The Giant Oat Grass inhabits high, dry ground in southern Europe and, although I have never seen it in the wild, I can imagine them rising above their companions in the steppe. This is how they like to be, in the company of plants that do not overshadow the tussock of evergreen foliage and where in the longest days of the year they take the light and hold it in a hovering suspension of coppery awns.
The stipa is an old favourite. I grew it first and en masse as an early emergent in the Barn Garden at Home Farm. We used the pockets amongst the old cobbles where previous buildings had been razed to the ground and allowed the oat grass to lead the mood in June. I let the Californian poppy seed through a sprawl of Potentilla ‘Gibson’s Scarlet’ at its feet and the rusty spears of Digitalis ferruginea ascended up into the cloud to score the vertical. I have the Stipa here too, also by our barns and growing in nothing but rubble and subsoil where they stand head and shoulders above their companions. To play on the dilapidated mood of the rusty buildings they are teamed with evening primrose and the tiny pinpricks of a wild dianthus.
Spearing at speed from the basal foliage as the days lengthen, the stipa are a litmus in this race to the longest day. Angling up and out so that there is sufficient room for the flowers to take their own space when they break the tall tapers, they head into a miraculous fortnight of flower. The panicles open out at head height to form a cage through which the wind can easily pass. The golden moment is the week the anthers furnish themselves with pollen, dangling free and on tiny hinges for mobility and ease of distribution for wind-blown pollen.
Though it strikes a particular mood of dry airiness in the garden, Stipa gigantea goes with almost anything if you pick it and bring it inside for closer observation. We have it here with a couple of neighbours from the planting. A tall Dianthus giganteus from the Balkans, which favours the same conditions and seeds about in the open places. It has proven to be long-lived here where the ground drains freely and has seeded easily but not annoyingly amongst but not into the crowns of neighbouring plants. Rising to almost a metre here, it is an easy companion, content to find its place on the edge of the planting and rising through the stipa to provide an undercurrent of colour. With blood red calyces and magenta buds that deepen the mood, the flowers open a soft rose-pink.
Close by, but very much in their own space, are the Baptisia x variicolor ‘Twilite Prairieblues’. Where many perennials are happy to be moved if you don’t find them the right position, you need to place the False Indigo in the right place the first time, because they like to put their feet down and hate disturbance thereafter. Being leguminous they fix their own nitrogen and are happy in the rubbly soil. As prairie-dwellers they hate to be overshadowed and will dwindle if a neighbour throws shade, but given a place they like with the surround of good light, they are long-lived and easy.
I have been experimenting with several of the hybrids for their longevity and their curious in-between colours and this one is a beauty. The female parent is the more usual indigo blue B. australis, but the male parent here is the yellow flowered B. sphaerocarpa and this provides the yellow keel. The colour of the standards is neither one thing nor another. A smoky violet-purple, without being muddied.
Rising fast and tall and again racing to the solstice, the lupin-like flowers strike a vertical accent whilst in flower. As they go to seed the plant becomes a rounded form that you need to allow room for as it fills out as it matures. The presence in summer is strong and definite, with good healthy glaucous foliage and, later, long-lasting seedpods that darken in winter to charcoal-black.
Though from the altogether different growing conditions of the cool damp meadows of southern China, the Iris chrysographes ‘Black Form’ refers here to the winter colours of those baptisia seedpods. Though iris could become a serious obsession, the reappearance of this one every June is always spellbinding. Black on first appearance, but the deepest royal purple on closer observation, they are worthy of a backdrop against which they will not be lost. In the garden they are allowed to hover in the paler suspension of Bowles’ Golden Grass, where their beautiful form is made all that much clearer. And here too, the stipa shows us that it is worth experimenting with associations you might not choose for their cultural compatability, but for what they might inspire beyond their place in the garden.
Words: Dan Pearson | Flowers and photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 19 June 2021
The oriental poppies have broken the green, rearing above the rush of June foliage. They are the first true colour in the garden, save the Tulipa sprengeri that teetered neatly on the last week of spring and preceeded them. Red is a jolt this early in our verdant landscape, but we are ready for it now, the first slash of summer.
I have planted the poppies in homage to several memories. The first, a plant I remember from being about the same height, gazing into their interiors in our childhood garden. It grew with ferns and sprawled beyond the borders to offer up bristly buds, the casing breaking into two under the pressure of soon to be uncrumpled flower. I am red-green colour blind, but not completely and those poppies are an early memory of being able to see red fully, for they present it without compromise. Luminous and as red as anything can be, heightened by black-blotched bases and turquoise stamens.
