By Jodie Jones
This week at Great Dixter there was a weird temperature spike and it suddenly felt like summer, but with tulips, and unwrapping the bananas in the Exotic Garden became a priority.
These overwinter in teepees of hay, canes and twine which are quicker to remove than to erect, but I have learned to proceed with caution, because you never know what might be hibernating along with the bananas. This year we uncovered (and gently recovered) a sleepy newt plus two bee nests, and still got it all done in time for morning break.
On route to the mess room I bumped into Jonathan Buckley, a brilliant photographer I have worked with on and off for 30 years but haven’t seen for ages, so we had a good catch up over coffee, and then he went back to photographing the garden and I went down to the nursery potting benches to help process cannas.
There was quite a crowd of us working on various things, so bench space was in short supply and shovels of old soil mix and pots were flying in every direction. As usual, the hardest job was finding a 4B pencil to write out the plant labels.
Activity stopped suddenly when Fergus invited us all to listen in on a lecture being given by ecologist Andy Phillips to a group attending a Dixter biodiversity study day. Andy has been auditing the gardens, buildings, meadows and woodland here for years and his talk was fascinating, focussing on dead wood habitats and the special requirements of solitary bees.
Given the sometimes-heated debate between rewilders and ornamental gardeners, it was great to hear him emphasise the importance of diversity – of habitats, plants and horticultural practices – to encourage the richest populations of invertebrates and other wildlife.
Then we finished the day walking with Andy around the outer edges of the garden, staring at bare patches of soil where, I gradually noticed, all sorts of tiny bees were flying in and out of little holes in the ground. At Dixter I have learned that good gardening is based on close observation, but this week I learned to look a great deal closer than usual.
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