Garden Centre

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Christmas roses

It’s very odd, but one thing that you can rely on, or at least I can, is my Iceberg rose producing at least one flower in time for Christmas. It’s an amazingly hardy rose, very suitable for beginners and the one rose I would recommend for anybody who has problems growing other roses. Here's mine in full summer flower.

It’s sold as both a free climber or a standard floribunda and it’s the climber that seems to always give Christmas gifts. The RHS says it bears medium-sized, white blooms, starting from shapely pink-tinted buds, (which) appear very freely almost all season. Hmmm. At any season, would be my judgement.

In my life I’ve had three Iceberg roses in three houses, two were pinkish in bud form, one wasn’t. One of the pink budding ones was lightly scented, neither of the others were. When you buy, it sometimes says that Iceberg is lightly scented and sometimes unscented – weird. The floribunda is more likely to be scented, as far as I can tell from decades of sniffing other people’s roses.

But honestly, although I think a flower without fragrance is like a dog without a tail, if you can cut a rosebud from your garden on Christmas Day, it really would be asking too much to have it scenting the house as well.

Labels: iceberg rose, RHS, winter flowers, winter rose

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:30 AM 0 Comments

---

Thursday, December 18, 2008

December flowering shrubs: Mahonia

It blooms in winter, provides berries you can turn into jam, offers architectural foliage, and loves the dry shade. Mahonia is quite possibly the shrub that every garden needs.

My Mahonia easily makes nine feet tall in its utterly dry and mainly shaded north facing corner of the garden. And now, in December, it towers over the bare shrubs around it, giving off a sunburst of bright yellow which tempts me out into the garden, where I’m rewarded by its strong Lily of the Valley fragrance.

The only time I get blackbirds in my garden is December, when they come to pick the stamens out of the Mahonia flower, because they love to eat them, but their depredations seem to do little harm to the flower spikes.

The blue-black berries can be gathered in spring, if you don’t mind getting a few scratches from its spiky leaves which are green in summer and red-ting but remain on the plant all year round. The berries make a great, somewhat tangy, dark jam. And finally the mature bark has a snakeskin appearance which is most attractive.

Mahonia courtesy of DH Wright

Labels: december flowering shrubs, mahonia

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:12 AM 0 Comments

---

Monday, December 15, 2008

Growing your own plants - stratification

One of the great mysterious processes of seed germination is stratification. Basically, all this means is that where perennial plants are from temperate climates, their seeds will probably need a period of both soaking and chilling before they will germinate. This is because the natural conditions in which they would germinate are that they would spend a winter on cold, often wet, ground. So that’s the process you need to recreate in home conditions to get your seeds to understand that its time to grow. Without the stratification process, they don’t get the message and remain dormant.

For plants from the Australias, stratification often involves heating, to mimic the forest fires that allowed seeds to grow where mature plants had been destroyed.

So to work out how a seed may need to be stratified, consider where it comes from.

This week I’m stratifying Alpine strawberries. They grow in extremely cold areas, so I’m going to give them at least a month of cold – normally this would be in the fridge, but as the Alps are under snow cover for much of the winter, I’m putting my seeds in the freezer! And although the process is usually both moist and cold, because of the extreme cold of the Alps, I’m giving them a month of dry cold (frozen in a plastic bag) and then two weeks of moist cold (in the fridge on some damp paper – that should give the impression of the ‘spring melt’ that they need to get their seed cases cracking and the embryos inside growing.

It feels very good to be starting to grow something in December, even if the growing process does begin with a period of chilling.

Frozen fruit courtesy of mindluge

Labels: alpine strawberries, growing plants from seed, stratification

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:13 AM 0 Comments

---

Friday, December 12, 2008

December greenhouse

Next year, I promise, this blog will be full of pictures of glorious forced bulbs, flowering in perfect time for the festive season, and lovely tender perennials, lovingly being overwintered in my brand new greenhouse. As it is though, what I actually have in there, right now, is one rhubarb crown being forced under a black plastic box (yes I know it sounds stupid to put something under black plastic to remove light, and the stick it in a bright greenhouse, but forcing rhubarb requires both dark and warmth, you see) and a tray of pea seeds that I’m hoping will germinate, and some bubble wrap.

Yes, just about the only thing that is flourishing in my wonderful greenhouse is the bubble wrap I’ve lined it with to keep it warmer. I’m also on the look-out for families that are buying big electrical goods for Christmas so I can go and beg the polystyrene packaging from them, as no less a resource than Gardener’s World says that sheets of white polystyrene can be used to line the sides of a greenhouse below staging level. Good enough for them is good enough for me!

