Garden Centre

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Garden colour schemes for May

Here’s a question for you – do you like complementary or contrasting colours? I notice that many gardens in may offer the former kind of display – forget-me-nots with pink tulips for example. I tend to prefer the contrasting colour approach: these bluebells are lovely on their own, but even more impressive, to my way of thinking, when backed by the acid yellow of the perennial behind them – and if any reader can remind me of the name of that sherbet-lemon yellow, slightly prickly, clump-forming plant, I would be grateful, as it has completely escaped my mind.

What’s happening this month? Well sometimes it feels like everything is! There’s very little time to stop and admire colour schemes, because everything is shooting up, needing to be planted out, or demanding a prune.

By now I’d usually have cut back the flowering stems of my hellebores, which I usually do as soon as the flowers have ‘gone over’ – pruning back to the base so that new shoots come up strongly for next year, but this year even the hellebores were a little slow to appear, so I’m giving them another week to finish flowering. I’m also leaving two stems of the helleborus niger to set seed, as I’d like to produce some plants to give away to friends.

I need to set some canes to support my raspberries, and also to help a new weigela get the idea of what’s required of it – weigelas are often described in old plant books as being ‘of lax disposition’ which always suggests to me that they have problems getting out of bed in the morning

And the weeds always, always, need to be hoed over, or pulled up by hand. May is definetly not a quiet month in the garden.

Labels: bluebells, hellebores, may flowers, may plants, weigela

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:40 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, January 20, 2008

Back to the winter - hellebores

I happened to be out in the garden today, and damned if three different hellebores aren’t in full bloom! Somehow, in the last few days, when I’ve been busy doing other things, the wonderful Christmas roses crept up on me.

I love hellebores, partly because they are happy to flower in the shade although they always do better in a sheltered position away from the effects of strong icy winds in winter and spring that can damage emerging blooms. In fact the leathery green leaves can often be flattened by frost, which has the advantage of revealing the downward-facing flowers, but does also leave them open to frost damage in severe weather. You can cut them for the house and stick them in a vase, which helps you see their golden stamens and the lovely interior colours of the blooms, but I always cut my short to the head and float them in a bowl of water – which really does show off their subtle glories and makes a dinner party centrepiece that convinces your guests you spent a fortune to please them!

There’s really only one downside - hellebores, like roses, can suffer from a variety of black spot that is at best unsightly and at worst fatal. Drenching the whole plant with a systemic fungicide once a month should help to prevent this, or if you’re organic, remove the worst-affected leaves and hope for the best.

Labels: flower arranging, hellebores, winter colour, winter flowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:16 AM 1 Comments

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