I love silence and empty space. (I think this may be unusual!)

I have just acquired two new books: The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin, and The Spirit of Silence by John Lane. One is about sound and one is about the absence of sound.  The cello is my favourite instrument.

This morning, most unusually for me I woke at 5.30. Even more unusually for me, I got up. The sun was shining and I made a cuppa and took it down to the shore and found, in the perfect silence, this beautiful scene - the thrift in flower, apparently growing out of the rocks.

I came home and put on Paul Tortelier playing the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello - what a start to the day.

Bliss!!

We were all new to opening our gardens to the public! (See post 12 May). Many wonderful and grand gardens open under the Scotland's Gardens Scheme, and while we think our gardens are full of interest, we make no claims to being grand. So, 'the people's gardens' are modest in size and, like their owners, very varied in character.
 
The gardens had to be vetted of course by the area organiser. Frantic tidying up - this was a great incentive to get on with all the half finished projects we all had. Great relief when they all passed muster. Plants were exchanged, meetings organised, friendships forged - lots of mutual encouragement.

After the event in 2009 Mary Thomson, area organiser said:

   '...the gardens were enchanting, the visitors delighted, the teas delicious and the weather benign....and the charities handsomely rewarded'

We were so pleased we agreed to do it all again! Don't miss it!  June 26 and 27 2010 - watch this space....

 

This is for my lovely book group - sorry not to be with you all.

One of my favourite garden writers is Helen Dillon. In On Gardening she follows in the tradition of Vita Sackville West's famous weekly Observer articles, though in Dillon's case they appeared in the Sunday Tribune in Ireland.

I like her irreverent sense of humour in articles such as Sowing a Few Seeds of Doubt, Stressed Out among the Greenfly, and Glorious Vulgarities in a Tub!

The following is from A Gardener's Refuge:

'The garden shed, the one you see pictures of in gardening books, is equipped with clean tools, gleaming tidily from their hooks, stacks of flowerpots, graded according to size, and an immaculate potting bench. The reality is somewhat different. The most versatile structure you can buy, the garden shed can be adapted to any use. Apart from being the last refuge for smokers these days, an extra bedroom in an emergency, a dump for anything and everything that seems too good to throw away, for me its most brilliant attribute is as a private place in which to escape from the world.

For a start nobody knows exactly what you are doing in the shed, but obviously you're very busy, and shouldn't be disturbed. It should be sited out of hearing distance of the telephone or doorbell. At the sound of approaching footsteps, rattle the flowerpots, so as to give the impression of work in progress....'

 

An exquisite flower in a wonderful shade of blue. Grassy upright foliage which makes a nice contrast with the rounded mounds in the garden. It flowers for only a week or two - but what flowers - you just have to stop and admire. A silver star for elegance and simple maintenance - cut back dead foliage in autumn or spring - that's it!

You've got to laugh at the advertising people. I got two new books from Amazon (The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin and The Spirit of Silence by John Lane). Inside the wrapping were two leaflets - one headed 'Secret Sales' and one called 'Naked Wines'. Neither of which turned out to be either secret or naked!

Secret Sales is 'exclusive' to anyone who cares to register, and in the small print on Naked Wines it says 'PS We don't expect you to drink your wines naked. We do think it's wise to always drink responsibly' !! Who thinks them up? Simply laugh and bin it....

Did I say I wanted minimum work? Must have been an off day when I said that, or yesterday's hot sun went to my head!

I'm now going to think about star plants of the second magnitude. Silver stars instead of gold. Gorgeous plants, but perhaps they  have a short flowering season, or they only last a few years before fading away for ever, or they need dividing every two years to perform well - that kind of thing - more work in fact. So the decisions are 'Are they worth it?' and 'Have I the time to do any work they require?' Decisions for later, after I've reviewed them here.

Oriental poppies require no extra work. They flower at a time when the top ten are still waiting in the wings. Stunning colours - this one is my favourite from a mixture called 'Pizzicato' which I grew from seed. I collected seed from this one and wait to see if the resulting plants are the same colour - it takes patience, but isn't difficult.

Other favourites are Coral Reef and Karine - gentle peachy colours, Brooklyn, a luscious raspberry shade and the delectable Patty's Plum, which I have not got (yet).

