Meet the houseplant: maidenhair fern

July 7, 2019 ~ Wolves in London ~ 1 Comment

Adiantum raddianum ‘Fragrantissimum’

I say this with the complete awareness that’s it going to make me sound like a full on #crazyplantlady, but when I first saw a Maidenhair fern in the flesh (in the leaf?), I gasped out loud in wonder at its beauty.

The delicate light green leaves, that dance around the plant, appear to float in space, so delicate are its stems. On closer inspection, the fine thin stems are a jet black, arching gracefully upwards and away from the base.

This, indeed, is the queen of houseplants, but, boy is it a bitch to keep it happy.

The first one I owned, I placed in my spare bedroom. Big mistake. This plant needs to be checked on daily (twice daily in the summer), to make sure it’s damp enough, that the soil hasn’t dried out, that the leaves aren’t crisping up with lack of humidity… I left my first plant for three days on its own and it was fully dead by the time I looked at it again.

This plant in the photos, the second one I’ve had in my life, lives in my bedroom and, by contrast, is incredibly happy. I water it almost daily, I mist it about once a fortnight, and I check the healthiness of its leaves morning and night. Any signs of curling or crisping and I water straight away and move it a bit further from the window. It lives about a metre from a West-facing window, so has good indirect light for most of the day and some late evening sunshine. It’s an absolute beauty and is growing bigger by the day.

Light:

This plant needs more light than you would expect for a fern. It thrives in bright, indirect light. Its leaves will scorch, however, in too much direct sun.

Watering:

Water frequently and don’t allow the soil to dry out. It also enjoys humidity, so mist it frequently, or place it on a gravel tray, ideally surrounded by other plants.

Perfect for:

High humidity places, such as a (not too dark) bathroom or the kitchen (but keep away from the kettle or the oven, it won’t enjoy suddenly getting extremely hot!) Also happy in less humid areas such as bedrooms (where mine lives) or sitting rooms, as long as you take care to mist it regularly and check up on its happiness.

Meet the houseplant: a new series

July 7, 2019July 7, 2019 ~ Wolves in London ~ Leave a comment

woman holding a houseplant

My home, these days, is stuffed full of houseplants. An urban jungle, an indoor rainforest, a interior garden… …you get the idea, there’s a lot of greenery.

Though I’ve not been blogging so much recently, I’ve developed a bit of an Instagram addiction (go and check me out over there if you’re not already! @wolvesinlondon). Some of my most popular photos there are my houseplants of the week: where I share some snaps of my favourite plants, along with a bit of info on how I look after them.

I thought it would make sense to bring that over onto my blog too: a weekly post about one of my plants, with a few care tips, a few photos, and some suggestions about where best to keep it. Plus, of course, the luxury of a little more space to write than I get in my Instagram stories.

So, if a plant filled home sounds like your kinda bag, check in each week for a meet and greet with my houseplants.

The first post is up now, and I’ll add each new plant here as it goes live…

Maidenhair fern

A new garden and some new plans

May 25, 2017 ~ Wolves in London ~ Leave a comment

With great excitement, we handed in our notice on our rental house recently.

Our definitely-completed-in-six-months building project is now at the start of month eight and, finally, builders have started on the final phase. The project has been drastically scaled back (the attic conversion is now going to have to wait for another time) but I am insanely excited at the prospect of finally moving in in mid June.

Most excited of all, possibly, at the thought of our new garden.

The view of the garden from the upstairs window

When we bought the new house, the one (and only) concern for me was that the garden was a bit smaller than our old one. In our last house, the garden was extremely long and extremely narrow (5mx20m) and though our new garden is almost a metre wider (believe me, in London, these kinds of small additions count for a lot!) it’s about two metres shorter.

But, after eight months in our rental house with just a tiny shaded courtyard out the back, the space is looking pretty palatial right now.

Since we moved in, while all the building work has been going on, I’ve been taking photos of the garden. Both to give myself some proper “before” shots to look back on, once the “after” is resplendent (hem hem) and also so I can remember what will flower where and what everything looks like at its best season of interest.

Garden

So this view, above, is looking from the patio down to the end of the garden in early Spring (with a little ornamental cherry in bloom in the middle of the grass).

Pyracantha blossom

And this is how it looks right now, with the old spiky, but rather attractive pyracantha in full blossom.

London garden

And this, above, is the view back to the house, from the end of the garden.

