Garden Centre

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Ornamental vines

I keep moving my ornamental vine – it doesn’t seem to mind, in fact it’s thriving in its latest spot, but the thing is, much as I love it, it just keeps taking over, so I went back and examined the horticultural information that I got when I bought it. The plant is called vitis vinifera and has beautiful foliage with – last year at least – an awesome number of small black and very bitter grapes.

The info says: A quick growing, spreading deciduous climber which will reach about 7-10 metre. New growth is green and slightly downy which matures to deep green in summer and gives beautiful autumn colour from orange, red through to purple. True grape-leaf shape to foliage. Ornamental fruit attracts birds.

Which is all true, apart from the birds, which never went near the grapes and having tried one, I can tell why!

Then it adds: Screening plant over a fence Climber over a pergola or arch providing shade in summer and sun in winter Works well as a backdrop. Likes: Full sun and well-drained soil Occasional pruning if required in winter to remove twiggy growth.

Not quite … it does grow 10 metres but mine does it in a year! Occasional pruning would leave me living in a house like Sleeping Beauty’s castle – I have to cut it back at least four times each summer and once in winter and that’s why I’m constantly trying to find a place it won’t like quite so much, just to try and slow its beautiful, but rather insane, growth.

Labels: grapevine, ornamental vine

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:17 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, August 24, 2008

August garden - the pond

I seem to be spending far too much time giving the pond tender loving care! The water level drops as the sun makes the water evaporate (and both dogs and the cats from next door seem to drink an inordinate amount of pond water) and so I top it up with the hose. Then I see some blanket weed, so I go and get a bamboo cane and spend half an hour trying to get it out of the pond, which is like trying to wrap spaghetti round a single chopstick using your left hand only!

Assuming I actually get the blanket weed out of the pond, I then see what it’s been hiding: a couple of yellowing and rotting waterlily pads, so I go and get the net and the long cutters and try to cut through the waterlily stem and catch the rotting leaf in the net, which is a bit like one of those grab machines you get in amusement arcades with which you try to get hold of a Rolex watch and never succeed. It’s absolutely essential to keep going until I succeed though, because if I don’t, the debris from the decaying plant material will add nutrients to the water, resulting in the growth of algae. And because we have fish in the pond we don’t want algae. Finally, while I’m there, I realise that I might as well check the filter for blockages … and that’s most of the day gone!

But there are compensations: the lilies, the mayflies, the sound of the cascade, the dappled light on water … there are worse ways of wasting a day, that’s for sure.

Labels: garden ponds, water plants, waterlily

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:28 PM 0 Comments

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Thursday, August 21, 2008

August rain

I’m trying to find something good to say about this weather. It’s not easy! This summer has produced a lot of blackberries, which is about the only positive I can come up with. And I’m very fond of blackberries, so that’s nice.

On the other hand … slugs and snails! It’s rained at some point every day for the past week and the immediate response to rain seems to be the emergence of a plague of nasty crawlers, some with shells and some without: black ones, beige ones, ones with frilly orange edges, fat ones, thin ones … and all of them hell-bent on eating every leaf, flower and stem in my garden.

I try to be kind – and I’m squeamish, so I can’t do what a lot of more hardened gardeners do which is get out there with the secateurs or the heavy boots and wreak carnage. I also don’t use slug pellets because I worry about their effects on the environment, so it’s slug traps, slug-repelling soil and salt and copper barriers for me. And the salt barriers get washed away every time it rains, so that I have to go and sprinkle some more. It’s a thankless task, to be honest.

But the alternative is to have a garden full of bare twigs and skeletonised plants, so I went out today and bought a new bag of salt …

Labels: garden slugs, slugs and snails

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:09 PM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Getting the best from summer bedding plants

Summer bedding plants are those annuals which offer complete and constant billows of colour all summer long. While they appear in nearly all hanging baskets and containers, and grace our municipal parks, they are a wonderful addition to garden borders too, excellent for plugging a gap between a summer and autumn display by providing shots of brilliant colour and dense carpeting growth. Busy Lizzy (impatiens) and begonia semperflorens are both fantastic, doing their duty in tubs and baskets or filling the borders, come rain or shine.

I love petunias, their large trumpet-shaped flowers are always impressive and because they have an immense colour range you can make lively displays for a very low cost. This year they have been outperformed by the impatiens because their large flowers get damaged by rain and have to be deadheaded more often, but even so, they really do look wonderful. All summer bedding needs to be fed and deadheaded regularly but you are rewarded by more flowers than you could shake a stick at!

