While my future exotic garden sits moist and warm under a thinck mulch of grass clippings (720 litres of OM so far) the rest of the garden has become a dazzling explosion of colour. Most of my annuals are rioting in the beds in a sort of crazed rainbow race. Way too colourful for my taste, but strangely, having kept the colours divided in blocks it still works. Very much on the edge, mind, but it works. There is an orange-yellow block with Calendula, Californian poppies, "peach Melba" nasturtiums and sunflowers (these are not blooming yet), there is magenta-purple block with anemones (St. Brigid, blooming late), ornamental cabbage and Matthiola, and then there is a deep blue clump of delphiniums and then all my white-pastel-deep-crimson collection.Hydrangeas begin to bloom now. Very prominent are quercifolias and arborescens, and "Preziosa", "O'Amacha", "Nigra". "Otaksa" and "Romance", all those that were not damaged by the march-april frost. Penstemon digitalis "Husker's Red" is especially beautiful this year, despite the move and the loss of some plants. And Lilium regale opened the first flower today. It is indeed lovely, and heavily scented. To think that I saved these bulbs from a heap of rubbish! All this dangerously juggled colour scheme is tipped off balance by the overwelming amount of pink roses that were already here. They were not blooming when I planted the rest and I dared hope that at least SOME of themmay be white, or yellow... naif, I know. Next year, with larger border and larger perennials andbiennials, the roses will not beso dominant, or so I hope.

Today a surprise in the mail! The roots of Heliconia angusta that I snatched on e-bay merely days ago arrived. All the way from Malaysia, to my door in a few days. Moist plump roots with healthy dark green shoots. The tropics are knocking at the doors of Macken.

Let it all begin.

Carried 60 liters of manure to the Exotic corner. A bit at a time it will rise... and hopefully shine. 540 liters of organic matter so far.

I ordered six bulbs (? I am sure they are not bulbs) of Colocasia esculenta. A bit late in the year of course, but it was such a good occasion. I hope to grow them on and overwinter them as kindly as possible, so they get a better start next year: roots that have been harvested and dried for mail delivery tend to take a long while to get into stride again.

And I received the promised Brugmansia seeds, with complete germination instruction, plus some of hybiscus (a surprise). The world of gardening is indeed "red in tooth and claw" (at least where snails and slugs and grubs and bugs are concerned, not to mention weeds and hail and mildew and late frosts) but it is also full of unexpected and heart warming generosity.

Today I transplanted my tiny "Pam's Choice" foxgloves into single 200 ml pots.

Yesterday I had a long walk in the woods that surround our tiny village, all the way to the romantic ruins ofthe Waldeck castle. The woods (and the ruins) are full of interesting plants: honesty, solomon's seal, hart's tongue, sweet woodruff, imposing male ferns, and beautiful blue campanulas... but it's the wild foxgloves that stole my heart.

Some are scrawny objects, half starved and little more than worthless weeds, but many are tall majestic plants, blooming almost all the way around the stem. They like woodland but are more happy in a sunny clearing. A plant for halfshade, no more. There are pink-mauve ones, intense magenta ones, some almost purple, and even one pure white, with the faintest blond markings in the throat. Some have purplish flowers on the lower part of the stem, but the upper, newer flowers are creamy greenish. I marked the white one. I hope to find it again and collect the seeds.

The stinking hellebores, Helleborus foetidus, that made such a lovely show in the woods in february and march, when all was dreary brown, are in seed now. I picked a handful of seed heads; I always liked hellebores, and this one is, I think, one of the most interesting. I love green flowers, but this species also has a beautiful foliage, very dark green, narrow, finely serrated, enourmously more elegant than any of the common garden hellebores. This is very fortunate, since three or more years may pass before the seedlings can bloom.

This is the Former Mess, now upgraded to Future Exotic Corner. Shame I don't have a picture of the "before", but when I got round to sort it out, it was not really planned, and I never thought to get a camera.

