Plant of the week – July
This is my red leaved banana, green leaves with red stems and herring bone veins, glossy, impossibly imposing, its central shoot scrolled into a beetroot spike before loosening into a funnel then relaxing into leaves beneath another shoot. Everyone says how splendid, and then, when’s it going to flower? Which it won’t, it’ll be dead long before it has a chance to consider this. It’s enough that now, every day, it is here, revealing a fresh leaf and spike every few days. The sun shines through 
in late afternoon, making it psychedelic, a creature half plant half animal. It guards me while I dream.
Four of these red leaved bananas stand to attention in pots beside the patio steps. They call to us, to pay attention and listen. They grow taller and taller, grander by the day. The name is Musa ensete maurellii.
Flaubert said, to make anything interesting, you simply have to look at it long enough. I never thought much about lobelias – I like them in summer flowing out of their pots, a cheery background to all the rest of the garden. I buy em in and pull em out, summer and autumn – annuals are lightweights, not stayers. Then out of their hundreds of tiny blue flowers I looked at one. It had a face – slanting white eyebrows and black mouth with a droopy three pronged white beard to summon insects in, and I had never...
> MORENearly August. There’s been rain – everything through its grey veil seems to quiver upwards. I stayed inside until it stopped. Outside the wooden water butt has swelled and closed the gaps in drying wood. Here there aren’t enough flowers to shout, and the only reason the garden looks any good at first sight is the leaves – the variegated cornus looking pale and interesting, the shiny hands of the fatsia with pointy nails, the maroon flutes of Eucomis Purple Burgundy and the strange reds of Persicaria Red Dragon, and the all...
> MOREI’m fed up with my garden birds, blackbirds, thrushes the lot! Loads of gooseberries, which I don’t mind sharing, but why do they always take the easiest to pick, leaving me with prickly hard to reach fruit in the middle of the bush? Especially now, when Whinham’s Purple left to change from green to pink to dark sweet delicious purple, the size of pullets eggs, hasn’t had a chance. They’re virtually all gone. Next year, remember, NETTING. No wonder the craze for PYO is over. The wretched growers...
> MORESummer scents! It’s the honeysuckle spread like a shawl woven gold and cream over branches of a tall Stranvaesia (?) which wave up and down, it’s the double philadelphus at the far end of the garden, it’s the trachelospermum which sheets the shed wall in twisty white stars. The philadelphus is quite pungent, but the other two waft scents I can live with all day, no bullying here, like the lavender which has just started to open, they are more stroke than shove. Soon there will be lilies, strong and sinister with...
> MOREThis year, eleven gardens on the main street of our village, Alresford, were open for charity. Owners had been sweating guts for weeks. All the houses along Broad Street are Georgian because after two massive fires in the 18th century they were rebuilt, each different, dignified and beautiful. On the other side, away from the street, the gardens stretch away, long and narrow – they are based on medieval burgage plots which had to fit the narrow frontages along Broad Street, and most are still the original 20 rods by 2 rods –...
> MOREAnd so we went to Encombe, a grandly simple house of Purbeck stone enfolded by hills and facing the sea, about a mile away. James Gaggero said in winter storms you can hear the sea roaring. We were there to see the new garden created by Tom Stuart Smith, doyen of garden designers. Led by charming gardeners (but how I hate being led, I want to wander with a plan of the place, or just wander, I don’t want to have to stand and hear how many tons of manure were incorporated in this difficult soil, etc etc), we duly admired the wide...
> MOREI was going to Dulwich Art Gallery, and he joked ‘Dulwich? How dull! That’s the origin of the name.’ I said crossly, ‘It’s not!’ I looked it up, and the name’s origin is Dill – it was the place where dill grew, where they went out to collect it to infuse gripe water for infant and other ailments. Suddenly I saw a map of England, alive with all the plants which give places their name. Not just dill at Dulwich. Alresford, where I live is the ford with alders. Woods of oak, ash, beech and birch abound at...
> MOREWe’ve been in 5 Bay Tree Yard nine years, and it gets shadier by the day. The quince was here already, and the two birches are now tall (the woman over the fence asked if we’d have them topped, because of the nuisance of leaves rotting her decking. We said no – the birches are a lot older than her house and garden). And, to create a further visual barrier between us and the fence, I planted four standard cotoneasters, one whitebeam, two Gleditsia triacanthos Sunburst either side the steps from the patio to the lawn,...
> MOREI’ve been so stupid in past years – tried to grow too many things, and when things germinated I planted them squashed together rather than waste them. (It’s the downside of that wartime message engraved on childhood hearts, Waste Not Want Not). This year, only two crops, parsley and runner beans. Ah the beans! I planted them in pots, and the usual thrill as their spears pushed their head through the earth. Variety: Flavour Star, except it can’t be because I can’t find it in Mr F’s catalogue which is...
> MOREIn this house we could do without every herb except parsley. Sage? Rather a stuffy old person smell. Basil, a bit too pungent for me though fine with tomatoes and mozzarella, making them look quite glamorous. Thyme? OK, but I’ve never been good at overwintering it, and am not wild about the smell.. Bay, yes, very good indeed and living in Bay Tree Yard we have a bay bush either side the cottage, ideal for stocks and the like. Rosemary? Yes, good with roast lamb. Lemon balm? It’s here – I ought to dry or freeze it for...
> MORECopyright Sarah Coles 2018 Privacy Policy Website Design & Creation Forum Media and Design - Alresford