June 11, 2009
Cistus creticus
Last year I wrote about keeping things in my garden ‘in balance’ by cutting back the lush foliage of my border plants at this time. With hindsight – looking at pictures I took – it is clear that many of my plants were hugely over-enthusiastic – they looked as though they had been fed on steroids.
I put this down to the fact that it was their first proper season in new homes and they were luxuriating in the newly muck-and-compost-enriched soil (that was originally exhausted and clay-ey).
They now look better – sturdy, nicely filled-out and flowering well, aided, (in currently tumbling rain ) by all the invisible corsetry that I put in place to hold them up. A year later and all that original effort and soil improvement is showing with a profusion of flowers and growth in the newer shrubs, and even the old duchesses that were here – the tree paeonies and viburnums and so on as well as the the large established trees – seem to have put on extra weight.
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Posted by Helen
May 17, 2009
That there Libertia
During a week (the run up to Chelsea ’09, my thoughts go out to the poor souls out there…) of perpetual grey skies and a nasty niggling wind, a friend (called June, ironically) emailed from southern France, with words to the effect that her garden was looking good, but then if you can’t make your garden look good in May you must be a pretty poor gardener…and I suppose she is right.
To me, the first half of May can be a bit of a waiting game which I rather enjoy. The in-your-face Spring ’stars’ are flagging: the last of my tulips are now dog-eared, juicy Dicentras are leggy and buffeted by the wind.
Of course, there are flowers aplenty – the tree paeony is in top form and it is a particularly good time for Aquelegias.
Appreciated greenery
I am particularly appreciative of my upstanding Euphorbias that seem to glow in the gloom, for that much-loved spikey, dusky-leafed Libertia ixioides (about which I wrote this time last year and which is even more fullsome now).
Almost above all though, I am enjoying the the splendid pristine contrasts of the green foliage in my borders which I plant with leafy May in mind almost as much as for the eventual colour of its later blowsey performance.
I have a visiting group tomorrow…I hope they appreciate the greenery as much as I do.
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Posted by Helen
May 6, 2009
Hold on to your hats, this may be a long one…
Crete Balls of Fire
Getting away from my desk is hard.
My weekly problem-solving column in The Telegraph gardening supplement has run more or less without a break since 2001 (apart from some jiggerypokery around Christmas times) and involves a weighty e- and snail-mailbag.
I endeavour to keep things as up to the minute as possible, and juggling the weekly deadline with other commitments and with various speaking engagements, as well as coping with my natural gardener’s reluctance to miss anything interesting on my own patch, means that traditional planned holidays are rare. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Helen
April 28, 2009
Allotment finally tamed – April 2009 (click to enlarge)
Fabulously and at long last – I have got the upper hand on my allotment.
All raised beds are built (some, to my great personal satisfaction, using recycled decking), spuds (Charlotte, Vivaldi and Anya) are up, autumn raspberries are a foot hight.
Strawberry plants (Florence, Honeoye and Alice) are doing well in their smart new home and some are even in flower, there is a spectacular abundance of gooseberries swelling almost visibly and the roses are all in great shape following their first proper prune.
And that is just some of it…
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Posted by Helen
March 25, 2009
Quite out of the blue I have been asked to be the President of a local village Horticultural Society – a purely ‘ceremonial’ role, I expect, but one that I am really pleased to take on.
I should love to hear from anyone else who has done, or is doing, something similar and hear about their experiences.
How ‘hands on’ can one – is one expected – to be? Some horticultural societies are frozen in time (somewhere in the 1950′s), some others seem to be really proactive. Most seem to have members that are getting on a bit, and perhaps seem unable to attract younger members. How does one get over this problem?
Annual membership subs are in my view unrealistically low – while the expected fee from decent lecturers has understandably risen in the past years. In my village there is hardly any link between the allotment people and the garden society. Is this typical? Comments please.
