Hello everyone

Well, if you are a weekend gardener, I would imagine you're finding it pretty tough going at the moment.  Those two precious days don't leave you much of a window should the weather turn nasty and at this time of year, it can be very unpredictable in deed.  I mean one day will be superb weather, glorious sunshine that make it feel like the end of April already when the next day it can feel like mid January again.  The clouds, rain and wind return with a vengence.   So one day the sun is beating down, the next there's driving rain and you can hardly stand upright because of the Force 10 gale!  The weather, is in effect , halfing your  time in the garden at best!

Of course, it is fashionable at the moment to blame the "old" chestnut of global warming for these alternating conditions.  Only problem with that though is this type of weather really isn't new.  Take 50 years ago in London as an example.  In those days absolutely nobody was bothering with "carbon footprints".  At the time, down on the Thames river, there was increasing concern about the then Festival of Britain.  There is a classic account of the Festival by Russell Page in his "Education of a Gardener".  In the chapter on gardening "for the public eye" there is a very interesting account of the cruelty of the then English weather.  Page had won a commission to design a series of flower garden for the Festival site which was in Battersea Park.  In both 1950 and 51 severe gales and high tides had caused the Thames to burst over the embankment and turn the site of the Festival into a mud bath.  Page recalls, "Not infrequently we had many as 40 lorries stuck axle deep in the park."   He would also recount how he would return to his small office after spending a day gardening in "calf-deep" mud!

With two months to go to the Festival, the main central lawn area was still an inland sea and had to be covered with truckloads of finely ground cinders, two foot deep, unto which the new turf was directly unrolled.  He then found that the grass grew together within two weeks and rooted quickly through the cinders.  This is an often forgotten piece of advice for anyone planning to to lay or repair a lawn with ready made turf.  Unfortunately for Page nothing was going to save his white tulips.  He inspected the thousands of selected tulips at the very end of February.  They were to be the centre-piece of a white garden that was to be edge with lavender.  However, when he dug up the bulbs, he found that they had all rotted due to the wet winter.

So, basically, we have had wet early months before, it's not something new.  Statistics really only show averages and smooth out past fluctuations which, it has to be said, are no different to what we experience now.  Assuming all this continues I would focus on plants that actually enjoy the  wet conditions.  Many of the best spring things are plants and bulbs which like to wear a "wetsuit".

These can come in all shapes and sizes, from trees down to small plants on the carpet beneath.  Some of the best carpeters such as celandines are very happy on damp ground but they seed very freely and can become invasive.  Most carpeters belong on sloping banks or under the light shade of trees.  S long as they stay away from the flower beds they can be enchanting and love the weather we all hate.

So do all the primroses.  The favourite white flowered Spring Snowflake, a damp loving bulb, is recommended for any ground on which the rainwater is slow to drain through.  Unlike the tulips, as Page discovered, the bulbs never rot and they soon send up stems with hanging flowers like small lampshades.  They are just as pretty as their well known cousins, the snowdrops.

Perhaps the winners for the wetsuit prize are the ornamental willows.  The year is made for them as their stems and young catkins show up magnificently in the sunny intervals whilst their roots revel in the wet weather.  They are a perfect family for an informal garden because their bushes will spread freely and they will compete with any weeds as long as they do not dry out.  Mixed plantations of them have the sort of wild look which appeals to gardeners who want the minimum of bother in return for weeks of good colour.

One of te best is quite easy to control, a taller willow called Salix daphnoides Aglaia.  With good reason, the last part of its name means a gleam or a bright light.  The bulbs and young catkins are a glistening silver, which is scattered all over a tangled tall outline of stems.  The stems themselves are a pretty shade of purple and even in the summer the leaves are rather charming.

The beauty about these wet loving willows is that they root with absurd ease from long twigs cut off a parent and stuck into wet ground any time now.

Since 1951 and the Festival of Britain, the rhetoric of gardening has changed.  Now we hear so much about supposedly "natural" gardening.  If there were to be another Festival of Britain, I am sure that "native wild flowers" would dominate.  If Russell Page's tulips had rotted away this year, we would have been told to obey the biomass and plant willows instead.  In fact he replaced them with thousands of white double stocks.  They must have looked marvellous and I do not begrudge them a penny of their fossil-fuelled greenhouse heating.

The Gardener

www.ft.com/lanefox