Heatwave

Lately we've been experiencing a



Well, what passes for it in this neck of the woods, but pretty hot it has been and still is.
45 C (113 F), baby! Granted, that was in the conservatory but outside it was quite uncomfortably warm too with temperatures around 30 - 32 C (86 - 92 F). And that is pretty hot as it's very humid here as well.
Poor Dolly is stretched out as far as she can go in an effort to cool off.
Her Mummy Vita is taking very desperate measures to get some shade.
Kadootje (left) and her Mum Surprise are catching the cool evening breeze coming through the screen door in the conservatory. Kadootje: It ain't half hot, Mum!
And Willow is chilling in her favourite chair.
Due to the excessive heat many plants in the new border have burst into colour and leaf. This part of the border is only 7 months old but already you're hard put to find a bare patch of earth between the plants. It's like a jungle out there!
In the potager it's even worse cos due to the heat we have a riot on our hands, a riot of colour, that is.
Things got so bad, we had to have the doctor in, Dr Jamain to be precise. And if that wasn't bad enough, in the kitchen things went all kablooey too with salads exploding with colour.
With all that going on and not fancying a sunstroke much, Tara and I went in search of something cool.
And we found it, Tara, fetch ball!
And Tara is launched,
parting the waters like a ball seeking missile.
Tara Torpedo, a dog with a mission!
Almost there.
Got it!
Now for a spot of backpedalling,
quite sharpish!
She hits the ground running
Mission accomplished! One soaking wet dog, shaken not stirred, hold the olives.

And if you are thinking: well that's Tara all cooled down but what about you YE? Rest assured that yours truly is all cooled down too, every time that Tara shook herself, which was quite a lot as I had to throw the ball for her again and again, ad nauseum would not be an exaggeration, I got cool, very cool. Not surprising really as I am both cool and also of the hot. ;-)

copyright 2009 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Bad Design Much Improved

Jaguar Mark ll (Morse's car)

It's surprising really that for such mundane tasks as transporting oneself from A to B and back they've designed such spiffy little gadgets as the ones shown above and below.
Emma Peel with her Lotus Elan

Whereas when we enter into the exciting world of hedge trimming we're fobbed off with this.
Why?

Trimming hedges can be so very exhilarating, especially when you grow hedges like this,
this,
or this.
So really, such a dull and lame looking piece of garden equipment most certainly will not do. Nah, we need something a little bit more exciting than a snorefest. So, as a designer, I've come up with a much better designed hedge trimmer than the sad trimming affair shown above.





Very, very much better.






Spectacular in fact.







And so handy.








Not to mention decorative.







Guaranteed to put the fun back into hedge trimming!











Pure adamantium, baby!

See?


Yep, my hedge trimmer will sent the sparks flying in the heady and fascinating world of hedge trimmer design!
And once you're done trimming, my fantabulous design scrubs up nicely too so you don't have to hide it in the deepest, darkest corner of your garden shed but can instead stick it in the hallway where it will look all nice and decorative with a tray of drinks to meet and greet your guests.

And because I'm a brilliant designer (and modest about it too) I've designed it so that it's a multi purpose garden gadget. When it's not in use as a hedge trimmer or drinks stand or whatever else you might like to do with it (I'm sure you can think of a few things), it's also great to use as a water feature.







See?

And this is what it looks like when it's turned on.






Whoa mamma!


So, if anyone is looking for a great designer of garden gadgets, tools and such I'm your (wo)man! And I do a mean garden too.

copyright 2009 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Take Your Pick

