Garden Centre

Friday, September 28, 2007

Katsura

Forgive me if I’m boring you, but I’ve got trees on the brain right now.

This is a Katstura from Japan – it’s not the best looking tree you’ve ever seen, I suspect, and it does have some disadvantages in the garden appearance stakes – for example, the trees often produce several trunks, especially if they’ve been exposed to ground frost when young and the leaves are not exactly pretty in autumn, but let’s leave all this aside.

In winter you can see tiny bright red flowers and then in early spring rounded heart-shaped bronze leaves emerge. During the following weeks they will become greeny-yellow and then pea-green, as they become wider and flatter.

But it’s the autumn that makes these trees so special. The foliage colour changes – several gardening books say it becomes a dusty pink and/or creamy-yellow, which mine certainly doesn’t, as you can see. Mine goes bright gold with crisp brown edges! But it’s the smell that matters – again the horticultural tomes say it’s like burnt sugar or caramel which can be picked up on a calm day some distance away. And I say they are wrong: it is exactly the smell of candyfloss and I took this picture in heavy rain with a strong onshore breeze and I could smell the wonderful sugary aroma quite clearly – no need for a calm day in my garden! Strangely though at close quarters, the leaves do not smell.

For those who care about such things (like me) Katsura, along with the Ginkgo, once flourished in much of the world before the Pleistocene glaciations which reduced it to a relatively tiny population in Japan and the intervening region of eastern China – unlike the Ginko, this tree has not won worldwide renown. I have no idea why, and urge you to do your best to spread it over every continent – for its smell alone, this tree is worth planting.

Labels: autumn colour, garden trees, katsura tree, tree plantring

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:30 AM 0 Comments

---

Monday, September 24, 2007

It’s that time of year …

Conkers! When I was a kid I used to soak them in vinegar and bake them in the oven and then use them to bash other kid’s conkers. I never got past the first round though …

These days I gather up all the conkers I can find for a different reason – I plant them. Most of them I just ease into the ground about a couple of hundred yards from the parent tree, but some of them I bring home and raise in pots.

I’m about to make a terrible confession – I’m a guerrilla tree-planter! Yes, every year between November and March I go out with a bunch of like-minded activists and plant saplings in a place where we think they stand a chance of growing into trees. Let’s be honest, it’s not exactly world-changing, but on the other hand, if you’ve ever tried to get your local council to replace a tree that’s died, or been vandalised, you will know that tree-planting is an aspect of life that most politicians at the local level view with complete suspicion. ‘Unsafe’, they say, or ‘too close to buildings’ or ‘blocks the view of the road’ or ‘may drop leaves on the pavement’.

So my baby horse chestnuts, oaks, and so on will mysteriously appear one winter’s day in a place where there used to be a tree but no longer is. I think of it as my Mother Christmas act and there’s something pretty wonderful about knowing that when I’m long gone, some of my ‘babies’ will be going strong.

To grow conkers, just stick them in a pot and put them in a reasonably sheltered area, and forget about them apart from making sure they don’t dry out entirely. In anything from six to sixteen months you will see the shoots appear.

Labels: growing from seed, guerilla gardening, horse chestnuts, tree plantring

The All Seasons Gardener at 11:43 PM 0 Comments

---

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Concealment

Thanks to Chris and Graham for telling me the name of my mystery plant – bless you both for that! It’s gone on the list …

And today a pongy problem – what do you do with your bins?

It was all right in the old days, either you had a garden with a pig and a privy in it (both of which were pretty noisome) or you had several hundred acres with a deer park and a folly (with or without resident hermit) – in the former case then the pig ate whatever household rubbish you produced and in the latter an army of minions ‘dealt’ with refuse and detritus and you never troubled your mind with the mechanics (a bit like our own Prince Charles with his toothpaste squeezing valet).

But in the modern garden, bins have to go somewhere!

This nice idea works if you’ve got what used to be called an ‘area’ but most gardens don’t have a convenient concealed place to stick bins. And most bins, these days at least, aren’t neat cylinders in unobtrusive colours. The ones provided by my local council are:

1 - large green wheeled objects, something like the Tardis or possibly a thing you would hide behind and push forward in a riot if you were a police officer in a repressive regime (never let it be said that I lack imagination!)

2 - sundry small black boxes for recycling that have stupid large flat lids that blow off in the slightest breeze and try to decapitate you.

At the moment I have them tucked behind a trellis growing sweet peas, but as the last peas go over, out loom the bins like a family secret.

So how do you hide yours?

