Our Garden Focus – A look back at August

The most meaningful happening in the gardens this month was the graduation of our wonderful student gardener, Christie. This event took place at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire and myself and my deputy, Chris, were also invited along with close family to celebrate the achievements of this years graduates of the Historic and Botanic Garden Training Programme (HGBTP). She has been the perfect inaugural student for us, works incredibly hard an eye for detail and most importantly a lovely person to have around with a stellar personality. Please do congratulate her if you see her in the garden.

Made hay while the sun shone. August means meadow cutting here in the gardens. We have a variety of sites within the gardens where we have meadows; the main wildflower meadow at the far west of the garden, the Apple Walk meadow flanks and the Estate Office “lawn”. They vary in composition but all receiving a late summer cut and collect. As they are generally ripe when cut we don’t need to leave it to drop seed, instead we can rake it into windrows ready for collecting and that process in itself will disturb a lot of the seed, as will the act of removing the material.

The timing of the cut does vary slightly each year depending on how quickly the meadow ripens; hot summers tend to enable an earlier cut, whereas cool ones tend to lead to a later cut, as a general rule. So some years we cut at the beginning of August, some years into September. Once cut and cleared, we then mow it really short and keep it mown short right up until Christmas. This enables autumn germinators to establish without the competition of the cool season growing grasses, which otherwise would outcompete them and shade them out. This is a crucial step in ensuring a vegetation rich, diverse meadow site.

Our moat banks are also effectively sloped meadows, and the main garden moat banks have their cut in mid-September. This is partly to distribute the workload but also it contains later flowering forbs such as devils – bit scabious, Succisa pratensis, and wild marjoram, Origanum vulgare. The later cut also means we won’t need to cut it again “later” in the season, which would be practically a lot more challenging than mowing a “flat” meadow.

We have also been cutting our hedges, starting firstly with the hornbeam, then into the yew and Osmanthus hedges on the east side of the gardens. We check them for any late nesting birds. This usually takes a couple of weeks for one to cut and clear, less if we can put two people on it. This is a satisfying job once complete as it re-establishes the permanent formal structure of those areas, acting as an anchor for the informality around it.

In the productive gardens we have been harvesting by the bucket loads. I always think August is the most productive time as the later crops, such as sweetcorn, tomatoes and aubergine overlap with the earlier persistent ones, such as runner beans, chard, kale and courgettes. The succession sowing of salads, calabrese, kohl rabi and carrots tend to mature by this time and late raspberries, plums and peaches all ripen then too. We have been planting also; Florence fennel, rocket, coriander, tatsoi and pakchoi, lettuce and radish.

The Dahlias are looking really good this year. We’ve also experimented with an Asteraceae (plants which are part of the aster family) bed, almost exclusively seed raised annuals and dahlias, which has received lovely feedback from visitors. Plants such as Tithonia ‘Torch’, Dahlia ‘Admiral Rawlings’ and ‘Bishop of Leicester’, various cosmos, and Tagetes ‘kees Orange’ and ‘Cinnabar’ are mixed amongst red cornflowers, burnt orange sunflowers and the only non-aster inclusion, tree spinach, for its height and lovely pink new growth. It’s totally immersive and we have really enjoyed it as a spectacle so far. The gourd tunnel is fruiting up nicely and the Cobaea scandens tunnel (the current most asked about plant) has all but consumed its frame.