Battening down the hatches for winter

I've gathered in the last spoils of spring and summer sowing before battening down the hatches, in the kitchen garden anyway - and herein lies the dilemma. Vegetables are meant to be eaten, I know, but when they are so pretty, who can bear to? 

Take the pure white, shiny pattypans, that feel so nice in the hand and look like flying saucers with scalloped edges. They're meant to be eaten when a few inches in diameter, but like courgettes, they like to hide beneath their large leaves, so that some aren't discovered until they're a good deal larger. 

Steamed until tender, slathered with butter, they're quite delicious. But I prefer them gathered into a group on the sideboard, and interspersed with night lights. If they don't rot and have to be thrown out beforehand, I may use them as a Christmas table centrepiece, scattered with a little silver glitter dust.

Then there are the chilli peppers. Oh so many of them. Scotch Bonnets, Cheyennes, Cayennes, Apaches, Gusto Purple, all of which I grew to supply various shades of heat to guacamole, chilli con carne, casseroles...

Scotch Bonnet is supposed to be blisteringly hot but I'll never know, because I won't be using them in the cooking pot, but threading them onto cotton and hanging them on the dresser. So after growing all those chilli pepper plants in the greenhouse, it's back to a tube of chilli paste in the kitchen. 

Ridiculous, really, but having bought ready-strung garlands of peppers in Amalfi and bought them back in a suitcase, I know how lovely they look - not just for Christmas, but all year round. And I can always use them dried.

And then, of course, there are the pumpkins. What's the point of growing them if you don't get to eat them? What indeed. But I just can't bring myself to consign the beautiful turks' turbans to the cooking pot - or roasting tin.  Apparently they taste a little like turnip, a little like squash.

But again, I'm not likely to find out, because it's impossible to cut them up and cook them when they look so decorative, all in a line down the dining table. It makes sitting down and eating a meal rather difficult, because to tell the truth, they're rather in the way, but you can't have everything.

In January I will be working out my list of vegetable seeds for the coming year. I intend to be brutal, and grow no vegetable that I'm not prepared to eat. 

Christmas in Chelsea

Next Wednesday 16 November, 6pm-8pm, The Chelsea Gardener will be holding a Christmas shopping evening, offering a 20 per cent discount on all purchases. There will be exclusively made garlands, wreaths and centrepieces, unique tree decorations, gardeners' gift sets as well as freshly-cut firs for sale, which The Chelsea Gardener can deliver, install and dismantle. Canapes and drinks will be served; entrance is free.

This weather is bananas

Talking of which, you should see my banana plants. As far as they're concerned, they're having a second summer, and spreading out their huge propellor leaves in the sun; they get larger by the day. The Convolvulus sabatius is going crackers; confined to a small pot, it never produced as many flowers as this in summer.

When I went on holiday at the start of September, I had mentally confined the pelargoniums on the wall to the compost bin, because I knew the cat carer would never water them, and I'd return to find near-dead plants. In fact I did, and hadn't bothered to resurrect them.

However last Friday, when the weather perked up, so did they - after a trim back, water and feed. Now they are flowering their heads off (pictured, above): how long will they carry on like this?

For the first year ever, the winter-flowering pansies and autumn chrysanthemums are blooming alongside cannas, pelargoniums and petunias (above). So there's a veritable melee of seasonal mellow fruitfulness going on alongside the decidedly non-seasonal Mediterranean blooms.

As I write, the pumpkins are drying out in the sun (right) at the same time as the strawberries are flowering and fruiting all over again. Confused? You bet they are, and they're not the only ones.

Usually, at this time of year I'm ruthlessly ripping out the summer bedding and settling in the winter charges; out with the old, in with the new, not least because I'm keen to try new container combos.

Exceptionally, I've decided to make hay while the sun shines, even if that disrupts the colour scheme (summer had lots of blues and lilacs; autumn's scheme is all rusts and burgundies) and plant what autumn bedding I have alongside the old. The result is bold, bright and I feel I have the best of all seasons. Long may it last - even if it's just for a few more weeks.


There are dilemmas, though. I can't plant some of my spring-flowering bulbs till I've freed up the containers to plant them in, so I've dug up the cascades of blue lobelia in one pot and added them to another, so I can plant a bowlful of hyacinths, at least. Which is how orange winter-flowering pansies peek out alongside the blue lobelia, looking pretty if a bit incongruous. In these uncertain days of global warming, we gardeners have to be adaptable.

Showy begonias and dahlias are a joy in the late summer garden

The spoils of a late summer garden are many - provided you're not too fussy about flowers, ie a touch haughty-cultural. If you think begonias are vulgar, as some gardeners do, you're missing out.

