I visited the gardens at Childwickbury on a softly sunny evening in early August 2011, the first summer after planting.

While no-one was looking, the white flowered, silver leaved Lychnis made itself at home and started to self-seed about the place in a cottagey kind of way, with my client relishing in giving spare seedlings to gardening friends. Bees adore the late flowering maroon Allium sphaerocephalon and Cynara, whose robust thistle heads of purple are beautifully back-lit against the dark purple leaves of the Cotinus.

This is garden development sets out to rejuvenate a farmhouse, cottage and barn united by a shared driveway and set amongst gorgeous rolling hills in rural Hertfordshire. Besotted by the landscape, I used soft and undulating shapes, reminiscent of the shapes on the horizon, to unite the new gardens to the wider environment.

This beautiful and elegant contemporary garden was designed autumn 2010 and construction started May 2011; it’s always an exciting time when the garden leaves the page to take shape and become reality. Here’s the original concept illustration, concept design and master plan.

I’m interested in contrasting and complimentary shapes so experimented in this south-facing border with irises, alliums, box and daisies backed with wisteria, roses and clematis. My colour palette for this bed was shades of greens and purples, with white highlights.

The box balls echo the round shapes of  Allium Purple Sensation and daisies, with the iris providing a cool contrast of sword-like leaves in a quiet grey-green, topped with fantastic flowers. I also added some Allium nectaroscordum with nodding bell-shaped flowers of maroon and pale green that flower a few weeks after A. Purple Sensation.

Spring is all about detail as tiny flowers in bright colours vie for your attention, then there is a massive surge as whole trees are covered in blossom!

Woburn Abbey Gardens was another place on my list of local gardens to revisit. We went on a clear but blowy bank holiday monday.  Lovely maze (keep the hedge on your left-hand side to find the middle – same to find the way out!), deer park, bog garden, art works, grotto …  must go back to look round the house itself.                                                                           

With the beautiful weather over Easter, we went to visit Chenies Manor, nr Rickmansworth one afternoon.  I’d forgotten it had such a good vegetable garden, maze and labyrinth, as it’s more commonly known for the spring display of tulips.

It’s so exciting seeing bulbs erupt with such an explosion of colour!  Have a look at these beautiful tulips and spring bulbs at Childwickbury.

seed bombs

I was given some seed bombs for Mothers’ Day. They are fascinating and full of promise!

The seed bombs are firm and heavy with seeds and earth packed tightly together.  These ones were made into cakes with an embossed motif on the top and were the size of a chocolate brownie, but one contains the seeds of red clover Trifolium pratense and the other of wild mignonette Reseda luteola. I was supposed to throw them out into the countryside in a wild and cavalier fashion but I’m curious to see what happens, so I’ve carefully nestled them in rough grass in the verge of a footpath behind my house. So tame!

My daughter went on a walk in London all about guerilla gardening and seed bombs, and you can read her blog by clicking here.

red clover

wild mignonette

                  I saw this article today in The Guardian and it helped me understand what’s been going on.  I thought I’d been choosing the wrong plants for our changing weather, but no, it’s nature itself playing a wild card.

“A large number of shrubs and trees, some large and mature, appear to have died this winter. These losses are far greater than are usually seen even in Britain’s coldest weather and will be a surprise to many gardeners.

It seems the December cold snap is responsible. Research during the last century showed much colder winters than this one, for example 1962/63, killed fewer plants. In those cases the extreme cold had followed a gradual cooling through the autumn until extremes set in after Christmas. However, in years when November was mild and temperatures plunged in December, the rapid change wiped out large numbers of plants believed to be hardy.

A paper, published in 1982, following an extremely cold December of 1981, showed that many varieties of roses and even privet hedges were killed. Not surprisingly figs and mature bay trees also died. Among the casualties listed was ceonothus, otherwise known as the California lilac, whose blue flowers light up many suburban gardens in the late spring. This year many mature specimens, up to 3 metres tall, stand black and apparently dead.

What seems to be the cause of these widespread fatalities is that plants have still lots of sap in their stems and leaves after a mild November and have not fully become dormant. The sudden December freeze kills them. One bright spot recorded is that some specimens pronounced “dead” in 1982 were still alive below ground and produced new shoots when all hope had been lost.”

Snow on wisteria