By Jodie Jones
This week at Great Dixter it was time to cut the meadows. This is a significant waymarker in the cycle of the gardens, and a big job that will probably go on intermittently for a month but is never ruled by the calendar. The meadows set their own schedule - each contains a different mix of plants, each ripens at its own rate and each is cut only when its key components have set seed.
On our morning tour we walked past the top compost heap, now a mountain of pumpkins, Fergus identified the next meadow sections to be cut, and handed out jobs to make use our time while that happened.
I was sent to the Barn Garden, with a brief to ‘do what needs doing’. This included staking plants veering towards the path (before the public arrived at 11am and flattened them), deadheading dahlias, putting second cane ties on heavy headed amaranthus, and scrambling round the back of one border to check all was well with a massive stand of cosmos. It was.
Then I went to the meadow hidden behind the Topiary Garden hedge to tackle the edges that machinery can’t reach. An unwieldy Trakmaster, like a set of giant sheep shears on wheels, is used for the first cut. This produces coarse volumes of clippings which are raked into rows, forked into tonne bags and carted off to the compost heap. The area then gets a second pass with a strimmer to really scalp it, opening up the ground for the germination of all that fallen seed. But the edges – under hedges and around tree trunks – have to be cut by hand. So I settled myself on the ground, took out my secateurs and started to snip.
It's a job which can be enjoyably meditative or irritatingly tedious depending on your mindset. In the warm sun, with birds bickering in the branches above, I was in the mood to enjoy it and happily shuffled along on my bottom until it was time to rake the lower Orchard meadow.
This was harder work, but it is satisfying to see order emerge from shaggy chaos, and I do love messing around with a pitchfork. And there was ginger cake, courtesy of @reza, to have with afternoon tea, which was also very nice. In the past I have got fed up with meadow cutting, but today was good, so maybe I won’t be tetchy this year…
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