However, it has struck even someone as numerically challenged as I am that I have more followers on the Linda Slow Growing in Scotland account than on the one where I write long posts. Either that says something about people losing the will at long posts about plants (and I sometimes do myself), or that they’re fatally confused (which I obviously also am myself). So in a bit of a wrench, I’m going to post from now on here, and leave this poor forlorn Slow Growing in Scotland as a sort of archive. I’ll include a link to it at the start of each post so that it’s not forgotten entirely, but otherwise, on we go into a new Substack setup and a new season.

If you’ve followed all that, well done, because I’m still confused, but to make things simple just pop across to Linda Slow Growing in Scotland and follow me there if you don’t already.

Street border looking east

I should issue a warning right away that this isn’t going to be a post of lovely photos. There will be very few photos and a bit of anguish.

I was in a hurry this spring. The long curving border beside the street needed to be planted. At that point we still intended to go ahead with our holiday plan of my husband driving out to Sweden in May to do some solo sea kayaking, and me joining him in early June so that we could wend our way back to Scotland via Denmark, Germany and France. On that timescale any new perennial planting would need to be established enough to do without watering if the weather was warm and dry. Working back from that, I needed to get plants in the ground in April at the latest, even though that was taking a risk in terms of frost, which we can get into the start of June.

Unlike the border I planted last year, I had no clear feeling about this one. I knew I wanted a transition from the silver, blue and yellow in the adjacent border, but I just couldn’t see the flow of it in my mind’s eye. For weeks I put off doing the hard work of sketching out planting plans, noting height and spread and flowering season and winter interest and spires and mounds and airy flower stems so that the look of it would be harmonious. Suddenly it seemed far too late to start on all that, so I went to the Claire Austin website, panicked, and asked the “Garden Assistant” for a few suggestions for a planting this area, ideally to cope with UK hardiness H5 or colder, strong winds, and light sandy soil. In other words I asked the AI and I’m vexed with myself.

I’d previously asked the Garden Assistant for some suggestions for the border and got a barrage of suggestions that came at me too fast. I wrote about that experience here. It was disconcerting and I thought I wouldn’t use it again. But yet I went back and asked this non-entity a question and ended up with a very large order of plants on which I spent a (for me) very large sum of money, and I really don’t think it’s going to work. Last year’s border is a joy to me every time I see it. That’s partly because it works in terms of colour and shape, and partly because I know that I had stitched together every plant that was there into something that was my creation.

Now that I’ve planted out this very large order, what does it look like?

Small plants and many weeds

It’s very weedy. This isn’t because we went away on holiday in June, but because I’ve been avoiding looking at it. We didn’t in fact go away: because of Trump’s war with Iran, fuel supplies at service stations along our route began to look rather fragile at one point, so rather than get stuck in Europe with a van complete with a kayak on the roof we decided to cancel. I should have had plenty of time to keep the weeds at bay, but I’ve been working in other areas of the garden. And also avoiding this border.

Because I didn’t work out plant spread on paper, with drifts and circles as I did for the first border, I feel it’s very bitty. I have a great fear that next year when things are in bloom it’s going to look like a municipal bedding scheme from the 1970s but with perennials instead of annuals.

Lack of a detailed planting plan meant that there are large gaps. In a way this has been convenient, because I’ve been able to shove in surplus kale, Cosmos and Tithonia.

Cosmos and wilting kale

Cosmos self-seeded from last year

All is not lost, however. Since planting the border I’ve been doing Jo Thompson’s ‘Studio’ garden design course for paid subscribers of her The Gardening Mind Substack. This has turned my vision for the garden on its head. Disconcertingly at first, the course started not with creative planting design, but with a factual inventory of the garden as it is now before going on to an appraisal of it, then consideration of voids, thresholds, enclosure and discovery.I now know what I’d felt instinctively, that the garden has plenty of void but little to none of the other elements. I now know from the Studio course that as well as the steps above, I lacked an overall concept for the border.

The plants that I’ve put in this year will have to do for the moment, but I’m starting to feel my way towards a very radical change in the shape (and threshold, enclosure and discovery) of this part of the garden. Definitely no more ‘assistance’ from AI. I now need to use my brain and my instinct, and enjoy the process.

Cambo cartwheels

Cambo reveals itself slowly. It’s not one of those “enter and gasp” gardens. I certainly gasped at the beauty of individual plant combinations, but I was three quarters of the way round the garden before I saw the joyfully cartwheeling children on top of the wall.

The vista

The garden slopes down to a burn1 running through the centre, then up towards the west facing wall. That wall is planted with climbing roses, irises and alliums.

West-facing wall

Cambo Burn

The Cambo Burn flows from roughly south to north through the garden. After it leaves the garden it flows down to the sea through a wooded glen with paths taking you down to the shore.

Burn archway

I would love a burn in or beside my garden. The house we lived in during my school years had a burn just outside the garden wall, crossed by a small metal bridge. The water was a run-off from a distillery lade, but had no alcohol in it! I loved it in all seasons, especially in cold winters when ice formed along the sides.

The Cambo Burn runs into the main garden under an archway, behind which is the kitchen garden. It’s very much a working vegetable garden rather than a National Trust-esque display garden and it was rather heartening to see weeds growing among healthy and prolific crops. However it was a bench that stole my heart in the kitchen garden.

The beauty of a bench

What a great idea to form border edging from coppiced branches and twigs, and to set a bench there to give both a resting place and definition of the space.

Before the kitchen garden there’s a feast of irises. I could fill this post with photos of the irises, but here are two. The Google lens thingy suggests ‘Benton Susan’ for the yellow one - can anyone confirm?

Possibly Benton Susan

Possibly Action Front

And this gorgeous russet one is possibly Action Front. Love the iris, hate the name, although all is explained when you read that Action Front was bred in 1942.

Adiantum pedatum var. aleuticum (?)

After the irises the path goes through an area shaded by small trees. The ground cover planting combines leaf shapes beautifully. The maidenhair fern (possibly Adiantum pedatum var. aleuticum) is grouped with the different leaf shapes of Epimedium and possibly False Hellebore (Veratrum)

Veratrum, Adiantum and Epimedium

In a slightly damp area in the lee of a north facing wall there are majestic clumps of Rodgersia, underplanted and surrounded by geraniums, ferns, Bergenia, and a tapestry of ground elder. It looked so ‘hardy perennial’ that it took me a while to realise that it was the same ground elder that I’m trying to eradicate from one corner of my garden.

As you move to the upper part of the garden this bench is at a convenient stopping point, although judging by its embrace by neighbouring plants most people continue on.

This half of the garden contains an orchard underplanted with lilies, alliums, poppies and roses.

The back wall is clad all along its length by climbing roses underplanted with alliums and irises.

View across the upper garden

Cutting bed

The orchard gives way to long cutting beds interspersed towards the far side of the garden by a series of rose hedges.

The blue and silver bed

Mixed rose hedge

Harlow Carr

Roald Dahl

Queen of Sweden

At the far side of the garden are the most wonderful insect-friendly tepees. I now can’t wait for late spring so that I can start one of my own with last year’s perennial stems.

Useful, beautiful and slightly bonkers

And they march down the slope among yet to flower perennials and more ground elder. I didn’t think I would visit Cambo and come away feeling charitable towards ground elder.

The march of the tepees

The benches continue, each one set amid different planting.

Small details of plant combinations stand out. This Salvia picks up the violet shading on the Thalictrum leaf edges beside it.

Violet harmony

Echium pinanana

In a sheltered, sunny spot beside the gate are these fantastic Echium pinanana. They mirror the one beside the glasshouses.

My visit to Cambo introduced me to many plants that were unfamiliar to me, but above all it was just a beautiful garden to walk around and to absorb. Do visit if you can.

On day two of an extremely mini visit south recently we visited Cambo Gardens near St Andrews. Of course I was aware of it, as it’s part of the general Scottish gardening consciousness. I’m on their mailing list, I’ve ordered snowdrops in the green from there, and I long to visit when the estate woodlands are carpeted in snowdrops (they also hold the National Collection of snowdrops). Our daughter was at St Andrews University nearby, but never once in our start and end of term drop off and pick up did we deviate past the gardens. I think my garden mind wasn’t fully activated then, and we were in the time-poor sandwich stage of fitting in work, children at university and the needs of elderly parents.

(Is anyone else writing on Substack feeling the need to fight against having what you write emerge like AI despite yourself? There is so much AI content, and it all reads exactly the same in terms of sentence structure.

Those single sentence paragraphs.

Those short sentences.

That aren’t even.

Sentences.

As a modern languages graduate I’m trained to aspire to mimic the speech patterns and accent of a foreign language, and that’s increasingly what so many Substack articles read like. Aaargh.)

Anyway, back to the calming world of flowers. We visited Cambo twice in two days. On the first day it was cold and not exactly wet, but damp, with a fine mizzle mixed with haar blowing in off the sea. We (I) loved it so much that we returned next morning when it was bright and blowy. Apart from the header photo above (clue: blue sky), the photos in this post are all from the haar/mizzly day. The weather didn’t make the slightest difference to the beauty of the garden.

You don’t enter the walled garden straight away. Instead there’s a winding path flanked by perennial planting. Since we’ve reached the stage of ‘The Journey” in the Garden Design Studio course I’m doing with Jo Thompson of The Gardening Mind, I could hardly move along the path for noticing how its curving route concealed the ultimate destination, and how the plants themselves slowed your pace because you wanted, however unconsciously, to enjoy them. I think I must have taken 20 photos within the first few metres. Nothing was said, but the husbandly back was exuding what we might call “marginal impatience”.

When you do reach the walled garden the path presents you with a choice: either turn right to the garden, or left to continue through woodland to the sea. Not at all a choice in summer, but I imagine it will be during snowdrop season. “Did you get a photo of the wood the gate’s made of?”, my husband asked me later. Er, it was made of wood as far as I could see, but apparently it’s spalted and worthy of a photo. Therein lies a difference between us: spalted wood versus “oh look, the garden walls are in the vernacular Old Red Sandstone”. I think that if I had been any good with numbers, and any good at art (both huge ‘ifs’ and resoundingly not the case in both instances), I might have been an architect given the joy I find in vernacular building materials. But that’s a very Lady Catherine de Bourgh statement. “There are few people in England I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”

What I hadn’t realised until I looked at the photo above again is that you don’t see the whole garden as soon as you go through the gate. The dark hedge (Cotinus? I’m afraid I didn’t check, there was so much else to notice) gives more of a sense of ‘something beyond’ to be discovered than if the whole sweep of the garden had been revealed at once. The hedge and the border in front of it also force a further right/left choice of path. As I typed this a sudden bizarre memory surfaced of a paper I wrote in my French degree Finals, on the choice between the right and left ways (droite and senestre) in the Old French Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Perhaps unconsciously influenced by all that medieval stuff from over 40 years ago, I turned right, towards the upper slope of the garden.

At this time of year the eye is immediately drawn to the contrast of blue irises and a huge and obviously venerable Phlomis russeliana.

Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone, Euphorbia, Allium siculum

Phlomis is repeated in the planting as you go uphill towards the glasshouses. This time it’s Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’, with a background of Euphorbia and grasses, and in the foreground a discovery for me, Allium siculum. Such lovely shades of green, cream and pink, and apparently autumn seed heads to look forward to. Both the Phlomis tuberosa and the Allium are going on my list for future planting. I’ve been so captivated by Phlomis ever since seeing it for the first time at Audley End that I’ve wanted to repeat it, but the russeliana yellow of my blue, yellow and silver border wouldn’t work in a border of blues, pinks and purples. Problem solved with tuberosa, and with some mirroring across the borders into the bargain. The Allium seems ideal for me as it copes with exposure, is drought-resistant, and RHS zone H5.

Allium siculum

The Phlomis tuberosa is repeated at the other side of the path beneath the dark hedge, this time with toning colours of Cirsium and Thalictrum, and a white of what I think is Libertia chilensis (New Zealand satin flower). Unfortunately the Libertia is only H3 hardiness, so it would turn up its toes in my garden. Perhaps Gaura would be a substitute, although it’s a bit marginal for me. Any white, airy alternative suggestions welcome.

Phlomis tuberosa, Cirsium, Thalictrum, Libertia chilensis, and some Salvia and Allium too

Teucrium fruticans

One which sadly won’t survive in my garden is Teucrium fruticans, tree germander. Such a pity, as it’s a beautiful shape, it’s evergreen, and the soft green leaves with blue flowers to come are endlessly versatile. But it’s H3 and wants shelter. It just shows how ideal a walled coastal garden is in Scotland. The dream.

What I really need of course are some glasshouses. Not my inherited 40 year old greenhouse with crumbling concrete block foundations and dusty soil floor inside, but glasshouses (always plural) with original Victorian heating grilles in the floor.

A glasshouse. One of a series

The table of dreams

An essential element is the stripped wooden table which will have been a cast-off from the housekeeper’s room (much too elegant legs to have come from the gardeners’ bothy).

Fuchsia procumbens variegata

The delights in the glasshouses ranged from the miniature, as in this Fuchsia procumbens, to the glorious Aeonium.

Aeonium. I want one

Allium of some sort

Outside again, more Alliums were being starry in a lovely way.

Allium roseum

This little pink Allium roseum was another discovery. Related to wild garlic, it’s meant to do well in sandy soil, but needs warm sun and shelter from strong winds to do well. I can do the light soil, but a combination of warm sun and shelter from winds in spring is more difficult. This one may have to wait until the various wind barriers we’re planning are in place.

At the base of the Allium is this lovely Betonica macrantha.

Betonica macrantha

Or more commonly, ‘Big Betony’. Attractive to pollinators, H7 and flowers into early autumn.

Dianthus carthusianorum

Floating through the planting were these points of deep shading to rosy pink. Dianthus carthusianorum, a drought lover, is recommended by designer Jo Thompson in her post about hot and dry gardens and also the natural process of self-seeding combined with our human judicious editing. The latter has now been given the name of ‘Chaos Gardening’, by whom I’m not sure. Possibly someone who doesn’t have a full time head gardener, or is wedded to an ideal of Victorian bedding displays. Coincidentally I’m currently reading ‘In Nature’s Slipstream’ by Carol Bruce. Carol’s garden at Old Bladbean Stud was featured on Gardener’s World a few years ago. You may remember the stunning double mirrored borders and Carol’s huge planting plan on a scroll of paper. Since watching that I’ve been following the garden online. In her book Carol describes her inspiration for the different areas of the garden, her design process, and her gardening ethos, which truly is following in nature’s slipstream. I’ll do a post once I’ve finished the book and let the ideas percolate into my approach to my own garden.

Iris sibirica ‘Flight of Butterflies’

I’m finishing this post as I began, with some irises. This is a taster for the irises in my next post as we move into a different area of the garden.

Renovating a garden is like renovating a house. We’re reasonably far on with the latter, depending on which of us you ask. Me - quite a way to go yet. Husband - nearly finished. At an early stage in the renovation a bedroom was turned into a bathroom, a utility room created, and the kitchen and another bathroom renovated. That meant an awful lot of taps to choose. And my goodness there are a lot of taps to choose from, all doing the same thing but in an infinity of different designs. Sometimes when I turn on a tap now I think, “Thank goodness I don’t have to choose a tap again for a very long time”. For a while all I could see, and all I looked for, were taps. Open a homes and interiors magazine and sofas, beds and wallpaper all faded into the background while taps flashed like beacons before my eyes.

A couple of weeks ago we visited Logie House gardens near Forres. It’s one of those places we’ve been meaning to visit since we moved from Edinburgh 6 years ago, but never quite got round to. I didn’t go with the intention of looking at trees, but since I’m at the tree stage of garden planning it was happy timing. At the same time last year I would have been deep in ‘blue, pale yellow and silver plants for dry sandy soil, ideally RHS hardiness 5 or below’. I’m not sure if the garden at Logie has these, because my tree vision was activated the moment we entered.

Apple and pear trees are set among long grass planted with spring bulbs. The mown path is also an aspiration of mine, less so for closely mown lawn husband, but since it was “trees set in grass planted with bulbs”, my temporary tree brain noted this for future reference.

The late narcissi were just at the end of their flowering, and so I’ll have to return earlier next spring to see this at its height. I have two precious memories of narcissi. In the first, I would have been no more than 4, perhaps even younger. I have a clear memory of standing waist-deep amidst Pheasant’s Eye narcissi while a blackbird sang in a tree overhead. I know I must have been that young, because it was in the wild part of my grandmother’s large garden, and we lived there until I was 4. The second is of the fields of wild narcissi at the Col du Lautaret, in the Hautes-Alpes department of France. I was just finishing my year as an English language assistante in a lycée, and a teacher and her husband I had become friendly with took me on a long day trip up into the mountains from our town in the Rhône valley. This was towards the end of June 1980. I’ve just checked some tourist office Facebook pages for the area, and they have photos of the narcissi in flower now, almost a month earlier. But this is a photo of a photo from 1980:

I’m in tree mode just now because for the first time in my gardening life I have space to plant small trees and large shrubs. The area that was previously taken up, very boringly, by the large cotoneaster hedge seems ideal for introducing some height, shelter, and layers, all of which would be provided by trees and shrubs. There would be blossom, and for the deciduous varieties, autumn colour, berries, and interesting branches in winter. They can’t be very large, because that would be out of proportion to the rest of the garden, and because we don’t want to block too much of our neighbours’ view of the surrounding countryside. The area adjoins farmland and beyond that large mature trees then hills. Planting trees here would be an informal edge to this part of the garden that would be in harmony with what’s outside it.

Logie provided inspiration in abundance. This is Viburnum plicatum ‘Kiliminjaro’. White flowers in spring, flushing to apple-blossom pink, then deep red berries maturing to black, and orange and red foliage in autumn.

I love this. Viburnum plicatum ‘Pink Beauty’.

Sometimes I did notice the underplanting -this is a gorgeous Euphorbia. I’ve become rather keen on Euphorbias, having pretty much ignored them until recently. There may be an Euphorbia phase to follow on from the tree phase.

Here’s the Viburnum with an Exochorda x macrantha ‘The Bride’ beside it.

Some more subdued blossom here in this Enkianthus campanulatus Redvein. The detail on the flowers looks like lampshades or cloche hats from the 1920s.

More of ‘The Bride’ below, but I don’t think my house will provide quite such a grand backdrop.

Some small native trees should be on the final list. A Rowan perhaps, like the one below. This may be the Kashmiri rowan. I’m also thinking of Hazel and Guelder Rose. Could I also fit in Witch Hazel? I need to get down to some serious measuring.

Mini kale forest

Last year I sowed kale far too late. We were away for all of June and then again for a spell in July, so it was the second half of July before I got round to sowing. Predictably the outcome was tiny plants which didn’t have enough time to grow away before winter. They put on a spurt during March this year, which has meant that we’ve had a mini harvest of baby leaves and flower tops. It’s been amazing just how much they’ve given, but they’re shooting away now, and we missed having their fresh leafy green to harvest during the winter.

This Spring I was determined not to lag behind, so in early April I sowed half a tray of Midnight Sun, and half a tray of Red Russian. The germinated brilliantly. Two days ago I started pricking out.

Midnight Sun seedlings

Seedlings always immediately look so much bigger once they’re pricked out, don’t you find? Anyway, I was at the self-congratulatory stage when yesterday this arrived in the post.

The science project I forgot

In my kale haste I had completely forgotten that I’d registered to take part in a Garden Organic citizen science project of growing “Resilient Greens” i.e. kale. As the introductory information explains, above, it’s a trial of heritage varieties and their contribution to food resilience in the UK.

Yet more kale

Three packets of seed are provided for each participant: Ragged Jack, often grown in cottage gardens; Tall Kale, grown since the mid 19th century; and Uncle Bert’s Purple, grown extensively before WWII but disappearing soon after. The demise of Uncle Bert could have been a result of the growth of the big commercial seed companies as British agriculture modernised and “improved” after the war.

Now not only do I have more kale to sow, but I have to do scary science-y recording stuff.

Scary recording stuff

This is one of many sheets on which participants have to record minute details of growth and harvest. As someone cursed with a non-numerate brain, the numbers cause me to glaze over, but I’ll have to grapple with them. How do I distinguish between 24% and 25% of leaf area lost?? But perhaps this will prove my science teachers at school wrong. The Physics teacher who begged me never again to try to wire a plug, the Chemistry teacher who said, “I hope you’re not going to be doing Chemistry for O Grade”, and the Biology teacher who probably didn’t know I was in their class. But I was NOT one of the people fainting when we dissected a cow’s eyeball, or when cow’s lungs were inflated with a pump. Just saying.

I’ve also signed up for a Garden Organic project on climbing French beans, which I have not forgotten about. More on that in another post. Meantime if anyone in the north east of Scotland will need kale this winter, you know where to come.

If you want to read more about the invaluable work Garden Organic is doing in citizen research, there’s a link here.

Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’

In her Substack post today at The Gardening Mind, Jo Thompson writes about plants for that problem spot, dry shade. I have some of these in my garden, and since it makes a change to write about plants that I have rather than plants I’m planning to have, or showing you microscopic plants that I’ve just put in, I thought I would let you see some of the things that are actually growing.

The first one isn’t on Jo’s list, but it’s been such a happy convert to dry shade that I have to include it. Initially it was planted in the hot, dry south facing border in my first attempts to have something in there after the tangle of couch grass, thistles and brambles was cleared. It showed how miserable it was by getting smaller each year, until it looked so pathetic that I eventually grasped that this wasn’t going to be, to use the ghastly expression, its “forever home”. I lifted the mini plant, chopped it into 3 even smaller plants and stuck them in a narrow border backed by a wall and shaded by apple trees, ivy and a rampant honeysuckle. Off it went, filling out and flowering frothily.

