Garden Centre

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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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Hot stuff and colour issues

Blazing June? Not where I live! The past week has been gifted with intermittent sunshine and torrential showers, with muggy heat but grey skies that have stopped the garden showing its full June glory. However, plants with hot colours grouped together make little bonfires of brilliance in the garden, and here you can see a fig tree that's trained to grow along the fence, fronted by an outdoor dracaena (the red palm in the background) fronted by kniphofia – better known as red hot pokers – fronted in turn by the fiery beauty of a papavar orientale or oriental poppy.

In other parts of the garden we have cooler collections; like white arum lilies and pale violet iris near the pond, flanked by variegated pond grasses and with lower growing clear blue forget-me-nots in front. And in other parts still, powerful contrasts give drama – purple iris and bright orange Californian poppies or clear yellow St. John’s Wort sitting alongside a blue ceanothus that shines like its common name – Californian lilac.

Using colour to create effects is useful, particularly in Britain’s changeable climate when we can’t rely on endless blue skies to provide the backdrop for our plants and structures. Plants aren’t the only way, however, you can use paint to change the effect of light and warmth in the garden or even use planters and pots to provide a focus of colour: black is dramatic and somehow rather oriental, silver is modern, adds light and supports the use of highly structural plants like topiary, while terracotta is warming and traditional and leads to an impression of Greek, Roman or even Egyptian influences.

Using colour requires us to be ruthless though – there’s very little point having a paisley swing set, floral cushions, tangerine coloured loungers, blue picnic-ware and a tartan rug if we want to create a coherent impression! Thinking ahead to keep our accessories either neutral (British Racing Green, for example, goes with everything!) or in line with our major design themes is essential. For an oriental garden, think of red wood, black as a good colour for fabrics and lots of green. For a modernist garden, link silver and aluminium to clear blue or purple and think about square designs and lots of light. For that traditional Mediterranean impression aim for rustic furniture styles, neutral fabrics with a lot of texture or those with bright ethnic patterns and chunky irregular glassware and blue and white glazed plates and pots to remind us of those wonderful old-fashioned urns and ewers hand-made by potters in ancient days.

Labels: garden flowers, garden tasks, garden tips, kniphofia, papavar orientale

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:43 AM 2 Comments

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Saturday, June 9, 2007

Garden Designs; the good the bad and the ugly

As I travel, I often come across imaginative gardens, or, alternatively, throwbacks to a previous age. It’s quite astonishing how easily one can date a garden by the plants in it and the layout. Decking, for example, will mark the first decade of the new millennium, while the big 1950s trademark was the conservatory. The swinging sixties didn’t just bring free love and mini-skirts, they were also the zenith of the raised rock garden (if you walk into a garden when the flowerbeds rise to about waist height and are studded with granite, you can bet that garden was built in the 1960s. So, in the interest of good garden design, I’ve been clicking away at the gardens I pass to bring you some of the nicest, nastiest and most thought provoking.

Here’s my first find – a garden just down the road from me. It’s an interesting take on the classic formal garden, remodelled for the tiny suburban frontage. The standard box hedges have been laid out in a formal design and there are two classic trees, cut to spheres – a feature that normally flanks a doorway – here nearly adjusted to flank a bay window. There’s an ivy mound in the centre of the formal knot garden; ivy mounds are common in grottoes and wildernesses but not usually seen in formal spaces, and the urn, which in a stately home would have the coat of arms (known as the armorial bearings) of the aristocratic family, and would normally contain a cascading plant, is here housing a nice spiky succulent which offers a good contrasting shape and texture to the dense rather fidgety leaves that make up the rest of the display.

It’s a really imaginative and well planned space – the maintenance will be quite time consuming, but perhaps not much more so than in a front garden with grass and a flower border – I would imagine that the people who live here are used to people stopping and admiring their frontage, because formal gardens always attract attention, so this is not a style to adopt if you don’t want folk hovering outside your house. On the other hand, this is certainly an all year round winner, because formal gardens in winter are spectacularly lovely, especially when coated in snow.

Labels: formal garden, garden design, garden makeovers, garden tips

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:45 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Knowing what you're doing

If you plan to garden outdoors and grow anything more than grass, you need to have a basic understanding of the conditions of your plot. This understanding includes:

1 The condition of the soil
2 The light, wind force and direction and temperature throughout the year
3 What grows well locally.

And ideally should also encompass what’s grown in the soil before you arrived. This last can be a tough one to find out and isn’t essential, but the other three are.

Let’s assume you want to grow potatoes, calla lilies and heathers. Well, you’re in trouble for a start because potatoes like loose, well-drained soil high in organic matter, as do callas, but your heathers will demand light, slightly acid soil and a cool, moist climate, so something has to give way! Trying to grow too many plants with varying and competing demands is one way to wear yourself out and achieve nothing – I’d either put those heathers in pots, where you can give them special ericaceous compost, or find something else that will harmonise with your overall garden planting.

