Three, er, maturing sisters, talk about plants and gardening and a bit about how we’ve been sisters for over 60 years. Our gardens are in England, Scotland and Normandy.
I have been in quarantine for a couple of weeks now with an impressively wheezy chest and have had to experience Christmas and New Year vicariously through E and C’s slightly competitive WhatsApp messages ‘We had 53 people to lunch on Christmas Day and danced till 2 am’ (E); it’s so hot here on Cyprus […]
So here we are, we’ve reached Christmas again, and despite our very best efforts, our gardens are STILL not perfect…(for perfect, look at Louise’s Great Plant this Month at the end of the blog) so I think we should all turn joyfully to studying our gardens with a clear eye as to what ‘worked’ last […]
Now what could you as a bona fide paid-up member of Gardeners Anonymous possibly want for Christmas? You already have the greatest hobby in the world; five trillion small plastic pots, and a jacket-pocket full of handy bits of twine. And yet perhaps there ARE one of two items for your Christmas list, that could […]
Growing up in an isolated rural setting we three young Growbags had to make our own entertainment. One of our innocent pastimes was making bird traps by propping up our father’s shrimping net with a stick, tied to a long piece of string, and baiting the trap with breadcrumbs. When an unsuspecting blue […]
Once upon a time, summer was a hot season and was followed by autumn, which was cooler and then winter, which was properly cold (back when baths were once a week; Christmas lights didn’t light up until December and no one had heard of the jet stream). But all that has now changed and we […]
We knew, we just knew that we were going to have a good day at the Great Dixter Plant Fair when we pulled into a field to find Fergus Garrett himself, Head Gardener Extraordinaire, helping to get the cars parked. Laura and I had persuaded our game husbands (terrifically useful for carrying bags) to come […]
Do you remember waiting to be picked up from school? Most parents would be there at the normal time, then all the ‘late parents’ would sweep in, leaving you still standing there until finally, finally, just as you were contemplating walking the eight miles home, yours would nonchalantly roll up wondering what all the fuss […]
Yes we’re on hedges this week. Not only is it coming on the perfect time of the year to plant them, but also they’re in the news because apparently they ‘suck up’ a good deal more pollution than trees in our cities. I like this no-nonsense approach to their role. It chimes with our attitude to […]
The end of August and all of a sudden, you notice the grasses which have been slowly developing among the flamboyant late summer flowers. They were made incredibly trendy a few years ago by the groovy horticultural guru Piet Oudolf and steadily even small back gardens were filling up with wafting groups of Miscanthus and Calamagrostis. Now, I […]
There are two ways you can achieve a last hurrah in your garden from late summer climbers: perennials or annuals. In the wild climbers rely on the support of other plants to reach up to the light so are naturally gregarious creatures, happy to mix in with whatever plant populations already exist in your garden […]
A few years ago when my sisters said that they were going to come over to France for a couple of days, I jumped at the chance to show them what I had been up to in my rather rampageous Normandy garden. In the event, they found out why this part of Europe is so […]
Still not sure about dahlias…..they were originally brought into the country as a food source, their tubers to be cooked as a culinary root vegetable and there are still times when I feel this might be their finest use. James Wong has an interesting recipe for dahlia fritters but the thought of grating the Bishop […]
I don’t really like roses ….. only kidding, I know that to even murmur any sort of criticism against this national gardening treasure is a treasonable offence tantamount to suggesting that the queen isn’t quite pulling her weight nowadays or that Adele is just a teensy bit overweight. But there are roses and then there […]
Can you remember the exact moment when you realised gardening wasn’t boring? I ask the question as I have watched young adults recently realise that politics isn’t boring when their country’s parliament is apparently an asylum run by lunatics. Nor is gardening – for me it was a comment in an obscure book that the world […]
Strong and stable: for the many not the few; politicians seem to have drawn on alliums for a number of national campaigns. There aren’t many gardens which don’t have these wonderfully architectural plants dominating their beds in June. It’s a funny thing about alliums – we use the Latin name for all the decorative ones, and common […]
Our Chelsea Flower Show Review 2017: If Chelsea Flower Show didn’t exist, we would have to invent it – otherwise we wouldn’t have a ceiling for our artistic gardening ambition to hurl itself against. Much of what you see there is near-impossible to re-create, misguided or just barking-mad – but witnessing the misguided or the […]
A few years ago the English wine industry was at serious risk of losing 75% of its multi-million pound harvest this year because a -6 frost in the south of England in the last week of April destroyed the buds. The ones above, snapped by Laura’s husband Tim, certainly took a direct hit. It was quite […]
Have you been buying plants in the last two weeks? Don’t feel guilty. Apparently we’ll spend £1.4bn by the end of the year (the British, not just you and me), but did you get them from a garden centre or an independent nursery? Look on any gardening forum – it’s contentious. Whether you go to Dobbies […]