Labels: begonia, busy lizzie, impatiens, petunias, summer bedding

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:50 PM 0 Comments

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Saturday, August 16, 2008

Clematis (and wilt)

A friend of mine was panicking about clematis wilt yesterday so I went round to have a look. Now if you get it, or rather your plant does, clematis wilt is very bad news indeed. The foliage turns black overnight and the whole plant just falls over and dies, but it’s a much rarer condition than most people think and there are numerous other causes for wilt – in fact I’d say that a clematis is likely to wilt just to wind you up!

The first thing to do is NOT to panic – check if the foliage is brown rather than pure black and whether it has veining – unless it’s coal black and the veins have disappeared, it’s not clematis wilt.

Then decide what’s going on – the likely causes of browning, droopy or crispy leaves and a plant sagging on its supports are:

• Brittle stems have twisted and broken in windy conditions – if this is your cause, buy some good supports, and clematis netting instead of relying on ties which can allow the plant to snap
• Slugs and snails (and I’ve heard that earwigs and caterpillars are prone to this, behaviour too, although not in my garden) have munched through stems at the base of the plant, causing all the leaves above them to die spectacularly – deal with the pest first (organically if possible) then prune the plant back to preserve it for next year
• Careless hoeing or weeding around the base of the stem can either cut stems or just damage them enough to cause wilting.

In her case it was simple - dry roots on a plant that likes cool damp conditions for its lower levels!

Labels: august garden tasks, clematis, clematis wilt, pruning clematis

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:55 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, August 13, 2008

English roses

Are intoxicating. Their shape, colour and scent are spellbinding, but let us be completely honest: they are not the easiest thing to grow.

They appear at their best in the early days of summer and early days of autumn – by this time of the year they are looking pretty sad. But don’t despair, there should be plenty of other colour in your garden to compensate and there is just nothing to match them for fragrance. With proper mulching they should only need a really thorough water two or three times a week and some staking – especially in the current August winds!

If you’re an organic gardener (and why not?) instead of investing in a packet of rose feed, you can simply give them a handful of blood and bone meal in spring and another one of Epsom Salts in May with a final handful of Kelp (either as powder or as kelp and bark mulch) to get them happily through the autumn.

The real problem with English roses is black spot or mildew and if you see any, the first step is always to pull the spotted or mouldy leaves away from the plant at the stem and either burn them or put them in the rubbish bin – never compost them or you’ll be re-infesting the whole garden with mould or fungal spores. A new leaf will grow back within weeks and often isn’t infected at all.

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:37 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, August 10, 2008

Herb gardening again

The uses for herbs in the garden aren’t limited to food, although fresh herbs do improve the taste of any dish. Here’s some ways I use herbs to improve my garden or my hospitality!

• I have a lovely Angelica which thrives in semi-shade. The plant is supposed to reach six feet tall – mine never gets over two because I harvest it so regularly. You can candy the stems of one variety, angelica archangelica which you then use to decorate cakes, but I don’t have time for that – instead I make ice bowls with one smaller bowl (with its outside covered in a layer of cling film) inside a larger one, and water poured between the two. In the water I arrange the huge and delicately cut angelica leaves, so that when I take the ice bowl out and fill it with punch or fruit salad, the tracery of the angelica shows up like a wonderful Byzantine design. The flowers are gorgeous too, as this picture shows.

• Curly-leaved parsley looks brilliant as a lawn or bed edging and is particularly good when set against reds, oranges and yellows. It’s also a potent barrier against slugs and snails. If you find it difficult to germinate, dig a very shallow trench, sprinkle in your parsley seed and then pour boiling water on top – it works, believe it or not!

• If you find you have a gap in your garden, you can divide a clump of chives: either the common purple-flowered or the white-flowered garlic chive and plant them in the gap – cut them down to about two inches as soon as you’ve planted them and they will make a neat little clump within two weeks. They seem to thrive on this kind of behaviour.

