Making Veddw Garden: part 21 The Cornfield Garden

Yep. We’ve actually made this garden and then remade it three times.

Fortunately now the structure seems likely to remain. Can’t be sure of the planting.

Those bricks are wonderful – handmade by a company based in the Forest of Dean – could be this. We got seconds at what seemed like a bargain price and, what’s more, got to watch bricks being made. By people.

Then, of course, someone had to actually lay them. Which was mostly me, until Charles took exception at my bricklaying and made me take loads of them up and do it again. I think he might have had to join in at that point. He’s still really fussy about those paths.

At first we surrounded the beds with box, plus railings because the box was tiny and the beds needed containing and defining. And we had Anne’s first plan.

Why is it called The Cornfield Garden? Well, at this time – about 2001 – people were begining the thing of having ‘wild’ gardens, which took the form of ‘meadows’ (wild?) with field weeds. They’re still doing it, I think. But it annoyed me to call imitation arable fields, with no crop but with weeds, ‘wild’. Generations of hard working farmers would have something to say about that. So a formal garden with cornfield weeds seemed like a good confrontation with all that. It certainly didn’t look as if it was pretending to be wild.

And at first it was amazing. We loved it.

 

Though truth to tell, I remember it as more flowery than that. Hm. And I stencilled the railings with the names of all the plants and flowers in the garden, as you can see.

 

Sigh. In 2002 I did the second sowing – you have, of course, to redo these annual weeds every year.

And this time either the slugs or the birds or some blessed thing made sure it didn’t happen. Who knew how hard it is to grow weeds?

I think we gave up after the third year of nothing worth having. I can’t remember what did grow, seeing it wasn’t weeds. Something must have grown? My relentless photo taking had not yet happened and Charles was still on analogue. Who knows what treasures might be stashed away in his many filing cabinets? But I do know it would never be a garden fail. I take those pics. He takes pretty ones he can sell.

So what was Cornfield Garden Version Two?

That too was pretty amazing when it worked. I had this idea of filling those spaces with grasses, Calamagrostis Karl Foerster. I thought they would look wonderful, and they did.

This is still heartbreaking, you know. It was just wonderful.

Except (there’s always an except…) every year without fail we would have a cloudburst when the grasses were in flower. And that would smash them. The whole thing would become a mess of grass stalks all over the place. It no doubt didn’t help that the grasses were competing with the hedges and in some shade. Shouldhavethoughtofthat. I still miss that beautiful simplicity.

And, of course, the box got blighted and had to go too.

Cornfield Version Three.

Well, it hasn’t quite arrived. If it ever will. But we did, with Jeff’s help, add new railings and fence to replace the box.

 

If you wonder what happened to Jeff, we wore him out. He gave up outdoor work and is probably all the better for it. (Hope we don’t wear Angus out!)

You can see, just behind Jeff, a water feature which, besides not actually being as attractive as we thought when we bought it, was a nightmare to make work properly.

So it got replaced with something waterless, that I love. One of our serendipity occasions. We were looking for something to fill that space, visited a garden which strangely had an accompanying sort of scrap yard sales corner, and found this:

 

It was just right in that space.

So I planted this benighted garden with a variety of late flowering perennials. Like Solidago Fireworks:

 

Which is great but it flowers so very late. As does the other major plant, Althea cannabina. So I found it boring until late flowering happened. So I’ve added much more. Especially thalictrum. I am in love with Thalictrum Splendide:

 

 

I want this garden full of it in June and July, along with the six Aruncus Horatio that I have at the back of each bed, which does this in June:

 

and this in the autumn:

 

I think the whole thing is coming on.

 

Althaea cannabina doing generous, if late, flowering

Hm. But then, it is actually best known as the Disaster Zone. Who knows what will happen next?

 

Charles

Phew, its exhausting just thinking about all the work and changes that have gone into this one small part of the garden.

Whatever Anne does in the beds I still have to keep the paths weed free. Difficult, as the bricks were just bedded onto sand, apart from at the change of levels, where I fixed them into a mortar. The bricks have settled somewhat over the sand so now we have some awkward edges. I can’t bear the thought of re-setting them all.

Anne seems to be still adding plants. And I weed invasive stuff like the Persicaria campanulata from the beds.