Garden Centre

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Why July 15th is important to gardeners

July 15th was St Swithin's Day. The saying claims:
“St Swithin's day - if it dost rain, for 40 days it will remain.
St Swithin's day- if it be fair, for 40 days 'twill rain nae more.”

In other words, any rain on this day heralds another forty days of rain but if it stays dry, forty days of fine weather lie ahead. I don’t know about you, but I woke on Sunday morning to not just rain, but torrential rain, thunder and lightning!

Surprisingly, for a man who’s had such an influence on British horticulture and agriculture, not much is known about the chap called Swithin who was to go on to be canonised as a saint. It is likely that he was an advisor to Egbert, King of the West Saxons and we do know that he was consecrated as Bishop of Winchester in 852. On his deathbed, it’s claimed, Swithin requested that he be buried by the north wall of Winchester Cathedral, where passers-by could walk over the site of his grave and the rain fall upon it. But about a hundred years after his death, it was decided to move his body inside the Cathedral. The removal of his bones and relocation in a more ‘appropriate’ location took place on July 15, 971 – that night there was a great storm! In addition, prayers to Swithin were rewarded with miraculous cures and it was that, rather than his ability to get the heavens to open when his wishes were thwarted, led to him being canonised as a saint.

Meteorologically speaking, there’s absolutely no evidence to support the forty days theory – and in truth Swithin is only one of several European saints whose ‘days’ are supposed to be followed by periods of wet or fine weather. What I do know for a fact is that this summer has been a great one for slugs, and if they carry on at this rate I won’t have any lilies left! My garden is also full of baby snails, and although I don’t like using slug pellets, even organic, wild-life friendly ones, I’ve given in to the need to try and conserve some of my flowers from their predations, but there are so many slimy night-hunters around that my slug pellet bill is getting out of hand.

Labels: garden pests, garden secrets, slugs and snails, st swithin

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:39 AM 1 Comments

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Sunday, June 24, 2007

Gardens open to the Public – St Catherine’s Hospice at Hurstpierpoint

It’s a sad fact that my idea of a great time is to poke around other people’s gardens! Of course if you do that without permission you end up explaining yourself to the local constabulary but once or more a year, many long-suffering, green-fingered, generous-minded folk feed my addiction to other peoples’ herbaceous borders by opening their gardens to the public.

On Sunday, braving the rain and almost gale force winds, 'himself' and I set out for a tour of Hurstpierpoint, a village not too far from us, but which we’d only ever driven through. And what a difference we found to our rather unwelcome afternoon in Worthing recently! The open day combined allotments and private gardens, and we were enthusiastically greeted in every place we visited, given tons of information (one kind gentleman even went and looked up a plant name for me, in The Plantsman – greater love hath no gardener for his garden than to lay down his copy of Plantsman in the rain for a stranger!), purchased an excellent tea ('himself' had fruit cake and I had a fresh cream meringue), and bought some unusual and high quality plants which I’ll describe in detail later.

Partly because of the weather, which was vile, but partly because I’m a nosy soul and take twice as long to get around as anybody else, we only managed to visit a few of the gardens that were open, so we’ll have to go back next year. And over the next few weeks I’ll be exploring each one in greater depth. The photograph shows the last of the four gardens we visited – what I’d call a true plantsman’s garden. It’s a small rear garden, and the notable features are the intelligent and imaginative plantings that combine texture, colour and structure to give the eye a complex, but perhaps not restful, experience. To offset the drama of the plants, all the garden structures have been painted a matte green – you can just see one of the five seating areas in this small garden at the back of the photo, a gazebo with a fold up table and chairs – and have been placed in different areas of the garden, each with a clear focal point. You can see the carex grasses at the front of the photograph which soften the edges of the path, and make a nice foil to the orange and red shades of kniphofia behind, which are in turn offset by small-leaved shrubs that allow the sword-shaped foliage of the kniphofia to contribute to interest in the garden, even after the flowers have gone over.

What’s most impressive about this garden, apart from the obvious care and attention needed to maintain it, is the way each plant’s location contributes to the overall plan, rather than being a specimen plant that draws the eye and forces its neighbours into the background.

Should you have the chance to visit the ‘Secret Gardens of Hurstpierpoint’ and explore them for yourself, I can’t recommend it too highly – until then, you’ll have to wait for me to dribble out the information over the next few weeks!

Labels: charity gardens, garden design, garden secrets, garden visits, Secret Gardens of Hurstpierpoint

The All Seasons Gardener at 11:44 PM 2 Comments

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Thursday, June 14, 2007

Basic Biology for Gardeners - Dead-heading

The plants in your garden really have only one interest, much like young men in too much aftershave on a Saturday night – which is to produce seed during a relatively short life! If you let them do this, their task is over.

However, you can trick your plants easily into continuing to blossom, simply by removing flower blooms that have passed their prime, which encourages the plant to produce more flower blooms, all with the intent of producing seed. This results, quite obviously, in a ready show of new flowers. You can extend the bloom life of some flowering plants by three or four weeks by nipping off spent flowers every day. These mesembryanthemums, being guarded by Rebus the blond Cairn Terrier, would have stopped flowering by now if I hadn’t been an assiduous dead-header.

But there are other reasons to dead-head – as I’ve already said in this blog many times, annuals reproduce by seed, and if given the opportunity, you may end up with far more plants next year than you ever wanted – Californian Poppies are the worst culprit for this, in my opinion, and they can take over a lawn in two summers, if you give them half a chance. So removing the flowerheads before they can set seed means you have less work to do in getting rid of unwanted plants next year.

Additionally dead-heading diverts the plant's focus from producing seed, to putting on new growth above and below ground. This means that new shoots will often appear and strong roots systems will develop. For perennials, this can extend the life of the plant as well as improving its appearance.

