Records all round this year
A seaside garden in East Sussex that opens for charity, featuring sculpture and reclaimed objects.
This autumn has been the best ever in terms of apple crops on both the trees we have. The ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’, just four years old, has really gone mad, with many beautiful fruits ready for picking. I’m going to have to start harvesting and storing them.
There seems to have been a bumper crop, too, on the Fuchsia arborescens. This tender, evergreen shrub, with panicles of very small flowers that are rose or rose-purple, followed by dark purple fruit, seems to grow well here, but I do keep it under cover through the winter. They’re
ideally grown in a conservatory or cool greenhouse, or brought inside for the winter.
This year the Shasta daisies, one of my favourite flowers, seem to have been flowering for longer. They’re still looking quite good by the path in the centre of the garden.
Out in the beach garden at the front of the house, the Coronilla
glauca ‘Citrina’ is lighting up the garden with an abundance of lemon-yellow, pea-like blooms that just keep coming. It’s flowered once already this year and is now in full bloom again, making it a hard-working addition to the garden. It’s very hardy and shows off its sweetscented blooms against unusual blue-green foliage.
It’s also a versatile shrub, performing particularly well in exposed locations and coastal areas such as Seaford. A compact, rounded habit makes this tough little performer ideal for patio containers, too, although all mine are in the ground.
Another shrub doing really well at the moment is the Fuchsia
magellanica ‘Versicolor’ that’s also in the front garden, in a very exposed place. It’s a deciduous shrub with small, grey-green leaves, variably margined with cream and flushed-pink when young; flowers are slender, with red tube and sepals, and purple petals. It does look incredible with hundreds of blooms on it.
We’ve had our best ever year for fundraising, topping an amazing £18,400. During the recent Artwave Festival we had over 1,000 visitors, too, and the lucky 1,000th, Carole Sykes, got to choose art to the value of £50.
Read more about the garden at www.driftwoodbysea.co.uk.