By Victoria Plum

A thrilling evening for me at this week’s meeting of the Reepham & District Gardening Club, as it was my first book signing in an extensive tour. Apologies to those who got held up by the tour bus in Back Street! The wonderful Reepham Community Press has published these Up the Garden Path articles in a book for you to read. I hope you enjoy it.

Simon Harrop from Natural Surroundings was our speaker at the meeting; he is so knowledgeable on plant and insect life and all associated matters. The topic was “Wildlife Ponds for the Garden”, and the main message was that any size pond will enhance and bring extensive and varied wildlife to your garden.

It is helpful to try to restrict nutrients to encourage the right plants (native plants, please) to flourish. If they flourish then all the little creatures will have comfortable hiding and breeding places and will, in turn, flourish.

Don’t have fish; they eat everything. And fish out the old fallen leaves because they add nutrients. Clean a third of the vegetation out every year because water plants tend to be rampant.

To make a bog area, bury old compost sacks, opened up and with some holes, about eight inches below soil level. This will help to maintain a moisture-rich area and will increase the variety of plants you can grow.

I have several ponds in the garden; a large one has Koi carp; two are just washing-up bowls in tucked-away places.

My most recent is a wildlife pond made from a redundant plastic loft water tank measuring about 28 x 20 inches and sawn down to 10 inches deep. It looked very raw at first but quickly settled in. There is a log ramp to allow easy to and fro access for frogs and insects.

I also have “rot holes” or “hoverfly lagoons”; small, not beautiful, but useful, I hope. Cut down a four-pint plastic milk bottle, put some organic material in, then water and ensure you put long projecting sticks so hoverfly larvae can climb out of the water. Mine are in hidden, quiet places and remarkably seem to stay filled with rain water, though you might need to monitor this and move if necessary to catch the rain.

The first peacock butterfly today enjoyed the grape hyacinth, and female bumble bees were on the pulmonaria, this last-named because the doctrine of signatures decreed that the pattern on the leaves looks like a lung and therefore the plant would cure lung problems. The country name for this plant is “Soldiers and Sailors” because there are often red and blue flowers on the same stem.

Please join us at 7.15 pm on Tuesday April 21 in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham, which marks the club’s AGM, always swiftly dealt with. The popular speaker is Guy Barker – The Naked Gardener. We enjoyed him last in 2024. The theme is “Things for Spring”.

Top: Wildlife pond in progress. Below: Lungwort aka Pulmonaria aka Soldiers and Sailors. Photos: Tina Sutton

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By Victoria Plum

I have been emptying my hot compost bin; it is Australian. It should be hot and fast at its work, but in fact it seems to be just damp like any heap, possibly not in an optimal position.

I am always interested to see what has happened to the random stuff I throw in. I have found it is true that stones do not compost down. I found knicker elastic; the cotton knickers (a test piece) have rotted.

Right at the bottom I found a sturdy plastic bag with very clear writing stating “100% Biodegradable”. So after about a year in my bin this bag had not decomposed and is in fact still in a very usable condition.

Remember that just about everything is biodegradable but sometimes you have to wait thousands of years.

The ice cream cartons have degraded, and also the paper and cardboard that I put in as the dry elements necessary for a mix for good composting with the green, wet stuff. Not so the Sellotape or plastic windows from envelopes.

The potato-starch wrappers in which some magazines come by post seem to degrade as they should. I usually rip these first, and I notice that the strands are still partially intact at the bottom of the bin, but obviously I just stick them back in the top to go through again, and they have become very fragile.

Jim Paine, our fascinating speaker at the February meeting of the Reepham & District Gardening Club, told us of the hypothesis that an ancient planet named Theia crashed into the ancient Earth, which caused the tilt of Earth’s axis, which in turn has given us the phenomenon of the seasons and incidentally the advent of the Moon.

Seasonality is crucial to the evolution of all life on Earth. Can you imagine what our world would be like with no seasonal changes?

Jim explained phyllotaxy – the way in which plants organise their leaves to catch maximum light according to their environment. This is what I find so attractive about my succulents: the patterns their leaves form to maximise light absorption.

Have you ever noticed the spiral way that Brussels sprouts grow on their stalk? Did you know that this relates to the Fibonacci sequence that you can often see illustrated in a diagram on the set of TV’s QI and occurs constantly in nature in a variety of ways?

How lucky we are to have a proper nursery on our doorstep: Woodgate Nursery in Aylsham. I picked up a copy of the National Garden Scheme “Yellow Book” there, so that I don’t miss any garden openings, and I claimed my 10% discount, as you can too, for showing a gardening club membership card.