As you can see, it’s all pretty overgrown, but there is lots to work with. The shrubs and trees are mature but now too large for their spaces, so my plan with these is just to do a bit of a constructive edit. I’ll prune some right back and remove others, to leave a smaller number to shine. There is an acer, in particular, that is going to be delightful.

Arch

The patio is separated from the garden with some rickety trellis, that is looking pretty unstable now. I think it will have to come down fairly soon (or fall down on its own) but I love the idea of a separation here and am thinking I might try and put a huge corten steel circle in, as a modern take on a moon gate. Watch this space!

Fence

The equally rickety fence at the back conceals three lime trees and a small strip of council-owned land. Both neighbours have taken the fence down to reclaim the land and absorb it into their garden. After a mere 20 years, apparently, it will be your own… And the wooden bear was left by the previous owners. The boys already love it.

Pond

There is a small and rather sweet pond, backed with overgrown dogwood. I am planning to coppice the dogwood asap, so that next year it will just be a small collection of bright red newly grown stems, reflecting in the water.

The lawn is curved at the sides and covered in moss, but a great space for the boys to play. I’m not too bothered by the moss actually, but I do plan to straighten out the edges, so that it’s a regulation rectangle, surrounded by similar-sized beds.

Camellia

There are quite a few flowering shrubs jostling for space, but little herbaceous interest in the beds. A camellia in the front garden is looking nice. A pieris could have a chance to shine with some judicious pruning around it. All in all, lots of tidying and shaping to be done, and then some herbaceous perennials planted in the newly created gaps.

Scrappy side return

At the side, a really quite large patio with a pergola that we’ve had to remove (it was dripping damp into the house). Here, I am planning on festooning the fence and walls with green and making a shady little evergreen nook to sit in on really hot days.

And, what’s this here? An extremely ugly add on to the house, you say? A no, no, no! This is actually the room in the house I am most excited about because, for the next few years until we can afford to build a side return, this is going to be my plant room. My urban jungle. My green retreat. My wannabe-orangery. It’s a bit hard to imagine, looking at it like this, but I have high hopes of making something very beautiful in here!

So, lots to do, lots to decide and lots of promise for the hot summer months. May mid June roll on as quickly as possible!

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Autumn days at Sissinghurst

October 27, 2016 ~ Wolves in London ~ 7 Comments

Sissinghurst Hello, poor neglected blog! I’ve thought of you a lot over these past few months and yet never found the time / energy to pop in and say hi…

Late pregnancy this time round has been a total crusher of energy. Partly, I suppose, because I’m older, partly because I have two other little people to look after and partly because I seem to have been ill with one thing or another at least once a week. (Though the last of those is down to the first two, I am pretty sure…)

Anyway, here we are with ten days to go before the baby is due, and I’m finally managing to drop in and share some pictures of our trip to Sissinghurst from a few weekends ago.

Sissinghurst

It was one of those glorious Autumnal days, the sky blue, the sun shining, the leaves just starting to turn and the fruit trees dripping in bounty.

The kids ran around, I slowly wandered about admiring the planting and ruminating on the how the garden design fit the architecture and surrounding environment (I was compiling a sketchbook on said topic for one of my garden design assignments) and we all ate heartily at the (rather expensive) cafe.

Sissinghrust tower

Sissinghurst oasthouses I don’t need to say much about Sissinghurst, I’m sure, as it must be one of the most famous gardens in the country. But, despite the glamour and renown of the garden rooms, I have to confess that I find some of the outlying parts a little more appealing. The kitchen garden, surrounded by views of the fields, was fat with pumpkins. The orchard was full of apples, crabapples and pears. The lakes, towards the very perimeter of the “gardened” land were looking beautiful with huge stately oak trees shaking their branches over the top. And perhaps my favourite parts are where you can catch glimpses out to the Kentish farmland beyond, the gentle chug of a tractor in the distance, a few faraway figures walking the dogs through the yellow fields… I do love the domestic romance of the English countryside.

Country view

Sissinghurst lakes

crabapples

I noticed, for the first time, that there is a B&B on the grounds of the estate. (Website here: sissinghurstcastlefarmhouse.com) One to add to the list for a child-free weekend away at some unspecified point in the future!

