The All Seasons Gardener

November garden tasks

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:04:00 +0000

This month I’m starting my hardwood cuttings – I’ve got spirea and viburnam that I want to propagate to sell this time next year at a garden sale for a local hospice. The best time for these plants to be struck as cuttings is from November to January because they have gone dormant from this year and not begun to set the coming year's leaf buds. Cuttings should be about a foot long and have around three buds. Trim the cutting to about six inches, keeping all the buds and simply push the right end of the cutting into an area of sheltered soil, or a large pot containing a mixture of potting compost and sand. If you plant it upside down it will NOT grow! Leave alone for a year and you have baby plants.

I’m also mulching, although I don’t have too much exposed soil to mulch this year, I’m trying to get some good layers of organic matter under the evergreens where the soil will be getting starved of nutrients.

And I’m piling up sacks and sacks of leaves from the apple trees to use as mulch in two years time. Such a boring job but at least it makes for free garden enrichment!

A good year for all roses

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:12:00 +0000

It’s been an amazingly good year for roses, even heavy-headed roses like the English ones which usually only do well in dry summers because rain causes the many-petalled roses to lose their shape. Nobody could say this summer had been a dry one, but even so, the roses, generally, have done well.

And I’ve been amazed at how well the simple roses have held up this autumn – from my weekend walk I came across not just one, but two, perfect examples of why the simpler, smaller, roses are really worth growing. The first is a dog rose, and one pictures captures the whole lifetime of the flower, from bud through perfect blossom to decaying bloom.

The second is some kind of moss rose that is growing in a neighbour’s garden. She doesn’t know what its called, and says she’s had it for as long as she can remember – she’s in her seventies, so whatever it is, one can assume it’s hardy and long-lived as well as pretty!

Autumn border colour

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:23:00 +0000

How about this!

It’s a coneflower, obviously, a Rudbeckia I’m fairly sure, because the flowers are produced in daisy-like inflorescences, with yellow or orange florets arranged in a prominent, cone-shaped head. And it’s yet another autumn surprise because although I did plant some coneflowers given to me by a neighbour, over eighteen months ago, they did nothing at all last year so I’d assumed they weren’t viable seed and suddenly here they are!

How do other gardeners deal with this kind of thing – you get given seeds or cuttings or bulbs and you put them in where you want them, then nothing happens so you plant something else and both things come up at once! Is it just me being overly impatient or does it happen to other people too?

Anyway, Rudbeckias are lovely at this time of year as they don’t look bedraggled as so many autumn flowers can do, and I prefer them to the Japanese anemone, which is pretty but rather fragile looking, while I like my autumnal borders as robust as possible. And yes, those are snail-eaten nasturtiums below the blossom - they seem to be having an Indian summer all of their own, those sturchums!

Asters or Michaelmas Daisies

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:03:00 +0000

I have Asters in my garden. Apparently you’re only supposed to call them Michaelmas Daisies if they are Aster novi-belgii which is news to me, as I thought the two terms were interchangeable!

It’s an old-fashioned flower, the aster, which means star from the shape of the petals, but it’s a great one for the autumn border if you don’t let the plant succumb to mildew. That means dividing clumps with a spade, discarding the old dormant sections from the centre every second year – this stops them getting overcrowded in the heart of the plant. It also means mulching to keep the moisture at the roots and spraying with a fungicide as soon as you see the first hint of mildew. I think the taller ones are less prone to the problem, perhaps because they are naturally more open, but they do tend to need staking.

I thought I’d taken all mine out, but two clumps have suddenly appeared, or reappeared, so perhaps they’ve come from seed. Anyway, I’m quite happy with them, although they are the bog-standard Michaelmas, not one of the more elegant forms, as they are filling in a gap left by a lobelia that got mown down by the dogs and never recovered and yet another grass that I’m going to take out as I’m just not keeping up with trimming off the seedheads and the garden is becoming a pampas as a result!

Autumn trees – sorbus and maple

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:26:00 +0000

The sorbus, or rowan, is a tree with a long history in European folklore. Long believed to have magical properties, it is said to protect against evil spirits. It’s also highly practical as its dense wood was always popular for walking sticks and it is said that druid staffs were traditionally made out of rowan wood. It was also carried on ships to avoid storms and planted on graves to stop the dead walking.

