I have not done a blog posting in what feels like ages – very busy, amongst other things, with starting a new garden in Portugal. We're here, having followed Jo’s daughter and family who wanted to bring their children up to get European passports. I've never lived in another country and now (at the age of 62) if I don't I never will. And good to be in a country which is going places (albeit a bit slowly at times), rather than one which seems determined on a kind of slow and national suicide. Not that we're selling up in Britain, as we continue to keep a little house in Bristol, and I'll be working from there quite a bit. But, quite honestly, its good to be out of our depressing, hijacked country for stretches of time.
So, in Portugal we are, “two thirds up and half way across”; and for those with a better grasp of Iberian geography, an hour east of Coimbra and halfway to the Spanish border from the Atlantic coast. The Atlantic indeed tends to dominate the climate for much of the year – rain and grey skies can dominate for weeks, but we also get long periods of clear high pressure and in summer the climate goes definitely Mediterranean with a hot dry season from June to September. So, not the classic Mediterranean climate by any means – I think most people who hear that we are in Portugal think immediately of the Algarve and long days of sunshine by the pool. Wrong! The nearest climate parallel I can think of is Portland Oregon (but thankfully minus its occasional Arctic blast).
Understanding climate in a transition zone like this often involves talking about 'lines', defined either by minimum temperature or water stress. There is the 'olive line', south (or downhill) of which it is possible to grow them (and in a way this perhaps best defines the Mediterranean climate region), the 'orange line' (ditto for citrus) and the 'box line' (south of which you forget about box and grow myrtle instead). We are just north of the orange line (the valleys here are too frosty for them) and well north of the box line. I find myself talking about the 'camellia line' which I think is a little to our south; there are some enormous camellias in the village and so these plants (naturally from a summer rainfall climate) must be able to get their roots down deep enough to access soil moisture in the summer. A bit further north, around Porto, summer rainfall kicks in and the camellias grow huge, expansive and decadent.
We have inherited a little garden of stone-edge formal beds, and a few shrubs, including the never-stop-flowering Solanum rantonnettii, which I used to grow when I had a nursery business back in the 1980s; and about a one hectare terreno of burnt-out, but recovering, olive trees and some elderly (and interestingly unburnt) other fruit trees. This region was severely affected by the fires of October 2017 (please see my blog postings on Portugal's ecological problems ). And... it's all flat! Which is unusual here. And wonderful easy-to-work soil, probably very acid (it is virtually all granite) although towards the back of the area the wildflower population suddenly gets better (perennial species taking over from lush arable weeds) so I think the soil must be thinner; and in fact this area has some re-generating oak – 'English oak', Quercus robur, which gives some idea of the species' tolerance for different climates and the fact that it shows we are only marginally Mediterranean.
The little formal garden at the side of the house, with porcelain seed pod sculptures we brought from England (some people think they are slugs!). Solanum rantonettii still in flowering mode. These beds will gradually get filled with salvias, pelargoniums, Mediterranean silvers, cistus, abutilons and many many more.
What's the plan?
Basically, try out everything we think might thrive and then go with the survivors. We'll be doing this mostly in the little side garden where we can give new plants some attention, such as watering to help establish. Secondly trying out some more ambitious large-scale planting combinations further out where any irrigation will be impossible. I have decided I want to use Stipa gigantea as a theme plant -it's locally native and I like the idea of having great drifts of it linking the different areas together and creating a kind of meadowy haze between, below and around the olives, which is a bit how you see it locally as a woodland edge plant. Plantings out here will be made from plants put in as small as possible to maximise the root penetration of the soil and therefore increase the chances of them having access to moisture during the dry summer. I have visions of intermingled perennial beds, but since these will either be Mediterranean or steppe climate species they can be expected to die back during the summer. Dry season interest will have to be maintained with shrubs, of which the region has a great many. Having said that, most of these are sub-shrubs, which tend to be short-lived, and are often inflammable, more on this in another blog.
Jo has planted out a few veggies, but this is basically going to be a plant trialling area. If you look carefully, you can see a camellia just coming into bloom.
Mediterranean climates
We have a stereotyped image of a Mediterranean climate as being hot and dry. Which is really only the summer, which is the dormant season for plants. Growth typically restarts in the autumn with the first rains, so it makes sense to think of this as 'spring no. 1' rather than 'autumn'. Growth can then cease or at least slow down in the winter before reviving in 'spring no. 2' which segues into the early summer maximum growth and flowering, which is when the majority of the region's bulbs, shrubs and annuals (and the few perennials) flower, and the countryside can be extraordinarily colourful. Drought then leads back into the dormant season. Where we are in central Portugal the winters are not that cold, so growth actively continues – all my seedlings in trays are making slow growth and on our land the weedy annuals like wild radish, grasses etc. are all actively growing.
Hana Vanova, our Czech garden volunteer (recruited through Workaway) planting out some of the plants I bought from OIivier Filippi. Hana has been invaluable during our first few months. She fell in love with gardening while working in Devon, and aims to return there.
With our garden volunteer Hana, in an area of ground sprayed off and ready to receive plants. Hana has been doing a great job pruning our recovering olives, which got burnt badly in the 2017 fire.
The weeds
Always a major issue with any ambitious garden (actually I don't yet know how ambitious I'm going to be). Perennial weeds, grasses in particular are the curse of naturalistic plantings in Britain, particularly in the wet mild west. In Mediterranean climates annual weeds are far more important and thankfully easier to deal with. The lush grass that fills our patch of olives looks just like the suffocating competitive grass that smothers all before it in the west of England. But.... it is not the same. Crush it (as beneath the wheels of the tractor of the guys who came to cut out the burnt-out olive trunks) and it all dies, goes yellow and doesn't recover. The ground in September/October is covered in a dense carpet of germinating annual weeds, including grasses. I'm not even sure that any of that lush green is a perennial grass. That's something I'm thankful for.
To be continued …..