Hew and I had a wonderful time last week at Wyken Vineyards. We had a delicious lunch in their restaurant The Leaping Hare (with Wyken wine of course), a browse around the fantastic shop and utterly superb book room – I never come home empty-handed! And then a walk around the gardens which were looking glorious and still remarkably fresh thanks to their borehole. And utter joy – I saw my first hummingbird hawk-moth. 

Talking of moths – I noticed a grey silvery moth resting on the gate outside our walled garden the other day, looking remarkably similar to a birch twig which really made it stand out against the green paintwork. I was very lucky to see it as usually like so many moths they make themselves perfectly camouflaged and almost impossible to see but this one I think was just having a rest. A quick browse at my moth book identified it as a buff-tip moth and I read it mimics exactly to look like a broken stick for camouflage. I must confess I know very little about moths but would love to learn more. I have always wanted to get an expert here to set up moth taps to see all the various moths we do have here and then once noted, duly set them free. Apparently now is the best time to see moths – at the end of summer when they become really noticeable especially at dusk. I love that we include plants that depend on moths here such as honeysuckle, evening primrose and tobacco plants which increase the richness of insect life in the garden and help the steady decline in moth numbers. Hew saw our own hummingbird hawkmoth in the new Italianate garden the other day so clearly our planting is working. 

September is one of my favourite times in the garden and I think this has much to do with the light. The sun noticeably drops in the sky slanting at an angle so that for a few weeks it creates the best light of the year. 

To notice birds you have to watch them. I love when I get time to watch them watching me. We share the garden here with all sorts of birds. The first are those that dip in and out of our sky – swallows and swifts are among my favourites and when they go in September they leave such a loss until next April when they return. Also skylarks which we hear more often than we see them. Because we have a moat we have ducks, occasional geese, morehens, coots, a heron and we’re very lucky to have a pair of kingfishers – that wonderful electric blue of their backs and wings make them unlike anything else.  We have ravens, crows and magpies and lots of jays down the drive, buzzards, kestrels, sparrowhawks and of course we have lots of pigeons. Then there’s the birds that occupy the body of the garden itself. A garden like this, lush with growth, seed, berry and leaf plus the unknowable numbers of insects and caterpillars – all of which provide the perfect home and food for song and woodland birds. Finches, tits, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, sparrows and wrens. All inhabit the garden here just as much as we or the plants do and provide the soundtrack. Hew has the Merlin app on his phone and loves to sit in the evening to identify the birds he can hear. Oh and we mustn’t forget Percy the pheasant who we feed every morning. 

August is the peak of the vegetable year. It is the month of harvest and it is delivering crops such as tomatoes, French and runner beans, courgettes, basil which has done incredibly well this year and has thrived in the heat as well as successional crops such as lettuce, salad leaves and chard. It’s also prime seed collecting time. It’s free and I collect on a sunny, dry day (there’s certainly been plenty of those) I use brown envelopes – A5 the ideal size – and I carefully cut the seed head and upend them into the envelope, seed head and all, snip the stem off, seal it then store it clearly labelled with the date, name of the plant and then I store them in a cool, dry place. After a week or two the seed should be dry and can be sieved, cleaned and either sown or stored in sealed packets. My favourite plants to collect seed from are poppies, foxgloves, love-in-a-mist, hollyhocks and  runner beans. 

A huge thank you to the 138 people who came to my special talk here on July 31st. It was a wonderful evening and raised lots for St. Elizabeth Hospice. August is the last month of summer so relish it to the very last drop.

Having a moat means we get lots of damselflies and dragonflies. I could watch them for hours zipping across the surface of the water adding a jewel-like lustre to the garden. A dragonfly female lays her eggs on a plant in water or even directly in the water itself and the eggs hatch into nymphs that look like beetles that scuttle in the water where they can remain for up to four years. Then when fully mature it waits for warmer weather before crawling up a plant, shedding its skin to reveal the dragonfly lurking within. Magical. Apparently it can take up to two days for the iridescence of its wings to fully emerge and then it hunts for food frantically for two months before dying. I learnt all this from watching an episode of Countryfile the other evening. So what we see here is a speeded up culmination of a life spent mostly under water getting ready to shine for their bright, brief time in the sun. 

Just a reminder that I am giving a special talk here in our 18th century barn on the evening of Friday July 31st. In a very personal account I shall be sharing how we have created the gardens here from scratch and the part I have played in its development over the past 29 years and my love of Columbine and gardening. You can book tickets by clicking on the link on our homepage.

I have not long been in from the garden where I have been on my knees hidden amongst the grey glaucas leaves of our globe artichokes weeding. But I am completely happy – bending down in the under-layer. In the walled kitchen garden the hoe does ninety per cent of the weeding and we run it through the soil every few days in dry weather but hand weeding is the only answer for weeds growing in-between plants where you have to concentrate carefully and work with clever fingers so as not to pull out a tiny treasure. It’s completely satisfying and a vital part of caring for this garden. 

