Blooming into Flaming June

[Blackpuddingbertha]

Keeping the potting shed party going from the previous Rhubarb Society thread and all threads before it.

Please feel free to join in all gardeners, whether novice, professional or aspiring. Plenty of blackberry gin for all.

Oh CUP, no wonder you feel sad. I certainly do understand your attachment to your garden. You just cannot replace that time. I do hope it works out. It must also be so hard with back problems when you are a professional gardener.

The garden is looking lovely after 4 days of decent sun, but my water butts are depleting fast so a little over night rain would be good.

Not done much in the garden the last few days as our new cat has arrived. It was my nans cat but she is not well and so cant look after it anymore. My brother transported it from london to us down on the south coast on saturday and since then it is busy finding places to hide. My other cat is very friendly and wants to make friends but she hisses and spits at him. Then where the bath panel is off in the bathroom (we had a leak that has just been repaired and i need to get a new floor laid before putting the panel back on) she got under the floorboards and from there found her way through to the eves of the house. Took me all day to get her out again. She is a beautiful British blue but is not used to other cats or living in a home with a lot going on. I think it could take a while to settle her and it is eating into my gardening time.

Hello CUP. Was it you who added cutted-up pear to the MN lexicon?

I did laugh at echt's reply but, truthfully, I do sympathise with how you feel about the prospect of leaving your garden. I could fairly happily leave this house, but the garden I made from scratch over many years and it would be an awful wrench to leave it. I am sorry too that your back problems are putting your professional work in jeopardy.

Do feel free to post about such things here - although most of our gossip is about plants and gardens we do roam a little wider on occasions.

CUP, that is tough. If you do move can you enlist help to move what you want ? If DP won't move then he can at least help you move the bits you want. We've been here for ten years and I definitely get the attachment.

My gardenis still very much work in progress. It's actually got three chain saw wielding men in it at this very moment. Well they are on another tea break actually, a long tea break. But they are here. The huge conifer is on its way out finally and will make a big difference. As will the other tall trees beng topped. My Harlow Carr rose looks like it might flower today in honour of the occasion.

Notanother, I'm not sure bout hydrangea and clay I'm afraid. But me being me I'd have a go, just dig a big hole and chuck lots of compost in. With the cosmos I'd try to leave them out but if you think they got slugged then it probably is better to do them inside until they get bigger.

at Echt's all year round veg crops !

::Arf:: at Well they are on another tea break actually, a long tea break. But they are here.

Hi Maud. It wasn't me who wrote the Cutted Up Pear thread but it made me laugh so much that I stole the term for my nickname

Yes it's a nightmare with my back at the moment. I used to be able do so much (which probably put me where I am now). The future is a scary place - but I think it will push me more into garden design, which I'm qualified to do but have been neglecting over the past few years.

However I've seen people on here saying they don't think there's a living to be made in it - not for all of us designers anyway.

What do people here think?

Hmm, that's tricky, I think.

I have a good friend who is a garden designer and admit I toyed with the idea of retraining as such myself during my ML. I didn't because I thought the market here (reasonably affluent corner of sarf London) was overcrowded with mummies-who-had-retrained-as-garden-designers. From what I can see locally, there is plenty of work for people who are well-trained, experienced (word of mouth recommendations help a lot) and will also do the planting and some practical stuff (like putting up trellis, not so much the very heavy stuff). I think the recession probably has shaken the done-a-weekend-course-dilettantes out of the market, though.

Where are you based, CUP?

Sorry you are having a hard time of it at the mo cup.

can you google your area and garden design to see what the competion is like in your area?

Hi CUP. That's really tough when you reach an impasse like that with a partner re where to live. We had it to an extent. I didn't want to leave Sussex and move to London, but I ended up doing so. I pined. I pined for six years. In the end DH relented and we moved. It's rough when somebody has to compromise like that; it's hard to find a solution. And even though it was me who was driving the move, I still found it a wrench to leave the London garden that I'd created. I keep wanting to go back and peep over the hedge to see how it's doing and make sure they prune things at the right time.

Starting a new garden is fun though! Could you get excited by that maybe, as a consolation?

It was me who was talking on the other thread about there being no money in garden design. I do think you can make it work though, if you are very business minded (I'm not) and disciplined. I know people who do. There is money to be made on the plants - buy them wholesale and sell them to the clients at a profit.

Sorry to break off mid flow - dd has just done a poo in the bath. I will continue...

Poo incident dealt with.

Avoid working for friends and family. They want it on the cheap, you end up endlessly re-drawing for them because they have no concept of your time being money or that "can you just twiddle that bit there/add a path etc etc is another whole day working for nothing. They don't value what you've done and complain when their newly planted border doesn't provide an immediate screen even though they would only fork out for the smallest plants... Oh listen to me I've gone into rant mode...

There is plenty of work out there though. I am still grudgingly accepting it turning it down even though I have never advertised and have only done a couple of gardens over the past three years since starting a family. Word of mouth is a powerful force.

I think the bottom line is make sure you charge enough. Don't fiddle around endlessly adjusting designs. Get them done. Get a good builder on side for the hard landscaping. Choose your clients carefully and don't be afraid to turn down work if you get the feeling that clients are going to argue to toss of every figure or change their minds constantly. Actually, changing their minds is fine, provided you've made it clear to them that each change made to the drawing will be charged.

argue the toss

first rose out on the rose walk - Mme Alfred Carriere. Too high up to smell it though.

Here is a story about a lady who moved gardens
www.independent.co.uk/property/gardening/farewell-my-lovely-victoria-summerley-bids-farewell-to-her-beloved-london-plot-8225175.html
This is the garden she moved from
victoriasbackyard.blogspot.co.uk/

Roses out here too today, climbing around the French doors that open onto the orchard. I think they may be Gertrude Jekyll. They look lovely against the old brick of the wall.