The second memory, and one that I have planted into this garden, refers not to poppies at all but to meeting scarlet Amenone pavonina flaring amongst euphorbia and the march of giant fennel on the Golan Heights in Israel. I was there for a year working in the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens and the brilliant Michael Avishai, then Director of the gardens, would take me on weekend excursions to look at the flora of Israel. A fearless and terrifying driver, we would leave at 4am, to arrive at a site, spot on time for a happening in the landscape. This one came with his advice to not stray too far from the road. If you stepped over the wire marked “Land mines. Do not enter !”… The red of anemone I can see too and I shall never forget its shimmer amongst its opposite acid greens and the sun rising over an army of fennel stretching into a dangerous distance.
So, this particular memory comes with a charge and the oriental poppies that step through the giant fennels in the garden here take the place of the anemone. We have two varieties by default, not design. The requested ‘Beauty of Livermere’ (Goliath Group) are pillar box red, while there are three plants of a tangerine orange one that were substituted and planted without knowledge of their difference. I do not have the heart nor the desire to take out one or the other. The reds are good together and if I were to try and remove the plants to only have one, they would still likely regrow from root cuttings. This is the way to propagate oriental poppies for they do not come true from seed.
The rush into life in the spring, first with a mound of hairy, lime-green foliage and then the reach to flower is made possible by energy stored in thick, deeply searching roots. Hailing from Central Asia, their habit of disappearing once they have flowered and set seed is a survival mechanism against the drought of summer. The gap they leave will need to be negotiated by cutting the plants back to the base as soon as they begin to wane and in combining them with later-to-come perennials that will cover for the gap they leave behind. Asters and late flowering grasses make good couplings.
The reserve in the root can also be used to advantage in the fringe of the garden in rough grass and amongst cow parsley for the early growth will also outcompete grass in spring. The secret is to introduce them as established plants and keep them clear of competition in the first year whilst they are building their root system. Their dwindling summer growth will be disguised by the meadow and the autumn regrowth can be mowed around once it returns with summer rains.
Though I do not grow more varieties here, for the oriental poppies set an opulent tone and demand your attention whilst they are in flower, I have grown several in the past. At Home Farm I set ‘Perry’s White’, with its contrasting dark blotch, amongst gallica roses and inky bearded iris. I used the wood aster, Eurybia diviricata to cover for them later. For a while I also grew ‘Patty’s Plum’ for its thunderous bruised grey-mauve flower though it was never a keeper and dwindled for me. Then there was Saffron’, with wide open flowers of pale tangerine.
Burned into the June green, I will be there as I was aged five this coming weekend to witness their awakening. Never dimmed, always welcome.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 12 June 2021
The farmers around us are making the first haylage, harvesting this moment of energy in the pasture before the grasses race to seed. Meanwhile, we let our meadows grow and watch the energy change on a daily basis with the mown paths deepening as the growth pushes into June.
After the slow, cold spring and now the rush with the weather warmed, we find ourselves feeling as if the world around us is in fast forward. So full of life and never lusher.
The Paeonia peregrina holding on with its perfectly spherical buds, glistening and burnished whilst it was cold still in May, were the perfect example this year. Despite the slow spring, the anticipation in their readying was as good as the moment they opened when the weather warmed earlier this week, the richly coloured goblets acting as sound boxes as the bees busied themselves inside. Pollinated and the business done, they were gone and on to the next part of their life cycle. Such is the way in these early summer days. You have to concentrate and make the time to look or you will have missed the moment.
The ephemerality of many of the plants that see in summer is made more acute for the rush. The first field poppies and evening primrose, each flower lasting just for a day. The creamy hawthorn or the flash of scarlet Tulipa sprengeri (main image). You have to put aside time to be with them as they move from one stage to the next. Miss a day and you will do as I did just last night and return to find the vivid tulips already dropped, their scarlet just a memory.
We try right now to spend time walking the meadows daily. The garden is deliberately planted to be slow whilst they are in their prime and to come into its own once they dim and lose their lustre. The daily visits out into the landscape chart the happenings. The week of the dandelion, the pause and then their clocks two weeks later, seeding and silvery as the first of the buttercups rise and put the sway into the meadow as it lifts and reaches skywards.
The dynamic nature of the meadows is what makes them captivating and our walks are slow as we follow one colony of plants or stumble upon the first orchids or the dainty, day-flowering Pale Flax, which has moved its place from the previous year. One year is different from the next as the balance addresses itself to the weather or the grazing or a window of opportunity as one species ebbs or migrates.
