‘I describe it as a generous garden’, my new client explained earlier this year when showing me around her garden before engaging me to assist with seasonal maintenance tasks as and when needed. The long slim plot behind a Victorian terraced cottage was brimful of treasures when I first saw it at the beginning of May and vegetation was thrusting out of every available inch of soil. At every turn along the narrow lawn between deep curved edge borders I spied interesting plants- to one side a statuesque tree peony and the Euonymus alatus or Spindle Tree. And on the other side: large stands of Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Fascination’ and Acanthus mollis (Bear’s Breeches). The overall effect was punctuated by light purple dabs of Honesty flowers (Lunaria annua).
A keen and knowledgeable gardener, my client has loving maintained this extraordinarily productive space for more than three decades. She attributes its ‘generosity’ to regular and liberal applications of well-rotted manure and garden compost. These have contributed to a deep layer of humus rich soil, teeming with earthworms. An open aspect, unimpeded by mature trees in neighbouring gardens, and an irrigation system snaking across all the borders, also play their part. Unlike more recently planted gardens where the black irrigation pipes can look quite unsightly lying on the surface of the soil, these pipes are hidden amidst the undergrowth.
Inevitably uninvited guests presume on the garden’s generous hospitality. One morning last week I removed at least a dozen substantial plants of Green Alkanet (Pentaglossis sempervirens), those Borage relatives which masquerade so convincingly as Foxgloves until the last minute when their forget-me not blue flowers emerge. By this stage their deep roots have secured a toehold at least six inches beneath the ground, rendering them tricky to extricate from surrounding growth without snapping. Like Dandelion removal, it is all the more satisfying when the root emerges intact. Fortunately the recent rains and a fundamentally sandy soil mean that in this garden this is a relatively easy task.
More welcome guests I have seen whilst working in this garden are robins and blackbirds and last week a vividly green-plumaged Rose-ringed Parakeet roosted for several minutes on a branch a few metres from where I was working.
During one of my May visits one job was to tidy the three chunky clumps of Liriope muscari near the rear of the garden. I stripped away last year’s browning leaves from the healthy dark green strappy leaves into which they were embedded. It was a joy to discover that the garden had repaid my earlier efforts with a stunning display of bright purple flower spikes, a sumptuous foil for the orange, yellow and scarlet flowers of the hugely overgrown and soon to be grubbed up Nasturtiums which had escaped from a neighbouring bed and overrun the sunny paved area at the rear of the site.
Beyond this paving is a deep border backed by a brick wall which I cleared of spent tomato and runner bean plants, as well as several suckers of the Stag’s Horn Sumach (Rhus typhina). My client tells me this spectacular tree was itself a blow-in from a nearby garden. The same border also houses a fair sized peach tree which is ideally placed in its due south-facing location.
In another client’s garden, that adjective ‘generous’ crops up again, this time applied to a David Austin climbing rose which I recently pruned and then trained against the fence, having first installed three rows of strainer wire. ‘The Generous Gardener’ (the definite article is part of the name) is described in David Austin’s catalogue as ‘a rose of delicate charm with beautifully formed flowers…a soft glowing pink at the centre, shading to palest pink on the outer petals…when open, the numerous stamens create an almost waterlily-like effect’. Judging by the girth of some of its lower stems this rose was planted many years ago and had, as often happens, grown into the habit of reaching skywards with few flowers below a height of a couple of metres. The time had come to fan out the stems against the fence, and by encouraging them in a near horizontal direction, to produce flowers as far down to the base of the plant as possible.
Generous she may be but in her mature years this rose has developed some serious thorns and both pruning and training proved challenging. But now that I have started the taming process, I am optimistic that next summer the promised perfume of ‘Old Rose, musk and myrrh’ will fill the courtyard garden rather than evaporating into the branches of the neighbouring garden’s trees. Some yers ago I gave this rose to a friend as a present and earlier this year helped her to support it with a hastily lashed together trellis of bamboo canes. I anticipate this proved a flimsy solution and have made a mental note to ask after The Generous Gardener and check that the extravagant horticulturist of the rose world has not exceeded her brief and attempted a takeover of my friend’s garden.
