Garden Centre

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Gardening in a heatwave

It’s been ten days since we had a drop of rain in my part of Sussex, and with the daytime temperatures officially classed as ‘heatwave’, the garden is suffering. Not because there is a hosepipe ban this year (or not yet, anyway, there’s still time!) but because it’s almost impossible for an environmentally friendly gardener to lavish the amount of water necessary to keep a British garden looking at its best at this time of year. I simply can’t justify running the hose night after night when I know what the environmental (and economic) cost will be.

The first thing that I’ve neglected is the lawn. To be honest, were it not for the fact that the dogs like to sit on it, and OH likes it, I would remove the lawn altogether, it’s a drain on resources – not just water but also the regular mowing and aerating and fertilising it requires also use electricity and our energy, and chemicals. But an established lawn usually comes back, and I’m giving it ‘benign’ neglect by emptying my (cooled) washing up water onto it at the end of the day, which has always been enough to keep it alive, if not green and lovely, through the hottest, driest summer.

Next there’s the question of what absolutely must be watered – salad crops for a start and trees that are still not well established, because the former will not grow without water and the latter may die if their roots dry out. For the trees I water at night and have used the municipal tree approach of sinking flexible pipe a foot into the ground near the young trees and pouring water down it. It can actually be counter-productive to water the trunk and leaves on a young tree in hot weather, as the leaves can scorch and the bark can soften leaving it more open to predator attack.

Finally, I’ve picked out the plants which will cope without water and I’m simply ignoring them – they are plants with deep taproots that will reach water in the subsoil, grey foliaged plants, especially those with hairs or filaments on the leaves, as both greyness and hairiness help the plant trap and conserve moisture from the air, and succulents which store their own water against times of drought.

Labels: garden drought, garden heatwave, lawn

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:51 AM 1 Comments

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Saturday, June 27, 2009

A rose by any other name

My garden is not suited to roses, as I’ve said very often. We have a combination of clay soil which is like terracotta when dry and like a bog when wet, and an onshore wind which can be salty in summer and gale force in winter. So despite my love for all things rose-shaped, rose-coloured and above all, rose-scented, I content myself with my Iceberg rambler which would, I believe, survive if planted in concrete, one Old English Rose which gets as much care and attention as the whole of the rest of the border (and smells so gorgeous it’s totally worth it), a yellow rose that I was given, and two miniature red roses that arrived by accident when I ordered something else.

I don’t know what this rose is called, and for three years I forgot it existed, but this year, being a good year for the roses, it suddenly decided to remind me.

The way I acquired it was strange: I wanted to buy a garden lantern and saw exactly what I wanted at a car boot sale. As the owner wrapped it up, she held out a twig in a pot and said, “Want this?” Under the table she had quite a few of these twigs and explained that her husband had been a driver for a nursery which laid him off while he still had a van full of roses. Three months later they hadn’t been to collect them and she was giving them away with every purchase. As I say, for three years the twig remained a twig, but this year it’s rewarded my patience. I hope all its siblings were as lucky.

Labels: june garden, june roses, pink roses

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:52 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Violas – unsung summer beauties

When the showier flowers are doing their thing, it can be difficult to see the smaller, more modest summer bloomers that give the garden its air of complex bounty.

One of my favourites, this year, has been the violas I grew from seed. They are F1 hybrids, which means any offspring they have won’t come true to the parent, but I still think for the subtle colours they’ve produced, it’s worth having them, even if they won’t reproduce truly for future generations.

Because they are so low growing, violas are often neglected, but they are ideal plants for some of those places where nothing else will grow. I’ve put mine as an underplanting below my winter jasmine, which is in a concrete trough on a north-facing wall – the jasmine takes most of the moisture and there is probably less than ten minutes of sun a day for the flowers to bloom on, but they are still doing a sterling job, sturdily getting five or six flowers a plant out there and as long as I dead-head, they will give me gentle colour right through until September.

I haven’t decided yet whether to treat them as annual bedding or give them perennial status – so few flowers have coped with this hostile situation that I’ve got used to planting the trough as summer bedding only, but somehow I think these violas may thrive where others have suffered.

Labels: violas, winter jasmine

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:37 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, June 20, 2009

Kniphofia – a lily by any other name?

If I failed to appreciate my Tamarisk, I make up for it when it comes to some other garden flowers that others consider vulgar – I love gladioli, both the natural and the hybridised kind, and the gaudy Kniphofia with its plethora of common names, is a perennial favourite.

