Suddenly the violets are in bloom, an invisible cloak of perfume that hangs heavy by the milking barn. They are planted for exactly this moment, on the bank by the path, in the lea of the building and where the early spring sunshine unlocks their early blooms and bounty. The surprise, when walking into their orbit that first spring day makes you instantly breathe deep.
The handover from winter to spring started in the third week of February and in reaction to a week of hard freeze. The catkins on the hazel fell like streamers being shot from above at a party and the silken pussies on the willows gathered in number and glistened in light reflecting shoals. A windy few days, which saw the gales leaning heavily into the garden put paid to the snowdrops, but in a perfectly orchestrated handover, the primroses were there to replace them. One or two at first and, within just a couple of days, more than you could count and running away into the distance where over the years we have been splitting and dividing.
Although it comes with a little sadness to be clearing the garden, the push of the new has made way for change. Old stems now feeling tired for the contrast of fresh buds at their base and the expectation of spring applying a mounting pressure to move on and make way.
Each year since we planted the garden, the clearances have revealed a place that is slowly hunkering down and becoming itself. The layering I had planned for and that only comes with time. Pulling back the old growth and cutting it to the base is always a good time to look and see what has really been going on under the cover of a growing season. Asters that are on the verge of running riot where they have got the upper hand on their companion. The sanguisorba that this year will need dividing to prevent them from toppling mid-season.
The clarity of the clearance also reveals the interlopers. This year it is a running epilobium which has jumped from the nearby ditch with wind-blown seed. Growing away happily and out of sight it has set up home with a mother plant and she has begun to run. Ducking and diving and popping up a new and lustrous rosette like a mole throwing up hills. Fleets of arum seedlings have also made their way in through birds that have been resting up in the spent stems of winter and pooping. The parent plants, which now have a lusty presence in the garden hedge just a few strides away, have obviously been sizing up the ‘open’ ground of the garden. Beth Chatto warned me about the Arum italicum which had taken over her woodland garden. “It is a terrible weed.” she said, “Watch out for it!”. I have been and I will, each seedling carefully removed with a long-bladed trowel, being very careful not to leave the pea-sized corm at the base.
Pull away the old growth and you find the evidence of life that has been going on under cover. Scatterings of a specific stripy snail shell, smashed around a stone where the thrushes have made their makeshift anvils. Nests of mice and voles under the thatch of the ornamental grasses. You can imagine how cosy it must have been as you pull the old growth away to expose the evidence of their foraging. Neatly gnawed holly berries and what I’m thinking might be the dismantled seed heads of the Agastache nepetoides that I’d been looking forward to for their blackened winter pokers. They mysteriously vanished over the course of a week in the autumn.
As the garden grows and becomes its own ecosystem, every year demands a specific response to retain the desired balance. I made a start this year in January where I’ve been planting bulbs and early woodlanders in the shelter of the shrubs that are now casting their influence. The Cardamine quinquefolia are already showing green when most of their companions are sleeping. Running happily amongst the dense rosettes of foliage cast by the hellebores, they make perfect company if you cut the hellebore foliage in December when making way for the flowers. The cardamine will have done its feeding and be flowered and dormant again, their short life above ground stored in wiry rhizomes and done by the time the foliage takes its space back on the hellebore.
The big clear up at the turning point between winter and spring takes place in the cross over of February into March. We take three weekends usually with the middle weekend being with invited enthusiasts and many hands on deck. Not so this year, the year of things being less social and more distanced. So the clearance will happen over a month and take another week to work our way clockwise. From the top where the Allium ‘Summer Drummer’ is already etiolated with its early growth drawn up into last year’s skeletons. We will then pass around the outside where the pulmonarias are blooming in the sun and need to be liberated and enjoyed. Finally we will draw back in to the centre, the most complicated of the beds where the detail and fingerwork is intensified. It is a process of reveals and observations, decisions and actions. One leading to another and spring engaged with through the doing.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 7 March 2021
The winter form of last season’s skeletons has been easily as interesting as the first summer in the new garden. Though their muted presence is not the thing you plan for first, it is an aspect that is worth considering for the ghosts that are left behind. Some, the daylilies for instance, leave nothing more than the space they took in their fleshy growth period, but those that endure are arguably as good as they were in life. Without the distraction of a growing season, its pull of colour and the steer of upkeep, you are free to look at the dead, left-behind forms anew. Blacks and browns, sepia, cinnamon and parchment whites are far from monochrome and their structures and seedheads are worth planning for in combination.
