Expectations of a second year plant scheme

Bramble & Briar #44

As a biennial, the purple flowered Honesty (Lunaria annua) doesn’t bloom in the first year, and over-zealous weeding in autumn can deprive you of a spring display

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I mentioned recently that we’d abandoned the garden few a few days in March and headed off to Norfolk. We rented a cottage in Blakeney, having found someone who was either sufficiently brave or sufficiently foolhardy to surrender their holiday-let to a couple with two zoom-crazy spaniels, and surrendered ourselves, as you usually do when you fall under the enchantment of a particular place, to the kind of daydreaming that pictures you upping sticks and relocating half way up the country. Blakeney’s a fabulous little town, the sea variously lapping against the furthest edges of the bordering salt marsh, or covering it completely. I’ve taken a morning run along the raised bank that leads from Blakeney to Cley with the bright blue sea on one side of the path and the green and yellow weeds of the marsh on the other, but it’s not always quite so idyllic and benign. While particularly high tides frequently see the quayside car park under water, it’s been known for high storms to flood the seaward edge of the town, and wash the orange soil of that elevated revetment back out across the marsh. Look closely, and you’ll see the stone walls that bound the gardens of the hotels and houses fronting onto the quay all have metal channels into which flood barriers can be lowered and, into the end wall of one building – and here I’m finally getting to the point – plaques have been set to commemorate the worst floods in the town’s history. Each plaque features the words “flood level”, the year of the event, and a line showing the height to which the waters reached – the highest marking the devastating flood of January 1953, which ravaged the English coast from Kent to Norfolk, and proved even more deadly on the other side of the channel in Holland.

It’s a far gentler tide that laps around the garden at home in spring, a froth of fresh green growth that seems to roll in one night and refuses to recede for weeks. This April its character is transformed, as the selection of aquilegias, thalictrum and Tellima grandiflora I planted as 9cm pots – gifted by the lovely folk at Crocus – have spent the last year getting their roots down, and are now making the most of the recent luxuriously soggy conditions to put on as much top growth as they can possibly manage. And just now, whenever I look at one of the taxus balls I planted when I began to rework this shady border, I’m reminded of the plaques on the end of that building in Blakeney, and I’m tempted to snip a line into its deep green foliage to mark the height of the advancing green wave, though I realise this would, of course, be pointless as, with every passing day, the yew balls bob about in an ever increasing foam of herbaceous animation, finally succumbing to the swell and disappearing below before suddenly, one hot summer’s day, the whole lot collapses in upon itself, or gets flattened by our bright-eyed, wet-nosed girls.

Copious rainfall has played a part in swelling this green spring tide

That day is a while off yet, and if I manage to contain Nell and Evie for a few weeks longer (doubtful) there’s the prospect of us getting to see at least the beginnings of how I’d envisaged this border would be (first year plantings are always a little underwhelming, not just if you have crazy dogs, and if you’re canny and plant up an area with 9cm pots, you will have to wait a few seasons before you get to full floof. Interestingly, planting from divisions that you might have temporarily parked in a 9cm pot – so ostensibly a similar sized plant to the ones you might buy – are likely to take off almost instantly and probably give you good results in the first year, as they’ll be chunks of a more mature plant, which has the advantages of a more established root system, a greater reserve of energy to draw upon, plus the x-factor of the vigour that’s imparted to an established herbaceous perennial when you chop it into bits. Who says gardening is boring, it’s clearly magic of the first order). So, yes... this year, I’m expecting to be wowed. Ever so slightly. I’ll report back in a few weeks.

Dandelion, forget-me-not, aquilegia, honesty, Rose ‘Lady Emma Hamilton’ and more honey garlic that you can shake a stick at