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.
Did you know the latest fad is to have freckles tattooed over your nose? I hated mine when I was young but freckles are looking fabulous right here, right now…. inside a hellebore. I have a huge range from the glowing chartreuse green of tall Helleborus argutifolius to the dark sultry opalescence of the solid colour H.orientalis varieties but my favourite hellebores are the […]
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 […]
Can it be true that it’s decades since there was any published research on garden visiting in the UK? It’s clearly not as compelling to academics as cats’ dinner preferences, but even at the last count it was estimated over 16million people visit gardens every year, and the Growbags are significant contributors to that figure. Setting aside whether £350 million […]
Listen carefully. DO NOT buy a house in Northern France. Do not be seduced by old stones, a deeply-rustic position, cheaper house-prices, friendly natives, quiet roads, sandy beaches six miles long, or the availability of fabulous wine for tuppence-ha’penny. If you fall for these sirens, you’re in trouble. You will be condemning yourself forever to […]
Still in recovery from the rigours of making my garden sufficiently presentable for its open day, we’ve taken a few days off. Being a farming family we endlessly enjoy the British countryside so our holidays are invariably taken here in the UK. With five of our seven dogs we are currently on the Isle of Islay in the Southern […]
So the scene was set. Glasshouse was swept and decked out in bunting; Growbag sister Elaine was installed on plant sales; son’s girlfriend, Emily, was put in charge of tea and cakes (son couldn’t be trusted, it needs someone properly organised for this key role, ergo someone female); family friend Anne was installed on the gate; radio contact […]
What a splendid day we had at Chelsea! The sun shone, the flowers amazed, and even the surprisingly LONG QUEUE TO WASH YOUR HANDS after the loo (!) did not deter us from enjoying our day (there was some disgracefully sexist talk in the line about how long men would queue for, to wash their […]
Chelsea Flower Show 2016 review – so much quieter in the evening when the booze begins to flow and the bars fill up!
Our first Chelsea blog in 2016: We’re all off to glorious Chelsea Flower Show this week. Here are five things I love about it: 1. It’s completely mad. How ridiculous to virtually dig up and re landscape an area of our capital city simply for a flower show. I just love that we do it every […]
What a gladsome thing a peony is! Peonies are the ‘over-the-tops’ of late spring and early summer from the buxom ‘officinalis’ beauties so often seen in cottage gardens to the glamorous ‘suffruticosa’ tree peonies with their sumptuous blooms. About 12 years ago, I fell for one of these in a garden-centre; it’s called Handaijin (very dully translated as […]
Summer’s arrived and it’s hard to believe that two weeks ago we were battling through driving snow in Scotland. It’s been grisly and if I was wondering quite why I was lifting turf to create a new shady bed in nose-drippingly awful temperatures last month, the new plants were even more distraught. They spent the next […]
Middle sister Laura kicks off: So, we know sowing seeds immeasurably improves your sense of well-being but we now need to consider the dark forces that can descend as you sleep and rob you of all this self satisfaction in a few strategic rasps their radulas.I am referring of course to slugs.There are many […]
Senior sister Elaine kicks off: OK, I ask myself, why do I do it – EVERY year? The seed catalogues plop through the letterbox every winter, and the Cottage Garden Society seed list, and the RHS seed list, and seed offers too good to miss. Sarah Raven and Thompson & Morgan are two catalogues to pore […]