Or rather, the blog. It’s been a while. I blame Instagram, which I joined only this summer, and which has confirmed everything tech haters hold to be true about social media. The ease! The addictiveness! So many beautiful pictures and so much all-round gardening loveliness! And amazingly, unlike its crushingly uncool older sibling Facebook, even some young people following me. Suddenly, pinging away pics of lovely flowery vistas seemed so much more appealing than writing up a piece on the third summer of changes in the herbaceous borders here at Oaklands. It is a known thing amongst gardening folk that the necessarily cyclical nature of the gardening year can make for repetitious reading, or even viewing. You only have to watch the presenters of the BBC’s Gardeners World doing their damnedest to make tulip bulb planting exciting, for the 20th year in a row, to see this in action. Small cyclical changes can be really interesting for devoted lovers of gardening, seasonal variations being inherently part of the green game. If you are not so fascinated, I’m aware that third time around on the garden in June, complete with sweet peas a little late but looking fabulous and the lettuces coming up beautifully despite the unseasonal temperatures, may lose some lustre.
There has to be room for both, though, and I would not now be without “the ‘gram”. Amateur gardening is in large part a visual activity. If there is an author whom you like, you buy their latest work and read it. If you follow a garden designer or landscaper, you may get to visit one of their creations, or hear them give a talk. Often though, you buy one of their books, and I suspect that will be for the images as much as the writing. The works of some of the great designers such as Piet Oudolf and Dan Pearson span the globe, and on Instagram it is amazing to be able to watch a video walk-through of those landscapes, or see snapshots in the creation of a new project. Perhaps this is just a reflection of the people I follow, but Instagram also seems infinitely kinder than the dark place now known as X (Twitter). I love the food writer Diana Henry, and had a little exchange with her a while back when she had referenced the idea of eating thirty different types of whole foods per week. I can’t see that happening on Twitter. Gardening and foodie people comment and share ideas and suggestions on Instagram, often in real time (or nearly). Every single tech platform has its dark heart, and Instagram obviously has its bullies and braggers too. However, I left Twitter with the sense that if you were foolhardy enough to post a comment on anyone’s feed, even something like nature, or lawns, you were likely to be shouted at by someone very angry about something. All just highly subjective experience of course, but even as I see those Meta tentacles snaking out to my contacts/photos/etc, I figure the Insta pros currently outweigh the cons. And it’s #oaklandsflowers in case you were wondering.
Back to the garden now. And a little cyclical repetition. It has been a strange summer and autumn. Since we arrived here in 2019, we have not had this much rain in late summer. Fewer barbecues, more dahlias. Many, many more dahlias in fact, along with all the other late season performers, all relishing mild temperatures and copious amounts to drink. The roses returned for their second flowering in abundance, albeit speckled with blackspot, which was also enjoying the warm damp. In the potager, the winter brassicas are soaring skywards, and yet again we have an embarrassment of Jerusalem artichokes. This year also underlined for me, as a relative novice, just how badly 2022’s extreme heatwave had punished young plantings. I had kept watering in new hydrangeas and other flowering shrubs last year, but it is the steady downpours this year which have encouraged them to double in size. We are now down to around 5’/6’ at night, and it is dark by 5/5.30pm, so growth has finally slowed right down in the borders, yet the trees have only just started changing. Our ‘big three’ in the main garden (lime, oak, walnut) are only just starting to yellow. The Norwegian maples in the wood are pure gold already, but they are the exception. Some people get very worked up about fallen leaves, and rush around chasing every last one. That would be a fool’s errand in this place, given the size of our large friends, but also if leaves fall on a bed, that is a good and helpful thing. They will decompose and form the very leaf mulch that is recommended for improving soil structure. I agree that leaves on paths need to be cleared - my refusal to evict self-seeders from the paving slabs already means most our older paths are skating rinks by December - but spare me the leaf blowers.
For the garden as a whole, we are now at another milestone. Phase 1 (potager, terrace and hot beds) is complete, and two years on, phase two (long borders east and west sides of the house) are settled. I have a lot of tweaking to do in all the borders in these areas, but most of the anchor points are in and relatively happy, and Neil is full stream ahead with the veg production. Phase 3 encompasses the driveway and everything beyond it: three large areas running from the old pond at the front gate all the way back to the wood. It is a significant body of work, encompassing everything from our plans for a native hedge along the eastern boundary, to making the space around the garage both more useful and better screened, to the big meadow plantings intended to sweep from beyond the oak tree across to the woodland edge.
It was going to be a busy autumn, and very exciting in the sense of completing the work which began in 2020. Then I dislocated my shoulder. Not the first time, but badly, this time, really badly. I have now lost six weeks and counting to “taking it easy” and am waiting to hear if I have to have surgery (the only part of which I registered was “at least six months rehab, often twelve”) Cue bitter tears and much remonstrating with self as to why I had not had surgery in Dubai when we did not have acres of exuberant growth to deal with. Hey ho. As a couple of friends have wisely said, if surgery buys me a decade or so of (relatively) trouble-free gardening, then it would be worth the enforced containment. I am not immobile currently, but suffice to say there are still 400 bulbs in a large box waiting to be planted and Neil is helping on a daily basis with heavy digging, moving large pots and so on. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if I had at least done it sawing a tree branch or manoeuvring a myrtle into place. Instead I was throwing my sweatshirt on over my head, and with it went my right arm. At least I learned that you can use Siri to call an ambulance. What a tech lover am I.
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