Quotidian

An A-Z of 2024 in the garden: Year ending

It’s always a delight to see these catkins as the year is ending. Bright, shining, moving in the breeze, they are an inspiration for the year ahead. But elsewhere in the Dumfriesshire Garden there are still plenty of reminders of the year that’s coming to a close. The pictures below also have their own beauty, revealing the structures and variations in common plants that fill our borders and the annual cycle of the trees.

The year ending, as I have shown in this A-Z of the garden in 2024, has been rather mixed. A curate’s egg, good in parts, but also with losses and disappointing results. Yes, the roses, the potatoes, the bog plants and the younger trees all did well. But the bursts of colour in the big border didn’t materialise as in previous years and the weeds got unruly. The garlic crop was meagre compared to last year. The spring bulbs were patchy. A number of transplanted viburnums didn’t make the transition. At best, we could describe it as a contradictory year in the garden.

Yet if we set these minor vicissitudes against the greater problems in the world, any horticultural misgivings seem a crass indulgence. Whatever the merits and demerits of the gardening year, we are always left in credit. The garden is something I live with constantly and day by day. When I’m away, I garner new ideas for it. The garden has a unique place in my life: the perfect backdrop to my quotidian world and the people I love most dearly.

So as this year nears its end, I feel thankful, and look forward to 2025 along with everything it may bring – and not only in the garden.

The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/

An A-Z of 2024 in the garden: Xanthocyparis Vietnamensis

This letter of the alphabet was causing me a problem with my A-Z of the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024. Then I realised the solution was right in front of me.

One day this summer, my neighbour rang to say that the owner of a large specialist plant nursery in Galloway had called to say hello and in his van was large number of interesting plants. This is a call which does come from time to time, and to which I happily respond. The horticultural equivalent of the ‘fish van’, albeit intermittent, is a wonderful opportunity to buy interesting material at the garden gate, and not to be missed. On this particular day I bought a variety of shrubs as well as an unusual hornbeam (Carpinus Fangiana) and a rather special horse chestnut, Ohio Buckeye (Aesculus Glabra).

Content with my haul, and somewhat poorer, I turned with my wheelbarrow, only to receive one more compelling pitch from the plantsman. The shining green specimen in question was the Vietnamese Golden Cypress – or Xanthocyparis Vietnamensis. Despite the ‘golden’ of the common name, it seemed to have a touch of silver sparkle about it. The plant was obviously healthy and had been grown locally. But I was told it had only been discovered in the wild in 2001 and is considered an endangered species. At £18 I added it to my purchases and vowed to take care of it.

Over the summer I kept it on the terrace among other groups of potted plants. When early frosts arrived in September I decided to bring it into the house, where it sits happily among more standard indoor plants. Thus cared for, it has almost doubled in size. I think I’ll continue with this interior-exterior mode of cultivation and if the plant gets stronger it will eventually go out into the garden proper. I’m hoping for great things from this recent and rare arrival – bought off the back of a van.

Sadly, it will no longer help with ‘X’ in any future A-Z that I may write. Following various taxonomic disputations, its name has now been changed to cupressus-vietnamensis

The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/

An A-Z of 2024 in the garden: Winter and its tasks

The tasks of winter in the garden, it seems to me, are twofold.

On the one hand there are practical things that need our attention. Pruning out the hazels, tidying up the rose arch and the bentwood hornbeam tunnels. There is some strimming to be done in the longer grass where daffodils and narcissi will be pushing through even before the year’s end. There are leaves to rake, first into serpentine forms if the fancy takes, and then piled up to make leaf mould or dragged onto weeded borders as a mulch. There’s also planting, mainly of trees and shrubs. This December in an unusual mild spell, I’ve been busy putting in rowans, acers, juniper and viburnum. Then don’t forget the vegetable patch – cleaning out some of the raised beds, tidying up the leeks, keeping watch for the garlic to appear in bright shining rows. Such are the tasks we take on when feeling energised or called outside by a spell of sunshine and a patch or two of blue sky on a winter’s day.