Right now it is the time of the mauve-grey Tragopogon porrifolius, which I introduced to the meadows to see if it would find a niche. Blinking open in morning sunshine and closing in the afternoon, the flowers also last just a short time, but they relay over three weeks or more with one flower rising from the grassy foliage to follow the next. Standing tall, a head or so above the crowd it will be the end of the month before their giant dandelion clocks are suddenly with us. Coppery and transparent and holding the light. The parachutes that help the seed travel will slowly further their reach as the seed itself is heavy. They are less invasive in a meadow than if you let them loose in the garden and they bridge the two and help blur the boundaries.
In these first few weeks of summer I often think that I will end up gardening in meadow one day rather than controlling to the degree I do in the garden. The pale Camassia leitchlinii ‘Alba’ is a nightmare seeder in a bed, but it is happy to find a niche in the meadow to follow on from Pheasant’s Eye Narccissus. The magenta Gladiolus communis subsp. byzantinus, which might steal the limelight in the green of an early summer garden, sit so comfortably in the shimmer of the first grasses. They accept the punch of this foreigner in the community and then eclipse them as they run to seed once the summer takes hold.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 5 June 2021
I look out of the window and all I see is green. The endless rainfall of the past weeks and the last few days of warmer, sunny weather have resulted in a sudden explosion of growth that threatens to bypass spring altogether and fast forward straight to summer. Racing growth everywhere. Everywhere, that is, apart from in the vegetable garden.
By this time of year I would usually expect to have planted out almost all of the tender veg – courgettes, pumpkins, sweetcorn, and bush beans – and would hope to be eating the very first broad beans, lettuces and beetroot. This spring has been so cold that my first sowings of carrots took a month to germinate. So tardy that it was only when remaking the seed drill last weekend to resow that I discovered they were just starting to emerge from their seed cases. Kohl rabi that I started in plugs in the polytunnel and planted out in March have only just started to swell and the first peas, sown in the third week of April, are only now sending out their first climbing tendrils. So, although we were able to extend the harvest season with the polytunnel this year, there has still been a yawning hungry gap that will take a few more weeks to fill.
And so my eye has started wandering. I have been sizing up the broad bean tops and the kohl rabi and beet greens. The Swiss chard (which has to be the easiest, most reliable and productive green vegetable anyone can grow) has appeared in every guise imaginable – raw in a chopped salad, creamed with stewed shallots, pureed and added to ricotta for a green sformata and the stalks braised with saffron to waste not a thing. The land cress has gone to flower, but still has enough leaves to make it worth keeping and the fat hen seedlings that were missed and have matured in the polytunnel, transform from weeds into food with a simple change of perspective. As the plants of the woods and hedgerows have been burgeoning, seemingly less affected by the chill, damp weather I have been throwing garlic mustard and wild garlic into anything and everything and adding dandelion leaves, cow parsley and cleavers to salads.
Foraged wild greens would once have been a mainstay of the British kitchen at this time of year as we bridged the hungry gap without the benefit of greenhouse or polytunnel, but now they are only seen on the menus of upmarket restaurants. In Greece they are still firmly on the menus of anywhere you choose to eat and are easily found on market stalls in city and island villages the length of the country. Horta, as they are called, can comprise any foraged greens including nettle, dandelion, purslane, wild chervil, wild sorrel, sow thistle, shepherd’s purse, chicory and other wild greens that do not grow here. Most often these are served simply boiled and dressed with olive oil and lemon juice, but a favourite way to eat them is in a pie laden with fresh herbs, bought still warm from the village bakery and eaten straight from the oil-stained paper bag.
Foraging for greens doesn’t take nearly as long as you might think. The bagful I picked for this recipe took about thirty minutes, and it is an agreeable way to pass some time, providing an opportunity to slow down and look closely at plants that normally get a cursory glance or scowl. Both nettles and wild garlic are at the very end of their season now, so don’t pick the tops of nettles if they have started showing their flowers and choose the youngest, smallest garlic leaves. The older ones will be bitter.
When foraging for any wild plants remember to only take a little from each plant, do not gather from roadsides or anywhere that dogs have access and take a good wild plant identification guide. If wild greens are hard to come by they can be bulked out with chard, kale, chicory or beet tops. It can also be made with shop bought filo pastry and, divided evenly, makes 6 turnovers with a reduced cooking time of 20 to 25 minutes.
Today, eating a warm slice for lunch with a fresh chard salad in the long-awaited sunshine, we could almost feel the heat and smell the salt spray of Greece. Soon, we said, soon.
Pastry
350g plain flour
175g unsalted butter, cold from the fridge and cubed
1 whole egg, beaten
Salt
A little cold milk
Filling
400g mixed foraged and cultivated greens – nettle tops, sorrel, dandelion, garlic mustard, wild garlic, fat hen, orache, wild chervil, wild hop shoots, broad bean tops, pea shoots, chicory, beet greens, chard, land cress, rocket
100g mixed fresh soft herbs – dill, parsley, chervil, mint, fennel, tarragon, coriander
180g shallots, leeks or spring onions, finely sliced
2 fat cloves of garlic, finely chopped
200g feta cheese
2 eggs, beaten
Olive oil
Freshly grated nutmeg
A little milk
Serves 8
Set oven to 180°C.