To know your soil you have to look at it in more than one part of the garden, at more than one depth, and at different times of year. For example, at the bottom of my plot, the original owner had glasshouses and I’m forever digging up bits of her footings and foundations. Laying a lawn over that kind of rubble would result in bare patches, so I’ve chosen to pave it and put in perennial shrubs whose roots will cope with the occasional half-brick or bit of concrete. Once you know where your soil is rich and poor, waterlogged or free draining, you need to turn it. Turning the soil reveals what’s underneath, aerates it so that bacteria and worms can do their job of enriching it and breaks up clods that are anaerobic which means they don’t allow water or nutrients to penetrate easily and so are an inert on non-growing medium. I’m very fond of kit like this, which allows lightweight gardeners like myself to turn the soil without killing ourselves. And once the soil is turned, allow the weather a chance to break up those clods and lumps before you begin planting.

Labels: garden tasks, garden tips, garden vegetables, garden-tools

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:11 AM 2 Comments

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Thursday, May 24, 2007

When Size Matters

Those are supposed to be miniature summer Savoys. In other words, you should be looking at some small, tightly-packed cabbages, a bit bigger than a cricket ball, but not much. As you can see, that’s not what we’ve got! They are still nice cabbages, but they haven’t formed hearts and they seem likely to continue growing until they come up to my knees and are as big as footballs.

Because of this unexpected growth, we’ve had to lift the mesh lid, because the snails were just using it as a convenient browsing system, crawling out onto it to munch on the leaves as they pushed the mesh up. They actually have less chance to eat the cabbages without the lid, because they have to crawl up the outside of the plant and traverse the tough outer leaves to get to the tender inner ones, instead of picking the best leaves to eat by zooming across the mesh as they were until a couple of days ago.

Here’s what we did wrong:

Germinated the seed too early
Put the plants in a soil that was too rich.

But at least they haven’t bolted, which would have been rather sad.

It’s a good problem to have, in a way, better too big than too small, as long as there is still a real flavour to the crop, but it’s something to remember for next year. We haven’t grown cabbages here before, and next year I think we’ll start with the full size plants anyway and firm them in much harder in poorer quality soil.

The mesh wasn’t to keep snails out (obviously) but a Falco preventative. That’s Falco in the bottom left corner: the Cairn who eats everything. Actually, not absolutely everything. He can’t be bothered with cabbage for example, and lettuce without salad dressing is not worth the effort, but he’s got his eye on the carrots next to the cabbages now that I've had to lift the mesh, and as soon as they are big enough, he’ll dig them up and eat them! We have a tayberry at the bottom of the garden, and every year he eats every berry he can, and I find the bush is denuded of fruit, even to the point of his being able to reach the bottom half of some fruit but not the top, so he nibbles them and leaves the top half of each fruit hanging just out of reach!

Labels: garden tasks, garden tips, garden vegetables

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:13 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, May 11, 2007

Spring in is the air ...

But water is on the ground! What happened to the sunshine? A couple of days ago we were basking, now we’re floating!

So this might seem like a very odd time to be inviting you to consider hoses and accessories but on the other hand, this is the perfect time to do some of the fundamental things relating to water that will improve your garden no end.

First, walk around your garden and see where the water is pooling and gathering – if it’s on the flowerbeds, those are the places that need to be built up, or have the soil improved to give better drainage. Apart from anything else, water that falls regularly on your precious plants will damage their growth and can kill them. If rather than having problems with your flower beds, you find the water is collecting on the paths or patios, decide whether you need to relay those areas on sand, and slightly elevated, or just buy at mop or squeegee to push the water out of the way whenever this happens.

Second, look at where rain water drips and descends – you can consider placing water butts in these areas for use in later, drier periods, or you can run guttering along areas that drip, like sheds, garages and gazebos to collect the water and direct it into butts.

We all know that rainwater is much better for our plants than tap water, and of course it’s better for the environment if we recycle this gift from the skies instead of using mains water which depletes the reservoirs and leads to – yes, you’ve guessed it – hosepipe bans! You can get systems that run rainwater through pumps so that it is under pressure and can be used in a variety of ways or just use drip irrigation to water your garden.

Finally, while the weather is so rotten outdoors, you can sit in the shed and work through the final part of your ‘water’ strategy, which is making sure your hose doesn’t leak and has all the attachments and nozzles you need. Consider getting a coiled hose tidy or some sprinkler systems to allow you to spend less time on mundane tasks and more on the valuable and rewarding ones, like weeding, cutting flowers for the house or just sitting in the garden with a long cool drink – assuming, of course, that it ever stops raining long enough!

Labels: garden tips, garden tools

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:41 AM 3 Comments

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Friday, May 4, 2007

What a difference a month makes ...

In the four weeks since I started this blog, my garden has changed considerably. Everything has grown, despite much of it being cut back in the interim, and most of it has become very much greener – and these are the hallmarks of the late spring garden – growth and greenery. Comparing this to the April photograph, the really noticeable thing is that the blaze of yellow from my neighbour's Forsythia has gone and the whole picture is basically a landscape of greens. Of course it looks lovely, and if you’re keen on words, as I am, then ‘verdant’ is the one that comes to mind, but don’t be fooled, there’s nasty stuff going on under the surface that the canny gardener will be aware of.

