Newsletter February 2006

Cookham and Cookham Dean Horticultural Society

NEXT MEETING: WEDNESDAY February 22^nd 7.30pm

Cookham Dean Village Hall

“Preparing the Garden for Spring “

A talk by Carolyn Foster

Letter from the Chairman

How good it was to see the sun on Sunday the 5^th February, it seemed like the first time this year after all the bitterly cold and grey weather, it was most welcome and now the days are beginning to lengthen again so its roll on Spring.

As we have had such a prolonged cold spell I think the Society bulbs for the competition will need some extra TLC over the next few weeks to get them ready and into flower.

I would recommend that if you haven’t already that you lift them out of the ground during the first week of March and put them into cool but light conditions. By the middle of March the buds should be looking full and beginning to look yellow, if not, then put them somewhere warmer till they do.

The Committee has decided to reformat the Raffle held each meeting and to limit the number of prizes to 6 or 7 per night which will be drawn during the coffee break. Please continue to help support this worthy cause.

Don’t forget our lectures now start at 7.30p.m prompt, as no-one uses the Hall before us.

Have you renewed your Membership for 2006 and paid your subs, if not please do soon as the Newsletter will not be sent to unpaid members after this. A warm welcome to our new members; Marion Howard, Barbara Halstead, Genevieve Usher, Mary Hotchkiss and David Wiggins.

See you at the meeting on February 22^nd.

Brian Thompson

01628 484821

Date for your diary

Tuesday, 4^th April 7.00 for 7.30pm

“A Blaze of Glory”

Talk by Timothy Walker (Oxford Botanic Garden)

Cookham Dean WI Hall £5.00 Gardening Which? members £5.50 non members from Helen Turner 01494782349

This event has been organized by the local Gardening Which?group so please support them.

THE HORTUS NEW YEAR'S DAY FLOWER COUNT

Some of you may have heard about this on the Today (Radio4) programme last month; Hortus (www.hortus.co.uk) has kindly agreed to this being reprinted here………

There were 410 lists emailed to the Hortus office on Sunday 1st January before the cut-off point at 4.30 p.m. A further 300 lists were emailed after that deadline. They came from all over the United Kingdom.
The longest list was submitted by Elsa and Adrian Wood in Tintern, Monmouthshire They recorded 43 plants in flower, representing a wide range of species we would normally expect at this time of the year – mahonias, viburnum, sarcococca and shrubby honeysuckles. Among those which were flowering outside their ‘normal’ season were Cerinthe major ‘Purpurescens’, forsythia and penstemon.
A list of equal length was submitted by Carl Dacus from Dun Laoghaire near Dublin. As Eire is not part of the United Kingdom (though in the British Isles) it falls outside the geographical bounds of this survey, but is interesting none the less for its inclusion of 6 different roses in bloom, penstemon (again) and the early flowering of Exochorda x macrantha ‘The Bride’.
Southern-hemisphere hebes figured largely, and I myself spotted one in glorious full flower in the opera house garden at Glyndebourne just a few days after New Year. Rosemary was also well represented and fuchsias featured on many lists, which is surprising considering their poor tolerance of frost and the low temperatures recorded across the country between Christmas and New Year.
I was surprised to see so few snowdrops on the lists and there were fewer sightings of Iris unguicularis than might have been expected. Curiously, there was hardly any mention of winter aconites (Eranthis) which even in my own garden (400ft above sea level in Herefordshire) have been known to flower at Christmas.
Following the top Monmouthshire list, exceptional entries came mostly from coastal counties, but not necessarily coastal areas: Norfolk, Somerset, Cornwall, Co. Down, Gwynedd (where William Elfyn Hughes near Criccieth noted Clematis ‘Gravetye Beauty’ and 2 rhaphiolepsis among his 33 flowering plants), Isle of Man, Glamorgan, Sussex, Cheshire, Dorset, Devon, and Hampshire. Similarly long lists came from landlocked Radnorshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Buckinghamshire.
Compared with a similar survey conducted by Hortus in 1994, the overall lists are shorter (winning entries then listed between 60 and 70 plants in flower on 1st January), which leads me to suggest that there is nothing particularly exceptional about this winter so far.
I hope very much to run the survey again next year and in following years, as it is only by comparison that we will notice any serious or prolonged changes.

David Wheeler
Editor, HORTUS
11th January 2006.

GARDEN VISITS I ENJOYED IN 2005

I have been making use of dark evenings and rainy Sundays lately to catalogue my colour slide collection and have been reminiscing on all the wonderful days I spent last year visiting many beautiful gardens. I thought that I would write about some of them to inspire others to enjoy them too, as many of them are in the ‘Yellow book’ and so will be open in 2006.

In early May I visited The Manor House in Blewbury, which has a moat and lake in a 10 acre garden. The owner is a garden designer and she has developed the structure of the garden from a virtually blank canvas. It now has parterre, mound, long pergola, vegetable garden, woodland garden and sunken gravel garden. The features are beautifully linked to lead you round the garden with more formality near the house and a magical woodland garden from which you walk back by the lake through a meadow of Narcissus poeticus. The formal moat has a very striking border beside it with planting in shades of orange. I would certainly like to revisit this garden later in the year.