To make the pastry put the flour, butter and a good pinch of salt into a food processor. Process until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. With the processor running, slowly add the beaten egg and enough milk to bring the dough together. Turn off the machine, tip the dough and any remaining loose mixture onto a worktop and quickly bring it together, kneading lightly, into a ball. Wrap in greaseproof paper and refrigerate for 30 minutes to an hour.
Heat a little olive oil in a saucepan over a medium heat. Add the shallots and garlic and sweat with the lid on for 15 minutes until soft and translucent. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.
Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Blanch the greens for 1 minute, then drain and immediately refresh in cold water. Drain again and then squeeze out as much liquid as possible. Chop coarsely and put into a bowl. Chop the herbs fairly finely and add to the bowl. Add the cooled onions and garlic. Crumble the feta cheese into the bowl. Season with a little salt (the feta is salty), pepper and as much nutmeg as you like. Add the beaten eggs, reserving about a tablespoonful, then mix everything together thoroughly.
Divide the pastry into two almost equal halves. Roll out the larger half to line the bottom and sides of a 30 x 20cm rectangular metal tart tin or baking dish. Spoon in the filling and smooth out evenly ensuring that it is pressed into the corners.
Roll out the second piece of pastry to fit the top of the tart tin. Mix the reserved beaten egg with two tablespoons of milk and brush onto the edges of the pastry case. Lay the second piece of pastry on top and gently press the edges together with your fingers to seal. Trim off the excess pastry with a sharp knife.
Brush the remaining egg wash over the top of the pie. Make slashes in the top to let out steam. Put the pie onto a baking sheet and put into the oven for 30 to 40 minutes until golden brown and gently bubbling.
Serve warm.
Recipe & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 29 May 2021
Bright as sunlight and illuminating these wet, windswept days, the Welsh poppies are dancing down the steps. This is their way, seeding into cracks and crevices and taking advantage of any window of opportunity. This is usually in bare ground but, being adaptable, it could also be in the centre of a later-to-emerge perennial. The seedlings, which are happy in cool shade, take the initiative, sending down a sturdy taproot and then bolting up unexpectedly the following year without you so much as noticing.
This is how they arrived here, as stowaways in the ark of plants that I brought with me from the Peckham garden. Probably wedged in the roots of the Molly-the-witch peonies or amongst the hellebores which, in turn, hitched a ride in the plants that I brought with me from Home Farm years before. Now that I cast my mind back, hopping and skipping from one garden to the other, I can trace them back to a trip I made to the Picos de Europa in northern Spain when I was in my early twenties. They were a highlight on the way there, growing with wild goat’s beard and Mourning Widow geranium on the cool, shaded side of the Pyrenees. Their bright, gold flowers were the reason we stopped and climbed amongst the rocks to see where they grew and with what companions. Beguiled, the seedpod I slipped into my pocket marked the beginning of their journey here.
Meconopsis cambrica is wide-spread in upland areas of Western Europe and appears here in south west England, parts of Ireland and Wales, hence our common name the Welsh Poppy. Though in the wild you will find it, as I did, in the cool crevices of rocky places, a garden setting can emulate these conditions readily. So readily sometimes that you have to be careful where you let it seed. One plant that I couldn’t bring myself to remove that had found its way into a crack in the concrete in my growing area behind the barns has seeded repeatedly into the trays of seedlings and pots nearby. This is how many of our plants have found their way into the garden.
Being thoroughly perennial and happy to find a niche, their spring to early summer flower is welcome now before the garden gets into full swing. From bright green, ferny foliage the fine yet sturdy stems rise and stand free in their own space. The hairy cases are cast aside as the buds tilt upright to reveal the crinkle of bright petals. Each flower lasts just a day or two, but there is a relay of buds that will throw colour for quite some time. The secret to keeping them within bounds is to cut them back, leaves and all before they seed. A second refreshed crop of foliage and sometimes flower will return and these are usually the plants that catch you out to throw their seed when your eye is then firmly set on the summer.
We have a naturally occurring soft orange form that I’ve let run on the other side of the barns, but I do not want it to pollute the pure chrome yellow of those that enliven the garden. Away from both, by the trough in the milking barn yard, I am building up a colony of the variety ‘Frances Perry’. Though more diminutive in stature, the dark tangerine flowers are quite my favourite thing of the moment. Flowering for a month to six weeks they coincide with the acid green of Euphorbia cyparissias ‘Fens Ruby’. Opposites on the colour wheel which vibrate one against the other.
