Heavenly Hellebores

Lenten roses in Lent - how appropriate!

The sunshine is bringing out the flowers and I snapped this dusky beauty in a client's garden this week. She was warming her face in the sun, as was I, while I had my lunch.

My client has pretty heavy, chalky, clay soil and this is perfect for these plants, although they also do well in my sandy garden. They don't like being disturbed, so leave them in peace and quiet to build up good big clumps.

These white ones are eyecatching too. If you buy a plant of each, you can look forward to seedlings, with flowers in a mixture of colours.

Spring is springing at last!

Had a lovely day out at http://rhs.org.uk/wisley gardens today. The sun was shining at long last and the area around the lake was looking gorgeous, with the displays of coloured stems of Cornus and Salix glowing like bonfires.

The best bit for me though, was the witch hazels in full flower in the woodland.

I don't know why but the spidery tassels of flowers always remind me of food - no doubt, some exotic shredded garnish I've been presented with at a restaurant in the past. Does anyone know what the food might be? Anyway, the delicious scent matches the delicious appearance, and there was much sniffing going on, and much mouth watering. So much so, that I ended up in the tea shop ( what a surprise) where I bumped into some old friends (what a surprise!). A jolly good time was had by all.

Who can resist snowdrops? Not me, anyway! Every year I try and plant a few in my garden, longing for great drifts of them under the trees, but they just don't like my soil. I've got the 'well-drained' and 'plenty of humus' requirements, but fear I lack the 'moist', on my Bagshot sand. It doesn't stop me trying a little pot full every year though. Maybe one day I'll find the perfect spot, for perfect low maintenance planting.

Snowdrops remind me of my childhood, and the first great picnic expedition of the year, to go 'Snowdropping'. We would pack into Dad's car and drive to 'our secret spot' in the Dorset countryside, where a hazel wood was full of carpets of white, ready for our eager mitts to pick by the handful. Perish the thought now. Snowdrops, and the great British tradition of a picnic in the car, made a treat of an afternoon out, never mind the cold.

Apparently, if you ring the bell of the first snowdrop you see in the new year, it brings you luck. Or so said Enid Blyton, and I'm not one to argue with her. (Where would we be without The Famous Five?) So maybe I'll give this pot full a good shaking when I plant it, and this time I might be lucky and might get the start of a carpet.....or a rug at least!

Armchair gardening

If you are fed up with being outside in the cold, the rain and the snow, how about getting ahead with your garden this month from the comfort of your armchair, with a nice cup of tea and a cosy fire? Take some time to make some plans for the coming season before the seeds need sowing and the weeds start growing. It will save you time and money in the months to come. It’s also a much better way of spending the afternoon, than wandering aimlessly around the garden, looking at all the mess the snow has left behind. Here’s how to come up with a great plan for the year ahead:
　
Plan your time.
It’s easy to be consumed by a huge wave of enthusiasm, as soon as the first flowers start to bloom in the Spring. This is the year you are going to 1) plant up hanging baskets all along the front of the house 2) have a bowling green lawn 3) re paint all the fences 4) replant the whole of the front garden 5) pull out every weed by the end of February……..You get the general idea. Lots of good intentions, but have you got anything like enough time to carry them through? Leaf through your diary for the year ahead and have a think about how much time you actually have, week on week, to garden. Do you have time most weekends, or is that time taken up with shopping, visiting friends and other hobbies? Have you got any periods, when you will have no time whatsoever – you may be going away on holiday or have a busy period at work. Try and decide how many hours you will have every month. Then, take a look at the time you need to maintain the garden and complete new projects. Make sure they match, or you are in for a stressful year!
Plan for low maintenance
Think about jobs that you dislike and that take a lot of time and if there are any ways to reduce the maintenance involved. Hate mowing? Reshape the lawn to make the job quicker or get rid of the lawn altogether. Hate weeding? Mulch all the borders to keep the weeds out. There are usually a few ways to cut down on maintenance if you plan ahead.
　
Sow slow!
There are lots of gaps in the borders at the moment and the garden centres are full of lots of packets of lovely new seeds, waiting to fill the gaps. But don’t go mad! Every seed sown in the greenhouse has to be nurtured, pricked out and potted on before it makes it to the garden. So just sow what you need. If you only have space for a dozen marigolds in the border, grow a dozen, not 18 or 24. You know you don’t need them and they’ll end up on the compost heap.
Veg matters.
If you are growing your own veg, only grow what you want to eat. There’s no point spending time and money sowing seeds, planting out young vegetables, protecting them from slugs and watering them, if you don’t eat them. I’ve still got a dozen cabbages in my garden, full of slug holes and looking very sorry for themselves. I spent ages keeping the cabbage white butterflies off them in the summer, but, truth is, we don’t really eat much cabbage. Looks like the chickens are in for a treat.
This is a great time of the year for paper and pencil gardening, so get some plans made now, ready for the Spring.
　
　

