Garden design

2023-02-08: Today I visited the Gilbert White House, he is the father of ecology and a world renown naturalist. discovered he lived and work only 20 minutes from home in Selbourn and died in 1769. very inspirational, especially in the meticulous notes he took of all his discoveries and plantings in the garden

2022-12-28: Planning for 2023 is starting in all seriousness. In 2023 I want to focus more on individual beds and plant zones. Try to understand the needs of the plants in the location and get each plant to perform to their best ability.

2002-09-05: In the next season I want to concentrate much more on getting plants better situated in the right environment - e.g. shade or sun, wet or dry, and acid or alcaline; and also focus on plants that is more slug proof, and have less maintenance. The other focus next year would be to increase my stock of perennials, add more varieties and plant more of the same variety together, instead of planting plants of the same type in ones and twos throughout the garden. This is also important because this practice clearly shows where plants grow best.

2002-09-04: Experimenting with the vegatable garden this year was a great success. Especially the parsley, carrots, onions, garlic, and lettace was a great success. We also had beetroot, colliflower, sage, mint, spring onions and are busy growing spinish. The later seedings is still to bear fruit, but it appears as if they are struggling - too many pests and competition. Need to move the Rhubab to a different location, and take out the lycemachia that is overgrowing the vegatable garden. I am also tempted to increase the size of the plot (it is only 2*4 m).

2002-09-02: Learnt that nothing grows under the silver birch, and that is the reason why I am struggling to get the beds going under these trees. I will have to find out what to do. Maybe I should just over the soil close to the trees with ivy or ferns, and then widen the beds to allow for the plants to grow better and hide the main tree stumps. These trees are too beautiful to remove.

2002-09-02: I started to move some plants around in the garden, to see if they will flower better in other spots. This has resulted in many specimens being planted in the same bed, in stead of having a mass of the same plants in one bed. It certainly looks better to have a mass of the same plants, but first need to get the right spot for those. I also noticed that I still tend to plant the annuals too far apart with the result that it looks too sparsy. Will put more emphasis next year on planting the bed more fully.

2002-08-09: Worked through the seed catologue and ordered many interesting hardy perrennial seeds. Some of it to inprove the varieties, and some of it is very new to me. Improving varieties include mysosit sylvatica royal blue; aquilegia vulgaris william guiness doubles; begenia cordifolia new winter flowering hybrids; digitalis lantana; euphorbia longifolia amjilassa and lathyrus bushy and climbing perrenial. I also ordered some seed of plants that I do not yet have in the garden including: agapanthus campanulatus white form; aster composition; dictamnus albus purpureus; dierama pucherrima slieve donard hybrids and malva sylvestris mystic merlin.

2002-08-04: Visited the Wisley gardens with Elmien en Joshua today. It is always a great inspiration and really fired me up again to start propagating for the new year. I also realised that the plants in Foxgloves is not at all in a bad state.

2002-08-03: decided that I want to increase the varieties and quality of the perrenial stock that I have in my garden and that I will be ordering new varieties of plants and seed of those plants that is a great success in my garden. This include new varieties of pelargoniums, dahlias, erothrynium, frittilaria, iris, etc. I am slowly working through all the catalogues and specialist sites to identify suppliers and start ordering

2002-05-13: Now that I completed the plant propagation area, I should think and plan carefully for the propagation of next year. This year I had hundreds of containers to plant out the garden, next year I will have to prepare everything from scratch.

2001-03-04: Ventured into planting my own plant baskets for indoors. I think they really look great

2001-02-27: Venturing into herbs, I bought some plants: Thyme, Parsley, and sage. We also have lots of Lavender in the garden. The plan is to plant the herbs in a special herb stand that I will order from a supplier.

2001-01-19: I also got a new book on roses for my birthday from Gawie and Fran:  ‘Roses’ by Andrew Mikolajski is a wonderful addition to my passion for Roses.

2001-01-13: The Garden Answers for February has an article on 100 plants to flower on New year’s day.  I will spend some time to use this information to plan next year’s winter garden.

1999-05-02: All the bulbs in the mail order brochures are so beautiful. I have ordered some 3000 bulbs to be planted from Sept onwards for a spectacular display in the spring.  The order included many different types of Narcissi, Crocusses, Tulips - including parrot tulips and cutting tulips, fritillaria crown imperials, Fritillaria snake head, imperialis maxima lutea, imperialis rubra maxima, meleagris, Hyacinths, various varieties of alliums including: hollandicum, siculum, azureum, coeruleum and moly; oreophilum, sphaeroeephalon, hpllandicum, snowdrops - single and double, lilies, freesias, anemonies, Ixias, sparaxis, scilla, Ornithogalum, and eranthis.