After an end of July with many visitors and one of the best action photos I’ve yet managed of any of our grandchildren…

Fiona and I were fortunate, this week, to be able to hear a speaker whom Gardens Illustrated magazine has described recently as the “Lionel Messi of Horticulture”. Talking on the subject of “Great Dixter – Past, Present and Future”, keen gardeners will recognise that this could only mean that Fergus Garrett was in West Wales. This was a rare opportunity since Great Dixter, in East Sussex, is widely recognised as being one of the most exciting gardens in Britain.

We were fortunate to have visited Dixter a few years ago and were indeed wowed by the experience.

But what of the man who’s been there for nearly 30 years, first as head gardener to the then much-loved owner, garden custodian for many decades, and phenomenally prolific garden writer, Christopher Lloyd. After “Christo’s” death in 2006,  he also took on the role of CEO of the Great Dixter Trust, which Lloyd set up before his death to secure the garden and house’s unique history and legacy as a forward-looking, education-based centre of imaginative horticultural excellence. The last thing Lloyd wanted was for the garden to pass into the National Trust and become “preserved in aspic”.

I’d known from following the excellent Irish gardening blog by Paddy Tobin, that Garrett had been speaking at the Carlow Gardening Festival the previous Saturday, so naively figured that he’d have made his way back via the ferry to arrive at Boncath in West Wales on Wednesday night as a special guest speaker for Llechryd Gardening Club’s 40th anniversary talk. Not a bit of it. After a sequence of unfortunate personal circumstances, Garrett had to return to Sussex, left there after lunch on the day of this talk to drive the 295 miles to West Wales on his own, got held up in traffic for an over 6-hour journey, and arrived just in time for the start of the talk with no time for supper. After fielding several questions at the end, he was heading straight back to Sussex that night for an event the following day. What phenomenal stamina!

No wonder Anna Pavord has said of him ” The energy of the man is amazing. Even more astounding is his generosity. Of himself he gives, gives, gives.
Not just to the garden, imbued with his joy, exuberance and wild energy, but to the people that work there: students, volunteers, scholars, gardeners.”

The talk was indeed superb, and we were also impressed not just by his energy and enthusiasm in delivering it, but his enquiring mind and focus after all these years spent in what is clearly a very special place. In a short taster video which you can watch here, he outlines the Dixter philosophy of being dynamic, experimental, and inquisitive. Very good aspirations, I’d say. Over the years both Lloyd and Garrett have constantly challenged orthodoxy in horticultural planting designs and been prepared to rip things out and start again – even when they’ve been working really well.

I was struck by the many examples Garrett showed of intermingled plant combinations at Great Dixter – which is a strategy we’ve found ourselves drawn to over recent years – as well as his focus on promoting gardens as communities of many different organisms, not just plants. As luck would have it, in researching a little more about Garrett whilst writing this piece, I discovered that he’s giving a paid ticket Zoom lecture this coming Wednesday, August 16th, and repeated on Sunday, August 20th. The event is described thus:

“Meadow cutting season is upon us. The meadows at Great Dixter are one of the richest and most diverse garden meadows in the country and contribute to the high level of biodiversity in the garden.

In this lecture Fergus will talk about the meadows at Great Dixter, how they are managed and how you can create your own meadow using a range of simple practical techniques like hay strewing and the most effective way of using hay rattle (Rhinanthus minor).

Fergus will look at how you would go from lawn to meadow, discuss different management regimes, and how you attempt to control the most vigorous grasses and thuggish elements. The lecture will cover assessing, planning and setting out a route forward.

Fergus will also explore the wider context of meadows and grassland and their vital contribution to increasing biodiversity.”

I’ve signed up, and am sure I’ll learn something new about perennial wildflower meadows from one of the UK’s biggest proponents. Regular readers will know that our own garden development has been hugely influenced in recent times by an increasing awareness of the interconnected ecosystems which exist in an established wildflower meadow, and how this can form an inspirational basis for more sustainable and biodiverse garden design, planting and maintenance strategies.

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One of the things I look forward to hearing from Fergus’s talk is just how they cut their meadows, remove the hay, and what they do with it. Is it needed for animal fodder, or as a source of green hay and seeds to establish meadows elsewhere, or does it have to be composted?

