This is fast becoming one of the most special places in the garden for me. It has been planned in a totally haphazard way, but its finally beginning to work.

The Crab Apples are beginning to create an arcade effect-making the two different parts of the garden-the inner and the outer, have a really different feel to them.

Here are a couple of videos to show you how it looks now that the Crab Apples are no longer in flower and the roses, peonies, iris and alchemilla are taking over the flowering baton.

done

done

The rectangle of Crab Apple Trees -Golden Hornet- has always been in the  plan..but its taken me nearly 15 years to work out what to do with the rest of this space. Ah well,….good job I’m in no hurry…….At first we had to weed underneath them: BUT I HATE WEEDING. So, I planted alchemilla. It looks frothy at thsi time of year and I love it, and it supresses the weeds.(It also seeds everywhere but hey….)

 

In 1999 I made it into a cutting garden inspired by Sarah Raven’s book. That was such intensive  work that my poor decrepit body couldn’t stand it.

Today it has finally metamorphosed into something I’m beginning to like…its not perfect by any means but we are beginning to understand each other this patch of the garden and me.

The Crab Apples are filling in the pleached rectangle and the borders are beginning to find their identiy.. 

The small fruits are now setting and it does look,in my hunble opinion,quite , quite different from  the very floriforous but somehow neat  and tidy view of the garden in the spring.

The back borders are  remnants of the cutting garden, a mixture of shurbs that I can still use for cutting -roses,  vibrunum, mock orange and some lilacs(well, not the lilacs….obviously) The elder bushes form the hedge in the eastern boundary sometimes intrude, but I like that , its OK ;-)

Who can object to this?

The front section of the borders contain a mix of alchemila mollis, Rosa mundi (just coming into flower),which is my favourite rose and in true Gallica fashion is now sending suckers throughout the border…

 Some peonies….

and siberian iris. 

This is Perrys Blue,a fabulous luminous pale shade:

Now there should by rights, be four matching bushes of Rosa Mundi, one in each border…but there are only three.

Not my fault. Honest, Guv.

The rose supplier( not Peter Beales or David Austin) sent four Gallica rose bushes but one of them was Jeanne Duval. We only discovered this after the bush had flowered of course and by that time I had not the heart to root her out.  After I’d identified her by consulting friends and rose books, my husband The French Scholar was able to tell me all about her. On hearing of her somewhat tempestuous life I thought she might enjoy some quiet and peace  in my garden.

 

Jeanne Duval was the mistress of the French poet Baudelaire and  the inspritation behind many of his poems inlcuding his series, Fleures du Mal.

Here she is as portrayed by Edouard Manet.

She now  has a rather congenial  neighbour, however.

 

James Galway Irish flautist supreme.

 

There are four bushes of his rose ,bred by David Austin, in the central topiary boxes.

 

They have grown very tall and floppy this year. Generally I like floppy but I think that ,on reflection, they need a pole to semi climb. On the  ”To Do List”.

I do wonder what their conversation is like…..and what topics they cover…..