Garden Centre

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Autumn border colour

How about this!

It’s a coneflower, obviously, a Rudbeckia I’m fairly sure, because the flowers are produced in daisy-like inflorescences, with yellow or orange florets arranged in a prominent, cone-shaped head. And it’s yet another autumn surprise because although I did plant some coneflowers given to me by a neighbour, over eighteen months ago, they did nothing at all last year so I’d assumed they weren’t viable seed and suddenly here they are!

How do other gardeners deal with this kind of thing – you get given seeds or cuttings or bulbs and you put them in where you want them, then nothing happens so you plant something else and both things come up at once! Is it just me being overly impatient or does it happen to other people too?

Anyway, Rudbeckias are lovely at this time of year as they don’t look bedraggled as so many autumn flowers can do, and I prefer them to the Japanese anemone, which is pretty but rather fragile looking, while I like my autumnal borders as robust as possible. And yes, those are snail-eaten nasturtiums below the blossom - they seem to be having an Indian summer all of their own, those sturchums!

Labels: coneflower, nasturtium, rudbeckia

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:23 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, October 26, 2009

Asters or Michaelmas Daisies

I have Asters in my garden. Apparently you’re only supposed to call them Michaelmas Daisies if they are Aster novi-belgii which is news to me, as I thought the two terms were interchangeable!

It’s an old-fashioned flower, the aster, which means star from the shape of the petals, but it’s a great one for the autumn border if you don’t let the plant succumb to mildew. That means dividing clumps with a spade, discarding the old dormant sections from the centre every second year – this stops them getting overcrowded in the heart of the plant. It also means mulching to keep the moisture at the roots and spraying with a fungicide as soon as you see the first hint of mildew. I think the taller ones are less prone to the problem, perhaps because they are naturally more open, but they do tend to need staking.

I thought I’d taken all mine out, but two clumps have suddenly appeared, or reappeared, so perhaps they’ve come from seed. Anyway, I’m quite happy with them, although they are the bog-standard Michaelmas, not one of the more elegant forms, as they are filling in a gap left by a lobelia that got mown down by the dogs and never recovered and yet another grass that I’m going to take out as I’m just not keeping up with trimming off the seedheads and the garden is becoming a pampas as a result!

Labels: aster, autumn border, autumn colour, michaelmas daisy

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:03 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Autumn trees – sorbus and maple

The sorbus, or rowan, is a tree with a long history in European folklore. Long believed to have magical properties, it is said to protect against evil spirits. It’s also highly practical as its dense wood was always popular for walking sticks and it is said that druid staffs were traditionally made out of rowan wood. It was also carried on ships to avoid storms and planted on graves to stop the dead walking.

The fruit is popular with birds, so it’s a great tree to plant if you want a wildlife garden – the red berried variety is easiest to grow but you can have golden or even white berries (actually they start pinkish and become white as they age) and all are equally palatable to wildlife, although they shouldn’t be eaten raw by humans as they can upset the digestive system, although once cooked they are fine.

In autumn this tree really comes into its own with its neat oval symmetrically placed leaves and bright clusters of berries, it looks neat and cheerful and because many varieties of sorbus are very small indeed, there’s a tree that will work for even the smallest garden. I particularly favour the white berried version alongside Acer Trompenburg because the colour combination of the maple near the sorbus is utterly gorgeous.

Labels: autumn trees, maple, sorbus

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:26 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, October 19, 2009

Autumn features - bark

At this time of year, as the leaves fall there can be a lack of interest in the trees you’ve planted, but some have gorgeous bark that make it really worthwhile growing them just for their autumn effect.

Lots of people are familiar with the acer griseum, which is also known as the paper bark maple. It has an outer layer of bark that peels back in papery or onionskin layers to reveal a bright coppery inner bark. The leaves are also a copper or bronze colour in spring and turn red or flaming orange in autumn.

A particular favourite of mine, although it requires a bigger garden is the paper-bark birch which has a ghostly white bark that actually gleams in the dark and peels to reveal even more luminous layers of white beneath. It also has pretty golden autumn leaf colour.

Another lovely autumn-barked tree is the sorbus aucuparia which has the appearance of a traditional mountain ash apart from its gorgeous coppery autumn trunk colour.

All three can be underplanted with autumn crocus, excitingly known as naked ladies, which spring out through the autumn leaf litter, as long as there is enough light, to give a show of pink, white and bright magenta.