Anyway, I hope you’re all well. I suspect I won’t have time to drop in again now until after the baby arrives, until when I am busy trying to finish my last assignment for the course (designing a show garden for Chelsea / Hampton Court!) and finishing off the blanket that I have only just started knitting. (You can see it on my IG account here: baby blanket) Oh dear, little baby, I am sorry that before you are even born I have had less time to spend on you than I did on your siblings!

Peak bloom at Thames Barrier Park

August 11, 2016August 11, 2016 ~ Wolves in London ~ 10 Comments

Thames Barrier Park is one of those slightly random places in London that I tend to read about and never visit.

Built in 2001, next to, you guessed it, the Thames Barrier, it’s a really cutting edge bit of garden design and I’ve seen photos of it in magazines, online, and, frequently, in lectures at my garden design course.

And yet, it always seemed so far away and hard to reach that I’d never had quite enough impetus to go and visit. And that’s coming from someone who already lives in London.

But at the end of July, we had a scheduled visit on my course, so I hit the jubilee line and then the DLR and set off for Pontoon Dock, the station beside the park. (Side note: Pontoon Dock! What a fabulous name!)

My reservations about travelling so far must be shared by others. It was a gloriously sunny day, but the park was all but deserted, apart from my gaggle of eager garden designers to be.

The park is surrounded by a huge amount of new buildings and new building work, bordered at one edge by the river and the barriers, and at the other by the DLR line, and directly under the flight path of City Airport, with planes taking off and landing every few minutes. Yet, despite the noise and the bustle, it’s a surprisingly relaxing place to be.

At the centre of the design is the sunken garden: the one you’ll probably already recognise from photos. Clipped hedges of yew are shaped into huge rows of undulating waves, the long lines leading your eye all the way down the barriers. Interspersed with the green yew is a range of colourful perennials and grasses which, when we visited, were at peak bloom.

It’s an impressive and innovative spectacle, no doubt, but maintenance issues were apparent when we visited (and, I think, all the time) as the clipped forms need constant care and were growing straggly in places and had even died off completely in others.

You can walk down into the garden and wander along the lines of plants, but it’s really designed to be viewed from one of the bridges that cross over its width.

Hydrangea — That instagram fave, the hydrangea, was in full flower when we visited

Around the main area, is a swathe of wildflower meadows, interspersed with a grid of birch trees and, I have to confess, I found this a more enjoyable place to sit and spend time. The semi-natural environment provided more of a relief from all the construction and hard lines around, and it was lovely to watch the grasses waft in the wind and the bees landing on the flowers.

I would say it’s well worth a visit if you’re already in the area, but that begs the question who would be in the area and why? I wondered exactly why such a contemporary garden had been built here and whether the original intention was to draw people to this rather neglected part of the docklands simply to come and see it? If so, I’m not sure it’s been successful, but I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’ve visited…

I am delighted to say I am joining in with Annie Spratt’s wonderful How does your garden grow once again. Annie’s has long been one of my fave blogs to visit and I was really sad when Annie announced her decision to stop blogging recently, and over the moon when she decided to resurrect HDYGG again. Do go over and visit everyone else’s posts, there’s always some great inspiration to be found…

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6 easy updates for a beautiful summer garden

July 25, 2016July 24, 2016 ~ Wolves in London ~ 1 Comment

When I first got into gardening, I was always slightly embarrassed by my own garden in the middle of summer. Springtime tended to be luscious and green, Autumn was russet-toned and lovely but in the very middle of summer… …well, quite often not much seemed to be going on.

Where were the flowers? Should the grass be that brown? Why did everything look like it might be about to shuffle off this mortal coil?

In fact, since learning a bit more about horticulture, I realise that high summer is one of the trickier times in the garden. Lots of the earlier blooming flowers are over, those that wait for the cooler days of Autumn are yet to impress, and everything tends to be in good need of a large drink of water.

Thankfully, I’ve also learnt it’s not that tricky to resolve the situation, so here are six easy tricks for sprucing up your garden.

Bedding
Delicate star-shaped nicotiana

Cosmos | Wolves in London — Beautiful cosmos

Sweet pea | Wolves in London — Sweet pea

I used to dismiss bedding as old fashioned, blousy and, frankly a bit naff. If someone mentioned “plugging up the gaps in your beds with bedding” I’d immediately think of petunias or marigolds. Garish flowers that would look perfect in an Victorian park, with head gardeners wasting endless supplies of water keeping them alive, only to rip them up at the end of the season and start again.