The fruit is popular with birds, so it’s a great tree to plant if you want a wildlife garden – the red berried variety is easiest to grow but you can have golden or even white berries (actually they start pinkish and become white as they age) and all are equally palatable to wildlife, although they shouldn’t be eaten raw by humans as they can upset the digestive system, although once cooked they are fine.

In autumn this tree really comes into its own with its neat oval symmetrically placed leaves and bright clusters of berries, it looks neat and cheerful and because many varieties of sorbus are very small indeed, there’s a tree that will work for even the smallest garden. I particularly favour the white berried version alongside Acer Trompenburg because the colour combination of the maple near the sorbus is utterly gorgeous.

Autumn features - bark

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:33:00 +0000

At this time of year, as the leaves fall there can be a lack of interest in the trees you’ve planted, but some have gorgeous bark that make it really worthwhile growing them just for their autumn effect.

Lots of people are familiar with the acer griseum, which is also known as the paper bark maple. It has an outer layer of bark that peels back in papery or onionskin layers to reveal a bright coppery inner bark. The leaves are also a copper or bronze colour in spring and turn red or flaming orange in autumn.

A particular favourite of mine, although it requires a bigger garden is the paper-bark birch which has a ghostly white bark that actually gleams in the dark and peels to reveal even more luminous layers of white beneath. It also has pretty golden autumn leaf colour.

Another lovely autumn-barked tree is the sorbus aucuparia which has the appearance of a traditional mountain ash apart from its gorgeous coppery autumn trunk colour.

All three can be underplanted with autumn crocus, excitingly known as naked ladies, which spring out through the autumn leaf litter, as long as there is enough light, to give a show of pink, white and bright magenta.

Acer bark courtesy of wlcutler at Flickr

Pyracantha

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:41:00 +0000

Sometimes when I’m out and about I see something in a garden that makes me stop and catch my breath. I pride myself on my orange-berried pyracantha, which I team with bright pink nerines for a shocking colour contrast. I used to have a red pyracantha but it would be stripped of berries by the starlings by the end of October, so I invested in the orange one, which is much less popular with birds and retired the red one to the area around the pond where feathered fiends can pick off the berries to their heart’s content without ruining the view from my kitchen window.

It’s said that when the shrubs bear many winter berries, we’re in for bad weather, so this year is going to be particularly hard on wildlife, if this shrub is anything to go by – as I said, I pride myself on my pyracantha but this one leaves it standing – against an autumn blue sky it was positively dazzling.

After the rain

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:24:00 +0000

The nerines have held up, as they nearly always do – in fact they prefer cold and wet to warm and dry, and the Pyracantha looks great, but most of the rest of the garden is looking very much the worse for wear.

The pond is literally brimming over – the water is right at the lip of the liner and the marginal plants are not so much marginal as sub-aqua, right now! If the water doesn’t drop a little by Sunday I shall have to do some bailing out, because otherwise too much of the soil nutrients will be washed into the water and that’s bad for the fish as well as the insects that live at the pond bottom.

An awful lot of leaves from the apple tree have ended up in the water too, and I’ve been fishing them out (ineptly) with the fish net whenever I walk past the pond, or they will rot down and add to the debris at the bottom of the pond. I can’t help wishing that we didn’t have such a big, deep, ugly pond – why on earth did the previous owners of our house decide to have a pond that’s nine feet long and six feet deep? And why did they pile all the earth up behind it to make a monumental mound like a buried VW Beetle? And why didn’t I get ruthless with it when we moved in 11 years ago?

As it is, the bamboo that are planted on the mound are loving the rain and their position and are now trying to block out the sun, so as soon as its dry enough I shall have to go out and cut them down to ground level too. At least they make great pea sticks for next year.

Plants that look good in the rain

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:37:00 +0000

I think there should be a rule in garden centres that they must display plants as they would look after several days of heavy British rain. It’s amazing how often we buy something that then degenerates into a soggy brown mass in the middle of the border.

Most plants can cope with a couple of days rain, but when we get it for seven or ten days in a row, as we often do in March and October, the garden can end up looking pitiful. Not only that, but plants that are prone to mildew will seem to recover from their semi-drowning, only to succumb again to the nasty grey growth that appears from ground level and seeps under every leaf before crawling up stems.

