Angelica sylvestris mark the damp hollow and stand tall to either side of the ditch. The ground here is always damp, fed by springs which keep the water running even in the driest of summers. The mud close to the water’s edge is boot-grabbing and deep and the angelica are as happy there as they are in the firmer ground above it. But their preference is mapped clearly, the stems towering head height where they get the moisture they need and diminishing and then vanishing entirely where the wetland gives way to the drier pasture.
August is their season and when they are at their finely-spun best. A bolt of slender stem, leaves evenly spaced and then left behind as a tightly held fist of flower bolts up and then out to strike a series of horizontals. Creamy rays tinged with pink and receptive to all pollinating insects, they stand head and shoulders above the grasses that are now tawny around them.
Though this is their time, they have been present since late winter when we raked away the thatch and the tall woody skeletons of the ones that came before. They take two years to flower from seed. The seedlings bright and already forging a way before mud gives way to growth. Growth that will put them in the roughest of company. Marsh thistle and horsetail and tussocky grasses that it is hard to believe will tolerate company.
The seedlings disappear beneath the wetland growth and are happy to be eclipsed in shadow, but last year’s seedlings have sent down a strong tap root and from this they rear strong and early growth. Distinctly angelica, slender and reaching, some of the youngsters already show a variance in colour. The darkest are a rich plum purple and carry this through into their adult incarnation with flowers that are also stained dark throughout. ‘Vicar’s Mead’ or ‘Ebony’ are garden selections that maintain good colour and, though I would be happy to have them in the garden, I am more delighted to have their natural spontaneity in these wild places.
In the garden and to make the leap between the wildness of the ditch I have used the perennial Angelica anomala, which is easier to manage than the biennial Angelica sylvestris for knowing where it will appear every year. Too many self-seeders in the garden make for hours of editing in the spring, but the spontaneity of the wild angelica is delightful in the ditch for finding its own place, which from year to year is never the same.
In the lower parts of the water course and close to the fourth and final crossing that weaves a way back and forth in its descent, the angelicas appear amongst the Telekia speciosa. This robust perennial is strong enough to stand its own once established and it teams very handsomely with the angelica. Both revelling in the heavy wet ground, they take the feeling of the garden deep out into the landscape and, at this time of year, it is the angelicas that you follow to find yourself there.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 15 August 2020
A tide of ox-eyes have surrounded us, lapping up the banks that come to meet the house at the front and running down the centre of the track at the back to make it impassable. I cannot bring myself to mow the strip that runs to the barns when the meadows are up, in part because they mark this moment. They stand bright, aloft and alone on stalks that raise them into their own space in the meadow. Moving as one when caught in the breeze, each flower is a point of individual brightness but together they flare, so that all you see is whiteness.
Leucanthemum vulgare is a simple plant, happiest when pioneering and taking new ground. The profligate seed, produced on youngsters that are often not even a year old, is light enough to travel, perhaps not far but far enough to seize open ground. Germinating as soon as the weather dampens with September dews, this year’s seed will already be hunkered down and big enough to cope with winter. They have the start they need to be ahead of the race the following summer and their precocious behaviour will see an explosion of daisies for two years or so. Then the knit they have so helpfully made to seal bare soil will be colonised by the slower to establish meadow plants which ease their hold and dim their presence.
We seeded the ground around us after the landscaping was complete in the autumn of 2016 so the daisies are still in their dominant period. They grow so densely in parts that you have to squint on a bright day. By night they bounce the moonlight, brightening the ceilings in the house and earning my favourite name, the Moon Daisy. When growing as thickly as they do in the early years, you begin to wonder if anything else has the room to form an association, but they live fast and die young and are then content to have a lighter presence.
I used their easy nature to my advantage when we were addressing the ground that had been thrown up after making the pond at Home Farm. Frances, my friend, client and collaborator, was keen to blend the pond seamlessly with the landscape beyond and so we sowed meadow to the rear of the pond and took the gravel from the drive down over the gentle slope that met the pond in the hollow which we softened by seeding the ox-eyes were directly into it. We let it have its reign and within a year the pond sat in a sea of whiteness that met easily with the meadow and the wild carrots that proliferated there. It was an extraordinary place to pick your way through to the dark water. So simple and yet with so much life, return and generosity on the part of the daisies. We left them to blacken once they waned so that you saw the water again through the ghost of spent stems and then cut them back in September. An easy job with a strimmer or a scythe. A gentle weed in the autumn to remove seedling grasses was all we needed to do to retain the grand gesture.
Where we have over-seeded the old pasture here, their presence is entirely different. Seizing a window in the meadow is more difficult, so they smatter lightly where the Yellow Rattle diminishes the dominance of the grasses. The old pasture keeps the daisies in their place though, the closed system preventing the pioneer’s behaviour. They appear here and there and in lighter colonies where they find an opportunity, but are every bit as beautiful for fitting in and being happy to not even hint at world dominance.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 6 June 2020
The elder is spilling from the hedgerows, creamy, heavy with flower and weighted by a deluge of June rain. This is their month and we can see them marching up the valley and foaming from the edges of the copses where they are happy to seed into shadow, but prefer to push out into the sun.
Elder is fast. Their shiny black berries, which are some of the first to be gorged on by birds in the autumn, are deposited wherever there has been a perch. I find them here under the woody shrubs in the garden and where there has been a perennial left standing that has provided a place for a pause. We even have a quite mature elder that has found its way into a humus laden crack high up in an old ash pollard to prove their ease in finding a niche.