It is really nice to have a whole year to improve the ground and go through lists of plants. In autumn I will dig up the upper half of the hypericum colony and plant it somewhere else, to get more space for the "hotties".

Now that a place is set out for the tropical corner it is really nice to dream and plan of the plants that will go in there. I only want things I can grow by myself from seed or root, but even like that there is plenty to choose from. Ricinus "Carmencita", for sure, and a colocasia, possibly "Black Magic" if I can get my hands on it,but in truth any colocasia will do. A banana, if my poor shivering seeds manage to get going. I was offered seeds of Brugmansia, this would be a grand centerpiece! Those huge nodding pale flowers would look stunning on the background of waving dark leaves. My zantedeschias will sure enjoy summer holidays in open ground, and nasturtiums "Black velvet" in the undergrowth. Cannas, of course, "Wyoming" I have already. If I cannot get the bananas going I must find Canna musifolia. Easier to overwinter too. I am not sure about dhalias, honestly. I could love Zea mays in some variegated form, if I can find the seeds. Creepers twining their way through things. Rhodochiton atrosanguineum, for sure, and something lighter, may be white... an ipomea perhaps, a passiflora? Cobaea scandens "Alba"? A jasmine? Would Hydrangea "Sargentiana" be out of place? Will my papayas grow enough to make a show? And why not creeping gourds? White cosmos to light up the big leaves, and some true stunner, strelizias, heliconias? A bengal tiger?

More and more work in the former Mess. The place begins to look really civilized now. With the hazelnut gone (and Iwill see to it that it remains gone, so that the remaining trees and shrubs form an open arena) the place has gained a whole new look. Plenty of light streaming in all morning until 1 pm, and dappled shade afterwards. It's sheltered from the wind in three directions, north, east and west, and it's visually isolated from the rest of the garden by evergreen shrubs. There is no chance to make an exotic garden as in Great Dixter here, but I think I could at least carve a little tropical corner. I really need to improve the soil before that though, nothing can be planted there until next year.


I have spent the morning hoeing out a barrow load of neettle roots, and an amazing number of stones. I can only imagine that the place under the boulder has been used as a dump for the stones from all the rest of the garden. When I finished with the hoe the soil looked absolutely appalling. Dry, crumbly, spent. I don't know what all the weeds and brambles were living of: there is absolutely nothing in this dust. And not a single worm. I can only imagine that the plants were gnawing on each other like overcrowded tadpoles.

I carried close on 500 liters of compost and leaf mould to the place. Some of the stuff is not fully composted yet, but since I don't plan on planting anything soon it hardly matters. More important of all the leaf mould is teeming with nice fat earthworms. I have some ten cm of organic matter on top of the soil now, but I aim to at least triple that before this time next year. I will beg for manure from the farmers, bury troublesome neighbours, and mulch with a mountain of leaves... but next summer I will plant the tropics in Macken.

Today I took in hand a corner of the new garden that we had not touched yet. It's the less visible from the house, but the first thing visitors see, so it had to be done soon or late. That corner is my despair; in a patch of ground the size of an average dining room there are: a grown walnut, a lilac, a forsythia, a large yew, two huge boxwood bushes, a leylandyi, a hazelnut and a large boulder. Everyone was growing on the head of its neighbours and brambles covered all. Under the brambles there were apparently also some kind of hypericum, and a lovely but slowly drowning clump of Lysimachia punctata, plus an ungodly amount of nettles and a kind of weed of the umbelliferae family that I have not identified, but that had set out for world domination long before I came here.

The hypericums are what made it so difficult to tackle. Weeding under large shrubs is a joke, one cuts everything to the ground until the place is tamed and that's it. But weeding among smaller plants is another thing entirely. You must do it selectively. So it was postponed again and again until it turned into a tangle that nothing short of napalm could sort out.

