Petrovska

April is the month everything starts to grow and the arrival of long daylight hours means more time available to spend in the garden .

Time was Japanese maples were pretty limited in the garden centres as you had the smaller ones like palmatutm purpurea and a golden version and a larger one called Crimson King and that was about it but now there are a lot more available and this month we added a variety called Koto no ito which if it does well will complement nicely with a purpureum planted beside it .

Koto no Ito has amazing foliage , the name is Japanese for harp strings and the RHS describe it as “ a very enchanting tree and will certainly add an exotic feel to your garden ” … couldn’t ask for  more !

I have learned painfully from past experience that deer go crazy for the soft maple leaves so I have protected the two new maples with wire netting to give them a chance in their first season in the garden … a nice sheltered spot from winds but the soil is a bit dry so will keep watering them over the summer months to give them the best possible start to their new home at Old Spa Road .

I had this large rock installed about eight years ago as a place to sit in the morning overlooking the new water area in the Lower Wood and this month finally added a wooden seat to complete the  project … it faces east and is a favourite place to sit to greet the rising sun winter or summer .

For the past fifteen years or so RTE runs a garden show where six “ gardeners” compete to create a garden design which will be exhibited at Blooms ,  a Dublin garden festival in June .

Each year I try to give it a chance by watching the first of six episodes but each year it has increasingly descended into a kind of game show but last night was the pits and I only managed ten minutes before hitting the off button  where a Mexican wannabe garden designer living in Ireland helped by five “ friends ” couldn’t even operate a mini digger but they all managed to look like slick boyband members … yuck and more yuck … pure awful !

This is the original stream in the garden and it runs from a spring on our neighbours land , quite powerful and keeps a good volume throughout the year . Originally discovered in the Lower Wood by Snezana after we bought the property and in the beginning it was only a metre wide but we widened and deepened it with a digger and then like otters built various dams of railway sleepers that increased the height and most crucially it created a series of rippling waters which gave out the sound of running water .

To get the sound of running water can be trial and error and sometimes the moving of a single rock can suddenly result change the flow and you lose the sound but equally you can tweak the rocks and suddenly the glorious sound of a babbling brook is achieved !

Croatia in April

We spent a week in Croatia at the end of April and had quite a bit of catching up in the garden at Gornja Podgora after being away for six months since last October , mainly hard weeding and digging out any casualties over the winter months .

Different countries different weeds and it takes a few years to get to know the local   weeds , what to tolerate ,  which weed is invasive and which needs to be ripped out … they all look beguiling in flower but some have deep roots and are a real problem if you let them settle … now it is clean but it took a few years to build my local knowledge of the weeds which are after all just a plant in the wrong place !

Red poppies are everywhere in the rocky soil of Dalmatia and I love them but while they grow everywhere outside the garden in Gornja Podgora frustratingly none have grown in the actual garden although flourishing just outside over the fence … same rocky soil but I think as this is a manufactured maintained garden with selective planting and weeding I feel it doesen’t suit the wild poppy as it prefers to grow in totally wild and untilled conditions .

In 1976 I did a back packing trip around Crete staying in youth hostels , I teamed up with a US doctor from Indiana for two weeks as we had similar tastes in photography and Minoan ruins . Robert was a Nikon camera fan while I was a Pentax aficionado … a photo that Robert took with his nikkor lens , a close up of what I thought was a giant dandelion pissy bed seed head impressed me to such a degree that I left Pentax and have been a Nikon fan ever since .

I never saw that giant dandelion seed head again until I came across it in April in the Croatian garden from a plant I had thought was a garlic seed head … it shows how advanced camera phones have become as the quality of this shot with my cheapo Samsung android is just as good as Bob’s Nikon state of the art SLR lens from the 1970’s .

The main planting in Croatia is your typical Mediterranean mix of lavender , santolina and rosemary and this forms the back bone of the planting under and around the fifteen mature olive trees with aquaves added for structure .

I  don’t have much luck with lavender even though the climate and the rocky terrain suits them and I put that down to too much watering in July over the past three years when I was trying to get them to grow … but location is the main key watering or not and lavender need full sun and will not tolerate shade and I learned that lesson the hard way in Croatia when several bushes popped their clogs … but santolina does really well as does rosemary which is great for structure and for softening the edges of the planting .

I use two types of rosemary mostly the ground cover prostrate version but also the upright bush type for some height although I give these single specimens a good prune every year to keep them in check  while until now after six years in the ground I have had to cut back hard the prostrate varieties as over time they have swarmed over the stone walls and we had a choice to make … enjoy the beautiful Immotski stone mason’s work or cut back the rosemary and Snezana gave me grief until the stone work was  cleared !

As in Ireland I don’t go much for flowers in Croatia but I grow a lot of iris’s  , the bearded iris type that I have collected in abandoned gardens from deserted house after the 1962 earthquake … I mark out the various clumps as I ride around the hillside in April / May and I collect them in October … these varieties love sun baked soil and the bulbs or corms are almost on the surface without deep roots … trouble free but best in full sun and I cut down the flowering stems in early May but the sword like leaves are evergreen and look good at the back of borders all throughout the year .

Although the supply and variety is limited in Croatia we have built up a nice collection of pots over the years and in these I use a blue Tradescantia pallida as well as aguaves , both of which are natives of Mexico but popular throughout the Mediterranean /Adratic  … in Ireland and the UK  we grow a grey leaved tradescantia as an indoor plant and these used to be known in less politically correct times as “ wandering jew ” .

As usual in Gornja Podgora on each trip we visit Brac Island and the Biokovo mountains by scooter and the nature in both places is just fantastic … probably the most famous beach in Croatia is Bol Beach on Brac and we make a point of swimming at sunrise there on each trip … coldish but a great sense of occaision to see the sun rise up from the Biokovo Mountain range across the water on the mainland !

April in the Garden

A favourite spring flower of mine is an understated woodland coloniser , the wood anemone , which thrives in dry shady conditions and which spreads by underground rhizomes across ground it likes … an unobtrusive plant which dies back totally by end of May as if it was never there .

You can buy the wood anemone bulbs in autumn in all sorts of colours but they never look the same as the wild version which you have to dig up either in the wild or from an obliging gardener friend  .

April is Hosta time and from the time they peep their heads above ground in the first week of April you have to protect against slugs which I do with the strongest anti slug pellets I can find … believe me all those so called clean / green alternative anti slug have no effect and you will end up with tattered shredded leaves …all out war in April here at Old Spa Road !

April is also when the giant gunnerra first open their leaves and no problem with slugs there as it would take a dinosaur to eat gunneras !