Keukenhof in particular, and the spring bulb fields of The Netherlands in general, should probably make it to the top of your to-do list if you’re as mad about tulips as I am. Picture a park-like garden, mostly consisting of spring bulb beds and shrubs planted among bright green lawns; now picture old deciduous trees just coming into leaf high ahead. The trees filter the light and the winding river and water features reflect the light here and there, giving the whole garden a rather enchanted atmosphere.

I love these gardens, but because this my third visit to Keukenhof, I genuinely hadn’t expected to see much new. So it was pleasant to be pleasantly surprised: here’s what I found refreshing and extra-gorgeous on this trip:

Bulb fields at the perfect time: On previous trips, I don’t remember the commercial growers’ fields looking so stunning. The drive into Lisse takes you past rainbow stripes of yellow, blue, red and pink; this year we were lucky to see the hyacinths, single early tulips and taller Triumphs just coming into flower. Previous trips brought me here in Week 1 and Week 3 of April; this time, Week 2 was perfect, although warmer or cooler springs will hugely affect what’s flowering when.

Show-garden areas offering stealable ideas: I loved the Keukenhof ‘Inspiration’ gardens, something that may have featured in earlier years but which I’d not seen before (my other trips were with my newborn daughter and other family, and this was the first trip I had plenty of time to linger). Notice the clever use of trompe d’oeil in this girly pink garden — it has mirrors, empty frames suggesting mirrors, and double planters suggesting reflection. Love it!

Another of the Inspiration gardens was this canalside deck, which at the back features raised planters that hold tiny espaliers of apple trees. The seating area is covered to keep out the rain and furnished with casually gorgeous, just-been-styled-for-a-Gardens-Illustrated-photoshoot elegance. Look at this combination of muscari armeniacum album, with pink bellis daisies, along a lace runner over a simple gray wooden table. If this doesn’t conjure the illusion of effortless outdoor-living perfection, I don’t know what does. Large wooden planters at the canalside, some of which seemed to float over the water, hold a combination of dusky purple hyacinth, mixed tulips and anemona blanda.

The joy of block plantings: Ingenious planting combinations at Keukenhof (crocus, chionodoxa, early and late tulips, alliums) are a particular strength of the place, showing how any garden can keep the interest going for 8 weeks in spring. However, I completely fell for this simple combination of Tulip Purissima and Tulip Flaming Purissima, which was repeated in huge rectangles all around the area around the central pavilion. The effect was full, sweet and feminine — like a bowl of strawberry ice-cream (a bride among the tulips looked perfect; I think she was a model on a shoot). Keukenhof always does this to me: it was here I first became betwitched by the Keukenhof ‘blue river’, the mass plantings of muscari armeniacum, and I ended up buying 900 bulbs to carpet a corner of our garden. (Thank God I didn’t get the ones that seed around freely; mine bulk up rather than seeding. I have muscari armeniacum Fantasy Creation, a gorgeous double; pots of this double muscari feature heavily in my Rare Plants for Rare Diseases sale next month). There’s something about Keukenhof that makes me crave mass planting on a grand scale, even if my garden doesn’t have the space for it.

Isn’t it all a bit contrived and un-natural, those bulb beds?

If you think a garden like this isn’t your thing, you may be surprised. No, there’s nothing naturalistic about Keukenhof — “Oh, look, 350 hyacinths in a rectangle”; it’s enough to make Piet Oudolf spin in his grave if he were dead. As breathtaking as I find meadow-style plantings to be, I don’t believe that nor any other loose planting style is the only kind of garden beauty.

Wandering amongst these spring bulb beds, with sun filtering through the breaking buds of the old oaks above, may not make you feel you’ve stumbled on something secret or half-wild. But its formality is wholly a part of its charm. Exploring Keukenhof is like walking through a Klimt design or the contours of a Moorish mosaic: the artistry of the creators, and their mastery over their materials, is part of the wonder.

A few practical notes – make the most of Keukenhof

Don’t worry unduly if you’re thinking of coming to Keukenhof but have limited mobility. Free wheelchairs can be reserved in advance and borrowed for a refundable deposit, and today I also discovered that for €10 non-refundable rental you can borrow an electric mobility scooter. Plenty of older guests get about the garden’s ample 32 hectares with this assistance; I had to use one myself for today’s visit, after badly injuring my foot a few days before.

