Garden Centre

Monday, May 12, 2008

Garden treasures in May

It’s very easy at this hectic time in the garden to forget to stop and look around – and also equally easy to miss the more subtle beauties of the garden in amongst all the showy ones.

Things to look out for that you can hardly miss because they are slapping you in the eye include: Solomon’s Seal with its white bell-shaped pendant flowers, the plum trees that are at their best just as the cherries ‘go over’ and the anemones and tulips. But the things you might miss include the Euphorbias, with their small green flowers on the end of erect, somewhat Dr Who looking stems, and the blossom of the Photinia, as shown in the photo. It’s really tiny, each blossom only half the size of my little fingernail at most, but utterly gorgeous.

Photinia is usually grown for its fantastic red spring foliage, and so it’s cut back hard in winter to force the bright new growth, but the flowers are like miniature tropical blooms and well worth seeking out.

Labels: may flowers, may plants, photinia, solomon's seal

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:35 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

After the Rain

While November probably brings the wettest, darkest and most horrible days of the gardening year, as in the famous poem by Walter de la Mere (no not the one by Thomas Hood, although that’s famous too)

There is wind where the rose was,
Cold rain where sweet grass was,
And clouds like sheep
Stream o'er the steep
Grey skies where the lark was.

October can offer some nasty surprises too. Yesterday’s rain beat everything in the garden flat – the bamboo is lying down, which is not a huge surprise, but the photinia is flat too, and that is unexpected! Of course, a lot of the garden plants that have suffered were previously at least partially under the canopy of the monstrous apple tree that we cut back at the end of summer, so this has been their first real exposure to strong weather without a protective umbrella.

Fortunately we’d cut back the plants on the pond margin, or they’d all have either toppled over and bent over and spread vegetable matter across the water surface – that’s not a problem in summer when insects, fish and other forms of biological action will destroy plant detritus very fast, but in winter those fragments of leaf and seed will just sink, becoming rotten and contributing harmful gases to the pond, which can build up fast if the pond freezes over. Our timing was just about right for that, at least.

So this may be the last summery picture – my brave nasturtiums shaking off the rain.

Labels: autumn colour, autumn storms, bamboo, garden ponds, photinia, rain

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:09 AM 0 Comments

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