I am looking forward to next month’s gardening club speaker, Simon Harrop, telling us about ponds for wildlife. Join us in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham, at 7.30 pm on Tuesday 17 March. All welcome to these interesting evenings.

Above: 100% biodegradable (terms and conditions apply). Below: Aeonium showing phyllotaxy. Photos: Tina Sutton

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By Victoria Plum

Here is my “Shelf of Shame” (above). Spring cleaning recently, I found these horrible chemicals in the shed; I notice there are plenty for sale in my local garden centre and hardware shop.

Do not be deceived: I have used them but soon realised that the promised quick fix just does not happen. One year I carefully applied ghastly glyphosate to every bindweed plant as it grew, precisely focused like a funnel with the aid of a four-pint milk carton with the top and bottom cut out. So, was there any bindweed the following year? Of course there was.

Now I have learnt not to use any chemicals; I just pull up the stems when I see them and allow them to desiccate in the air. (The Romans used to steep pernicious weeds in water to kill them.)

I’m sure you know that just about any insecticide you apply will kill its target along with virtually anything else in the vicinity, including the natural predators.

I noticed a fascinating ring of tiny seedlings in my miniature garden (below). You can see how small they are by the scale of the moss and the sedum leaves. This little garden lives in an undrained saucer, outdoors, with no fertilisation or soil change, so growth is never lush, in fact all the plants therein have a hard time.

When I took it to the Reepham & District Gardening Club show in the summer (it won),  I added some nigella seed pods for ornamentation – wonderfully weird alien-looking structures that they are, and I think these are the seeds that have grown. I look forward to seeing what happens next.

I have two dark-red, slim-flowered hardy fuchsias that I like very much, and they tolerate any amount of chopping back for my convenience. I was given a similar pink fuchsia that I never liked, but this year I have noticed how beautifully the pale flowers glow against a dark background just when there isn’t much colour in the garden.

The next gardening club meeting on Tuesday 17 February at 7.30 pm in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham, is about gardening in the shade. Plenty of shade in my garden from next door’s Bramley apple tree, which overhangs my garden, although the fallen fruit is a bonus.

People often plant big and rampant items at the edges of their gardens to try to make the most of their space without considering the impact on the neighbouring garden. Obviously, this applies to other people, not me, because I have a row of figs along the other edge of my garden.

I’m also looking forward to Simon Harrop’s gardening club talk on wildlife ponds in March, and of course Guy Barker, the Naked Gardener, to brighten up the AGM in April. All welcome to meetings.

Photos: Tina Sutton

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By Victoria Plum

This year at the Reepham & District Gardening Club Christmas party we sat round in a friendly group and chatted, enjoying the shared snacks we had all contributed, and the punch carefully brewed by the committee, and remembering some of the most memorable speakers from the year just gone.

We vowed to ensure a visit to Henstead Exotic Garden: we were all so impressed by the photos and the talk given to us by the owner and creator.

We were challenged with a quiz, hooray! Even our vice-chairman, who really does know just about everything about growing things, learnt something new.

Did you know that vanilla, which we all know comes from Madagascar, is in fact an orchid? I looked on my bottle of vanilla extract (crucial to chocolate brownies) when I returned home and, yes, there’s the clue: a picture on the label.

Did you also know that Nebuchadnezzar planted the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? And that garden gnomes are in fact allowed at the Chelsea Flower Show?

One of the new members asked me what sort of gardening I liked – an interesting question. So, I have been thinking about it. What I really enjoy is being surprised by a plant doing what it wants to do with little or no direction from me.

Surprising seedlings from one of my favourite euphorbias providing me with extra plants to grow on or give away. Fruit from a chocolate vine, which someone gave me, just laid in a pot to see what might happen and it has given me a host of seedlings.

Cuttings just stuck in the ground with two chances: will they strike, or won’t they? Random seeds, for instance, cardoons that I gathered at Hickling, some of which I have sent to friends making a garden at the Mayfly community café in Lowestoft.

All this is clearly the opposite from, say, stately home or municipal planting, where massed planting of perhaps salvias are positioned for their colour and mass effect and then discarded when past their best.

So, what’s it all for? Why do we bother? For me, it’s the satisfaction of seeing the magic of what can grow, and as I wander round the damp and dead-looking garden, apart from the brilliant yellow mahonia, at this time of year it’s extraordinary to remember what a gorgeous mass of bright, lively colour was there in the summer and what seeds are loitering in the soil, just waiting for their chance of the right conditions to grow.