Do consider bringing a lunch or at least a hearty snack with you; there are plenty of benches and some picnic tables, and a packed lunch leaves you more money for the gift shop.

Thanks, Keukenhof PR team for the press pass; my kids still had to pay, but as my husband was pushing my wheelchair, he came in on my pass. At €14.50 per adult excluding parking — and with children over age 11 paying full price — this is not a cheap outing. But you’re bringing your sandwiches, right? So there you go. Guilt-free and gorgeous. Go!

It did not end happily. In fact the result was just about as bad as bad can get; Alex was diagnosed as one of only a tiny handful of patients in the UK who have something called neuroacanthocytosis. It’s a relentless neuro-degenerative disease that slowly robs the sufferer of their ability to chew, speak and walk. Probably the worst aspect is that it’s often adult onset: it can hit people in their mid-20s just at the time they should be starting their own independent lives, returning them to total dependence on their families. Even today, there are just 10 diagnosed cases in the UK of this disease, which bears resemblance to, and we believe could shed light on, other neuro-degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s.

Rare disease research: families are doing it for themselves

My friends started an Advocacy for NA Patients and a few years ago I started helping them by publishing NA News, the newsletter for their growing community of research scientists, patients and clinicians now studying the disease. There hasn’t been any Lorenzo’s oil style miracle yet, but thanks to the tireless efforts of the Advocacy and their research partners, scientists have identified the protein missing in patients who have one of the NA group of diseases (chorea acanthocytosis). Research is making good progress: if only they could depend upon long term funding from some reliable source.

So I’m having a plant sale (jump to a list of the donated plants here: http://bit.ly/swgsale. One of my big messages is, rare disease research should not be supported by plant sales. It should be supported by long-term and I believe government-backed research, especially in economies like Scotland’s, where we have a tradition of excellence in genetics and have a fighting chance of finding the causes of these rare diseases.

My friends at the NA Advocacy have attracted some significant European funding and some pharmaceutical company attention, but for now, bake sales and plant sales continue to play a vital role. So on 6 May 2012, 10am to 1pm, I’m holding “Rare plants for rare disease research” here in Pencaitland, East Lothian. If you’re anywhere in the Edinburgh vicinity, please stop by for plants, cakes, and a pitying glance at my wisteria, whose frozen buds are now dropping by the handful onto the ground following our cursed late deep-freeze.

Stopwatch Gardener on Facebook? Yup.

I’ll put updates about the sale and about my garden in general on the new Facebook page for Stopwatch Gardener that I’ve started — it’s a lonesome, newborn thing which would be most grateful for any likes. I’ve uploaded pictures of the plants that I know I have for sale. Notice the total lack of rare plants? But I’m hopeful. You can also follow the hashtag #swgsale on twitter.

I heard today that the wonderful and generous Beth Chatto team is going to donate plants, as is Frank from the gorgeous Humbie Dean garden near me. I’ve also been onto Brighton Plants, as well as MacPlants, Crug Farm & Kevock Garden Plants. By the sheer force of my obnoxious pushiness I hope to get more donations of unusual plants.

Could you donate a rare or unusual plant?

Nurseries of the UK, please get in touch if there’s anything rare or unusual you could donate before 5 May. It will help us gain media attention for this event, which will mean everything to an organisation like the NA Advocacy. If you’d like to make a donation towards NA research but you can’t come to the sale, please visit our fundraising page: Rare Plants for Rare Disease Research. The Advocacy for Neuroacanthocytosis Patients is a registered UK Charity and every single donation, no matter how small, is much appreciated.

(Thanks to the clever people, too, at Fennel & Fern and to Elizabeth Buckley for tactical advice on how to sell cake!)

To the right throughout this post are some of what we’ll have on sale on 6 May. Do come.

Frogs climb. They’ve got the legs for it, and the powerful hunger on them as they emerge around now should motivate them to tackle our new addition: the stairway to slug heaven. I imagine hedgehogs and newts may also use this shallow set of creature-sized steps I made yesterday, using containers on the stairs that connect our two garden levels: the gravel path with mini pond below, and the borders and lawn up high.

