Heuchera and a lily growing up through it.

As you can see I’ve got a good crop of moss here, apart from the fritillaries. These ones self-seed but the white version seems to have disappeared.

This is a right fankle (tangle) of shrubs and trees, I always overplant areas because I want to squeeze in as many as I can. I was actually trying to photograph the vinca (periwinkle) because it’s a gorgeous shade of blue but you can hardly see it at all.

This is actually a tub containing a pieris forest flame and an azalea along with some things which have invited themselves to the party via self-seeding.

The weather forecasters are promising us ground frost overnight and I won’t be surprised if we get it because the wind at the moment is positively Baltic. So much for it being May!

I know, having said that we’ll almost certainly get inundated with snow at Easter, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time. But for now I’m just grateful for the sunshine and winds which don’t feel as if they’re whistling through my bones.

My garden shouted to me to come and redd (tidy) it up. So my brown garden rubbish bin is now full to the brim. This photo was taken before the big clean up.

This is the path from the other end. I’ve always liked paths with the slabs placed diagonally and it’s very easy to do. I laid weed suppressing fabric before laying the slabs and then bought bags of river pebbles from a garden centre, although I must admit that I did nick some bigger stones from a nearby beach. Too naughty, but I can’t stop myself from scanning the shore for pretty stones. For me it’s the best thing about going to a beach.

The reason I was out taking photos was because we just had our old cast iron guttering replaced last week with nice new shiny black guttering – and not before time. Half of the old guttering fell down during that second big hurricane which we had last month and as you can see the back wall has been getting really wet. That wall is now part of the kitchen, which was originally the old wash house, the small square window used to be covered with a wooden shutter instead of glass as it was the coal hole/bunker. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the right size of guttering in grey to match the guttering on the left and right sides of the house but I don’t think it looks too bad as they are offset and don’t adjoin the black stuff. As you can see our house is an unusual design, almost as higgledy-piggledy as the ones I was taking photos of in England.

The weather hasn’t been good for the plants in my garden, they haven’t coped well with the mild one day and frosty the next. The snowdrops lasted no time and the crocuses resembled burst balloons after a couple of days of dodgy weather. But these primulas are nice and bright, even if my photo is blurred.

It hasn’t been a great time for the garden due to the weather. My sedums usually have loads of butterflies visiting them, in fact that’s really why I grow them but everything has been so late in flowering due to the cold weather and unlike England we didn’t even have any good weather in the spring. Fife has had the wettest weather in the whole of Britain this year, I thought it had been a wee bit damp! So by the time the sedums opened it was really too late for the butterflies.

There was just this one today which always fluttered past me just when I had a paving slab in my hands. By the time I got the camera it danced off elsewhere, I’m sure it was taunting me! So this is the best I could do photo-wise.

Otherwise there aren’t many flowers on the go at the moment. I had a lot of fuchsias in the garden but they almost all died over the past two appalling winters which we’ve suffered. I bought a new selection for my planter and they have been very late in flowering too, in fact I think that it’ll soon be too cold and dark for them and that will be the end of their growing season. I’ve been taking cuttings of all my new fuchsias as I have a horrible feeling that this coming winter is going to be a doozie too. Things like that always seem to come in threes. I don’t want to lose them all again. They’re supposed to be hardy but then so were my old fuchsias but there’s a limit to what they can be expected to put up with.

Anyway, this is my apple tree and although it’s over 30 years old it doesn’t get any taller than about 7 or 8 feet. I haven’t a clue what variety they are as it was planted by the previous gardener. Scotland isn’t a great place for growing apples, I don’t think the growing season is long enough but I usually get enough for a few apple pies from the tree.

My lovely Liquidamber tree is rapidly changing to its autumnal colours, it was all bright green just last week. This tree is very slow growing and is ideal for a small garden. I got this one from the shop at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens.

These are some of the autumn crocuses in my garden, I really like them but I’m not so keen on them in the early summer when the thick leaves come up on their own and take up quite a lot of space.