Epimedium ‘Something’

The first one from Jo’s list, this could be Epimedium x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’. It’s been hanging on in that same hot and sunny front border for about 15 years, from the stage when I was trying to help my Dad, who was no longer fit to garden. On one of my visits north from Edinburgh I’d arranged a delivery from Abriachan Nursery on Loch Ness side. This Epimedium and the Brunnera were the only survivors from that delivery. The rest were swamped by weeds. Incidentally, forget about the Loch Ness Monster if you’re ever driving down the side of the loch - visit Abriachan instead. They have an extensive range of hardy and unusual perennials and shrubs, and an outstanding Auricula collection.

By the time I came to move it this spring, the Epimedium had formed a hard, dense plate which took a pickaxe to break through. Split (hacked) into 4 pieces, plonked in and given water, it’s bounced back and looking entirely settled.

Geranium macrorrhizum ‘Ingwersen’s Variety’

Jo writes that Geranium macrorrhizum will “cope with the deepest, rootiest shade”, which it certainly does. I brought a small rhizome from my plant in Edinburgh and stuck it into this border, and off it went. It completely smothers anything in its path, which is exactly what I wanted it to do to combat a thug of a dry shade lover which I misguidedly planted here. Even in this harsher climate some leaves remain over winter and continue to provide ground cover.

It’s about to come into flower, when the bees love it. The flowers are held on long stems above the foliage. In autumn the foliage takes on reddish tints. If you decide it’s spread enough, just lift some of the rhizomes to check it. It seems entirely forgiving.

Ingwersen’s Variety flower buds

Here’s the thug below. I thought I’d got rid of it, but I found some today ready to creep out from behind a climbing rose stem.

Galium odoratum (Sweet Woodruff)

It’s a pretty thug, isn’t it? The white starry flowers are pretty for about 3 weeks in spring, and after that it’s a dense mat of fetching and delicate leaves. Beware - there’s nothing delicate about it. The RHS says “spreads enthusiastically, with the potential to become a nuisance”. I’m going to be back out there tomorrow trying to dig up every scrap of it root that I can.

Violet

This little violet has been a surprise success. I bought it on a whim from the local garden centre, popped it in, and over the past 3 years it has gently spread.

Here it is nestled among Honesty seedlings. During the first lockdown I planted some Honesty seeds taken from my Edinburgh garden in a “pot” that was an Estée Lauder face cream cardboard box. Remember that mania for using anything and everything for sowing seeds that year, even though we might have stacks of actual plant pots to hand? The plant that grew from that seed has populated half of this shady border in a very happy way. I just let it do what it wants each year, pulling out some seedlings if I feel it’s too much of a good thing. Sadly I won’t be able to buy that face cream again (Daywear Multi Protection Anti Oxidant Sheer Tint Release SPF15 if you’re interested), given the company owner’s support of certain political quarters.

Face tint today has been part SPF 50, part grime, as I sow broad beans (late, I know), plant Charlotte potatoes, and prepare the next border for perennials. I’m so flat out trying to juggle getting some crops in the group plus moving ahead with perennial planting that it’s been good to stand back in this post and realise that there are some things growing that no longer need my attention all the time.

The pressure has been on. I started planning the next border in January, and suddenly April was in sight and I was still unable to make up my mind what plants I wanted and how they would fit together. The syndrome I didn’t expect is that the more plants you know and could include in a planting plan, the more you want all of them.

I knew, or felt, that some sort of harmonious progression was needed from the end of the border at right angles to the now-planted blue, yellow and silver border along the front of the house. I needed to pick up some of those soft colours and gradually merge into a bolder palette further along the border. At the far end there would have to be another softening, but one which would harmonise with another right-angled planting yet to be sketched out. My brain was beginning simultaneously to seize up and go round in circles.

Happily, several books got me out of this initial impasse. The first was ‘The Gardener’s Palette’ by Jo Thompson. Subtitled ‘Creating Colour Harmony in the Garden’, it’s all about really looking closely at a flower and seeing all the colours contained in it, and building from there. This wonderful book has 100 colour palettes expressed in terms of planting in real gardens. I was hooked from the very first chapter, called ‘Strawberries and Cream, with a Drop of Wine’ (yes please). Across the 100 palettes, there are combinations you might think of, such as ‘Cherry Pink’, and ones where it’s only Jo’s eye for colour and all the other attributes of particular plants that reveals the possibilities to you. ‘A Tumble of Light’, ‘Vividly Pink in Deepest Purple’, ‘Isabelline’, ‘British Green’, ‘Falling off the Colour Wheel’, ‘Brown Light’. Reproduction of paintings showing the specific colour combinations of the planting are included in several chapters, ranging from Delacroix to Georgia O’Keefe. Isabelline was a new colour to me. Jo includes a quirky side note about it, ranging from the Académie Française to the undergarments of Clara Eugenia of Spain, wife of an Archduke of Austria.

When I saw that there was an updated and expanded edition of Claire Austin’s ‘Book of Perennials’ I had to have it. This new edition now includes sections of how to choose perennials, not just for soil and light, but for a range of gardening styles, for wildlife, for cutting and containers. Then there are plentifully illustrated sections on putting perennials together, in terms of edging, mounding, upright and focal plants, combining flower shapes and using colour, leaves, shoots, buds, fragrance and seeds, seasonal planting, and planting with annuals, bulbs and shrubs.

All that before a good practical section on planting and propagation, and dealing with pests and diseases. After that there are 150 pages of the plant directory, crammed with desirable perennials, and with high quality photos. I have to say that this book had me teetering on the edge of going round in circles again, there are so many wonderful plants.

If you order plants from Claire Austin you’ll receive her Handbook of Perennials. It’s an annual distillation of the nursery’s stock, again with advice how to plan your planting. The sections are arranged in useful categories such as plants for shade, dry spots, ground cover and so on. Photos give ideas for planting combinations in the various categories.

This selection of Gertrude Jekyll’s writing had sat on my shelves since I bought it in the summer at the V&A Dundee’s Garden Futures exhibition. I have to admit that the very Scottish reason I bought it was that it was the cheapest book about gardens on offer in the V&A shop. Reading it at last this spring has been a revelation and I wish I’d been letting it influence me over a longer period. The surprise for me was how wonderfully acerbic Gertrude Jekyll was. “I have always had great delight in the study of colour…when one hears the common chatter about ‘artistic colours’, one receives an unpleasant impression about the education and good taste of the speaker.” Her close study of colour is quite humbling, particularly when you consider how bad her eyesight was. Like Jo Thompson, she really looked at colour and refused to accept inaccurate commonly-used terms. “Another example of the same slip-slop is the term flame-coloured, and it is often preceded by the word ‘gorgeous’. This contradictory mixture of terms is generally used to mean bright scarlet. When I look at a flame, whether of fire or candle, I see that the colour is a rather pale yellow with a reddish tinge about its upper forks, and side wings often of a bluish white - no scarlet anywhere.”

I know that I haven’t done justice to all the wisdom in this book in the plant choices I’ve arrived at. But I’ll continue to read and re-read and hope that as it sinks in I’ll gradually refine my own vision as my garden evolves.

Late on in my planning of the new border I remembered a book I’d borrowed from the Central Library in Edinburgh over 10 years ago. At that point I had a very small city garden, but the planting plans of Gertrude Jekyll made a big impression on me. Not only did they have the colour progression I was aiming for, but her plans showed the plants in drifts rather than blocks. When I tracked down this copy from a used books site, I realised at once that I should have been more ‘drifty’ in the border I’ve already planted, and that I should aim for this in the new border.

This is where I have to admit that I’ve completely failed to draw up a classic planting plan taking into account plant spread. I was overcome by a severe case of “resting maths face”, to quote Debora Robertson, and my dyscalculic brain seized up at the prospect of squared paper and drawing circles to scale. Even drawing drifts on squared paper was beyond me. By this stage time was really going on, and if I was going to place an order and get the plants in the ground before summer I needed to make up my mind. So I returned to my longlist of desired plants, made rough guesses at numbers required of each, had a look at the scary total cost, lopped a few plants off in a totally random way, and pressed ‘confirm’. I’ll be astounded if I’ve got it right for the size of the border. It’s either going to be too few plants, or, as I suspect, too many. I’ll also be astounded if I’ve got the desired colour progression. This is going to be the Work in Progress border. A further report to come later in the summer!

Obligatory pennant flag

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A couple of weeks ago we nipped over to Norway. There are very few places one can “nip” to on a direct flight from the north east of Scotland, and Stavanger is one. Garden writer Clare Foster commented the other day in her Bud to Seed Substack that “It’s so easy driving to Belgium and Holland taking the Eurotunnel”. That filled me with envy, as it’s a multi-day journey from here. Envy notwithstanding, I’d encourage you to read Clare’s article on Painterly Belgian Gardens for some beautiful gardens featuring water and calm lines of trees - and to read the latest on garden gnomes and the Chelsea Flower Show.

Back to the north, where the Old Town of Stavanger was all white clapboard houses and Norwegian pennant flags. If you have any size of garden space in Scandinavia it’s very common to have a flagpole with a pennant national flag. This is wonderfully called a “vimpel” in Norwegian, and much favoured because it isn’t subject to the usual flag rule of lowering at sunset. On the national days of the Scandinavian nations it’s good etiquette to fly the full flag, and there’s a host of other official flag-flying days in each nation’s calendar. Norway and Sweden have a slant towards birthdays of the royal family, Denmark is similar but adds a lively slew of 19th century battle commemorations. I favour the Finnish model, which is proudly humanitarian, republican, environmental and literary, with “Day of Children’s Rights”, “Day of Civic Participation”, “Finland’s Nature Day” and “Day of Finnish Literature”

.The houses in Stavanger’s Old Town mostly stand directly on the pavement. This means that there’s a flourishing container culture. At the time of our visit this mainly consisted of dwarf narcissi, hyacinths and a few pansies, but the restrained palette went hand in hand with imaginative touches . The pussy willow stems in the container above really transform this doorstep. One to remember for next year, as even here in the north east the willow catkins are in the halfway stage between furry yellow pollen and leaves.

The lantern between these wicker baskets of narcissi, hyacinths and snowdrops - plus leaf spikes of a hosta? - gives the whole arrangement a focal point. But it’s only on uploading this photo that I notice that the lantern is padlocked to the bench. Even Stavanger is not perfect.

Neighbourly co-operation was needed for this swag of clematis reaching across the narrow cobbled lane. What an inspiration to drape it with twinkling lights.

A lesson in spanning the seasons with not very much - Christmas pine cones and moss with some Spring hyacinths. I imagine what looks like a well-pruned upright rosemary would have had its garnish of twinkly lights in the dark season.

This is inspired - a mini doorstep scene beneath a doorstep, complete with seasonal sledge, skis, lantern and Christmas tree. Plus a comatose hen. I wonder if the scene is changed as the seasons go by. Almost worth the plane fare back to Stavanger to find out. It reminded me of the “Verwonderende voetschrapers” (Amazing bootscrapers) in Antwerp, which are really entrancing and great fun to track down as you walk around the city.

