Veg Plotting

Regular readers know my fondness for Dahlia 'Moonfire', but not that it's been absent from my garden for the past couple of years. I'd managed to successfully overwinter it in the ground for over 20 years, but that's always a risk which eventually found me out. Oh, how I've missed her. How could I resist those firecracker blooms when they winked at me from the plant stall at Chippenham's market last week? Not I - a small exchange of cash ensued and I bore her triumphantly home. I was so pleased with my purchase I even stopped on the way to take the above photo in the Donkey Field! I've always known this dahlia as 'Moonfire', so I was surprised to see her called 'Sunshine' in some of the plant catalogues earlier this year. It turns out that this was the name given by the original breeders in the Netherlands in 1993, but a stray seedling made its way to the UK before commercial release, where it was named 'Moonfire' by Chris Sander...

Here I am with my friend and fellow garden writer Sue on Chelsea Press Day, our fab photo kindly taken by another friend and photographer Ian Thwaites, who's given his permission for me to use it in this post. Thanks Ian!* 'Oi, stand aside,' I hear you say... 'we want to see the garden you've been telling us about for months!' Well, here it is... ...almost exactly the same view, but without us!  I'm also rather fond of this photo looking the other way, despite it being shot into the light. I think it gives it a slightly mystical feeling, especially as I mentally called the tree on the left 'the whomping willow' whenever I saw it. Weren't we lucky with the weather! The reaction to The Flood Resilient Garden on the day, on the Chelsea TV coverage, and in the press was immense. Naomi and her co-designer Ed certainly caught the zeitgeist after our miserable rainy winter and spring. Joanna Lumley said she adored it. Here are a few more scenes from the...

I spent an amazing couple of days at RHS Chelsea helping Naomi with the planting tasks for her Flood Resilient garden . This is what I learned along the way... Have hi viz, will travel! Luckily I didn't need to borrow NAH's heavy duty railworking hi viz jacket and trousers (on standby in case it really poured with rain), nor did I need a hard hat as I was working after the main construction phase. I had to take an online site safety course and test before being allowed on site It's good to travel comfortably and wait until the last moment to don your heavy steel capped boots. Even better when you find a bench at Chelsea Barracks to do so whilst admiring their fab Chihuly glass installation at their Spring Festival Have a spare pair of steel capped boots available when the rubber tread on your day one boots drops off on the way home. Luckily I was by the Barracks when this happened and could swiftly change into my trainers. Even luckier is my shoe size is almost the same as ...

Let the Flood Resilient Garden's build commence! My friend  Naomi and the rest of the team are on site at Chelsea today, so now all the dreams and plans are set to become reality. I'm getting really excited as I'm working on the build just before the show! Hopefully there will be time to snap a few quick pics when I'm there so you can see what's happening. In the meantime we'll have to make do with the sketched design - as you can see there's a lot crammed into a small space. FloodRe - the garden's sponsor - have an interactive version on their website which allows you to explore the garden's features thoroughly - both in terms of the various habitats and planting - which are also chosen carefully to help with flood resilience, as well as the more engineering aspects to the design. As a result I'm currently pondering whether we can have some extra wide guttering installed on our house as we have real problems with overflows on an increasingly r...

One of the highlights of the recent Garden Press Event was the Guernsey Clematis stand where they showcased their two clematis due for launch* at this year's Chelsea Flower Show. If you're unfamiliar with the company name, then I'm sure you know of the lovely Raymond Evison , who is the breeder behind these two new plants. * = if they're launching them at Chelsea, then it looks like I've let the cat out of the bag 😉 On the left of the photo we have 'Lindsay' with 'Guernsey Flute' on the right. Both have been selected for their plentiful blooms across the entire length of their stems, flowering from May through July with a second flush in September. They grow to around 6 feet in height (90-120cm in metric) and are good candidates for a large pot as well as the more usual site in the garden. 'Lindsay' is the one for sunshine and 'Guernsey Flute' for the shadier side of things - as is the case with most white clematis. Unlike its forebe...

