Snakes Head Fritillaries

I took some time out today to have a walk just down the road, around North Meadow, Cricklade, which is an ancient Lammas Meadow, a National Nature Reserve, and is home to more than 80% of the nation's population of Snakes Head Fritillary, Fritillaria Meleagris. North Meadow represents a part of England's rural heritage which, once common, in now almost extinct. It is a flood meadow, and although now owned by English Nature it is still largely managed by the ancient Cricklade Court Leat in exactly the way it's been done for hundreds of years.  Most such meadows have been either developed or "improved", by being ploughed up and treated with artificial fertilizers, but North Meadow has the distinction of being "unimproved" and is therefore able to support it's amazing crop of wildflowers.

People come from all over the country, indeed all over the world to see the fritillaries in April, and if you are in the West country at this time of year, it's well worth taking a detour to see them. More information here

A Tall Poppy?

I went out into the garden yesterday to take a couple of photos of the very pregnant lady who is living in the next field..

Lovely isn't she? She isn't mine but I go out to take her carrots and apples every morning, and yesterday, as I had my camera, I looked around to see if there was anything else worth photographing. In the next field, which is an arable field, was this

A Poppy. Nothing unusual in that you might say. Well first of all it's November and there are very few poppies  in flower in November in Wiltshire. Secondly, it's in a field of cereals where you never see wild flowers at all because they are sprayed into oblivion unless they're organic and this one isn't. And thirdly it was the only one in the whole field and you could see this one tiny flower from hundreds of yards away.

So I took these photos and went back indoors because it was starting to rain again. I turned on the tv  - it was 11am, the Remembrance Day service was on and the two minutes silence just starting.

How strange was that!

Order, Order

Someone once said to me on discovering my interest in gardening, that they didn't think that I would have been "that much of a control freak". Now no one, of course, likes to think of themselves as any kind of control freak, but I can kind of see where he was going. A certain amount of interfering with and organizing of, Mother Nature's bounty is what it's all about. Leaving it entirely to nature only really works if you live in the Amazon Basin; if I left my greenhouse to nature for a couple of weeks it would in fact resemble the Amazon Basin, and I wouldn't be able to get in the door. Indeed I often can't. So there has to be a certain amount of "ordering nature" going on in all gardening to make it work. Or as a cleaning lady I once had, used to put it "Making order out of chaos dear", (what could she have meant?).

Certainly serried ranks of tulips have faded from fashion in suburban gardens, and with council bedding schemes becoming as rare as hens teeth, cheaper and more natural looking prairie style planting is springing up on roundabouts the length of the country. There's been quite a fashion for gardening "au naturel" in recent years, and I don't just mean that naturist couple who garden in Malmesbury in the altogether. Of course, gardeners have always looked to acheive a "natural" appearance in their schemes - hiding supports under the flowers and foliage and so on. But we all know really that it's complete nonsense, and that looking natural has nothing at all to do with how the garden would look if you really did leave it to nature. But wildflower meadows, ornamental grasses, natural ponds are the effects for which we all must now strive if we are to keep pace with modern horticultural trends.

I I have to confess I can't seem to get to grips with ornamental grasses very much really, I think they know I don't like them much, and so they don't do well for me, - you can only grow what you like the look of, as indeed you can only successfully cook what you enjoy eating, but I have made a small experiment with a wildflower patch, and it has been sufficiently successful to encourage me to expand the idea for next year.

I used a packet of wildflower seed, although most of what came up was the pretty yellow Corn Marigold, which used to be a ubiquitous weed of cornfields before industrial farming did for it (and many other once common but now rare and endangered wild flowers).

Anyway it has spread its grey-green foliage and bright yellow flowers around enthusiastically, almost as though it can't quite believe no one has come along in a tractor and sprayed it from a great height with Glyphosate, and in company with some red field poppies, the odd bright blue cornflower and a bit of white chamomile has made a tiny "natural" patchwork of the kind you would never ordinarily plant in your border, but which has a charm all of its own. It's also good for the bees, which is always a consideration in my garden. So I've been collecting the seed from the very many seedheads, and am hoping to expand the planting area next summer into a Monet-esque cornfield ( what do you mean ambitious..?) but without the corn of course. Come to think of it, the corn might actually come in handy for the chickens...Hmm.. Anyway it's a sloping area under trees which currently supports a good display of daffodils in the spring, but not much else, so I'm hoping this plan will fit in with the early bulbs and provide a continuity of flowers through the summer and autumn.