Rhubarb I've worked in garden design for 8 years so I'm aware of the pitfalls. (I usually say to clients - be careful pointing your finger around asking for more stuff; every time you point it costs £100!)

I give friends/family an hour free consultation with a back of the envelope design done there and then. If they want to do it themselves, fine. We've had a chat and a cup of tea. If they want me to do it, good, I'll price the job up and we do it on a clear schedule from there.

But jobs have been running dry in the last few years. All my work has been word of mouth and I've never had to advertise so far. I do events work as well so I've had another career to attend to. (Which is actually very similar in format). Therefore, I think, the design work has fallen off.

I'm thinking of making the leap and spending money on a website (gulp).
It's less of a question about how many other garden designers are in my area, more how many potential clients are out there?
I live in rural West Gloucestershire btw.

Funny - Thanks for that link, I'm really enjoying Victoria's blog.

Wynken - thank you for the cosmos advice. I nearly bought a tray of ready grown ones this morning but I shall try to resist and raise the seeds.

Cuttedup - sorry to hear about your back... But oh to be a garden designer! Do you have a signature style?

My roses are out too I have peach coloured a patio rose rose, in a pot with violas, right by my front door and this morning there were 2 mini blooms there to greet me. I bought it when it was looking a bit cheap sad at the end of last season so it's lovely to see it thrive.

I had a lovely morning at work today. I had to see a tree nursery client, which is always nice anyhow, but this chap had a sideline hobby of competing Nationally in veg competitions. So, instead of doing what I was strictly there to do, I was indoctrinated into the madness science of growing enormous and perfect vegetables. What a wacky world! There were cucumbers growing in Perspex tubes, carrots and parsnips growing in 200L drums of sand, leeks growing in pipe lagging, kohl rabi growing on miniature stilts (which I may actually try with mine). And the volumes were incredible, 60 tomato plants just to ensure 12 perfect tomatoes! I was shown photos of carrots that were 45inches long, leeks the size of a leg, just incredible.

That sounds amazing Bertha. I would have loved to have seen all of that. Loving the kohl rabi on stilts! It reminds me that I keep meaning to attach a milk bottle to a teeny apple so that it grows inside the bottle and I can amaze the dc.

Apparently kohl rabi have a habit of flopping over as they grow (which mine are doing - I'm a first time kohl rabi grower so didn't know this was normal), so, if you put three plants sticks around the foliage to prop it up then when the bulb bit forms it works its way up and ends up sitting on the sticks like stilts. Ot something like that anyway. Very clever.

I'm not going to start growing carrots in drums though...

What do they feed them on to make them grow so big? Is all chemicals? Or good old Guiness?

Hi.

I was on the old thread but dropped off because I fail.

I love this thread.

I haven't counted my pots but I have a ridiculous number - we had a balcony and they just sort of accumulated. I've got one of those half-barrel things with a magnolia in it, plus a couple of olive trees and a bay tree in similar-sized plastic pots. We did nearly kill ourselves getting everything in the car when we moved here.

I am so jealous of people with roses. There is an interesting-looking rose growing all over the back fence from the neighbour's side, which is covered in buds (it looks as if it might be something like rambling rector, not sure). But it won't open!

I do however have a gorgeous pale-pink peony that is flowering right by the kitchen window and the smell is just amazing. It's making me very happy.

Just catching up and saw it was wynken asking about the magnolia in the half-barrel, so will be more specific.

Mine was labelled as stellata and it was winter. Come spring, it became very obvious it wasn't stellata. I think it's grandiflora. So, whoops! It's been in the barrel for well over three years now and it is doing absolutely fine, though obviously not growing bigger at the rate I think it naturally would. It always has around 10 flowers, which is not many, but I think this is to do with the fact that where I used to live, the squirrels would eat the buds.

I don't feed it anything (I probably should), and I've never taken it out and replaced compose (again, probably should, but it's a total bugger to move). It does obviously need quite a lot of water.

But that's it. And I reckon if it works with one of the big magnolias, it should be fine for the others!

I'll try and put a pic on my profile in a mo.

That's fantastic LRD, thank you very much. Mine is labelled Stellata but need to wait until spring. I'm gong to shove it into a very large pot and let it get on with it. One of the offer cheapie magnolias has started to come into leaf. I'm definitely going to have to give one away, I do not have room for 3 .Sticking with the school I think as DS leaving this year. It would be lovely To think we might go past in future years and see it in blossom and remember DS's time there. The head was asking for donations of shrubs etc, it's just a large shrub!

I still don't have a totally open rose, the Harlow Carr is the closest. My Alfred Carriere is in year 2, lots of growth but no sign of flowers. Someone gave me a split bit of peony last year. I thought I'd killedit but a leaf has appeared. My non flowering one is still just that but i've put in the new offer bare root tree peony so will have to see what future years bring.

I love Magnolias. I am jealous of you having three but they'd be equally beautiful in school grounds of course.

I've had to look up Harlow Carr, but that looks lovely - I can imagine the smell would be amazing.

I have a standard stellata in a half barrel - it is the only magnolia in the garden that thrives. It has really good quality soil and we top dress it sometimes.

I love this thread too LRD. It works as a diary for me, I can look back and see how far the garden has come. I also really appreciate being able to ask questions and get suggestions from experienced gardeners.

Sunny but very windy here today. The cottage borders are looking lovely with lupins, oriental poppies, aquilegia in every colour from deep purple through pink to white, some purple, white and blue iris, sweet rocket, verbascum, peony buds and Young Lycidas flowering. There is a lot of green foliage to set everything off. I am really pleased with it.

We have been eating salad from the greenhouse every day this week. Yummy rocket is the best.