Meadow moment

By Jodie Jones

This week at Great Dixter the meadows were looking really, really good, in the way that can only be achieved after a century of careful management.

Meanwhile, the rest of the garden was teetering on the cusp of a seasonal shift. Our ridiculously hot spring, followed by intermittent days of torrential storms, mean that nothing seems to be happening quite when or how anyone was expecting. Most noticeably, the hesperis is going over fast and the cow parsley has, by and large, already gone. 

My small contribution to saving the garden from the ignominy of an unscheduled slump was to go round helping to remove almost all of that cow parsley before it could set seed and land us with a whole new headache next year. While I was about it, I also pulled out more bryony and cleavers (the gifts that keep on giving) from the High Garden, the back of the Solar bed and through the more out of the way sections of the Barn Garden. 

None of this was entirely straightforward because half the time I had to stand on one leg in an almost-arabesque to have any chance of reaching the particular stem I was reaching for. I also had to do it as fast as possible because the weather was forecast to break shortly before lunch. And, right on cue, just as we were lugging the final two buckets up to the compost heap the heavens opened, sending us back to the mess room and the coats that no one had thought to bring out with them.

In the afternoon, with the rain bucketing down, we headed en masse to the Long Shed, where there were plenty of annuals to be potted on. I helped process a good few hundred Matthiola incana ‘Alba’, and some very chunky Persicaria orientalis that needed to move on into 2 litre long toms.

We worked our way through an awful lot of pots, old soil mix and conversational gambits, but by the end of the day we had processed everything on the list and got it all labelled and lined out in satisfying order around various holding bays.

 It may not have been my most newsworthy day in the garden, but it was the sort of solid bread-and-butter graft that all the glamour is built on, and I felt thoroughly satisfied as I squelched my way back to the car.