Garden Centre

Friday, May 22, 2009

Weigela: another shrub some people love to hate

I’m very fond of the candyfloss pink form of the Weigela and quite a few butterflies seem to like it too. A few years ago, you could find Weigela in garden centres here, there and everywhere for a couple of quid and people planted them with wild abandon, loving their fast growth rate and, of course, the huge stems of white, pale-pink or magenta flower trumpets.

And then they realised the downside: Weigela is what is charmingly called a ‘lax’ grower, which always makes me think that it’s got rather slutty habits, like pushing the dust under the furniture instead of getting the vacuum cleaner out. What lax actually means is that the Weigela will throw out a couple of dozen long springy stems, and then decide it can’t be bothered after all, and let them fall to the ground in rather pretty bending arches, with then absolutely smother themselves in flowers. And that’s all great, until the blossom falls in a rather messy brown pile, and you’re left with eight foot stems of rather uninteresting branches that bend every which way and seem to try and trip you up.

The answer is heavy pruning every year. This keeps your Weigela lush and dramatic but also pins it back in its corner for the rest of the year so you can get round the garden. And then you get the best of all possible worlds. What could be better than that?

My Weigela is underplanted with variegated ivy, which echoes the dappled colours of the flowers rather well, I think.

Labels: variegated ivy, weigela

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:31 AM 2 Comments

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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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