Garden Centre

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Garden tasks for June

If you’ve got lilies in containers they will need support as the flowers start developing and adding a large amount of weight at the top of a single stem. The standard route is to set several canes into the compost around the edge of the pot, linking them up with string to provide stability. If border lilies are not supported by neighbouring plants, use stakes for them too. Remember to put clay or cane-toppers on them though, so you don’t poke your eye out! Look out for the pestiferous lily beetle too - it leaves slimy black gunk on the leaves in which its grubs are cunning hidden. If you find the beetle or the larvae, squash them!

I’m busy lifting and dividing my iris clumps. Iris behave rather oddly in my garden: every three years we get a fantastic show, and every three years they seem to fail completely one year, which means I go out and buy new bulbs, only to find the next year or the year after they all flower at once!

My neighbours are all putting out their summer bedding plants now but having made a resolution not to buy these plants any more, I am standing firm against the lovely trays of annuals to be seen in every garden centre and on every garage forecourt. I love these frost tender annuals but I’ve vowed to grow them from seed or do without, and so my home-grown lobelia are just about hardened off and my perennial wallflowers went out a week ago. I wonder if I’ll manage to stand firm against the lure of the petunias though?

My foxgloves are starting to look a bit tired, they don’t like this summer heat, being plants that prefer a rich soil and light shade, but the bees love them and as they self-seed, I can ignore them apart from giving them a bit of mulch to cool their roots, confident that they will spread and tower over the garden year after year, without my needing to do anything about it.

Foxglove courtesy of foxypar4

Labels: foxgloves, iris, lily, lobelias, petunias

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:16 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, May 31, 2008

More floral contrasts

Here’s another of my favourite pairings – and it’s one of those serendipitous happenings – totally unplanned. The iris had been in place for several years when the Californian poppies were windblown in as seeds and appeared out of the blue.

The colour combination works perfectly, it couldn’t have been better if I’d sat down with a style guide and planned it, but I wouldn’t have, as iris usually like moisture-rich soil and Californian poppies dry and poor growing conditions. So, with all that ‘intellectual’ knowledge in my head, I would never have put the two alongside each other. Nature knew better, slapped them into the same space, and for the past four years has produced this lovely show.

In similar fashion we’ve be ‘given’ windblown forget-me-nots this year, which have taken to the side of the pond as if they were a planned planting, and my currant bushes are as thoroughly underplanted with variegated nasturtiums as if I crawled in under there every year with a packet of seeds and made it happen. I don’t.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I should just watch the garden without interfering, I’m sure it would get along perfectly without me!

Labels: californian poppies, floral contrasts, iris, windblown seeds

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:04 PM 0 Comments

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