Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature

Pretty Wild

March 24, 2024March 23, 2024 Ann Mackay21 Comments

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Despite the title, I’d describe these flowers as ‘pretty and wild’, since Primula vulgaris is the primrose, a wildflower which grows in woodlands and meadows. The wild primrose is also a welcome early spring flower in many gardens. It likes the semi-shade at the foot of hedges, so is a great plant to grow below deciduous shrubs and in other partly-shaded places. In my eyes, it’s prettier than the more brightly-coloured primula hybrids and I find it easier to blend into the existing planting in my garden.

A friend gave me several clumps of this primrose from her own garden last year. Some have been planted out to join the primulas already in the garden. Others were potted up to plant later on, after I have finished splitting and moving other plants around. All are flowering happily! They harmonise well with, and flower at the same time as, the mix of cream and darker yellow daffodils growing here. (I will need to add some blue flowers for the best effect. What a good excuse for buying more plants!)

Wild primroses were common along roadside verges when I was a child and I can still remember my delight at the sight of these pale yellow flowers. There were not a lot of flowers to be seen in the gardens of the ‘far north’ of Scotland in those days, so finding pretty flowers growing in the wild was an experience to value. I don’t know if they grow there still, but here (in Suffolk) I see them in the wild only occasionally. It’s good to know that they are growing and thriving in many gardens, where they provide an early source of nectar for the first of the year’s bees and butterflies. 🐝

More Hellebores…

March 17, 2024March 15, 2024 Ann Mackay17 Comments

Spring arrived here this week. Every year I feel that there is a day when winter clothing suddenly feels much too much and the sun has real warmth to it. The cats have deserted their bed by a warm radiator and taken over the conservatory chairs again. The birds are busy, busy and so are a few early bees. Best of all, things are growing again.

Nevertheless, it’s a slow process for colour to start reappearing in the garden. Our daffodils have opened at last, and there’s a scattering of blue and white Anemone blanda and some yellow primroses. Amongst these spring flowers, the hellebores are still holding their own. They flower for weeks, bridging the period spanning late winter and early spring with their glorious blooms.

This year the hellebores have done well. They’ve become much more sturdy plants, with many more flowers than I’ve seen on them before. Both photographs here are of ‘Rosali’ from the HGC ‘Ice N’ Roses’ series, which I planted last year. I hope that this newer hellebore will turn out to be as robust and resilient as other older varieties are said to be…time will tell!

There’s Always Hope…

March 10, 2024March 8, 2024 Ann Mackay21 Comments

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A couple of weeks ago, I was disappointed to see that rain had flattened the crocuses and turned them to coloured shreds. So it was a happy surprise to find another group a week later. (A different variety, but still with my favourite purple colouring.)

I don’t have a lot of crocuses in the garden and some are now in awkward places that are hard to get to, so difficult to photograph. Others were planted in more accessible places but have been accidentally lost when moving other plants or planting something new. Eventually, when the borders are a bit more settled, I’ll try to reserve a few areas where they can grow undisturbed. (But this year there is too much reorganisation going on in the garden. Maybe next year?)

For now, these bright little sparks are providing a touch of enjoyable colour in the garden. They also filled the gap before the daffodils began trying to steal the show. To be honest, I don’t have many daffodils either. (They tend to get disturbed by replanting of the borders too, even though they’re planted much deeper.) In the future I’d like to add considerably to the spring bulbs here – every flower is valued at this time of year!

Heralds of a Wet and Windy Spring

March 3, 2024March 2, 2024 Ann Mackay21 Comments

Hellebores are resilient plants. They need to be, given that the weather in very early spring can be anywhere between sunshine and gentle breezes to the blast of high winds and freezing rain or snow. This year we’ve had a fairly benign mix – quite a lot of rain but sunshine too and no gales around here.

I did worry that this hellebore and the others that are planted beside it might suffer in the gusts of chilly air that are sent out from the air-source heat pump that we recently had installed. The heat pump works by extracting warmth from the air around it so the air it pushes back out is very cold. Luckily, it turns out that the airstream is just enough to the side of them not to be damaging.

