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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Thursday, November 19, 2009

No flowers, no fruit, November

Actually there might not be any fruit but there are plenty of flowers! The nerines are going mad and the winter jasmine and the winter clematis are in full bloom – several weeks earlier than they were last year. We haven’t had our first frost yet, which is surprising, although we seem to have had enough rain already in November to provide for the whole year.

We still haven’t managed to clean the greenhouse and with more bad weather forecast for the weekend, I just can’t see when we’re going to get the task completed. How do I feel about this? Equally divided between happiness at not having to do something so loathsome and back-breaking and tense about the fact that it does have to be done, and the longer it’s left, the worse the weather gets … I am a worrier, for sure.

Normally, by this time of year I’d be thinking about Christmas flowers and decorations, holding back some plants to try and have blossom for the house over the holidays and so on, but this year, as we have two kittens, there won’t be Christmas flowers. There won’t even be Christmas decorations! Having been through this a few times before, I know how kittens can break almost anything, how much they love shiny items and that small cats up Christmas trees look funny but can actually do themselves harm. So all I’m doing this year is getting the kitten-monsters used to vases. I do this by blu-tacking a vase to the marble fire surround for a couple of days, after filling it half-full with nice heavy ball-bearings. This means they can’t knock it over, and soon get bored with it. In a few months, when they are bigger, I will put flowers in these floor-level vases, and then as they calm down even further, I’ll move the vases onto mantelpieces, shelves and tables and hope they survive – the vases, not the kittens!

Labels: assembling a greenhouse, nerines, november flowers, winter clematis, winter jasmine

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:41 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, September 11, 2009

September garden tasks

I want to say something rather odd here, but it’s a realisation that’s grown on me rather fast in the past few weeks. If you have neighbours, especially elderly ones, whose gardens are looking a bit unkempt, why not offer to give them a hand?

This has struck me because my own garden has completely got away from me since my surgery in June. The picture is of the area around the front porch – in it there is a winter jasmine, a clematis and a holly tree, while the porch itself supports two ivy plants. Normally I prune every quarter, to keep the climbers and creepers in check, but I didn’t prune in March, wasn’t able to in June, and now we’ve reached September, the whole area has turned into a Sleeping Beauty nightmare!

I am getting it back into shape, which isn’t obvious from the picture, but I’m removing about a bag of cuttings a day and that’s as much as I can cope with at present, so it’s going to take a while. I’ve decided to take away one of the ivies and the clematis which has run rampant, and possibly to replace the holly which was here when we arrived, with something like a bay tree. That might give me less need to prune.

I’m shocked at how fast this happened, in six months I lost control of part of my garden completely, so if you have neighbours who are not coping, just an hour of your time might really make a difference to them and allow them to feel that they don’t have to undertake such daunting and demanding tasks. I know it’s a shocking thing to suggest, but if anybody had offered to help me with this mammoth pruning exercise, I’d have been grateful, believe me!

And that’s before I get started on the proper September tasks like pruning my back-garden rambling rose. If you don’t cut them back, the stems tangle which results in poor flowering. According to the BBC you should:

•Use secateurs to remove very thin, dead, diseased or dying stems.
•Next, take out branches that are outgrowing their allotted space or ruining the shape of the plant.
•Continue to improve the shape of the rose by removing about a third of the older stems. Prune flush with the ground.
•Tie in new, vigorous shoots with garden twine for flowering next year and prune back any sappy growth to encourage flowering the following year.
•Finish by shortening side shoots by about a third and tie in.

Hmm. I know this is what I should do, but what I will probably end up doing is hacking away the worst areas, tying nothing in at all and saying I’ll sort it out in spring, and that leads to the kind of problem that I’m contending with in the front garden … it’s a very vicious circle!

Labels: clematis, holly, ivy, pruning rambling roses, september gardening, winter jasmine

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:50 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Violas – unsung summer beauties

When the showier flowers are doing their thing, it can be difficult to see the smaller, more modest summer bloomers that give the garden its air of complex bounty.

One of my favourites, this year, has been the violas I grew from seed. They are F1 hybrids, which means any offspring they have won’t come true to the parent, but I still think for the subtle colours they’ve produced, it’s worth having them, even if they won’t reproduce truly for future generations.

Because they are so low growing, violas are often neglected, but they are ideal plants for some of those places where nothing else will grow. I’ve put mine as an underplanting below my winter jasmine, which is in a concrete trough on a north-facing wall – the jasmine takes most of the moisture and there is probably less than ten minutes of sun a day for the flowers to bloom on, but they are still doing a sterling job, sturdily getting five or six flowers a plant out there and as long as I dead-head, they will give me gentle colour right through until September.

I haven’t decided yet whether to treat them as annual bedding or give them perennial status – so few flowers have coped with this hostile situation that I’ve got used to planting the trough as summer bedding only, but somehow I think these violas may thrive where others have suffered.

Labels: violas, winter jasmine

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:37 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, December 24, 2007

Yule log with a difference!

Here it is; the ‘log’ is a piece cut from the apple tree this spring, decorated (with two little exceptions) only with garden products – and isn’t it gorgeous? I can say that because I didn’t create it – this particular floral decoration was put together by 'himself' who has an amazing knack for this kind of thing (he takes a lot of the photos that grace this blog too, but don't tell him I think he's good at it, or he'll become insufferable).

Let’s start with the exceptions – we didn’t grow the citrus fruit rings (although we just about could have done) or the pomegranate (which is definitely out of our league!).

Everything else you can see came from the garden:

Ivy leaves
Holly leaves and berries
Purple hebe flowers
Yellow winter jasmine flowers
Sedges from the pond
Olearia leaves
The seedhead of a garlic chive
Laurel leaves
Dried lavender heads

And the final ingredient … plain flour from my kitchen cupboard!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all readers. I hope your garden’s have been as exciting in 2007 as mine has, and that you’ll join me again in 2008, when I’ll be making New Year’s Resolutions.

Labels: flower arranging, garden flowers, winter colour, winter jasmine

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:05 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Winter flowers

What’s in bloom in your garden? For some reason, my arum lilies are suddenly having a new spurt of small flowers – although we’ve had a couple of air frosts, they seem not to have got down low enough to attack these arums, because even the smallest touch of frost browns them and they turn to slime the next day. My nerines are glorious, and they have been joined by the pure yellow Winter Jasmine.

It grows in full sun or partial shade and is as hardy as a Sherpa on top of a Himalayan mountain. It can grow to three metres tall and wide, and flowers from December to March.

Unlike many other jasmines, it doesn’t twine, so will need tying in if grown vertically. As you can see, ours is simply woven into a simple trellis, which is all the support it seems to need. The stems are quite flexible and stay green even in winter when the bright yellow star-like blooms appear. The best thing about Winter Jasmine (jasminum nudiflorum for those who like botanical names) is that – unlike the arums – it continues to flower even in the coldest weather.

Labels: flowers, winter colour, winter jasmine

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:18 AM 0 Comments

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