Jeeves in the potager

Because that's what I've been doing lately and am still at it as a matter of fact.
There was much picking of the strawberries,
and raspberries
that are growing over an arch in my potager.
Also doing the arch thingy is my Japanese wine berry but those berries are not ready for picking yet. But picking there will be, and much of it.
And I'm not the only one who's been doing the picking, the birds in my garden are getting their fair share of rich pickings. I've finished picking my white currants but left enough for the birds to enjoy.
And as usual, the birds have been picking the fruits of my Amelanchier lamarkii, a tree that is called currant tree in my country, for obvious reasons. I had hoped to do some picking of my own but it was not to be as there are hardly any fruits left.
But not to worry as there are mucho rich pickings elsewhere like gooseberries, lots and lots of gooseberries in red
and chartreuse.
Yesterday I filled this basket with ripe gooseberries and there is plenty left to partake of some more rich pickings later on.
There was also much picking and eating (did I mention eating?) and enjoying, very much enjoying of the broad beans, especially when sprinkled with savory, a herb that also grows in my potager.
And as it is a potager, there are lots of flowers to be picked as well. And I have.With Blissful abandon.
Gratuitous picks of my pretty potager
A sneak preview of my new border that also provides rich pickings of flowers.
Very rich pickings. The only picking I haven't done is that of the nit. ;-)

copyright 2009 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Qualified & Clueless

You've heard of that old hoary chestnut "fighting like cats and dogs", right? But is it really true? I'm thinking: not so much! Why? Well, take a good hard look at the next few pics and then make up your own mind.
Tara: Hi Jeeves!
Wanna play?
Jeeves: Sure!
Jeeves: Hang on!
I just remembered
I've got an important phone call to make. Must dash, toodle pip!

So, it must be us who are barking as both Tara and Jeeves are completely clueless about the whole fighting like cat and dog thingy. They're not grokking that concept at all, nope not a sausage, poor widdle innocent ickle babes in the woods.

In other puppy news today:

On 4 June Tara took her puppy exam and she did very well so now she is a qualified puppy! The next courses are Elementary Obedience 1 and 2, the first one will start next Thursday. Two weeks ago we started with Agility lessons and Tara can now do a tire jump, run through a tunnel, jump over 2 hurdles in a row (the hurdles are set very low as she is still an ickle puppy) and she has started learning how to weave poles. Not bad considering she's only 9 months old.

And although I'm not one who likes to brag about my puppy (ha, who am I kidding? I love to brag about Tara) last Saturday she also managed to actually swim while fetching a stick from the water.
Who's a clever puppy then?
copyright 2009: Y.E.W. Heuzen

Having A Hissy Fit At .......

Recently I went on a garden tour to Britain. Why? Well, that's actually a good question as we all know that if I want to look at scrumptiously gorgeous gardens I can do it here at my leisure in my own country, the Netherlands, where we have oodles of them as every gardener knows. Well, every gardener worth his/her salt, that is.
So why did I bother to be bussed and shuttled across vast distances just to look at a bunch of British gardens? Well, for one thing, it's always good to check on what your neighbours are up to and, for another, I had heard a rumour that there were actually some decent gardens to be found in Britain. I know, I know, rather a concept of the very mind boggling kind but still worth checking up on. So off I went to see, among others, this garden.
And, as gardens go, this one was not too bad but it did have rather shabby old doors that could do with a lick of paint,
crazy paving which is much cheaper than buying enough paving slabs to lay a decent looking path,
a very ancient weather vane (1839? Hello, this is the 21 century!),
very old and crumbling walls, in dire need of a spot of re-pointing as plants were growing in its cracks (shocking, innit?),
and peeling paint, the skin flints! Not bothering to keep the place from crumbling down our ears but very good at charging obscene amounts of money for entrance fees. I feel a hissy fit coming on so high time to change the subject.
I haven't told you yet that 2 days before I went on my garden tour my old camera broke down (panic stations everyone!) so I had to buy a new one and learn how to use it in just 1 day. As you know, I am rather fearless and in possession of a very large brain so I did manage to learn in time how to manage my new camera. Whew!

With my new camera, complete with huge memory card, I can take 3,236 pics in one go. Not too shabby and 3,236 pics would be just about enough for a short garden tour. Not surprisingly, I love to experiment with my new camera, as shown in the pic above, so yours truly was happily snapping away and in the process besting a whole busload of Japanese tourists in taking the biggest amount of pics in the shortest possible time.
There, I feel all calmer now, so enough of my new camera and my fantastically wonderful photography, let's continue with showing you this garden. As you can see they not only have crazy paving but crazy plant training as well. I get dizzy just looking at it. Fig torture, the latest craze in gardening!
It was rather a relief to find that they actually did have some very nice borders and stuff in this garden. Or so it seemed at first but then I stumbled upon this:
a great big gaping hole in the planting. What a let down, especially when you take into consideration that they have an army of gardeners here to maintain the garden. In a way it's heartening though for the amateur gardener when a professionally ran garden, famous throughout the world (or so they claim), shows vast gaping holes like that.
A vast hole of a different and much prettier kind

