By Jodie Jones
This week at Great Dixter, the poppies, in all their transient beauty, were punching well above their weight.
Dixter’s signature Ladybirds were spreading splashes of scarlet across the Long Border (and in just one crack in the Sunk Garden wall - serendipitous self-seeding or artistic guerilla gardening?) and my new crush ‘Copper Queen’ was adding a touch of excitement to the house end of the always lovely Kitchen Drive, but it was Beth’s Poppy that really sent spirits soaring.
I am not sure I can adequately convey just how heart-achingly lovely this looks in the Peacock Garden right now. Its colour is a particularly clear, pure pink that shimmers against the surrounding new-season growth, in form it is like the finest bone china teacup balanced on one elegantly extended finger, and its distribution - amongst the topiary, dark tulips, euphorbias, and building madness of the season to come – is absolutely perfect.
Fergus said to me recently that his aim was to make the garden so beautiful that it brought a tear to the eye. ‘Setting the bar pretty high’, he grinned. But right here, right now, that is exactly what he and the team have achieved.
Meanwhile, my first goal for the day was to wrangle an enormous hosepipe across the front lawn, down the steps into the Wall Garden, up the steps into the Barn Garden (past a lovely clump of Welsh poppies) and through a small gap in the dense planting to reach the Sunk Garden pond, which needed topping up. The water comes from Dixter’s own borehole and it takes a while to fill a pond this size so while I waited I did a spot of weeding and light titivating, then pea sticked several huge pots of tiny gypsophila plants.
As hordes of visitors suddenly descended, I got a bit of help to wrangle the hose safely back out of the way, then pulled a lot of bryony out of some beds I pulled a lot of bryony out of last week.
And in the afternoon I helped plant up some big pots with Silene armeria and others with Crimson clover (an experiment) following the Dixter adage of ‘more is more’, and then I went for another quick look at the poppies before heading for home.
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