Garden Centre

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Overwintering

Tender perennials will last for years if you can give them a little help to survive the winter. Indeed, many put on even better display in their second and third years.

What is a tender perennial? Well, unlike other definitions, this one isn’t fixed – it depends on where you live! Basically it means any perennial plant that will grow outside successfully in temperate climates during the summer months, but requires some winter protection. So in Sussex my agapanthus are not tender, but in Yorkshire they would be – and sadly, the only way to find out is to see if they survived that first year!

If you have limited space for overwintering plants, make it a priority to save those which are expensive to buy, such as pelargoniums and large fuchsias, as well as anything unusual that might be difficult to replace – for me that’s my south American shrubs, which rarely make it to British nurseries, even specialist ones. After that, pick your favourites and take cuttings as insurance

Once you’ve got your cuttings, root them in a heated propagator or on a sunny windowsill. Choose healthy looking, non-flowering shoots and trim them to about two inches, just below a leaf joint. Remove the lower leaves and any flower-buds and insert them around the edge of a pot filled with cuttings compost – or compost and sand, mixed. Cover the pot with a clear polythene bag (but not for bedding geraniums/pelargoniums which hate the damp and will rot off) and place in a well-lit position out of direct sun. Remove the bag when rooting has taken place (yes, I know it’s hard to tell, assume six weeks from potting up) and keep the plants cool all winter. Pot them up individually in spring and plant them out after the last frosts.

Labels: overwintering, tender perennials

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:39 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, October 28, 2007

Autumn leaves and water ...

Isn’t this gorgeous? It’s St Stephen’s Green, where the ducks hang out, and this one area, with the burgundy foliage reflected in the water, was quite superb. It reminded me that for most of us this kind of expanse isn’t possible – eighty foot trees on the banks of lakes don’t really fit into our gardens – but there are plenty of ways to try and achieve foliage and water effects:

If you have a small specimen tree, like a maple say, plant it on a bank behind your pond so that it reflects in the water.

If you have larger trees, particularly beeches or birches, you can give them ‘temporary’ water. My favourite device is to drag the old kiddies paddling pool under them and fill it with water, it reflects the trees beautifully and (taking a leaf out of Merry Hall, the book written by my gardening hero, Beverley Nichols) we can make ‘artificial’ floating flowers – small yellow chrysanthemum heads floating on red or brown fallen leaves for example, or individual nerine blossoms laid alongside the leaves of variegated dogwood (cornus) to give a nice blend of pink, white and green. They look wonderful and give a focus point to the reflections in the water.

And if you can’t manage even that, find a bird bath that isn’t too heavy and position it under a tree with autumn foliage – you won’t get much of a reflection, but it’s a lot better than nothing.

Labels: autumn colour, autumn foliage, birdbaths, garden ponds

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:02 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Dublin - the green green

I went to Dublin this week, one of those two day breaks that are supposed to refresh and inspire, but end up just making you feel rather tired and confused, as if you haven’t had time to digest everything you’ve seen and done.

One abiding impression of Dublin is that the pavements are hard and the water is soft! Other than that, there is definitely something about the quality of the air (often damp and faintly misty) which softens colours and causes green to predominate in the garden palate, as it does across so much of rural Ireland.

It really made me think again about the role of colour in the garden – as this image shows, the subtle interplay of greens, blues and silvers can be just as dramatic as the brighter colours of calla lilies or gladioli, and may also work better with our more moderate climate.

And, of course, Dublin’s parks are superb – they may be a long way apart, which makes you glad to find them when you do – but they are beautifully maintained and imaginatively laid out. London and Brighton both have something to learn from Dublin on that account.

Labels: autumn colour, dublin, garden planning

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:02 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, October 20, 2007

The garden slows down, but the chores don't

As leaves fall from the trees, collect them and put them in a wire basket so that they can rot down and become leaf mould – I’ve seen it said that you can do this by putting them in a black bin liner and knotting the top – maybe so, but all I’ve achieved by that method is a bag of disgusting smelling slime. Don’t put them in the compost as they will retard compost development which will slow down massively over the winter anyway. In particular you need to remove fallen leaves from the lawn because a layer of leaves will prevent oxygen getting to the grass which then becomes yellow and deteriorates rapidly.