One plant that I love in my rainy garden is the catmint family – they don’t mind some wet soil as well as a good soaking from above, and they are still going strong into October

Any plant that comes from the rainforest will do well in our October rains, although probably not so well in March as they are used to a more congenial temperature along with their rain – but if you don’t like planting non-natives, you’re rather limited: ivies always look good, some of the large pond marginals will still be giving good service at this time of year – such as the cardinal lobelia, and spindles will always look sparky, even in a deluge.

October garden tasks

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:12:00 +0000

This month is all about:

Planting my spring bulbs and deciding if I’m going to plant any new shrubs or perennials as this is the right time to get them in the ground – not too hot but before the first frosts so that they can get their roots down and the soil settled before zero temperatures can strike through the disturbed soil to kill their roots.

• Moving a couple of more tender plants into the unheated greenhouse so that they can be safe if we get an unseasonally early frost.

• Finishing deadheading and pruning and getting all the material into the compost heap so it has a few weeks of reasonable warmth to begin to rot down before the cold weather puts aerobic activity on hold.

• Cleaning the pond – my least favourite task. We don’t clean, exactly, because we have a mature eco-system, but we cut back the growth around the pond margin and then decide if we need to scoop muck from the bottom of the pond which is a very deep on. Normally we don’t take more than a quarter of the detritus from the pond floor in any given year because it contains lots of microbial life and insect larvae that help to keep the pond alive.

• Himself will mow the lawn for the last time – hurrah!

• Giving a last feed of fertiliser to our winter flowering and early spring flowering plants so that they are fully equipped to give us a great wintry show.

And, of course, staring at my beautiful pink nerines ...

Autumn Lawn Care

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:06:00 +0000

A guest post from Himself about the lawn, as it’s the one subject I know nothing about and don’t choose to educate myself on:

• Autumn is when the grass in your lawn slows down – because it is growing slower you need to raise the cutting height of your mower, and reduce the frequency of mowing.
• You also need to restore nutrients that the summer-growing grass has used up, by applying an autumn lawn fertiliser which has less nitrogen, as this is the element that makes the grass soft and sappy.
• If your lawn is compacted, you could aerate it by making thin holes in the lawn which adds oxygen and helps the grass roots grow. You also need to scarify – which is a form of raking that removes the dead grass and grass clippings that build up over the summer and can strangle the spring growth when it appears.
• If moss is a problem for you, make sure you apply moss killer before you scarify, so that you don't spread the moss around.
• Renting a scarifier, or even a scarifier and operator to save you the hard work, is a great idea as it can get the job done professionally. A hand rake with springy tines can be used to scarify a small lawn, if you push the tines deep into the lawn surface and rake it back hard. It’s extremely hard work.
• Then you can top-dress your lawn with a specialist top dressing that fills the holes you made aerating and lays on top of bald scarified areas to encourage new growth. Top-dress on a dry day and then water the top dressing in.

September garden tasks

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:10:00 +0000

The task I hate most at this time of year is rootling out perennial weeds from the lawn – when you see dandelion or dock or thistle leaves (no matter how small) you should get right in there with a sharp pointy tool (but not your OH’s best screwdriver … I speak from experience) and dig them out because not only are they a problem in themselves, but they spend the winter spreading out their roots and their leaves on the surface, killing off the grass on either side, so that if you wait until spring to get rid of them, they will already have caused a nasty bald spot.

My second least favourite task is fishing out the tender pond plants like water hyacinth so that they can be overwintered in the shed. We only have water hyacinth left now, as a tender perennial, and I’m really thinking of giving it to a pond loving neighbour because it is such a hassle to find it, put it in a big container and keep the container topped up with pond water – everything else just gets cut down to near ground level with a couple of plastic containers floating in the water to prevent total freezing over. Perhaps I’ll donate the water hyacinth and save myself a job next year!

Dead-heading is a bit of an issue – I like to leave some flowerheads all winter, because they look so lovely as they fade, but OH is rather inclined to go and chop them all off if I don’t stop him!

Last rose of the year?

