August is a great time to take stock of your borders and containers. Right now, they should be in full swing; a riot of colour! But in a couple of months they will begin to fade and so it’s worth planning ahead now. Make sure that you have some plants waiting in the wings if you want to keep your display looking fresh and colourful.
Here are some top tips for extending your display well into autumn.
Continue reading “Top Tips for Extending Garden Colour into Autumn.”
Have you spotted any butterflies lately? If your garden is a haven for them then why not take part in the Big Butterfly Count? This annual event runs from Friday 17 July and Sunday 9 August this year, so you still have plenty of time to get involved.
It’s a simple but effective way of testing the state of the UK’s butterfly populations. People up and down the UK will be stepping outside for 15 minutes with a cuppa and an identification sheet, downloaded from Butterfly Conservation’s website https://bigbutterflycount.butterfly-conservation.org/ . Choose a sunny spot to sit and record how many of each different species you can spot in your garden.
Continue reading “Join the Big Butterfly Count 2020”
Ask any gardener what’s on their list of must-have tools and chances are they’d say a trowel, fork and secateurs. Good gloves and stout boots also often get a mention but there’s something else I’d add to the gardening essentials – a notebook.
Keep a journal or notes on your garden. It’s one of the best ways to plan ahead and remember exactly what you’ve done.
Combine it with a camera and you can keep track of all those gardening jobs and flashes of inspiration. This helps you improve your plot every season and keep a detailed history of its development.
Continue reading “Taking notes in the garden”
Wintergreens, or evergreen perennials, are a valuable group of perennial plants that add texture, shape and colour to our borders during the dark days of winter, long after the flower-filled days of summer are over. These plants have so much more to offer to our gardens than their flowers because they don’t die back in winter like herbaceous perennials.
‘Wintergreens’ are not necessarily green, despite what their name suggests. Think glaucous blues, silvery greys, sumptuous deep purples, uplifting yellows, gentle tracings of pale variegation, and glowing red-edged foliage. The palette is surprisingly varied, so winter borders need never be dull.
Continue reading “Growing wintergreen perennials”
For summer spectacle and scent it’s hard to beat the rose, and few gardeners feel their plot is complete without at least one.
The colour range is vast and with everything from rampant ramblers to dainty patio roses, there’s something to suit every size of garden.
While they may be the stars of summer, between November and March is the best time to plant. Bare root roses are not only cheaper than potted plants, they also establish more easily. Continue reading “How to choose and plant roses”