It had been bothering me that the frogs are more or less trapped in the lower level of the garden, while slugs and snails have the full run of the place. Then, last year, I realized that a ladder like this would work – I stuck any old pots and stones down the far side of the steps and a few days later I was so excited to spot frogs in the upper level. Now I’m doing a more aesthetic version: shallow hyacinth bowls filled with go-ahead-and-ignore-me sempervivums, sedums and pinks, along with a few traumatised crocus I dug up from the border. I intend to water semiannually – that’s my starting negotiating position, anyway. Behind and around the bowls are rounded stones to give creatures a leg up. At the top, the steps aren’t wide enough for bowls, so I used a few stones with pinks tucked in behind, and bits of old plastic flower pot lining the edges to protect the masonry. As cuttings those pinks thrived on nothing last year and are now strong little plants, so I’m pretty sure they won’t mind my minimalist watering schedule.

I’m not too sure why I have gone crazy for frogs – Two years ago I screamed on seeing a toad or frog in my outside space, but now I’m a changed person. Not only have I built them their own ladder, I’ve also filmed ten minutes of a frog fruitlessly stalking a slug, a video which I can still watch with great interest all the way through. I think I used to scream at them because I felt they were terrifying vermin invading my space. Now I see the garden as their space, and my job is to make them feel at home.

Anything special you’re doing for the creatures in your garden this year?

Our garden here at Mercat Cottage is fairly buzzy with flowers that make insects happy, from the February crocus to the early November cosmos daisies. This flower choice was more through accident than art; so was our choice to put in a pond, which was really meant for the newts and slugivore frogs, but which I’ve learned is vital for bees, who consume litres of water. (In this week’s episode, Sarah Raven’s beardy garden naturalist told her she could bump up the wildlife value of her walled garden “two points” by adding water).

The “perfect for pollinators” initiative launched by the Horticultural Trades Association and the RHS, also discussed in this week’s show, was probably the single most important blow for Sarah’s campaign. Gardeners need advice at the point of sale, and the yellow and black logo will now make it easier to choose pollen and nectar-rich plants in the garden centre. It’s a shame it’s taken so long to do something so sensible; gardening magazines, even those I love, haven’t done enough to drive home the urgency of the biodiversity message. The magazine messages I remember about pollinating insects and garden plant choice have been along the lines of, “double plants don’t do much for bees.” After listening to Sarah, I think her alarmist opening gambit (“pollinators are in crisis and we gardeners have to act now”) is more appropriate at this stage of the game: three species of bees are extinct and hundreds more insects are on the brink because traditional habitats (country wildflower meadows) have been replaced by modern farming methods.

The millions of hectares of British back gardens could feed rather than frustrate pollinators who land on our flowers looking for a nectar payload, not just pretty colours. My husband calls the foodless plants — like the double begonias — “Franken-flowers” and he’s right. Over-bred and over-valued by gardeners craving a “wow” factor, they could easily be exchanged for colourful and nutritious alternatives, flowers that take care of the “wow” as well as the welfare of insects. Don’t forget, they’re the ones who pollinate the crops that feed our families.

“Why does biodiversity matter?”

It’s fair to ask the question, and I did once, when speaking to an ecologist. I’m a writer by day and was doing a brochure for a university wanting to attract more students to study science at third level. I asked him why biodiversity — multiplicity of habitats and species — is so important. He told me the stories you’ve probably already heard, but which were new to me in 2009, about the disappearance of bees in parts of China, where crops now need to be hand-pollinated by humans. That’s expensive — but it’s also the beginning of who-knows-what kinds of chain reactions in the environment.

Biodiversity, the ecologist said, is like the rivets in an airplane: lose one habitat or species, and it may not matter; but you never know which loss will trigger the catastrophe.

“What flowers should I plant to help bees and butterflies?”

In the cutting garden I’ve been planning as part of my New Year’s Gardening resolutions, I’ll have lots of sunflowers, lemon basil and zinnias. I’d thought about skipping the sunflowers, but now that I know the bees and other insects need them badly, they’re going to make the cut.

