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I was preparing a talk on my time at Bourton House recently when I dug out this picture. It goes back some 25 or so years and is still a favourite of mine. The ceramic pot is by Mark de la Torre - a man who does not like to stand still and who has a vast creative energy which he sends off in all directions. His partner Clare and son Luis are also stoked full of the craft maker's urge to design and create. To appreciate the broad spectrum of this trio's capabilities and how much imagination and ingenuity can be crammed into one household go take a look at their work at http://www.delatorre.co.uk/index.html
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I have bought a new camera and somehow managed to set it to black and white and took a few pictures before I noticed. I am glad I got the settings wrong because I think this black and white picture says a lot more than the colour version below. Shapes and shadows become much more important.
More of this garden even belower.
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Teeny Weeny Incy Wincys
Startled baby spiders scurrying up and down their webs to escape predation
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Flower of an unknown succulent plant
Yet another flower of an anonymous succulent with my grubby mit looking like it is made of wood.
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Box Rust
I was cutting back some box plants a few weeks ago and spotted these little black blobs. Turns out they are the spore producing pustules of Box Rust, Puccinia buxi. They appear in autumn and persist through winter to spring. They did not appear to be harming the plant and nor were they particularly disfiguring. No treatment necessary.
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Box growers gird your loins.
No matter how tight you clip your box hedging sooner or later it will creep beyond a size that is suitably balanced and proportional and there comes a time when loins have to be girded, bullets bitten and a bit of serious clipping embarked upon. Sometimes it takes a client with a bit of nerve and a degree of blind faith to take the leap and start the process of regeneration. Fortunately I have such a client who can see beyond the immediate and relying on my previous experience of successfully renovating overgrown box plants we started clipping If you look at the pictures below you will see a bit of before and after and see we have been quite drastic. In fact now my only concern is that we have not been drastic enough and we might end up with some dead twigs with a base of fresh shoots on the long low sections of the hedge.
We did this in mid April.
The weapon of choice.
The clippings catcher proves mighty useful when it comes to tidying up.
As scary as it all was there was a reassuring number of shoots already sprouting in the depths of the old twigs.
I guess these tiny shoots would have withered if they had not been given the light that cutting back offered them,
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Spot the typo on this packet of Coop hot cross buns.
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Aaaah, how cute. - that's cynicism by the way.
It is one of the Silkweeds, Asclepia speciosa I think, parachuting its seeds into the wind..
