To stand and stare

April can be a frenetic time in the garden – as soon as light levels and temperatures increase, there’s so much to be done. While it can be tricky to strike a balance between making adequate preparations for later in the season, and stopping for long enough to appreciate the wonders of the moment, it’s worth making the effort.

Truly, I am a deplorable ingrate. At the very moment the world around me erupts into Glorious Technicolor, I – having spent the darker months bemoaning the short winter days in vigorous anticipation of superior vernal levels of illumination – begin to plan for summer. Were you Spring, you could forgive yourself for being a bit miffed.

To an extent this behaviour is inevitable – to garden with any degree of success you need to possess more than a passing awareness of what might by coming up around the corner. There’s no denying this is a busy time of year for the gardener, and so I stride with purpose along the path, flanked by emerging tulips and hydrangeas tentatively unfolding new leaves against the risk of a late frost, blind to all but the list of seeds yet to sow and summer lovelies to pot on in the greenhouse.

A posy of weedy things. Carex pendula (cut the flowers off before they go to seed!) and hybrid bluebells

I tick off the milestones in the gardening year as they appear in the borders – first snowdrops, winter aconites, then hellebores, epimediums, tulips and so on – an activity in which I receive wholehearted support from the gardening press.  And all the while a small voice within wonders whether this relentless acquisition of gardening events might look a little like the kind of compulsive consumerism I like to decry in other areas of modern life. That same voice suggests I might like to linger a while, pause in my busy-ness, and claim back a moment to savour the reappearance of each old friend.

Against this gentle suggestion, the other internal voice, the one that suggests there’s far too much to get done without having to hold a mini fête for every flower, seems rather mean-spirited. I can’t help but recall that half-doggerel couplet by William Henry Davies, one-legged Welsh poet and sometime super-tramp, who spent several years only a mile or so from here:

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

The emerging shoots of Paeonia 'Karl Rosenfeld'

Flower buds a few weeks back on Amelanchier larmarckii. Or possibly A. canadensis. Noone really knows, though many like to pretend.

The very gorgeous Tulip 'Queen of the Night'. So bist du meiner Tochter nimmermehr.

Honestly, one of my favourites, for spring colour and summer seed pods. Bog standard Lunaria annua, seed nicked from the gardens of our great friends Mab and Lou Burgess several houses ago.

Requiem for a lavender hedge

I’ve finally found the resolve to tackle a task I should have grappled with months ago – removing a lavender hedge past its best. But, as it was the very first thing we planted in our blank canvass garden when we moved here ten years ago, I’m allowing myself a little trip down memory lane.

It was the flood that did for it. Two weeks up to your neck in water is a less than pleasant experience for anyone, and when the chilly tide crept towards the house over Christmas two years ago, we wondered whether the lavender would survive the most un-Mediterrannean conditions. After a fashion, it did – but by the time of that damp event, the plants within the double hedge flanking the path were already eight years old, and had suffered a two year period where, busier at work than in the garden, I had foolishly permitted them to grow out of their soft, juvenile curves into lanky adolescence. Thus the lavender, not renowned for its longevity, limped through another couple of years on our heavy soil, looking like some frightful sculpture, twin rows of cadaverous angularity, bleached bones with sparse scatterings of blue-grey hair. Sentimentality can lead to cruel indulgences – I should have administered the coup de grâce last year. It would have been kinder.

Flood water subsiding, but roots still in the drink. Christmas 2013

Ten years isn’t a bad innings. A decade of colour and scent, of sharing our space with delighted bees. That wonderful week in July when the red Crocosmia breaks out and arches over the mauve stripes, that period in late summer where the flowers mingle with the metallic sheen of the Deschampsia in the evening light. The buckets of fresh lavender we cut – far more than we knew what to do with, the smell of bunches drying in the shed, the sweet scent of cuttings on the first bonfire of autumn. 

The lavender arrives - May 2006

The first planting in the garden of our new home

Taking shape...

...settling in

It’s gone now, grubbed out and waiting for a still evening and a swift blaze. Now I can get into the path edges and weed properly, something that had become increasingly awkward as the hedge lollopped around. Another reason to keep it in neat, disciplined, mounds – very controlled, very British. I’m toying with not replacing it – but I don’t fancy my resolve. I think we might try a different variety – Lavendula angustifolia 'Maillette' was the original, an oil-rich strain with long mid-purple flowers to 7 or 8cm, above grey foliage, growing to an overall height of 60cm – not far off some of the more vigorous x angustifolia, the lavendins. Perhaps we’ll opt for 'Peter Pan', a good 15cm lower, with considerably shorter flowers – it should knit itself into a perfect hedge. A few weeks yet till the nursery starts shipping plants, so time to mull things over. Let’s see if I feel like buying myself a birthday present.

Emma weeding between the lavenders

Bill surveys the wreckage in the wake of the hedge being pulled out