Acer bark courtesy of wlcutler at Flickr

Labels: acer, autumn colour, autumn crocus, paper bark acer, paper bark birch, sorbus

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:33 AM 1 Comments

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Thursday, October 15, 2009

Pyracantha

Sometimes when I’m out and about I see something in a garden that makes me stop and catch my breath. I pride myself on my orange-berried pyracantha, which I team with bright pink nerines for a shocking colour contrast. I used to have a red pyracantha but it would be stripped of berries by the starlings by the end of October, so I invested in the orange one, which is much less popular with birds and retired the red one to the area around the pond where feathered fiends can pick off the berries to their heart’s content without ruining the view from my kitchen window.

It’s said that when the shrubs bear many winter berries, we’re in for bad weather, so this year is going to be particularly hard on wildlife, if this shrub is anything to go by – as I said, I pride myself on my pyracantha but this one leaves it standing – against an autumn blue sky it was positively dazzling.

Labels: autumn shrubs, pyracantha

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:41 AM 2 Comments

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Thursday, October 8, 2009

After the rain

The nerines have held up, as they nearly always do – in fact they prefer cold and wet to warm and dry, and the Pyracantha looks great, but most of the rest of the garden is looking very much the worse for wear.

The pond is literally brimming over – the water is right at the lip of the liner and the marginal plants are not so much marginal as sub-aqua, right now! If the water doesn’t drop a little by Sunday I shall have to do some bailing out, because otherwise too much of the soil nutrients will be washed into the water and that’s bad for the fish as well as the insects that live at the pond bottom.

An awful lot of leaves from the apple tree have ended up in the water too, and I’ve been fishing them out (ineptly) with the fish net whenever I walk past the pond, or they will rot down and add to the debris at the bottom of the pond. I can’t help wishing that we didn’t have such a big, deep, ugly pond – why on earth did the previous owners of our house decide to have a pond that’s nine feet long and six feet deep? And why did they pile all the earth up behind it to make a monumental mound like a buried VW Beetle? And why didn’t I get ruthless with it when we moved in 11 years ago?

As it is, the bamboo that are planted on the mound are loving the rain and their position and are now trying to block out the sun, so as soon as its dry enough I shall have to go out and cut them down to ground level too. At least they make great pea sticks for next year.

Labels: garden bamboo, garden rain, nerines, pyracantha

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:24 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, October 5, 2009

Plants that look good in the rain

I think there should be a rule in garden centres that they must display plants as they would look after several days of heavy British rain. It’s amazing how often we buy something that then degenerates into a soggy brown mass in the middle of the border.

Most plants can cope with a couple of days rain, but when we get it for seven or ten days in a row, as we often do in March and October, the garden can end up looking pitiful. Not only that, but plants that are prone to mildew will seem to recover from their semi-drowning, only to succumb again to the nasty grey growth that appears from ground level and seeps under every leaf before crawling up stems.

One plant that I love in my rainy garden is the catmint family – they don’t mind some wet soil as well as a good soaking from above, and they are still going strong into October

Any plant that comes from the rainforest will do well in our October rains, although probably not so well in March as they are used to a more congenial temperature along with their rain – but if you don’t like planting non-natives, you’re rather limited: ivies always look good, some of the large pond marginals will still be giving good service at this time of year – such as the cardinal lobelia, and spindles will always look sparky, even in a deluge.

Labels: catmint, ivy, lobelias, plants for rain, spindle

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:37 AM 3 Comments

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Thursday, October 1, 2009

October garden tasks

This month is all about:

Planting my spring bulbs and deciding if I’m going to plant any new shrubs or perennials as this is the right time to get them in the ground – not too hot but before the first frosts so that they can get their roots down and the soil settled before zero temperatures can strike through the disturbed soil to kill their roots.

• Moving a couple of more tender plants into the unheated greenhouse so that they can be safe if we get an unseasonally early frost.

• Finishing deadheading and pruning and getting all the material into the compost heap so it has a few weeks of reasonable warmth to begin to rot down before the cold weather puts aerobic activity on hold.

• Cleaning the pond – my least favourite task. We don’t clean, exactly, because we have a mature eco-system, but we cut back the growth around the pond margin and then decide if we need to scoop muck from the bottom of the pond which is a very deep on. Normally we don’t take more than a quarter of the detritus from the pond floor in any given year because it contains lots of microbial life and insect larvae that help to keep the pond alive.

• Himself will mow the lawn for the last time – hurrah!

• Giving a last feed of fertiliser to our winter flowering and early spring flowering plants so that they are fully equipped to give us a great wintry show.

And, of course, staring at my beautiful pink nerines ...

Labels: garden ponds, nerines, october garden tasks

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:12 PM 0 Comments

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