Apparently, this form is less profligate as a self-seeder, but my pot of seedlings that were sown when ripe last summer and overwintered so they got the frost are looking like they are far from difficult. Difficult is not a word I would apply to the Welsh Poppy which, if it decides it likes you, will probably be with you for the long haul. Here and there and, if you are not a little careful, everywhere there is a cool corner and opportunity.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 22 May 2021
This week has seen a quantum shift happen all around us. The crab apples in full sail like cumulo nimbus and the meadows flashing chrome-yellow as the buttercups push above the sward. The lane has suddenly narrowed with the cow parsley rising up and racing to flower. It is that moment we have been waiting for, the ground wet again from rain, warmth finally in the sun and growth with no excuse but to burgeon.
The lanes here are miraculous for a fortnight. Walk them in the morning and the verges reach out to touch you, dripping from the night before and spangled with starry speedwell, stitchwort and the first pinpricks of campion. All suspended in an extraordinary moment of aptly named ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’. Fresh and reaching and smelling of newness this interlude between spring and summer is dashed by the local farmer who brings out the flail to raze the cow parsley as it comes into full bloom. It taints the milk he says, but since he no longer droves the cows along the lane I think it is more about order and control. The carnage makes me smart. He doesn’t touch the verge on our side – rules are rules – which we leave long and unkempt and brushing the windscreens.
I have invited the cow parsley into the garden in its cultivated form Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Raven’s Wing’. Darker for the contrast of pale flower as they begin to expand and lace, I watch the new growth closely from the moment it begins to muster. This is usually just as the snowdrops fade and you become ready for something new. The filigree newness of ‘Raven’s Wing’ shows its true colours early and the best of the seedlings are dark from the moment they produce the first true leaves. Our lane-side population have their influence though and many seedlings begin their reversion back to type, turning first chocolatey instead of the deep plum purple and then green. The early vigil to winkle out the plants that revert is important so that I am marking the difference between the hedgerows and the garden proper. An echo of our surroundings, a segue and a gentle transition between the wild and the cultivated.
Derry Watkins has a darker version named Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Dial Park’, which I will try here too because cow parsley goes with almost anything. Go to Great Dixter at this particular zenith in a fortnight and you will see how extraordinary it is where Fergus has invited the wild form into the borders. I have to exercise control here, leaving just a single plant, the best of the dark-leaved forms to seed where I want the lace amongst slower-to-rise perennials. The majority are cut as soon as I see the seed ripening, since they are profligate seeders. Being hedgerow plants anthriscus are as happy in sun as they are in shade and use their tolerance of the latter to take their time under the cover of summer growth to send down taproots into the crowns of plants you’d rather they didn’t. Their early growth can be the undoing of a later-to-rise aster or sun-loving iris or nerine.
Cow parsley, also known as wild chervil, opens the season of umbellifers here and the laciness of the umbels is something I love and include for their loftiness and suspension. Chaerophyllum hirsutum ‘Roseum’ is already in flower too, a pink form of Hairy Chervil with a flowering season of about a month. The flowers start low and on a level with brunnera, but rise up to hip height to accompany the first of the Iris sibirica. Another related umbellifer which flowers at the same time is Myrrhis odorata. Before sugar was freely available the leaf and seed of Sweet Cicely were used to sweeten cakes. We have it here in the herb garden, where it is happy in the shadows of the Afghan fig and giant fennels. Its filigree of aromatic early growth is good beneath plants that take over later, but if you are not to have a thousand seedlings it is best to remove the seed heads once you have enjoyed them green and before they start to drop and conquer all they survey.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 15 May 2021
The spring this year has been slow. A wet winter finally giving way at the end of February to a long and testing period without rain. This came with a relenting fortnight of frosts that saw us fleecing the wall-trained fruit nightly and praying for the plum orchard, which at the time was in full and vulnerable flower. It has been too cold to direct sow in the kitchen garden and the self-sowers, which I like here to make the garden feel lived-in, are looking sparse, the seedlings dwindling without the water in the top layer of soil in this critical period.
We knew the garden would find the water with well-established roots searching it out, but new growth needs rain and it began to show it in tardiness and a reluctance to get out of the blocks. This spring we have pined for the burgeoning that is so much part of an April landscape.
Cue the tulips which, although slower to appear than usual, have sailed through unscathed and oblivious. Miraculous for their ability to cover for the pause between the narcissus waning and the cow parsley filling the hedgerows, we would not be without their impeccable timing.
Despite the hiatus in the garden and their ability to plug the gap, I have deferred from including tulips there due to their immediately ornamental nature. Preferring the slow unravelling of greens against our rural backdrop, we have, instead, grown the tulips in the kitchen garden for picking where, in this productive setting, their flamboyance can sing and not shout.