Actually, though, there’s plenty of tasteful, beautiful, non-garish and even modern bedding around.

Technically speaking, bedding can refer to any plant that’s an annual, or lives only for a year. Because it’s just a one season thing, it’s cheaper to buy than perennials (nobody has had to look after it for years before it blooms) and often easy to grow from seed.

Some of my favourites, all of which should be available in a good plant shop near you, are cosmos, snapdragons, sweet peas and Nicotiana alata. The last of these has the most incredible scent in the evening, but is fairly toxic, so make sure you plant it towards the back of a bed if you have kids or animals roaming around.

The best thing to do if you’re planning on buying bedding, though, is just taking a browse at a garden centre or (even better) a plant nursery and grabbing anything that takes your fancy and is looking good right now. Remember that it won’t be around next year, so make sure it looks like it’s got a good bit of flower production still left for the season and then just plant it anywhere that needs an extra dash of interest…

Pots

white flowers This is the quickest win of all when it comes to gardening. Buy some plants already in flower (bedding, or perennials) and put them in a pot in a prominent position.

Gardens Illustrated always has brilliant combinations for plants in containers if you need inspiration, or just follow your heart and choose things you think look nice.

The really great thing about pots is that you can move them around, so once a display is over, put the pot into a hidden corner to wait until next year, or dig up the plants, re-plant in your garden if appropriate and put something new in.

3. Cleaning

Al Fresco summer garden | Wolves in London — Perfectly clean!

I know, sorry, what a boring option! But if you’ve not got the time / money / inclination to re-paint fences or furniture, then just giving them a really good scrub can often work wonders to perking up the whole look of your garden.

Endless spring showers (and often summer ones too) mean that tables and chairs can get dirty and everything can start to look a bit drab and brown.

This is especially true if you have a very modern-looking white-rendered wall style of garden, where every stain and mark shows up. A friend of mine who works as maintenance gardener once described working in these gardens as being a bit like an outdoor cleaner: more often than pruning shrubs or weeding, she found that cleaning the walls made the biggest difference to how everything looked.

Mow the lawn

NB, this is not my lawn! (Photographed at Walcot Hall, Shropshire, where we got married.)

I am constantly, constantly amazed what a huge difference it makes to my garden once we’ve given the grass a good mow. Suddenly, everything looks neater and more intentional when set against the backdrop of a finely trimmed sward

Choose some lighting

High summer is prime time for late night suppers in the garden. In an ideal world, we’d all have atmospheric mood lighting to accompany the event. You know the kind: dramatic uplighters highlighting a stately tree trunk, or a string of romantic bare bulbed lights over our eating area. In real life, this is often a fairly expensive option for the rare evenings in this country where we want to be sitting in the garden at night.

But mood lighting can be simple (and cheap) too; candles for eating dinner are perfect. Perhaps a hurricane lamp strung from a tree. Or just some outdoor fairy lights festooning a fence. Anything that twinkles, basically, is a good bet…

6. Add some fabrics

London garden

I can sometimes be guilty of not bothering to carry things outside to the garden, because I know I’ll just have to take them back inside at the end of the day.

But a picnic blanket, some cushions, a hammock strung between the trees: these are the things of comfort and relaxation and long days spent soaking up the sun. Our kids love their red and white striped teepee and can spend hours minutes sitting inside quite happily on their own and pretending it’s a space rocket.

Do you have any other tips for quick fixes to make your garden look inviting? Do share them below…

6 tips for a summer garden update

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In the garden: June

July 2, 2016 ~ Wolves in London ~ 7 Comments

Seedhead Well, wasn’t the last week of June utterly depressing. Like so many, I was knocked for six with the results of the referendum.

I find the whole thing terrifying and bleak. The result itself, the reports of increased racism that have peppered the news this past week, the furious packpedalling of the Leave campaigners, the Leave voter regretters, but also the really unpleasant bile and accusations that have been rife on my Facebook feed ever since — predominantly from those who share my political views and also voted to remain.

Yes, I agree, it is bloody miserable that more people said leave than stay, but I don’t think that justifies branding half the population either racist or moronic. Nor do I feel much empathy for those who want to take London out of the UK (erm, doesn’t that kind of go against the whole point of staying stronger together?) or moan about how they’ll no longer be able to retire to a lovely villa in Spain.

