Chelsea - Cleve West's Libya Garden

Inspired by Libyan ruins.  The handmade hatched texture of the concrete columns and the plant palette call up 50s textiles

Who wouldn't want to walk to the bench at the end?  The uneven floor and the steps would ensure you slowed down and thought about where you're going.  A garden's key role is to make you think about where you are going. The whole, aided by a dusty looking mortar and silver-leaved plants, evokes mediterranean heat and having to slow down.
The herbaceous planting focuses on flower head shape: the 'plates' of Achillea taygetea (mustard yellow that fades - very nice and seen a lot this year), globes of allium, domed umbels of Anthriscus and parsnip, spikes of Camassia and Stachys, screens of fennel foliage.  Brightest red buttons of Dianthus cruentas sing out (a new plant for Chelsea; Alan Titchmarsh confused it with D. carthusianorum, which is pink, and which  has been in fashion of late with Nigel Dunnett's take on prairie planting).  You can't have a show garden without a multi-stemmed tree; in this case Sophora japonica, which would have great autumn colour and big sculptural seed pods. 

Some of my pictures were used in Landscape magazine’s July edition, pp38 - 39

there are 5 all together

Sphora japonica, Acanthus mollis 'Rue Ledan'

herbaceous planting

Parsnip flowers

Chrome yellow, and very attractive.

Unwittingly I have aped in a very minor way Cleve West at Chelsea. I missed some parsnips and have let them go on to flower. As many other umbellifers (Apiaceae), they attract hoverflies.  Hoverflies are invaluable predators of aphids in the garden. They lay their eggs in them and the larvae then eat up. I was pleased to get these close ups as the 120cm stems were more than swaying in today's winds. Ladybirds seem to like to be on the flowerheads, be they in flower or set seed.

umbel

 

seed head

nectar feeding

Parsnips and earthworms

The soil was soft today and I forked out the last of the parsnips for Sunday lunch tomorrow.  I include a pen in the picture so you can see what whoppers some have been.  I only did one sowing so I suppose the variation in size is due to different germination rates.  I haven't quite learned parsnips' ways yet.  They are, as the books tell us, slow to germinate.
I put in a catch crop of chard in between the parsnip lines to remind me not to sow there, and to get something out of the space 'til the parsnip leaves came up.
You must sow fresh parsnip seed every year, again, as the books say.  It hardly seems worth testing this with last year's seed, as there's enough wondering will they/won't they as it is.
It was gratifying to see some really juicy big earthworms. They would have been too much of a mouthful for the current robin that is bobbin' about. There was a nice crumbly soil structure.  However, forking over the patch for a full investigation will have disrupted the soil ecology. I put a mulch of strawy manure on top to protect what is left of it from rain, and for the worms to drag down.  Sorry there no pictures of the worms here, but there's a really nice identification guide at the natural history museum site, British earthworm slideshow, and this survey project looks like something to follow up, UK earthworm survey.
Lastly, I'm looking forward to seeing Cleve West's parsnip flowers in his Chelsea garden this May, Cleve West video