The silver star is for their sumptuous beauty is spite of their short season and the big gap they leave when they finish flowering.

No 9 is anemone japonica. Takes time to establish, and can then be a bit thuggish, but utterly reliable, utterly beautiful and maintenance free (until they take over - but it takes a while, then you have to be prepared for some hauling out). 'Honorine Jobert' is white, 'September Charm' and tomentosa pink. The flowers are from midsummer onwards and float in the air above attractive foliage well into autumn.

Hosta is my no 10. Restful on the eyes among the froth of summer, big, bold and simple, and apart from slug protection - I just have to remember to start early, no attention is required, and clumps get steadily bigger and rarely need dividing.

No photos of the above yet - I'll take some this summer - but of course if you 'google' the name you'll get lots of images. I'm enjoying using only my own photographs in this blog - it's part of the fun.

With my ten star plants I think I can create a gorgeous garden with the minimum work: alchemilla mollis, hardy geraniums, foxgloves or delphiniums, nectaroscordum siculum, rosa glauca, hakonechloa albo-aurea, viola cornuta, knautia macedonica, japanese anemones and hostas. Underplant with lots of daffodils. Simple! Done!

                    'Any fool can make things complicated. It requires a genius to make things simple'

                                   E F Schumacher (or Woody Guthrie, depending on your source!)

Ten minutes drive from the house, and a couple of hours of just relaxing and I feel like I've had a holiday! The primrose picnic was so refreshing. It is almost totally silent up there - one bird singing across the other side of the glen - echoing in the dark forest. Primroses, violets, some interestingly marked bird feathers, rough bark and lush mosses.

It is so nice to look at things that are not your responsibility. Much as I adore my house and my garden, it's hard not to think 'I must do this, and I must remember that' as I look around them. We often take a stroll round the garden first thing and I have to concentrate on not making it into a to-do list, but just observe what is new and beautiful - (the to-do list comes later - I'm a great list maker).

I'm still 'throwing ten things' (see 11May). Always having been a go at it full blast type, I am trying the incremental approach and finding it strangely satisfying. I don't feel so overwhelmed by a big task (and our shed is a BIG task) when I tackle it in 'throwing ten things' steps, and I've made spectacular progress by doing this every day for just 6 days!

I must obviously add 'chill out' to my to-do list every day too....

The primrose picnic was freezing but there were lots of violets too this year - exquisite!

Another star plant, or rather a galaxy of tiny stars, is the hardy perennial knautia macedonica from the scabious family. Flowers like small pincushions wave around on the tops of wiry stems over a very long season. They come in shades of lilac, violet, ruby red and crimson and I have been selecting from the deepest vivid claret coloured ones and now have many flowers of this colour weaving in and out of other things, looking like dots in an impressionist painting. My friend Claire, walking around the garden said 'The more you look, the more you see'.

I recently read of composer Alison Burns' music that it 'shivers and crackles with delicious harmonies'. Knautia shivers and crackles in the garden with harmony when it is among magenta hardy geraniums, and with contrast when threading through the lime green flowers of alchemilla mollis, or intermingled with the brilliant orange of alstroemeria. It also looks stunning in posies with blue cornflowers. Love it!

I have spent many a sunny afternoon wandering around someone else's lovely garden, sitting on chairs and rugs thoughtfully provided, drinking tea and eating wonderful home baked cakes and often buying a few seedlings or cuttings of some of the beautiful plants I'd just been looking at. Seeing parts of villages and towns that I would never have seen otherwise. The first summer I lived in Oxford was a glorious one, and we spent every weekend doing this.

So I decided it was payback time, and looked around at some of the hidden away gardens in my area of Argyll, and knowing that there were some passionate gardeners around, I offered to see if we could open some of our own gardens under the Scotland's Gardens Scheme. The area organiser was keen, one thing led to another, and we found nine gardens in the four villages and set a date for 2009.

Last year £340,000 was raised in Scotland. The money goes to Maggie's Cancer Caring Services, The Queen's Nursing Institute Scotland, The National Trust for Scotland, Perennial and the Royal Fund for Gardeners' Children.  The information is in the famous 'Yellow Book' available in most bookshops and some garden centres. The website is at www.gardensofscotland.org

Ethically, it goes without saying - recycle, compost, charity shop, gift it, whatever.

