FOUR SHIRES v COUNTRYFILE IN THE
look forward to the heady perfume marking my homecoming as I walk to the front door.
garden
“It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the
eyes will take care of themselves” ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Besides planting bulbs for the autumn, traditionally roses are pruned in March. Mowers are sharpened in anticipation of the first cut later in the month and the vegetable patch is titivated ready for the first sowings of early potatoes and aspararagus crowns. The last of any bare root planting has to go in the ground and sweet-peas can be sown for an early summer flowering.
Lawns
should be repaired – thatch raked and removed with any gaps over-seeded before feeding later in the month. For the eager gardener there is much to do – sadly for Haigha, the Mad March Hare of Alice of Wonderland fame, there is no time for tea. It seems that to rest now, one would miss setting up the garden for the remainder of the year... but perhaps now, right in the midst of the growing lists and tasks, we really should stop and consider what we want from our outdoor space.
Jon Uglow garden designer at
NICHOLSONS in North Aston
revels in the onset of the beautiful spring season
M
March heralds the beginning of spring, mad hares and the onset of longer days - some even bright and sunny if we are lucky.
It all
comes as a welcome respite after the months of winter, and there is nothing more cheering than seeing the first flush of flowers – Crocus, Narcissus, Anemone blanda and the little grape hyacinth, Muscari armeniacum – all paying dividends for the seemingly thankless task of planting bulbs in the dying days of autumn. Indeed, if you get a chance to see spring bulbs en-masse in a park, large garden or arboretum at this time of the year, the memories of scrabbling about in the dirt on bended knee fade in an instant. Sweeps of exuberant colour more akin to the careless artist’s canvas than the restraint and balance of an English country
48 FOUR SHIRES v MARCH 2012
garden typically rule the day, gleefully daring colour purists to criticise.
For those who happen to enjoy scrabbling in the dirt (and there are always some!) March happily is a good month for planting snow-drops ‘in the
green’ – a much more reliable way of increasing your stocks than planting the dried bulbs later in the year.
If the weather
sets in mild, bulbs and corms for autumn flowering species can go in the ground – Gladioli and Lily varieties are really useful in extending the flower border’s season once the early summer flush has waned. I am planting masses of Acidanthera (Gladiolus Callianthus) corms this year – a delicate, scented member of the gladioli family with white, hooded blooms on lofty flower stalks. Its native home is Eastern Africa so it needs to go in after the last frosts and I don’t expect to see much of it until we are practically in summer as the soil needs to be quite warm to stimulate growth, but I know it will be well worth the wait and already I
At Nicholsons, we have a theory that one should balance the amount of time at play within the garden – be it lazing in a hammock, having a picnic with the children or simply throwing a ball for the dog – against the amount of time one spends maintaining it. Of course, some people love to garden; it absolutely is their enjoyment and play. Others have the luxury (or necessity!) of a gardener to assist in the care which can skew the balance. However, if you don’t exactly fall in to either of these two categories, it is worth thinking about how you could simplify things without compromising on the aesthetic. Perhaps you might consider using the services of a gardener on a job-specific basis - it can work out to be very cost effective, especially on the more tricky tasks such as fruit tree or wisteria pruning. Maybe a re-design of some areas is required - I know the first thing that I did when I moved to the Cotswolds from London and was faced with a garden larger than a postage stamp was half the width of the main border, relocating many of the standard roses that inhabited it so that I could pack the remaining area full
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