Finally, dead-heading reduces the scope given to pests and diseases to creep into your garden and take hold of your favourite plants.

Labels: garden flowers, garden secrets, garden tasks, garden tips

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:48 AM 2 Comments

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Friday, June 8, 2007

Where the really wild things are ...

Okay, a little extremity today. I can't show you a picture of this, because it's not actually in bloom yet, but my wild garden is actually a bit wilder than you might think, because around the edge of my pond I planted a bog, and in the bog, I planted - carnivores!

Yeah, really - in fact there are several native carnivorous plants like sundews, butterworts and bladderworts. I grow sundews, which are pink to red coloured plants, covered with glistening blobs held on long hairs, like threads of molten glass – they are actually very pretty creatures, I mean plants! The thing you have to remember if you want to grow them is that just about all the native sundews actually thrive in nutrient-poor environments, which means wet, peaty situations which are low in nitrogen and phosphate. Give them too much soil nutrient and they die – weird but true. It’s because they are designed to get nutrients from insects and (1) the wrong insects turn up in rich soil areas and don’t land on the plants, so they starve, (2) the overabundance of nitrogen in the soil poisons the plant.

How do they work?

I’m glad you asked, because it’s pretty gory - the red hairs or filaments are more like tentacles which respond when something lands on them or the plant surface by bending inwards to trap and hold the prey in a sort of living cage by means of the sticky mucilage at their tips. Initial reaction begins within ten seconds which is not Bruce Lee fast, but it’s still quite impressive to watch.

If you’re interested in growing carnivorous plants in the UK, by which I mean outdoors, rather than in special tanks (I always think ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ when I come across people growing carnivorous plants indoors) these people are the business.

When planning your carnivore garden, remember that it needs to be nutrient poor and you have to be able to stop animals like cats and dogs trampling on it as the plants are highly sensitive to damage – it has to be nutrient poor, which may mean actually bringing in poor soil and large plants must not shade out the bog – light is necessary for many carnivorous plants to thrive, which is the opposite of normal ponds, where shade is valued because it stops algae and other nasties taking hold of the water because they breed so fast.

Not all of these plants are fully hardy in England, and there’s no real data on how well they do in other countries, so you may have to protect them (I do) with cloches over the winter nights.

Labels: bog plants, carnivorous plants, garden ponds, garden secrets, sundew

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:25 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, June 1, 2007

Chelsea!

I can finally sort out my thoughts. I don’t know what Chelsea means to you (‘blue is the colour, football is the game’, quite possibly) but to me, and a lot of other gardeners, it means the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show. It’s the biggest annual bean-feast, competitive gardening event and all round jolly in the UK gardening world, but it’s also a superb venue for picking up new ideas, for exploring trends and for ear-wigging bitchy gossip.

If, like me, you’re there on a journalist ticket, you get – if you’re lucky – one day to tour all the gardens and make notes on everything you see, and that means ending up with something very much like vegetative indigestion. There’s so much to see, so much to smell (not a huge amount to touch, sadly, it’s rather a hands-off show for obvious reasons), so much colour, texture, space, light, the sound of a thousand water features sends you running to the loo where the queues are longer than those for strawberries and cream at Wimbledon ….

Okay, back to the point. Once again the judges - that formidable bunch of horticulturalists - handed out a plethora of awards. Did I agree with them? Sometimes. I thought the National Linnaeus Tercentenary Committee garden (what a mouthful) was gorgeous and well-designed, but the Fortnum and Mason's one was just a bit tacky; too focused on ‘themes’ and not enough on plants – and their shell grotto arches were, frankly, naff.

My favourite garden: The CAF Giving Garden; Where the Wild Things Are - didn’t place at all, which is utterly bizarre to me. Based on the book by Sendak which many of us read as children or to our children, it was a lovely, imaginative and thoughtful planting; perhaps not entirely pulled off visually but really beautifully worked through – the bed of the little boy was covered in camomile, lavender and passiflora, which all encourage sleep and then there were exciting ‘dream’ plants like banana, giant elephants ear, flowering rhubarb, artichoke and angelica which indicated the ‘wild things’ that the little boy encounters. It would have got gold from me!

And once again the BBC Peoples’ Award went to a classic garden, as opposed to the somewhat avant garde ones that won the formal judging. The Old Gate, designed by Adam Woolcott and Jonathan Smith is based on a 1930s and ‘40s theme which the judge’s seem to have overlooked. It just goes to show, you can’t please everybody.

Labels: chelsea flower show, garden secrets, plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:03 AM 4 Comments

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Wednesday, May 2, 2007

National Garden Scheme

Every year NGS gardens across England and Wales welcome over half a million visitors. Most gardens which open for the NGS are privately owned and open just a few times each year. Few people realise that through this more than £2 million each year is raised for nursing, caring and gardening charities. Most of these 3,500 gardens are privately owned.

The NGS has a long and worthwhile history - in 1859, a philanthropic Liverpool merchant, William Rathbone, employed a nurse to care for his wife at home. After his wife’s death, Rathbone kept the nurse on, but asked her to help poor people in the neighbourhood. The local need was so great he bean to raise funds for the recruitment, training and employment of nurses to enter deprived areas of the city.

This was the beginning of District Nursing. By the end of the 19th century, the idea had been taken up across the country and, with the help of Florence Nightingale and the warm approval of Queen Victoria, the movement became a national voluntary organisation responsible for setting standards and training nurses.

By 1926, the service, now renamed the Queen's Nursing Institute (QNI), set up a new fund invest in more training and to give pension support to retiring nurses. A Council member, Miss Elsie Wagg, came up with the novel idea of combining our national obsession with gardening with raising money for this valuable work.

Labels: garden secrets, national garden scheme

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:09 AM 0 Comments

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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

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