The winner of 2020’s competition was Tim, with an enormous harvest weighing 3lbs 13 oz! The prized packet of crisps was donated to the food bank instead of being presented to Tim as meetings were suspended. Close runner-up was Peter with a yield of 3lbs 8 3/4 oz. Peter’s consolation was that he had a well deserved bangers & mash supper. Thank you to everyone who competed and sent in their photos!
Hole Park is in Kent somewhere between Benenden and Rolveden but I warn you it is not well signposted and we drove past two entrances without seeing them, so beware! It’s not a garden for specialist plants but if you want to see a beautiful garden set in parklands with lovely views then do visit. It has 16 acres of formal gardens with woodland walks and with a manor house dating from 1720 surrounded by 150 acres of parkland.
There are yew hedges, a walled garden (although short on plants here) the Egg Pond and a Vineyard. Then there is the so called Millenium garden, which could rival Great Dixter’s sunken garden, if there were more plants in the surrounding beds and so on. The Woodland walk is famed for its bluebells in late spring.
The house is not open to the public as it is currently occupied but the owners are on hand to give advice and information. There’s a stableyard with a small cafe doing light lunches and tea and coffee and they sell their own jam and Hole Park honey. And best of all, there weren’t hordes of visitors either and the staff were friendly.
If you want a nice peaceful relaxing visit in lovely surroundings, I recommend a visit to Hole Park!
Hole Park is about 1 hr 15 mins from Greenwich and is open Weds & Thurs plus some Sundays in October. Sat Nav TN17 4JA. It is open for the NGS on 11 October. Tickets £8 (the Gardeners World 2 for1 tickets work). Also keep an eye on their Events page, they host plant fairs occasionally.
As I look around my garden I am very conscious of the origin of many of my plants. I have a bright pink phlox which was originally in my mother’s garden and which comes up faithfully year after year – highly scented but rather susceptible to disease and needs to be cosseted a little. And then there are the Salvias, many of which are from Terry, but Jezebel and Phyllis’ Fancy are from Pat.
Over the years a number of plants have been bought from the plant sales held in Jillian’s wonderful garden when it was opened to visitors and have now become mainstays in my own.
I now have a small collection of Acers, but my first one came from an open garden in Beckenham Hill. The couple gardened on a steep slope covering a vast area, at the bottom of which was a railway track. He was an acer expert and grew many rare varieties, some of which he propagated himself. The garden was always a pleasure to view and my love of Acers began here. Sadly, I no longer have my original purchase, although it lived to a good age and the couple sold their house some years ago and moved away. I remember him saying that they would need a single large furniture van just to transport the plants!
I have long cultivated the beautiful Pelargonium Sidoides, but at one of our Autumn Shows, Harry showed a variety with a slightly different colour – paler and more crimson than mine, he gave me two pieces immediately and I successfully rooted these to produce my own plants. This year at the Old Pond Garden sale, Jean offered a pelargonium with a leaf which looked very much like Frank Headley but with a frilly pink and white flower – I think she called it Apple Blossom. I bought this and have made two cuttings which I hope will give me more plants of this unusual variety. On a recent visit to Great Dixter, I fell in love with P. Concolour Lace. Kathy had some to spare and I have bought one from her.
And so it goes on: the gardening stories and memories which we make with each other.
Vija
Our star speaker from last year, Nick Bailey, has a very informative blog on his website: ‘New Ways with Spring Bulbs‘. Worth a read before ordering hundreds of bulbs from those enticing catalogues!
We had a lovely relaxing day at Hall Place on 9 September 2020. It has been maintained very well considering lockdown issues. This “tropical” display near the main entrance was particularly colourful, with cannas, castor oil plants, dahlias and sunflowers. The topiary “beasts” looked very smart and the long borders were interesting for ideas as they were laid out by colour. After a picnic lunch, visiting the small but very good quality plant centre finished off an excellent day.