'Throw Ten Things' I read in a magazine. I started in the greenhouse. Five minutes and I'd thrown ten things which were rubbish or shouldn't have been in there anyway. Then I threw away ten things from the shed. Then I went to the back of the shed - ten more things - then the pot area, then the bench area. In twenty minutes I'd got rid of fifty bits of junk and I felt great! Now if I did this every day....?

Then it was a coffee in the cosy greenhouse out of the cold north wind, with a new book I got for my birthday (Amazon wish list is such a good idea!).  The book is 'Lazy Days and Beach Blankets - simple alfresco dining with family and friends' Inspiring - I plan to have more of this this year. Starting with the primrose picnic . 'Picnic When Possible' is on my Simply Eat manifesto (see 9th April). A hill up the Larach, a pass between Loch Long and Loch Eck, has huge swathes of primroses on it and for a couple of years now we have taken a simple picnic up there - if it gets warmer by the end of this week I shall be ready with some food and a flask, and the picnic quilt made by Laura (who also bought me the book). Simple pleasures and lazy days. I think I need to practice lazy....

Just writing about my garden makes me appreciate anew, how lucky I am to live where I do. There are red squirrels, pine marten (I've not seen one yet), and a wide range of birds: blue, coal, great and longtailed tits, greenfinches, and for a few days only, every year when the forget me nots are in seed, a pair of bullfinches come and feed on them. Recently some goldfinches appeared, and in winter we get fieldfares and redwings. Siskins, cuckoos just now, swallows which nest under the eaves - we can watch the babies from the bathroom window; owls, woodpeckers, jays, buzzards and smaller birds of prey which swoop at incredible speed along all the back garden bird tables, and on the loch herons, eider ducks and gannets...and of course the second tame robin....

We only realised there were two, when we discovered that I was feeding one at the front door and my husband was feeding one at the back door, at the same time. How long there had been two we have no idea. Even the experts have a hard time telling the male from the female and identifying individual robins is impossible, other than by ringing them which we didn't want to do. (It seemed like a betrayal of trust somehow.) When they brought their young into the garden it was clear they were a pair, and that one was a little less bold than the other. Right now they are nesting and don't come to the door every day, but soon we hope to see their young....it is such a priviledge to have wild things all around us.

A number of years ago Ross, aged three, shared his breakfast with a robin. He was enjoying his cornflakes outside in the sun, and casually dropped a bit in the direction of a baby robin which was hopping on the grass. We watched quietly from the door, as Ross walked slowly all around the garden, talking to the robin and dropping little bits of cereal, and the robin followed closely. The innocence of them both was very touching. Ross was too young to realise that wild birds didn't usually do this, and the baby robin was too young to know it should be wary of people.

We think this is the robin which today sits on the doorhandle, looking intently in, waiting to be fed, brings its babies to show us, and likes to sunbathe beside me on the bench. I was sitting with my face up to the hot sun and my arms relaxed out by my sides, when I looked down and saw beside me the robin hunkered down, with its face up to the sun and its wings spread out to keep it cool....

My seventh star plant is the little viola cornuta lilacea. It's reliable, undemanding, spreads slowly and has a quiet charm about it. Other violas come and go but this goes on and on. An occasional trim, deadheading if I have time (it definately gives more flowers if I do), it gives a continuous display from May to September. Good for the edges of borders, under roses and shrubs, and in gaps between paving. Pretty in little glasses on sidetables and on window ledges. I also have the white form - a very clean white (pictured).

Viola labradorica is similarly robust, but has purple leaves and rich purple, very tiny flowers. I've seen it thrive under dry shady hedges, but it also succeeds here in a sunny spot in gravel, seeding around nicely.

Small but perfectly formed....

  

Form and colour are my focus in composing the garden, and so far my star plants have been mounds - frothy alchemilla and softly rounded mounds of hardy geraniums, and spires - foxgloves and nectaroscordum. In contrast to these the grass hakonechloa macra albo-aurea (I know, I know, but I honestly don't know of another name for this beautiful plant!) has a very different form. It flows, fountain like. I have it, as here, at the front of borders, but it also looks wonderful in a pot. It spreads quite slowly, gets cut to the ground in early spring before the new shoots show and requires no other attention.

