Heady scent

Jasmine

On returning to France we found the jasmine in full flower and its scent so powerful that with the back doors open it perfumes the whole house! The cape marigold planted under the blackberry is providing a superb display of flowers, tumbling to the floor; I will get more of these (in other colours) to plant in the front garden. I'm relieved to discover that there are signs of life in plants which might have died due to the lack of water in Feb/Mar; just two tiny shoots on the kumquat, but the lemon tree has many leaves starting to open, and the potted hydrangea, whose leaves were shrivelled, now looks nice and healthy. I think I've lost the lavender and white gaura though, so will replace those. Now in full leaf, it's obvious that the wisteria is coming back to life; it will be fed throughout the season and maybe we'll have a good display of flowers next spring.

Cape marigold

The weather is fine and sunny and we've put the gardenia back outside. It's looking great at the moment after its winter indoors. There is some other colour in the garden - the roses are starting to open, the clematis is in full bloom, and there is blossom on the fruit trees - in fact the fruit is already setting! However, I would like to see more colour and will be thinking what to plant next to achieve that.

Desiccated citrus

On my previous visit to France I had forgotten to check the batteries in the watering system (the system consists of four separate ares, each controlled by a battery-operated timer). One of the batteries had gone flat whilst I was away; combined with unusually dry spring weather, this led to the drying out of part of the system - including the pots containing the lemon and kumquat trees. When I removed the winter protection from them, I discovered that all the leaves had shrivelled and some of the branches had turned brown. After removing all the dead material they now look very sorry specimens...

My March visit - just over a week - was planned mainly for the purpose of gardening. I managed to clear a couple of areas in the front garden - the beds under our bedroom window, and the one beside the bins - happily discovering while doing so that the wisteria, which we had feared dead, had leaf buds beginning to open. I've started fertilising it and hope it will recover to flower again one day.


The front garden was created from the existing soil on the plot when we bought it, whereas the back garden has been supplemented with better topsoil. Both these beds had been a bit neglected recently, and it's time for an overhaul. The escallonia had once again succumbed to the black spot, so has been cut right back. I need to have a way of identifying each bed rather than having to describe them as, for instance, "the bed under the bedroom window", "the bed up against the front wall" and so on. Maybe a plan with numbers (or compass directions) would be the way? It's something to think about on my next visit.

Avocado surviving, weeds thriving

29th July - after the chop!

11th August - the new shoot

After being left to its own devices for a while, my sprouting avocado pip had shot up to over a foot high, and produced some healthy looking leaves at the top - really quite attractive - but online advice was to cut it back to 6" high. I did this with trepidation, fearing that the loss of all its leaves would be such a shock that it would die... however, less than a fortnight later it has sprouted again.

Soaker hose installed

After a week of fairly frenzied gardening in mid-July - mainly to change parts of the automatic watering system (which had suffered from our neighbour's young cats knocking over sprays as they jumped up on to the garden walls) - there has been little done recently, as the weather has been far too hot for the expenditure of much energy. In two places - the bed against the front wall, and the extreme end of the long border (with the rhubarb and loganberry) - the drip and spray watering has been replaced by soaker hose. I hope the cats can't destroy that! The rest of that long border remains to be done in a similar fashion; it is showing the effects of lack of water.

Both blackberry and mulberry have been fruiting prolifically for several weeks; I'm currently straining mulberries (5 kg) to make jelly. The apples are fruiting well - particularly the one in the centre, which was actually planted a year later than the other two - despite the reappearance of the bugs which wrecked the leaves last season. Obviously the winter tar oil treatment wasn't enough to prevent their return. It will need to be applied more frequently in the coming winter. We've also had our first crop of blueberries!  - just one bowlful, but it's a start.

I've tried to encourage the citrus fruits more this year, by removing all the parts killed off by winter frost or wind, and applying specific fertilisers. The orange and lemon seem to be responding fairly well (although no fruit has yet appeared) but the kumquat, though looking quite healthy, has hardly grown at all. I fear it is badly positioned in the front garden, where it only gets sun in the mornings, and plan to move it in the autumn into the large pot at the back which formerly held a young lime tree.

Discoloured leaves

The patch under our bedroom water needs a lot of work at some point. It was a mistake to plant tansy in there some years ago - it spreads underground and can't be contained! The soaker hose doesn't seem to be letting water out, and several plants are looking quite parched. My main worry is the wisteria. We've lost most of it once before - after a lovely spring display it just died away, but new shoots appeared so I hoped it was recovering. Now the  shoots which came up in the last couple of years are showing similar symptoms - yellowing and patchy leaves, though there is also new growth which looks healthy. It may be because the watering hasn't been working well - other possibilities are lack of nutrients or viral infection. I'm hoping it's water or nutrients, as these can be addressed. I've treated it with a fertiliser specifically for climbing plants, and will continue to apply this until the autumn.

Spring cleaning

The last couple of weeks - since the torrential rain stopped! - have been an extremely busy time in the garden.

Last year our escallonia plants - both in the front garden - suffered severely from black spot. The RHS online information was that this is something quite new, and so exact treatment has not yet been identified. I settled for cutting them back hard, removing as many of the spotted leaves as I could from on and around the plants, then treating them with a fungicide. I've used the one I bought for the roses, which is myclobutanil. One of the bushes was cut back much earlier than the other, and is already beginning to sprout new leaves, thankfully showing no sign of the fungus.

With the help of a borrowed pressure washer, the crazy paving has been given a thorough clean - the first pressure wash since it was first laid - between four and seven years ago! Mike was doubtful it would make a difference - but once it was all dried out the difference was quite noticeable. Two afternoons of work, but worthwhile, I think!

Before

After

The biggest single difference - and the longest to achieve! - has been the weeding of the long border along the east side of the garden. This was so overgrown that the weeds were higher than many of the plants. Now it's tidy once again, and our neighbour Véronique has given me cuttings of several ground cover plants which may help to prevent a recurrence of the problem.

Cleared east border

At the front of the house I made a planting error a while ago - I planted an ivy against the front wall of the house. It looks great framing our bedroom window, but would have been more practical against a garden wall instead. Unfortunately its rapid growth threatens the gutter and downpipe so requires annual cutting back to avoid problems. Two long sessions up and down a ladder, broken fingernails and scraped fingers - and this is how it looks now.

We were sad to find that our wonderful wisteria at the front of the house had been killed by bad winter weather a couple of years ago, but new shoots have taken hold and these have now been trained up to the wires originally installed over the front porch.

In the back garden the blackberry border has been cleared, as well as the pots in the poolhouse corner. The oleander has been looking quite sad for a year or two; I hope with some fertiliser and a regular check on the watering we may be able to improve this. The other pots contained a tree peony (now dead), lavender, and a blue hyacinth (bought using a gift voucher from my neighbour Jocelyne for my 60th birthday). All the pots have had fertiliser and top-dressing applied.

The composter has been reactivated using the screw mixing device and a chemical accelerator from Lidl. After some rainfall I collected a bumper crop of snails and consigned them all to the drainage system!

I've also sown a few annual seeds here and there: marigolds (orange flame), zinnia, sweet williams, and eschscholzia. The last named were sown first and have already germinated.