A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

[MaudantWit]

Join us for ongoing gardening chat in the MN potting shed. Blow the cobwebs off a deckchair, help yourself to a glass of elderberry champagne and tell us about your garden.

I named dd for Jerusalem The Golden

Its a lovely name for a lovely child

Yes, a lovely name. All Humphrey's children have lovely names.

::name snob::

That reminds me, Humph. What was the title of the Susan Hill book about making a garden that you recommended?

It is because I know JS is the son of Margaret Drabble that I find his norf London accent very grating.

How kind you are to say so!

He looks and sounds very like his father, Clive Swift, doesn't he, who doesn't seem to go with M Drabble in any way either.

He certainly looks like his father (aka husband of Hyacinth Bucket).

Interesting point about arts and crafts gardens being the start of garden views from windows. It could well be that it went mainstream then. Prior to that, the big country house gardens were often designed to be gazed at from the house (eg Elizabethan knot gardens and parterres, best viewed from above), but obviously these types of houses were hardly mainstream. Normal gardens were for a long time places to grow food rather than to look pretty.

Avoiding prevailing bad weather - what an interesting point that is too; that would explain why the side of our house with the best views has few windows: it gets the worst of the weather. I never spotted that. Oh well - still going to go ahead with knocking out another window!

Yes, often older plebian houses have small windows, or windows which are quite high in the wall, so that if one is sitting down one cannot quite see the garden. I am lucky in that my first floor dining room has a large floor to ceiling window which looks out over the garden, as does the ground floor room on that side.

There is the other side of a window to consider too: It was lovely to see Monty training his honeysuckle to frame the window of his house and made me wonder what the effect of honeysuckle and its roots would be on the house walls. It is common to see roses round windows and doors, and wisteria and winter jasmine too. I'm guessing all these have roots which don't disturb foundations.

Good idea therefore to have another window Rhubarb!

Interesting about the design of houses;ours is poss. 15thC and has most of its windows facing south over the garden, at the front, there were originally none at the back (which was farm storage) because there's a 'petit fermette' at the back IFYSWIM.

This is handy in that it saves money on shutters; they all needed renewing (we're still saving up to do the sitting room french window ones).

Ref. J.S. He is a Nth Londoner btw. I went off him when he rhapsodised over concrete walls, or was it glass walls? in gardens. I apologise if anyone likes them but they just don't look right IMO I don't go for 'trends' unless they're attractive and he, like a lot of architects\ designers goes for design over beauty

Our house is a very humble barn turned house, original building is 15thC and was converted into a house 17thC (probably, who knows really?!) and NONE of the windows look towards the garden, all are facing away from the prevailing wind It is very annoying. At least we look out on some pretty gravel and pots now instead of nasty old tarmac.

Is it weatherboarded Humphrey?

Have only just caught up on the thread!

Funnyperson thank you for the wonderful description of Humph's garden and open day! :-) Humph congratulations! You are an inspiration and your garden sounds wonderful! Must get on FB and see the photographs later on!

Nightshade I hope your wedding day was everything you hoped it would be.

Rhubarb best of luck with the renovations! Hopefully Mdme Alfred will bounce back. Frustrating to have workmen stomping about but hopefully the remodelling will be worth it.

Have been enjoying reading everybody else's garden antics. Halsal thanks for the strawberry link.

Have achieved next to nothing myself - but I suppose I am growing a baby! ;-) Still suffering from ms and although I'll turn 13 weeks tomorrow I'm down 6 lbs on my pre-pregnancy weight, so that tells you how unwell I've been feeling!

Have enjoyed admiring my roses and watching the little apples growing on my tree. One of my repotted Christmas trees is absolutely thriving with lots of bright green growth. The other is brown and withered. It's amazing the difference when they had equal treatment!

I will have to post up a photo of one of the DA roses - it is definitely not the Sceptre'd Isle that I ordered. It is, however, very very beautiful, so I don't mind. Do you think if I emailed them about it they would include Sceptred Isle for free on my next order? My wisteria continues to struggle and climbing Iceberg seem to have been attacked by caterpillars. The highs and the lows of my garden. Lots of things need potting on, but I'm under pressure to get things decided for the house. Went ahead and ordered a reconditioned 4 oven Aga. It's coming on July 23rd and I'm excited about that! Now I need to decide on kitchen plan and order - very important decision!!!