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Posted by Helen
March 6, 2009
DEFINITELY not my friend's rose
Are you a bit of a ruthless control-freak in the garden or do you just twiddle about? If you ask any gardening acquaintances they will readily jump (or tiptoe hesitantly) into one or other camp.
I have just been rescuing a Twiddler friend’s climbing roses from years of indecisive mismanagement. You know the picture: horrid gnarled undercarriage staggering jaggedly up to a just-out-of-reach 10 ft or so, the hips from last year’s sparse flowers clonking on the bedroom window when the wind blows. There are no leaves or flowers and precious little new green growth visible down below, and the lone shoot that started to make its way into the world last summer was shamefully cut off because it was either a ‘a sucker wasn’t it?’, or had ‘started going the wrong way’.
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Posted by Helen
March 2, 2009
Slugs are a nuisance
Hello, I’m back…
Somehow I lost enthusiasm for sharing my thoughts. It all started to feel like a bit of a vanity trip to nowhere. However, Spring is here etc. etc… I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been enjoying several good gardening days on the trot.
I absolutely adore this time of year – quite apart from the obvious morale-boosters of the rapidly expanding driftlets of crocuses and snowdrops under the leafless trees, first thing each morning I wander at a snail’s pace around the garden, thrilled to see new rashes of welcome tiny seedlings (of poppies, fox gloves, primulas in the little bog garden) and the little green noses of emerging perennials and late spring bulbs.
As I go I pinch up little colonies of weeds – bitter cress and willowherb – that still appear here and there, and scrabble around picking up the last of the winter garden debris. It all gets my complete attention and takes ages – and I find that on a sunny spring morning it is absolutely the nicest way to start my day.
Too soon for biological slug control with Nemaslug (the soil is not warm enough), little black and brown slugs are already in action and can decimate seedlings and the first shoots of some perennials. So I have put out protective barriers of copper, grit and/or sheep wool (SlugBuggers) around plants that are known favourites.
New this year is a grit barrier (apparently with a rougher surface than most and therefore more efficient) from Eco-Charlie. It looks pleasantly low-key and seems to be doing an admirable job around such slug-caviar plants as my Rudbeckia ‘Green Wizard’ that got nearly eaten to death last year.
Within each barrier I put two slug pellets to knobble any little horrors that find themselves trapped within. Yes, two pellets – that is all it takes, and you can pick them up the next morning with the corpses… I learnt last year the hard way about slugs and snails trapped within my elaborate fortifications.
Something else I learnt last year – slugs and snails don’t eat perennial Aconitum (Monkshood), so if you have to give up on Delphiniums, at least you can have some tall blue/purple (slightly later) verticals in the garden in the form of Aconitum carmicahaelii ‘Arendsii’- and it does not need all that messing around with plant stakes, twigs or hoops either since it is self-supporting.
Helen
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Posted by Helen
July 15, 2008
My apologies to holiday Googlers everywhere. This is not about the south coast of England’s famous watering hole, but about a small bit of my garden, somewhat dismissivly described by a non-gardening friend as ‘looking like Torquay‘ when it first started to evolve. If you look at the pictures you will probably see why.
I absolutely love my Torquay – it looks infinitely better than it did when I moved here just over 2 years ago.
Then it was a deeply shady area of straggly and dead grass, with some sentimentally planted ex-Christmas trees plonked into the dry, acid soil, together with a lanky and yellowing caster oil plant and not much else. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Helen
June 28, 2008
Ho Humm. Here’s yet another reason why we should shun dizzy annual bedding plants - particularly those boring little red begonias and busy lizzies (or is that bizzy lusies?).
According to an email I recieved last week, bumblebees don’t like them because they have little nectar on offer. And did you know that the various bumblebee species differ in the lengths of their tongues, and as a result their flower preferences differ?
Here’s another intriguing nugget – the native flower most attractive to most bumblebee species is Viper’s Bugloss (Echium vulgare).
All this fascinating information came, via my son (the Geek) - from his girlfriend.
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Posted by Helen
Hello! Welcome to my gardening blog