Sarah’s experts on the show this week made it clear what to look for when planting bee- and butterfly-friendly flowers:

• Visible pollen: If you can see the yellow centre, there’s probably something there for bees. Bees need daisy-like flowers and other “singles” that aren’t so packed with petals you can’t see the flower’s reproductive bits.
• Variety of shapes: Imagine a crocus, a foxglove, a daisy, a buddleia (butterly bush), an achillea and a lily. From trumpet shapes to goblets, flat landing pads to long clusters of close-packed flowers, all require the insect to work in a different way to get the pollen and nectar. This attracts and feeds a wider range of insects than loading up your garden with a single flower type or shape.
• Early to late: Look for plants offering food in the quiet periods like February and October…fill any gaps like these with flowers guaranteed to offer nectar and pollen, so insects never go away empty-handed.



• No excuse for no water: If you’ve no water already, go outside today and fill a large drip tray or shallow bowl with water and put a stone in the middle for insects to land on. Tiny ponds are also cheap to buy and easy to maintain, if you’re feeling more ambitious.

Make a bee-loud border

Remember the Yeats poem about his desire to live in a “bee-loud glade”? Imagine if British domestic gardens were full of bee-loud borders. We may live in imperfect and troubled times, but still — what a wonderful world that would be.

Last year one of my key gardening New Year’s resolutions was to stop and sit in the garden more (done) and the previous year it was my own personal Eatin’ Project I was planning, trying vegetable growing for the first time (done).

Gardening resolution one – water those vegetables

Speaking of vegetables, this year I will do the edibles better, because I’m resolving to plan my watering properly. The beans and other edibles never had the best chance because my watering was so erratic, but 2012 is the year I will irrigate. Must find a good leaky hose supplier. Suggestions?

Gardening resolution two – force bulbs properly

I will not mess up my hyacinths next winter. This year I could have (just barely) have had them flowering for Christmas but I never brought them in from the cold conservatory to the warm sitting room – I never realized I had to until @imogenbertin set me right. Here in Scotland I have to plant the prepared bulbs in August, as soon as they are on sale, so I can get them into the light by October, and into the conservatory by November. Until now I’ve never known I needed to do a final step of bringing them into the warmth in December, but I will get it right in 2012.

Gardening resolution three – love my window boxes

I’ve never done window boxes well, but this year my mother-in-law gave me books on the subject, the bare windowsills of our roadside cottage here at the market cross are desperate for plant life, and I love the idea of challenging my worst gardening vice – I willfully, spitefully neglect container plants. So, window boxes it is. Secret weapon in the war against my neglectful side: when I prepared the new window boxes last week, I mostly used plants I’ve grown myself, so their said, thirsty faces should (I hope) move me more than the nameless, shop-bought trays of pansies I’ve watched die in my window boxes in the past. I’ve chosen vinca, fern, schizostylis, hosta, hebe, lamium and ivy, along with a rash of bulbs and tubers including cyclamen coum, muscari armeniacum fantasy creation, Kaufmanniana tulips Heart’s Delight, triteleia (formerly brodiaea) and autumn crocus to plug gaps between the plants.

Gardening resolution four – train a stepover apple

It won’t really be a stepover apple, because the single tier I’m planning will be about 90 cm off the ground, so I guess we can call it a leap over. I’ve chosen the Apple Greensleeves on an M106 rootstock, and since it’s on the north side of the short fence, the horizontal cordon will only see the sun if it starts at 90 cm high. I’ll let you know how that one goes. I credit this resolution to Helen, who was tweeting about the stepover apples she was planning; it’s something I’d always wanted to do, and who was I to resist a three-year-old tree on sale for just 9 pounds sterling?

Gardening resolution five – easy cutting garden

Earlier on Stopwatch Gardener I video blogged about how to nip out cosmos to encourage more side shoots and robust flowering, and the US flower farmer Lisa Ziegler who taught me that technique has now inspired me to try her scheme for a 3′ x 10′ cutting garden. It’s meant to be a low-maintenance plot of zinnia, celosia, choice sunflowers and lemon basil. Any advice on telling my husband I plan to remove 30 square feet of lawn?

I really want to know what you all are planning for the new year — please drop me a comment below before you go!