I know that the key to a tidy garden is to hoe, because if you hoe where there are no weeds then there never will be any. But if you do hoe you deny all those little chance seedlings an opportunity to surprise you. And in any case, there are so many plants in my garden there’s no room to use a hoe; mine has been gathering rust in the shed for years.

There’s no gardening club meeting in January, but lots to look forward to next year, particularly Simon Harrop on “Wildlife Ponds”. And thinking about ponds, do look up the Norfolk Pond Project online, a truly inspirational movement. Happy Christmas!

Above: Mahonia in December. Below: Vanilla essence and my orchid. Photos: Tina Sutton

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By Victoria Plum

Bad luck if you weren’t with us at Reepham Town Hall this month for the Reepham & District Gardening Club meeting – a hilarious and witty chat describing Andrew Brogan’s completely non-gardening early life and his decision at age 31 to create a garden.

And what a garden! Unhindered by old-fashioned English ideas of double digging, fertiliser and storing dahlia tubers, he went full-scale into all sorts of hardy exotica, palms, bananas and bamboo – not just any bamboo but a giant variety that grows one foot per day (though that can’t be for 12 months a year surely, I forgot to ask) and has roots 28 feet long.

The garden he made, Henstead Exotic Garden, near Beccles, is open on Sundays in the summer. The photos are certainly stunning. And Mr Brogan brought along plants for sale, rare things, and we clustered and fought to buy the most exciting, which actually was all of them.

I have just entered an online competition to win a visit to the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB), which celebrates its 25th birthday this year. It is obviously a vastly superior version of the old biscuit tin I have in the shed, with ancient, leftover seeds that might come in useful and I can’t quite discard. Cool, dry and cosseted, the MSB contains more than 2.5 billion seeds of countless species. What a wonderful and foresighted scheme.

I have heard talk, on Radio Four of course, of how this country should be more self-sustaining in food production with concerns over solar “farms” wasting farm land, housebuilding on farm land and concerns over the costs, in every way, of chemical control of weeds and pests.

Those poor farmers are having a hard time making money from their acres by actually farming them, so who can blame them for selling off land?

There is an answer. I know that farmers do a wonderful job growing lots of sugar to make us fat and corn to make that lovely cake they sell in supermarkets, but what we need is more smallholdings producing vegetables.

The productivity that can be obtained from smallholdings is phenomenally more than that from farming. Two or three acres can support a family, and yet a farmer of, say 500 acres, which is a tiny farm, will bemoan the fact than they cannot make money.

The soil enrichment and biodiversity engendered by those clever smallholders has to be seen to be believed. Visit Eves Hill Veg Co in Aylsham to see this in action. They grow and teach others how to grow. How wise and forward thinking is that? We need more of it.

Tuesday 9 December at 7 pm will be the gardening club Christmas party. Please bring a dish of something tasty to share. The committee will entertain us and there will be a quiz, hooray! Its always an enjoyable evening, so do join us in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham.

Above: Andrew Brogan with just some of the plants he brought to the Reepham & District Gardening Club meeting in Reepham Town Hall. Photo: Tina Sutton

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By Victoria Plum

It was wonderful Wally Webb who came to entertain a large audience at the Reepham & District Gardening Club this week. I used to hear his familiar voice on Radio Norfolk, and here he was in person, with his autobiography to sell.

The technology all worked and he rattled through lots of slides of the Broads, boats and Broadland scenes and wildlife. He and his wife have always been keen boaters, and his talk was from a watery perspective.

I found the bridges in Norwich particularly interesting, as they are bound up with the history of this fine city, but also the views are so much more fascinating from the river than the land. You never usually see some of the bridges as they are hidden from the road view.

And guess what? Pull’s Ferry is called after Mr Pull who used to run the ferry, and there used to be a canal from Bishops Bridge to the cathedral, built to carry the building stone which had been transported up the river from France. Queen Victoria was the last traveller on it, after which it was filled in and is now a roadway.

We saw pictures of pike, ducks, mullet, swans and a lovely photo of a pretty otter: what lovely eyes they have. Is their increase in numbers responsible for the dearth of small waterbirds? I’m sure it isn’t, I think otters are all vegetarians.

Next month we look forward to Andrew Brogan telling us the story of Henstead Exotic Gardens at 7.30 pm on Tuesday 18 November in Reepham Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham. With tea, cake and a raffle, this is always an entertaining evening.

