Country diary: there's new life in Miss Willmott’s Ghost

Allendale, Northumberland: A spider has anchored its nest to flowers and stems, linking the sea hollies in fine threads

The summer boom may be over but there are still insects feeding from the sea hollies in my garden. There’s nectar in their steely grey tops though the lower flowerheads are browning and going to seed. White-tailed bumblebees work fast, probing the tiny clusters of five flowers, interspersed with spiny barbs, that are rhythmically arranged in tall domes. This is Eryngium giganteum, also known as Miss Willmott’s Ghost, which is named after Ellen Willmott, an early guerrilla gardener who left a trail of seeds in the gardens she visited.

I’ve seen the native wild eryngo, E maritimum, growing in the gravels of the north Norfolk coast. A shorter plant, its flowers are metallic blue and burr-shaped and, like my garden variety, protected by a silver ruff of viciously spiked bracts. Sea hollies are actually umbellifers and, like so many of the apiaceae, very attractive to insects, in this case to wasps in particular.

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No-dig mulch – with bonus mushrooms

Here’s a great little gardening secret: chips with everything

Brought up on a steady diet of old-school gardening books, as we get into autumn I would once have been convinced that now was time to prepare for the Victorian practice of double-digging. Excavating the soil from garden beds out to approximately 50cm, before mixing it with copious amounts of manure or compost before backfilling it, this was proper back-breaking work but with allegedly enormous benefits.

Fortunately, in subsequent decades a range of scientific trials compiled by Washington State University have shown that this practice is not only unnecessary, but in fact creates worse results by a whole number of measures. Following on the work of Washington State University’s associate professor Linda Chalker-Scott, I have become fascinated with easier, cheaper ways of improving the soil where I garden, and have seen results that have radically changed my way of thinking. As a total fanboy, I have even put my own spin on her ideas. As now is the perfect time to get started, here is a quick run-through of the process.

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No-dig mulch – with bonus mushrooms

Here’s a great little gardening secret: chips with everything

Brought up on a steady diet of old-school gardening books, as we get into autumn I would once have been convinced that now was time to prepare for the Victorian practice of double-digging. Excavating the soil from garden beds out to approximately 50cm, before mixing it with copious amounts of manure or compost before backfilling it, this was proper back-breaking work but with allegedly enormous benefits.

Fortunately, in subsequent decades a range of scientific trials compiled by Washington State University have shown that this practice is not only unnecessary, but in fact creates worse results by a whole number of measures. Following on the work of Washington State University’s associate professor Linda Chalker-Scott, I have become fascinated with easier, cheaper ways of improving the soil where I garden, and have seen results that have radically changed my way of thinking. As a total fanboy, I have even put my own spin on her ideas. As now is the perfect time to get started, here is a quick run-through of the process.

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Save seeds now for next spring’s garden | Allan Jenkins

It’s easy to harvest seeds from plants you’ve love this year – just keep them organised

I have to hide them, the rapidly filling bowls. Stash them downstairs. My wife thinks multiple dishes of drying seed are impossibly untidy, though to be fair she isn’t that sure about bookshelves.

But it is the best gardening thing, honestly, to grow from seed you’ve saved yourself: more intimate, more magical, with more of a relationship.

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What is an offset mortgage? Nottingham Estate Agents

If you’re lucky enough to have a decent savings pot and want to reduce the cost of your monthly outgoings, an offset mortgage could be worth considering. OnTheMarket talks you through a type of mortgage with which many consumers may not be familiar. Offset mortgages explained As the name suggests, this type of mortgage allows […]

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Save seeds now for next spring’s garden | Allan Jenkins

It’s easy to harvest seeds from plants you’ve love this year – just keep them organised

I have to hide them, the rapidly filling bowls. Stash them downstairs. My wife thinks multiple dishes of drying seed are impossibly untidy, though to be fair she isn’t that sure about bookshelves.

But it is the best gardening thing, honestly, to grow from seed you’ve saved yourself: more intimate, more magical, with more of a relationship.

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The home restoration that came full circle

The updating of Connecticut’s Round House, which rotates amid amazing views, adds to its already considerable charm

Back in the 70s, the Round House in Wilton, Connecticut, was so famous that it even appeared in an advert for Old Grand-Dad bourbon. “Pine forests, rolling hills, lakes and a house that rotates to take it all in… what more could you ask for?” said the ad, which graced the pages of Time magazine. Fast forward three decades or so and the Round House had fallen into relative obscurity – so much so that its current owners had hardly even heard of it before they decided to buy this ground-breaking home back in 2010.

“I found the house on a pop-up ad from Yahoo Mail,” says artist Rea David Tully, who shares the Round House with her husband, art critic and journalist Judd Tully. “I saw this little image and decided to explore it further, but we weren’t even in the market to buy a house and we didn’t even know where Wilton was.”

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