Labels: garden makeovers, garden planning

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:59 AM 0 Comments

---

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Autumn colour

Suddenly everything has changed – it’s not just the weather but the effect that it has on the quality of light that signals the change of the seasons. Summer sunlight is usually ‘saturated’ Directionless sunlight provides vibrant, well-saturated colours while low, strongly-directed sunlight de-saturates colour. Photographers know this, which is why they work with the sun at their backs and wait for sunny days with high blue skies that refract back the light from all directions.

What does that mean for gardens? Well one thing is that some colours like hot pinks and whites can look either garish or grubby under autumnal light conditions. Warmer and deeper colours hold up better under directed light or almost no light, such as we get on a day with heavy grey clouds – and that’s why bronze, yellow and reds at the dark end of the spectrum please us in the autumn months.

It also means though, that we see more detail and less drama – lower levels of light require is to look for longer at our plants, in summer we glance, pick up the strong colours and don’t bother to focus on small details, but in spring and autumn we tend to look for longer (there’s been research done on this – many summer car accidents are caused by people who glance rather than look because the road is dazzling their eyes) and that means plants with more complex forms, multiple colours, or intricate shapes will come into their own. The Cotinus or smoke bush is a case in point. In summer it is covered with a haze of soft pinkish flower plumes, giving it a smoke-like appearance, and in autumn its nicely shaped burgundy leaves offer subtle shades to an otherwise bland garden while the remaining flower stalks give interesting structural contrasts to the leaves. It's also easy to grow - a real beginner's plant - and tolerates full sun to medium shade and heavy pruning.

Labels: all-year gardening, autumn colour, cotinus, garden plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 11:50 PM 0 Comments

---

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Autumn’s bounty

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun …

As Keats so truly said. There was a time when gardeners had a fetish about cutting every rosehip out of their gardens, to produce more flowers the following year, but now most of us are content to leave some hips for the birds and for winter colour.

Hips

These are aggregate fruit of the rose plant, consisting of several dry fruitlets enclosed by the enlarged, fleshy, usually red floral cup. Though too tart to eat raw, the ripe reddish-orange fruit of the rose is often used to make jellies and jams, syrup, tea and wine. Because they're an excellent source of vitamin C, rose hips are also dried and ground into powder and sold in natural food stores. Rosehip syrup was an important source of vitamin C for children during World War II and English children were paid three pence for a pound of rosehips which were then turned into Delrosa rosehip syrup. As many will remember, this brand of rosehip syrup was supplied to new mothers for their children up until the 1970s. You can make your own:

Rosehip Syrup

Pick a kilo of rosehips and place them in a large pan holding three pints of boiling water. Bring back to boil, remove from heat and let stand for ten minutes. Strain through a jelly bag (or a clean old pillowcase that you don’t want to use again) for about four hours. Return the strained liquid to pan with another pint of boiling water. Re-boil and allow to stand as before, strain. Pour into a clean pan, reduce by boiling until juice measures about a pint and a half to which you should add half a kilo of sugar. Stir over gentle heat until sugar dissolves, then boil for 5 minutes. Pour into hot bottles, seal. Once opened, this syrup goes off in a week or ten days, so choose small bottles or plan to use it up fast!

And Haws

The Haw is a small, oval dark red fruit about 1 cm long, berry-like, but structurally only containing a single seed. Haws are important for wildlife in winter, particularly birds which eat the haws and disperse the seeds in their droppings.

Haw Vodka

Pick berries, wash gently and dry .

Fill a small jar two thirds full of berries and then pour in 80% proof vodka to fill it to the brim and seal tightly. Leave to steep for six weeks in a darkened area (not full sun which makes it go brown and horrible looking) but at normal room temperature, shaking gently once a week.

Strain through a paper coffee filter into a clean bottle or jar and leave to mature for at least a couple of months (again in a darkened area at room temperature) before serving.

Labels: garden flowers, garden plants, garden recipes

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:04 PM 0 Comments

---

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Help the all Seasons Gardener!

What on earth is the name of this plant?

I should know it, and as soon as somebody tells me, I shall remember, but right now I cannot bring it to mind and having spent about three hours peering through one gardening book after another trying to identify it by sight, I'm in a very bad mood indeed.

Whatever it is, I want to get one for my garden, and like most shrubs, it'll probably cope best if it's planted in the autumn and allowed to over-winter before putting on spring growth, but unless I can come up with the name, I can't order it ...

Labels: garden plants, name this plant

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:21 AM 3 Comments

---

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Gardening - a little rant ...

Doesn’t this kind of thing annoy you? It drives me absolutely spare!

It’s bad enough that half my neighbours are turning their front gardens into paved deserts, just to have somewhere to park their cars, without my little bit of green becoming a living bin.