The bag sale is in November, too. This is when gardening club members bring any surplus plants, labelled, in a carrier bag, to be sold for £1 for club funds. This is a way of avoiding throwing good plants away and passing them on to new homes. (I have some spare ground elder and bindweed. I will label them, so you’ll know what you are buying.)

Meanwhile, the cyclamens in my garden are looking gorgeous. I do like plants that look after themselves with no effort from me. I brought one corm to my current garden 20 years ago and it must have seeded. But several of the groups I now have began as raffle prizes from Tony’s famous gardening club raffle.

Above: Cyclamen, showing the amazing “coiled spring” stems that surround the flower bud prior to opening. Photo: Tina Sutton

Top image: Wally Webb, his wife Sheri (right) and Reepham & District Gardening Club members Fran Neal (left) and Eileen Lerpiniere (second from right). Photo: Tina Sutton

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By Victoria Plum

When I was a child we had Montbretia in the garden; they seem to have morphed into Crocosmia now. I’ve always liked them. A friend gave me some of the very popular, tall, handsome, brilliant-orange variety, wonderfully named Lucifer (above).

It does well and someone told me to remove and replant the youngest of the long sausage of disc-shaped corms that develop over time and throw the older ones away. However, I can’t quite bring myself to throw any plant away, so I have just separated and replanted lots of them. I’ll see how many come up next year.

Wandering around the garden centre with my £5 winning-garden voucher from the Reepham & District Gardening Club show in August burning a hole in my pocket, a different Crocosmia caught my eye.

I’m not usually drawn to flashy flowers (despite what I’ve just said), but these are just gorgeous. Emily McKenzie (below) is the name of this shorter variety and I’m really pleased with it. I’ve planted it in a different area of the garden to avoid hybridisation.

I’ve also sown grass seed to repair the dog damage to the grass area in the back garden, which I laughingly call “the lawn”. (Did you know that laundry is called “laundry” because it used to be laid on the lawn to dry? There is a painting in Felbrigg Hall that illustrates this.)

I’m leaving the surviving grass to grow a little long in the hope that it stops the pigeons eating the seed, which is what they did in the spring. Autumn, when it’s warm and wet, is always the best time to sow grass seed: less predation and good germination.

A treat was had at last night’s gardening club meeting with Matt Wickens telling us about the newly created Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Sweet Briar Marshes reserve.

Situated on our side of the city, this fascinating 90-acre site lies between the River Wensum on one side and Marriott’s Way on the other. You will have driven through it because Sweet Briar Road cuts right through the middle; there is a small connecting bridge underneath the road.

Historically, the site comprised grazing marshes, mature woodland and arable. The soil types are interesting and various as a result of glaciation and evolution, which enable a wide variety of flora and fauna to flourish.

This is a valuable site and is proving a useful and popular open space for people living in that area of Norwich as well as for the creatures that are thriving there. Please join us on Tuesday 21 October at 7.30 pm in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham, and bring your friends to enjoy an illustrated and revealing talk by Wally Webb (a Radio Norfolk blast from the past) who will talk to us about The Broads (I’ll be queueing for his autograph). As aways, tea, coffee and cake, a raffle and friendly chatter, so do come and join us.

Photos: Tina Sutton

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By Victoria Plum

There was great excitement at the Reepham & District Gardening Club Summer Show this week. Many members brought lots of entries, flowers, fruit and vegetable, and I was thrilled to win the “wild card” category, which can constitute absolutely anything you choose, with my miniature garden.

This grows in an undrained plant saucer only about 4 cm deep and perhaps 15 cm across. This mini-garden has been growing now for seven or eight years. It stays outside all year, and the soil is poor because I never change it. Naturally, some plants die off or outgrow their position and have to be replaced so the garden evolves over time. (In case you wondered, no dinosaurs were harmed in the care of this garden.)

Voting at the summer show is democratic (pictured above); we each vote for the exhibit we think best in each class. And of course there was a quiz, with many howls of anguish at the clever answers we couldn’t get right. Many thanks to the gardening club committee for organising a jolly, light-hearted and amusing evening.

I have a Petite Negra fig (above). I bought it on a gardening club trip to Reads Nursery at Hales Green about 15 years ago and chose it because it should live happily and fruit well in a pot. It has black figs, though not as prolific as the green, which are just a little bit more delicious.

It lived in a pot for some time but produced no figs so I allowed it out in to the garden, suitably constrained by concrete slabs. Still no figs, despite doing all the things you should. That was until this year when it produced a handful, delicious of course.