Unfortunately, the site that had to be used for the heat pump meant that a path and a low retaining wall had to be dismantled to make room for it. Now both path and wall will need to be reinstated and the hellebores may be in the way. If possible, I’d rather not move them, especially when they seem happy in their present position. Hopefully, if I do, they’ll survive and bring more joy to next spring.

(Meanwhile, I’m wondering what has laid its eggs on the flower in the top photo…do you see those white ovals? Not slugs or snails, which have round eggs. Not to worry, I suspect the rain we’ve just had will have washed them off!)

Briefly Brilliant

February 25, 2024February 23, 2024 Ann Mackay22 Comments

The unusually wet weather has been very destructive to the crocuses this year. I don’t have many here, and those that have flowered have been quickly flattened by the rain. They end up looking like tiny scraps of brightly-coloured silk lying on the ground.

Luckily, other years have been kinder to these late-winter flowers and to the early bumblebees that were able to enjoy their nectar. (Crocuses are nicely timed to feed bumble bee queens that have just come out of hibernation.) The photographs here are from a sunny February a couple of years ago: at the top is ‘Prins Claus’, while the flower below is ‘Pickwick’.

Right now there is still one relatively undamaged group of purple crocuses which haven’t yet been rained flat. I can’t get at them to photograph them without tramping on a lot of wet soil (and thereby compressing it), so I’m unlikely to photograph them this year. But I can at least enjoy the sight of them and maybe the weather next year will allow me to photograph them then. Here’s hoping!

A Welcome Sight

February 18, 2024February 16, 2024 Ann Mackay14 Comments

white hellebore flower ('Cinnamon Snow')

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February has brought the opening of hellebore flowers in my garden. Along with a scattering of snowdrops, they’re the first of the year’s flowers. (Although there are still pink flowers on the viburnum ‘Dawn’ and yellow ones on the winter-flowering jasmine. But they’ve been around for quite a while now.)

It’s a cheering sight to see something pretty at last, after a rather wet and muddy winter. And now I have something that makes me want to be outside in the garden with my camera…or else indoors in my little studio, as with the flower below. I reckon that I can promise that there will be more hellebore photographs here very soon!

hellebore flower - white with pink spots

Looking for Inspiration: The Bog Garden at East Bergholt Place

February 11, 2024February 10, 2024 Ann Mackay21 Comments

Last year I created a small bog garden here to make it easier to grow moisture-loving plants. For inspiration beforehand, I went to see a bog garden at East Bergholt Place. This is a large garden and arboretum which also has a plant centre (‘The Place for Plants’). Although my own bog garden is tiny – just five foot in diameter – I reckoned that being able to see what was growing happily in a large and well-established bog garden would be useful.

This garden is only about 16 miles away from our home, but the conditions are very different. The soil in it is naturally moist, due to there being a high water table and there is plenty of shade from large trees. (While walking around I noticed how damp the ground was underfoot. And being in the shade made it an excellent place to spend a very hot afternoon.)

The bog garden sits along the banks of a narrow, stone-edged stream that runs down from the area of a large formal pond. The damp soil here supports very lush growth which hides much of the watercourse.

A very small part of East Bergholt’s bog garden. You can just see the stone edges of the stream.

The structure of the bog garden at East Bergholt is obviously entirely different to my own one. Mine is entirely artificial, created by using an old tent groundsheet to trap moisture. (I first made holes in the groundsheet with a garden fork and then added a layer of stones and gravel to provide some drainage.) But I’m hoping that many of the plants that grow well at East Bergholt will be fine for my bog garden too.

I made the bog garden with the intention of providing suitable conditions for astilbes and Siberian irises. Other plants in it now include ragged robin (Lychnis flos cuculi, AKA Silene flos-cuculi), purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and a red hesperantha that had been struggling in too-dry soil elsewhere. (It is much happier now!)

Left: primulas, hostas and irises along the damp edges of the stream. Right: a view over the formal pond uphill from the bog garden.

It was reassuring to see the astilbes and Siberian irises growing well in the very damp soil at East Bergholt. There were lots of candelabra primulas,which were in full flower on our visit in mid-May last year. From the photographs, you’ll see that there were also ferns and hostas and I spotted the blue flowers of camassia and the pretty leaves of Alchemilla mollis too.