Around the waterfront in the main part of town the Spring planting effort was going ahead at bar and restaurant terraces.

One still, grey day we took an electric-powered commuter ferry out to a peninsula in the fjords around Stavanger. Of course we ended up in a “greenhouse café” for lunch.

“VIPPS” in the photo above, and the number beneath it, refers to the Norwegian mobile payment app. With this you can send money, pay bills, buy items in a shop or online using only a phone number. There are over 4 million users in Norway, out of a population of just over 5 million. The Swedish equivalent, Swish, has 8.5 million out of a population of 10 million. There were many times in Sweden last summer that we would have loved to have had Swish, for example in small community cafés which only accepted payment by the app. Since you need a social security number from the relevant country, we had no way of accessing it. I discover that the UK did have an equivalent system, called Paym, which launched in 2014 and was discontinued in 2023 because of low uptake. Go us.

A coastal walk that day was through muted winter colours.

A ladder down to the sea was waiting for wild swimmers.

Offsetting the muted colours back in Stavanger were bright touches in shop windows, the harbour and the…Norwegian Canning Museum. The Canning Museum was fascinating - social history, the economy, and label design. What more do you want on holiday?

And all this is perhaps a long-winded way of saying that there’s not too much happening in the garden at the moment. Planning of new borders continues, and I’m finding it hard to pin down what I want. But a new book has just arrived in the post which may help break the deadlock, and I’ll write about that soon.

That apart, I’ve potted up 13 dahlias in the greenhouse, have 2 more arriving shortly, and have sown a tray of sweet peas, a tray of salad mix, and a total of 6 tomato seeds. The tomato seeds have germinated, the sweet peas and salad mix have not. The sweet peas were my own seed saved from last year, and I made a mistake by leaving the trays in the unheated greenhouse while we were away. The salad mix (from Seeds of Italy) is out of date, but I thought I would do a test sowing. Today it’s 4C and snowing/hailing/sleeting. However into next week we should get to 11C and perhaps a little more, so I need to get organised for proper sowing.

In the slow, dark days of January I’ve been planning the next border. This is a big one (for which read ‘expensive’, so I want to get it as right as I can). It has a long curve, backed by another of our ugly 1970s low breeze block walls, and I call it “the street border”, because that’s what it’s beside. It’s long, but I can never remember how long it is. I have to measure it in stages each time I need to know. It’s longer than the extent of the very long extending metal tape measure. I think I’ll remember, but because I’m dyscalculic-without-a-diagnosis I never do. Numbers really mean nothing to me. I took the photo above today. Soggy, grass threatening to return but it’s too wet to weed, and dead Cosmos stems straggling all over the place.

This is part of it in its 1980s heyday, planted by my late Dad. It’s been a slow process reclaiming it from the bramble-infested thick mat of couch grass when I took on the garden. In 2024 we had all the borders widened. For the border that runs along the front of the house planting inspiration came suddenly and all of a piece in blue and silver and soft yellow, and that was the first to be planted with perennials last spring. Since then I’ve been feeling my way towards a planting scheme for the narrow border that backs onto fields and the view, and started planting it this past autumn. I’ll post about that in due course, but for now it’s been too dark for photos to show anything but a strip of earth. But oh my goodness how I’ve struggled to see what I should do with the “street border”.

I discover that I have very few photos of it, because it doesn’t look good at the moment. It’s also very difficult to get a single photo because of the way it curves. The street beyond is not one you would want to gaze at, so it does need softening/camouflaging (and in my darker moments, hiding from view behind a Leylandii hedge). Last year I stuck my 16 dahlias in there, and filled in with snapdragons I’d grown from seed. The shrubs that I planted the previous year - Cotinus ‘Royal Purple’, Philadelphus ‘Belle Etoile’ and Lonicera ‘Winter Beauty’ were dwarfed by the dahlias. The Clematis ‘Petit Faucon’ hung on for grim death against the strong southerly winds. It’s an odd shape at the end that used to adjoin the Horrible Hedge, as taking out huge roots meant that some turf had to come up. The azalea bed on the right of the photo below is planned for removal, but I don’t yet know what to do with that space.

Having come to a stalemate, I’ve decided to stop planning and just step back and read more. As a modern languages graduate, I keep returning to the idea of garden design as a language. We need to gather vocabulary, and learn the grammar to knit the words together into something meaningful. I think I’ve been trying to learn garden grammar in isolation without enough pleasing/beautiful/interesting words.

The New Romantic Garden

At first I thought the border was going to be full of hot and strong and vibrant colours. Everything was going to blaze. I desperately wanted to draw the eye from the grey of the street beyond. There are greys in Scotland that are part of the landscape and the building vernacular and are lovely to look at: the weathered and lichen-topped drystane dykes, the glittering mica in Aberdeen’s granite. But 1970s grey isn’t even Brutalist chic, it’s just dreary all year round. As I began to settle on a soft palette for the border along the front of the house, and have vague thoughts of hazel, hawthorn and guelder rose where the hedge had been, I realised that strident colours in only one border were going to fragment the garden. Perhaps softening the grey was what I needed, rather than pretending it wasn’t there. The Leylandii hedge was tempting in terms of obliteration, but it would just have looked silly in the way that bad DIY from the 1970s does now.

This is where Jo Thompson’s ‘The New Romantic Garden’ has come to the rescue. I’ve been reading and re-reading, absorbing summer and winter vistas, plant combinations, and how to look at a space to understand what it needs. The most difficult thing for me with this border is how to apply Jo’s precept of “respecting the location and applying that respect”. She acknowledges that it can be difficult, that sometimes we have a wish that’s about us rather than the garden in its specific location. I’ve been reading and looking at my garden and thinking and reading again, all the while trying to bear in mind Jo’s watchwords of Attraction, Integrity, Depth, Intoxication, Friendship, Mood Lighting, Courtship, Intrigue and Commitment.

https://www.jothompson-garden-design.co.uk/the-new-romantic-garden/

Various stockists are listed on the page above. I ordered my copy from my small local independent bookshop, Yeadon’s of Elgin, and I hope that if you do order a copy you’ll avoid the behemoth beginning with A…..

Claire Austin’s Book of Perennials

This all gives me an idea, a feeling of what I would like the border to be, along with a few key plants that Jo uses for different effects. There aren’t plant lists in ‘The New Romantic Garden’, but you can pick up the language of the plants in the gorgeous photos. For specific plant ideas I’m returning again and again to Claire Austin’s ‘Book of Perennials’. So many plant varieties, with good photos, plus plant requirements, situation, pollinator friendliness, which part of the border, good for cutting, care. The book’s initial sections are about how to choose perennials in terms of soil, light and situation, and it then moves on to putting perennials together: building a picture, shapes, shoots, buds and seeds, flower shapes, colour, leaves, seasons. The varieties are all hardy herbaceous perennials - perfect for my northerly location. Mine is a second hand edition from 2015, but there’s a revised edition out now which I’m going to have to get. It’s available direct from the Claire Austin website. All the perennials I’ve bought so far have come from Claire’s nursery in England. I’ve been delighted with the customer service and the quality of the plants.

https://www.claireaustin-hardyplants.co.uk/products/claire-austins-book-of-perennials-revised-edition

Plants for Places

This little RHS book was recommended by my tutor on the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh ‘Planting Design’ course that I did online. Apparently it’s used by staff there. I’m finding it a really useful in fine tuning ideas for very specific locations.

The New Kitchen Garden

A charity bookshop find in Edinburgh, Anna Pavord’s ‘The New Kitchen Garden’ is a true delight. I haven’t had time yet to do much planning for the vegetable beds in this garden, but I’ve been turning to this book for ideas on incorporating some edibles in the street border. In her section “In the Border”, Anna Pavord states that “Occasional drama is what you want in a herbaceous border, to wake up the sleepy hordes of geraniums and well-bred campanulas…What could be more dramatic spearing through a mound of bright red verbena than the elegant, drooping leaves of leeks, especially the French purple-leaved cultivar Bleu de Solaise?”. Potagers, cottage gardens, the city larder, vegetable patchwork - so many ideas. There’s even a chapter on growing an ‘alcoholic hedge’, irresistibly introduced as “For taking away the backs of your knees, there is nothing like a slug of sloe gin”.

‘The New Kitchen Garden’ is out of print now, but it’s available second hand through Better World Books: https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-new-kitchen-garden-9780751302554

George

As for George…George is the new online “garden assistant” on the Claire Austin website. I was browsing plants there and thought I’d give George a whirl. Within 15 minutes of questions from George and answers from me, then further refining of questions from George, I had a fully planned section of border (a different one to the street border), complete with planting advice and planting distances. George came back to me with plant suggestions while I was still trying to process his previous ones. Eventually I asked “George, are you an AI”?, to which George replied “You’ve caught me out, yes I am, although I’m based on years of garden knowledge”. My young adult offspring who works with data keeps telling me that this isn’t AI, it’s a Large Language Model. Whatever it is, it’s very fast, extremely good, and rather disconcerting. It all went too fast for me - no time to mull and ponder. I’m pretty sure that I would have arrived at roughly the same selection of plants given a few weeks to research and think. George gave me what I wanted, fast, but I felt curiously shut out of the process. Well done to Claire Austin for a sophisticated help feature that will genuinely help some people, but I’m still disconcerted. Has anyone else explored garden design AI (sorry, LLM) tools? And how do you feel about them?

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My goodness, that photo is zingy to the eye already accustomed to the winter-bleached tones of January. But this was November, and November in France means chrysanthemums on individual graves on 1 and 2 November, la Toussaint (All Saints Day and All Souls Day), and war memorials for the 11 November Armistice Day commemorations . One of the (startlingly few) pieces of useful information my cohort was given in preparation for spending a year of our French degree in France was never to take chrysanthemums as a gift when invited for a meal, as they’re firmly associated with death and mourning. The only other pieces of survival information for 20 year olds that have stuck in my mind were always to take an odd number of flowers when bringing your not-chrysanthemums as a gift, and that the tap water was probably safe to drink. Ah, 1979, simpler times.

Since my stay in Vichy this past autumn coincided with 11 November, I went along to the town’s commemoration of Armistice Day. It was a very moving ceremony, all tricolour sashes, the lighting of a flame, civic and military representatives, and impressively elegiac and moving tributes and appeals for peace from young school students. I didn’t take any photos of the ceremony itself as I felt that would have been intrusive. But the next day I returned to capture the massed planting of chrysanthemums.

The association of chrysanthemums with commemoration of the Armistice and thereafter the fallen in all wars dates from 1919. The French President, Georges Clémenceau, called on the French people to place flowers at the graves of fallen French soldiers. The chrysanthemum being the main flower still in bloom, it became the flower of choice for this purpose.