There’s nothing like meandering round the garden and picking fresh, ripe produce to eat as you wander. I hope my Petite Negra will now go from strength to strength and give us many figs in the years to come; I am an optimistic gardener.

Tuesday 16 September is the date for the next gardening club meeting. Join us in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham, at 7.30 pm for a talk on the exciting new Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserve on the edge of Norwich at Sweet Briar Marshes.

Photos: Tina Sutton

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By Victoria Plum

I really enjoy my garden because I’m always fascinated to see what my plants are doing: what they choose to do, how they cope with the vagaries of the weather, my interventions, insect depredations, and soil quality.

For instance, my alpine garden has been in situ for 14 years, though with some renovation of course, and the poor soil quality has kept the size of plants in check. I also have a tiny miniature garden that I started well before Covid, which still works well for the same reason.

But in general, my main garden is wild territory: everything in it has to look after itself and the way plants cope with the micro-climates always interests me.

However, at this week’s meeting of the Reepham & District Gardening Club, Mick Hillocks, chairman of the Norfolk Bonsai Association, explained the careful and specific interventions required to turn a normal deciduous tree into a perfect, natural-looking miniature version of itself using a saw and wire, and branch, twig, leaf and root pruning.

The most bizarre, I thought, was “threading”. For this technique (I’ve never heard of it before) you drill a hole through a branch or trunk and thread a slender, pliable branch from one side of the branch or trunk to come out on the other side. It takes some time for the branch to weld itself to the trunk, a bit like pleaching, I suppose.

You might do this to balance the look of the tree because there is art as well as science in bonsai. To train a tree takes years. Have I got time for this? In fact, I have to admit that I do rather like bonsai trees; I have killed off my fair share.

Pictured above: Purple Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) bonsai. Below: Mugo pine (Pinus mugo) bonsai: when the “candles” grow in spring, halve them with fingernails to keep the plant low. Photos: Tina Sutton

Summer show

Prepare for excitement at next month’s gardening club meeting in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham, for the Summer Show and Social Evening.

Bring your show entries to compete for stunning prizes. There will be a raffle, a quiz and even a glass of wine, not to mention the chance to chat with friends about the weather and our various garden traumas.

Note the date: Tuesday 19 August at 7.30 pm but bring your entries a little earlier to display to best advantage.

Coming up later

If you belong to the Norfolk Wildlife Trust you will know about the reserve at Sweet Briar Marshes, close to Norwich city centre.

We are lucky to have a talk about this new reserve in September, and then in October a talk from Wally Webb who I have heard many times on Radio Norfolk. Bring your friends.

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By Victoria Plum

Our last speaker at the Reepham & District Gardening Club told us that he weeded through his garden in the spring and after that his plants would cover the ground and therefore no more weeding is required for quite a while. I aim to do this.

Two sayings are: “Nature abhors a vacuum” and “The best manure is the farmer’s boot”. If your plants cover the ground, there will be no room for weeds (although we know that they are only wildflowers in the wrong place).

And the farmer’s boot? If you keep a close eye, like a good farmer, on what is going on, you can take swift action to forestall problems.

I really enjoy the organised chaos that fills my garden at this time of the year but I am trying to keep order.

White bryony is everywhere and is very pretty. If you saw it for sale in the garden centre, having got past the candles, clothing, birthday cards, random ornaments, prettily packaged fudge and café, to the back of the property where the actual garden plants are, you would buy it.

Perennial, easy to grow, pretty leaves, flowers and tendrils and gorgeous red berries. Poisonous, so perhaps you wouldn’t buy it, but I would.

Some years I have left it to grow, but given the chance it takes the mickey, like the pretty bindweed (clue in the name here) and smothers, pulls down and swamps my choice plants. So, this year I am pulling it down as soon as I see it; I’m developing a ruthless streak!

Sadly, at the last minute, our speaker for the gardening club this month was unable to come. This is rare; our excellent speakers are usually very reliable.

Next month, on Tuesday 15 July at 7.30 pm in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham, Mike Hillocks will tell us about bonsai: how to prune, how to maintain and general information. There will be tea, coffee, and cake. Bring your friends. Meetings are informal, friendly and always interesting. And there is a raffle.

I’ll just pop outside to refill the hydroponic Super Gro and sugar solution for my marrow plants because it’s nearly time for the Summer Gardening Club Show in August.

P.S. Has anyone got a hose that doesn’t leak and twist? If you have, please tell me what sort it is.

Photo: White bryony (the bright green leaves) in my garden. Look closely and you can see the delicate, coiled tendrils. Photo: Tina Sutton

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