Sarah Coles

Garden Blog

February 10th, 2015

Green Walls

Not freezing, but grey.  A grey day.  English weather, says Jane. Then, inside the glasshouse at Wisley I was admiring a green wall of ferns and other plants.  Expensive and time consuming?  Yes indeed, grown in a modular system, says the notice.  Alas, not for me.  I got home, and saw my very own green own wall of variegated ivy, which grew by chance from a few tiny pots of Homebase ivy bought five years ago, to stabilize the earth walls by the greenhouse.  I’d never really looked at it before.  Not so glamorous, my...

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January 25th, 2015

The Garden as Jewellery

‘Daisies are our silver,    Buttercups our gold: This is all the treasure    We can have or hold. Raindrops are our diamonds    And the morning dew; While for shining sapphires    We’ve the speedwell blue. These shall be our emeralds–    Leaves so new and green; Roses make the reddest    Rubies ever seen.’ A hymn by Jan Struther (aka Joyce Maxtone Graham) which we used to sing at school as children, and which has stayed with me ever since. OK the words are so banal and the rhymes so plinkety plonk doggerel...

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January 23rd, 2015

Garden in the Sky

Jonquil had to choose between her bedroom with its sky view, and her basement with its garden view, and she chose the first.  I thought she was mad, but now I understand.   I lay in bed, sleepless.  The dark sky became dull gold, then bruised yellow and mauve, then it became a band of brilliant rose against blue, this faded, and it became stippled with little clouds.  It changed each moment.  It was my garden in the sky.  A garden which just arrived, and gave.  Every day different.  Then I fell asleep.

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January 10th, 2015

Winter Iris

All those fancy bearded iris, heavens I’ve tried to grow them – in the sun, in shallowly planted with the rhizomes in their cradles on the soil, but!  Spent a fortune on Cayeux from France.  Useless.  On the farm the rhizomes developed holes as if mites had been in them.  RHS advice was irrelevant.  English/Dutch  iris slightly better, like a water colour painting, and up every year.  Iris sibirica, not much good. But one is flowering now, in the depths of January – Iris unguicularis from Algeria, blue with patches of...

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December 16th, 2014

Plant Intelligence

Just read an article in the New Scientist (Smarty Plants, 6 December 2014) about the intelligence of plants by Anil Anathaswamy.  I had explored this concept in my book LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND GARDENING.  Plants respond to touch (Mimosa pudica quickly, but others more slowly, heavens a lot more slowly), they respond to light and shade, they can hear (we saw orchids swaying to music in Thailand, yes, I am not joking), they can smell and communicate.  ‘They think, they react, they remember.’ Now it’s being explored scientifically.  With...

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December 1st, 2014

First day of Winter – December 1st

Today, first day of winter in the meteorological calendar.  So the met office says. Tidying up, they say one shouldn’t, that there are hibernating things of all sorts under the dead stuff, but I do.  Like  housework, but enjoyable, clearing and piling the slimy soapy leaves into sacks. No frosts, yet all deciduous leaves have fallen.  The sky striped with bars of blue sky and pink clouds.  Above me the white barked birch becomes pink, like branched coral.  Stillness, yet change every moment.  All is illusion. An Iris...

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November 16th, 2014

NOVEMBER

November Leaves hang, heavy, tired and sick, longing to die, longing for the hard frost that will release them.   Trees and perennials long to be free of their sodden weight, but the leaves just drag on, like a dying person still clinging to life. I have two Cotoneaster rothschildianus, and this year they have berried up prolifically – loads of gold berries.  Earlier, I wished I only had red berried cotoneasters – then Rosie Sturgis saw these through the window and marvelled, and I too realised they were beautiful.  Sometimes I...

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September 22nd, 2014

SEPTEMBER SPIDERS

In the garden’s early morning, golden wires lead to heaven. Iridescent webs shimmer.    Single leaves spin mid-air, hung suspended from invisible lines. Chief spider is Araneus diadematus – its diadem is a cross shaped filigree pattern on its abdomen – you can just see it here.  The web is sticky, hung with eviscerated tiny flies, and the threads which hold it to bushes, trees or buildings and along which it abseils down to a corner are not. Why on television and books people do get so excited and partisan, taking sides with...

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September 19th, 2014

MY FERNERY

What to Grow on Dry, Shady, Chalky Soil. My water garden was a large metal bowl on the patio, and in it grew a miniature water lily, golden grass and one or two other watery things. Then one winter it sprang a leak, and all I was left with was a mud filled bowl. Not that far away was a dull, dry patch, mostly earth and chalk lumps, where grass would hardly grow, overhung by shrubby things screening a fence. Suddenly it dawned. Of course, fernery. I placed the bowl in the middle of this patch, filled it with earth, and planted it with miniature...

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September 8th, 2014

Green September

  Why do people claim there’s no colour when there’s every shade of green around?  Just look!  True, there’s less variety – the buttercup leaves of Gleditsia triacanthos are now greened up with chlorophyll, and the golden Sambucus is mottled like a snakeskin, and the pale felted leaves of my whitebeam curl brown at the edges, but the others!  The Sophora (the Chinese Scholar’s Tree – love that name) is still a dainty umbrella of lozenges, and the marbled leaves of the cyclamen Neapolitan spread in little fringed circles...

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