To begin with, there are the weeds – it’s not just the plants that are racing into new growth now; the green tips on the bay tree and the laurel are matched by horrible new rosettes of dandelions and fresh ground elder leaves. The only way to deal with these monsters is to get in there and dig them out, taproots, suckers and all. While weed-killers remove the evidence of pernicious perennial weeds, they often fail to eradicate the root, which means in a few weeks the thing is racing away again, and if you don’t notice, it’s got dozens of offspring all over the garden before you can say ‘rake, hoe and dibber’.

Then there’s all that sappy green growth. It needs to be staked up or tied in now, before the flowering season is in full sway. My broad beans are doing their best to become sunflowers, and several of my climbers have grown eight to nine inches in the past week, with the perfect weather, which is great, but taller plants overshadow those that don’t get away so fast, and can make lower or slower growing neighbours into weak and sickly specimens, so keep an eye on them.

Making more of the green bits

And all that green can be a bit boring, to be honest. As the spring bulbs go over, and the early summer flowers aren’t even in bud, it’s all rather monotonous – this is the time to look at the role of water and statuary in your garden to add some interest to the leafy green period.

Labels: garden ponds, garden tasks, garden tips, weeds

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:03 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, April 27, 2007

Problems with Bulbs

Some bulbs take over the world – as is shown in this photograph. These woods are noted for their bluebells, but even so, if this happened to your garden you’d probably be a bit peeved. The only thing that stops it happening – if you have bluebells – is the fact that their rampant spread does require clear soil (so they romp away under trees, for example) and dappled shade (which the trees are good at providing too) and most gardens don’t offer those conditions. You may find you have blue spikes emerging in your lawn or round your sundial, and the only thing to do is life the bulblets and hope the parent plant gets discouraged.

Digging up bulbs? This will help ...

On the other hand, some bulbs never seem to get going. In my garden, there is ‘The Mysterious Case of the Crocus that didn’t Flower’ – which isn’t actually that mysterious at all. Like many gardeners who try to encourage wildlife, I wrestle with the issue that the wildlife I want and the wildlife I get are two different things! What I get is grey squirrels, and what grey squirrels really enjoy, come winter, is digging up my precious crocus bulbs, all stuffed with starch and sugars to serve their flowering season, and having a good munch. The past seven years of Crocus Patrol have revealed some interesting results:

1. white, cream and lilac bulbs taste best to squirrels. Yellow and dark purple bulbs are usually left in the ground.


2. a squirrel can dig up a crocus bulb and run off with it in the time it takes me to open the back door and charge across the lawn.


3. squirrels like to sit on the fence and eat crocus bulbs, just to annoy the dogs who bark like frenzied lunatics and hurl themselves at the fence until (a) they get concussion, (b) the neighbours come out and complain, (c) I drag the dogs inside by their collars


4. a good shot with a garden hose can hit a squirrel amidships from about twenty feet away


5. if you manage to squirt the squirrels often enough, they just come back and dig up the bulbs at night

Labels: bulbs, garden tips, garden-tools

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:14 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, April 16, 2007

Tie me daffodils down, Sport (or don’t, as the case may be)

Do you do this? I’ve got to admit it looks very dainty. The daffodils in my garden are an untidy lax mess by comparison. The thing is, go where you will, and ask whom you like, everybody will tell you this is a very bad idea – looks nice, serves no good purpose, in fact.

Why? Well because it’s a question of nutrition. When any bulb has put out flowers, it will have shrunk to a tiny size, as a bulb is essentially nothing more that a warehouse holding flower-making components, when the job is done, there’s nothing left of the bulb. But we want it to flower again next year, and for this to happen, the warehouse will need to be replenished with food – which in bulb terms, comes in the form of starch. This is the purpose of the leaves, making food to build up the bulb to a decent flowering size. If you cut or mow down the leaves too early the bulb will not have stored enough starch to get it through next year’s flowering season. This is also why we leave bulbs in the ground after flowering, even if we’re going to have to lift them before winter, like freesias and gladioulus – it gives them a chance to build up their stores. Although tying the leaves together makes them tidier while they die down, it simply reduces the amount of light they receive, which means the photosynthesis is reduced and that means there is less work going on to feed the bulb. To extend the metaphor, we’ve reduced the warehouse staff to one man and his dog, who aren’t going to be much good at filling the shelves, and next spring we’ll be wondering why the flowers are so wimpy.

Regularly removing the dead flower heads, on the other hand, is beneficial to next year's flowering as the daffodil does not put energy into seed production. If you are a fussy gardener, like ‘himself’ then restrain yourself for six to eight weeks after the final daffodil flowering and you can cut off the withering leaves. For this task I use tree loppers which mean you can cut at ground level while standing up and then rake the leaves up with a light rake, no stooping or crawling around in the borders. Okay, it’s not the purpose for which loppers were created, but then, daffodils weren’t born to be tied either, were they?

Labels: garden flowers, garden tips, spring

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:51 PM 2 Comments

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