BTW have you figured out which garden it is yet? Apparently it's an icon of the garden variety and it draws a quarter of a million visitors yearly. Frightfully shocking those herds of visitors stampeding the garden, wouldn't you say? So glad that my own garden isn't subjected to that kind of treatment on a yearly basis.
Also of the shocking was coming upon this (almost) nekkid chap in the shrubbery quite unexpectedly. It gave me quite a turn, I can tell you. Nekkid men in the garden, what is the world coming to? And I was very much right in checking up on my neighbours as they had, horror of horrors, another nekkid chap that was actually admiring himself in the moat.
The brazen whatsit, even though he's made of marble! Gentle reader, I hope you are as appalled as I am by all this flagrant and gratuitous nekkidness.

But now ...... the big reveal (perhaps an unfortunate choice of words with all those nekkid chaps about) ......
Yes, you've guessed it : Sissinghurst!

And from now on there's no need to throw a hissy fit caused by garden envy when at Sissinghurst as yours truly has shown you how very far from perfect this garden actually is. There's no need to thank me, your bill is in the mail!

Kind regards,

Dr YE, world leader in the prevention of hissy fits in gardeners

copyright 2009: Y.E.W. Heuzen

It's a Dog's Life!

It's not easy being a little doggywog. You get taken on holiday without so much as a by-your-leave. This is where we went recently, some humble abode in the country.
Havezathe Voorstonden

Really, what is that all about? See those big trees? What is a girl doggy supposed to do with them? Not a lot, you got that in one.
I liked the garden as it was very large and they had birds there, lots of birds. I like birds they are very nice for chasing, although I never catch one. Must practise some more, I think.
This was also very puzzling, what a waste of space to built a great big house like that when you could have grass for me to sniff and play on
I love sniffing stuff. BTW what are Rhododendrons?
Yolanda kept mentioning them, saying how very beautiful they were.
Hmmmmm, they can't be more pretty than I am, can they?
Nah, of course not.
This had me totally confuddled, what the heck is it? It's not a doggy or a birdie and not a kittycat either. I know kittycats as we got lots of them at home.
There was another house there and I could see the point of that one as it was very nice and cosy inside, it was were we stayed during the holiday. Having a roof over your head is good, especially when it rains.
Upstairs it had a big window reaching down to the floor with a great view over the garden and I could also keep my eye on that strange big beastie from there.
In the evenings, as it got a bit nippy, we did this. I like this!
This is me in the garden of the former coach house, checking out all those new plants Yolanda has bought. I don't know why she bothers, we have enough of those at home and they had quite a lot of them at Voorstonden too.
I don't understand this fascination with plants. Sure, I like to nibble on them and chew of the flower heads but what else can you do with them?
I know that people buy them, sometimes travelling a loooooooong way to find them and when they get home they put them in the ground and then they go inside. What's the point?
This I get, I love hedges, they are fun. Can you see me in the pic?
I really liked the garden as it had so much interesting sniffing opportunities and we played with a Frisbee on the lawn quite often which I like very much.
They had lots of water there too, which was also pretty good as I love drinking the stuff and playing in it, getting myself soaking wet and then shaking myself vigorously. The shaking seems to delight all the people close by me because they all squeal with joy. Note to self: get wet more often and do the shaking thingy!

And then, just as I got used to having such a big playing space around me, we went home. Bummer! Our garden is much smaller than this one and I don't like that at all. Sigh, it's really a dog's life I'm living, don't you think?

