Lupinus luteus, an annual species widely used as a green manure. Our former garden volunteer Hana sowed these and we are hoping they’ll naturalise.
Well here we all are, in lockdown. Nearly all of us it seems. And it looks like anyone who can, is gardening. Annie Guilfoyle reported to me that on the last Saturday before lockdown her local garden centre took five times its normal turnover. The Chiltern Seeds website is shut, overwhelmed by orders. It is as if gardening is something we all turn to in a time of crisis; especially a springtime crisis of course.
Nevertheless the garden business will be hit very hard. Many nurseries and garden centres make nearly all their money in a two month spell from now until June. There will be millions of stockpiled plants that won't find buyers, and shelves stacked full ready for a spring boom that will never happen. It could not have come at a worse time for the industry. Only those who have geared up for, and able to continue offering, mail-order could come through this, which of course is continuing a trend which has been happening for some time.
The old ornamental garden whose pattern we have reproduced for the rest of this space. A little like a monastery garden? It’ll be where we try out plants, propagate from them and generally have fun.
We, Jo and I, are lucky, we are in a good place, in Portugal, a country with a reasonably competent government (unlike the UK, or even worse, the US), AND in the country, AND with a big bit of land. And, I might add, garden centres seem to be excluded from being shut down under the lockdown. On the subject of the embarassing failures of the UK government, I do an occasional blog post called Why is Britain in such a mess? which tries to explain the eccentricities and failures of the country that many anglophile garden both love but also puzzle over; there's another one coming up soon.
Trays of plug plants ready for planting - into sprayed off grass. They’ll go in at 25-30 cm spacing. Randomised.
So, we continue the story of our Portuguese garden. I explained my basic strategy in a previous post - which was basically to imitate what happens in this climate and sow seeds of hardy plants in the autumn, growing them on to plant out in the spring as 25mm plugs. A friend from Poland was going to come and help but of course she's not coming now, so Jo and I doing the planting all by ourselves. In fact by no means all the things I sowed and then pricked out into plug trays are ready; growth rates over the winter have varied enormously. So, all the things that are too little are either going to have to be grown on until the autumn (and watered :( ) or planted out in nursery beds and transplanted later.
So what were my choices when I sat down and ordered from Jelitto last autumn? and how have they done so far? Well for a start everything originated in a climate where there is a definite and potentially severe summer water shortage: which means Mediterranean climate origin, or steppe habitat, or in the case of Limonium perezii, coastal.
Ampelodesmos mauritanica, Stipa gigantea and Festuca mairei are all tough eastern Mediterranean grass species, forming distinct and decorative tussocks. Sesleria heufleriana possibly less drought tolerant but I wanted to try a shorter grass for matrix type planting.
Centranthus ruber, and Lychnis chalcedonica are two rapidly-developing, often self-seeding, possibly not that long-lived, perennials with good decorative impact. 'can't go too far wrong with them' plants.
Gaura lindheimeri (from Texas) seems to be an extremely successful perennial in many warm summer climate zones, including some pretty challenging ones. Goniolimon tataricum and Papaver orientale are both very drought tolerant steppe origin plants, the latter behaving like a bulb as it grows early and goes into summer dormancy. Also steppe origin are: Gypsophila repens 'rosea'
Jurinea mollis, Anthemis carpatica 'Karpatenschnee', Nepeta racemosa, Perovskia atriplicifolia (now Salvia yangii)!!, Phlomis tuberosa and Salvia nemorosa, but they are coming on too slowly to plant out yet. Pulsatilla vulgaris in this category too I suppose.
What is too small to be planted out in final positions this spring is going into these nursery beds. The soil is so light and extraordinarily easy to sculpt with a rake, allowing for targeted irrigation (although we intend to minimise this).
This distinction between 'Mediterranean' and 'steppe' is a very fluid one as they grade into each other, particularly in Spain where the Meseta (the high altitude plains) is definitely borderline steppe (anyone who thinks this region is Mediterranean should come in the middle of the winter!) and in the eastern Mediterranean basin where there is a continuum between the two. Through geological history, the steppe zone has moved up and down as the ice ages have come and gone; there have been long periods when there has been a continuum in vegetation between Spain and Iran, and between eastern England and China; re. the latter it is surprising how many British native plants you seen in eastern Kyrgyzstan, near the Chinese border. Origanum vulgare and Pulsatilla vulgaris are two examples of geographically very widespread plants that cross many boundaries and which cope with summer drought. The latter though is very slow, still sitting in their plug trays with only a few leaves, so we'll have to leave them for a bit.
Old cardboard boxes from moving coming in useful for suppressing bindweed (fortunately only the native little pink one).
There are various 'classic' Mediterranean region plants I'm growing from seed too: Lavandula angustifolia, Marrubium incanum, Ruta graveolens, Teucrium chamaedrys, and the odd Cistus. These tend to send down long roots and be a bit slow about growing much in the way of foliage, so they'll have to be grown on a bit slowly too.
I want to focus on Mediterranean and Eurasian natives mostly; given the terrible problems Portugal has had with invasive aliens, I'm a bit cautious about non-Iberian species. The American North-West though has many attractions however, not least because coastal Oregon has a very similar climate to northern Portugal, so all the various Eriogonium and Penstemon species are enticing for starters. So, I'm including Penstemon barbatus ssp. coccineus and Eriogonum fasciculatum. But if any of them start seeding too much I'll get rid of them. Trying new plants in a territory as open as this to invasives does require responsibility!
During the lockdown, check out www.gardenmasterclass.org - we are rescheduling all our events to the autumn, and we are going to be putting up blog posts at regular intervals and will try to put on some webinars. And, if you want to do something education check out Learning with Experts, who have a whole line of courses in gardening and garden design.
So, adios! and look after yourslves!
Jo edging the beds in the side garden. Young Cupressus sempervirens on the right - strangely hardly ever seen in central Portugal.