While the prohibition on bringing chrysanthemums as a gift has remained with me. I feel no such barrier when it comes to thinking of planting them in the garden, in fact I long to include them. The bronze, orange and red ones in particular, in all their forms - incurved, reflexed, intermediate and pompom. Perhaps I’m influenced by happy childhood memories of rows of staked chrysanthemums glowing at the foot of the garden behind the cabbages. It would be wonderful to grow enough to bring a sheaf into the house, just as Mrs Miniver does (although hers are merely bought from a flower-seller). “…she unwrapped the chrysanthemums and arranged them in a square glass jar, between herself and the light, so that the sun shone through them. They were the big mop-headed kind, burgundy-coloured, with curled petals; their beauty was noble, architectural…”

I thought I would have the rest of my stay to admire the municipal chrysanthemums, but I returned a week later to discover:

Gone. Replaced by standard issue pansy, wallflower and cineraria. What happened to all those beautiful chrysanthemums, I wonder? Replanted in a municipal nursery for next year, or composted? I did feel very grumpy towards Vichy about this abrupt ousting.

But then I discovered their riverside planting.

There’s a beautifully maintained and landscaped path along both banks of the River Allier where it flows between the town of Vichy on one bank and the smaller town of Bellerive (literally ‘beautiful bank’) on the other.

Boating pontoons, swimming platforms, a variety of seating areas, and varied planting that had obviously been planned for year-round interest and sustainability. The planting of grasses gave movement and sound and softness, while gaura flowers still danced between the stems.

When the snow came, it settled like fallen petals.

A bit of plant identification added to the pleasure of walking this 6km circuit.

The pink flowers are from the Abelia grandiflora ‘Edward Goucher’. Edward might be one for me - it’s hardy down to -15C.

Euonymus, possibly hamiltonianus ‘Koi Boy’. Again, I’m tempted, perhaps in the area vacated by the cotoneaster hedge. Tho the seeds make me think immediately of scallops with their coral…

Even the fencing and pathway lights were carefully thought out, and the furthest thing from standard municipal issue.

On the Bellerive side of the river the lights were mostly set to a warm golden light at night. On the Vichy side, more built up, the lighting was vibrant in places. Normally I’m not a fan of illuminated plants, but somehow this seemed lively rather than twee. And there are pools of darkness between the lit sections off the path, to give birds and insects some respite.

One aspect I didn’t envy was having to set traps for “chenilles processionnaires” - pine processionary caterpillars. Their hairs are extremely irritating and can be fatal to dogs. We have an allied species in the UK, the caterpillars of the oak processionary moth, which has become established in London and surrounding areas.

The final image from this Vichy interlude has to be the little offering on a tree stump in one of the parks. Perhaps from a very small Vichy inhabitant already in tune with nature.

It’s not quite “after the snow stocktake”, because the snow still lingers in sunless corners. That’s both annoying and valuable. I now see where there really is no sun at this time of year, and where the frost will probably be deepest and linger. The immediate annoying thing is that this is where I need to plant out the hawthorn whips, so they’ll have to wait a bit longer.

The line of snow above is the continuation of the same north-facing wall, towards the west end of the garden. What will eventually go here I just don’t know yet. I need to introduce more shelter against the strong prevailing southerly winds and there’s a plan for that this spring. At the moment it all looks pretty desolate. The black weed-stop fabric is covering the bare but root-infested ground left by the 5 year old turf stack that refused to become a “rich, crumbly loam”. The pot on top of it is weighed down with stones inside to help anchor the fabric. During the snow that pot was obliterated, and I can’t say I’m overjoyed to see it and that messy area appear again. Is there such a thing as aesthetic weed-stop fabric?

Not everything emerging from the snow is unwelcome. These mini lettuces were self-seeded from a row that I let go to seed. They’ve been under the deepest snow, possibly 3 feet, since this was where we dumped the snow cleared from the greenhouse roof .

The unintentionally mini kale plants, the Sutherland kale heritage variety above, and the Red Russian (or is it Red Ruffled, or Russian Ruffled? ) below, also seem none the worse.

The perennials planted in April last year have largely come through well, although for some of them it’s last year’s dead stems and I’ll have to wait until spring to see what re-emerges.

Only the tips of this Artemesia were visible above the snow. All the new autumn growth on the Alchemilla, below, looks flourishing. On that, I realised that I’ve only really grown annuals before, and so I have an autumn growth question for more experienced perennial growers - should I just leave that new green growth in the spring, or cut most of it back to encourage further new growth?

The Phlomis, above, are all rather frost-scorched on some leaf edges, but otherwise fine.

Where I do have doubts is the planting I did in October, against the north-facing wall. Here the plants haven’t had time to establish before the darker, colder months. In Scotland we don’t have a long, benign autumn, so I knew I was taking a bit of a risk. As the lingering snow has told me, this is also the coldest part of the garden. The grasses, Hakonechloa and Calamagrostis, seem to be hanging on, and the common Yarrow isn’t remotely bothered.

But where foliage has died off over winter, or where there’s been frost-heave, as with this Bowman’s Root (Gillenia trifoliata), below, it all looks a bit uncertain. This was a plant new to me, discovered when browsing the Claire Austin website, and ordered from there along with all my perennials so far. Bowman’s Root promises so much across white, fluttering flowers, red stems and colourful autumn foliage. I’ve gently pushed it back down and mulched with more compost today, and it’s now in the crossed fingers category.

If several of the plants in this border don’t make it through the winter it’ll be a hard lesson, but it’ll let me see that I should concentrate on spring planting instead. For the moment, I just need to be patient.

What about your snow survivals/casualties? Hopefully they’ve all been in the survivals category so far.

When I was a teenager discovering T S Eliot’s great poem ‘The Waste Land’, I didn’t realise that my future self would find horticultural truth in it, alongside all the huge intellectual and spiritual themes.

Over a foot of snow, softly piling up for a week now, and I am indeed forgetful, because I’ve forgotten where young shrubs are so that I shake snow off to stop them breaking. I’ve forgotten where I stuck in rose cuttings beside the greenhouse when I’ve been clearing the roof of snow. Snow is heavy: 2.5cm of snow can weigh up to 10kg per square metre. So I need to keep clearing the roof, but I’m probably standing on the cuttings at the same time.

I also forgot, before the snow, that I really should have taken advantage of a run of days without frost to plant out the bare-root hawthorn whips that arrived when I was in France in November.

This is where the hawthorns are meant to go. The slight dents in the ground are from when I went confidently out to plant them over a week ago, on a day when the temperature reached 6C. The tines of the fork went in a few millimetres and then bounced. So now I know that this area is going to be permafrost during the winter. (If you’re not distracted by the weeds, you’ll notice from the feathers at the right that a bird has been done to death here. There’s a sparrowhawk that hunts in this area, so all the more reason to have prickly native hedging for the small birds to hide in. )

The whips themselves were popped in to a trench by my husband while I was in France, also on a day of snow cover “I didn’t realise they were so close to the grass”. It may just look muddy, but that ground was also frozen solid, so there they’ll have to remain until things warm up.

Since there’s nothing to be done, I may as well forget them and gaze at the snow.

No sign of the mini kale plants, marked by stakes within the netless cage. The cage was netted against pigeons, but with heavy snow forecast we took the net off. Past experience has shown that even a very little snow will cause the net to sink almost to the ground in the middle, and that it’s really hard to dislodge the snow. It also puts me in a foul mood because it’s achingly heavy and wet and nasty. To be avoided. This weather is making me bring forward my longer term Polycrub1 plan so that I can grow winter veg under cover sooner rather than later. It’s frosty in the greenhouse - a lemon verbena plant that I have in a pot there, protected by fleece, has got well and truly frosted this week. The Polycrub by contrast has a twin wall construction, so acts like horticultural double glazing.

Trips to the compost bin with green waste have been enlivened by its snow sculptures. This was from 3 days ago.

The photo above is from today. I’d knocked the snow off the lid 2 days ago, but it’s piled up again, and creeping up the sides of the bin. Inside it’s noticeably warm, and full of very wriggly life.

Our outside taps are insulated and were turned off inside the house before the serious frost arrived. The level of the snow here is around 2.5 feet (yes, I know I mix my measurements, but I need to think in feet for any depth).

I’m now glad that I didn’t prune the 2 year old lavender in the autumn. It had a very late flowering and the bees were still busy at it. This week a couple of goldfinches have been feasting on those seed heads still poking above the snow. I’m planning to grow teasels and similar seeded plants for wildlife, having seen what a few lavender plants can do.

There doesn’t seem to be much let-up in the weather this week - a bit less snow but harder frost. Garden planning it is, then.

I spent most of November in Vichy, right in the centre of France. I knew when I booked my top-up French course1 at the Alliance Française there that my stay would be merging into the start of Christmas preparations, and that was part of the attraction of going in winter. The other factor governing timing was that gardening activity was calming down. Admittedly I hadn’t lifted the dahlias yet, and had to subcontract the task to my husband in my absence (leading to a plaintive WhatsApp message of “Is this a dahlia?” above a photo of a cosmos plant), but I felt that was a risk I could take.

It’s been precisely 46 years since I’ve been in France as December approaches. I spent the academic year 1979/80 in a small town in the northern Rhône valley as part of my degree. Seeing that number of years in cold print is shocking. How can I not have visited a country I love so much at this time of year? Answer: work, then the mid-life pressure years of work + children + elderly parent. My memories from 1979 in France are of a gentle drift towards Christmas. Britain at that time, alongside all the winters of discontent, power cuts and general shabbiness, was in a harsh, shouty glam-rock to punk transition period which claimed Christmas as well. Noddy Holder’s hoarse shout of “It’s Christmaaaaaas” is the soundtrack to 1970s Christmas in the UK. In France by contrast the spirit of the season seemed to be embodied by gourmet food items coming into stock in the small independent shops, and many end of year festivities featuring rivers of champagne. I have a particularly happy memory of the yoga club Christmas night out in the local château where we danced and drank champagne until 4 am, and not a yoga pose in sight. That and a magical evening in Lyon city centre for the Fête des Lumières2 - a festival of light that back then consisted only of lighted candles in all the windows around the Place Bellcour and the old town. It was gentle, natural, and one of the most enchanting things I’ve ever seen.

Back in the present, Vichy had a day of snow just before its main Christmas decorations went up. The town centre retains the 19th century air of a gracious European spa town, with covered promenades, tree-lined alleyways in a central park and elegant spa pavilions where people still come to ‘take the waters’ on medical prescription.3

The snow brought the gentle late autumn to an end, evoking Apollinaire’s beautiful and melancholy poem ‘Automne malade’ (‘Ailing Autumn’), where autumn dies when snow falls in the orchards4.

While a few fir garlands, baubles and candy canes made an appearance in late November, the illuminations began on 27 November. I wandered around the centre in the early evening dark as people began to stroll through the alleyways of the park to soak up the atmosphere. What struck me most was how the lights were in keeping with the elegance of the architecture and the park, and that where trees were involved the lighting mimicked nature.