In the same way a child clutches a blanket at bedtime, I’m holding onto one or two comfort items as we head into the winter darkness. A terra-cotta pot with snowdrops, topped with some moss scraped off the ground, will sit by my back door to light up my comings and goings. I’ve already placed a chair where it will catch noontime sun this month and next month, and from there I’ll also see the snowdrops. The daphne that’s also nearby will smell powerful and sweet – if a little bit like my Nana’s bathroom – early in the year.

Clipped evergreen for structure
This is the first year I’ve bothered to clip a red-berried cotoneaster (I think it’s a cotoneaster) in the garden here: it was in August that I took out the shears and made it into a tallish rectangular block near the back door. It has red-stemmed cornus to the right of it and an ivy-covered tree stump to its left; along with the fan trained plum behind it and a few helleborus foetidus at its feet, this solid shrub is already making a good focus for the eye in the increasingly naked garden.

The picture here shows the scene two weeks ago – sorry about the plastic pot, but the rest of it is nice to look at.

A big bulb show for February – iris and early tulips
I’ve done a massive re-dig and replanting on the main part of the border in order to give good planting depth to about 50 tulips and 100 iris reticulata. The whole space is only 15′ x 6′, but I’ve rethought it in a way I think will work for the winter garden and the rest of the year. A short graveled path bisects the border from front to back now, terminating in a chimney pot that sits at the base of the ivy-covered wall at the back of the border. Looking at this border with new eyes, I realized that the ivy and wall are great features: a number of different types of hedera cling to the wall, planted by the previous owner. The new path not only echoes the one at the back of the garden, near where I buried my beautiful little dog, but it also gives access for the first time right to the back of this border, for tying in, weeding, and cutting flowers.

Either side of the graveled path I’ve put lychnis coronaria, with the hundred iris reticulata, for a bluish-grayish February show. Some very early Shakespeare tulips and heavenly lily-scented mahonia japonica are also in the border now, and I’ve incorporated a load of manure and compost to help me get better performance from the roses there. I saw how well the plants grew on top of the place where I buried Lizzy, and I’m sure part of it was the great easy run the roots had because the soil was so well-dug.

Renewed commitment to digging the garden
I’ve read loads about the no-dig method for gardening, especially vegetable gardening, but I think my soil wasn’t in the right condition to go down that route. I’m loosening everything up now and I think the results will be better.

Get inspiration from Rosemary Verey
For some more good ideas read the late Rosemary Verey, “The Garden in Winter,” which has been by my bedside for the last few months. She gives practical advice about how certain winter-performing plants behave in the garden, and her ideas about structure have influenced most of what I’ve done with my garden this year.

What are you doing in your garden now? Have you given thought to how it looks during winter, or do you prefer to shut the door on it till March?

This is a power tip that I picked up from Lisa Ziegler, who runs a cut flower nursery in Virginia in US. She was on my favourite gardening podcast earlier in the year, HearSay with Cathy Lewis and Jim Orband “In the Garden.” Lisa’s advice to count up four sets of leaves from the soil and cut off the flower there has proved an absolute winner for me, and given enough cut flowers for every room in the house! I’ve done a short video to show you how many flowers I got from one of my plants in the garden.

What do you think? Leave me a comment & let me know. Apologies that the video is somewhat truncated at the very end – I had to edit out the audio from my husband, who at that moment came into the garden and shouted, “Where is the dead bird?” I won’t go into detail — suffice to say it involved our cat, my squeamishness, and the division of labour in our house.

How to get get more cut flowers by deadheading (video)

Novemberish gales are blowing the September garden sideways and making me think prematurely about mulching, clearing and cozying in. The open wire grille I put down to keep leaves out of the pond has stopped airborne bits of recycling from pummeling the tiny puddle of water and its newts. I’d never managed to cover the pond before this year. Maybe last winter’s swift, shocking start in November is what has me bracing for the end of the gardening year, and a bit too soon. The apples and pears are bearing, most leaves are stuck fast to branches and the late asters haven’t even shown yet.

Do you do dahlias? I’ve never grown one I liked — they are martyrs to earwigs, which means I’m not tempted even by the lighter, arier single types. The more traditional dahlias, great blobs of colour, are repellent to me. The autumn roses I grow are fat and colourful, too, but all are balanced with large areas of their own green foliage. The dahlias are unrestrained, unremitting splotches of red, pink and purple blowing a technicolor raspberry from the border — you can keep them.