Something so simple but giving us such floral joy is the meadow running alongside our driveway, which now at the beginning of June, is bursting with buttercups, making the whole field shimmer buttery yellow. This is the meadow buttercup, Ranunculus acris. I love the thought that if I was transported back here in 1390 – the date of the house – there would have been buttercups flowering in the same meadow here. Buttercups do very well on this part of the meadow as it is damp and the buttercup is only really happy in damp soil where they are pollinated by bees who can easily get at the nectar and pollen with their open flat flowers. 

Just a reminder that we are opening the garden here on Sunday June 14th 1-5pm.  Pre-booking only – you can book tickets here.

Nothing can diminish the beauty of May. The late tulips are sumptuous, the apple blossom is at its most bountiful, the bluebells in the woodland and under our big oak tree are fully on song so too are cowslips, forget-me-nots and camassias. And above all the intensity of new leaves on all the hedges and trees is breathtaking. For a few weeks this garden is elevated by morning dew and cow parsley, apple and hawthorn blossom (such a lovely word) and the dawn chorus. The garden here is better than anything else this world has to offer.  

For me nothing celebrates the month of May more than cow cow parsley. There is nothing in this world so beautiful and it steals my heart every year. It is technically a weed but here at Columbine we encourage it as much as possible. It is fine growing as a single plant but nothing can compete with it en-masse. The soft, clouds of white sitting on tall feathery foliage multiplied a thousand times. It is an umbellifer, member of the carrot family and a brilliant thing to have as they attract a range of beneficial insects such as hoverflies and ladybirds into the garden. There is a cultivated variety Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’ that we grow here with purple leaves and brown stems beneath the white, lacy flowers. It cross-pollinates with wild cow parsley which means that the offspring quickly loses the intensity of purple leaves, so if its purpleness is the main attraction for you then do what we do and keep it well away from its wild cousin. I confess I don’t mind as I’m obsessed with cow parsley in all its forms. It couldn’t be more welcome here. 

Monty Don sums May up perfectly for me in his diary entry in The Ivington Diaries which was published in 2009. 

“23rd May 2003 
When I die I shall go to May. It will be green. Not environmentally correct, for things will just be, without measurement or judgement, but actually the colour green in all its thousand shining faces. Every day will feel like Christmas Eve when I was ten. Every green leaf will be perfection exactly as it is and yet will grow and change every time I turn my eyes to it. Every moment will be like the arc of a diver breaking the waters of a green lake. I know this because this is what May is like here and now. Almost unbearable really. It does not hold for half and hour. Yet in the shifting, growing hymn of light and colour and leaf is the still simple reason that I garden”.

We have hundreds of tulips breaking hourly into radiant flower and above all the garden is turning green. That wonderful April green at its most potent. There is a sense that every leaf is burgeoning and growing into the freshest and vibrant green possible. As I get older this becomes more and more precious. How I love this time of year. 

It is such a busy month in the garden especially with seed sowing. The greenhouse is currently the engine room of this garden. But we should do everything we can to reduce the amount of plastic we use. We are doing this by reusing any plastic seed trays and pots that we have – and looking after them so we can continue to use them for as long as possible and not replace them. 

I love primroses. No other plant epitomises spring more. We have them growing on our moat banks, in our woodland and on a bank near the bog garden and I am cheered by everything about them. They range from ivory-white to a egg-yolk yellow although the vast majority of them stay the lovely shade of pale yellow we all expect. Don’t be surprised if the occasional bright pink one pops up – here we always have one or two of those that appear every year. Primroses spread by seed but I do love to lift and tease some apart once they’ve finished flowering to make new plants for planting elsewhere. Wherever they’re growing this lovely little flower personifies new life. 

And while I adore the delicacy of the early spring flowers, I cannot write about April without again mentioning tulips – wonderful, joyful tulips. The first real blaze of colour of the year and every year they astonish me anew. We plant hundreds and hundreds of them and now is their time. 

I have kept a gardening diary ever since I came here in 1997. It is surprising how the record builds up day by day, like a huge jigsaw describing the relationship between me and the garden. However it’s main function is to record what comes into flower or fruit and when, the weather, any nature observations and what I sow and plant. You think you’ll remember but you don’t. Anyway to my surprise I see that on March 15th 2017 I planted the clematis montana that grows along the wall of our jetty. In nine years the clematis has not only become established to the point of swamping the wall – but has become even more established as a fixture in the garden. It feels as though it has always been there. Our bridges although only built recently are already settling into the landscape especially now that all the landscaping and turfing around the new footbridge has been done and they too feel like they have always been here.