Instead of the carpet of wild flowers above, it would have been so easy to flood the area with brash lights hung from the tall plane trees. The restraint and naturalness of the lights were really magical, and interestingly captured the attention of the many small children out in the early evening. The vin chaud/mulled wine crowd would come later - I’m not sure if they were equally captivated, but I hope so.

A few things were definitely not of the natural world - only the French could get away with a huge Belle Époque candelabra. The light show projected on the façades of the Opera and Casino was beautiful, set to classical music, and reminded me of the children’s book illustrations by Edmond Dulac.5

The real wonder for me were the clusters of lights hung in the plane trees. On my train journey from Lyon to Vichy at the start of my stay I’d noticed large clumps of mistletoe in trees. How beautiful to mimic this in the town’s Christmas lights.

It was so beautiful that I felt I had to sit at a wine bar terrace and delight in the scene. Yes, that’s my glass of wine and no, that’s not my ashtray.

More from Vichy after Christmas, but for now I wish you a peaceful few days over this time, and an infusion of the natural world if possible.

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A year ago I made the long pilgrimage from the north of Scotland to Saffron Walden in Essex to visit the Fry Gallery. You hardly notice the gallery sign in the photo above, so modest is this wonderful gallery. It concentrates on 20th century paintings, prints, illustrations, wallpaper and decorative designs, with a special focus on the Great Bardfield group of artists. Last year the gallery held an exhibition called ‘Great Bardfield and Beyond: A Working Landscape’,1 including works by Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, two of my favourite artists. The exhibition was all I’d hoped it would be, but I hadn’t expected also to find so much garden inspiration alongside. It was a visit of doorways to enclosed gardens, and to my childhood.

Since we have the doorway to Bridge End above, we’ll go down that sunlit path to the pointy gabled house at the end.

From there the half-hidden archway on the right takes you into the garden.

Bridge End has pleasing echoes of Mole End in ‘The Wind in the Willows’, and like Mole End it had at one time fallen into neglect but had then been re-awakened. I hadn’t known that the Fry Gallery was founded by Francis Gibson, a local Quaker businessman, and that he had also created Bridge End Garden in 18402. It is an absolute delight, a series of interlocking ‘rooms’ of different characters, managed by the local Council and free to enter. I would move to Saffron Walden simply to have this public garden on my doorstep.

This sunken parterre was replanted according to a design sketched by Gertrude Jeykll when she visited in 1912.

By this stage in the season the topiary and secluded areas like this plant theatre were providing the main interest, but in summer the perennial and rose borders must be glorious.

And so to Audley End, which I had thought was just a whopping English Heritage stately home with a bit of a garden, and frantic with themed seasonal events moving inexorably from Hallow’een to “Festive Fun” and on round the stately home “fun” calendar. All of that does exist, but thankfully we visited between bouts of fun and found a doorway to another garden.

Immediately inside the doorway is this heart-lifting border of dahlias and salvias.

My dahlia planting this year has been of the dotted around sort, in a border for which I still have to work out a planting plan. I doubt I’ll have a plan drawn up for next summer, because it’s a border I’m finding very difficult to visualise. But while I’m waiting, why not go all out dahlia-salvia-wigwams, whether the wigwams host climbing beans or nasturtiums? I particularly long to grow the scarlet whirly dahlia in the foreground above, which I think I’ve tracked down as Marie Schnugg.

The glasshouses were stupendous, and introduced me to the photogenic Malabar spinach with its Deadly Nightshade-looking berries.

If the glasshouses were immaculate so was the potting shed.

Clean tools. Orderly storage. Lots of notes to self.

It was at Audley End that I discovered phlomis. In its brown autumn state it stood out as a plant that I really, really wanted for my garden, and now I have a half dozen one year old plants which have been sitting not doing anything much all summer, but at least not dying. I’m very impatient for them to get to the stage of these brown pom poms. Frosted or capped with snow, they’ll look wonderful.

These are probably planted more densely than mine, and I may need to bulk out with more next year, once the new plant budget allows. But in the meantime I’ve just noticed the clump of salvia to the left of the photo, so with a few cuttings from an existing plant I can fill out the front of my border around the phlomis.

Salvias again here, but purple this time, with sedum, euphorbia, eryngium, alchemilla, iris? and a couple of plants to the left of the photo that I can’t identify. If anyone can tell me what they are, I’d be grateful.

The glaucous green of the euphorbia along with a rich autumn colour is given a different aspect in the pairing with cotinus, and sedum again, below.

Seen in October, both Bridge End and Audley End made me even more determined to have a garden that keeps a structure in winter, and not to be afraid to really fill up the space in borders. And to clean my garden tools better.

In the next post, a doorway to my childhood.

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Last year I grew 3 dahlias. They all thrived and lulled me into a false sense of security. This year I attempted sixteen from tubers and a pack of Bishop’s Children and the results were - mixed. Unlike some people, I had no trouble with slugs and snails. However it was ferociously dry and very hot, if by very hot you mean 27C, which counts as extremely hot in the north of Scotland.

The three that I grew last year I stored as tubers over the winter and potted on successfully in spring. The other 13 I likewise started off in pots. Only one failed to sprout. There are 2 contenders for which it was, but of course I didn’t note it at the time. They were all potted up between 23 and 25 March and kept in the greenhouse until hardening off. I didn’t record when I planted them out in the border, but it would have been early May. That was a bit earlier than I would have liked given that our last frost date in end May/beginning June, but I was going away for the month of June and needed to get them establishing before I left. On 12 April I sowed Bishop’s Children, and planted them out in late May. They were all planted in the same south-facing border in light, sandy soil. During an August storm several of them were blown over, because of course I hadn’t staked them. Once I’d righted them and put in stakes they’ve continued to flower, but I did lose several strong stems. What with heat, drought (general plus my neglect) and gales, they’ve sorted themselves into 3 categories, which was very obliging of them. There’s also one in a category of its own, and not in a good way.

Thrivers

Crème de Cognac

Crème de Cognac was a jolly little dahlia. I say ‘little’, because the plant didn’t reach a great height, but put out plentiful, full-sized blooms. I imagine that in a kinder year it would be bigger plant.

David Howard

I grew David Howard at my allotment in Edinburgh, and have been missing it ever since. Here it gave fairly plentiful blooms, with a decent sized plant, but not as plentiful nor as large as in Edinburgh. There it was in a soil rich with leaf mould, which was shaded in the later afternoon, and sheltered from the prevailing wind. Exactly the opposite of what it had to contend with here. Towards the end of the season it’s begun to revert in some blooms, which is quite a pleasing effect.

David Howard paired very well with airy purple Verbena bonariensis dancing around it.

David Howard reverting

Chat Noir

One of the 3 I grew last year, Chat Noir grew much less strongly this year. It was also felled by the August storm. It was a few days before I could get at the plants to stake them, and by that time the stems had begun to twist up towards the light, so there’s been a period of wonky stems and strange angles. The blooms are smaller than last year, but overall it’s done well.

Dark Spirit

I do love a pom pom dahlia, and I wonder now why I didn’t order more of them. There’s something so tactile and visually pleasing about them in a Fibonacci sequence sort of way. Poor Dark Spirit got clonked on the head by a neighbouring Cosmos plant (also not staked) which keeled sideways in the storm, but has pulled away heroically.

Bishop’s Child 1

Bishop’s Child 2

Bishop’s Child 3

I think these are the children, although Child 1 could be a stunted Bishop. We had a labelling mishap in August just before the judging for the village ‘Best Kept Garden’ competition. Mine is in no way best kept, and the judging reflected that (which of course I was not the least peeved about…), but I entered to swell the numbers. My husband obligingly did a ‘bit of a dig’ in this border to remove some weeds, and in the process some of the labels got lost.

Jennifer Mary Ellen

The name sounds like something from ‘Dallas’, but don’t be put off. This was my strongest plant and with most blooms last year, and again this year. It was blown apart from the centre during the August storm and I doubted it would survive. But I staked round it and bundled it back together again with twine and it’s thrived. My bundling together has meant that the flowers are a bit tighter on space than they would have been, but they’ve found a way through.

Jennifer Mary Ellen after the storm

Survivors

Breakout

Breakout was really on the cusp between thriving and surviving. It’s produced a total of 4 flowers all summer, 2 at a time and all huge as advertised, but the plant itself has been puny. As a result it’s had a weirdly top-heavy look in the border. Given a better year next year, and more watering/feeding by me, I’m hopeful that it will live up to its potential.

Great Silence

This has been grudging with flowers after a floriferous year last year. As with Breakout, the plant itself was undersized, although not quite so unbalanced. It’s a lovely flower with a bit more apricot in it than this photo shows. Very good as a cut flower for picking up tones from other flowers.

Waltzing Matilda

I ordered this as much for the name as for its looks. My daughter is currently living in New Zealand, and this was my tribute to the Antipodes. Again undersized, it’s done its best in a very dry spot at the front of the border, but looks rather pained at all times.

Bishop of Oxford

I think this is the Bishop. Please tell me if not. It’s a horrible photo, taken on a day of yet another gale so that I had to hold it in (rough) focus. Today is even windier, so no point trying again. If it is the Bishop, he was a small one, very late into flower, and also with that unhappy relationship between plant size and flowers.

Mexican Star

This was really lovely, but extremely sparse in flower. Fingers crossed for next year.

Demisers

French Can Can

This was a midget, barely 6 inches tall. Flowers are only just appearing. After all aspects of the plant struggling so much I wonder if there’s any point storing it and trying again next year. Advice welcome.

Dahlia var. ‘Demised’

This is/was either Natalie G or Bacardi, and either Natalie G or Bacardi will have been the one which didn’t sprout at all from tubers.

Still, it went one better than Verrone’s Obsidian, which has disappeared from the border without trace.

Downright annoying

Innocent Silence

Why did I order this? It has annoyed me every time I’ve looked at it, which is very often since it’s right at the midway point in the long, curving border. What I thought would look pleasing was its advertised ‘white with a hint of lemon’. This was a mistake given that all the other dahlias are pink/purple/burgundy/orange/cream. It hasn’t helped itself by going all out for lemon rather than white, and a particularly acid, shrill lemon tinged with green, plus now some hints of clashing pink. It has annoyed me so much that I can’t even think of planting it somewhere else next year. Sometimes the compost bin beckons…

V&A Dundee

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Living now in rural north east Scotland, a visit to a gallery or an exhibition is a rare treat and all the more so when the subject is gardens. In July I went to “Garden Futures: Designing with Nature”, which is at the V&A Dundee until 25 January 2026. It’s subtitled “Unearth the extraordinary, everyday world of garden design”. Having stared at a blank screen for half an hour, wondering how to write an introductory paragraph, I’ve realised that my difficulty lies in the juxtaposition of “extraordinary” and “everyday” in that overview. The exhibition does include both, and also gardens as acts of colonisation, resistance, hope, creativity and connection with nature. I went in to the exhibition thinking that I was going to see a lot about the future of environmentally friendly garden design, and came out with my head full of chairs sprouting greenery, 1960s insecticide packaging, Persian-inspired tapestries and gardens as acts of exclusion. What I show here is going to be a bit of a jumble, then, partly because it’s difficult to distil so many themes, and partly because I did come out of the exhibition with my mind in a jumble. Or boorach1, to be Scottish about it.