It was on a trip to see the Dutch bulb fields while a student at Kew that I first saw tulips jumbled together en masse. They were in an old orchard at the back of a bulb farm where the spares had been thrown and provided (for me at least, desperate for naturalism) a relief from the rigour of the regimented rows in the fields. It was an unforgettable sight. Free and liberated and multi-layered with colour and juxtaposition of forms. We grow them together here in homage to that memory and to ease the tulips’ innate formality.
Each year we put together a collection that explores a particular colourway using early, mid-season and late varieties so that we have a month to six weeks of flower. Thirty of each and usually ten varieties planted randomly about 6” apart in November. We move the tulips from bed to bed so that they appear in a different place in the kitchen garden to avoid Tulip Fire, which builds up if you replant the tulips in the same ground repeatedly. A five to seven-year cycle means that the fungal disease goes without its host and, by the time they return to their original position, the ground should be ‘clean’ and ready to receive them again.
The annual selection sees us experimenting with new varieties, and returning to old ones that we favour. Inevitably, because one tulip bulb looks roughly like another, we curse the bulb suppliers who substitute one or two without letting us know so that there are some wild surprises. This would matter if you were planting them into a scheme, but it rarely matters in the mix and sometimes throws up an oddly welcome guest.
After ten years of enjoying growing the tulips in the knowledge that they provide us with a guaranteed respite after winter and a kickstart in spring, we are beginning to feel less easy about their disposability. We are particular here about reusing what we can and not more than we need and it goes against the grain to discard the bulbs, because we don’t have the room to keep them. So, a new place, which will be our equivalent of the Dutch orchard, will be found by the polytunnel for the bulbs to have another life and show us which ones have the potential to be recurring in our heavy, winter-wet ground. This may take some time, but it feels the right time to apply this rigour.
In the search for varieties that do well year after year, we are going to try a few in the garden, but only close to the buildings and used very sparingly so that they do not compete for attention. They will be worked in amongst the volume of the Paeonia delavayi at the garden’s entrance, so that the early flower coincides with the unfurling plum foliage of the tree peonies. We are referring back to our 2019 selection that focused on dark reds and plums. The moodiness of the almost brown ‘Continental’ and the glowing cardinal red of ‘National Velvet’ will sit well here. We will let you know next year how the association fairs amongst the peonies.
In order of flowering our selection was as follows:
First to flower in early April and with a long season of over a month. Tall, straight stems. Uncommon shade of lemon sorbet yellow. Widely listed as growing to 40cm, we found it to be one of the tallest at 55-60cm.
Difficult in a garden setting as the flower is so out of scale with the stem length, for cutting this wine-dark tulip is rich and lustrous. Almost as good as the peonies it precedes. Long flowering season. The shortest for us at 30cm, although listed at 45cm.
Opening primrose yellow with dramatic green flaming this lily-flowered tulip fades to cream and twists extravagantly as it ages. 40cm.
Another diminutive tulip better suited to a pot. A boxy shape we were not so keen on and a rather violent shade of scarlet in the garden. This mellows when cut and brought indoors though, where the exaggerated fringing and black eye can also be seen to best advantage. 30cm.
Delightfully elegant Viridiflora tulip with green flaming on gently waved petals of off-white, broadly streaked with raspberry red. 45cm.
Similar in colour to ‘Orange Sun’ which we have grown before, this Darwin tulip is taller and more elegant. The pure, citrus orange flowers have a satin sheen and a clear yellow centre, which is shown when the flower opens in sunshine. 50cm.
A more sombre shade of burnt orange which is accentuated by the matt petals, which age to faded apricot-gold at the margins. Deliciously sherbet-scented. For us this was the shortest lived at just two weeks. 45cm.
The court jester of parrot tulips. The flaming of primary red and yellow is utterly joyful. The yellow fades to a more subdued clotted cream as they age. 50cm.
Late and tall this tulip has huge flowers the size of a goose egg in a rich shade of deep crimson. With sturdy, ramrod straight stems it is ideal for a windy site such as ours or for picking. 55-60cm
The scarlet lily-flowered tulip in the main image is ‘Red Shine’, which we grew last year and would seem to be a good contender for perennial flowering.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs & captions: Huw Morgan
Published 8 May 2021
The poplars are the litmus. Standing tall and forming our backdrop, grey in all their parts and also in name, their ghostly stillness will let us know that spring is here when suddenly one day their catkins are caught by new light. That early, the wild garlic at their feet has already emerged to carpet the ground, shiny and lush and rushing whilst the wood is still open. Then, as spring gathers pace and the understory of hawthorn becomes green, the trees above assume their next chapter.