While you’re on the lawn, and if you can find a dry day, brush off worm casts with a stiff broom before mowing or else the lawn will smear with mud when you cut it. It’s claimed that you can lay a sheet of black polythene over leatherjacket prone areas of your lawn overnight. In the morning the little pests will all have come to the surface and can be swept up. Again, this may be true, but whenever I’ve tried to do this, it’s rained and all I’ve ended up with is a sheet of polythene with a nice slick of water on top and no evidence of leatherjackets. Were I to find the monsters, I would certainly sweep them up and incinerate them in my chiminea, they are my pet hate!

I’m planning and planting my spring-flowering bulbs, dipping them in paraffin to try and deter squirrels (faint hope) and putting a half-handful of sand in the bottom of the planting hole to give the roots something more draining that my horrible clay/chalk mixture to sit in. Bulbs that don’t get pinched by the squirrels only tend to last a couple of seasons in some parts of the garden and I’m sure it’s because the roots rot.

Labels: autumn colour, autumn tasks, lawn care, leaf mould, leatherjackets

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:51 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

More autumn colour

The Japanese anemone – which oddly enough, is a native of China – has large-petalled flowers in shades of white through pink to quite a bright magenta or light purple, surrounding bright yellow stamens, the whole display carried on two to four foot stems above deeply lobed green leaves.

This is a flower that is easily grown in fertile, moist soil with plenty of organic matter mixed in – which is why you see them so often on allotments. They prefer full sun in northern gardens but will adjust to partial shade and they really need partial shade in southern gardens as they scorch quite easily in the (rare!) hot autumn days. You do need to protect them from slugs. In areas that have severe winters with little snow and strong winds, plants should be mulched in late autumn to protect the root system and because they flower late in the year, if you want to cut them for arrangements, you’ll need to offer some kind of protection from early frosts in colder areas. It’s lovely when allowed to run a bit riot in a big clump of tall waving stems.

At this time of year, few plants can match Japanese anemone for providing reliable autumn colour, especially in partial shade. It has its disadvantages though (doesn’t everything?)

It can be invasive.

There are many worse things to be invaded by (bird flu? Red spider mite?) but if it worries you, then plant them in big pots, so they have a couple of years to spread out, and every third year, lift and divide the root system, repotting the most vigorous looking roots and giving the rest away.

Labels: autumn colour, autumn flowers, japanese anemone

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:37 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, October 13, 2007

Still rain, therefore sunflowers

Whatever the weather throws at us in the autumn – Indian summer or arctic winter – certain plants cope well. Nasturtiums are always good, dahlias cope with anything except a frost, and Japanese anemones are good, even when whipped around by strong winds.

And of course, there are always sunflowers, brilliant, easy to grow annuals whose seeds can be sown straight into well-drained soil in the spring, giving them full sun and a lot of water. Sunflowers are fast-growing, undemanding insect attractors and also feed winter birds – something like a cross between a giant daisy, a food bank and a record breaker! The tallest sunflower ever recorded grew to over 25 feet and the largest sunflower head recorded so far was 32½ inches.

There are downsides, although these are few: ensuring you use crop rotation means you’ll avoid diseases like Sclerotina which is a white mould) which makes the sunflower head rot.

Sunflowers are ready to harvest when the back portion of the head turns brown. Original sunflowers are yellow-petalled with dark brown centres. New cultivars have dark yellow, tan, orange, maroon or striped petals, and dark green-yellow centres. Low-pollen sunflower varieties have been introduced to enable hay fever sufferers to enjoy them too.

You can collect seeds in autumn for planting next year and either leave the heads on the flowers through the winter or cut off a whole head and hang it upside down from your bird table.

Labels: autumn colour, autumn storms, sunflowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:27 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

After the Rain

While November probably brings the wettest, darkest and most horrible days of the gardening year, as in the famous poem by Walter de la Mere (no not the one by Thomas Hood, although that’s famous too)

There is wind where the rose was,
Cold rain where sweet grass was,
And clouds like sheep
Stream o'er the steep
Grey skies where the lark was.

October can offer some nasty surprises too. Yesterday’s rain beat everything in the garden flat – the bamboo is lying down, which is not a huge surprise, but the photinia is flat too, and that is unexpected! Of course, a lot of the garden plants that have suffered were previously at least partially under the canopy of the monstrous apple tree that we cut back at the end of summer, so this has been their first real exposure to strong weather without a protective umbrella.

Fortunately we’d cut back the plants on the pond margin, or they’d all have either toppled over and bent over and spread vegetable matter across the water surface – that’s not a problem in summer when insects, fish and other forms of biological action will destroy plant detritus very fast, but in winter those fragments of leaf and seed will just sink, becoming rotten and contributing harmful gases to the pond, which can build up fast if the pond freezes over. Our timing was just about right for that, at least.

