HOT BORDERS
Borders are a bit of a nightmare… SACRILEGE. But it is really true.
The fact that all is not ripped up every year means that all those pernicious perennial weeds, ground elder and worst of all bindweed can get established and never leave. Those breakable but still thrustingly powerful white and fleshy roots seem inneradicable and every attempt to clear them out only produces a new crop of breakaway rootlets to re-establish the colony. The equally muscular and frangible rhizomes of the couch grass with their little daggers forging on into the root systems of any herbaceous resident with which they can intertwine are also ubiquitous. Perhaps I am a defeatist and should persevere.
If I did it would be to produce a fierce and fiery border for September and early October of the sort perfected in the wildly lavish gardens at East Ruston Old Rectory. Anybody who has visited that ebullient rumpus-ride of lurid colour and near tropical lushness, galloping gloriously close to tastelessness and yet so convinced, confident and wholehearted that it could never be so, will know the desired model. Dahlias in the brightest reds and oranges and the blackest crimsons, Calla lilies, scentless but dolly-mixture-bright zinnias and glowing blue salvias all stacked thick and deep until the first frost levels and trashes the whole Moulin Rouge floorshow.
But neither Matthew, whose heart is in the vegetable garden, nor have I really ever pulled this off. Dahlias we have had in profusion to be picked from June to autumn half-term but they are under stricter control amongst the leeks and the beans and candy pink Zinnias and heady smelling nicotiana thrives in ranks between the rows of fennel and Swiss chard.
Now we have moved from rural Norfolk to North Oxford, to a garden that is long and thin with a canal, greenly still, at the end. It is a complete change, the rotovator and the humper dumper, a vast wheelbarrow without which life in Norfolk would have been unthinkable, are gone and a new set of gardening disciplines will need to be developed. Matthew seems unwilling to give up the good life altogether though and a very reduced, population of bantams are shortly to arrive as even the most devotedly organic bought egg is a feeble and pallid insult to any one-time hen-keeper. These new town birds will find their freedom seriously curtailed and like us must learn urban ways. This is far from impossible, we had a productive little flock fifteen years ago in Fulham who lived under cover and behind chicken wire for most of the day only coming out in the evening to scratch about for delicious green stuff and insects. One thing the new garden is rich in is snails and their charmless and unmentionable cousins. Although a nuisance to us, I see that the cabbages our predecessor has planted are reduced to lime green skeletons and no sign of a caterpillar, these will be a boon to the chickens for which they are a delicious treat.
The garden seems too polite for any kind of showy business like dahlias and zinnias. We have inherited lovely and well tended box hedges, boscy and productive apple trees and two towering figs that shade the rest of the garden. Not of course that ANY shade has been required in this sunless summer. I hope there will be minimal borders either hot or more restrained and even in September I can see that our work will be cut out with the conquering of a thick carpet of ground elder…..
See the full range of Emma Bridgewater pottery and accessories at www.emmabridgewater.co.uk Purchase from the Emma Bridgewater website until 10th October 2008 using the promotion code: borders and 5% of your purchase value will be donated to the NGS by Emma Bridgewater
Click here for Emma's favourite gardens
Click here for Emma and Hellebores
Click here for Emma and Tulips
Click here for Emma's Kitchen Garden
Click here for Emma and Children