From January through June, Matt Collins, writer and Head Gardener at the Garden Museum, will document the subtle and often overlooked scenes of a changing garden. Join us throughout the season as he reflects on the ever-changing landscape of his Hampshire plot.
2nd January 2024
A first visit to the Garden Museum in the New Year; an eager walk around the gardens in low sunlight, a cool wind blowing off the Thames. I seem to forget, every year, how much growth continues during the Christmas closure period — how, over the course of eight or nine days, the tulips, croci and narcissi raise their speared leaves; how the germander silvers and the euphorbias green. I forget, too, just how uplifting the first snowdrops actually are. In the assemblage of terracotta containers at one corner of the courtyard garden, the earliest varieties are already beginning to bloom, their snow white petals ribboned with the residual green of their winter casing. I’ve never hugely gone in for snowdrops, but materialising at this uncertain, unsung moment of the garden calendar, so early in the year, they stir something positive in the channels of my brain; they feel good to look at.
Once home, in the early dark of the late afternoon, I take a torch to inspect the cold frame at the back of the garden, to check on the seedling pots, and pass on my way the jagged, electric-white leaves of a Spanish thistle. Sown last year from raw seed, grown on in the cold frame and planted out in the residual warmth of autumn, the little plant is conspicuously lunar in the dark: it glows unlit, from somewhere within. The thistle is a reminder of southern Mediterranean climes, and perhaps of the warmer spring days to come; in spring it will put out vibrant pink flowers, if the British winter doesn’t see it off.
8th January 2024
Damp snow arrives late this afternoon, seen through the kitchen glass as streaks of white falling through the blackness, coating the garden table and the lantern hanging above it. It’s pretty, but triggers an involuntary shudder. And comes that familiar, disheartening feeling of disconnection all of a sudden; a realisation that the garden has for some time now drawn apart from the house, ceasing to be an extension of it. Gardeners of the temperate world know this feeling so well (no doubt it’s universal), dawning always somewhere around mid-January, just before the first real awakenings of spring: the dark hour right before the dawn. Just as the perennials have withdrawn beneath ground, and the creatures have found for themselves invisible quarters in unknown recesses, I, too, have had to recompose my relationship with the space: at this time of year there is so little to be done in the garden that is actually constructive, it feels — to move over the sodden earth only disturbs and disrupts it further. So, to temper the frustration, I open the door and step out into the falling sleet, and stand on the wet terrace for a moment, watching the herb pots whiten and the grass powdering over.
12th January 2024
The recent winds have torn away a section of our back fence, pulling down with it a jumble of aggregate and soil, exposing our neighbour’s garden. The new view feels strange and abrupt, like the sudden pull of a hospital ward curtain. Before I can replace it, the rubble needs clearing and new retaining stones set into the bank. Yet the ground has since frozen. So I swing with a mattock, and go back and forth to the kitchen for kettles of boiling water to thaw the stones. Laborious work, but satisfying; and all the more so for discovering — and removing — great lengths of bindweed root that had seemingly threaded into the bank. In some sections, the enormous cream-white strands are as thick as chopsticks.
18th January 2024
Today the dampness has held off long enough for me to clear out and reorganise the shed, and so its entire contents is spilled out onto the muddied grass — tents, tarpaulins, paint tins; the strimmer and mower; a bucket of moulding and forgotten dahlia tubers, scraps of timber. I’ve not been able to reach the back of the shed in months, and amidst the clearing I rediscover a rust-coated billhook unearthed from the garden soon after we moved here, almost three years ago. It was an exciting find, I remember, coming up with the flint and chalk that litter our Hampshire soil, while I was preparing a new border. Hard to know what kind of billhook it is, and for what purpose it was formerly used, but the assumption would be hedge-laying or hazel coppicing. The prospect of a woodsman having lived in, or worked close-by, our little house was immediately thrilling — not least as, having relocated to commuter-belt Hampshire from agrarian Suffolk, I was eager for indications of rural tradition.
But Hampshire, I learned not long after, is considered the ‘hazel capital of England’; the county with the richest stands of hazel coppice, still managed by craft-woodsman today. Thriving in the chalky woodlands that survive on land mostly privately owned, hazel is abundant here, cut on a seven year rotation for productive material. And such is the ancient craft, every inch of hazel wood is processed for use: the thicker lumpwood for charcoal, the poles split for hurdle-making and thatching spars, or left in the round for garden beanpoles. The much-branching ‘brush’ or ‘top’ wood is lopped for use as pea sticks and bundled faggots. Seeking locally-cut beanpoles and pea sticks for the garden a while back, I was introduced to a pair of coppice workers managing woodland on Hampshire estates, one of them travelling down from Derbyshire each year to cut the finest hazel in England.
Hazels are remarkably rewarding shrubs, with endless benefits for both utility and wildlife. In the first autumn after moving in, I planted two varieties in our garden: one — a ‘Cosford’ cultivar — for hazelnuts (‘cobnuts’), the other a wild species to aid the former’s pollination, and to provide a few supporting stakes for the garden perennials each year. Though they are both young, the Cosford yielded twenty to thirty nuts last year; the latter enough pliable, whippy stems to provide the base for a Christmas wreath. Right now the Cosford’s catkins hang long, lengthening each day and fattening with pollen. Given time, I hope the hazels will swell to an extent that warrants me purchasing a billhook of my own.
25th January 2024
A cirrus sunset tonight, capping a rare day of clear blue skies with linear waves of azalea pink. I always remember, years ago, hearing a literary agent advise a room of aspiring novelists not to waste time describing the sky. “No one wants to read about clouds,” she’d said, suggesting such detailing was as superfluous to a narrative as the recollection of dreams. Then, and still now, I couldn’t agree less; the sky is always remarkable. It depresses me to think that days might have slipped by when I did not consciously register the clouds.
27th January 2024
To prune or not to prune the black elder… Stood facing the sunny border, I’m giving more thought to this quandary than I ought to. The question, in real terms, is: more ‘body’ or more ‘height’? The elder is young still, grown from a cutting of my mother’s in Wales, and only a wispy couple of meters tall at most. But now is undoubtedly the best time to prune — while all life inside those curiously pith-packed stems remains dormant — and to make cuts that will dictate its future shape. All the same, I find I cannot quite make a decision. To prune it low, as I’d like to, would mean setting the shrub back an extra year or two before the growth gets anywhere near significant, while in the long run the plant will be all the fuller for it. Whereas, to leave as is would give much better height this coming summer, and produce a beneficial statement within the border, the gorgeously dark foliage hanging from tall, wandering limbs. I resign to sleep on it. January is not a month for decisions.
Matt Collins is a garden and travel writer, and head gardener at the Garden Museum in London.
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