The last week of April this year is the moment you wish you could stall, the buds on the poplars breaking open in unison to shower the trees and once again define the extent of the of their canopies. You have to stop. Against a thunderous April sky, it is almost impossible to describe the colour, a mat aluminium. Chalky and luminous. Caught in the low evening light and with breeze in their limbs this backdrop is mercurial. Plumes of silvery ink dropped into water, shoals of fish; the mind tries to grapple for an image to describe the moment.
The truth is, the poplars are just doing their thing, at scale and in unison and marking a particular shift that we know now will take us rapidly through into early summer. One day the silveriness is sage-green and the leaves fill to tremble and hiss on the wind. With the unfurling, the now-flowering garlic is plunged into shadow, the bright white briefly brilliant, the wood smelling never more strongly as the understorey runs to seed.
The Grey Poplar, Populus x canescens, is a naturally occurring hybrid between the White Poplar, P. alba and the Aspen, P. tremula. The silver in the leaf from one parent and the flattened petiole from the other which allows the leaf to tremble and means that the poplars are rarely still in summer. Soaring with hybrid vigour to 30 metres they are loftier than either parent. They sucker up the hill and out into the light of the slopes to the other side and to date have not crossed the stream in their reach to conquer new ground. Living fast and outreaching themselves they do come crashing down, usually in full leaf and after an August rain. Once at night and just to the side of a camping party we were having on the bottom field by the stream. Everyone slept through it and came out unscathed. Another time one fell to take out the power lines which cracked and whipped like a snake in a snare.
In the time we have been here there have now been three that have fallen. After they have been limbed for firewood, we have left the trunks as makeshift walk-the-plank bridges. A wild bee colony has taken up residence in the “party tree’, the first to topple ten years ago. We are pleased not to have been too hasty to clear and to tidy completely and it will be interesting to see how long it will be before the bridges collapse under their own weight and decomposition. Poplar wood, traditionally used for panelling rooms and for workshop floors, absorbs both the sound and the blow of a tool to protect it from breaking if it is dropped. It is a soft wood and as it burns hot and fast when it is dry, it is also used for matches. Maybe the bees have already found the fault in the trunk that will bring the first of the bridges down.
At altogether another scale and entirely more manageable, I planted the whitebeam, or what I believed to be whitebeam in the blossom wood to take the silver up onto our side. Sorbus aria also has a delectable moment which is no more than a week of awakening. The leaf buds light the tree silver before it dims to a pleasantly grey-green. Unbeknownst to me the whips I was supplied with were the Swedish Whitebeam, Sorbus x intermedia. A wonderful tree for a seaside setting or an exposed site, but here it is already being left behind as the Geans and the faster growing trees in the blossom wood outstrip it. No matter. We will enjoy the mistake whilst it lasts as we do the awakening of the poplars when they are in their moment.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 1 May 2021
We put the terracotta forcers over the crowns of ‘Timperley Early’ at the end of January and over the variety named ‘Champagne’ at the end of March, although it probably should have been a little earlier. Despite the fact that the ‘Timperley Early’ would have been good weeks ago, there has a lot been going on in life and we just haven’t had time to pick it. The stems and emerging foliage of both have now pushed the lids off the forcers and exposure to light has been threatening to undo all of the good that forcing does for vibrancy of colour and flavour. Consequently, we have a rhubarb glut and, with plenty already cooked and in the freezer, part of my recipe challenge for this week was to answer the repeating question, ‘So, what else can you do with rhubarb?’.
When I scrolled past a mouthwatering image of Diana Henry’s Luscious Lemon Bars (thickened lemon curd on a shortcake base) on Instagram last week I thought they would adapt well to the sourness of rhubarb and so compared a number of different recipes to get a feel for proportions before alighting on one which sounded simple, foolproof and delicious. I made a couple of adjustments, substituting ground almonds for some flour in the shortbread base and replaced the flour in the custard topping with cornflour. All of the other ingredients, proportions and cooking method were as per the original recipe.
On Thursday, in between ferrying aubergines, peppers and chillis to the polytunnel, watering everything in pots, and doing anything requiring the pair of hands that we’ve been missing after Dan’s hand surgery last week, I managed to get a tray of these luscious rhubarb bars into the oven. Except that is not what came out. Through the mysterious alchemy and chemistry of cooking what emerged was something completely different. A layer of buttery, crumble topping above a firm custard with a thin layer of jammy rhubarb in the middle. Though delicious they were not what I had imagined and clearly needed more work to produce what I had in mind.
