Flâneur Gardening

What IS he doing now, you might wonder? Rustic jewelry? A fearsome weapon to bludgeon the slugs into submission? Or has he, indeed, finally lost his marbles and replaced them with stones?No, it is none of the above. Rather, I am trying to make use of one of the presents my Mum left me when she visited this spring: a bag full of stones with natural holes in them. I am using them as a flexible means of reigning in the sweet peas that would rather flop over than climb the twigs and sticks that I provide for them. The stones at either end of the string are lopped around the posts of the Uncovered Terrace, and ind a week the sweet peas will have grown enough to hide the string completely.

I always use sisal string to tie up plants; it looks very bright at first, but weathers to a silvery grey with time. Strong enough to last 4-5 years in the garden, the fact that it’s a natural fibre means that it can also go straight on the compost heap when used to tie up herbaceous plants like my sweet peas.

There. Enough about stones on a string. Have a rose:Last spring I planted ‘New Dawn‘ roses around the two trees that hold up alternately the laundry line and the hammock, and the are growing well and doing exactly what I hoped they would.
At one end the glossy green foliage and the pale pink flowers form a textural contrast to the rough bark of an oak, and at the other they form a colour contrast to the blackish-red leaves of a cherry plum.By now, most of the plants have at least one branch that had grown tall enough for the deer to leave them alone; this might be the key to growing roses in a deer-visited garden – fence them in until they are tall enough no longer to count as an easy snack!