In this photograph it is harmonising in colour but contrasting beautifully in shape with one of the two clipped forms I have. Lonicera nitida is a straggly thing left to its own devices with branches going at odd angles every which way. The other clipped plant I have is a box, cut in an oval rather than a ball. These shapes act like full stops in the froth and flow of the summer garden, and provide bold shapes in the winter. Clipping them is a rather soothing operation, done when the notion takes me, two, maybe three times a year....

 

I was told you couldn't grow tulips here, because the deer would eat them - but I have been growing them now for 7 or 8 years. The secret? Smelly soap!  Buy the cheapest, most perfumed soap from the supermarket and cut it into pieces and scatter them either close to the plants you want to protect, or as I have begun to do, around the perimeter of the garden - this seems to work for me as my garden is quite small. I love growing tulips - such brilliant colour so early in the year is exciting. I love deer too, but not in my garden, thanks....

I don't grow many roses - I always think of them as high maintenance plants - but rosa glauca I would not want to be without. A little trimming back of wand like growth about now is all the attention it gets here. It is the foliage which charms. It has a 'glaucous' bloom on it, hence the name, a kind of subtle purplish overlay to the green and it harmonises well with the colours I like to use in this part of the garden - pinks, lilacs and purples and mauve. In the first, most recent photograph, I have put knautia macedonica (another star!), linaria 'Canon Went' and astrantia 'Roma' beside it. The flowers of the rose, just visible in the other photo, are a very delicate pink but don't last long, though it does produce hips, and have little or no scent.

Talking of scent, we fought our way to the balsam poplar (the one surrounded by brambles - see 26 March posting) and cut a few small branches which are scenting the whole room with their delicious perfume as I write. If they root in the water I shall plant one in a more convenient place for cutting, and as they are fast growing I may have a supply every year.


 

When I was a wee girl in Glasgow, I loved to go with my Dad to his allotment. I can remember so well: being lifted up to peer into the mysterious stillness of the deep water in the water butt, the smell of dahlias and tomato leaves, pulling carrots and shelling peas, all the sheds and huts made out of old doors and corrugated iron (though my Dad and his neighbour Mr Gavin, a joiner, built a very fine greenhouse with a brick base and proper windows against the wall of the cemetery which backed the plot). All the plots were fenced and had their own gates. I have memories of carrying home vast bunches of flowers.

One year Dad grew a patch of the most beautiful daisies I had ever seen. The purity and freshness of the big white flowers in the dirty old city was enchanting and I knew that one day I would want to grow daisies like these. Not just any daisy, but this exact daisy, so I memorised the name - chrysanthemum spectabile 'Cecilia'. When I rattled it off at home I was accused of 'showing off' (Scottish children were never encouraged to show off!) so I kept quiet about it after that, but was hooked on the latin names. I loved them, and never had any trouble remembering them. When I went to secondary school I studied Latin, and, older still, when I was given a copy of the Reader's Digest Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and Flowers by my sister and brother in law, I just read it from start to finish, as you would any book, and without really trying, the latin names stuck.

So if it sounds like showing off, I don't mind - they read like poetry to me, and meant a lot to me in the years when I dreamed of having a garden of my own in the country and growing all my favourite flowers.

Well, nectaroscordum siculum subspecies bulgaricum (learn that off by heart!) are not exactly spires, but they are tall, do well in my garden, spreading just a little each year, and hang their pretty bell flowers well above the domes of foliage of the hardy geraniums in May and early June.

They are decorative onions, 'curious and beautiful' says Beth Chatto, whose descriptions of plants and flowers are enchanting and very accurate (I love her books). This allium has little papery cases which split to reveal the thimble like flowers, which, as they are pollinated, turn upwards again to make lovely seed heads. Unlike some alliums whose foliage flops on the ground, their leaves remain attractive - quite spiky, and staying upright, at least until hidden by the surrounding geraniums.

A lovely plant, easy and different. If it does have a common name, I don't know it. (Have just looked it up - Sicilian honey garlic? OK, but I like the way nectaroscordum siculum bulgaricum trips off the tongue.)

next posting - latin names and showing off....