I’m not supposed to be buying any more plants for my garden because if everything goes to plan I’ll be planning a new garden soonish, or revamping an old one when we downsize, but I couldn’t resist these ones. The Fuchsia is called Voodoo and is very dark purple in reality, nearly black. I’ve been looking for heuchera ‘Pewter Moon’ for ages but I haven’t been able to find it. I was tempted by this one though, unfortunately I can’t remember its name. I think I’ll take the fuchsia into the house soon but I’ll plant the heuchera as it’ll be easily dug up when the time comes.

At the moment they’re sitting outside on the kitchen window sill. Maybe I’ll be able to get into the garden tomorrow – if it doesn’t rain. We don’t seem to be getting two days the same together this year so you can’t really plan anything.

I’ve just realised that I’m in that last photo, well my reflection is.

Monty Don was given a tour of the beautiful gardens but for me it was all too brief. I had to have a look to see what was on the internet and I found these images. Go on, have a look if you like plants and gardens.

It’s a lovely mixture of formal and informal and I can see why on his first visit there President Obama remarked that he thought he had applied for the wrong job! What a perk to live in surroundings like that, on the other hand it must be difficult to leave it all for an office in the middle of London. I wouldn’t.

They always say that you should plant trees for your grandchildren, meaning that they are slow growing so you probably won’t live long enough to be able to appreciate them, but the trees which I have planted all seem to grow like Topsy. They’ve shaded out the greenhouse which is behind these trees and since taking this photo I’ve been busy with the loppers and a saw. I couldn’t even see the top of the silver birch tree which was only about three feet tall when I planted it 10 years ago. I’ve cut back all of the branches and my husband hacked the top of it out, a good eight feet of it I think. When I move to another garden, remind me never to plant any trees because as they grow stronger – you (me) grow weaker!

The blackbirds have been enjoying the rowan berries and when they’ve stripped them all off I’m going to give the tree a good haircut as it’s spreading far too wide and high and casting an awful lot of shade.

The grass is now covered with lopped tree branches and my brown garden recycling bin is full so we’ll be making yet another trip to the town recycling centre. One good thing about this area is that all garden waste is composted by the council instead of it just going to landfill.

I’ll take some more garden photos when it has all been tidied and cut back, no doubt it’ll look drastic, but it has to be done!

Within the parkland there are small areas of garden which could be any suburban plot really and would be easy to copy if you were that way inclined. I think this photo is of part of the kitchen garden although it could be the cottage garden.

I originally thought this one was the cottage garden but I’ve just spotted some red lettuce plants so it’s probably the kitchen garden, the planting in the two gardens is sort of sililat, more like the French potager idea really.

This photo has crocosmia and agapanthus in it amongst other things, all very pretty and easily achievable for anyone with a wee bit of a garden.

If you look closely at this photo you can see cherries on the tree. I’m really jealous because cherries don’t grow where I live in Scotland. We get plenty of lovely blossom but its just never warm enough for long enough for them to develop.

So that’s that for the wee gardens. I’ve put all of the Chatsworth photos onto Flickr now if you want to have a look at them. I’ll do some more posts on Chatsworth but I think I want to blog about Haworth in Yorkshire tomorrow. That’s Bronte country of course and although we went there last year I couldn’t resist another visit on the way home from Derbyshire.

This time we didn’t do the Bronte Parsonage tour but we walked up onto the moors and had a snoop around the shops in the village after we visited the graveyard. I do love old graveyards. Am I strange? Probably!

This is a photo of a damaged pine tree in the pinetum at Chatsworth. It looks like it has suffered some sort of trauma in a storm and the top of it has split off. It seems to be flourishing again, I don’t know what it looked like before it was maimed but to me it looks beautiful now. It might sound daft but I think that that tree could be a lesson to us all!

I have a bit of a penchant for box hedging so this wee bit of the garden appealed to me even although this is a very simple design. As you can see there’s a sculpture there too. There are quite a lot of modern art works dotted around the park. At least the Devonshires are still supporting living artists, just as their ancestors did.

