10th May- A whole year, and a riot of tulips

So the 11th marked a whole year of Garden Explorers (though the blog is a more recent addition), and many adventures and happy memories. It’s such an amazing privilege to see the garden and woods change from week to week- even when it doesn’t feel like it on those days when you lose touch with your extremities in the middle of winter.

Once again numbers seem to be swelling, and there was a bumper turnout this week. I am going to look at offering a second day at least while the summer sun encourages us to venture outdoors.

There are now starting to be a few bits that can be harvested from the garden, and as there is more on offer I will try to make sure the recipes we cook centre around foods that we grow. This week- rhubarb.

I tried to find a cake recipe involving rhubarb that didn’t also necessitate hours worth of cooking – finally settling upon this recipe for rhubarb and custard muffins- which we set about making first thing (my having picked the rhubarb last night in order to expedite proceedings).

The muffins are supposed to have a kind of gooey custard centre to them which is achieved by shoving a bit of ready made custard into their middles and covering the top over with a blob of extra cake mix. There being 2 small problems with this: rather than muffin cases we actually had ordinary bun cases (less room for custard) or worse, petit four cases, and I failed to in any way follow the recipe for the baked rhubarb element- so there was a significant amount of guestimation in the addition of the rhubarb. The mixture tasted pretty decent, however, and so we put the cakes into the oven, and headed off to see what was going on in the garden.

The warm weather over the Bank Holiday has really bought everything into leaf and/ or flower to the extent that the landscape of my drive to work seems entirely changed. The same change applies to the garden, with everything suddenly bursting to life signalling what will be the relentless onward march of its succession planting. We made a beeline to have a look at the rhubarb we’d just been cooking with, spotting Mike from the nursery who told us that the lovely magnolia in the orchard garden was Magnolia nigra liliflora, past the China Pink tulips in the High Garden, and the camassias lined out for stock by the fruit cage- much further on than in the front meadow.

Spot the Mike

We found the rhubarb, and then snaked our way up to the top of the water tank, passing lots of green winged orchids Anacamptis morio (formerly Orchis morio) in the meadow.

After stopping for a group shot at the top, we made our way back down to the Long Border, stopping to have a look at the Long Border tulips and the masses of green winged orchids in the orchard meadow, and the brilliant combination of this orange tulip (will find out name) and Myosotis ‘Blue Sylva’ on the circular steps.

Edit: Today’s lunchtime chat revealed the tulip to be ‘Cairo’ – apparently unreliable in this wet weather (not all bulbs came to something)- but a good one nonetheless.

At this point I managed to lose most people who made their own way back- I hope not missing out on the incredible pot displays in the Blue and Wall Gardens, as well as the a pretty zany tulip combination in the Barn Garden.

Tulipa ‘Abu Hassan’ with Smyrnium perfoliatum

Tulipa ‘Red Shine’ and ‘Ballerina’ with Euphorbia polychroma

Back at the ranch it was definitely time for a snack and a sit down. David the volunteer entertained us again with his Ukelele, while I faffed about with under cooked cakes. The end result was a bit on a stodgy side, although mostly seemed to end up eaten- but this could have been a result of my failing to follow suggested quantities (or cooking methods) for the rhubarb. Though I’m sure I can find a better recipe to show off rhubarb. How wrong is it to eat dessert in the morning? Surely no worse than eating wild garlic, right? Faffing done, I read the Where the Wild Things Are story again (by Maurice Sendak) – before David took half the group to plant climbing French beans (which I thought he’d done a couple of weeks ago-mistakenly) (variety Cobra) and runner beans (I think Lady Di), while I took the others to earth up potatoes, do a spot of raking and plant some radishes, lettuces and nasturtiums.