On trees

Trees to me appear to be one of the unsung heroes of gardening. They create a sense of time, place and history within the landscape. Having a house perched on a bare piece of ground creates a feeling of exposure, rawness and incompleteness. Place a largish tree nearby and suddenly the house belongs. Trees provide history, a course of events. They create a sense of belonging in the landscape. At the same time there is nothing worse than a tree that is misplanted; one that does not belong. We are all guilty of doing this. Finding a plant in a nursery that we love the look of, but failing to read the label. Do we really want a 60' giant in our small back garden - however good it looks when it is 6' high! I love eucalyptus trees (my time in Australia converted me to them) but they are singly inappropriate in most of our gardens. Thuggish root systems searching out all water sources they tend to drop their branches whenever they feel like it and grow at the rate of knots. Not only that they are highly inflammable. The Blue Mountains in Australia get their name from the haze that lies across them; bluish in colour it is created by the oils released from the eucalyptus trees and is highly inflammable - not a good tree to plant alongside houses with chimneys. In addition they do absolutely nothing for our wildlife. However, if you do plant one (and I have a very small one in my garden) you can keep it short with pruning and it can provide endless foliage for indoor flower arranging.

Climate change?

A client and I both opened a national newspaper the other day to observe that there was a headline saying something along the lines of spring arriving early this year – to do with Naturewatch and the observations of thousands of people around the UK. Where are they coming from? Up with us, the snowdrops are only just over; we have a couple of daffodils out and that is it. Everything else is only just starting to break – and that is the way it should be. In the towns it is a different story, and here climate change is engendered by sheltered spaces; the warmth of tarmac and concrete and a completely different micro-climate. Here spring is well advanced and almost halfway through. Yes, the birds are starting to think of nesting, but the partridges are not paired up yet (well behind other years) nor are the pheasants. Welcome back to the more ‘normal’ winter and spring of earlier years. Who knows we might even have a hot summer. Just as I was about to post this, I saw my first Brimstone butterfly in the garden, so who knows what is happening? (No this isn't a picture of the Brimstone I just saw - as you can see it's feeding on lavendar, but I thought you might like a little reminder of their wonderful acid-yellow with the signature black dots on the wings).

Hedges

I have been driving a lot around Devon and Somerset over the last few weeks, and it never ceases to amaze me the difference in the skill of those hedge cutting the sides of our roads. Sometimes there is a real artist at work; the hedges are cut cleanly, the trees left alone and the mess is minimal. You can see the care and attention to the plethora of species that comprise a good English hedge. Others are positively barbaric and I wonder if the blades of the cutters are ever sharpened, if they even know or care about the difference between a hedge and a tree? Branches and trunks are skinned, half cut off and shredded and the whole is a complete and hopeless mess with blackthorn and gelder rose strewn all over the road. I wonder if they have a contra deal with the local tyre fitters. How many times have I lost a tyre to the sharp point of a blackthorn? But there is one overriding observation – spring is definitely round the corner.

Our new-look website

As the sun streams across the lawn on this, St David's Day, it really smells of Spring. And what better way of celebrating the arrival of the new season than by launching our refreshed website

As always with these things, it has taken longer than we thought it would, and there are still parts of the site we need to flesh out with content, but at least it gives a good overview of some of the really exciting projects we are working on and have completed. I just love seeing the transformation that comes with our gardening work. Whether we are just clearing a forgotten part of the garden that has become overgrown and unruly or in those cathedral-like projects where a whole scheme is realised from bare earth, the exhilaration and excitement never palls.

We are just at the brink of a new phase of work in the garden when all the good husbandry of autumn starts to shoot forth. The garden is awakening and with it there is a sense of revelation, renewal and rebirth.

Big trees are in

I have just got back, exhausted, from Germany where we have been sourcing some mature 30 foot trees for one of large landscaping projects. Germany has long held a fantastic reputation for growing superb native European trees, and after this visit, we can see why. There were 57 hectares of beautifully-planted, pruned, turned and therefore symmetrical trees, including beech and hornbeam. Big trees are much in demand at the moment as they form arboricultural anchors for landscape schemes, and lend an immediate sense of longevity to the newest project. It is a joy, though, to see real expertise at work and we were privileged to be shown round these pinnacles of horticultural skill. The euro's strength against sterling may favour UK nurseries, but I fear we have a great deal to learn before we can rival Germany's pre-eminence in providing big trees.