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:00:00 +0000

I never know exactly when I’m going to pick the last red rose of the year. Sometimes the plant rewards a particularly clement November with a cluster of buds, but they rarely open to produce full roses, so this may be the last red rose I cut this year.

It’s Ernest H Morse, and it’s one of those roses that one ends up with as a result of something else. I wanted an Iceberg rambler to climb my apple tree and there was a special offer of two roses for the price of one. Most of the others on offer were pretty insipid floribundas but one was this deep red rose, so I grabbed it.

It has a superb tea and sherry type scent, and a single flower can fragrance a whole room. While Sussex isn’t particularly kind to roses, this one has a robust constitution that has kept it in good form over the past seven years. And while I always savour the last red rose of summer, I can look forward to the Iceberg continuing to bloom right through the year …

Dahlia Delirium

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:12:00 +0000

My neighbour grows perfect dahlias. I don’t. In fact I don’t grow any dahlias at all because instructions like this just send me into a spin: Plunging the tubers refers to the starting of tubers at the beginning of the new season. As a rough guide tubers may be started from January onwards. Box them up using some compost or a mixture of peat and sand or Perlite and place them on a bed of sand heated by a soil warming cable. Do not cover the crown of the tuber (the junction of old stem and the fatter part of tuber) with compost and do not overwater. If you can maintain a steady temperature of about 50 degrees F your tubers will soon start to throw fresh shoots.

I’m not sure I can maintain a steady temperature in my house, let alone for dahlia tubers!

And that’s not all. How about: Stopping = pinching out the central growing tip from the plant. The term stopping is inaccurate as it actively increases the growth of side shoots and thus the plant into more vigorous growth. Stopping also affects when the plant will eventually flower; different varieties require to be stopped on different dates. The middle of June would be about average.

And that’s where I realise that I am a sub-average gardener and give up on the idea. Because much as I love the idea of being able to produce these perfect blooms, the wise gardener knows his or her own limitations and not only am I not the tidy, house-proud, diary-following gardener that these guidelines require, I am the owner of two small, agile and inquisitive terriers, and there is nothing like a terrier for knocking over, chewing, jumping on or rolling on top of a prized plant. And that’s why everything in my garden tends to be robust, resilient and spiky!

September garden tasks

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:50:00 +0000

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!

A downside to gardening in autumn

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:14:00 +0000

Need I say more?

My garden is infested with these scary but necessary creatures. I know how valuable they are, how important to the eco-system, how they absolutely cannot harm me (or not seriously – there are more than a dozen species in the UK that can actually give you a bite!) but still, I have to take a bamboo cane and knock down all the webs then go back indoors for a calming cup of tea to settle my nerves before heading back outside to do any gardening.

The worst thing of all, as far as I’m concerned, is that the big angry looking wolf spiders, which are the ones I’m most scared of, seem to like my favourite corners of the garden best too. They congregate around the katsura tree which is always at its best in autumn when its candy-floss fragrance fills the air, and also spin their webs from nerine to nerine, lacing the shocking pink flowers with their filigree traps.

I’m a wimp, I know, but that bamboo cane is my best friend at this time of year!

Borders and sheds

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:19:00 +0000

Well, I’m rethinking the white border idea. What about white and purple?

The problem with two-colour borders, as everybody knows, is that they don’t look like two colour borders, they just look like any ordinary border. Unless you make them stunningly dramatic like green and black, for example, they don’t have nearly the same impact as a single colour border.

Himself actually came up with a very interesting idea. Our shed is dark brown, as are most sheds. He suggested that we change the colour of the shed, which would add light and colour to that area of the garden, and using that as a background, work out how to make the border more impressive. It’s a pretty good wheeze I think … except that we can’t agree on a colour!

He refuses to consider pink but fancies pale blue with a white border like a swiss chalet. I think blue would be too cold in winter, and would like a rich bright green or perhaps a peach. We both ruled out lilac and white.

So we’re still at the drawing board stage, but at least thinking about it is making me weed the border while I’m cogitating.

Rethinking the white border

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:36:00 +0000

Oh dear. Perhaps Himself was right after all, and I should have applied the 90 day rule to the white border.

