Today 
Gardeners' musings
Cake day
Posted by: James Alexander-Sinclair, 11 July 2007, 08.38AMI used to open my garden for the National Gardens Scheme. It was a great occasion that my children called 'Cake day'. They weren't even faintly interested in the garden but used to sit in my parents-in-law's garage (which was temporarily transformed into a tea room) and eat their way through more cake than was strictly good for them. We then had a couple of years when the weather was so unremittingly miserable that hardly anybody turned up - so I decided to give it a rest for a while.
The NGS scheme has been running for 80 years and provides the opportunity for nosey (ie all) gardeners to poke around private gardens large and small.
A garden that I designed, opens for the first time this year and, as a result, I've been scuttling around titivating things: more specifically I've been plugging any gaps in the planting to compensate for the ravages of the army of cute (but intensely irritating) baby rabbits that use the garden as their own personal theme park. There are very few ways of controlling the little blighters, except fencing off the whole garden and creating a sort of bunny no-go zone. That's not a simple exercise unless your garden is flat and unencumbered by the usual hedges, trees, shrubs etc. Any fence needs to be at least 600mm high and with a further 200mm buried to stop them tunneling their way in.
The garden is open as part of a group of eight scattered through the very charming village of Sulgrave in Northamptonshire (home of the ancestors of George Washington - first president of the USA and possessor of a set of false teeth made largely from hippopotamus). It's wonderful when a whole village gets involved in these things and by early afternoon the place was heaving with visitors (between 400 and 600 people) mooching about and drinking tea.
The weather was glorious, people were very polite about the garden and seem to have had a wonderful time. My client thoroughly enjoyed showing people around his garden - while cheerfully admitting that he knew the name of only one plant - allium. Hopefully nobody asked him too many questions or they would have gone away horticulturally confused!
Comments
Cathy
14 July 2007, 11.34PM
Jo
16 July 2007, 11.34PM
Chris
16 July 2007, 11.34PM
Valerie Carr
02 August 2007, 11.25AM
Sam Gee, Hertfordshire
15 August 2007, 01.27PM
Thank you for your comment
Thank you for your comments. All comments will be looked at by a moderator, however, due to the numbers of comments we receive, we can't promise that all will be posted on the site.