This year’s Parish Magazine articles are a little different from the last few years. Each month we’re highlighting a couple of our favourite plants for the time of year. These will be a mixture of ornamentals and edibles across the year.

February is undoubtedly a time when spring bulbs come into their own and we’ve got three on our shortlist of favourites. These are Iris reticulata, snowdrops and crocuses, but which makes it to the top spot?

Iris reticulata have beautiful flowers, which reward close up examination and are stunning in pots and containers. The details almost look painted on.

Iris reticulata

While many snowdrops also have beautiful and delicate markings, they probably look at their best in large scale drifts and their will be many gardens locally offering snowdrop walks in February.

Snowdrops are worth a closer look

A drift of snowdrops

However, for sheer chutzpah and their splashes of vivid colour in the bleakest of months, crocuses make it to the top of our list (well they do today at least). Whether planted in blocks of similar colour or in mixes, the palette stretching from whites, yellows, purples and combinations of the three make them the ideal bulb for gardens of a modest scale.

Another early spring flower well worth a mention is the Hellebore.  Again these are effective in clumps or drifts, but their often nodding flower heads are well worth closer examination to see the delightful detailed patterns.

Hellebore clumps

Hellebore close-up

On the edible front, February is likely to see the first of the forced rhubarb coming through, with the delicate pink stems being one of the first of the New Year’s crops. Most gardens have the space for a rhubarb crown and once established they offer gardeners year on year rewards. Forcing a few early stems doesn’t take a lot of trouble -we simply cover a part of the crown with an old sawn off water butt for a couple of months.

All gardeners like to chat, whether it is over the fence, across the driveway or between allotment patches.  This is the virtual version of that sort of chat and will talk about what has struck us recently, including the weather (we are English after all), what seems to be growing well (or badly) good (and bad) ideas that we have come across and anything else in the fruit and vegetable world that we think might interest other gardeners.

On the whole, our approach to developing gardens is one of evolution, rather than revolution.  Most gardens have enough in the way of quality plants and features that we prefer to build around what already exists rather than clear everything out and start again.

However, there are times when a garden gets tired and, more importantly, times when the gardener gets tired of it.  This summer we were asked to look at a small front garden dominated by a beautiful blue cedar.  Unfortunately despite much care and attention the surrounding lawn had always struggled and the borders were becoming overgrown.

June 2017

This autumn we started by clearing out the driveway borders and getting the turf lifted and the ground levelled slightly.

Getting started

Our brief was to create a low maintenance gravel garden, so after improving the soil, we used a heavy duty weed suppressant membrane to provide a base for the new gravel.

Improving the soil

Despite the added soil improver, the basic soil was pretty thin with a lot of gravel, so we dug out planting holes with a mattock before putting down the membrane.  This made planting through the membrane quite easy (we’d used canes poked through the membrane to mark the holes as the membrane went down).

Putting down membrane and positioning plants

The planting scheme used repeating grasses of different colours to contrast with the gravel colours, with dwarfing Dianthus and Irises providing splashes of seasonal colour. Low growing Junipers and dwarf Fuchsias repeated along the driveway border and the large concrete pots allow seasonal bedding to add highlights.

Plan

Once all the membrane was down and the plants were in, it was simply a question of barrowing in the gravel.  As well as two-tone mix in the centre, we re-used existing slate chippings to delineate a driveway border and some green stones to create a “dried river bed”.  The latter complete with some slate “bridges”.

Nearly there

Finished!

Our monthly tips are extended versions of the articles we write for the Cookham Parish Magazine.  In September we devoted the piece to promoting the village flower and produce show held in the middle of the month.  With almost 60 classes of vegetables, fruit, flowers and crafts and cooking, there is something for everyone, and with helpful organisers eager to assist new entrants, we wanted to encourage lots of entries.

The baking classes were, as usual, heavily subscribed and there seemed to be more entries in the vegetable classes than last year, but there were fewer flowers than last year.  One of the exhibitors said that the heavy rains in August and early September had meant that he had fewer blooms available than usual.  Nevertheless there were some lovely flower exhibits.

Top Vase Winner

Flower displays

Amongst the vegetables, the chilli pepper class was popular, with a number of different cultivars entered.  On the fruit side, there were lots of lovely looking apples .

Chilli Peppers

Apples

the heaviest pumpkin class attracted four entries with a winning weight of 37.2kg (or a whisper under 6 stone for those who prefer imperial measures).  this leads us to the second show of the month that we visited, the Malvern Autumn Show at the end of the month, which featured a giant vegetable show as well as more normal fruit and vegetable classes.

The Cookham pumpkins were just a little bit smaller than those in Malvern.  The winner at Malvern was over 400kg!

Cookham’s Pumpkins

Really Giant Pumpkins

Aside from the giant vegetables, there were lots of beautiful entries in the more standard classes.

A delicious assortment in a fantastic display

The sheer number of entries shows the popularity of show growing, maybe next year’s Cookham show will fill the village hall even more fully.

All sorts of vegetables

Perfect leeks

Yesterday was the Cookham Village Show and for the first timer we entered some of the fruit and vegetable classes.  We grow for fun (and mostly to eat) but wanted to support the local show.  We found that the difficulty of getting the matching specimens needed for showing confirmed our view that we won’t be entering any of the bigger shows around.  We don’t really want to be digging up/harvesting more than we can eat or use at any one time simply to have the requisite number of matching carrots (or whatever).

We did have some successes, winning prizes for carrots, sweet peppers and a collection of three types of vegetable (in our case carrots again – albeit a different variety, parsnips and onions), but probably our best entry was the chilli peppers.  These were Joe’s Long, which are not only appropriately named but very prolific, so that we were able to get the required six matching peppers.

Prize Chilli Peppers

Chilli plants are one of the great givers.  A single plant can provide enough peppers for a year (unless you’re a real chilli head).  As well as being productive they can be very attractive and although they are often grown as tender annuals in the UK they are in fact perennials and can be over-wintered in frost free conditions.

This one is now just over 2 years old and has been brought indoors for the winter and looks sufficiently splendid that it will be incorporated into this year’s Christmas decorations.

Chilli 24 Nov 2015

Generally seed packets suggest that germination of chilli seeds requires extra heat (we generally use a small propagator), but this year we also noticed that quite a few plants had emerged from fallen fruit in one of the raised beds in the allotment.  We’ve potted up half a dozen of these and they are now being looked after on a windowsill to give us some specimen plants for next year.