So this may be the last summery picture – my brave nasturtiums shaking off the rain.

Labels: autumn colour, autumn storms, bamboo, garden ponds, photinia, rain

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:09 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, October 8, 2007

Last tree to hug …

For a while at least. And this one is more of a mild tickle than a hug, because it’s tiny, if you hugged it, it would probably snap!

In July 2006 I went to Ben and Jerry’s Sundae in the Park, to interview Jerry Greenfield (yup, lucky old me! He’s a lovely guy, I got lots of free ice-cream and the whole day was great fun) and was given a tree seed in one of those glazed paper ice-cream tubs Ben and Jerry’s use, to grow. It also came with a compressed block of compost/planting medium.

So when I got home I immediately threw away the silly paper tub and the useless compost which claimed it would become a perfect planting medium when soaked in water. Out of curiosity I did soak it, and eighteen hours later, half of it was a powdery gunk floating in water and the other half was still a solid block. I planted my seed in plastic pot, in a mixture of multipurpose compost and John Innes number two and it went off a belter.

It’s had a couple of misadventures – a large slug tried a nibble in its first few weeks of life and just recently it got bowled several yards down the garden by a Cairn Terrier who was chasing a squirrel and wasn’t in total control of his paws, but it seems to be coping.

As you can see, for a tree that’s just over a year old, it’s not doing too badly – but what is it? The Ben and Jerry’s paper pot didn’t say, and one conifer looks much like another to me, especially at the seedling stage, so if you have any idea what it is I’m growing, I’d be grateful for your input.

Labels: ben and jerrys, garden trees, growing plants from seed, tree planting

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:59 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, October 3, 2007

The Lady Penelope of autumn colour

I didn’t bother to show you all my summer flowers, the vases and even buckets full of blooms, or to rhapsodise about the fragrances, colours and so on … why should I, when you doubtless had a thousand such experiences of your own?

But now autumn is here – and what is giving you those glorious moments now?

For me, it’s my nerines. This flower, also called the Guernsey Lily, and the Japanese Spider Lily is not fully FULLY hardy right across the UK, but it’s (a) dirt cheap to buy (b) worth the gamble – I mean, just look at it!

Those shocking pink flowers will bloom until early December, like a floral firework. They bloom as a cluster of flowers on a leafless stem. Each flower is trumpet-shaped, and the petals curl backward. N. bowdenii which you see here, is the hardiest or about thirty species and while some people say it’s faintly scented, I’ve got to say that mine aren’t – or not so that I’ve noticed, and I think, given my addiction to fragrance, I would have spotted any scent. The leaves develop after the flowers have emerged and start to die back in May. The clumps can be divided after flowering. In colder areas, it is best to apply a thick layer of dry mulch once the flowers have died off in winter to give them a bit of a ‘warm’ to get them through the chilly months.

All the books say that Nerine bowdenii is best grown in well-drained soil in a sunny, sheltered position – it thrives in beds, borders, rock gardens and containers, and right across my fairly exposed Sussex coastal garden.

Nerine bowdenii 'Alba' has white flowers flushed with pale pink – but I think it’s not quite as hardy (or nearly as spectacular) as its ‘Lady Penelope’ pink cousin.

Labels: autumn colour, nerine, winter colour

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:44 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, October 1, 2007

More tree hugging

Whether you call it the staghorn, the sumach or the angel tree, this is an autumn stunner. Let’s be perfectly honest though, this tree can be an absolute horror – it suckers like … well, like a sucker, and has been known to throw out feelers that pass under a nine foot concrete drive and emerge on the other side! My advice? Grow it in a pot, with a concrete slab underneath, that’s what I do, and look at the autumn colour it gives me. Apart from that lovely, almost fiery, burst of autumn glory, there are the tall deep red velvet candles that emerge in spring and are technically called drupes, they look gorgeous, believe me.

Horticultural details: Rhus typhina is commonly called Staghorn, Sumach or Angel tree, and is often grown as a tall shrub. It was brought to England in the 1690s from the Americans and while Native American Indians used to (and possibly still do, for all I know) made a lemonade-like drink from its crushed fruit, and tannery workers used the tannin-rich bark and foliage as a tanning agent, today it has only ornamental value, which is interesting as it is part of the cashew family and quite possibly will turn out to have nutritional or medicinal properties we don’t yet know about.

Labels: autumn colour, garden plants, garden trees, invasive plants, staghorn, sumach

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:30 AM 0 Comments

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