Today I was shyly nibbling at the edges of The Mess with my shears, just over the narrow line of short grass that we have carved around it, thinking I would just pull or cut some of the tallest things before they run to seed, when nibble after nibble, without really knowing how or when, I found myself crawling on all four among nettles and brambles, cutting, slashing and pulling right and left like a woman possesed, and in an hour or so of steady, sweaty, prickly work I cleared enough or the brambles and nettles to actually be able to tell friends from foes in the lower layers. In another hour the hypericum and the lysimachia saw the light of day for the first time this spring.
When I stepped back to contemplate the results of my efforts I realized that the shrubs looked amazingly shabby in this cleaned up context. The straggly hazelnut was downright squalid. I cannot remove it without the landlady permission but I can prune it, and prune it I did. I left only three green shoots waist high, the farthest away from the forsythia. Tis forsythia had ben butchered earlier in the year by a someone not me, in that ingenious cutting back tecnique aimed to turn a relatively graceful plant into a bright yellow lollipop. I cleared out some of the older, stiff branches and let only the straight young shoots. I want it to grow tall and bend over, like the fountain of gold that forsythias were meant to be before man invented shears and lollipops. I also trimmed the yew a bit on this side, and shortened the stemmy hypericum to encourage it to flesh out. We finally can see light!
Of the yew pruning I made cutlings (propagate propagate propagate!!), and I even discovered some straggling sprigs of variegated ivy buried deep in the tangle. These I digged up and removed to a pot, to grow on for winter display. I discovered a clump of Sedum spectabile as well, which was moved to one of the borders (it was either that or the lawn mower for him). I concluded the day breaking the ground with a hoe all around and in between the hypericum and giving some fertilizer.

This is not the time of year to do all this pruning and moving, but in such a tangled garden it must be done, and now is better than never.

When we moved in the new garden there was a pond in front of the house. I always dreamed of a pond but this thing was the size of a small bathing tub and under a horse chestnut tree and it was a sore mess. Nothing that small has a chance of being even remotely self sufficient and out it went. This makes it sound like an easy task, which it was not. It was a foul, muddy, rooty mess. Anyway, in the process of filling up the pond and levelling the ground I came across a large fleshy root stock that,in the mess, was crushed, scattered and buried. Now I have small peony shoots coming up everywhere in the radius of half a meter from the spot, among the new plants. It is unnerving, because they cannot stay there, but it is also avery nice surprise. I am sorry for having destroyed what must have been a very old clump, but I have dug up every single shoot, with its piece of the old root, and they are doing fine in pots. In autumn I will replant them in a new place.

Plants have a way of surprising you like this sometimes. The same thing happened to me years ago with some roots of Dicentra spectabilis. I had planted some cheap dry roots of it in a corner of the garden, and left the place alone for a year. Nothing ever showed up. I finally dug everything up and planted something else, and in a matter of weeks I had little dicentras growing all over the place.

I have a feeling that this succesful, if unortodox, way of propagating things works only because at the time I did not care about these plants. It is all part of the maddening perversity of life. Take my forsythia cutlings for example. I took them this spring when pruning, at what I would considered the wrong time of the year, and just stuck them in a corner of the kitchen garden. Every single one (of seven) rooted. If I had cared about them, and fussed, and carefully looked after them, they would have all dried, rotted or otherwise dwindled, but since I really don't like forsythias and just took cutlings in a sort of automatic reflex (propagate propagate propagate!!)they are doing fine. Well, I am building up stock for the great hedge I will plant on the west border. I also took cutlings of Sambucus nigra from the fields, and white flowered lilac. I took these cuttings, with science and care. Will they strike? Wanna bet?

The seeds of hollyhocks and of "Pam's Choice" foxgloves are already germinating. That makes it less than a week from sowing, busy little fellows.