Historically, we’ve been harvesting hay from our two wildflower meadows as winter feed for our flock of sheep. This year has been a big challenge, to put it mildly. Fortunately, we cut a light crop from perhaps a quarter of the meadows in the glorious weather before June 11th. Since then there have been no real weather windows. Suddenly, a half opportunity presented itself (seriously, this is the best chance we’ve had in nearly 8 weeks!) so I cut some on Sunday afternoon, and then on a warm, dry but mainly cloudy Monday, manually spread it all out with the trusty lightweight hay fork, only to row it up late in the evening, with Monday’s forecast showing “light drizzle”. In the end, the 12.5 mm of rain which fell over the next two days, under cool, grey, still skies was a little more than light drizzle.

The uncut meadow looked magical. The cut hay was a mess.

We thought that it would probably end up having to be piled up to rot. However, amazingly the higher temperatures on Thursday, with a brisk breeze and at least some sunshine, meant there was still a glimmer of hope. The upper layer felt dry to the touch first thing, despite a heavy dew.

By now Fiona’s sore back muscle had also resolved, so she was able to join me in turning the hay twice in the morning, shaking it out again, and then even more fortunately Andy popped over to lend a hand with shaking and pushing the hay into piles around tea time. (Thanks again Andy!) With rain forecast once more for 8 pm, we had a couple of hours to fill about 22 Big Bags, from the pushed piles, drag them into the hay shed, and upend them before the hay was wrecked.

On the gloomy sodden day before, I’d done a bit of trawling to see how others dry hay in barns and came across this lovely short YouTube from Ireland. The Coolmore stud is, apparently, the world’s largest thoroughbred breeding stud with top-flight stallions and brood mares.

This video shows how you can make perfect hay, with money-no-object machinery and masses of manpower. However, I suspect even they’ve struggled with the weather in 2023 which has apparently seen Ireland notch up its wettest ever July. (Merely the sixth wettest in Britain). The other point I’d like to note is how uniformly green their meadows are. Not a flower in sight, as far as I can make out, so for all of this perfection, I wonder if their on-site vets ever consider the nutritional advantages of giving their extremely valuable charges a slightly more diverse diet? This was a topic that never featured in our veterinary education, as I’ve mentioned before – a classic over-emphasis on medication over a diverse variety of nutrition, perhaps.

At least I’ve had the delight of glancing at the largely still uncut, or even re-grown meadows here and seeing the floral, fungal, and insect diversity which is still present all around me.

Unknown wasp species in betony.

An unfortunate Ruby Tiger moth trapped overnight. The spider lost its meal when a gust of wind freed the dead moth from its web, just as it was tentatively tapping it with one leg for signs of life.

Five butterflies trying to cram onto a single flower of the early flowering form of Devil’s-bit scabious which is now establishing well in both hay meadows.

I’ve always resisted plugging in earbuds or headphones whilst doing any gardening or repetitive manual work. I reckon one could easily miss something special, like the Emperor dragonfly, Anax imperator, above which only patrolled, at high speed over the cut section of the lower meadow. It’s a real challenge to get any sort of in-focus photo of these – point, swing the camera, press the shutter, and hope for the best with my equipment.

 

However, once the grass is cut on a session like this – and one really doesn’t switch off at all whilst using the power scythe – the task of shaking and turning hay is quite a slog. More so this time, since I’d cut quite a lot, only for Fiona to walk up as I’d finished and tell me that she’d tweaked her back again and so wouldn’t be able to help at all.

I decided I needed another memorable easy-to-hum song to help me out, once I’d got started with the hay shaking and turning. And even more so as I was nearing the two-thirds stage where fatigue and boredom were kicking in. Fortunately, I’d spent a bit more time looking into the background of Elton John’s music recently. We’d just bought both the “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (GYBR) CD, as well as the more recent “Rocketman” biopic film, after watching his Glastonbury set. We’d watched the “Rocketman” trailer a few years ago and decided against watching it since it didn’t appeal in the same way as the excellent Freddie Mercury “Bohemian Rhapsody” biopic which had been produced the year before. However, after my latest delving, I’d become intrigued by the apparently entirely serendipitous link between Elton, as a musician, and Bernie Taupin as a lyricist.

