By Jodie Jones
This week Great Dixter I started the day by watering all the pots. This required more concentration than you might think because there are so many plants crammed into each display, with their foliage all knit together, that it’s hard to know where each pot ends and fresh air begins. Peering closely reminded me (yet again) how important it is to consider form and foliage when combining plants, not just flower.
Although I did also notice that the petunia pots needed deadheading, and spent a sticky few minutes snipping off spent blooms and nascent seed pods.
Then I joined in a team effort to get as many cosmos staked as possible before the bad weather forecast for the weekend inflicted any lasting damage. The aim, as with the best ladies’ corsetry, was to provide maximum support with minimum visible presence.
Our efforts were curtailed by a distinct lack of suitable canes, and we got sidetracked into a discussion about the tidal wave of Anemanthele lessoniana currently washing over the perimeter paths in the High Garden. Suddenly a visitor from New Zealand popped up out of the undergrowth to observe that this plant, aka the New Zealand wind grass, grew really badly in her North Island garden, before asking excitedly whether she really had just seen Fergus guiding Piet Oudolf around the garden… Yes, she had.
At lunchtime, phlox were on the menu. There’s a good display set up in the front porch at the moment and a lot of the cultivars have eccentric names dating from Christo’s days, including Long Border Mauve (from the Long Border…) and Doghouse Pink (from someone whose home used to be The Dog public house). People read out snippets about them from some of CL’s books, making Fergus smile at the memory of the man behind the words, and for a moment it felt like he had joined us at the messy mess room table.
In the afternoon we potted on absolutely masses of Isatis tinctoria and then tackled an A4-sized wooden tray of Phlox paniculata root cuttings taken only last November. These had grown extremely well and Fergus guessed we would end up with 62 individual plants. Sadly, I have to report that he was completely wrong. We only got 59 in the end.
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