Persian garden carpet tapestry

Among the first exhibits are several tapestries which merge past, present and future. Above is The Garden Carpet Tapestry by Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh. Iranian-born and Dundee-trained architect Farshid Moussavi was commissioned to design the tapestry specially for the exhibition. It imagines a paradise populated by Scottish plants and wildlife that are at risk, including bats, bogbean and squirrels.

Whitburgh garden carpet

The Whitburgh Garden Carpet is again a Scottish-Persian (now Iran) fusion, this time of garden design and textile traditions. Also made by Dovecot Studios, It was inspired by the owner’s East Lothian walled garden, and reflects planting schemes moving from the warmth of autumn tones to the cool tones of winter. It was very beautiful as an artefact and as a concept. I subsequently found an article at this link2 which expanded my appreciation of the two tapestries, and gave me a greater appreciation of them.

Benton End and Bloomsbury looks

From tapestries to fashion. The outfit on the right celebrates Sir Cedric Morris, plantsman and breeder of rare species and irises, blending art and horticulture. In 2023 Fashion designer Erdem Moraliogu created designs celebrating the garden at Benton End.

The outfit on the left was inspired by the progressive Bloomsbury Group at Charleston, where they could live and create freely. Kim Jones of Dior created a menswear fashion line reflecting the radical nature of the Group, with the “look’ (I realise I should be calling these “looks” rather than “outfits”, but we don’t see too many looks in the north of Scotland) inspired by garden workwear and including images from paintings by Duncan Grant.

Sir Cedric Morris: Blackbird and Flowers

This painting by Cedric Morris was new to me. I love that the flesh of the pear in the centre is showing through, as the blackbird was interrupted in its pecking. If it’s anything like our blackbirds, it will give one peck and then move on to the next windfall, and the next…The style of the painting made me think of Tirzah Garwood’s work3.

There may have been exhibits immediately after that this that I appreciated but where I didn’t take photos, but I have no memory of them. I knew that I wanted to write about the exhibition when I went in, and so I took a lot of photos throughout. However it does beg the question if I would have had a different experience if I hadn’t had the documenting of the displays in my mind throughout. Reason number 1 to revisit the exhibition.

Planting celery in WW1 trenches

Having recently read ‘Where Poppies Blow’, by John Lewis-Stempel4, about the British soldier and nature during World War 1, I was interested to see this photo of celery planting in trenches. I do recommend the book. It struck me when reading it that it was solely about men’s activities, and I asked John Lewis-Stempel whether he had found evidence of women’s activities and writing about nature from the war. He very generously replied that he had, but had to limit the scope to the experience of the soldier. There’s certainly another book to be written about the female experience in this respect, given women who served in France as VAD nurses and ambulance drivers.

Swiss WW2 food production poster

Also in this section were World War 2 posters about food production, including this one from Switzerland. At first glance I took it for German, given the blondness of the youth and the looming soldiers. One of the most valuable things about the exhibition for me has been the avenues I’ve since explored. Based on this poster, I realised I knew very little about Switzerland during the war. Researching the food situation further, I’ve discovered a fascinating resource in the Swiss National Museum website, including this article on the use of railway land for food production.5

Alluring pesticides

We now move on the post war period, and in a bit of a leap my next photo is of packing for herbicides and pesticides sold by Geigy. The designs are by designer Andreas His and won a prize in 1957. The jury particularly praised their ‘toxic’ appearance…

This is where I rather lost the narrative, or perhaps I went the wrong way round the next section, which covered the politicisation of garden design. The only photos I have are of the cards explaining the exhibits – not riveting to look at, so I’ll summarise quickly.

· English town planner Ebenezer Howard devised the idea of a garden city in 1898. Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities in England were ultimately designed along his lines.

· Howard’s ideas influenced 20^th century Zionist planners. Large green suburbs encroached further and further into Palestinian territories, forcing out people who had lived there for generation.

· A vision for the city of tomorrow as presented in the film The City in 1939. This was of a ‘Green City’ as a desirable, community-oriented place. After the war this began to influence the design of suburbs in the US – although ensuring wide roads for cars.

Dutch garden designer Mien Ruys

Sparked by a podcast about urban planning that works for women, children and the elderly6, and also by Nigel Dunnett’s work, I’ve become interested recently in urban design and urban green spaces. Another welcome discovery then, in the work of the Dutch designer Mien Ruys, who created functional spaces that were open to all. Ruys worked with architects in the rebuilding of the Netherlands after World War 2. She focused on integrating communal spaces in cities, working with the surrounding architecture and using affordable building materials.

In 1950 Ruys published a book on perennials, which is credited with popularising gardening in the Netherlands. The book included high rise architecture, with advice on how to plant communal gardens in the shade, recognising that the available areas for gardens in these developments were often less than idea.. Her designs showed a fundamental concern for social issues, and the need to create a better quality of life for residents and users of public buildings and spaces. Further brief research has thrown up that Ruys’s father (who founded Moerheim nursery) had close links with Gertrude Jeykll, who loose planting designs influenced Ruys’s subsequent work. I discovered that the quarterly journal she founded with her husband, ‘Onze Eigen Tuin’ (Our Own Garden’)7 is still published today and that content can be accessed online. I can make a bit of painstaking headway in Dutch through having learned German, but I can see that I’m going to have to add ‘learn Dutch’ to the longlist.

There’s an interesting article at the Gardening Gone Wild8 website about Ruys as a major influence on later designers including Piet Oudolf. It also covers her use of garden structures, among which were the invention of portable raised garden beds and storage space under garden seating – ideal for accessible garden design and for people whose gardening space is a terrace.

Piet Oudolf design

With an introduction to the ‘new perennial’ movement through Ruys’s work, we get into it in a serious way with a large section about Piet Oudolf’s design process.

I’ll let a couple of photos above speak for themselves. I found his design process very heartening in that it springs from jotting down plants that fit the location. It underlined for me that to design planting you first need to have a ‘vocabulary’ of lots of different plants so that you can range among them mentally and start to select.

Eden Project Scotland

What looks like a cake cover or a salad spinner is in fact the architects’ model of part of the Eden Project Scotland. It’s planned for the contaminated former site of the Dundee gasworks. There are whoppingly large ambitions for it: “…brought back to abundant health, becoming a global exemplar of the transformative power of nature. As a visitor attraction and hub for innovation, culture, learning and creativity, it will showcase local and global approaches towards tackling the planetary emergency and help to fuel a sustainable future for Dundee and beyond, led by a new generation of Guilds”.

I spent a long time in front of the interactive Pollinator Pathmaker design, shown FN recently on BBC Gardener’s World.

This was the point at which the exhibition got away from me. There is so much to take in and I was visually and mentally saturated by this point. I can see the issue facing the curators – how to select from the variety of current projects, all of which point to the future of growing and garden design. A quick list of the current projects covered gives a flavour:

· Forest gardens

· Wildlife corridors

· Photo

· Wildflower meadows

· Vertical farms

· Winter gardens

· Biodegradable geotextile planters

· Vertical forests

· Self-powered rooftop greenhouses

· Edible neighbourhoods

· Edible estates

Chia chair

This is my boorach of impressions of the exhibition. I was guilty of losing the thread in the colonisation and appropriation sections, and I’m going to have to visit again to take in the present and the future sections. My experience of the exhibition was that it’s easier to summarise the past than the present, and certainly easier than trying to encapsulate the future. As Louis MacNiece put it in his 1938 poem ‘Christmas Shopping’, “Out there lies the future gathering quickly/Its blank momentum”. I’m sure a second visit will give me a better understanding of some of the sections. For those southerners among you who are already coming to the uncomfortable realisation that Dundee is not only north of Watford, but (gasp) north of Edinburgh, I realise that a second visit may not be an option. So go prepared to take your time. Take photos of exhibit rubrics that catch your attention. I’m so glad I did that, because as you can tell from this very footnote-heavy post, there are wonderful directions to explore.

Most creative use of English (non native speaker category)

Almost all the lorries I saw were European, which sadly nowadays does not include British. Slogans in English, as the international language of business, are one thing, but to be witty in another language on the side of a lorry is quite something:

It’s transpossible (German)

Very-ferry-good (Danish, plying by ferry to and from Sweden)

Flower Freight – we are great (NL) (winner of the ‘rhyming slogan’ category)

Trailermade solutions (German)

We like to mooovit, mooovit (bulk milk tanker with large picture of cow, Germany)

Not quite getting it right, but good effort

Then there were the laudable attempts, whose near misses in themselves made them worthwhile:

Alway (sic) on the right way

No-one roll’s it better. Extra points for misplaced apostrophe, almost enough to put it in the native speaker category

Coldest guarantee to success

100 years hurtig transport (‘hurtig’ means ‘quick/swift’ in Danish, but the effort of ‘years’ and ‘transport’ had obviously exhausted the slogan writer)

Daily transport to/from Swiss

Rather dull

Very much in the ‘could do better’ category:

Excellence, simply delivered (DHL). The dullest slogans tended to be from the multinational freight companies. It’s as if they’ve turned the task over to ChatGPT. The worst has to be the distressingly widespread ‘A passion for logistics’. Passion + logistics - really???

Intelligent logistics

We make the next move

Guaranteed express delivery

Dedicated to deliver

We move the bulk of it (and leave the rest??)

We are moving (one would hope so)

Not grasping the concept of ‘punch slogan’

Only one example of this, and it was lucky that I was able to read it all as we passed each other at 70+ miles an hour:

Our stainless steel contains the highest concentration of recycled steel on the market

British slogan awards

A microcosm of what it is to be British. The classical education as a preparation for a career in logistics (or politics - think British Prime Ministers and most of the Cabinet), a chirpy sense of humour, and attempts to look on the bright side despite the ‘couldn’t make it up-ness’ of life in Britain today:

Nec temere nec timide (neither rashly nor timidly)

FATSO – Fast Acting Transport Solutions

For cheerful service

Live life to the full and be happy

Overall award for inspirational thoughts on an autoroute

And with life in Britain today in mind, this slogan on a German lorry seems worth holding on to:

It is in our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.

You don’t normally go on holiday expecting to be wowed by municipal planting, but this is what happened to me in Sweden and Germany.

The first wow was in the Nova innovation quarter in the Swedish town of Trollhättan1. I was perhaps easily softened up to appreciate any greenery, as we’d just spent the morning at the SAAB car museum. The first three cars were interesting, beautiful even – those from the 1940s and 50s, all crafted leather seats and aesthetically pleasing colour schemes such as cherry red and cream. Thereafter my interest waned sharply (understatement). I preserved sanity by decamping to the fascinating photography archive telling the socio-economic history of the company, through its Swedish beginnings, its very Swedish company culture and impact on the local area, to the sad demise once swallowed up by globalisation and General Motors.