And Tara is not the only one who's living a dog's life, yours truly will be going to this garden (pic below) and quite a few others such as Leonardslee gardens, High Beeches gardens, Wakehurst Place gardens, the Savill gardens, Ramster gardens and Doddington Place gardens as well next Friday. I'm going on a garden tour in Sussex and Kent (UK) with a friend for a few of days.
Sissinghurst aka Hissingfirst

I know, I know, it's tough, but somebody's got to do it. Later!

copyright 2009 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Garden Design 101; The White Garden

Designing a garden is something that quite a few gardeners find difficult to do but it isn't, really. Today I'd like to blog about how I designed my front garden on what was quite an unprepossessing and impossible plot to start with.
This is how the front garden looked originally; a few humongous shrubs pushed against the front wall of the house and a bit of law with a very narrow path leading up to the front door. Boring? Definitely! Ugly? Without doubt!
As you can see the front garden is (when looking at it from the side) a very long and narrow strip of land. How to turn that into a garden that looks both good and interesting?
Let's start with the basics. That narrow 2 feet (60cm) wide path looked ridiculous as the front entrance is 6 feet (180cm) wide. So a new path was laid that is just as wide as the entrance. Makes sense, doesn't it? And, because there was no height to the garden, a pergola was added which also ties in the garden to the house and makes the transition from inside to out much more gradual.
During many months of the year you are enveloped in a cloud of rose fragrance as soon as you leave or enter the house, courtesy of rosa Madame Alfred Carriere and rosa Guirlande d'Amour.
Underneath the windows on both sides of the entrance paths were laid as well for easy access for window cleaning and the odd paint job. Then a berberis hedge was planted to keep the dogs from using my garden as a toilet as they really don't like those sharp thorns and also because it ties in so nicely with the surroundings. If you look closely at the pic above (click to enlarge) you see another berberis hedge across the street. In the third pic from the top you see a nice tree in the same colour as the berberis hedge. When designing look what is there and use it in your own design if you can.
Then rectangles were made using box. Why rectangles? Take a good hard look at the house, it's pretty rectangular, wouldn't you say?
And it's not only the house that's rectangular in shape, just look at how that wall to the right of the entrance is divided into 4 rectangles. On the right 4 rectangles of box were made and 2 on the left.
Perhaps you have heard of that old hoary chestnut that you should always use uneven numbers to make things look good in the garden and, as I've just admitted, I most certainly did not; I went for even numbers. I had to because otherwise the rectangles would be either too big or too small. But still it works. How? Well I may have 2 rectangles of box on the left but there are also 3 gravel paths there so 2 + 3 = 5 which is an uneven number.
On both sides of the path to the front door I made 2 borders. In spring they look very colourful in pink, blue, yellow, white and purple but come summer everything is white. In autumn they are brimming with colour again. I love white but not the whole year round.
Spring in the front garden
Summer in the front garden

Here's the white garden in full swing and it looks great. White is such a great colour to use in the garden, making it look a bit dreamy, romantic, ethereal. So, a white garden has only white flowers in it, right?
Wrong! You have to smuggle in a bit of colour here and there to keep it from being very flat and boring. I've planted all the rectangles up with white flowering plants and in the middle I've bunged a pyramid in every bed for a climbing rose to climb over. In one bed I've planted rosa Sombreuil, a lovely and very fragrant old white rose.
Rosa Sombreuil

But is she really white? On closer inspection perhaps not so much.
On the pergola Madame Alfred Carriere is flowering her socks off for many months of the year. The colour of her fragrant flowers is either a very delicate light pink or white with a pink blush.
This bed is planted up with Gillenia trifoliata that flowers white but it has red stems and a reddish tinge to the leaves. So the trick with a successful white garden is to smuggle in some other colours but be subtle about it.
Mother Nature was less subtle this year. I had sown some foxgloves last year that were supposed to be all white but there appear to be a few purple ones too. I'll leave them for now as they look so good but I will remove them before they can sow their seeds. The white ones will be free to self sow all over the place.
I'll leave you with the whitest rose I have in my white garden, it's rosa Blanc Double de Coubert. I love her delicate flowers that look like tissue paper, her very pretty leaves and, very important, her absolutely wonderful scent. It's a joy to work near her as her fragrance fills the air; it's a lovely rose scent with a hint of pineapple. Scrumptious! This year it was this rose that unexpectedly won the race of the roses as she flowered first on April 23.

copyright 2009 Y.E.W. Heuzen