In the knowledge that cooking, photographing and writing a recipe in one day is already quite a tall order, I had to come up with another rhubarb recipe overnight. I thought, ‘Keep it simple.’ and stuck with rhubarb curd instead. No baking, just measuring and stirring.
After consulting books and websites I decided to adapt a familiar recipe I have cooked many times, substituting rhubarb juice for orange in Sam & Sam Clark’s curd recipe for Seville orange tart.
I finally settled down to cooking in the late morning and immediately the contemplative focus of cooking calmed my busy mind. The simplicity of just four ingredients and one pan. The repetition and order of cracking and separating eggs, cutting butter into cubes, weighing out sugar and measuring rhubarb juice. And then the close attention required to cook it carefully to ensure that the eggs don’t curdle.
It took over half an hour for the curd to start to thicken over the lowest heat possible and as, I stood there in the warmth of the range intently stirring, completely focussed on the activity before me, my mind went into the entranced meditative freefall that cooking shares with gardening.
Makes around 2 x 200ml jars
140g caster sugar
170ml rhubarb juice (see below)*
170g unsalted butter, cubed
4 large egg yolks
2 large eggs
*The rhubarb juice in this recipe is a by-product of rhubarb poached to go into the freezer. Around 500g of rhubarb should give you enough juice for this recipe. Cut the rhubarb into short lengths. Put them into a non-reactive pan with a tight-fitting lid and put in a medium oven (about 160°C) for around half an hour until soft. Strain off most of juice. Keep in the fridge and use in place of lemon juice or vinegar. It is particularly good in spring salad dressings.
Lightly beat the egg yolks, eggs and sugar together in a medium pan. Add the rhubarb juice and butter.
Put the pan over a very low heat and stir continuously until the butter melts and the mixture starts to emulsify and becomes glossy and thick. Do not be tempted to turn up the heat or it will curdle. Once it attains the consistency of custard pour into warm, dry, sterilised jars. Seal, leave to cool and then refrigerate. Keeps in the fridge for up to two weeks.
The flavour of rhubarb is delicate, so don’t be tempted to add other flavourings to this curd or they will overwhelm it.
Delicious on warm scones, mixed with poached rhubarb and whipped cream or as a filling for a tart base.
Recipe and photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 24 April 2021
This is the fifth spring since Dan oversowed the newly landscaped banks at the front of the house with native meadow seed and now the cowslips (Primula veris) are really starting to show themselves. This year we have counted over fifty individuals on the bank immediately in front of the house.
Their luminous, pale green calcyes, like tiny inflated bladders, announced their presence long before the golden flowers unfurled from within them. The sturdy, felted stems rise up from a basal rosette of heavily textured foliage and can hold up to thirty scalloped flowers, each marked with five orange spots, on wire-thin stalks in a loose umbel. Their resemblance to a bunch of keys gives them another common name of Key Flower. They have a notably long season of three to four weeks, as the flowers open in succession in each cluster and with a relay of flowering stems as newer ones rise up to replace those that fade. They come on stream just as their cousins, the primroses, start to dim and so continue to provide early nectar for long-tongued bees, butterflies and moths. I picked some last weekend and they have been unexpectedly long-lasting in a vase and with the most delicious spiced apricot scent. I imagine this perfume is one of the notable attractions of cowslip wine, the romance of which haunts the hedgerows of Thomas Hardy and Laurie Lee.
The farmer who lived here before us grazed the fields with cattle, but after we relaxed the grazing regime we were delighted to find that a large colony of cowslips was still intact in the Tynings, the fields that our neighbours call the Hospital Fields. Although the colony has not proliferated quickly we have seen definite evidence of an increase in numbers and the start of an expansion of the main colony. Fine-tuning the mowing and grazing regime to increase the presence of flowering plants such as these is one of our constant challenges.
Due to bad agricultural practice in the 1970’s and ‘80’s the cowslip almost became an endangered species, but its inclusion in commercial meadow mixes over the last twenty years and more has seen it make a resurgence on motorway embankments and in new meadow creation schemes.
Plantlife, the British charity that supports native wild plant conservation, is currently running a Cowslip Survey. Cowslips come in two forms, ‘S-Morph’ and ‘L-Morph’. In the former the plural stamens (male) are presented foremost in the corolla, while in the latter form it is the singular stigma (female) that is seen. In healthy cowslip populations there should be around a 50/50 mix of forms, however this gets out of balance if there is a change in agricultural practice, land or habitat management. The survey has been launched to gain a broader understanding of how healthy British cowslip populations are and, consequently, the wider health of our native grasslands. On a cursory visual check today it would appear that our colonies, both new and long-established, are pretty well balanced, but I will definitely be taking a more detailed look for the survey to get a better understanding of how we can maximise the species diversity in our meadows.
Words and photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 17 April 2021
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