An autumn combination I prefer is growing now in the hall border, which I see foreshortened from my office window, so far-apart plants appear side-by-side. It includes:

• heuchera palace purple
• aster frikartii Monch
• liatris spicata
• schizostylis coccinea major
• Lobelia fan blue
• Rose de Rescht
• Rose Zephyrine Drouhin
• Rudbeckia Goldsturm
• Lonicera (honeysuckle) berries
• alchemilla conjuncta
• persicaria

I’ve tried so hard to get autumn colour here, especially late autumn colour, for my daughter’s birthday at the end of October. That means I really need November colour, and that’s hard.
Maybe this is the real reason I’m looking ahead to November: I’m keen to know if this year’s show will be any better, now that the persicaria and chrysanthemums will add to the later asters (Alma Potschke) and Schizostylis. Claire last year suggested some of the hardy fuchsias as good performers into November, and I’m propagating some from cuttings now.

Sorry if it’s tedious for you, but I keep coming back to this question of November interest (see here and here) because I can’t get it right. My two children are November and February birthdays, and a garden show at those times of year is Advanced Gardening. I have this vision of a blanket of snowdrops beneath black-ball Rudbeckia seed heads from the previous autumn. Do you think this will work? It would be some achievement to have a good autumn-into-winter show that celebrates both kids. But much of the garden gets too little sun for the Rudbeckias, and even those that thrive would need to withstand Scottish wind, snow and thaw.

I’m not sure if this black and white plan will work (I’m trying to propagate the Rudbeckia just in case), or if my kids will even know what I was trying to do for them.

Although plantings that are “for” others aren’t really what we gardeners do, is it? The planting is for us, to echo our feelings or memories of those who mean so much, we need them in the garden with us.

Who have you planted for? What did you plant?

So, I just found out I didn’t win the Ryan’s Garden photography competition, whose £100 prize was a huge lure to me in my year of gardening frugally. The winner was a sparkly spider’s web; I think my entries were better, but I’m probably distracted by these sour grapes I’m snacking on.

I agree with the comments of Charles, the judge, that the likely reason most entries were close ups is because wide shots of the garden are difficult. All photography is difficult if you’re doing it properly, balancing light, colour and composition in an artistic way; but wide shots are especially hard in your own garden, as you usually can’t avoid undesirable elements (faded flowers, plastic plant supports, gnomes).

But let’s not pretend that close-up photography in the garden is easy, either. I just finished taking an Advanced Flower Photography course at a new online gardening school, MyGardenSchool; I didn’t have to pay for it, as the team behind it were looking for my critical feedback (my other life as a technophile has given me a lot of experience with web-based services).

I was drawn to the course because I thought it would be a great next step following an in-person photography class I took three years ago with the talented Andrea Jones, who incidentally spent three days rapping my knuckles when I tried to take a close-up. I did get some good wide shots in that weekend, plus some super tutoring from Graeme Cookson on using Adobe Photoshop to remove unwanted colour cast in images.

But I had always wanted to return to close-ups. For me, the beauty of the plant is the thing: leaf or petal, in sunlight or frost, at any stage of growth. These details are what hold my interest.

So the Advanced Flower Photography course felt like a naughty indulgence. Stamens! Pollen! Dewdrops! It turns out I got all that plus other stuff, too. I even attempted a wider shot of a field of rosebay willow herb.

What I loved

Super Sue: You can’t fail to like the easy style and obvious knowledge of the tutor, Sue Bishop. She’s an accomplished garden photographer and a great communicator, which is a huge asset in the course format: four weeks of 20 minute online lectures, followed by downloadable lecture notes (a transcript of her voiceover as an illustrated PDF), and an assignment of three photographs to take each week.

Online is easy: even when I was travelling for one of the weeks in Ireland, a WiFi connection let me listen to Sue’s lectures and download the notes. As she talks, a series of still shots accompany her voiceover, illustrating her points. She shows you “wrong” pictures where details like composition or light were weak in her opinion; she then explains why she believes her final shot is strongest. This is tremendously helpful.