Years ago I bought a few box plants for my own garden and every time I trim them I take loads of cuttings so now I have them all around the edges of my garden in various sizes. I intend to make a Celtic knot garden with them in my new garden when we move. Hopefully it’ll be a lot more intricate than the Chatsworth design. I first saw that sort of planting years ago in Ludwigsburg, Germany in ‘Mad’ King Ludwig’s garden. It looks stunning there.

We drove into Chatsworth early on Thursday morning, and honestly if I had been a weeping kind of a woman I would have wept. Instead of seeing that beautiful house in all its glory the whole front of the house was swathed in plastic which had scaffolding behind it. What a disappointment! Anyway, such is life and I have to say that apart from that Chatsworth is a fantastic day out. You can see some of the plastic in this photo of the back of the house. The Cavendishes have taken advantage of the scaffolding and tours of it are on at the moment. We were tempted but after spending a long time walking about the grounds and the house we were too tired to take on the scaffolding too!

The grounds were designed by ‘Capability’ Brown in the 1760s, for some reason I learned quite a bit about him in history when I was at school, it was great to be in one of his creations.
This is a photo of one of the many ponds/water features.

This is the rockery which is on a really massive scale, the trees are a big feature of the landscape and are beautiful, I must admit that I’m not very far from being a bit of a tree hugger.

Can you see that there are two darker rectangles of greenery high up on this hill? I’m fairly sure that they are the letters ER which have been seeded in a contrasting green plant there to show the Cavendishes’ allegiance to the Queen but at the moment they don’t look too clear. Maybe they will flower.

This photo is of a seating area which is above a grotto, it’s quite a climb up there but it’s worth it.

I took loads of photos, inside and out, so there are a lot more to come. Obviously the house is a thriving business and a lot of people are being employed there and although I don’t have anything against the National Trust, I still think that a visit to Chatsworth is enhanced by the fact that the family is so involved with the running of it all. They don’t seem to have missed out on many business opportunities along the way although I have to say that as a keen gardener I was disappointed with the garden centre. They could make masses of money selling plants which have been propagated from their plants even if they employed a gardener just for that purpose they would generate far more money than his or her annual wages would cost. When we were there the only plants on offer were a couple of roses, lavender and heuchera (boring old Palace Purple).

I really wanted some plants for my garden as a souvenir of Chatsworth but I didn’t get anything at all. Maybe they normally have a better selection and I was just unlucky.

If you’re planning on visiting Chatsworth you should devote a whole day to it as there’s so much to see. If I were local I would definitely buy a season ticket to the grounds as it’s such a beautiful place to have a picnic or just go for walks. When we were there it was very busy, about half of the visitors seemed to be fellow Scots and the rest of them English, where were all the foreign tourists?

I bought two books in the shop there – a Chatsworth Guide Book and a massive chunkster called Letters Between Six Sisters, the Mitfords obviously, and I think it’ll be very interesting but very awkward to read.

More soon!

If you’ve been watching the Scottish Open Golf Championship you’ll realise that the heavens have opened with a vengeance. After almost a week of lovely weather the rain has been of Biblical proportions, thunder and all. Some places have been flooded but luckily not here.

These are a few of the garden photos which I took whilst the sun was shining. I bought the lily corms a few years ago, from a pound shop would you believe – 8 corms for £1 to be precise and they are multiplying. I’m really not too sure about them. I do like them but I sort of think that they’re a bit fancy for my garden, most of the planting is cottagey with quite simple flowers and herbs. On the other hand I suppose cottage gardens have always had formal bits in them like topiary so they kind of fit in. The colours are nice anyway.

The astrantias above are lovely to look at but I once made the mistake of cutting some for putting in a vase in the house – it wasn’t long before I realised that they stink like a dirty old cloth!

I love the random blue splashes on this cranesbill geranium. I thought that it had disappeared from my garden completely because the area which I planted it in is becoming congested with that very pretty yellow plant thug. Luckily I discovered this one on the other side of the garden, these geraniums are very obliging at seeding themselves.

So that’s what the garden was looking like a few days ago but everything was being fairly well flattened by the torrential rain today. I know the plants needed water – but not that much!