Garden Centre

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Garden Gadabout disappointments

Well I wondered whether to write about this or not, but in the end, I decided to go ahead. Simply put, I found the supposed Garden Gadabout to be a complete disaster. We were going to visit five gardens, but when we got to the area, three were closed.

Okay, the weather wasn’t great, but surely gardeners aren’t that wimpy? If we’d visited the gardens in a different order, we would have been even more annoyed than we were, because the first, very lovely, town garden we went to had information that there were three closed gardens (although not why they were closed) and so we knew not to walk to any of them.

Apparently one had been listed ‘by mistake’ which left me completely confused, because I’d checked the charity’s website before leaving home and it was still listed there, which suggests the garden owner’s hadn’t tried to correct the mistake or the charity was too disorganised to update their website. All these gardens were supposed to be open on two consecutive weekends and we were visiting on the second, which you would have thought gave plenty of time for putting right errors.

Anyway, we were going to wend our way to another garden, about half a mile away, but soon after we left garden Number One a rainstorm of monumental proportions began and we were caught in it. By the time we’d found somewhere to shelter and wrung out our shoes (seriously, I was emptying rainwater out of my shoes within about a minute) we wanted nothing other than to get home and find some large towels.

A wash-out, in two senses of the word, in fact and it will teach me to walk and use public transport rather than driving, as my OH pointed out rather bitterly as we squelched to the bus stop.

The one garden we did visit was very pretty but very new. Now, much as I love garden design, my big beef with garden shows is that they create artificial gardens and you have no idea how well the plants will live together or what it will look like at other seasons of the year. So it was with this tiny, modern-formal garden. I think it could grow to be delicious, but it’s too early to tell. It did have some lovely little features that I will be exploring in the posts ahead, but for now, here’s a couple of views to whet your appetite …

Labels: garden gadabout, garden tours, garden visits, gardens open to the public

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:32 AM 0 Comments

---

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Before Gadabout – garden wind and rain damage

We’ve been having amazing weather in the South of England recently – and I use the term to mean that the weather has amazed, not that it’s been particularly good. Which is not to say it hasn’t been good, in patches. What we’ve been experiencing is brilliant days, with hot sun but strong winds, and torrential rain with thunderstorms in the late afternoon to around midnight, then chill winds and high cloud cover until dawn.

This set of weather combinations means that while sheltered gardens have been enjoying brilliant growth and bloom – especially in roses – those on more exposed sites have had the miserable experience of getting up in the morning to find that fragile plants and climbers have not survived the night. Lots of clematis seem to have become top heavy and descended to ground level, which might be disappointing in the short term, but probably doesn’t matter in the long term because a clematis, whether pruned or storm-damaged, will usually grow back and better, from the roots. And hardy perennials, no matter how far their petals have travelled on the wine, can bounce back within a few days, if you cut back any broken stems or foliage.

It does matter more if your climber is less vigorous, and so it’s really important to try and keep up with a thinning regime, so that growth isn’t too top-loaded and stems aren’t supporting a vast amount of leafy foliage. Remember that the volume of rainwater added to leaves and flowers (which can trap a lot of liquid) can treble the weight of a plant and if your climber only has a few thin stems, it may just not be equal to the task.

I’m really hoping that none of the gardens I’m visiting tomorrow have suffered this fate, but I’m sure they’ll have found clever ways to recover if they have.

Labels: clematis, garden damage, garden gadabout, garden rain, garden wind

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:25 AM 0 Comments

---

Thursday, July 16, 2009

What is this grass?

Next weekend is my local Garden Gadabout for charity – around a dozen local gardeners will open their otherwise secret spaces to the general public, charging a small fee to raise funds.

I always come away not only awash with tea (usually a little too weak for me) and cake, but carrying plants and seeds and filled with brilliant ideas – most of which don’t get put into effect because they are overly ambitious and/or impractical in our circumstances.

In advance of this jamboree, OH and I headed out to a local municipal garden yesterday, to see their plantings. Usually there are two areas of interest in this particular garden at Tilgate: the intensively managed borders in the show gardens, and the allotment garden that is planted and maintained by the local allotment association. The former are usually fairly packed, fairly formal, fairly traditional English borders, the latter can be fascinating – a mixture of flowers and plants, shrubs, fruit trees and other bits and bobs, always a lot better looking than our own allotment!

This time I was surprised, in the formal garden, to discover a black grass, or possibly a member of the teasel family, that was planted in some urns. I managed to obtain some seed, as it was obviously ripe and blowing away from the flower-heads, but I’m wondering when and how to plant, as my chance-grabbed seed is very limited in amount. And can any reader identify this plant for me, as I have never seen it before? It was planted with begonias and geraniums so I’m assuming it likes warm relatively dry conditions with well-draining soil and shelter from wind, but apart from that I’m really guessing and would love any help you can give.

And next week I hope to have photos of the best kept secrets of Sussex gardens to share with you ….

Labels: formal borders, formal garden, garden shows, garden visits, growing from seed, plant identification, saving seed, Tilgate Park

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:05 AM 2 Comments

---

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Plants For A Future and from the past

Plants For A Future is a wonderful database which I use a lot when I’m choosing new plants for the garden, as it gives me fascinating information about the culinary, medicinal and wildlife value of my purchases. Who knew, for example, that the beautiful Amaranth Caudatus, commonly called Love-Lies-Bleeding, is actually used as a grain crop when it provides great levels of protein, or that the red varieties of the plant can be used to produce a red food colouring?

But today I’m not so much thinking about plants for a future as plants from the past. This common or garden hardy fuchsia was grown from a cutting in my tiny London garden where its parent plant put on a brave show every summer, fighting off the dust and poor soil of a city terraced street to please me and all my neighbours. That parent plant was itself grown from a cutting taken from my grandmother’s garden in Torquay, Devon, in the days when she was a hale and active woman, who in her eighties still got up on a ladder and painted the guttering around her bungalow!

Today she’s in her late nineties and while she’s still active she’s no longer hale. She lives in a residential home, because she has senile dementia, and while she is a happy person, she doesn’t know most of her family any more. So the plant has bittersweet memories for me, and this year—when it seems to be blooming more wonderfully than for many years—it’s particularly lovely to think that I can take cuttings from it, for my currently teenage son to grow when he gets his own home and that this plant from our past will become a plant for his future too.

Labels: amaranth caudatus, hardy fuchsia

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:15 AM 0 Comments

---

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 2 Comments

---