Both had replied to an ad in New Musical Express magazine in 1967, placed by Liberty Records, asking for budding songwriters and lyricists to apply for a new role. John attended an interview, and was turned down, but as he was leaving mentioned that he could only write tunes, not words. He was handed an envelope from the top of a large pile of sent-in-lyrics, which he opened and read on the tube home. John quickly wrote tunes to accompany the lyrics, sent them to Taupin, whose lyrics they were, and arranged to meet up. So began the decades-long relationship which generated most of John’s great hits. I’d never known this before, and the film highlights this critical relationship very well, in addition to the fame, fortune, and sexual manipulation which quickly sent John into a spiral of alcohol and drug abuse.

Taupin nearly left at this stage, and the lyrics of the titular GYBR song were clearly the result of this nadir in their relationship, from his perspective – Taupin’s parents had run a small farm in Lincolnshire, with Taupin’s mother having studied French literature, whilst Taupin’s maternal grandfather had studied at Cambridge, taught classics, and instilled in the young Taupin a love of nature, literature, and poetry.

Thus the chorus verses of the song suddenly, after all these years, made perfect sense to me:

… I should have stayed on the farm
I should have listened to my old man…

 

So goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You can’t plant me in your penthouse
I’m going back to my plough

Back to the howling old owl in the woods
Hunting the horny back toad
Oh, I’ve finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road

I have to say I’ve often found Elton’s voice, whilst unique, doesn’t always make the lyrics clear to follow, at least for me. Although part of this may well be an issue with having heard them on cheap radios in the past. The songs still work really well based on the strength of the melodies and arrangements from someone who is a masterful composer and piano performer.

No matter, now I had a hummable, memorable song for toiling in the meadows, with the hay, in the less-than-ideal conditions in 2023.

But imagine my surprise when I opened the back door after breakfast on Thursday, before the hay was all safely in, to find a huge horny back toad, hunkered down beneath the door’s weather bar.

It hadn’t been there very first thing when I’d nipped out for a pee.

I’d never found a toad there before, so took a couple of photos, ran upstairs, and showed them to Fiona on the camera.

Back downstairs in less than a minute, having left the door open, and the toad was nowhere to be seen.

Outside there’s a long expanse of gravel – nothing.

Inside I checked under the table, behind the cooker, and under the cupboards. Nothing.

The camera didn’t lie, I’m sure, so a lovely piece of synchronicity for me as I’d been reflecting on the joys of a simple rural life, and enjoying the mundane challenges of small-scale haymaking in the West Wales climate.

Having abandoned any Yellow Brick Roads of my own, many years ago.

Hunting the horny back toad.

For a piece of music to include in this post, here’s a slightly oblique twist and discovery from this morning. Of the many artists who’ve covered GYBR over the years, one impressed Elton so much that he sought her out, and requested singing a duet version of one of her own songs with her playing the piano. I’d never even heard of her before, but you might enjoy both of these recorded live musical offerings. The lyrics are certainly much easier to follow in Sara’s pared-back version, I think.

 

Sir Elton has just completed his final Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour – finishing in Stockholm on July 8th, 2023 after 309 shows spread out over 5 years. Delayed in part because of Covid and medical issues, each show finished with a performance of this song. It clearly means that much to him. That’s certainly what I’d call stamina.

Incidentally, we didn’t enjoy the style and production of the film “Rocketman” enough to ever want to watch it again, but as an insight into the remarkable talent of Sir Elton, and how he battled adversity to reach the heights he’s achieved, it’s a great insight.

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Three weeks on, and I can report a reasonable early success with the Daphne bholua seed germination – perhaps 30 or so above ground so far, with the earliest showing their first mature leaves after the cotyledons have spread. They’re distinctive and chunkier emerald green seedlings different from any of our common weeds, so easy to recognise. However, as I feared, slugs undoubtedly enjoy these young leaves, so given the very wet environment of recent weeks, I’ve had to resort to using ferric phosphate slug pellets locally to prevent a total loss. In addition, one or two seeds sowed in the ground seem to have been uprooted by something – possibly a mouse, vole, or bird. The challenge will be getting them to grow fast enough to be able to cope with their first winter, which isn’t now too far away, I guess.

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Finally, on the few occasions when the clouds have parted and we’ve enjoyed some better light, a few images to show that parts of the garden are looking lovely, in a wild, intermingled way, and the Hydrangeas are generally having a good flowering season, despite the very dry later spring/early summer.