Anyway, let’s hope that something comes up to stop us actually following through and leaving and that the unpleasant racism and Facebook fighting dies down and maybe, just maybe, we can all stand up against a political system filled with lies and nonsense pedalled merely as a desire for personal gain, irrespective of the good of the country.

In the meantime, pottering in the garden has provided me with some respite from the bleak outlook. June is often a bit of a “flower gap” in my garden, a time when the Spring blooms are over, but high Summer is yet to hit its peak. But there’s just enough of interest to keep me wandering around between all the rainstorms.

white thalictrum

My complete obsession at the moment are my stunning thalictrum plants. They’re Thalictrum delavayi ‘album’ and the flower buds form perfect white circles that bob about on slender stems, before opening to reveal delicate yellow stamens. I have about nine plants dotted throughout the garden and I just adore them. They were newly planted in the Autumn, but I shall put them in every garden I ever own from now on…

Another favourite is this scabious; I love watching it unfold from tightly packed bud to luscious flower and then into a rather glorious seedhead. I planted it next to some salvia argentea, which is a huge fat-leaved, hairy silver plant, that looked absolutely amazing for about a week. And then the slugs devoured every last bit of it. Three plants, completely munched through, with only the leaf veins left. Grrrr. Bee on erysimum Bee

Regular reads might chuckle to know that, yes, my wallflower is — as ever — in full bloom. Not only does it flower pretty much continuously for 11 months of the year, but the bees love it. It’s a garden staple, I think, if a little unglamorous.

Ladybird

I planted a beautiful pittosporum towards the back of the garden, but it has become a breeding ground for aphids. Every time I see a ladybird anywhere in the garden, I put it on the pittosporum in the hope it will munch those little pests right up. But, a few minutes later, there will be no sign of the ladybird and hundreds more of the little black dots multiplying in front of my eyes. I think I need a more effective form of control, but the hose doesn’t reach that far down the garden to blast them away, and I always feel a little queasy, I have to confess, about wiping them off between my fingers.

Echinops

There is lots on the verge of flowering at the moment too. Some poppies that have grown from seed that I asked the sproglet to chuck liberally across the flower beds are growing well. I can no longer remember what type we sowed, so I watch them every day in eager anticipation, waiting to see what colour the flowers will be. And my newly-planted echinops is getting taller and taller, the flower buds fattening. I can’t wait for them all to burst open.

London garden

Finally, a rather crappy shot of the garden as viewed from the patio looking away from the house. It’s not quite as short as it appears in the photo, but we cleared all the plastic kids crap away to put up the much more attractive fabric tent last weekend, so I thought it needed a quick snap. You can just make out the chicken house and the veg beds at the far end…

So, roll on July. Here’s to less rain, more flowers and, hopefully, a little more optimism in the whole political situation. Fingers tightly crossed.

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East Dulwich in bloom

June 14, 2016June 13, 2016 ~ Wolves in London ~ 5 Comments

Last Friday, I took a walk through my local streets, camera in hand, to photograph some nice examples of hard landscaping for my recent garden design assignment.

Does that sound interesting? It wasn’t hugely. I soon found myself photographing roses instead.

Pink rose | Wolves in London

White rose | Wolves in London

Rose bud | Wolves in London Over almost every front wall, it seemed, profusions of roses were blooming. Every colour, scent and type imaginable was adorning the streets of East Dulwich.

These are some of the finest…

pink frilly rose white dog rose

And if you ask really nicely, I might share my hard landscaping photos with you at some point in the future, but in the meantime, here is a photo of a nice bit of sandstone paving, plus cat…

cat

In the garden: May

May 19, 2016May 15, 2016 ~ Wolves in London ~ 9 Comments

Apple blossom in the garden | Wolves in London

Oh May! Such a fabulous month in the garden. Blossom dripping off trees, new buds emerging in the beds, bees drowsily buzzing. May is probably my favourite month, horticulturally. Summer is almost upon us, but the greens are still fresh and green and the dew glistens on the grass in the mornings.