At the end of August, my hostas are looking a bit ragged. They have had a tough year. Forced into early growth by a warm spring, a frost scorched the young leaves of many of the plants, particularly the green leaved varieties, which seem particularly susceptible to a late frost. Overcoming this early obstacle, the hostas forged on to produce lots of leaf and looked absolutely splendid in May. Strong winds then battered the leaves and here the larger leaved varieties suffered most. With foliage that was still comparatively young and tender they had not built up enough resistance to withstand the winds that barrelled down the side of my house. At one point they were all listing to one side like sailors who had been on ship for too long. Sum and Substance with leaves the size of elephant’s ears really struggled. A month of very hot temperatures has now left them looking very sad indeed. In a south facing walled garden they have basically been inside an oven and baked. Of course, hostas should not be grown in these conditions and in most years they have managed relatively well, but this year has done for them. Additionally, these stressed plants are also more susceptible to the depredations of slugs and snails. For the first time, they have been given a liquid seaweed feed. I’m hoping this will cheer them up a bit.
Vija
Ed: Here’s a clip of Vija’s garden at the recent Open Gardens event. Hostas definitely looking a bit cheered up!
Thank you to all members who visited Fran, Viv and Vija’s open gardens over the August Bank Holiday weekend. They have raised £319 in total for Macmillan Cancer Support, such a very good cause. The gardens all looked fabulous and everyone had a great time.
Thank you to everyone who visited!
Our 27 August volunteer session became “Game of Gardens: Destroying the Iron Phormium Throne” This was the end for the last Phormium in the central beds, but it went in style…
Whenever I am asked about my plans for dealing with a glut of produce from my allotment, my initial response is usually, “Chance would be a fine thing!”
I’m still on the lower slopes of allotmenteering, constantly marvelling at the (seemingly) effortless heights achieved by my neighbours.
Storm Ellen did her best to scupper my chances of a substantial tomato haul, but thanks to a tendency I have to cram things close together in the ground – I can’t get over how much space I have! – the plants and their stakes more or less held each other up. In spite of many hours agonising over the seed catalogues and subsequent cossetting of seedlings, I have to report that the finest and most prolific tomato crop on my patch this year comes from the gift of a neighbour. In the early days of lockdown she realised that she wouldn’t be able to get any seedlings from garden centres in time so she simply dried the seeds from some piccolino tomatoes she had bought at the supermarket and planted them.
Amazing results! She shared out dozens of seedings with nearby allotments, and now I am in the happy position of trying to decide what I should do to preserve this abundant harvest.
Last year, caught out with no plan for the cherry tomatoes on the eve of a holiday, I turned to Google for help. A combination of the words, “tomato”, “glut”, “preserve” and “easy” produced a range of solutions (literally) involving vodka.
All I had to do was pierce the tomatoes, pop them into a sterilised glass jar, add the celery salt and chillies that I didn’t have (but that doesn’t seem to have been a problem), cover with vodka and store the jar in the fridge. I was assured that the residual vodka would be the perfect base for a Bloody Mary, and that the tomatoes would form an impressive element of any tray of canapés. Do they ever get that far? Do they heck! With admirable restraint, I have enjoyed the odd tomato or two straight from the jar over many months.
As holidays are more or less out of the question in 2020, I will have some more time to think about what to do with my expected glut of tomatoes and be on hand at the right time to deal with them. I wondered what suggestions CABAHS members might have: what is your favourite way to preserve tomatoes?
Perhaps we can start a separate section, sharing ideas for making the most of our produce.
Melanie
Beautiful picture of Gatekeeper butterflies enjoying Sharon’s garden. Lysimachia clethroides is grown here with Anthemis “Cally Cream” near a Hydrangea Limelight in a pot.
These are Sunflowers, Helianthuis debilis “Vanilla Ice” growing daintily in Sharon’s garden, producing new flowers continually as she deadheads them.
Charlton and Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society 