Keep Calm and Carry on Digging

Mid-March, edging towards Mother’s Day, and how much has changed. A global pandemic. Countries in lockdown. Catastrophic demands on health services. It seems trivial to be writing about planting plans and fruit tree orders, but with my family scattered halfway around the world, it works for me.

Neil wrote last about the Great Works and how they are progressing. The four man team from Anemone have been working very hard in atrocious weather in order to keep to schedule, and the results are astonishing. To proceed from drawings on a plan to the cold, wet, muddy reality of paths and beds and structure is immensely exciting, and all the more so for the unrelenting storms here: relief all round that we live on a hill - five miles west of here and this project would have been under 1m of floodwater for the last last eight weeks or more.

It is still nigh on impossible to use the heavy machinery on the upper level to clear green waste into the wood.

While undoubtedly beautiful, this part of the garden previously felt like a long thin strip running from the house into the wood. I wanted to widen it out, to give it some breadth, so you feel you can walk east to west, not just north to south. Cheryl’s plotting of the levels around the potager achieves that. You can now go from the Victorian wall up through the raised beds towards the field fence, and from that higher level the western skies are in full view - sundowner station coming soon!

The pair of mature walnut trees seem to have stretched out in relief, no longer hemmed in by the old tennis court and overgrown conifers, and the sinuous path creates the division we wanted between the more formal areas around the house and the wilder, meadow area higher up.

Small matter now of filling this space. Sam Perry, head of Anemone, said in passing “fair bit of planting to do”, which qualifies as top Herefordshire understatement. Neil obviously has 700 packs of veg seeds with which to fill those lovely raised beds, and I think we have pretty much worked out that he wanted height and white/silver/purple tones in the two half moon beds above the veg beds.

So, impatient to get started and both equally incapable of resisting a #Crocus sale, I now have damp boxes of baby cardoons, hesperis (sweet rocket) and verbena sitting reproachfully beside the porch. They join the autumn fruiting raspberry canes, purple euphorbia, lupins, achillea and other unmissable treasures which have fallen into my online basket for other beds.

There is some method in this madness. Common sense dictates that the sooner you plant a perennial, the better established it will be in a year’s time. The same applies to roses, and of course fruit trees and bushes, both of which are not available as bare root plants after a certain point in March/April. There is nothing quite like browsing a rose catalogue to make you genuinely believe the whole garden could and should be filled with such fabulous plants; with a enormous amount of willpower, I have restricted myself (for now) to some essentials for scent (Munstead Wood and Summer Song for the hot bed, Gertrude Jekyll and - finally I can have one! - Rambling Rector for the woodstore wall, plus a good batch from P Beales). Four heritage Herefordshire/Marches apple trees are already heeled in thanks to Neil’s brother’s very thoughtful gift, and I have just taken delivery of organically grown crab apple and quince babies from #WalcotNurseries. Did I mention that kid in a candy store impulse?

How I had designed these beds in my head and from the paper plan is changing in some respects now I am here and seeing the site every day. A reminder of how the west winds tear up the hill, funnelled between the big wall and the house; the uncovering of water runs and possible clay pans as the guys dig; the sight lines from the conservatory outwards to the new terrace and beyond. We know this is good soil, sandy Herefordshire clay, a little stubborn in extreme conditions, but everything here before grew tall and strong, and this central area is now sunlit for most of the day, so barring real alkaline lovers, most options are available to us. Now we just have to ban the rabbits, squirrels, deer, badgers, mice, pheasant, pigeons............