Oh yes nightshade i hope it didn't rain on you

It rained for the whole day here yesterday which was a pain because there was a village 'neighbours' gathering where we all sat under a waterproof half tent and ate and shared our bring our own meals. It was fun anyway but too wet to dance!

Growing a baby is HARD WORK!!! It is so tiring, but glad things are going well, although sorry to hear about the MS still continuing. I cannot express my sympathy fully enough tbh, I couldn't get up from the sofa with my last pg without boffing (TMI sorry).

I LOVE my four oven aga. A plate warming oven is a fantastically unnecessary but desirable item

The house is stone clad, with the original timber frame of the oldest bit poking out through the front/side. OUr house is a really hotch potch puzzle, there is no making any sense of what happened where really!

Today should have been dedicated to gardening, but if you care to google Bom Australia radar, you'll see it was raining hard with hail all day.

So we drew the curtains, stoked the fire, and watched DVDS: "Blue Ruin", an excellent straight-to-DVD film, followed by the more relaxing "The Avengers - the Emma Peel years".

Tomorrow I will try to plant a rosemary and lavender low hedge. Both bloom well in winter, so very good for bees.

I'm off into the garden now, the lawn needs mowing, as does the bit of wild lawn where the daffodils were. the grass is now all silver and there are no wild flowers so down it comes.

You're lucky mousmous I planted "heritage" spring bulbs last autumn and they came up beautifully BUT our hedge and grass cutter man 'forgot' that I'd told him twice to leave that particular area Maybe it was my terrible french

So I'll buy some more this year and put a bleedin' fence around them

it's looking very sorry now, though.
but was rewarded by my roses, they look and smell amazing. maybe because of yesterday's good rain. here a picture of 'the beaty and the beast'

That's a lovely rose.

Castlelough., sorry to hear about the ms, but hopefully it will stop soon. Lucky you about the Aga - if only I had a bigger kitchen... I would defo tell DA about Not-Sceptered Isle, and fingers crossed you'll get the proper plant.

Interesting about the lack of windows on the prevailing wind side. It does make sense thinking about it. If anyone in SE has ever been the the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum, looking in the old cottages there makes you appreciate modern comforts - like glass. I have recently realised that Weald & Downland is near West Dean which has a lovely garden so I will have to go back soon.

In my garden news, we harvested our first potatoes today -a wonderful crop showing the effects of copious rain and manure (compared with the previous year when there was a lack of both, I got 4x as many potatoes, and they were firmer and tastier). And I did a trendy salad with lots of different flowers & leaves from the garden plus peas and broad beans in the pod and some goat curd, for a starter, which was gorgeous.

Ooh, blimey, Bearleigh that sounds lovely!

I realise that I never reported back on my DA rose not as advertised issue. I got in touch with the garden centre where I bought it, and although I no longer had the receipt as they requested (does anyone really keep receipts for plants? for a year? anyway...) they have agreed to send me a voucher for its cost. I'm hoping it'll arrive soon.

The salad sounds fantastic. What flowers did you use, Bearleigh?

I used deep pink nasturtiums, chive flowers and yellow pot marigolds, plus young leaves from things like turnips, beetroots, pea shoots, herbs, nasturtium leaves, you name it, plus the peas and really young broad beans.

I got the idea from a lovely restaurant that we went to in Edinburgh last summer called The Gardeners Cottage.

They have a small but lovely fruit & veg & herb garden and use its produce really imaginatively - I have just realised, that since they post a picture of their menu every day it's a good way of my tapping into that imagination of what to cook using stuff in the garden- see link:

www.thegardenerscottage.co

They also use good, unusual varieties - such as red-veined sorrel which is so much prettier than the usual sorrel that I was inspired to grow it myself. They had also made big pots of gooseberry curd that they used in savoury dishes - delicious.

Sounds lovely Bearleigh. We had broad beans for our dinner, but yours sounds pretty as well as flavoursome! The DDs had a school trip to Weald & Downland museum last week (well, DD1 didn't go as her anxiety kicked in and she wouldn't get on the coach as she 'didn't know the coach driver' ). It looks like a great place and DH is now determined to go.

Veg plot got some attention today so I sorted out the parsnip patch and the planted the leeks, threw some late purple beans into a space as all my previous ones got totally slugged, blasted black & green fly off various things with the hosepipe and introduced the scaffolders (who were supposed to be here yesterday but turned up unreasonably early today instead while I was still in my PJs) to mange tout.