Thankfully exiting the museum at last, I was primed to be enraptured by the municipal Corten steel planters brimful of healthy, climate-appropriate greenery. This is a planting that’s going to look good and also be robust over more than one season. By winter the Bergenia may have taken on burnished copper tones that will harmonise with the Corten steel, while the conifers provide year-round green plus structure. I didn’t take a close enough photo to identify the taller plant in the middle, which looks as if it has flower heads. Google Lens has just shown its limitations by informing me that it’s Japanese Knotweed. Could it be Helenium? Any informed guesses welcome.

The Bergenia is repeated here, along with Alchemilla and what looks like Spirea betulifoflia, which has “outstanding autumn colour”, according to Ballyrobert Gardens2, and is H7 on the hardiness scale. Sounds like one for my plant list on the last quality alone.

We ended up in this area a few times during out stay in Trollhättan. It’s situated beside the Göta canal, with a beautiful circular walk along the canal and locks, and beside the massively powerful waterfalls. There are few things more fascinating than watching boats navigating canal locks, from huge bulk carriers to small yachts. The latter have the added interest of sudden dramatic “differences of opinion” between skipper (husband) and crew (wife) as the wrong rope is loosened at a crucial moment.

Despite all the activity on the water, I was diverted by this self-seeded Verbascum. It was doing far better than my pampered ones in a border at home - perhaps tough treatment is the way.

I shouldn’t really tell you this because I’d like to keep it a secret, but the other reason we returned a few times was to eat ‘dagens lunch’ (the set midday menu) at Nova3 café and restaurant. The most economical way to eat out in Sweden is to have the set lunch. Much cheaper than an evening meal, and often astounding value. To take an example from one day, for around £14 a head we had a sturdy fish and shellfish soup/stew, any number of self-slice artisan breads and butter/non-dairy spread from the attached craft bakery, a massively varied serve yourself salad bar, crêpes with lingonberry jam and whipped cream, a choice of various free refill fruit juices, sparkling or still water, low alcohol beer, then free refill coffee and cake.

Since this is meant to be about plants rather than food, back to the municipal planting. A lakeside town centre park in Karlstad had this wonderfully calming and harmoniously indigenous planting of birch trees and ferns. You could be deep in a Swedish forest, instead of a municipal park. Many of the trees were Betula pendula ‘Dalecarlica’, also known as the Swedish Birch, or Cut-leaved Birch.

There’s a lot to be said for giving muncipal planting over to a palette of green, rather than trying to pack as much visual, floral stimulation in as possible. Flowers only have their limited season in which they do their thing, and then the rest of the year is a bit of a let-down.

With prominence given to leaf shape and interest, it’s no wonder that Swedish designers reflect that in their work. Look at this fabric by Edholm Ullenius for Arvidssons Textil, seen in a shop window in Karlstad.

If flowers are in the local council DNA, however, why not be imaginative with colours and leaf interest.

The planting that impressed me most in Sweden was understated in the extreme, but both beautiful and perfectly suited to its environment. I came across these beds beside a car park in the small coastal village of Bovallstrand. Sometimes you just have to be realistic about what is going to thrive, and that is what Bovallstrand has done with Sedum and low-growing pine in one bed, and Sea Buckthorn and hardy geraniums in another.

I could do a whole other visit to Sweden to look at municipal planting alone, and return to petition my local council. Where it’s not in thrall to the red Pelargonium and silver Cineraria scheme, it seems to have given up on the idea of planting as a way to enhance public spaces. I know money is tight, but plant once and plant well is surely more effective than the one season traditional bedding display.

Perhaps I need to include Germany on this future tour. This final image is of an inspired roundabout (not two words that I ever thought I would combine) in the small German town of Greven.

I’d be interested to hear if you have enlightened municipal planting, or if you’ve noticed good examples on your travels.

Grebbestad bench flair

Quite apart from plants, I was I was inspired by garden furniture and planters in Sweden and on our journey home through Denmark, Germany and France. First up:

Garden benches

Why be dull with a bench? What a great way to take a few wonky chairs and a couple of planks, and turn them into a feature. If you want to see it for yourself, it’s at the harbour in Grebbestad, on the west coast of Sweden. I really shouldn’t tell you about Grebbestad, because it’s so lovely. As a Scot I manage to overlook the fact that the ‘grave’ element of its name comes from a large Iron Age grave site outside the town, said by local legend to be the burial place of a raiding party of warriors from Scotland. This hasn’t been proved by archaeology, but why let science get in the way of the story?

That bench was left clear for sitting on, but elsewhere there was a theme of ‘populated benches’. Some of these were in private gardens, like this one at an Airbnb we stayed at.

In small Danish towns where the house frontage gave directly onto a pedestrianised street, the benches outside houses were occupied by plants. I imagine this might be to prevent passers-by settling in on your private seating and would be moved when the owners wanted to sit outside and watch the Danish passeggiato, but it certainly enhanced town centre pedestrian streets with a sense of shared responsibility for brightening the environment.

Very twiggy trees in pots either on or beside benches were also a theme, and suggest that at Christmas the streets would be gently twinkling with fairy lights.

Some garden furniture was definitely not for sitting on. This tastefully simple chair was beside the door of our German Airbnb in a granny flat at the side of the main house1.

Planted chair award has to go to this one on at a silversmith’s at Valla on the Swedish island of Tjörn.

The dual purpose bench/plant pot repository is definitely something I could use. Every year I long to have a ‘table of Spring’, and every year I realise it would be blown over. But a solid bench with a few pots on it, ideally in wicker planters like these, would definitely work in my location.

The benches also made me realise that we don’t have a variety of sheltered seating areas in the garden.Since taking over the garden I’ve viewed it only as a workplace.Somewhere to ‘make progress’ in, rather than somewhere that beckons you out to relax in a sunny or shady corner. Until now I’ve shrugged this off with the words ‘Scottish winter’.We have a very heavy bench that we lug out of a shed towards the end of April and lug back again in October.It gets plonked down in a west-facing spot beside the kitchen window. A bistro set of table and two chairs, legacy of our sheltered Edinburgh patio, are similarly heaved in and out, often multiple times in a summer because it blows over in any strong wind. But it all feels very temporary. Jo Thompson had a great post about designing social spaces in the garden at The Gardening Mind. I need to really study this and do some thinking and planning over the winter.

Other accessories

Whereas Britain has a tendency to accessorise gardens with wishing wells, gnomes and hanging signs telling people the glimpse of the b*****n obvious, as Basil Fawlty would put it, that they’re in a garden, Sweden goes for exquisite taste.

A garden in a teacup

Hen as accessory

Ladder attention to detail

I don’t have an accessory urge, but I did love these, including the hen. Until I was 5 we lived with my grandmother in a house with a large garden – and hens. The hen house was an old horse-drawn caravan. As I remember, the hens mainly accessorised the kitchen table, which was set against a window that was usually open in summer. I have a clear memory of the frequent shouts of “there’s a hen in the kitchen!” and being sent to shoo the hen back out into the garden.

Raised beds

The thin soil over rock in many places in Sweden means that use of raised beds is common. Often these are painted Swedish red.

Our friend Anette has created a wonderful garden from raised beds. Here’s one in June, with supports already in place.

June raised bed

August raised bed

Anything can serve as a raised bed:

While I don’t have a boat (although perhaps my husband’s kayak would make an interesting feature…), I do have an old metal wheelbarrow that’s no longer servicable. Instead of taking it to the council recycling centre, I’m going to extend its life by a few years by growing things in it. All suggestions welcome for plants suitable for a wheelbarrow.

The small raised beds have also made me rethink a large area that I was planning to de-turf completely and turn over to veg. Now I realise that I really need to give myself an easier time (not getting any younger and all that) by leaving most of it as grass and having a few raised beds. Much as I like the Swedish raised beds, I’m tempted to go for Corten steel. We’re on the edge of agricultural land, and a rusty iron look would blend well with some ‘features’ of the landscape.

Greenhouse use

Judging by those we saw, greenhouses in Sweden tend to be used as sheltered seating areas, or sitooteries2, as much as for propagating plants. Indeed, our Airbnb hosts in Trollhättan seemed to use theirs exclusively for a warm seating area. Note the net shading, which can be used to temper the heating effect of the glass.

Swedish sitooterie, Trollhättan

Anette’s greenhouse, currently with many tomatoes but still room to sit.

These presentable Swedish greenhouses made me feel very slovenly. I’m an extremely untidy greenhouse grower. Apart from a central flagged path the floor is of earth. By this time of year, with no plants growing on, it’s extremely dry and dusty, and this dust gets everywhere inside the greenhouse. The staging is made from 3 scaffolding boards screwed onto a metal frame. Underneath the staging I have what in Scots is called a ‘rickle’3. Opened bags of compost, grit, horticultural sand, buckets, many cobwebs and a persistant nettle that I keep hacking back to no avail. The whole thing is 47 years old. Replacing it isn’t in the budget at the moment – too many plants to buy – but I’m going to aspire to being a bit more Swedishly clean and tidy and I’ve resolved to lay flags (well, not me personally) on the earth floor.

Containers

I saw many gorgeous window boxes and containers which had obviously been carefully considered. My containers are the last thing I think about every year. I don’t really think about them, come to that. Living where I do, I’m limited for choice by what the local garden centre decides people want. This runs on a year in, year out list of violas, pansies, heathers, lobelia, pelargoniums, begonias, petunias and ivy. Somehow it seems too indulgent to send for different plants that are only going to do one season, especially if additional ‘remote area’ carriage charges are applied for living north of Watford. So I dash in to the garden centre, well after that magic signal to ‘buy annual plants’ that everyone else has obeyed, and stare glumly at the forlorn remains.

Taking photos of window boxes and pots outside front doors while we were travelling felt just a bit too intrusive, so I only have a couple to show you. On an evening of 32C heat we went for a walk round the neighbourhood of the German town we stayed in. The front gardens were tiny, opening directly onto the pavement, and every one was wonderfully different and beautifully planted. Here’s one that I did overcome my Scottish reserve to photograph. Black and white house, white shutter, white window box, white window frieze. Keep it simple.

Northern France was rather more on the blue lobelia and red pelargoniums wavelength, albeit very floriferous and obviously well watered and fed. It breaks my heart every year to see people here putting annuals in tiny pots and then not realising how much watering they need. These window boxes in Bergues broke away from the standard offering and again follow the keep it simple rule.

Incidentally, if you don’t know Bergues, it’s a real gem. It’s near Dunkirk, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and was the location for the French comedy ‘Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis’.

All of this container beauty means that I need to do winter thinking about containers, and perhaps even order plants that I won’t be able to get locally. Jo Thompson’s post at The Gardening Mind about ‘The easiest garden containers ever’ is very much on the stylishly simple Swedish line, and I’ll be reading Scandinavian gardening websites to absorb as much as I can.

I didn’t expect to return from this trip with a kind of reverse holiday homework – the sort that you do after the holiday rather than during it. But it’s going to be a real pleasure, and part of the ongoing delight of gardening.