The 90 day rule is one that we’ve instituted for anything (but particularly garden things) that we can’t buy out of your pockets immediately. So a DVD or a take-away meal don’t count under the rule, but a new garden seat or a holiday does count. It stops us buying big things impulsively and allows us to explore other ways of doing things – for example, a lot of garden items can be obtained on sites like Freecycle. Even if you can’t get expensive items for free, spending 90 days researching them does mean that you don’t make purchases that aren’t right for you, especially in this time of tight money and little chance to find cash for luxuries.

Of course I haven’t gone too far yet, with the white border, but today, the first day that we’ve had full cloud cover from dawn onwards, the grey light in the garden has really made me reconsider my plans. A white border will definitely add light to the north end of the garden, but what it won’t bring is any warmth, and given that I’ve been thinking about this in the four months of the British summer, ie the short period in which warmth and light are predominant, as opposed to the eight months in which warmth is rare and light is more steely than sultry, I’m wondering how happy I’m going to be if I proceed. After all, I'll be depriving myself of this kind of November glory.

I think I’d better think it out again …

Autumn flowers already?

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:15:00 +0000

I always associate my cyclamen with autumn and so it was a shock (and a bit of a downer) to walk past the border in which they nestle and find that they are not nestling in a dormant state at all, rather, they are in full bloom!

The garden does look decidedly odd right now, with the late lupins and what I am determined to think of as the ‘early’ cyclamen because it can’t be autumn yet! It’s confusing to say the least. Originally from Greece, the plant in my garden is, as is so often the case, an unknown variety that was collected from my mother’s garden in Devon. I’m guessing that it’s C hederifolium because the plants are:

1. usually the first variety to flower outdoors,
2. the cyclamen that has the classic light pink blooms with silver-green arrow-shaped leaves,
3. small.

I chose them because they have the most superb foliage with lasts right through the winter and enlivens an otherwise rather boring area under the winter jasmine which is, of course, doing its yellow best to make winter interesting just when the cyclamen leaves are also noteworthy.

Late and lovely August flowers

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:20:00 +0000

Now the reason this is such a late bloomer is my failure as a gardener. I grew these lupins from seed, but for a variety of reasons they got completely neglected in the seed tray, to the point that they were chucked outside the greenhouse door, on the assumption that the degree of aridness of potting medium that they’d endured for over a week meant that any seedlings that might have been about to emerge were effectively dead.

After a month, green shoots appeared in the abandoned tray that I hadn’t managed to move to the rubbish heap. But I’ve had that scenario before and found myself tending a tray of dandelion or chickweed so I just ignored the evidence that something was happening.

It wasn’t until true lupin leaves appeared that I rescued the poor things and gave them some tender loving care, and to my vast surprise, they have turned out just as well as the established lupins, but almost exactly a month behind, which is just about the length of time they spent on the rubbish heap …

White border update

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:26:00 +0000

I’ve been marking out the plants that could be moved from other places in the garden to create a white border and thinking about the cuttings I could take from friends’ and neighbours’ gardens to keep the cost down, although that would mean the border wouldn’t look like anything much for quite a while.

Instant impressions could be created with bulbs – I have white alliums and white flowering garlic chives as well as fritillaries that could be divided immediately and put into place. Then there’s a white hellebore that could be moved to the border and it already contains a white-flowering tinus, so the hellebore and tinus would give a good start early in the year when there isn’t much colour.

Summer is a bit of a problem though. I know where there’s a white-flowering hydrangea that needs a new home, but I’m not terribly keen on hydrangeas, as they do tend to take over and their leaves are not exactly pretty. White flowering shrubs, apart from rhododendrons and azaleas, are not that common. I could choose a white hebe, because they are very cheap to buy, but I already have three hebes in the garden and I’m not sure I want more. A syringe would be lovely but I don’t think it would cope in the border which is okay in summer but very cold in winter.

Still, bulbs and hellebores are a start, and if I get cracking, I shall have begun redesigning the border before Himself works out what I’m up to!

Bamboo or beast …

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:51:00 +0000

We have some bamboo in the garden – it’s supposed to be black bamboo, but it doesn’t look like the photograph – that was taken at Borde Hill Gardens, where they have the space (and the gardeners) to cope with bamboo.