I've spotted primroses popping up in many places on my walks this week and it's a welcome sight to see them. I found the pictured ones in Old Hardenhuish Lane on my way to Lidl* yesterday. They're in a patch on the edge of damp woodland next to Hardenhuish Brook and I've also seen them close to the River Avon right in the middle of Chippenham. They're a timely sighting as I'm thrilled to be working with FloodRe's The Flood Resilience Garden team in a small way during the run up to Chelsea Flower Show. I'll provide the written content for their Plant of the Week spot on the garden's Instagram account over the next few months. It just so happens the primrose is my first entry this week - you'll find snowdrop, birch and dogwood there already, as provided by Naomi , the garden's designer. My primrose finds show they're an excellent fit with the show garden's ethos which is to demonstrate simple choices in design and planting can help a...

Regular readers know I do love a good citizen science project and I'm happy to announce the latest one is launched by The RHS/Bumblebee Conservation Trust today. What can be better than watching bumblebees bothering our flowers on a sunny day and help science to boot? From today until 31st May we're asked to submit our sightings from our gardens and parks around the UK. Why is this important? Well, bumblebees are a vital pollinator for our garden flowers plus crops such as apples, tomatoes and peas. When the weather starts to warm - even on the odd warm late winter's day - queen bumblebees emerge from hibernation to find nectar to help fuel themselves and gather pollen to feed the hungry larvae of worker bees back in the nest. Finding out the exact situation in springtime is particularly important as habitat loss/climate change may be affecting the availability of springtime flowers, which in turn will affect the successful establishment of bee colonies at the start of the ...

It's the May bank holiday and coincidentally peak flowering time for two of our most iconic spring wildflowers; fritillaries and English bluebells .  It's a good year for the fritillaries at North Meadow in nearby Cricklade, so NAH and I headed out yesterday morning to see them. It's hard to show how marvellous this location is in a photograph as the fritillaries are small and there are dire warnings not to leave the marked footpaths so the flowers can get on with doing their thing. We chose the blue route which is the longest walk around the meadow, around two miles in total. It doesn't encompass them all and soon we were walking amongst thousands of fritillaries, with a pale pinky, purple haze on the horizon showing there were thousands more still to see. It's a few years since we were last there, and I'm sure there were more white forms dotted amongst their darker cousins this time. I haven't managed to find what determines the variation: genetics, or en...

It's National Gardening Week and it's timely the RHS have published the results of a recent study they conducted with Sheffield University on gardening and wellbeing. The results and the infographic above speak for themselves. To quote one of the researchers - the RHS's Alistair Griffiths - on Twitter: "The more 'doses' of gardening you get, the better your wellbeing :) " I hope those who discovered gardening as a great stress buster during Lockdown are motivated to continue - I've always said 'Gardening is the answer'. You can read the full published paper here . Happy gardening!

Sometimes a plant gets under your skin; one to be pursued no matter how hard the chase might be. Hesperaloe parviflora  - aka Red Yucca - proved to be such a plant for my garden. I first came across it in Austin at the Garden Bloggers Fling last year . It's a native plant to Texas and was found pretty much in everyone's garden; also at the gorgeous organic nursery we visited in the rain; and thanks to the legacy of Lady Bird Johnson and the wonderful work of the Wildflower Center which bears her name, it's seen along all the roads and freeways around the city. Of course it's a key plant for xeriscaping , its tough agave-like rosette leaves - without the skin piercing spikes and with intriguing 'stringy bits' (my technical term) - are ideally adapted for the harsh Texan conditions and whilst I'd mentally named it my plant of the Fling, with a sigh of regret I'd also consigned it to the 'not suitable for my garden' pile of potential pla...

I've walked around the garden with more of a purpose than usual lately because I'm on the lookout for any plants with spittle, commonly known as ' cuckoo spit '. It's a sign a froghopper nymph (aka spittlebug) has taken up residence within the protective froth just like you can see in the photo above. Until recently I'd thought these sap-suckers were relatively harmless, but now I see they're of concern as they're a chief carrier of the bacterium  Xylella fastidiosa , which results in the disease and death of many popular garden plants. It hasn't reached the UK yet and the RHS would like it to stay that way. They've teamed up with the University of Sussex and Forest Research, who need thousands of volunteers - like you and me - to help map the distribution of spittlebugs found in gardens, meadows, grasslands and woodlands from April to late June. We're being asked to report sightings of spittle, in our gardens or on plants elsewhere,...