Berry Beautiful

The shortest day is past, the daylight is coming back and the first late winter flowers will soon be blooming in the garden. However, even at this cold and gloomy time of the year, there is still quite a lot of colour about. I walked around my garden this morning, and, as well as admiring the frost on the dead seed heads – always a good excuse not to tidy up in the autumn – there were plenty of bright berries adding colour to the borders.
I planted a boundary hedge of mixed pyracanthas a few years ago. I wanted something thorny to keep out intruders – deer, mostly – and I chose a mixture of varieties, partly as an experiment to see how they grew. The most colourful at the moment is Pyracantha Saphyr Jaune, with lots of small butter yellow berries. Despite the cold weather, they have remained relatively untouched by the birds, and they are adding a warm glow along the length of the hedge. They also looked good in the Christmas door wreath I made. The same cannot be said of the red berried varieties, most of which have been eaten. There are still some small orange-red berries on Pyracantha Saphyr Orange and some densely packed clusters on Pyracantha Saphyr Rouge, one of my favourites. They make a nice contrast, along with the larger red berries left on Pyracantha coccinea Red Column. The individual plants are knitting together into a thick hedge, with branches growing out at every angle, so they need regular trimming to keep them compact. Pyracantha is easy to grow in sun or partial shade in any reasonable soil, and, of course, it is covered in creamy white flowers in May.
The red berries on the Cotoneaster, growing against the cottage wall, have also stood up well to the weather and the wildlife. There are still plenty of large, blood red blobs covering the bush, looking like miniature rosehips. Cotoneaster are similar to Pyracantha, but without the thorns and equally easy to grow. They also come in various forms, for ground cover, growing against walls and fences and as freestanding shrubs the size of a small tree.
There are still a few of the unusual berries of the Callicarpa bodinieri to be seen. They are a bright metallic purple and you might have trouble convincing people that they are real, and you haven’t just stuck them on the bush for show. The plant itself is not very interesting, and best suited to the back of the border, hidden by flowering perennials during the spring and summer. When these have died down in the winter, you will have the surprise of the berries.
Hollies are another good berry plant for the garden, with the added attraction of shiny and sometimes variegated foliage. I found one red berry on my holly Handsworth New Silver, which is a lovely form, with dark green leaves with cream margins. As it is a female variety, it is supposed to be a good berry maker, so I assume the birds got there first, when I wasn’t looking.
There is not much to do in the garden at the moment, but it is good to have some time to appreciate the plants, which have been chosen just for this time of year. Add a few to your borders and make the most of the season.

Shipwreck!

At last the garden is re-emerging from its' fleecy blanket of snow, as the thaw sets in. In the kitchen I can hear the constant dripping from the glassy icicles, hanging from the gutters. But how I hate this in-between stage, when the garden is neither snowy perfection or it's normal bushy self.

The snow is oh-so-beautiful and oh-so-helpful to those time-pressed gardeners, who didn't quite get around to tidying away the last of the half empty potting compost bags, last autumn. It lays a thick rug over the pile of used peasticks on the vegetable plot, which were meant to be chopped into kindling, but didn't quite get there. Perhaps that is why the garden looks so peaceful in the snow - no reminders of jobs waiting to be done!

Now, in the thaw, all the half done jobs reappear, like the masts of a shipwreck in a receding tide. Their half-hidden, half-visible state seems to make them more obvious. The gardener stops to look and consider what that lumpy snow covered mound by the path is, and recognises it as a pile of flowerpots, which need scrubbing and putting away. And, with a groan, sees that the peasticks are still on the vegetable bed, and haven't melted away with the snow.

Roll on the time, when the garden looks normal again, and the gardener can turn to his best friend, the blind eye, to help him in his daily work!

The best things come in 3's

The snowy weather has given me time for Attempt number 3 at setting up a blog. Hope this one works properly.