Garden Centre

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Gardens in Snow

It’s rare for snow to fall in Sussex, UK, and even rarer for it to settle, especially on the twinned city of Brighton and Hove, but this week has been that rarity and it’s fascinating to see how snow changes the shape and contours of a garden – no doubt Scandinavian and North American readers are wondering what all the fuss is about, as they spend several weeks or even months looking at snowy vistas every year, but me this is a quite unusual perspective.

One flower that literally stood out was the winter jasmine. I’ve raved about it before, and will do again, but this was the first year that I actually got to see the flowers against a blanket of snow: in previous years, although snow has fallen, it’s never stayed around for more than a couple of hours, so observing how the blossoms coped with sub-zero temperatures and then with the thaw, was very instructive. In fact the flowers never browned at all, which surprised me, as I’d thought that on the day the snow melted they might develop brown edges. And the plant coped well with the weight of snow, being trained up a trellis and (relatively) well-pruned. I did notice some local winter jasmine that were growing over low walls that did seem to be getting a little pressed down under the snow, but today they all look fine again.

So winter jasmine is an excellent performer in snow, and I’m glad to have finally had the chance to find this out!

Labels: garden in snow, winter colour, winter flowers, winter jasmine

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:32 AM 2 Comments

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Saturday, January 24, 2009

Hyacinths – indoor and out

If you were given hyacinths for Christmas, or forced your own in time for the day, they will be fading now. But if you have been to a garden centre recently, you’ll have found that they are full of pots of strong green shoots that will soon become the powerfully scented flowers named after the Greek youth of surpassing beauty (don’t ask for details, it’s not an edifying story!)

You can grow them yourself for Christmas flowering by purchasing special bulbs marked with the label ‘processed for winter blooming’ or just ‘processed’. They look best if you pick an odd number of bulbs, one, three or five, of the same colour and plant them to half their depth in a pot filled with moist bulb fibre. Then put the pots in a dark and cool place for around ten weeks.

When the shoots are about two inches, add more bulb fibre if needed and put the pot in a light place to bring them into flower. Easy!

And once they’ve flowered, let them die down naturally in the pot and then plant them outdoors for the following year – they won’t appear nearly so early but should continue to flower and be lovely for years to come. The like an open soil in the sun, and you need to put them in the ground in early autumn so they can get their roots down before the soil freezes. They need to go quite deep, around six to eight inches.

Labels: forcing bulbs, hyacinths, winter flowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:14 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, December 28, 2008

Christmas roses

It’s very odd, but one thing that you can rely on, or at least I can, is my Iceberg rose producing at least one flower in time for Christmas. It’s an amazingly hardy rose, very suitable for beginners and the one rose I would recommend for anybody who has problems growing other roses. Here's mine in full summer flower.

It’s sold as both a free climber or a standard floribunda and it’s the climber that seems to always give Christmas gifts. The RHS says it bears medium-sized, white blooms, starting from shapely pink-tinted buds, (which) appear very freely almost all season. Hmmm. At any season, would be my judgement.

In my life I’ve had three Iceberg roses in three houses, two were pinkish in bud form, one wasn’t. One of the pink budding ones was lightly scented, neither of the others were. When you buy, it sometimes says that Iceberg is lightly scented and sometimes unscented – weird. The floribunda is more likely to be scented, as far as I can tell from decades of sniffing other people’s roses.

But honestly, although I think a flower without fragrance is like a dog without a tail, if you can cut a rosebud from your garden on Christmas Day, it really would be asking too much to have it scenting the house as well.

Labels: iceberg rose, RHS, winter flowers, winter rose

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:30 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Winter Wonderland of Shrubs

Assuming that you’ve planned ahead, your garden should be looking something like mine – filled with flowers, scent and colour.

No?

Well I can probably help you – what I’ve got in bloom right now is Witch Hazel Latin name Hamamelis with it’s odd spidery yellow petals, and which will continue to flower until mid January. Because this is a heavily scented plant, I cut long flowering stems and put them in a tall vase so that their spring-like scent can cut through the dusty aromas of central heating and woolly jumpers.

Both Viburnum farreri and Viburnum tinus are in fine form: farreri has clusters of small pink flowers from December to early February which are lightly scented while tinus offers pink flower buds that become miniscule star-shaped white flowers, followed by small dark blue-black fruits which appear when the flowers go over around March – both are hardy and easy to grow. Excellent for decorating table settings.

My old favourite Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum in Latin) is a classic – the clear yellow flowers are guaranteed to appear in December and remain until March and in a vase with Witch Hazel, make a blaze of colour that looks like you flew it in from the Caribbean in a private jet.

Labels: christmas floral decorations, winter flowers, winter shrubs

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:37 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, February 9, 2008

All Seasons Gardening – season’s superstars

Of all the things I can’t grow, this is the most wonderful and spectacular. The Chaenomeles or Chinese Quince is a profound garden performer – it produces large and fairly weather resistant blossoms on bare wood, in colours ranging from the palest pink through to deep red, but most fall in the apricot to salmon pink range. I don’t know why this shrub won’t grow for me, because it’ said to grow in most positions and soils, expect an excessively limey soil, which causes the common ailment of yellow leaves. Few pests or diseases affect the flowering quince, so all the books say.