Once one overcomes the shyness of growing things from seed (it does take some optimistic inclination, especially at the beginning) this becomes addictive. It's a serious warning.
One should have a greenhouse for this, not because a greenhouse is especially necessary for the seeds but because else your own house will inevitably become bestrewn with pots and pans of "empty" ground much to the chagrin of those members of the family that are NOT into gardening. Failing a green house you can only try to keep your seed pots neat and orderly, and point out that it is the cheapest way to grow rare plants. This simple (and true, if you can get the things to grow at all) statement works miracles on rueful husbands.

I think my first deliberate seed sowing must have been nasturtiums. They are so lovely and so easy that they cannot possibly disappoint, even the very beginner. They germinate, they grow, they bloom and they will happily take over the whole garden if they get a chance. It was a discovery, an illumination. Seeds work!

I still sow nasturtiums every year. They come in very nice colours, but not always true. Like love-in-a-mist, marigolds (Calendula) and californian poppies, nasturtiums can be sown directly outside and never fail to do their job. All other things I sow in pots and pans and transplant. Sparrows and snails are way to greedy, and weeds are too much concurrence for tiny plantlets. I love to transplant and pot on. If done with care you never need to lose a seedling.

The seeds of papaya, Tetrapanax papyrifera and Musa nagensium are the result of the "tropical virus" that I got from reading "Exotic plantings for adventurous gardeneners" by Christopher Lloyd. What a voluptous and cheerful source of inspiration! It woke - perhaps in conjuction with my moving into a freezing and windswept, wintry german garden - a burning lust for sun, bold colours and vast, waving, dew spattered tropical leaves.
I ordered the seeds from Chiltern Seeds. It is very curious that the tropics may come to us in an envelope from the damp and misty Cumbria (at least, I can't help imagining Cumbria as a damp and misty place, but I may be wrong). You can travel the world on very green imaginary roads leafing through Chiltern's catalogue. I am fascinated by this activity - the distribution of seeds. I harbour a sentimental, perhaps, but real affection for these precise and meticulous Britons, nimbly sorting millions and millions of frail suspended lives in minuscle paper bags, dispatching them with unthinkable (for an Italian) punctuality and celerity to the addresses of complete strangers, allowing the recipients to achieve their dreams of tropical jungles, tasty vegetables, pastel coloured borders, white lilies, green columbines, brown foxgloves, meadows and rockeries. "He who sows a garden sows happiness", states the old chinese proverb (there is always an old chinese proverb), and certainly Mr Chiltern (not to mention Mr Thompson and Morgan and Mr Sutton) must have handled a lot of labeled happiness over the decades (and also many disappointments... nothing is sure in gardening, except snails and naturtiums).

Sowing has two obvious main advantages: it allows a gardener to grow unusual plants without difficult and expensive trips to out of the way nurseries, and it, with some practice and organization, allows one to grow large numbers of plants with little expense, and you get real plants, not the dwarfish flower blobs sold in garden centers as bedding material.

Seeds must not necessarily arrive by airmail from the other side of the world. Collecting seeds by ones own garden is a source of great satisfaction, expectations and surprises. Columbines hybridize easily among themselves ("their morals leave something to be desired") and it is always a bit of a mystery what will come of their seeds. Alessandra Orsi of the lovely omonymous nursery told me the Aquilegia viridiflora fathers the loveliest, most sophisticated hybrids. The first generation of "after viridiflora" columbines of my garden is just sprouting up now... we shall see.

I am not against pink flowers as a principle. It is crude pinks that make me grimace. Soft pastel pinks complements well with the green of the garden (any colour scheme in the garden should take the predominance of green into account,I think... but most of the times this does not happen).
I could not resist the David Austin rose "William Morris"; of course I blame the name for this (names means a lot, after all), but I am a bit ashamend to admit the the colour pleases me very much. It lifts a white flower scheme during the the hours of high sun. I love white flowers but they do look flat at midday. Also, it is a warm pink with no blue in it, blue spoils so many pinks, and it complements well with the dark maroon-purples that I tend to favour as accent colours.
The defect of "William Morris" is that while the open bloom is all soft peach and cream, the bud appears definitely magenta. The world is not a perfect place.

