Getting gardens buzzing

It is Chelsea week and we were glued to the telly each night on the look out for ideas and new plants for our garden.

This year the RHS launched a new program to attract more bees and insects into our gardens, called Good for Pollinators, and garden centres up and down the country will have this label on plants that do the job. Really pleased to hear this because our garden attracts loads of bees and insects and we have consciously planted varieties that are good for wildlife, also focusing on colours that insects and bees recognise, such as blues, purples and yellows. Look forward to the arrival of the Red Admirals when the buddleia is in bloom.

Of French Beans and Papaver magic

It has been so hard to keep pace with the garden this week. We have a corner of our garden that is planted with roses and practically overnight, they are full of roses and buds ready to bloom.

We also had high drama from the French Beans. The seedlings grew a few inches high and were expecting to be replanted into a larger space and, more importantly, be provided supports to climb on. When the bean shoots do not find the support they are looking for, they abandon leaf production and send out long tendrils in search of something to climb on to. Now, these pots were on a window sill with nothing but glass on one side. So, looks like the seedlings had a conference one night and decided to support each other. The next time I peeked in to see how they were doing, pairs of shoots had coiled around each other and formed two spires each almost three feet high. The protest worked! I decided I had to give these guys some support immediately and took the pots outside and placed them at the base of the cane tepee frame we had used last year that still stood in the garden. The beans were duly pacified and behaved well till the weekend when we had some time to plant them in the soil all good and proper. Who knew French Beans could throw tantrums like this!

We also have had to abandon plans to have a formal veg bed, partly due to our laziness and partly due to a paucity of creative ideas on where to create it. We will use spaces in our flower beds to plant veg. So the courgettes went in next to the beans along with stakes. In another bed, we potted some of the prolific mint to give away to friends and created space for six small tomato plants. In the same bed, we also carved out a neat little area near the lavender for the carrots. Relieved to have got these into the ground giving them a better chance of growth and survival.

Went on a shopping binge at a Garden Centre recently and Mr Macaron who gravitates towards species exotic was trying to convince me that we should load our trolley with this plant which has flowers the size of saucers and was so irresistible to bees that the bees came along with the pot to the trolley. Turns out they are hardy and will tolerate our alkaline soil, so I had no excuse not to have them. Soon our trolley was filled with two large Papavers and three Papaver Gnomes, which as you guessed, is the smaller version of the same. I have to admit that the Papaver is most expressive flower I have seen in recent times - one of Nature's Grand Designs.

The rest of our trolley included anthemis, salvia (which harks back to my childhood days, when we had an assortment of salvia in our garden), lily-of-the-valley, digitalis, agapanthus and seeds of sedum.

So we had lots more planting to do. We also inaugurated our barbecue, though I did worry whether all the heat and smoke would scare away wildlife that our garden attracts in small measure. There are blue tits who are regular visitors to the bird feeders. Spotted a beautiful ladybird while removing weeds the other day. And we watched in fascination as a collared dove picked up bread crumbs from the bird table, carried it to the bird bath in its beak and dunked it in water to soften it. Quite like how we dunk biscuits in our tea!

There is more to do, but we are exhausted! The lawn was mowed too, I noticed. Hoping that all the new plants will take to their new home and settle in nicely with their neighbours.

Over the summer, we have plans to create a little bench somewhere, clear out the overgrowth along the south wall and plant more roses in the rose corner.

Green Bed et al

We always look forward to the viburnum display in spring - spectacular though short-lived. The viburnum stands tall in what we call our Green Bed - where most of the planting is green or white. We have an old Christmas tree in here along with lupins, ferns, fatsia and hostas. The soil here remains rather moist from all the shade and the plants seem to happily co-exist. 

Elsewhere, alliums, aquilegia and wiegela bring a touch of purple and pink. I love aquilegia, has beautiful foliage as well as well as delicately formed flowers, and like the mint, it seems to have self-propogated. 

We were away recently, driving down the coast in the Abruzzo region of Italy, when we pulled our car in front of the home of an Italian mama gardening in her front yard. She came over to the fence and told us it was okay to park our car there while we hopped to the beach across the road. Before we drove away, Mr Macaron asked if we could have her picture. Here she is, her pitch fork in hand! Bless her!  

We simply cannot postpone the dig for the veggie bed any longer. The beans and courgettes have outgrown their little pots and desperately seek space and stakes. The hanging baskets look set to bloom shortly too. And the potted rhododendron, which has remain inert for ages, has gorgeous little pink buds. More on all this next week! 

Mint Treasure

Mint really does self-propogate, as this picture demonstrates. A dear friend gave us a plant from her garden last year, advising us to plant it in a pot if we did not want it to take over the whole bed! At the time I wanted all our plants to do just that and provide some ground cover. The dried up bit in the centre of this picture is last year's mint and this spring, we have had lush new growth all around it, nicely filling up space! I will have to take some out into pots and pass them on to friends this year though, before its neighbours, rosemary and thyme, protest.