Do you like Clematis? Of course you do! EVERYONE likes Clematis! Oh, and I do hope you are pronouncing it CLEM-atis (Ancient Greek, imaginatively, for ‘a climbing plant’), and not Clem-MATE-is, but however you say it, now is the time to get new clematis started. So many colours, shapes, sizes and flowering seasons, that even […]
Like Mole burrowing up to the sunlight at the start of Wind in the Willows, the Easter weekend will see millions of us driven by Darwinian forces to tackle ‘THE GARDEN’. It’s preternatural. It’s what we do in between complaining that winter will never end and buying a gas barbecue because it’s tipped to be the […]
Did you know the latest fad (you know I like to be bang on trend) is to have freckles tattooed over your nose? I hated mine when I was young and now that they’ve morphed into the liver spots of advancing age, they’re the reason I try to keep my hat and shirt on (mostly). However, freckles are looking fabulous right here, right now…. inside a hellebore. I […]
If snowdrops flowered in midsummer we would probably barely notice their presence. We might even find them a nuisance the way they clump up so quickly and leave behind a great mound of boring foliage which must be religiously left to feed the cursed little bulbils for next year. I can almost feel myself reaching for […]
‘Very pretty’, ‘beautiful’, ‘lovely’, all totally over-the-top hyperboles used by Laura and Elaine in our video to describe a few dun-coloured stems in Laura’s garden. Really? Willows and dogwoods seem to be the ‘in’ thing for horticultural types to be excited about in winter. I don’t understand why they get so enthused by these featureless spikes just because they’re green […]
I went over to Laura’s last weekend anticipating an omni-gossip interspersed with bowls of soup and cups of tea, but was summarily appointed to the dreary duty of pulling manky little leaves off dismal-looking auriculas. Laura does go in for this type of dainty treasure – fascinating in their own way, but more self-regarding than Donald Trump in full […]
Several hard frosts in a row have put paid to any meaningful outdoor gardening activities so it is time instead to lay down some ground rules for 2017. This year I will not buy any new plant that has already given up on me a maximum of three times – in this bracket I can […]
Indoor bulbs don’t turn everyone on (and I’m thinking of Elaine here, who’s quite snooty about them), but personally charting the progress of my ‘paperwhite’ narcissus bulbs provides a little cheery anticipation during these dark days in Scotland. What though should we be buying for Christmas? When we three were together recently we discussed what we might get our gardening […]
Do you keep a gardening diary? You really, really should. I recently found myself in France without mine, having unaccountably left it behind in England, and it was positively scary. What was the name of that unusual buddleia I had planted? Where was I going to move those monardas to? Which willow was it that […]
So you succumbed to temptation and bought a lovely salvia just starting to flower in late July and now it is still looking great but frosts are threatening and you are wondering what you should do. Salvias are a bit of a task to keep going year on year, they mainly come from places like Mexico and Africa […]
Planting spring bulbs? Just like boiling an egg, it looks easy on the face of it but has a sneaky timing aspect that can totally b**ger things up. Memories will eventually dim of my Inverewe chess board experience. I wanted to recreate that Highland garden’s striking black and white tulip bed. What a stunner – fab-u-lous x 10. […]
All three of us Growbag sisters are the products of what is apparently now considered the gold standard of tuition, our local single sex grammar school ‘Horsham High for Girls’ . We were so educationally well equipped that we could, apparently, have been captains of industry or Prime Ministers. So how is it that my […]
Optimists can brand September ‘late summer’ all they like, but the autumnal cast of rose hips, fallen leaves and late afternoon port drinking are definitely beginning to take the stage here in Scotland.With a sigh of relief you can confirm you won’t actually ever get around to making jam with the plums and offload your over-sized marrows and squashes to […]
How are your walls looking at the moment? And your fences, and arbours, and pergolas and gazebos? Are they languishing under a dismal-looking leaf canopy of May-flowering montana or June-flowering rambler roses, or, worse still, bare? Well they needn’t be – there are things you can do to remedy this sorry state of affairs, and the […]
We are using the high summer to dig into new territory. Do try our new garden quiz which sits on our site beside Louise’s Great Plants this Month We’ve also ambitiously created a Youtube channel. You’ll be able to click on our first video clip in Elaine’s section…from little acorns etc. Time was when your garden was pretty much spent […]
‘Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit beneath.’ (Chinese proverb). Well, I don’t know about old men, but this old lady has planted a fair few in her time. I really love trees. There is a huge and ancient oak tree at one end of our French garden, […]
‘Those hazy, lazy, crazy days of summer’ Really? Nat King Cole clearly hadn’t experienced a Scottish July. Depressing, particularly for anyone depending on good weather for a special event. Earlier this month gardeners in nearby Gifford unwittingly scheduled their Scotland’s Gardens open day for an afternoon of hopelessly wintery squalls AND Andy Murray’s Wimbledon triumph. A […]