There is one thing that is worrying me a little about having made a bog garden: what will happen if we get a lot of rain over a long period? There are drainage holes in the groundsheet I used to line it, but they may not allow water to escape quickly enough if there is too much. The danger then is that roots may rot. But that is something I will just have to look out for – and my fingers will certainly be crossed!

Although the bog garden at East Bergholt was the focus of my attention, we did take the time to see the rest of the garden and arboretum. There is a formal garden area beside the house with lawns surrounded by topiary and hedges, but I preferred the arboretum, with its beautiful trees and flowering shrubs. The wilder area of the ‘lower garden’, with naturalistic planting and a large, totally informal pond was delightful too. I’ll be happy to visit this garden again!

Candelabra primulas were the star of the show in May.

Following a Trail: Otley Hall

February 4, 2024February 2, 2024 Ann Mackay16 Comments

Last year my husband and I joined other visitors on ‘The Great Garden Trail’. This is a summer-long event for which volunteers open their gardens to raise money for the St Elizabeth Hospice in Ipswich, Suffolk. Gardens of all sorts take part in the scheme, big and small, filled with exciting plants, or more modestly planted. Some of the gardens are the setting for interesting historic houses and occasionally there may be a village with many of its gardens open to explore.

Otley Hall turned out to be in the ‘modestly planted’ category. I would have been disappointed if I’d gone there just to see the gardens, but I also love Suffolk’s quaint medieval houses, so the visit was worthwhile.

Built in the early sixteenth century, Otley Hall is said to be the oldest house in Suffolk to have remained ‘largely intact’, with some parts of the building added later in the same century. Timber-framed buildings from medieval times are a feature of Suffolk’s countryside and many of its towns and villages. They make you feel as if you could step back in history by just walking inside them. (But we didn’t go inside this one – it was only the garden that was open on our visit.)

In the garden itself, my attention was captured by the beautiful irises which were in full flower, especially the white iris above, with the little hints of colour, and the blue one below. (Our visit was at the end of May, a little too early for the many roses there to be in bloom.)

The main flower borders edged a croquet lawn, one of several lawns throughout the gardens. Other grassy areas featured a labyrinth, ‘The Mount’ – an artificial mound which allows views of the surrounding countryside, and an H-shaped canal. (The house still has a moat on one side too.)

Otley’s ten acres have a mix of both formal gardens and informal, more natural grounds. For example, near the house there is a small ‘knot garden’ with box hedging and herbs planted up in a classic Tudor-style design. Elsewhere there are woodlands and hedgerows, maintained to encourage wildlife and areas planted up with wildflowers.

Formal and informal, clockwise from top left: wisteria on an arch beside the house, abelia growing beside a lawn, irises along the wilder edges of the canal, a vetch in a wildflower area.

The combination of traditional and wilder areas gives an easy-going feel to a stroll around the gardens of Otley Hall. It’s not the best garden for a plantaholic to visit, but it does offer a pleasant afternoon with the opportunity to see a fine example of a medieval timber-framed house. (It has an excellent cafe too…coffee and cake is an important part of our garden visits!)

(Almost) Silent Sunday: Looking Back

January 28, 2024January 23, 2024 Ann Mackay30 Comments

Rose 'Zepherine Drouhin', covered in frost.

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I have Covid (for the first time), so I’m using it as an excuse to take it easy this week and just re-posting a photograph from 2019. Sometimes I get lucky and there’s something still in flower when the first frosts arrive. This is the rose ‘Zepherine Drouhin’.

Ordinary Things

January 21, 2024January 19, 2024 Ann Mackay16 Comments

After a long spell of mild and rainy weather, we at last had some frost. Photographically, it was a bit disappointing because it was mostly on the lawn and shorter plants. The taller plants, such as the Stipa gigantea (golden oats) above, had very little frost. So there were not many opportunities for photography. The pictures you see here are from last year.

Despite the thin coating of frost, it has felt really cold this week. The ground is frozen hard and there is thick ice over the top of the pond and in containers of saved rainwater. Only the week before, I had been able to spend time doing some weeding in the garden – not a chance of that now!

For the sake of this blog, I’m glad that I took lots of photos during last winter’s heavy frosts. The weather can’t be taken for granted, so there’s no guarantee of having anything to photograph at this time of year. Luckily for me, when it is frosty, the most ordinary of things look a lot more interesting!