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.
Okay, so if you’re wondering what to do in the garden at Christmas, here are our 12 tips to make the festive season special and absolutely none of them involve queueing, alcohol or recipes for vegan sausage meat. 1. Bring your garden birds close up. Hang your bird feeders right up against your kitchen window; your […]
So you need to organise that one special horticultural Christmas gift…. and luckily we three Growbags are here to guide you to a choice that will be a lasting monument to your fine taste and thoughtfulness. So, before Elaine wades in with a compost aerator, or C suggests shares in that singing reindeer she spotted […]
I love November, not just because it’s my birthday on the 29th (sorry but I just needed to make reference to this in public so that C and E officially have no excuses…) but because it’s about the only month in the year when you can actually RELAX. OK so Elaine will try and have you out […]
The end of October, and the shops are full of skeletons and pumpkins as Halloween approaches. Don’t think that the horticultural world can’t join in the spooky fun though; there are plenty of botanical nightmares out there worthy of The Little Shop of Horrors. The carnivorous plants hold a special fascination – monkey cups (Nepenthes), cobra plants […]
Virtually all of us know someone who has been affected by breast cancer, so this week we are going pink in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Day on Friday 19 October and suggesting some pink additions to your garden that you could purchase now, along with a donation to Cancer Research. And actually it is […]
When I proposed that we write about different rose hips for this week’s blog Caroline’s response was ‘Oh, is there more than one sort then? Honestly I ask you, how can someone who can spot a ‘Happy Hour’ sign half a mile away be so unobservant about the natural world? Rose hips are one of […]
I am still smarting from a passing comment a stranger who thought Caroline and I looked similar, ‘were we sisters, or perhaps mother and daughter?’ The cheek of it! It must have been Caroline’s pink leggings and silver trainers compared to my more tasteful attire that prompted this observation (think Joan Collins versus Judi Dench) […]
Still slightly reeling from a trip north of the border to Caroline and her fun-loving Highland friends – just how many parties can you fit into three days? I definitely needed a restorative perambulation round my own garden this morning which revealed some plants which, unlike me, seemed to be peaking right now, and provided […]
Apparently insect pollinators are responsible for one in three of every mouthfuls of food we eat. I expect you’ve all seen the apocalyptic scenario of empty shelves in the fruit and veg section if global bee numbers continue to tumble (don’t panic Caroline, grapevines are principally wind-pollinated so the wine aisles will be largely unaffected). […]
This summer’s weather has proved that gardening isn’t a great hobby for control freaks. You really just have to go with the flow and sometimes this delivers, as Louise’s plant of the moment demonstrates, and sometimes it doesn’t. But put a plant in a pot and suddenly you have much greater power over its destiny. […]
As in ‘Life’, amongst garden plants there are winners and there are losers. And then there are those who diligently graft away in the background until circumstances collude to give them that moment to shine – their Gareth Southgate moment, their Diving Rescue Team moment. So it has been this summer in my garden. There […]
What has intrigued me most about the World Cup (yes, completely hooked now) is how each team has a personality that reflects their nationality. Wildly talented and colourful South Americans, not too fussy about etiquette on the field, small but fiercely determined Japanese, ice cool Swedes (worrying this…..especially if it goes to a penalty shoot […]
What is a garden exactly? Can you have a ‘garden’ without a human element? You perhaps know that the etymology of the word is ‘enclosure’ (Middle English from Anglo-French and Old High German), but an enclosure of what? One thing for sure is that it is a heck of a lot more than just plants. […]
June is prime time for brilliant gardeners and barmily generous householders to throw open the gates to their gorgeous borders; home-made water features and adorable cats. It’s garden visiting season! Never mind the perfect show gardens of Chelsea, this is when you can find out how your neighbours tackle ground elder, and what return they […]
Chelsea meant boots when we were teenagers – fast-forward 50 years or so and now it means a fantastic day out for all three of us at the Greatest Flower Show in the World! This year it was definitely all about the lupins but Laura wasn’t impressed: “The trouble with lupins is they put so much […]
What fun hardy annuals are! Lots and lots of easy, pretty things from seeds scattered over a bit of soil – even a most frightful horticultural snob like Laura can’t get sniffy about that, surely? Now I am well aware that the clever-clogs among you will be saying “Why are the Growbags talking about hardy annuals […]
Hurray spring has finally sprung, and there are many reasons to be cheerful. But which spring plants cheered you up the most? Here’s our top 10: 1 Honesty (Lunaria annua– although it is actually a biennial) I have finally managed to spread this simple soul into various nooks and crannies around my garden whilst keeping the […]
How can anyone not love a Magnolia? Their lavish flowers declare in their classy way that spring has really arrived in all its finery. People like Caroline might assume these celestial-looking beauties are all the same but it’s NOT TRUE and you must be careful to choose wisely. Most are deciduous (lose their leaves in […]
So I took C and E to the Spring Plant Fair at RHS Wisley on Sunday, on the promise they’d behave themselves. Wisley is very much my stamping ground and I didn’t want any embarrassing incidents which might compromise my regular Sunday morning visits to this fantastic garden, (which I am now illustrating in a […]
Outside the garden is still being battered by the return of ‘the beast’ but the days are lengthening and we can all indulge ourselves in a bit of remedial therapy by getting some new plants on the go. Seeds of many northern hemisphere plants are best sown in autumn so the winter rain and cold […]
Yikes, just when we thought we’d got away with it, the weather went all Winter Olympics on us. So how far were you prepared to go to protect those borderline shrubs which you were just congratulating yourself on having nursed through the worst of the winter? In my case it was quite far; I have […]
Good to see it’s keeping poor old septuagenarian Tim fit and healthy – a perfect example for the 70th birthday initiative of the NHS’s partnership with the RHS to create the Feel Good Garden initiative #RHSChelsea #NHS70
It’s me first this week as I’m rather fed up with being last. Specifically I’m fed up of hearing how prematurely Elaine and Laura’s snowdrops; crocuses; tulips etc have bloomed in Sussex compared to mine which are still largely hunkered down in the Scottish tundra. But annoyingly, even my neighbours’ look more advanced. I’ve decided […]
When the weather closes in, and the days are still short, keen gardeners still need their fix and will turn their attention to virtual gardening, browsing catalogues and planning what seeds and young plants they need to order for the year ahead. Garden companies are well aware of the vulnerable state of the human psyche […]
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? Â 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 […]