And of course, given that I have only one rhubarb to examine, there’s no difficulty for me in examining the contents of my greenhouse for overwintering pests! By next year though, I hope to be having to search a dozen lush plants for infestations of whitefly, red spider mite and greenfly.

Icy greenhouse courtesy of Aunt Owwee

Labels: december greenhouse, forced bulbs, greenfly, red spider mite, rhubarb, tender perennials

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:18 AM 1 Comments

---

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Mistletoe – a kissing crop

This year Britain has a massive mistletoe glut – and that’s good news for anybody who’s hoping to get romantic this Christmas! Good mistletoe harvests depend on mild winters and damp summers, so very few people actually desire the right weather to grow this strange parasitic plant, but given how much it costs, even in a glut year, you might want to try growing your own.

Traditionally mistletoe grows in orchards, and the two trees on which the average gardener might manage to produce their own crops are apple trees and limes.

If you want to grow mistletoe, don’t try planting your Christmas crop, because it won’t be ripe and therefore won’t germinate. The berries are actually mature in March and so you need to spot a suitable clump of the plant in a tree you can actually reach, and wait until spring to cut your berries. Bear in mind that birds like mistletoe too, and you might need to cover your clump to keep them off while it ripens.

You also need to take care when harvesting the berries, as they split easily and then the seeds inside harden, which makes germination much more difficult. And once you’ve cut your germinating specimen, remember that it is most likely to grow on the same species of tree as the original plant came from. Your tree also has to be at least fifteen years old, preferably twenty, and the branch you put your seeds on needs to be at least four inches in diameter.

It’s a really odd plant to grow as you need to cut some shallow grooves into the bark of the tree, then squeeze the sticky seeds out of the berries and insert them under the bark flaps which should be covered with fine net to keep the birds off. You need to get quite a few seeds into each branch, as you need both a male and a female plant for berry production and there’s no way of telling which seeds are which in advance.

Then be patient – as the seeds germinate and the mistletoe develops, you’ll see the branch swelling but it takes five years for a mistletoe clump to be big enough to set its own berries.

And a little known fact is that girls who refused a kiss under the mistletoe were said to be destined to remain single!

Labels: apple trees, mistletoe, winter interest

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:21 AM 0 Comments

---

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Pruning Peach Trees

Well, it’s something that you don’t really want to have to do – you want your peach trees to have been beautifully maintained like filigree jewellery, to be productive and lovely. Sadly that’s not always the case – neglect, ignorance or winter storms can all leave you with an overgrown and underproducing tree.

Here’s what you do:

Begin my removing any broken or diseased limbs and then take out any branches that are downward facing. The ideal peach tree has what’s called an open centre, so you should think about cutting away any strong upright shoots developing on the inside of the tree, leaving smaller shoots for fruit production and keeping outside shoots for growth.

You can also cut out branches or twigs that will bear poor quality fruit such as shoots that are less than the diameter of your little finger, branches that point downwards or are shaded.

Good growth is about the diameter of a pencil and a foot to eighteen inches in length – if it is more than two feet long, you should cut back one-third of the length.

That should get you back to a reasonable tree, and then, annually, you simply repeat the process, trying not to cut back wood that will fruit well, and keeping all pruning to the absolute minimum that will open up the tree to allow sunlight to get to its entirety and to give air movement for pollination.

Peach tree courtesy of runder

Labels: fruit tree pruning, pruning peach tree

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:40 AM 0 Comments

---

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Winter Wonderland of Shrubs

Assuming that you’ve planned ahead, your garden should be looking something like mine – filled with flowers, scent and colour.

No?

Well I can probably help you – what I’ve got in bloom right now is Witch Hazel Latin name Hamamelis with it’s odd spidery yellow petals, and which will continue to flower until mid January. Because this is a heavily scented plant, I cut long flowering stems and put them in a tall vase so that their spring-like scent can cut through the dusty aromas of central heating and woolly jumpers.

Both Viburnum farreri and Viburnum tinus are in fine form: farreri has clusters of small pink flowers from December to early February which are lightly scented while tinus offers pink flower buds that become miniscule star-shaped white flowers, followed by small dark blue-black fruits which appear when the flowers go over around March – both are hardy and easy to grow. Excellent for decorating table settings.

My old favourite Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum in Latin) is a classic – the clear yellow flowers are guaranteed to appear in December and remain until March and in a vase with Witch Hazel, make a blaze of colour that looks like you flew it in from the Caribbean in a private jet.

Labels: christmas floral decorations, winter flowers, winter shrubs

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:37 AM 0 Comments

---