In June I fulfilled a dream to visit the new walled garden at Broughton Grange near Banbury, planted as a modern parterre by Tom Stuart-Smith, a very inspirational young designer who has won many medals at Chelsea for his design and plantmanship. He specialises in mass planting of perennials in drifts so that they work together to give a wonderful effect of contrasting shapes and textures, yet looking very natural rather than contrived. He has definitely achieved this at Broughton Grange and the overall effect was spectacular. Within the soft planting is a very strong line of a straight canal leading to a pond, and some vertical accents of pencil thin conifers, and on the perimeters there are some solid blocks of pleached hornbeams which frame wonderful views of rolling Oxfordshire countryside.

While in Broughton there is another wonderful garden to visit- Broughton Castle. This is an exquisite Cotswold stone castle with a garden with colour co-ordinated borders backed by soft yellow stone walls. There is also a central formal garden with topiary edged rosebeds in the shape of the fleur de leys. This can be viewed from the roof of the castle which is quite spectacular. The main borders however are beautifully planted with a mixture of shrubs, climbers and perennials, with different colour themes running through them. There is a lovely relaxed feel to this garden and with the moat, church and tearoom you can spend a very happy afternoon there!

When I went to Broughton Castle last August, I had some time to spare in the morning, before it opened and looked at the yellow book to see if any other garden nearby was open. The entry before Broughton was Brook Cottage, and it was in a place called Alkerton which fortunately was very close. So quite by chance I discovered this gem of a garden which was new to me, and well worth a visit. It is a well established garden on a hillside ( quite steep) with an abundance of interesting trees and shrubs that have been collected over the owner’s 40 years there. It was a very informal layout which made the visit very interesting as you kept discovering new delights, a bit like being in the ‘Secret Garden’. At the end you could go into part of the house where you were invited to make your own tea, which just emphasised the informal but welcoming atmosphere.

Nearer to home, in July, I visited Greystone at Kingwood, just the other side of Henley. This is the home of the local designer Duncan Heather. The house is at the end of a long narrow track and is set in beech woods. Greystone’s garden has a modern feel to it near the house with a L shaped rectangular pool, modern sculpture and large deck, but as you go further from the house the layout is based on circles, with an informal prairie planting on a crescent shaped bank flanking a circular lawn. The planting on the bank was is large blocks of perennials contrasting with grasses and was most impressive. Behind the bank there was a woodland garden with beech trees towering almost cathedral -like over grass paths meandering through a underplanting of shrubs. Various beautiful natural sculptures were to be found in the woodland garden and their placing was ‘just right ‘ in every case, really enhancing the interest of the walk around the garden.

The final delight was the beautiful potager – a gem of a fruit and vegetable garden, interspersed with brightly coloured Dahlias and Nasturtiums.

In the autumn I visited a garden that I had not been to for many years, but was surprised to find that it was very much better than I had remembered. This is the garden at Englefield House, just near Junction 12 of the M4 and on the way to Pangbourne. It is the garden of a huge estate with a historic house, church, deer park, lake, ballustraded terrace gardens and woodland garden – not a bad setting!!!

The owners have really put a lot into improvement of the garden and its maintenance and there were many surprise features within the woodland hillside. There was a Heligan-like walk through a valley of Gunnera, a pebble mosaic, within a circular hedge of yew, a children’s garden with a slide through a willow tunnel and carved wooden animals, a water garden with beautiful planting through it, and an amazing grotto lined with different sorts of fir cones. Apart from all this the woodland garden was beautifully planted with trees and shrubs many of which had superb autumn colours.

The more formal terrace gardens had colour co-ordinated borders and a rill waterfeature leading into a pond, and all this together with the house overlooked the huge expanse of deer park.

Again the atmosphere of this garden is very informal , you just put money into an honesty box and I have never seen many other people there so you can really enjoy the tranquility.

My final garden is one I have been to many times, but again not for ages, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that many new borders had been made and were beautifully planted. This was Waterperry, at Wheatley, near Oxford, which has always been a fantastic garden, but I thought it was even more fantastic in 2005. It has a history of being a teaching garden as it was the home of a garden school for ladies from the 1940s or so. It still runs courses and has very useful borders with rows of labelled plants which it sells from its nursery. However, they have also developed very many new borders which have a more modern feel to the planting so I thought it was better than ever and I will be returning in 2006.

This reminiscing has really made me look forward to spring and summer and gardens opening again for the yellow book, so I can sample some more delights.

Carolyn Foster

Thanks for this piece Carolyn. As I write this in mid January there has been a week of very grey dismal days and it was a tonic to get carried away into summer gardens again! If any one has a contribution on this theme please send me your thoughts for the next issue (by March 6^th) Gill Townend 01628 483092 or gilltownend@aol.com

PROGRAMME FOR 2006

February Carolyn Foster on “Preparing the Garden for Spring”

March Society’s Spring Show

April Uel Magowan, Head Gardener at Odney Club, Cookham,

On “Planting Hanging Baskets and Containers”

May Keith Fletcher from Waterworld, Shinfield, Nr. Reading

On “Ponds & Water Gardening”

June Chris Murray, Manager, Windsor Farm Shop

July No meeting

August No meeting

September Victor Scott on “Spring Flowers of Crete”

October Talk on growing Vegetables – details to be confirmed

November A.G.M. & Christmas Competition

December No meeting

If members have any suggestions for meetings please do not be shy in coming forward. Contact Susie Tremlett with your ideas on 01628

483444

I am looking for volunteers, each to write about one local garden open under the yellow book between now and the autumn. Only a couple of paragraphs ……

Contact Gill Townend 01628 483092