Labels: angelica, chives, garden herbs, parsley

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:18 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, August 7, 2008

The things you see while gardening:

• A hawk (probably a kite, but too high to tell) flying way above Sussex on the thermals resulting from last night’s storm
• A large solitary bee, getting very drunk on lavender, and at one point, bending the stem of one flowerhead so far over that it flipped back up, catapulting him across the garden! He was back within a couple of minutes though
• Next door’s cat asleep on top of the wall
• Three tiny tomato seedlings that shouldn’t have been in the flowerbed at all – I moved them into a pot, where maybe they will produce one tiny tomato each and perpetuate their guerrilla existence in my borders
• A second flush on my David Austin English rose – actually not seen so much as smelt, and then tracked down by nose. The second flush flowers are smaller and often don’t open fully, but the scent is just as strong
• Blackberries – lots of them. My thornless blackberry is in full production but somehow, not a single blackberry made it into the freezer from today’s gardening session, I ate them all right off the bush
• Enormous spiders: why do they always hide in dark corners and then run straight towards me when I disturb them? I’m trying to be kind to all living things but I do find it rather difficult when it comes to spiders, especially enormous ones …

Labels: all year gardening, garden bees, garden birds, garden insects

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:14 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, August 4, 2008

When is a garden not a garden?

When it’s a herb garden! I was lucky enough to find an absolutely brilliant herb stall at a local fair and came home with two bulging (recycled) carrier bags full of plants and seeds.

There’s a real advantage in growing herbs – you get to eat or otherwise use the produce from your garden. There’s also a disadvantage though – many herbs are annuals so there’s quite a lot of work to be doing in sowing seeds and digging up old plants that are past their best, and also that gives you some bare patches at different time, although you can always plonk down a potted plant to cover the bare earth.

So, on the perennial side I already had: bay, lavender, rosemary and angelica (okay, not perennial, but biennial and self seeding, so all I have to do is dig out the old exhausted parent plant every four years or so and let a youngster fill in the parent’s place) and some chives (both ordinary and garlic). I bought lemon verbena (a windowsill plant, but worth it for the glorious scent and to make lemon sugar for baking and a couple of leaves will scent bathwater as nicely as the most expensive bath oil) and a couple of self seeding salads like orach and mizuna which should just keep filling up their space year after year. And I fell in love with chocolate mint – which doesn’t taste as good as ordinary mint in cooking but smells like chocolates and is great in summer drinks and cocktails.

On the annual side I have now added dill, chervil (same family) basil and oregano. The problem is … where am I going to put everything!

Labels: angelica, bay, herb garden, lavender, lemon verbena, mizuna, orach, plant sales, rosemary

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:42 AM 2 Comments

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Friday, August 1, 2008

How many butterflies …

… have you seen this year?

We’ve seen cabbage whites, peacocks and chalk blues. We know where there are some wood whites but they are nowhere near our garden and I’m not saying where they live in case somebody goes and damages their habitat. But when I was a kid (and it wasn’t that long ago, really) I used to see many more different kinds of butterfly than I do now.

There’s a plan to build something called Butterfly World, a huge environmental safe space with specialised butterfly habitats. The name may be naff but the project is being supported by the great and good, including David Attenborough.

Butterflies love buddleia, Michaelmas daisies and many of them adore nettles – so if you plant some nettles in a bucket in the corner of your garden, it may actually keep the pesky cabbage whites off your cabbages and hostas! Here’s what you might see if you plant for butterflies:


• High brown fritillary (Argynnis adippe) Numbers down by 79% since 1970 – the most serious recent decline of any British butterfly. This large insect is now found in just 50 sites in the UK.
• Wood white (Leptidea sinapis) Numbers down by 65%. A delicate, low-flying butterfly famed for its “head-bobbing” mating ritual.
• White-letter hairstreak (Satyrium w-album) Down by 53%. A small butterfly with a white “w” on its wings. The species was badly affected by Dutch elm disease in the 1970s, which wiped out its main food. You see them a lot in France where British people on holiday thing they are ‘deformed’ cabbage whites
• Grizzled skipper (Pyrgus malvae) Down by 49%. Known for its rapid buzzing flight, it is typically found in old industrial sites such as quarries, used to be seen a lot on London bombsites after the war, my dad tells me!
• Marsh fritillary (Euphydryas aurinia) Population numbers down by 46%. A gorgeous butterfly now nearly limited to the west of Scotland, this brightly patterned butterfly can lay up to 350 eggs in a single batch.

Peacock butterfly courtesy of Neil Phillips

Labels: garden butterflies, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:30 AM 2 Comments

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