Snow flurries and rain laden winds began the topple in January, but the garden endured and weekly we have observed it falling away, shifting, dropping back and thinning. The vernonia, with their biscuit seedheads, stood tall amongst the pale spent verticals of panicum and I welcomed the repeat of the finely tapered Verbena macdougalii ‘Lavender Spires’ together with the bottle-brushes of Agastache ‘Blackadder’. The birds loved them too and some days the garden has been alive with activity with the foraging for seed and overwintering insects looking for shelter. The black stems of the veronicastrum were good amongst the molinia stems, but their seeds were stripped by mice early on. The grasses have been key for their foil, their pale colouring bright on dry days, warm in the wet, and their plumage acting as light catchers when the sun has broken through.
The clearance required to make way for the new season has been carefully judged. There comes a point, some time when the bulbs are showing you that new life is on its way, that the skeletons begin to feel tired. We have also had to pace ourselves, for it has taken five man days to work through the areas that were planted almost a year ago and, this time next year, it will take another three when the areas of the garden that were planted last autumn are grown up.
The lower bed before being cut back
From left to right skeletons of Sanguisorba ‘Blackthorn’, Verbena macdougalii ‘Lavender Spires’ and Vernonia arkansana ‘Mammuth’
We made a start in early February, working from the high ground that drained most freely and sweeping round to the heavier low bed by the field in a second session a fortnight later. In just two weeks buds that had been thoroughly dormant were already showing at the base of the euphorbias and the first new shoots on the grasses signalled the shift and the need to move things forward.
Before we started, I waded into the beds and marked the plants that I knew I wanted to change, for there are always adjustments that need to be made in a new planting. The densely-flowered Lythrum salicaria ‘Swirl’ will be exchanged for the more finely tapered L. virgatum ‘Dropmore Purple’, while the Artemisia lactiflora ‘Elfenbein’ that read too strongly as a group once their pale flowers caught the eye were left standing so that I could find them again easily and redistribute them so that their presence is lighter this summer. The changes will be different every year, but it is good to have time in hand to make them whilst the plants are more or less dormant.
After clearance bamboo canes mark the remains of Lythrum salicaria ‘Swirl’ in the top bed
Ray and Jacky work their way through the lower bed
The feeling of working through and stripping away is always a mixed one. I would leave some plants standing for longer, indeed, I have with the liquorice and the fennel, but the spring clean is good. Underneath the tussocks of deschampsia we unearthed the nesting places of voles, which had already tunnelled out and made a winter feast of my inulas on the banks. We only found one, which scurried to safety and I was relieved to find that their damage hadn’t been greater. Last year when lifting the molinias from the stockbeds to split them in readiness for the new planting, I found them almost completely hollowed out, roots and crown all but gone under the protective thatch of winter cover. There are pros and cons to leaving the garden standing and, although I prefer to do so, it is a good feeling to see the clean sweep reveal the planting again in new nakedness. Tight clumps, indicating quite clearly now that they have broadened, how the combinations were set out on the spring solstice almost a year ago.
The dry, cut material was piled high on the compost heap where it will be topped by some of last year’s compost to help in rotting it back for the future. And at the end of the day, as light was dimming, we carefully raked between the plants so as not to disturb last year’s mulch. A couple of weeks later I combed through the beds again to winkle out any seedlings that we’d missed in the first pass. Dandelions already in evidence and ready to take hold in the crowns of the grasses and buttercups and nettles that been secretly travelling in shade under the cover of summer growth. The beds that were planted and mulched last year will only be topped up this year where they have been disturbed where I’ve made alterations. Hopefully growth will be sufficient to suppress all but the strongest of the interlopers. Although we are still waiting for the planting that went in during the autumn to show itself enough before mulching these new areas, it won’t be long now until the need to move will be upon us and the garden once again dictates the pace.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 24 February 2018
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