By now the Royal Hospital grounds should be back to normal and this year's Chelsea Flower Show is fading into memory. Quite a lot of my show coverage this year was elsewhere on social media, so I'm taking the opportunity to scoop it all up and keep a record of it on here. Before I do that, I wanted to take the opportunity to congratulate Tom Hoblyn on his Dubai Majlis show garden. This was quite a different take on what the Middle East has to offer and I loved the rusty linking elements together with the planted highlights using my colour of this year's show, yellow. There were a lot of innovative displays in the Great Pavilion and this gold medal winning one by Roualeyn Nurseries was a delight, especially as I bought a 'Garden News' from them at Malvern. Staying in the Great Pavilion, Kirstenbosch's display was awash with their signature native flora. Green walls were everywhere, and I particularly liked its use as a map. I'm alwa...

It was lovely to get reacquainted with Exbury Garden's rhododendrons at Chelsea Flower Show this week. I first saw them at a GMG study day earlier in the year and it was great to remember that visit and how special the Exbury hybrids are. The Chelsea display is a joint production by Exbury Gardens and Millais Nurseries - who specialise in rhododendrons - to celebrate the garden's centenary. In that time, three generations of the garden's owners - the Rothschild family -have raised over 1,000 hybrids. Now Head Gardener Tom Clarke and his team are working with the nursery to ensure the rarer and more threatened hybrids in the collection are conserved. Tom explained this has to be done by careful propagation as any seed from the garden specimens won't come true (the hybrids are first generation offspring; true seed comes several generations later). The nursery launched a wide selection of new varieties at the show, many of which are part of the Exbury/Mill...

I had a delightful day at Chelsea Flower Show yesterday. My head is still processing which stories to tell you, but in the meantime here's Paul Hervey-Brookes' exquisite 'The Art of Viking Garden' to enjoy from the Space to Grow category. One of the questions most asked about Chelsea is 'what is this year's colour?' As usual purples and greens are in abundance as befits the time of year, but the colour for me this time is yellow. Paul used deft touches in his design to add highlights and ensure they stuck in my mind. I had a lovely surprise whilst I admired this effect. Paul turned round to me and said 'Michelle, just go and have a good look around' and I was delighted to skip onto his garden. Whilst we've known each other for a while, I had no idea he'd remembered my name. Update: the awards are out and the garden has deservedly won gold. Many, many congratulations Paul.

It's a while since I attended the Malvern Spring Festival and it was a happy return there last week. I might have been there on the only rainy day, but there was still plenty to smile about. Most of my show gardens photos have turned out on the dull side because of the gloom, but nothing could stop Peter Dowle 's award winning efforts from looking good on the day. The striking sculpture is called 'Zephyr' and is by Simon Gudgeon. When I looked him up, it transpires he owns Sculpture by the Lakes in Dorset, a garden which is now on my must-see list. Here are a few more of my outdoor highlights... The rusted metal are my chosen items from Tom Critchley this time and are shown 'planted' in my garden. Meanwhile indoors... It struck me there was a lot more thought put into the displays at this year's show. I particularly liked the x-ray and microscope images. The number of areas and themes for talks has also increased and I particularly enj...

I went on a fantastic road trip with my friend Naomi  recently, where we found our mouthwatering itinerary was chock full of winter joy, sneak peeks and surprises ... First stop was Hortus Loci  in Hampshire where we saw potting up was already in full swing to fill the huge polytunnels with the plants on order for Chelsea Flower Show.  This year they're growing for IKEA's  Gardening Will Save the World , which will be the first show garden in the Great Pavilion judged for a medal. It'll be on 2 levels and include lots of edibles; our guide Danny Green (Show Plant manager) confirmed it should include lingonberries, a signature berry of IKEA's fare whenever I go there. The other main show garden they're growing for is  Welcome to Yorkshire  which the lovely  Mark Gregory  is designing again this year. It promises to have a working lock gate as its centre piece - I can't wait to see it in action. The team are also growing for Malvern Spring Fe...

It's been great to see lots of people showing off their produce and show prizes on social media the past week or so. Prime village fete season is here and I'm delighted to be judging at Foxham again after my debut there last year . I dusted down my judging clipboard this week to find most of the 'equipment' I use is still in there. Can you spot what's missing in the above photo? NB there's a clue in the next paragraph... I also see there's some hastily scribbled notes on what I was looking for, plus some general observations on last year's standard of display. I thought I'd expand these, so that my job is harder this year. These notes should be good for anyone thinking of dipping their toes into showing off their produce, not just at Foxham Show. Before the show Have a look at the schedule and spot which items in your garden and/or house are likely candidates for you to show. It's been a tough growing season this year, but don...