Sanity and the Confedgery
Hello, ready for another weekly update from Long Mizzle Garden? Let's tea and gossip...
Sorry, no slow-motion, grand shots of me emerging breathless from a helicopter here. This little patch of sea thrift (above, bottom left) was grown from seed a few years ago now. It seems to flower on and off all year through. I will be dividing this and putting some in our own patch of Cornish dry stone wall. Some seeds will also be sprinkled in little nooks and crannies.
After a cold snap at the start the week, the sun came out as promised on Wednesday and the river lilies (Hesperantha coccinea) have since been having an un-masked party en masse, dancing about the border. I don't think you can ever have enough river lilies! Like the sea thrift, they grow in clumps, but are quicker to spread. They also happily self seed and make a great cut flower to bring into the house.
Notice anything missing from the old pond bed? It got too cold and wet for the succulents so I brought them in to the comfort of the greenhouse, where they will now stay for he winter.
I used a wooden lolly stick to flick off a whole commune of baby snails first. They especially seem to like taking shelter in the purple tinted Echiveria 'Pearl Von Nurnberg'.
The Dahlias, like myself on a Friday, are starting to look a bit bedraggled.
Other pockets of colour include phacelia, hawthorn berries, cerinth and St John's Wart.
This is the first winter my 'Brunswick' fig with be spending outdoors. I have made a special 'fig pit' by our south facing wall, lined with bricks and tiles in an attempt to constrain its roots. The branches will be trained against wires on the fence. Next summer, I will be sat here picking figs and sipping wine, dressed in my toga.
An area I haven't shown you before is the lower end of Long Mizzle... which for a long time was known simply as 'the wilderness'. Seven years of battling with brambles and bindweed and this is what we currently have...
... a wooded area that I intend to turn into a 'glen'... where I can lie with glitter on my face, feeling immortal, just like Edward from Twilight. There's still quite a bit of tidying that needs to take place before I can start planting it up with beautiful woodland plants such as foxgloves, bluebells, anemones and hellebore.
I have been utilizing the area for composting, but between my brown wheelie bin (fortnightly collected garden waste) and upright composter, I think my composting needs can be satisfied and the space freed up.
Finally, I'd like to share another previously unseen area with you. Once an line of ugly, cumbersome Leylandii hedging sat here. Two autumns ago, hire-a-dad-brandishing-a-chainsaw brought the whole lot down. The cleanup operation took months. Tubs full of sappy leaves, which irritated my eyes and royally fudged up the car, were deposited at the skip. The branches and trunks were piled up, with a wooded project in mind.
I intended to make a stumpery ... but those conifer stumps were not moving any time soon. So this is my rendition of a combined stumpery (upturned roots) and fedge (already a cross between a fence and a hedge) - a 'confedgery'!
That's all for today folks. I hope you are finding your piece of calm this week. My most calming moment unusually came not in the garden, but in having a quiet hour to myself yesterday to launder the linen. Simple pleasures, complex times.
As always, let me know what you have been up.
If you have stopped by, please leave a message. I do love mail!
Stay sane and safe,
Lulu xXx
Latest posts here - https://longmizzle.blogspot.com
Hi Lulu. Your garden still looks fabulous! I have a potted fig which I leave outside all year round (I live on the coast so not too bad for frosts). I love its beautiful leaves but, unfortunately, while it has lots of figs, most don't ripen. I usually manage a grand harvest of one or two! I love the idea of your glen - great use of that space and it will be gorgeous. I, too, am a lover of foxgloves, white being my favourite. They are so obliging by seeding themselves everywhere! Today I repotted houseplants, a job I have spent weeks building up to! Virtue knows no bounds!
ReplyDeleteThank you Catmac :) What part of the country do you garden in? I have had the potted Fig Tree for two years and likewise, have only had one or two to eat per year. I picked ‘Brunswick’ after I saw it recommended as the tastiest variety (albeit smaller fruits and crop) in a book about The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall. A good neighbour, who lives a few doors down, has her ‘Brown Turkey’ outside her back door, planted straight into free draining soil. It is pretty big and she gets a huge amount of ripened figs each year. I’m hoping my hot patio pit will do the trick (?)
DeleteGood for you for re-potting your houseplants! A job I’ve been meaning to do all year :0 Oh I love white foxgloves too. I’m yet to pick a colour scheme for the ‘glen’, but it might be nice to try lighter colours that’ll pop out from the shadows. The purple ones go crazy in the hedgerows down here. Lulu xXx
Hello again, Lulu! I live in Fife, Scotland so I am MUCH further north than you! I don't know the variety of my fig as I purchased it many moons ago at a church sale (probably about fifteen years ago!). However paltry its harvest, I do enjoy having it as a tree in the garden. I love to see those leaves waving at me!
ReplyDeleteHaha, I love the idea of waving fig leaves. Wow, you are up't' North there! I'm an avid Beechgrove Garden viewer, and the difference in planting times always amazes me. (We seem to be about two weeks ahead in the season with Monty Don's Longmeadow and up to one month with Beechgrove) Lu x
DeleteI wish you'd upload a video and send it to Monty, I'd be so excited to see your beautiful garden and face on the TV!
ReplyDeleteI really want a fig tree . They grew by roadside in Crete, the leaves are just gorgeous, aren't they? I was racking my brains trying to remember the variety that's supposedly easy to grow and you've answered it for me, Brown Turkey! Thanks for that!
What a gorgeous linen stash and fab baskets, too. Goodness knows what weird activities we'll be doing over the coming weeks after BoJo's update tomorrow! xxx
Hey Vix, my fella said I should do a video - but he'd be filming it and would completely put me off! We rarely have a straight faced moment in our house and he is constantly taking the mickey out of me! Wow, figs by the roadside in Crete, how lovely! I eagerly await Boris' message too!... LuLu xXx
ReplyDeleteThat's a great idea of Vix's!!! Please submit a video. And I would love to see people laughing and mucking about. Gardens are supposed to be FUN!
DeleteCheers Catmac, we'll see is we can produce any thing 'useable'! :0 x
DeleteConfedgery - what a brilliant name :) we have a 'delightfully HUGE' leylandii hedge between us and our neighbour, unfortunately it is his and not ours so we have to just grit our teeth and hope he does his usual once in a decade hedge trim..... he is a nice bloke too, he just does not care about his garden. sigh.
ReplyDeleteI used to work in a garden (up here in the north - eeh by 'ek it is grim up norf) that had a large and mature fig tree on the gable end of the garden, it happily figged every summer but the owners just let the wasps have the fruit as they did not like them.... (or the wasps come to think of it!)
Hello Kate, thank you so much for leaving a message and lovely to cyber meet you. Oh dear, the hedge must be big if it is only trimmed once a decade! My neighbours were delighted when the Leylandii came down (the old owner of our house acquired the nick name 'Leylandii' as she planted it everywhere!). The young student lad at the back slept through all the noise and awoke to find he suddenly had a view of the church and graveyard! Our awesome neighbour to the other side immaculately trimmed his once a month, but was still overjoyed, as it is now one less job for him to do.
DeleteI'm a Lancashire born lass - though not as up't north as you by the looks of it. Lulu xXx