What they lack in subtlety - and goodness knows, nobody could call them elegant or dainty - they make up for in showy, spectacular Las Vegas glamour. Huge flowers the size of my fist in the brightest of shades: the rich velvety scarlet layered blooms, like a dancer's skirt, seem to shimmer in the sun. It seems amazing that such abundance came from one small corm.

The other begonia that has been starring on my terrace is an unknown variety, because I rescued three scrappy plants from the remnants bin at the garden centre, and potted them up together. The result: cascading day-glo pink bellflowers that just keep on going, looking like outsize fuchsia flowers (below). They fall well, too, making blobs of colour on the ground that don't seem to fade.

I've yet to be won round by lemon begonias, but feel the same way about lemon dahlias, too. That hasn't stopped me growing dahlias in every other shade, notably the shocking pinks with marvellous chocolate foliage such as Excentrique and the wonderfully near-black cactus dahlia, Chat Noir (below).

Dahlias are tremendous value for money: bury the tuber, stand well back, and gasp at the display which starts when other summer flowers are peaking, and continues well into autumn. Like begonias, they've been sneered at by the cognoscenti for years, outlawed to the suburbs and local horticultural shows, until revived in recent years by the late Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter and Sarah Raven.
 
I must admit that new Dahlia Tahoma Moonshot (above) doesn't quite live up to her name: those lemon and cerise petals are special, but the flowers are dainty and gosh, even subtle - and that's one thing neither begonias or dahlias should ever be.

Show-stopping lilies

The jury's out...on which white lily has the most beautiful bloom. Is it flamboyant Muscadet, with its amazing 9ins wingspan and gorgeous, pink-speckled fluted petals, or pure, perfect white Casablanca, totally white and softly dimpled?

Possibly Muscadet wins by a pink speckle, but that could have changed if I'd grown pink-throated waxy white Lilium regale…..and come to think of it, Lilium longiflorum, the florists' white lily, which is just as easy to grow, is equally captivating.

(Above) The flamboyant Muscadet lily and (right) the perfect white Casablanca lily

African Queen dazzled us last month with her huge, rich apricot trumpet flowers - more the colour of a day lily - that fade down to a shade of warm sand. Just one flower in a water glass looks glorious.

Nerone, a Sarah Raven purchase in her signature deep claret Venetian shade, didn't disappoint either, and all those glossy flowers with swept-back petals, like giant tigerlilies, are so sumptuous that even though they've faded now, I can't bear to remove them.

(Above) Dazzling African Queen and (right) the Nerone has a deep claret shade

Now it's the turn of the beautiful bridal whites. All of them smell sensational. And the delicate, rose pink and white species lily, speciosum rubrum, with those wonderful curved-back petals, just creeps over the back of the sun lounger - grow lilies in pots and you can give them pole position - so anybody can lie there and become intoxicated by that heavenly perfume. They look like a beautiful Japanese painting.

(Above) The delicate, rose pink and white speciosum rubrum lily

Despite all the colour and clamour of the containers on my terrace, provided by dark sultry dahlias, jet-black petunias, yellow tomatoes and other delights, when the lilies are out, they steal the whole show. I can never quite believe that they can look so magnificent yet be such a doodle to grow. All you do is throw three or five bulbs into a potful of compost in spring - or the previous autumn if you're really organised - and put them away, out of the spotlight, and forget about them.

A mulch of grit helps keep out the slugs and snails and keeps the pots looking neat. The leafy stems start to poke out of the compost early in summer, and keep growing - not always at the same rate, but you can't have everything. From that point you have to keep an eye out for the red lily beetle which loves nothing more than to chomp out the flower buds, so vigilance is key, but it certainly pays off.

Amazingly, after having put in such a fantastic performance, the bulbs will do exactly the same thing the following year. I can't think of any other plants that will give such spectacular results for so little work on the gardener's behalf.

My Chelsea Flower Show highlights

Peeking at the Chelsea show gardens before the public gets to see them is one of the perks of my job. There are no crowds to spoil the view and the atmosphere, despite being a mere 24 hours before the Show begins, is comparatively serene, probably because everybody is half dead from fatigue.
 
I'm convinced half of the designers don't go home the night before but just settle down in a corner of their garden; so much easier for the 5am start the following morning, when the photographers arrive.

Bunny Guinness (above) could just sleep under one of the giant cloches in her over-scaled kitchen garden, which was one of my favourite show gardens: I loved the outdoor fireplace with glass-floored living room above (pictured below). When I asked her which vegetables she thought were the most decorative for us townies to grow in our borders, she replied they all are: and she's right. And reassuring to know that she actually lives the dream, and spends happy hours when she's not designing other people's gardens, in her own kitchen garden.

Using recycling and reclaimed materials featured large at Chelsea: the knack is making old materials look knockout rather than knackered. Nigel Dunnett pulled it off beautifully with his RBC New Wild Garden (below), with an old shipping container given fresh life as a garden studio. Painting it a soft blue, adding a green roof and attaching sculptural discs to the front wall that were actually insect habitats turned it into veritable eye candy.

I want one, but where to find a shipping container? The wonderful low, curved drystone walls he featured were topped with no-maintenance houseleeks and in-filled, he told me, with any old reclaimed objects, including books from the local Oxfam shop; these also had hidey-holes for insects.

B&Q's version of an insect hotel (below) was decidedly more luxurious: a high-rise wall with habitats created by youth groups and schools for insects, bees, birds and bats, though none were visible at the Show.

 
The high-rise tower block of growing edibles - like windowboxes stacked one on top of the other - was a brilliant concept from the designers Laurie Chetwood and Patrick Collins, who won a Gold medal for the garden, but I wasn't sure how the giant glass and perspex dining table, with goldfish swimming around in a tank beneath, fitted in (below). I guess it's just spectacle, which is what Chelsea is all about.

 
Talking of spectacle, Diarmuid Gavin's giant pink pod (below), hoiked up high above the crowds with a crane, presented the ultimate in visuals: nobody could top that. But despite the inevitable comments deriding him for making a completely unrealistic garden, Diarmuid won a Gold, so he had the last laugh. And if you view the pink pod up close, it is amazing, and beautifully planted.

But what really worked for me, and others who bothered to take a closer look, was the ground-level planting: clipped 'clouds' of box and yew with multi-stemmed trees and grasses … in its quiet, exquisite way, the lush green planting, which would translate well into an urban front garden, was the real star of the Irish Sky Garden.

But the one garden which many of us confessed we'd most like to loll about in was the Monaco garden (below), oozing Riviera glamour and style. Perhaps we can't grow carob and citrus trees outdoors, and maybe we don't have the space - or climate - for an outdoor lap pool, but we can dream, can't we? And I must admit that plonking a field of lavender on a garden rooftop beats sedums hands down.

The trend for looser, more naturalistic planting has sunk into our psyches by now, and everywhere, on all the gardens, the planting schemes were soft and subtle, with key colours of maroon, pinks and bronzes, best shown on the Laurent-Perrier garden.

The Cancer Research UK Garden (below) showed some great native drought plants, including Spanish broom Sparteum junceum and viper's bugloss.

If I could pull a key plant from several different schemes, though, it would be the burnt-brown iris Kent Pride, which put in its first showcase appearance on the Evening Standard's town garden, designed by Dan Pearson, back in 1990, proving, I guess, that truly great plants never date.

When did spring turn into summer?

The pansies, tulips and even a few daffodils are breathing their last gasp during this sultry spell - and buying summer bedding, from pelargoniums to red banana Ensete, because last year's predictably died a death, is high on the list.

It's thrilling that everything's so advanced: less thrilling that the red lily beetle has already put in an appearance in the folds of a Lilium regale's emerging foliage. Keep a watch on your lilies - and if you should see the Chinese-red beetle, show it no mercy, even though it looks pretty, and a bit like a spotless ladybird. Just one can see off a whole potful of lilies.

In the kitchen garden, the Euphorbia characias that is at the base of the olive tree, the centrepiece of the four veg beds, is billowing around the nearly completed defoliated tree as if protecting it. Huge heads of acid-green frogspawn flowers reach halfway up the trunk, looking as if they're trying to warm it up and will the bare stems into leaf. Alas, not much so far, but I live in hope.

The tree has till this weekend to come up with a pulse, as a trip is planned to Big Plants in Sussex - and another olive tree is top of the list. One can't mourn for ever...there just isn't the time. 

The black plastic, pinned on one veg bed to give the young courgette and pattypan plants a warm welcome (it wasn't really necessary, but who knew?) has been pulled off, and a mound of soil made, enriched with compost, for each one, to provide the rich, fertile soil courgettes love.

To steal a march on the lettuce seeds, I bought some baby plants from the garden centre: Little Gems are always worth growing, but I only bothered with Lollo rosso, which never really tastes of anything, because it makes a pretty deep red frill....but now I'll get down to business and sow a few beauties such as red-flecked Freckles and the pretty, dark-leaved Little Gem, Dazzle.

