Agnes Stevenson on spring’s challenges
It ain’t what you grow, it’s the way that you grow it, says Agnes Stevenson, as she casts a fresh pair of eyes over her garden two years on
One of my neighbours is replanting his entire hedge, setting it further back so that it won’t suffer the fate of its predecessor, which had been bashed by bin lorries and delivery trucks squeezing up our narrow lane.
As I chatted to him about progress another truck arrived, this one carrying a skip filled with a tonne and a half of green waste, which will help to give the new hedging plants a decent start. Used as a mulch or dug in, this soil conditioner, made from the contents of household brown bins, is good for breaking up clay or adding substance to light soils that would otherwise leach water and nutrients.
Adding organic material is key to improving all soil types but it’s still worth finding out what different plants like. Sometimes that can mean completely rethinking what you grow.
I recently visited a house where the back garden was a small and shady courtyard.The owners had transformed this unpromising site by fixing planting pockets to the walls and filling these with ferns and other shade lovers. I’ve got a friend in East Lothian whose free-draining soil boasts a lavender hedge that wouldn’t look out of place in Provence. What both these gardens have got in common is that they have been planted in ways that suit the conditions.The result? The plants are happy and are growing strongly. Switch those plants around and the ferns would turn crispy from too much sun and a lack of moisture.
Two years in and I’m still working out what grows in my garden and where there are microclimates that will allow me to grow something different, such as the stone wall that supports the slope above the lower patio. This corner of the garden gets warm when the sun shines, so I’m turning it into a herb garden by planting sage, thyme and marjoram between the stones.
I’m also gradually working my way through the established plants that were here when we arrived and evicting those that are struggling. One of the latter is a Choisya ternata that was blooming one minute and failing the next. It had clearly thrived for a time but then the moist, heavy soil had gradually got the better of it.
I’ve got an apple tree, too, that is for the chop. Last year it yielded just one apple and while there are signs of more flower buds this year, I’m not convinced they’ll amount to anything. It needs more sunshine and better drainage but it is too mature to move, so at some point I’m going to replace it with something more suited to the conditions.