I know there’s a high chance that our black bamboo will run amuck – any non-native plant can become an insane invader of other plants’ space, if it takes a liking to the climate and conditions.

These monopodial bamboos spread by underground rhizomes and can cover immense distances and, because they are interconnected to the parent plant, they can be almost impossible to kill off – containment is the answer – because the rhizomes don’t grew deeper than 18 inches, it’s best to give them a nice plastic edging of that depth to keep them to a set area.

Unfortunately we didn’t know that when we planted ours! I wonder if it will look like the Borde Hill plant one day?

Sensory Gardening

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 12:31:00 +0000

I am lucky enough to have all my senses in working order, although Himself might not agree – he says I have intermittent deafness, especially at plant sales when he asks where, exactly, I’m thinking of putting the gigantic plant I’ve just purchased …

Anyway, not all my friends are as lucky, so I’ve always had a tendency to plant with the idea of blindness, particularly, in my mind and that means planting things that are interestingly textured (and not spiky or toxic) at the front of borders for hands to brush as they pass, such as stachys (Lambs Ears to those of us who love the common names of plants) and focusing on scent as a major feature of the garden.

This week my sense of smell has been blessed by lavender. I have several lavenders in the garden, including the broadleaved variety which I think I’m going to dig up at the end of the year, it just doesn’t like Sussex winters and tends to rot down in February which is ugly as well as being bad for the plant, and white flowered lavender, which is beautiful. But it is the classic lavender-coloured lavender that fills the air with scent and with bees.

I also have a pink jasmine, but it’s not really inhale-able. It’s never done particularly well in the garden and I’ve moved it three times in twelve years – now it is doing rather well, but in a location halfway behind the greenhouse and to one side of the compost bin, which is not the ideal place for picking up the fragrance, so I’m wondering whether I should move it again.

Planning new borders

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:04:00 +0000

Our rear border needs a complete replant and I’ve got a real yen for a white border. I’m thinking about it, rather than doing anything about it, just because I’m still not recovered enough from surgery to dig anything out, and Himself is watching me warily, wondering how much work this is going to involve.

So I made a list of the pros and cons which I’m planning to share with him in a few weeks time.

Advantages of a white border

1. I want one (well, as I’m the one who does most of the domestic gardening, it’s important that the garden is a place I love and want to spend time).
2. The bottom border needs a complete overhaul, and if we’re going to take out a large number of plants that shadow the greenhouse, why not replant with something that would be impressive and lovely?
3. White at the bottom of the garden would add light and colour to an area that’s a bit dark and grim at present.

Disadvantages of a white border

1. It will be expensive to replant completely.
2. White flowers can look a manky (rotten and dull) when they fade
3. Somebody is going to have to dig out some very well established shrubs to make this work.

I know what Himself will say – why don’t we take it slowly, replant one thing at a time … etc. Which is a sensible, practical approach. But it won’t result in a white border! I know this because I know us, and unless I make a definite plan and get ruthless, there will always be some plant or other than needs a home, or just needs heeling in for a while and it will end up in the ‘transitional’ white border which will therefore remain just as: multicoloured!

So if you can think of any other good arguments for a white border, please let me know! If I hand over my list just before my birthday and say I’d like to start the border as my gift … what husband could resist that?

Garden visits

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 11:16:00 +0000

So, the one garden we got to visit was a very pretty town garden, recently completely rebuilt and replanted, with lots of hard features like the formal pond, flagstones, sundials and plinths and a low wall, with a small gazebo in one corner for sitting and eating breakfast.

One noticeable feature of the garden was that despite its sheltered location in the middle of the city and in the middle of a row of terraced houses, the plants were suffering from a degree of wind damage. Of course new plants are more prone to this, but even so, it was a sign just how strong and scouring the Sussex winds can be. At the far end of this formal pond, for example, is a small acer and the edges of its finely cut leaves were quite crisp and pale from sun/wind damage.

What did work particularly well in this garden was the limited colour palette: cream through soft yellow to pink and purple in the flowers, and the combination of strong structural plants and hard landscaping to give contrasts of form, especially when the sun shines – whether it would be so impressive during our long wet winters I’m not so sure, but perhaps the winter planting takes account of this by providing richer colours to lift the matt white of the paving and structures.