I've grown Sarah Raven's scarlet and navy sweet peas from seed to be sure of some bright splashes of colour, and bolstered these with a mixed bunch of sweet peas from the garden centre, going by the theory that any sweet pea is gorgeous, and has a superb scent.

My clever husband has found a way of extending the wigwam I bought last year (why are they always too short?) by simply putting one wigwam on top of another, like a hat, to make a sort of wicker man about 7ft6ins high. That ought to do it.

Gravel gardens are great, not least because they encourage plants to self-seed: that is the perceived wisdom, but what people never tell you about is the opportunists that settle among the stones too: weeds by every other name. Only the bravehearted - ok, the truly bonkers - don't put membrane beneath to try and stop the weeds. But if you do have membrane, then the good guys can't seed themselves around either, and I'm holding out for the French tufted lavender that I know is just longing to make colonies of sweet-scented lavender all over the place.

And now I've pulled out the goosegrass and routed out the stinging nettle (ouch!) and dandelion, I can see welcome waifs and strays: a scrap of oregano that has made its home here, a bit of Lychnis coronaria that has settled there - actually, it might be a Verbascum, but that's welcome too, and any amount of grey-leaved poppies.

Meanwhile the Salvia turkestanica promises to be massive, the trailing Euphorbia myrsinites is just lime-green gorgeous, the santolinas are looking lovely and the Coronilla glauca is wearing bright yellow flowers on its pea stems. And the house is full of lilac - who cares if the tree only blooms for five minutes if it produces fragrant, beautiful flowers like these?

Offering an olive branch to winter gardens

How to get everything done? Suddenly it all needs attending to urgently: I am running around the garden like the White Rabbit, trying to do it all at once...

The vines still haven't been pruned, the veg beds need manuring, the compost needs turning, the rose bushes need shaping, there are still pots bearing dead foliage...Oh, and did I mention that the deck needs pressure washing and the plant stands sanding down and repainting? Don't even ask what's going on in the greenhouse. I don't know, because I daren't look.

Clearing up the garden that is waking up from winter makes spring-cleaning the house a breeze by comparison. Small wonder I just feel like sitting at the kitchen table and doing a gentle task that keeps me indoors: chitting the potatoes. At least I have tubers and egg boxes to hand.

In truth, there is another reason that pulls me away from the garden: my beloved olive tree that put on so much growth in the last three years since being transplanted as a babe in arms - well, babe in pot - into the ground. Last summer it was thick with silvery-green foliage and even had small, hard fruits by the end of the season - this winter it is practically leafless, as if it were a deciduous tree with a natural habit of dropping its leaves. I can't bear to look at it.

When I first noticed the lack of leaves, I panicked; had I lost it? Was it dead? Should I have wrapped it up in layers of fleece? I called the emergency services: Big Plant Nursery, the nursery in West Sussex that sells the widest range of olive trees in the UK - and some of the oldest, too; you can buy, if you have the space, 150-year-old trees with huge trunk girths of around 100-120cms for a mere £975...

Big Plant's Mark Sylvester reassured me that just because my olive tree's stems are devoid of leaves doesn't mean they won't come back: they will. He also said that on mature trees when foliage is lost, the trunk will often resprout, lower down.

He said that all the olive trees at the nursery, ones that are home grown as well as those that are shipped over, are kept outside for the whole season because they really don't need protection from the cold. The problem isn't the freezing temperatures: it's lack of water.

He explained that because olives are evergreens, they need light and water through winter - and we have had long periods of drought. And when the ground is frozen, water can't get to the roots. He advised watering through dry periods - and of course that holds especially true for olives in containers. In spring, any dead bits of stem can simply be pruned back. Mark also recommended a seaweed feed both in spring and summer.

So I've given my tree some generous waterings and I'm waiting, fingers firmly crossed. If you have an olive tree that looks less than healthy, you might want to do likewise. You won't want to see a picture of my tree as it is now, so instead I'm showing you one of Big Plant Nursery's (above). It certainly cheers me up.

Looking forward to summer's fabulous blooms

As it's January, I thought I'd cheer myself up - and you too, hopefully - by reminding myself what the garden can produce, with a picture of glorious summer cutting flowers (above). I have to 'fess up, however, that this inspiring bunch of blooms - sumptuous dark velvety dahlias, pink cosmos, agastache, Verbena bonariensis, zinia and scarlet salvia - came not from my patch but my friend Barbara Kennington's, who bought them round last summer. Looking at this inspires me to order some dahlia tubers from Sarah Raven's new catalogue instantly. It's vital during January's grey days to have something fabulous to look forward to.