They look innocent as seedlings and are easily weeded but if you miss one you will have a sturdy little plant that will jump up and out into the light in its second year and in the third already be demanding space that might have been promised to something else. They go on in life living fast and hungry and, if you have them in a hedge and leave it uncut, they will create a gap there by simply outcompeting their neighbours. They age quickly and fall apart with topweight, so opening up a wedge. It is into these gaps that you will find brambles seeding and then a whole new wave of succession.
I must admit to removing them where I have been repairing the hedges so that I can replace them with hedging plants that retain a more measured growth cycle. Hazel, hawthorn, dogwood, viburnum and eglantine rose. It is bad luck I know, but where I have done it I now have hedges that are opaque in winter and layered from the bottom up with three plants replacing the weight of the interloper. A cut piece of elder wood reveals why its old Anglo Saxon name aeld (meaning fire) was given, because the hollow stems were used to blow air directly into the heart of a fire. Although it is also unlucky to bring elder inside, I suppose there must be room for exceptions.
We are lucky enough to have room to let a number of elders have their head here and, only when June weather allows, we steep them and make cordial, since the flowers need to be dry when harvesting. Their heady, sweet perfume is completely distinctive and reminiscent of this time later in the year. A moment of fecund growth and dampness still in a young summer. Where we have let a hedge grow out to make a bat corridor on our high field, a plant that is easy to harvest is paired very beautifully with wild rose, the cream and pink heightened for their company. The coupling has been inspiration for a cordial that Huw is making this week with some of the first roses as a means of capturing this moment.
Where I want to make a quick impression in a garden that needs something evocative of a wilder place, or indeed to segue from garden to landscape, I will often use the cut-leaved Sambucus nigra f. laciniata. This is a lovely plant, strong but lighter on its feet than the straight species and already tall and making an impression in year two. More ornamental selections have given us good dark-leaved forms with cut foliage that are exquisite and easily used. The filigree of ‘Black Lace’ and ‘Eva’ are better I think than ‘Black Beauty’, which has a more simple leaf that can look heavy. The darkness in their genes spawns flowers that are as pink as the species is cream and are a strong influence in the June garden. I haven’t grown the yellow cut-leaved ‘Golden Tower’ which is said to be smaller in stature, but it could be nice in a little shadow to give the impression of artificial sunlight when June days are bringing us (welcome) rain and grey skies.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photos: Huw Morgan
Published 15 June 2019
Stirring early from the dark mud, whilst almost everything else is sleeping, come the marsh marigolds. They were with us at the beginning of March this year, alone and lush and startlingly gold for their precociousness. Taking over just as the snowdrops are dimming, Caltha palustris is more than welcome when you are pining for momentum, their cupped blooms glossy and facing upwards to catch sunshine. Their growth is fast and out of kilter with the slowly waking world around them, their limbs arching out and splaying away from the rosette of lush foliage. Fat buds weigh the long flowering limbs, which hover just above water as if they feel their own reflection.
I started our colony here with a little clutch of plants that our neighbours gave me from their wet alder woodland. The deer population – or their passage through the woods – must have changed since then, because the colony has diminished through increased grazing. Where there is a decline in one place, there is often a countermove in another and I have made it my business to give them a place here at the head of the ditch, where a constantly running stream animates the crease between our fields.
When we came here the ditch was just that, a place that was fenced off to keep the cattle from getting lost in the mud and where bramble had taken over from barbed wire. We have cleared it since then, letting the hazels grow out and uncovering a surprisingly pretty rivulet of water that sparkles when it is free of growth in the winter.
Four years ago I planted a batch of 40 plugs, which arrived from British Wild Flowers just as the winter was turning to spring. Marshland plants and aquatics are best planted with the opening of the growing season rather than at the close, so that their roots can take advantage of soil that is rapidly warming rather than doing the opposite in the winter months. Planting plugs is always easy with a thumb sized knot of roots easily inserted with a dibber, but you have to have faith if you are introducing them into a ‘natural’ situation, for in no time the plants are overwhelmed by the growth of established natives and you loose them from sight for the summer.
I followed the mud and the smell of dormant water mint as I planted, pushing the plugs into soil that was almost liquid and avoiding the areas that I could see would dry out as soon as summer came. Caltha will grow in shallow water too, but the margins that maintain constant moisture are their preferred domain. They are surprisingly tolerant of competition and, to prepare for it, their early start means that they have set seed and the rosette has fed all it needs to before being plunged into shadow of wild angelica, meadowsweet and hemlock water dropwort. In summer they go into a resting period, the lush foliage of spring collapsed but not dormant, taking in all it needs to keep things ticking over.
The spring after planting I followed the watercourse to retrace my steps from the year before. Given the fecundity of the summer growth here, it came as no surprise that just one plant had made enough energy to flower, but to my delight I found the rest of the 40, which in three years were all flowering and tracing a line of early gold, providing first forage for the bees, whose hive sits on the ground immediately above them.
This year I have found the first seedlings, which have tucked themselves close to their parents in the mud where the conditions are controlled by the lush growth above them. The seed, which is heavy, germinates where it falls and does not move very far, but I imagine if it falls into water, it will wash and tumble a fair distance before finding purchase. To help in this process, and now that the youngsters are proof of the fact that they have found a niche, I have extended the colony downstream. Another forty plants went in this winter, just as the first signs of growth were showing, stopping and starting so that they look like they have found their own way in the watery margins.
A bridge now crosses the water where we connect from the garden to the rise of The Tump and I increased the Caltha to either side here so that we can look down on them and meet their upward-facing gaze. Looking downstream from the bridge, I can already imagine the colony extending its reach still further, finding the hollows and the wet puddles of mud that provide it with the opportunity of an early start and us the joy of seeing these wild plants naturalise.
Words: Dan Pearson/Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 6 April 2019
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