I know my camera, and my eye, better: Before this class I’d never even tried to use my manual focus; Sue got me to do it. She also taught me that I should be guided by what draws me in a garden scene. I need to use these feelings to help me narrow down the composition and choose its true subject. This, surprisingly, had never occurred to me — that in every photograph I make a series of decisions about what to include and what to exclude, and that my gut feelings should guide those decisions. I heard that some students thought Sue’s guidance was too advanced in places: I notice the new version of the class, which starts tomorrow, is called Flower Photography — I wonder if they’re dropping the idea of “advanced”; I hope not!

What I didn’t love

It’s lonely online: every distance-learning course struggles to create a sense of community among its students, and this is no exception. I want to see tools to bring students closer together, perhaps with competitions (picture of the week) or more open collaboration (encouraging students to comment on each other’s images — as it was, we couldn’t see each other’s pictures at all).

Quirks to sort out: file upload is clunky. I had to exit the course and go back into it to upload more than one image for an assignment. This got me thinking that the e-learning platform Moodle would probably be the best underlying support for this garden school; remains to be seen if they agree with me.

Learning materials: illustrations in the lecture notes need to match the text. Sue’s voiceover describes the shots she has taken, but those images weren’t consistently and properly used to illustrate the downloadable lecture notes. One class was about colour and the colour wheel; it’s a big omission that the colour wheel wasn’t reproduced in the lecture notes.

Would I recommend it? Actually, knowing what I know now, I probably would pay to do it myself, and I felt bereft when it ended. But Sue’s tips have stayed with me — I’m now hugely sensitive to details like whether I’m unintentionally including a dominant colour in a composition of muted tones. And the individual feedback Sue wrote about my images — very detailed feedback at times — gave me great confidence and encouragement.

So I’ll keep shooting, and feeling better about it than I probably ever have, even if the prizes do sometimes get snagged by the spider’s web.

But I’m not going to talk about any of that. In my garden, two frightening garden pests appeared within weeks of each other: a New Zealand flatworm, a pest which eats earthworms and may presage soil death, and my first garden gnome, a pest which offends good taste and many presage meerkats dressed like Chelsea pensioners.

Is that a flatworm or a potato peel?

A few weeks ago, I moved a trug near the place where I was digging out an apple tree. Curled up where the trug had been was a snotty little circle of flat slime, like a pressed slug. I washed and poked it under the tap — it looked almost exactly like an old peel from a potato or sweet potato, but I suspected from the texture of it that it was something alive. I left it on a plastic lid near the tap, and a few moments later, it was squirming about with its pointy little nose, horrifying me. Yes, it was a New Zealand flatworm.

The best resource I found was this flatworm info website from Northern Ireland, and if you find one in your garden in Scotland, do report it to flatworm expert Dr. Brian Boag, who isn’t currently collecting samples but is mapping its spread. You can also contact his colleagues for England and Wales flatworm sightings.

I put out some black sheeting to try to catch any others, but I have only found the one. When I was digging out the apple tree, I had remarked on the relative lack of earthworms there; there are some observations that earthworms in parts of Scotland have reached an equilibrium with the flatworms, and are not wiped out; we shall see. Ground beetles are thought to predate flatworms, fortunately.

Why is there a gnome in my garden?

My sister-in-law gave each child a garden gnome in their party bag for her girl’s fifth birthday, and my daughter brought hers home and jubilantly placed it in the garden, someplace “he wouldn’t get wet”.

He’s what you might expect: round, hatted, smiling. Now here’s the mystery: why doesn’t he bother me? I’ve been working on making sure the garden isn’t only my place — with the aid of some very wise readers like Carolyn, I let my kids plant literally anything they wanted into their barrel gardens this year, quashing my micromanagement instinct — but still, I would have thought I’d be horrified at gnome creep in my garden.

I’m not. He’s lovely. And after our little dog died earlier this month, my daughter put the gnome on top of Lizzy’s grave. We’re all pretty devastated by losing Lizzy, and I’m glad she has a bit of company. And maybe it will scare off the flatworms.

(Actually I picked up the gnome the other day and what fell out? A ground beetle. Mother Nature is a cunning one.)