Be thankful that I didn't have my camera with me when I visited my local Homebase over the holidays, because otherwise you would be gazing, slack-jawed, at a horrible sight: rows of heathers.

Now I've got nothing against heathers: in fact, the great point about heathers, as I see it, is that you can't really tell whether they're alive or dead, so if you have several in a container, and you forget to water them, it doesn't really matter. Nobody will know. Just throw them out when spring comes. They're the poor man's winter succulents in that they need absolutely no maintenance.

These heathers were truly terrible: they were all colours of the rainbow, because they had been tinted - tainted, more like - with vegetable dyes. I know we should all be making an effort to get colour into the garden at this bleak time of year, but this isn't the way to do it, with royal blue, purple and bilious green bedding plants.

Homebase did redeem itself a little bit, though, with a fine display of scarlet dogwoods, each a decent size and ready for planting. For real impact, you need to plant several of these where the low-winter sun can light up the branches - then you have the equivalent of a roaring, warming fire.

If you want the same effect on the patio, you're better off buying loose scarlet dogwood  - Cornus sanguinea Midwinter Fire or deeper red alba Sibirica - stems from the florist, and prodding them into a potful of compost to make a full and fiery show.

Apart from the benefits to the birds, for me, the point of keeping the birdfeeders full is that it gets me out there practically on a daily basis - and once I'm outside, unless it's doing something terrible weather-wise, I stay for a while...because I keep seeing things to do.

Right now, it's all about putting what I can to rights: cleaning and mending broken pots, tidying paths, picking up leaves. I have to do it in spurts because the cold hits after a while.

I miss the garden's colour and energy so much in winter that I decided to guarantee myself some permanent colour, even when the weather drives me indoors: hence the sofa (above), covered, to the upholsterer's delight - he said nobody goes for florals - in the biggest, boldest flower print (thank you Designers Guild for a sale bargain) I could lay my paws on. And it does make me smile: a little corner of my home that is forever flowering, and reminds me of sunny holidays, too - especially Key West. It's definitely more Miami than Margate.

Keeping my plants warm in winter

Let it snow, what do I care? After last year's weather assault, I've taken no chances. The banana plants have been cut down and white fleece hoods, like plant balaclavas, pulled over them to protect the growing centres, before being installed in the greenhouse.

During last winter, the handsome yucca on the terrace - more like a palm tree - finally succumbed to the continuous frost and snow, and it was a sad demise, the bunches of green leafy shoots turning to mush at their bases; they literally came away in my hands. And this was despite being given the fleece hood treatment so that through the living room window, right through winter, the yucca appeared to be a looming ghostly spectre, which wasn't very cheery, either.

So this year's new charge, bought from the houseplant section of Homebase and doing very nicely through summer, is now sitting comfortably, on the other side of the glass, right next to the sofa. Dropped into a larger celadon blue ceramic pot, and the compost covered with big pebbles, it looks rather decorative.

Meanwhile we can barely move around the dinner table for plants ranged three-deep along the floor, but this way I know they're safe from harm. Despite bubblewrapping the greenhouse, I felt my more vulnerable charges - and I reckon the smaller the plant, the more vulnerable - would be better off in the dry and warm, where I can keep an eye on them.

So that is how the avocado plant, the big black aeonium and two of its babies, three aloes, a young but super-prickly cowboy cactus and any number of small indeterminate succulents are all packed together onto a couple of Mexican-style mats (to underline the cactus garden theme), which in turn are protected by dishes under the pots. And though they're not likely to throw out any flowers or do anything dramatic growing-wise over the next few months, they do add an exotic indoor-garden touch to the place, even if moving away from the dining table a couple of inches becomes a hazardous exercise.

Already one pot in the front line has been overturned by William the cat (he is on the large side so a bit clumsy; the vet is, I kid you not, trying to get me to sign up to animal weight watchers) and dispensed grit and compost over the wooden floor.

There is another hazard: kept indoors over long periods, succulents, particularly the aeoniums, tend to get a messy bug which takes the form of sticky white blobs that need to be wiped off with hot water - not an easy task even with a cotton bud and a lot of patience - just think of all those nooks and crannies - or eventually they take the foliage with them. The hope is that it doesn't spread to the rest of the succulents. Cleaning up all of those would really be beyond me.

Meanwhile on the terrace the sunloungers look a little incongruous (we meant to haul them into the garage weeks ago but oh, the weight of them) as does the barbecue, but at least that's a nice cheery turquoise. At this time of year, the garden needs all the colour it can get.