I was walking along our moat walk the other day when suddenly I got the pungent aroma of mint. I looked down to see growing out of the wet ground wild water mint. It looks like watercress with purple under its leaves. The flowers are mauve and held up by burgundy stems and they make a pretty little posy in a jar which is now filling our kitchen with the minty fragrance of the garden.

The daffodil season in this garden is long. The first to appear are the wild daffs Narcissus pseudonarcissus in our orchard around the beginning of March followed by the first of our National Collection of Engleheart daffodils ‘Magnificence’ in our walled garden. We have hundreds of daffs from the miniature ones we grow in pots to ‘Thalia’ – a lovely white with a cream trumpet to highly scented ‘Geranium’, ‘Cheerfulness’ and ‘Winston Churchill’ and last to flower the poeticus cultivars flowering through April and into May. Delightful daffodils – you can never have too many.

As many of you will know snowdrops gets my pulse racing. I am obsessed with them and will admit I’m a complete galanthophile. Snowdrops spring up regardless of the weather and will carry on reliably reappearing year after year for generations. Each year they spread a little more by seed and I speed that process up by lifting and dividing every February. Did you know that snowdrops contain their own anti-freeze protecting the plants from frost and snow? In fact snowdrops were harvested during the First World War to make anti-freeze for tanks. I adore them and I love to pick just a small posy for indoors where the heat of the room brings out their wonderful honey fragrance. At this time of year, the sight of the first snowdrop is such a joy and fills my heart with hope and that is the spark that fires my gardening year and every day thereafter is touched with excitement. 

And talking of excitement – our new footbridge is complete. The scaffolding has been removed and apart from some landscaping and finishing touches to do – it is all finished and looking fantastic. We are also thrilled to have featured in the January 21st issue of Country Life and named as one of the top twelve gardens to visit in the country, plus we have a seven page feature on us in the March issue of The English Garden magazine – out now. We’re certainly on a roll!

The first violets start peeking from the base of our hedges here in late January but by mid-February they are resplendent. They do not leap out at you but gently invite you in. A little clump of violets is, if the ground is not too wet, something to get down on your knees for and enter into their microscopic world. 

The sweet violet Viola odorata is a woodland plant and in this garden grow and run along the base of our hornbeam and hawthorn hedges in little splatters of colour. Look closely at their individual flowers and they vary quite a bit in their shades of purple and mauve with the occasional pure white one. And like snowdrops hold a bunch of any shade to your nose and you will be transfixed with their gentle fragrance. It has been copied in sweets and soaps but nothing can compare to the scent of real violet flowers.

I love to grow food – this is my passion and I shall indulge it to the hilt. But this year I would like to grow more cut flowers. We actually grew quite a lot last year – our dahlias doing particularly well. Around early May we always have dozens of seed trays in the greenhouse filled with seedlings and more sitting outside waiting to be planted. We’re talking about making some new cut flower beds near our old orchard and filling the space with cosmos, sweet peas, zinnias, tithonias, nicotianas, poppies, molucella, marigolds and more dahlias to name but a few! I think with careful organisation, we can grow many more cut flowers this year that will flower over a much longer time – this is exciting. 
 
Work on our new footbridge carries on and progress on the oak railings being fitted is going very well. Here’s to a very happy, healthy and productive new year.

The best yellow has been from our field maples, which turned the most lovely buttery yellow just before the leaves fell. We planted a whole load all around the garden and have allowed quite a few to grow into good sized trees which being bigger makes them shine out more. Our hornbeam hedges have turned the most unexpected yellow this year, making a real difference to the amount of light in the garden. We planted them over 28 years ago and because of the hot, dry conditions this year it has intensified the sugars in the leaves and so the intensity of colour, but I know that they will turn their coffee-brown in a few weeks. 

Work on our new footbridge is progressing well. It’s a huge project. Scaffolding has been erected which quite frankly looks as if we’re building the Forth Bridge. The galvanised steel joists have been put in place – a huge and exciting operation which involved a 20 ton crane to lift the supporting steel into place. We all gathered to watch this piece of Columbine history and I’m happy to say all went smoothly and was all completed within an hour. Next stage is to fit the oak railings which are being handcrafted as I type. Exciting!

For most of the year ivy is much maligned. However, over the coming weeks it will be given some of the respect it deserves as part of our festive decorations of green indoors and wreaths hanging on our front doors. 

I like ivy and every gardener should nurture it. It provides welcome green at a time of year when nothing else is really giving any kind of display. Most importantly it provides winter cover for birds and insects. It flowers very late in the year so is one of the most important sources of nectar for insects – so be like us here at Columbine – deck your hall this Christmas with swags of ivy but also learn to love it in your garden. 

Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas.