Storms ahead

By Jodie Jones

This week at Great Dixter, there had been heavy rain overnight and the garden was sodden as we made our morning tour of inspection, while Neil the Cat followed us at a cautious distance. The Beth’s poppies in the Peacock Garden had been knocked sideways by the deluge and the cow parsley was bowed low under a blanket of water droplets.

To make matters worse, winds up to 45 mph were forecast for the afternoon, and there was a real sense of urgency as Fergus checked all was ship shape before the onslaught. Most things had been pre-emptively staked, so our main focus was on the cow parsley, which has gone over quicker than usual, in this hot spring.

I helped edit the Peacock Garden, working by eye to nibble away at the cow parsley until the picture looked right. The plants we removed were cut down, not pulled out, to avoid disrupting these tightly packed beds. And, for exactly the same reason, I trod extremely cautiously as I attempted to reach certain stems.

Despite the grim forecast, the garden was full of appreciative visitors. As the rain began to fall and the temperature plummeted, plastic Pacamacs appeared, along with some umbrellas that were bigger than sense (or decency) should have allowed, and a man in a bright orange Dryrobe who was impossible to ignore.

At lunchtime we discussed a really excellent Women in Horticulture mentoring event that I had just attended while the rain got heavier and the wind got stronger. And by the end of our break, the weather really was pretty miserable, so everyone piled into the Long Shed to pot on lots of seed-raised bedding that is already making chunky plants just three weeks after sowing.

I was on cosmos duty, first processing Versailles Red, then Purity, and I really hope I didn’t mix any of the labels up… They had stretched a bit, as cosmos tend to, so were repotted deep, to leave their fading cotyledon leaves sitting just on the surface.

We were soon penned in by crates full of plants, but with more bad weather forecast through the night, it didn’t seem sensible to shove them straight out in the cold frames, so we stacked them on the side, switched the lights off, and said goodbye.