Acer palmatum | Wolves in London

Bee in apple blossom forget-me-not Euphorbia

Erigeron karvinskianus | Wolves in London

In the last month, the back garden has really been taken over by the chickens and the kids. We bought two news chooks to add to the flock, which was brilliant but also necessitated buying a spare coop in case they all decided to peck each other to death. Luckily, they didn’t, but the empty coop now sits squeezed between the vegetable beds and the original chicken run and its orange-stained wooden frame is in direct line of sight at almost every point in the garden. At the end of April, the littlest had his second birthday and was the happy recipient of a brand new, bright blue plastic slide, that takes up almost all of our tiny lawn space. But, away from the blue plastic and orangina wood, the fruit trees are all in blossom and the flower beds are going great guns, with all our new plants growing well, if a little surrounded by weeds at the moment….

In the evening, the sinking sun sets right behind the fabulous acer and its leaves glow bright bronze. It’s one of my favourite sights at this time of year (and one of the few plants we kept from the previous owners…) And I’m delighted with my new bright lime green eupborbia, which is just as stunning as I’d hoped it might be. I had meant to plant some ruby red aquilegias around it, but instead it seems to be surrounded by weeds at the moment. Ah well.

London front garden in Spring

In our front garden, the morello cherry tree has been in spectacular bloom, the rock roses covered in white flowers and the Sicilan honey garlic (Nectaroscordum siculum) just starting to peep out above the rest. I can see the first long shoot of the perennial sweet pea starting to make its way up the obelisk, promising a profusion of bright pink blooms later in the year.

Yes, life in sweet in May – the only obstacle to my garden utopia that we’re about to go on holiday to Sicily for a couple of weeks and I’ve not got anybody lined up to do any watering in case of no rain here. Still, the weeds, at least will survive our absence, I’m sure.

In the garden: March

March 18, 2016 ~ Wolves in London ~ 8 Comments

So, after 3.5 years living here, we’ve finally – finally – landscaped and planted the garden. Hurrah! I’ll show you proper photos next month as it’s still all looking a bit bare and unimpressive while the plants establish, but in the meantime, here’s a little look at some of the recent additions to our little patch of turf.

On a sunny Friday at the end of Feb, we hired a van and drove to a plant nursery in Surrey. I’m still beside myself with excitement about the brilliant trade prices I’m now eligible for as a trainee garden designer, and wandering round a nursery stuffed full of plants, feeling the first of the Spring sunshine on my face, was pretty much my idea of heaven.

Lots of what I bought is nothing more than a small mound of leaves at the moment, but these are the ones with something to show right now…

corkscrew hazel catkin

I’ve been obsessed with corkscrew hazels (Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’) for a good few years now and couldn’t pass up the chance to have one in my own garden. The twisting stems look rather Tim Burton-esque to me (in a good way) and then there’s the delights of all the catkins in Spring and hazelnuts in Autumn.

Euphorbia myrsinites

Also a huge obsession, though a more recent one, since my visit to Beth Chatto’s garden last year, is this incredible Euphorbia myrsinites. Those grey spiky leaves, lime green flowers and flowing stems are just quite spectacular as far as I’m concerned. I’ve planted a couple of other euphorbias, too, which will hopefully be in full flower by next month.

Chionodoxa forbesii

The famous wallflower is still going strong (no photos this month, since I’ve shared them a gazillion times) and clustered around its base, a flurry of bright blue bulbs have come up: Chionodoxa forbesii, that I planted last year and I had completely forgotten about. There is something magical about bulbs, the way they pop up and down, year after year, and you can never quite remember what is going to come up where. (Or is that just me?!) These blue beauties are a welcome sight, though I think the slugs and snails agree with me, since their leaves (as you can see) are almost always bitten off, and I often find whole flowers disappear overnight.

ipheion alberto castillo

I’m hoping these new ipheion (‘Alberto Castillo’) will do just as well. I grabbed them from the nursery on an impulse as they were looking so stunning, and I was pleased to then find them recommended by Dan Pearson as one of his all time top plants in Gardens Illustrated later in the month. They’re very beautiful, with their long stems and white star-shaped flowers, striped down the middle with a faint line.

Stachys byzantina

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I can’t resist plants with fluffy leaves. So it is, the garden is heaving with Salvia argentea (which is a bit ratty looking to show you at the moment) and the lamb’s ear above (Stachys byzantina), which looks especially fantastic when it catches dew in the morning.

Stipa tenuissima Miscanthus sinensis

I’ve also added a few grasses. The beautiful Mexican feather grass (Stipa tenuissima), above top, which glows in the sunlight and waves around in the wind in a most fantastic way. I might have to try and take a video sometime. And some brilliant miscanthus, to provide huge seed heads throughout the winter.

Blossom