Read Online Playing With Water by Kate Llewellyn - Free Book Online
Authors: Kate Llewellyn
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think, to have these colours when the weather isn’t boiling hot.
Learning about gardening without doing a course is hit and miss. Yet some of the greatest gardeners, Rosemary Verey for instance, like some of the great cooks, did not have formal training. They learnt from their mothers and then they taught themselves. Maggie Beer, Gay Bilson, Stephanie Alexander—none was formally trained. Peri, is bringing me some Hortus magazines from London. My son and daughter-in-law are giving me a subscription to Gardens Illustrated. I ordered a whole year of the 1997 Gardens Illustrated as well. I want to learn quickly.
Rosemary Verey said something about beginning to learn by making her own famous garden which still amuses me every time I think of it: ‘I knew that there was no hurry.’ (Oh, here is a knock and here is the year’s copies of Gardens Illustrated magazine held out in a man’s palm.)
I simply cannot imagine being given a huge piece of land with a house on it where a garden was needed and not feeling hysterical with the wish to plant. RosemaryVerey sat and thought, consulted gardeners, went to the Chelsea Garden Show, and began very slowly. In that time an olive grove could have been planted and already be three metres tall.
Monday, 15th May
Mothers’ Day has been and gone. A million chrysanthemums decorate headstones and dining-room tables. Mine are on this dining-room table that I am writing at, three white blooms, each as big as a fist.
This morning I pulled out all the spent annuals. Terry said, ‘It’s the shortest day next month.’ This surprised me because it is still warm. No bulbs are up yet. The garden feels like a loaded gun. Lying bare and forsaken-looking. Yet at any minute it could explode.
‘Well, I’m off to buy some Lady’s Mantle.’ Jane said on the telephone this morning. I asked what it is. ‘Its real name is Alchemilla mollis,’ she said, spelling it for me as I scrawled the letters down. I’ll have some of what she’s having, I thought again.
Botanica says this plant is a herbaceous perennial, low growing and ideal for ground cover. Jane said it is often found on the edges of perennial borders in English gardens. Raindrops are caught in the wavy, slightly cupped and frilled leaves which make a sparkling look. The flowers are like Gypsophila and are greenish-yellow.
Still no sign of shooting from the seeds of that Floral Moonlight white Datura Jane sent me. I posted three lots off to friends in Bathurst. Helen, the tree grower, might have success. I sent some to the two girls on the farm at Peel where we planted all the trees. Big rains there, as here, so the trees are looking good, Ruth said on the telephone.
Lord, I long for the day I walk up their curving drive and see the swerve of trees leading to the house, all waving in the wind and higher than our heads. If trees will grow in that arid rocky soil, they will grow anywhere. It is strange that it seemed to make utterly no difference whether we planted a tree with compost, or with sheep manure, or with just a few rocks around as compost, they fared much the same. At first, shocked by the look of the soil, we ardently packed rich homemade compost around each sapling. Then, after a day or so, I remembered native trees do not always flourish with compost. So we desisted and simply scraped rabbit droppings around the base and dropped a few rocks on. Some in the end got nothing but the soil dug from the hole. Others got a spadeful of sheep manure, aged and matured, brought in from under Len’s and Helen’s shearing shed. So there it is: the trees are, as far as we can tell, flourishing and of equal size, or dead. It may be that the effects of shock and the amount of water are the only important factors. I enjoy a good conjecture, as you see.
It takes ten years, I heard today, for an orange tree to reach its full potential. On the River Murray, the orchards are being ploughed up because the Valencia oranges which had been
Learning about gardening without doing a course is hit and miss. Yet some of the greatest gardeners, Rosemary Verey for instance, like some of the great cooks, did not have formal training. They learnt from their mothers and then they taught themselves. Maggie Beer, Gay Bilson, Stephanie Alexander—none was formally trained. Peri, is bringing me some Hortus magazines from London. My son and daughter-in-law are giving me a subscription to Gardens Illustrated. I ordered a whole year of the 1997 Gardens Illustrated as well. I want to learn quickly.
Rosemary Verey said something about beginning to learn by making her own famous garden which still amuses me every time I think of it: ‘I knew that there was no hurry.’ (Oh, here is a knock and here is the year’s copies of Gardens Illustrated magazine held out in a man’s palm.)
I simply cannot imagine being given a huge piece of land with a house on it where a garden was needed and not feeling hysterical with the wish to plant. RosemaryVerey sat and thought, consulted gardeners, went to the Chelsea Garden Show, and began very slowly. In that time an olive grove could have been planted and already be three metres tall.
Monday, 15th May
Mothers’ Day has been and gone. A million chrysanthemums decorate headstones and dining-room tables. Mine are on this dining-room table that I am writing at, three white blooms, each as big as a fist.
This morning I pulled out all the spent annuals. Terry said, ‘It’s the shortest day next month.’ This surprised me because it is still warm. No bulbs are up yet. The garden feels like a loaded gun. Lying bare and forsaken-looking. Yet at any minute it could explode.
‘Well, I’m off to buy some Lady’s Mantle.’ Jane said on the telephone this morning. I asked what it is. ‘Its real name is Alchemilla mollis,’ she said, spelling it for me as I scrawled the letters down. I’ll have some of what she’s having, I thought again.
Botanica says this plant is a herbaceous perennial, low growing and ideal for ground cover. Jane said it is often found on the edges of perennial borders in English gardens. Raindrops are caught in the wavy, slightly cupped and frilled leaves which make a sparkling look. The flowers are like Gypsophila and are greenish-yellow.
Still no sign of shooting from the seeds of that Floral Moonlight white Datura Jane sent me. I posted three lots off to friends in Bathurst. Helen, the tree grower, might have success. I sent some to the two girls on the farm at Peel where we planted all the trees. Big rains there, as here, so the trees are looking good, Ruth said on the telephone.
Lord, I long for the day I walk up their curving drive and see the swerve of trees leading to the house, all waving in the wind and higher than our heads. If trees will grow in that arid rocky soil, they will grow anywhere. It is strange that it seemed to make utterly no difference whether we planted a tree with compost, or with sheep manure, or with just a few rocks around as compost, they fared much the same. At first, shocked by the look of the soil, we ardently packed rich homemade compost around each sapling. Then, after a day or so, I remembered native trees do not always flourish with compost. So we desisted and simply scraped rabbit droppings around the base and dropped a few rocks on. Some in the end got nothing but the soil dug from the hole. Others got a spadeful of sheep manure, aged and matured, brought in from under Len’s and Helen’s shearing shed. So there it is: the trees are, as far as we can tell, flourishing and of equal size, or dead. It may be that the effects of shock and the amount of water are the only important factors. I enjoy a good conjecture, as you see.
It takes ten years, I heard today, for an orange tree to reach its full potential. On the River Murray, the orchards are being ploughed up because the Valencia oranges which had been
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