1 – if you have to pave your green space, can’t you at least have a couple of corner beds that house small trees or shrubs and an under planting of native flowers? You could be saving the lives of countless insects and birds by giving them an oasis in which to rest before moving on to the next green space, and it would provide a bit of run off for all the water that will otherwise have to fill the drains and – quite possibly – flood your house. And I’ve got to say, I think it serves you right if that happens. One of the major reasons that the floods this year were so bad was that this kind of paving or slabbing or bricking of front gardens means that water which used to be soaked up by the soil or taken deep into the ground by thirsty trees and shrubs now sits on the surface and has nowhere to go.

2 – why does every drunkard in the South of England choose my garden for his bottle, can or chip wrapper? Some of them are so carefully inserted into the hedges that I think there must be a litter fairy who is just picking on me! But there will soon be a shock in store for all these litter depositors – behind my evergreens I’ve planted berberis and once the spiky, spiny, impossible to remove, barbs dig into their hands, they’ll be sorry!

Labels: berberis, garden makeovers, garden planning, garden vandalism, litter

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:26 AM 0 Comments

---

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Today’s garden

Looks a bit of a mess – the apple tree has had drastic remedial surgery and the whole garden looks like it was hit by a hurricane. The skip is filled to the brim, the compost bin ditto, and the idea of clearing all this up is enough to make me want to emigrate. But things WILL get better.

Of course it feels awful to hack the tree down so hard, but it’s a kill or cure scenario – this year it produced exactly four apples and it shades two thirds of the lawn for most of the day, meaning our grass has become weak. Apple trees aren’t meant to be giants – the rule of thumb (that good old gardener’s rule of thumb that gets called on for everything from planting to composting) is that you should be able to reach the highest apple on the highest branch from a stepladder. You couldn’t reach the highest branch of our tree (not that it had any apples on it) from a two level scaffold! In addition, the trees are old, probably sixty years old, and elderly fruit trees have a tendency to rot from the point where the largest branches join the trunk, meaning that they can be very unstable – large unstable branches are not a good thing to have in a garden that copes with gale force winds!

Still, I keep telling myself it will be okay, in six months we won’t recognise the poor thing, but I wince every time I step outside and see it …

Labels: apple trees, summer pruning

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:19 AM 0 Comments

---

Monday, September 3, 2007

Never act (or garden) with children or animals ...

I’m about to be visited by a young person – an extremely young person. Sort of between the sitting down and dribbling stage and the stomping around and eating worms stage, which made me think about setting up a special area for him, while he’s here.

Children are often happier having their own area of a patio garden because otherwise you end up yelling at them every minute of the day, either to stay away from things you think are precious or to stay away from things that are dangerous to the, like poisonous berries, ponds, and so on.

Forward panning helps!. A sand pit, water area, swing or Wendy house can be planned, to give them a sense of a secret adventure place of their own, but remember that any water feature – whether specifically designed for them or for adult use – should be visible from the house and/or securely netted to avoid a child falling in. Remember, anybody can drown in five inches of water, drunken visiting rugby players (you know who you are!) take note. Wendy houses can be hideously expensive, but this lovely log cabin is a standard shed, cunningly adapted by a gifted dad!

Your garden may be so small that you feel this kind of planning isn’t possible, but usually imaginative solutions can be found. A pergola planted with pretty annual climbers can also be the home of a child’s swing, as long as the wood of the pergola is strong enough and is securely set into concrete foundations.

A collapsible paddling pool can be set up on any area of grass or paving and stored out of sight when not in use – and happy little waterers can be encouraged to use the pool to water thirsty plants, saving you a job!

Labels: garden design, garden planning, garden ponds, garden shed

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:28 AM 0 Comments

---

Saturday, September 1, 2007

What is the point?

I know that local councils are being encouraged to ‘green’ their city spaces both literally and figuratively, and I’m all in favour of getting as much natural beauty into people’s everyday lives as possible, but what’s the value of this?

To begin with, the plants are only visible if (a) you know they are there - because they are twenty-five feet up on the side of a building and (b) you crane your neck while standing on the pavement outside a busy multi-storey car park that is fronted by a taxi rank – something of a recipe for curses, if not for actually being hit by a mad taxi driver or maddened car park user.

Second, these plants might not have much visual utility, but they could have been a wonderful environmental resource as bee and insect attractors, or pollution sinks. But they are neither – they aren’t the right species to meet either of those criteria.

And third, they are in such awful shape: desiccated, straggly and ugly, that any good they might have done is completed negated by their appalling condition.

What a waste of an opportunity.

Labels: garden design, urban plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:28 AM 0 Comments

---