Garden Centre

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Yet another 'what is this?' moment ....

Except I’ve managed to find this one out. It’s odd really, I think of myself as being a pretty competent gardener – I can do Latin names and all that stuff and plant identification is an absolute doddle for me, but when it comes to the birds and the bees (and the butterflies and the moths) I’m actually pretty useless. I can tell blackbirds from other birds by their call, and I can just about tell the various forms of tit apart (don’t giggle) blue-tits, coal-tits, great-tits (I said don’t giggle) etc. Neglected education I suppose, which makes me wonder – I grew up in the country and if I can’t name common butterflies what hope is their for our urban young people to be able to recognise and appreciate such beautiful creatures?

Anyway, this is a Holly Blue – ‘The larvae of the Holly Blue have two preferred food plants. In spring, the larvae feed on the flower buds and berries of Holly while in late Summer, the buds and young berries of Ivy are preferred (odd, as this picture shows it making itself comfortable on my bay tree, another evergreen but not one of the preferred food plants, both of which grow all over my garden). The larvae are up to 15mm in length and are generally green in colour with a pale yellow line along each side and a small jet black head which is generally unseen because it spends much of its time deep within a flower bud or berry feeding. The adult Holly Blue emerges early in spring. Unlike other blues, the Holly Blue tends to fly high up around trees and bushes in full sunlight. The males can sometimes be found at ground level taking salts from dried up puddles in summer.’

An excellent site for butterfly novices or nuts is British Butterflies from which I cribbed the butterfly description above.

And this is one baby I can feel completely happy about – it can eat ivy and holly to its heart’s content – as far as I’m concerned they are both just wallpaper plants that provide a background to the garden, and to get this gorgeous blue beauties flitting about, a few nibbled ivy leaves is a small price to pay.

Labels: General, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:42 AM 0 Comments

---

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Why have a garden?

Not a lot of people seem to ask themselves this question, which always surprises me. Of course, we don’t always get a choice, we buy a house and hey presto! it comes with garden attached whether we like it or not, and we have to make the best of it, but even so, understanding your purposes in gardening can help you gain pleasure and save money.

For me, gardening has lots of purposes – including stopping me going mad by pounding the keyboard all day. One of the other reasons I garden was inspired by one of my gardening gurus – Beverley Nichols. You might vaguely remember his name; he had a column in a women’s magazine for several decades. He was a complex, often unhappy man, and a keen gardener who could write about plants in the way other people write about food or sex, making the reader want some for themselves! He had a few advantages over me – like being a much more successful writer and being able to afford Georgian mansions and gardeners to do the dirty work, but one thing he said struck me so firmly that I’ve never forgotten it. He said there was no reason for a person with a garden to be without flowers for the house, no matter what the time of year. He was right too.

I’ve made it a bit of a crusade to have some kind of flowers in the garden all year round, and I’ll be posting pictures of what’s in my vases every few weeks. But it’s not just any old flowers – I added my own twist to this claim; I want most of my pretty things to be scented too, because I’ve never really understood why people want flowers that don’t smell as good as they look. So today’s offering is a native British posy: lungwort (known in posh as pulmonaria) and lily of the valley. The former is prettily shaded in pink and blue, and the latter has a heavenly scent. And the table – well, there’s a story to that which I’ll tell one day.

Labels: garden flowers, garden secrets, General

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:06 AM 0 Comments

---

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The All Seasons Gardener’s Garden

The All Seasons Gardener’s Garden

You know, one thing that annoys me about gardeners who appear on garden programmes is they all seem to have a couple of acres. ‘Oh here,’ they say, ‘we’re building a bog garden. It’ll only be about a quarter of an acre …’

Oh yes? Most of us don’t have a quarter of an acre if you include the house, the front garden and the bit of pavement before you get to the road! As for bog gardens, that’s what we get when it rains a lot, isn’t it? Just as an arboretum is the elderly scabby apple trees planted by a previous owner, and a lawn is a partly bald patch of grass which acts as a combination football pitch and sunbathing area when the weather allows.

So The All Seasons Gardener’s Garden is a real garden – as you can see. It has a washing line and a rather sinister shed. It is yomped over daily by two Cairn Terriers and a cat with a hole-digging fetish. It has to accommodate a barbecue, a hammock, flowers, trees, shrubs, vegetables, herbs and a pond. It is looked after (or neglected) by the ASG, aided and abetted by ‘himself’ aka ‘the lord of keeping things tidy’, and ‘the boy’ who is fifteen and seems to have developed an aversion to sunlight.

The All Seasons Gardener works from home, so her garden really ought to be a shining example. It isn’t – because working from home means eight hours pounding the keyboard, with only sporadic trips outside to pull up groundsel and chase starlings out of the polyanthus. And it’s not one of those wonderful organic Edens either. We do try, but ‘himself’ likes to pour liquid plant food over everything, and the All Seasons Gardener loves her wildlife-friendly slug pellets, without which she would have no vegetables. So we compromise, like most gardeners, most of the time – and if that sounds like you, then I hope you’ll come and tour The All Seasons Garden and share our highs and lows over the year ahead.

Labels: General, welcome

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:02 AM 2 Comments

---