The new garden is an improvement over the old one in size, shape and - from a certain point of view - even in climate. If one hears "Italy" one thinks of mediterranean shores shaded by the waving fronds of palms and mimosas, but that is wishful thinking, at best. We, in the north, got choking hot, droughty, and sultry summers, true, but also wickedly freezing winters: even the global warming did not make our winters mediterranean.
We still have freezing winters in the new garden, that we already ascertained, and howling north west storms all the way from the Atlantic ocean, but we can hope in somewhat more merciful summers.

The draw backs of the new garden are the tea roses left by the landlady and the haphazard approach to tree planting that all of her family must have inherited as a genetic trait from some ancient forefather related to triassic squirrels. There is no other explanation.

The tea roses are for the most part pink and magenta - light magenta, dark magenta, medium magenta. They make my teeth ache, but I cannot remove them. I will have to be stoic. I know I can. Or so I think.

In late april we finally got an internet connection, and I could order seeds of something choicer than the bedding annuals that seem to be only plants available in this region. I have now sown some tropical beauties (Musa nagensium and Tetrapanax papyrifera, and, more for chance than choice, Carica papaya) and several biennials that will grace the borders (hopefully) next year: foxgloves (parviflora, lanata, purpurea "Pam's Choice") , hollihocks (black), Rhodochiton atrosanguineum, and Campanula pyramidalis "Alba".

We also inherited peonies, wild roses, and a dicentra, also pink.

I have sown seeds of my own old columbines all over the place, white, indigo, mauve and cream, black, green and chocolate. The local columbines, stray seedlings that I tenderly saved from the lawn mower all over the garden are, predictably, pink. It is not their fault but I cannot help thinking of them as of ungrateful creatures. It is amazing that SOME flowers here are actually NOT pink: forsythias, daffodils and crown imperials and a vast number of snowdrops. The only reason I can find for this is that these flowers just don't come in pink.

In 4 months we made ourselves at home, the plants and me. This involved much digging, much sweat, hand blisters, and some fortitude (the hand blisters were mine, the fortitude mostly of the plants). We came from a comparatively mild Italian winter to a freezing German spring, several weeks of snow and icy winds. Still we all came through in one piece. Several hydrangeas lost the flower buds, but are recovering.

Some plants did astonishingly well after the move. Geranium machroryzzum and Bergenia "Silberlicht" doubled in size in a matter of two months or so. I think they like lifting and dividing a lot more than books and nurserymen let out. Others are sulking, but not dramatically. My magnolia x "Soulangeana" produced a single bloom of astonishing splendour that did however look quite ridicoulous all alone on the plant. Like it had gotten there by mistake. I lost my beautiful Hydrangea serrata "Shinonome" to the last bitter cold spell, but luckily I had cutlings, some of which survived.
The mexican Hydrangea seemannii also came through, surprisingly.

Most of the digging was made to make the kitchen garden. It was started late (end of march), and I only planted out my tomatoes yesterday, but it's there, which I did not think possible: I thought I wd have to leave it until next year.

Me and my plants moved in the new garden in early february. Many of them traveled with me in the Micra. I chucked out the back seats, and put all the dormant perennials in pots on the floor of the car. Then I laid flat boards on top, and loaded the smaller shrubs. So I had two layers of plants, and a large Hydrangea paniculata "Pinky Winky" on the passenger seat. I also had small alpine pans under the seats and box ball in front of the passenger seat. The bigger shrubs traveled in the truck. It was so crowded in there that the lighter packets were stuck between the branches of the larger plants. I could not possibly leave anyone behind! It was a bit scary to drive 1000 km with my car full to the ceiling of watching plants, they do not trust my driving (can't blame them there), but as a matter of fact we all arrived intact, even the cacti and agaves packed into the old file cabinet. We made it. Yeah!

"This is a fertile land... we will call it... This Land..."