On the other hand, in my garden it just doesn’t grow. My oldest quince is seven, my youngest two, neither produces more than four flowers, and neither has grown more than five inches! They are said to like a sunny site with well-drained moderately fertile soil and pruning is usually necessary only to thin out overcrowded branches when growing as a freestanding shrub. I’m going to put mine in a tub and see if they do better next year, but for now I’m reduced to admiring this specimen in a neighbour’s garden.

Labels: chaenomeles, winter colour, winter flowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:37 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, January 27, 2008

The flowers I’m not picking ...

From last week’s cold snap – this frosted polyanthus is today shining like summer has arrived – despite being touched by ice only five days ago. Today, of course, the sun is shining and there have been two bumble bees (white-bottomed ones which I’m guessing are B. hortorum) buzzing drunkenly around the garden as if it’s June already.

The bumble bees ignore the polyanthus, of course. Their favourite lurking ground is inside the flowers of the winter clematis, which then wiggle around on the plant as if they are bells being rung, and the bees also visit the winter jasmine, but they ignore everything else that’s in flower.

We put out logs last year for the solitary bees that we finally identified – these bees, which are great pollinators, nest in cavities in wood. In nature these are formed by beetles that live in the wood as larvae, then tunnel out as adults – so the beetles leave behind a ready made nest hole for bees and wasps that prefer to nest in cavities. Because solitary bees are great pollinators, because only the females sting (and feebly, at that, and usually only if you actually handle them roughly), because they don’t ‘gang up’ and swarm gardens, preferring to hang about on their own, I’m really keen to have more of them. It is said to be easy to recreate these ready-made nest holes. Simply drill timber with holes that slope slightly upwards (this stops them flooding with rainwater in bad weather and drowning the bee or its larvae) and watch the bees take up residence. Well, we did, but whether they bees will move in is anybody’s guess. I shall keep a close eye on the bee logs this year.

Labels: bees, winter flowers, winter interest, winter plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:36 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

What’s going on in the garden?

My list of plants in bloom is pretty extensive:

1. Five hellebores (all of them except the niger, in fact)
2. Both Mahonias
3. Violets
4. Snowdrops
5. Polyanthus
6. Jasmine Nudiflorum (winter jasmine)
7. Clematis cirrhosa (winter clematis)


I always say I’m going to pick flowers for the house, but I almost never do – not even the violets, because I have this weird feeling that removing them from the garden destroys an irreparable part of the eco-system. Now, this is absolutely not true, as the horticulturalist in me constantly points out, and many plants, the polyanthus among them, actually need to have flowers removed to produce more and better blooms.

Still, at this point in the year, when most of the garden is bleak and bare, there’s a daily excitement to going outdoors to see what has poked its head above the mud (we haven’t been blessed with snow this year) and that little bit of a thrill increases a thousand-fold if I catch the wonderful earthy fragrance of a violet and have to follow it through the garden like a human bloodhound, bent double so as not to lose the track, until I find the tiny purple flower hidden in the grass or concealed under the overhanging leaves of a skimmia or rhododendron.

Labels: garden flowers, winter colour, winter flowers, winter plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:23 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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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Hyacinths

Or, as they are known in our house, hy-whyhaven’tIgotany-cinths.

There are two reasons for the complete dearth of hyacinth around the All Seasons Gardener’s plot:

1 – squirrels – which seem to eat every bulb, just about, that I plant, except nerines, and who make a special case for digging up the hyacinths in September, eating half the bulb, and then scattering the remainder on the path and

2 – small dogs – known as Rebus and Falco, who are agile enough to get onto every windowsill in the house and who knock off any plant pot put there, or eat its contents (Falco turns out to believe scented geraniums are dog breath freshener, they aren’t but he keeps trying) .

And I love hyacinths, so I’m reduced to buying them from the garden centre every year, guarding them on the middle of the dining room table and then planting them out, more in hope than expectation, surrounded by a little grille of wire mesh (the squirrels leave it on the path) and dipped in a pot of turpentine (which is obviously the squirrel equivalent of brown sauce, just adding a little piquancy to the flavour) and watching the squirrels dig them up in the autumn.

Hyacinth by geishaboy500

Labels: hyacinths, indoor flowers, winter colour, winter flowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 11:34 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, January 7, 2008

Brilliant whites, anyone?

You need two things – snow, and a garden with a beautiful range of galanthus (snowdrops to you and me). The earliest I’ve seen these was 8 January in the Anglesey Abbey Gardens, more than a decade ago, but February is the more likely month and there are several gardens around the country that open to show off their amazing display of these beautiful mid-winter bulbs.

Top of the list has to be Lambrook Manor Gardens, South Petherton, Somerset - www.eastlambrook.co.uk because the woman who created the snowdrop gardens here was such an aficionado (especially for pure green snowdrops) that she actually has a snowdrop named after her. She was Margery Fish and the Margery galanthus is a wonderful green-innered beauty. You can see it in the gardens too.

Otherwise, try Anglesey Abbey Gardens, Lode, Cambridgeshire or Heale House - www.healegarden.co.uk, Middle Woodford, near Salisbury, Wiltshire. This garden has a special offer, snowdrop walks with an experienced snowdrop locator on the first and second Sundays in February.

If you fall for snowdrops in a big way, remember they have to be purchased, and planted, ‘in the green’, ie while they are still full of juice. Those dried out bulbs sold in garden centres have a high failure rate and really aren’t worth the money!

Labels: snowdrops, winter colour, winter flowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:18 AM 0 Comments

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