But there is another exquisite garden task in winter that should not be ignored or under-estimated. I am thinking about contemplation. For when the leaves are gone, the garden reveals to us its structure, drawing our eye in different ways and suggesting new ideas. When snow and frosts come (not much this year) the appearance of the garden is further enhanced. Winter is a time for deeper thoughts and plans. It’s also a time for reading and for entering the storied world where the unique array of relationships between gardeners and gardens are revealed in all their fascination.

Both sets of garden tasks are important in winter time, though the second is of course the more tempting!

The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/

An A-Z of 2024 in the garden: Visiting other gardens

I’m not an assiduous visitor of gardens, though I do have my favourites, such as Hidcote Manor in the Cotswolds (seen here in the featured image), which we head to at every opportunity. Visiting any garden is always a chance to garner new ideas and inspirations and maybe to bring them home for local adaptation.

Sometimes the stimulus comes from unlikely places. The tree planting at the University of Navarra, for example, was instrumental in shaping my ideas for the arboretum in the Dumfriesshire Garden. The sunken garden at the Crichton Campus in Dumfries also found a refracted application in a sunken area of my own garden ‘design’. In 2024, three contrasting gardens stand out as sources of pleasure and influence that might in some small way be transferred and translated at home.

We spent a very wet five days in the Lake District in mid-April. I enjoyed wandering around the informal country garden as well as the more structured elements adjacent to the property and had two take away ideas.

First the photinias. I noticed how they were doing well planted in grass and in wet conditions. So when I got home, I replicated the approach near the pond in my own garden. In the more woodland area of the Lakeland garden, with its mown paths, I encountered a beautiful wooden circle that was pleasant to walk through, but which also created a wonderful focal point and could be seen from various angles. This surely will merit a conversation with our joiner in 2025.

In July, a few days in Paris provided the chance to visit the Luxembourg Gardens, well known through films and novels but never experienced first hand. It covers 25 hectares, divided between the ‘French’ and ‘English’ styles. With its centrepiece of elegant fountains falling into a 50 metre long bassin, an orangerie, and chestnut groves it has much to admire. ‘Le Luco’ as the Parisians call it, has everything a city could want in a public space. Including its wonderful garden furniture, stylish and robust and perfectly suited for a quiet spot in the Dumfriesshire Garden!

August brought a weekend at Matfen Hall in Northumberland , where a recent uplift had included enhancements of the original Victorian garden. Like all the best gardens, this one demonstrated the important quality of foresight, manifested especially in wonderful trees to delight generation after generation. Thus inspired, and on returning home I planted a giant redwood (at the moment about 15 inches high) to add to other specimen trees like coast redwood, Californian pine, holm oak and cedar of Lebanon that are already doing well in the Dumfriesshire Garden.

If travel ‘broadens the mind’, it also has the capacity, even in small ways, to enhance our gardens at home.

The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/

An A-Z of 2024 in the garden: Uninvited guests

For a place that is largely unfenced and merges seamlessly with the surrounding landscape, the Dumfriesshire Garden has been mercifully free of serious damage by rabbits and deer. Certainly the former have been scarce in numbers in recent years, but the latter are seen regularly in the nearby woods and fields and do occasionally visit the garden. In the past they have browsed on young holly and on dogwood stems in winter. One year they munched off all the seedheads of my meconopsis before I could collect and store them. But in general they have not caused serious damage.

The night of 9th/10th February 2024 was a different story however. On this occasion what may have been a small group of deer, species unknown, came into the orchard and with antlers and teeth, made play with the trunks of some still fairly young apple and plum trees.

I rapidly closed the stable door after the horse had bolted. Wire netting was found in the garden shed and quickly wrapped around a half dozen trees. In a few cases I wondered whether the damage had been enough to kill the tree. Fortunately that was not the case. But the uninvited guests of a February night undoubtedly contributed to the sub-optimal apple crop of 2024.

Come the spring, one plum tree failed to come into leaf and was later pronounced dead. Paradoxically it was one the deer had left alone.

The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/

An A-Z of 2024 in the garden: Topiary and clipped evergreens

Topiary is putting it rather strongly. There are no elaborate geometric forms, leaping dolphins or stags at bay in the Dumfriesshire Garden. But over the lifetime of the garden I have come to appreciate more and more the evergreens (and the beech hedging) that we have been able to clip into pleasing shapes. In truth I wish I had planted more yew, box, and ilex in years gone by. Especially at this time of year, when their clipped forms seem to emerge from herbaceous borders, come increasingly into view, and give structure and elegance to the garden.

Recently I have discovered a faster growing alternative holly and yew, in the form of lonicera nitida. This tough plant not only establishes itself quickly, but cuttings that fall to the ground from the shears are quick to take root, thereby providing a steady supply of new cuttings which can be brought on in pots before planting out around the garden. This lovely lonicera ring, seen below, surrounding a garden table and chairs was planted in spring 2020 and is already one of the most striking feature in the garden. So topiary may not be the long game that many people think. I am certainly planning more creations, and using home grown material to create them.

The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/

An A-Z of 2024 in the garden: Salads, herbs, fruit and vegetables

It’s one of the great pleasures of gardening to grow some crops for the family to eat. However modest the quantities, something grown at home, freshly harvested or carefully stored over time adds to our diet and the pleasures of eating. To this end, the greenhouse and the raised beds work in conjunction to extend the growing season, providing an early bite and a late garnish.

I like to grow early salads in bowls in the greenhouse, moving on to herbs like dill and coriander when the weather gets warmer. Then I plant out red and green pick-and-come-again varieties of lettuce, followed later by the hearting varieties. all of these started off in the greenhouse. For more than six months of the year it’s possible to ignore the salad section in the supermarket. We have parsley all year round, under glass and outdoors, though this year a nasty frost in November put paid to a lovely row of that all-round useful herb. It can be seen in the pictures below, flattened next to the first sproutings of garlic.

In 2023 the garlic crop was exceptional and saw us through to harvesting in late June this year. But the 2024 crop was meagre by comparison. The bulbs were small in general and in some cases did not subdivide into cloves. Come planting time this year I bought in fresh seed stock and am hoping for better results in 2025.

Potatoes, however, did superbly well this year. One half of a raised bed kept us fed for five months. The crop was heavy and generally in good condition. The leeks too have been very excellent, and I continue to stick with the reliable old-fashioned short variety, Musselburgh.

The apple crop I have already described. The last ones in store are the Bramleys and they will see us through until the end of January. The raspberries yielded enough fruit to make a batch of jam, but the patch is in need of two things: some fresh canes to replenish old stock, and a hefty mulching of well rotted manure.

At the moment (21st December – the day of the Winter Solstice) the weather is very mild. I am tempted to sow a bowl with salad seeds in the greenhouse. There’s just a chance they will germinate and provide a few leaves to add to a sandwich before the new year is too far advanced. I’m keeping an eye on the rhubarb patch too, and hoping to force a few early stems.

As elsewhere in the garden this year, the vegetables, salads and fruit have been like the Curate’s Egg – good in parts. Yes some things did well, but there was nothing quite like the spectacular escarole, seen in the picture below, which did so much to excite an Italian visitor in August 2023. But 2025 is another year, and who knows what culinary delights it will bring forth?

The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/

An A-Z of the 2024 garden: Roses

Roses are not my specialty. But they are nevertheless essential to most gardens. In the Dumfriesshire Garden the big rose feature is the rambler on the metal arch. We try to tidy it up every winter as it seems to get more and more unruly. But the effect can be fantastic. It’s had a really good year in 2024, as can be seen here, and with extended flowering,

I have a couple of paeony roses in a not sunny enough and slightly out of the way spot, so as soon as they start to bloom I cut them, bring them into the house and let my inner florist get to work.

This year I also planted a new short climbing rose, named after Gertrude Jekyll, one of the great garden innovators of the 19th and 20th centuries. The rose is a wonderful deep pink colour and has a lovely old-fashioned fragrance. It is settling in well, propped up by a couple of hazel rods for support, though I’m looking for a more decorative frame for next year.