Kniphofia is also know as Tritoma, Red Hot Poker, Torch Lily, and Poker plant – it’s African in origin and has bright rocket-shaped flowers in many shades, not just the red/orange/yellow combo that I personally favour. Nor does it have to be a four foot tall spire of showy brightness that I adore – there are cream and green kniphofias, pale yellow ones, and even some miniature ones. Lovely I’m sure, but why, I wonder, would you bother with such subtlety when there are a thousand other summer bloomers that will deliver those minor garden notes? If you want a Stravinsky-like blurting of incandescent colour, go for the very early (June) or very late (mid-August) classic kniphofias and enjoy them for their spectacular, firework-like, brilliance. Actually, what they most remind me of is the Rocket ice-lolly I used to eat as a child!

Kniphofias are not difficult to grow at all if you understand that they get a lot of water in the growing season in their natural home, but none at all in winter – they insist on good drainage, especially in the colder months. Give them that, and you’ll have a firework display of your own.

Labels: knifophia, red hot pokers, torch lily, tritoma

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:37 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

June Flowers and Invalid Gardeners

There are times that owning a garden means that you never lift your eyes above knee level, or at least the height of your highest shrub, and your focus is totally macro: you can see every aphid and ant, every snail trail and wilting flower, but not the big picture.

At other times you can only see the big picture. Two weeks ago I found myself having unplanned major surgery. Now I have another four weeks where I can’t dig or lift heavy things or even drive. It’s a surprise to me, just how much time I’ve spent with my eyes lowered to the task in hand, instead of raised to the garden as a whole.

Enforced leisure can be fun, but it brings other problems: I can see what needs to be done but I can’t do it! My fingers twitch to pull out the annual weeds that are springing out of my borders, and to dead-head the roses but I mustn’t. I can mention it to my nearest and dearest but if they don’t listen I can hardly nag them to do what they don’t even notice.

But after a few days, my eyes adjusted and I started to see certain charms that I’d never seen before, often because I’d removed them from the garden before they had a chance to be charming! Take this field poppy. I have glorious oriental poppies in the border, but usually these chance blown seedlings get removed before they have the chance to flower. This one escaped my weeding this year and has rewarded me with a smaller, simpler but perhaps more graceful flower than its blowsy oriental cousin.

Don’t worry though, I shall be back to frantic weeding by Mid-July!

Labels: june garden, june tasks, poppies

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:43 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, May 22, 2009

Weigela: another shrub some people love to hate

I’m very fond of the candyfloss pink form of the Weigela and quite a few butterflies seem to like it too. A few years ago, you could find Weigela in garden centres here, there and everywhere for a couple of quid and people planted them with wild abandon, loving their fast growth rate and, of course, the huge stems of white, pale-pink or magenta flower trumpets.

And then they realised the downside: Weigela is what is charmingly called a ‘lax’ grower, which always makes me think that it’s got rather slutty habits, like pushing the dust under the furniture instead of getting the vacuum cleaner out. What lax actually means is that the Weigela will throw out a couple of dozen long springy stems, and then decide it can’t be bothered after all, and let them fall to the ground in rather pretty bending arches, with then absolutely smother themselves in flowers. And that’s all great, until the blossom falls in a rather messy brown pile, and you’re left with eight foot stems of rather uninteresting branches that bend every which way and seem to try and trip you up.

The answer is heavy pruning every year. This keeps your Weigela lush and dramatic but also pins it back in its corner for the rest of the year so you can get round the garden. And then you get the best of all possible worlds. What could be better than that?

My Weigela is underplanted with variegated ivy, which echoes the dappled colours of the flowers rather well, I think.

Labels: variegated ivy, weigela

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:31 AM 2 Comments

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Tuesday, May 19, 2009

May flowers - unknown roses

I don’t know what this rose is. It was planted in the front garden when we arrived, and in the first three years we lived in the house I don’t think it ever flowered. In year 4, armed with some pruners and a lot of hard-heartedness, I pruned it to within an inch of its graft. The following year it produced beautiful blush pink and golden blooms in May and has done so ever since. It’s strongly scented, with a tea and sugar fragrance, and has large open flowers. If you think you know which of the many hundreds of roses it is, please let me know.

Because we’re on pretty intractable clay and live in a windy, salt-exposed environment, even though the garden at the back as six foot fences, we don’t have massive success with roses. I have one Old English Rose, which holds its own but has never really been impressive, one Ernest Morse which does pretty well, and an Iceberg climber which thrives (but then Iceberg would survive in a dustbin, given an inch of soil) so this rose, whatever it is, makes me very happy as it provides the illusion of a British summer garden without putting me to too much effort!

Labels: English rose, may roses, rose garden

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:25 AM 0 Comments

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