needing to get a move on, I’ve been going through the seed boxes and found to my dismay that we’d completely overlooked sowing the Lathyrus odoratus alongside the other sweet peas in the autumn. They will be not be as strong as autumn or February sown sweet peas, but they may well provide us with a nicely staggered supply of blooms. We will be sure to watch them for the mice by keeping them out of reach on the staging, as they can so easily ravage a generation of peas before they have even germinated. The stocky young plants from last autumn’s sowing are ready to go out now after being hardened off in a well-ventilated frame.

A seedling of Beth’s poppy (*Papaver dubium subsp lecoqii var albiflorum*)

Autumn sown sweet peas ready to be planted out

I sow a number of perennials from seed so that I can grow them on and produce them in the numbers I need to make a planting flow. The green form of Bupleurum perfoliatum and unusual umbellifers that are hard to find. With bulbs such as Tulipa sprengeri and locally harvested Bath Asparagus (Ornithogalum pyreniacum) I sow every year so that I have a steady flow of plants. The four to five year wait feels like nothing once you have them in relay and the first three years behind you.

I started the same process with Anemone pavonina (main image) last summer. I bought the parent plants from Beth Chatto. She was originally given them by Cedric Morris who had collected seed from plants on a Greek hillside. Knowing the provenance of a plant adds immeasurably to both the feeling of belonging to a community of plant lovers and an understanding of where they will do best. It is warming to think about them sharing stories about where they grew and with what and then their experiences as they went on to grow them here in England.

The seed is as soft as down when the seed head ripens and ruptures. It was sown fresh last June in an open compost with a dusting of grit to hold it down and make it feel at home. Sowing seed fresh is always the best option because you sow it with the plant and your vision of more of them firmly in mind. Fresh seed also tends not to lose its viability, where saved seed often triggers a longer dormancy to help protect it. Primrose seed, for instance, germinates erratically if kept on a shelf until the autumn, but if you sow it fresh it will have begun its life by July to overwinter as youngsters and be that much faster the following spring.

The anemone seed germinated in December as it might with winter rains ahead of it in Greece. I kept them in the frame to prevent them from getting too wet here in Somerset and will keep them in their pots for another two years before planting them out in a little stock bed where I will grow them on to flowering size. Being seed-raised there will be variability in the offspring, but in this case I will welcome the unexpected. Anemone pavonina is famed for its candy colourings and my original plants range from white with a blue eye to lipstick pink, deep rose and blazing scarlet. Colours you are as happy to see in spring as the promise of germinating seedlings.

Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 19 March 2022

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