Finally, let’s not forget the borrowed landscape and in this case, the lovely, delicate dog roses that appear in June along the boundaries and watery margins of the garden. They too are well worthy of their place.

The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/

An A-Z of 2024 in the garden: Quercus Ilex

It was a fine February day in 2019 and I was on a pleasant visit to St Andrews. Sitting in the sheltered sunshine of the courtyard beside the University’s School of Divinity, I was struck by the massive tree, with it huge girth, that dominated the space. The tree was in the perfect shape of a mature oak, and yet its leaves were waxy evergreen, rather like holly. I went off in search of more detail and discovered that this magnificent specimen, said to the be the finest in Scotland, is a Holm Oak, or Quercus Ilex. Later that year, on holiday in France near Bordeaux, I came across another example of the same tree in the grounds of a ruined abbey. Here it seemed totally at home in the hot afternoon, wonderfully shaped and with a mass of dusty-green foliage.

When I got home, I quickly looked up the tree again, and despite reference to its Mediterranean origins, I ordered a small specimen, about 3 feet tall, growing in a pot. I duly planted it in the middle of a circle of dark dogwoods and hoped for the best. How would it fare in our mild, wet region – so different to the Gironde or indeed to Fife. In the intervening years, I have been delighted to see my Quercus Ilex rebut wind, rain, snow and frost and make steady progress. Not yet a specimen tree in the conventional sense, and photographs still don’t quite do it justice, but the Holm Oak, first brought to Britain around 1500, is among my favourite trees in the Dumfriesshire Garden. It is now about 8 or 9 feet tall and puts on healthy growth each year. Looking at the pictures here, I should perhaps try to improve the staking. Beyond that it is left to its own devices and brings forth my fond admiration when I look at it each day. It has also nicely solved the ‘Q’ problem in this A-Z of the garden in 2024!

Oh and by the way, here below is a picture of the St Andrew’s Holm Oak, taken by me in 2019. Thought to have been planted about 1740, its short trunk is 12 feet in girth. Apparently it suffered some storm damage to its crown about 20 years ago and had to be pruned heavily at the time, but quickly put on new growth. Its toughness bodes well for my Dumfriesshire Garden specimen.

The full list of pieces that make up my A-Z in the Dumfriesshire Garden in 2024 can be found here: https://davidgrahamclark.net/a-z-of-the-dumfriesshire-garden-in-2024/

An A-Z of 2024 in the garden: Pots

Most gardens have some pots of some kind: for that special plant, some early bulbs or perhaps for summer annuals. I’m pretty much the same, though in recent years I’ve got more interested in having them dotted around the place in small groups and have invested in a few more upmarket specimens, from a favourite maker in the Cotswolds.

There’s a lot of pleasure in growing things in pots, for me especially in the early spring, where they can be moved in and out according to conditions. The greenhouse is a favoured place for growing things in pots. I tend to go for more exotic bulbous plants there, and have had some success with things like Pineapple Lily and Colcasia, though not necessarily with over-wintering them. In the last couple of years I’ve been buying sometimes sad-looking Japanese maples from supermarkets and trying to bring them on with a bit of tender loving care. They certainly enjoy being under glass through April and May, coming into leaf a little earlier than their outdoor companions and looking very nice when the early season sun appears.

There’s another group of pot-grown plants that I actually bring into the house in the coldest weather. A lovely silvery tinged Fatsia Japonica, given to me last Christmas, comes into that category, as does a Norfolk Island Pine, bought one year ago in the Edinburgh botanic gardens. When the weather is particularly good I operate in reverse and even take out house plants, such as the succulent Aloe Vera, seen here basking in the Dumfriesshire sunshine.

Of course, pots are excellent for bulbs. This year I have some narcissi and tulips all planted and ready. I am also keen on growing hyacinths in glazed pots. We have them on a wire jardiniere outside a window, so they can be seen from the hallway. They give a lot of pleasure for quite a time, and with no bothersome malodour in the house. With the bulbs, I have taken, as with some other plants, to topping off the compost with mosses gathered from the garden: a very pleasing effect.