Beautiful bushes! Gardening Tips for early April

Spring is gathering pace and it’s most welcome!  But so are the gardening jobs and it’s time for plenty of hustle and bustle.  

This week we must turn our attention to pruning certain shrubs, optimising the summer perennials and successional sowing amongst other things…

Giving shrubs a spring clean

There are a lot of ways that you can help your shrubs – those absolute workhorses of most gardens – a real helping hand right now. Take a really good look at any shrubs you’ve got and act accordingly:

Many of the late-flowering shrubs (Buddleia, Lavatera, Euonymus, Cotoneaster, Fuchsias, etc.) flower on wood they make in the current year, so it’s important that you get straight on with this pruning task now if you haven’t already done it.  In my experience, these can take a hard prune if that is what is required, but if it’s a very overgrown bush, it’s better to do it in stages over 2-3 years, or they may take umbrage.

I will also be tidying up Hypericum, Abelia, Hebe, Spiraea, Artemisia and Physocarpus which can get rather leggy and floppy as the summer wears on.  For these, I’ll take out dead, crossing or old stems at the base, and trim the rest to leave a neat shape.

I prefer to leave other summer shrubs like hydrangeas and Hibiscus for the second wave of spring pruning (I’m just getting started on this now, as in the feature pic this week) because their new shoots are more prone to late frost damage if I make the cuts too soon. These generally don’t take so kindly to severe pruning I find, so I trim them back to strong shoots instead. 

That’s the flowery section of summer shrubs mostly dealt with, but what about foliage or stems?  Cut back elders (Sambucus), Rhus (Sumach) and Cotinus now for bigger and more dramatic foliage.  Cut back dogwoods (Cornus) and willows (Salix) for new beautiful stems that will brighten the garden during the winter and last till this time next year.

Now for the winter and spring shrubs. Plants like Viburnum, Garrya elliptica and winter jasmine will flower next year on the wood that they make THIS year, so as they finish blooming, cut them hard back.

Do the same with other spring shrubs like flowering currant, Weigela, Philadelphus etc.– enjoy their bright spring flowers and then get the secateurs out.

One last thing about overgrown evergreen shrubs: you can be brutal in spring with laurels, hollies and even yew, if they’ve got way out of line. You could also try ‘raising the crown’ where you take off all the lower branches and turn the plant into a small ‘tree’. Overgrown Escallonia, Fatsia and Hebe would prefer a slightly gentler pruning approach by just taking out a third of the oldest wood each year and trimming up the rest.

Successional Sowing

Whoa, after all that pruning action, let’s turn our attention to a much quieter task – successional sowing.  This is when you sow seeds in late winter or early spring, but you don’t sow them all. A fortnight later you sow another lot, and then maybe another lot a fortnight after that.  This technique has two great advantages that I can see:

1. You haven’t put all your eggs (ie seeds) in one basket, so if you mess up the first sowing (hmm, hmm, it’s confession time…..!), then you’ve got another crack at it.

2. If all your sowings germinate nicely and grow well then you have extended your flowering/cropping season beautifully and lessened the chance of gluts.

The idea works really well for leafy veg of all kinds including lettuce, spinach etc., peas and beans, Cosmos, Nicotiana, cornflowers, Cerinthe, Ammi, Zinnias and sweet peas.  Annual herbs like dill are good for this too.  You can even successionally sow cucumbers, but you need a long growing season for that!

Gardening shorts

• The grass has started growing like crazy and the mowers are out again. Even if you are very keen on your short green lawn, please do find a corner for some wilder native beauties that will help the early pollinators and gladden your heart into the bargain.

• As a retired Classics teacher, I am terribly sad about the recent government decision to stop funding the Latin excellence programme in schools.  Latin (and Greek) have provided us with more than 60% of our English language, and is main vocabulary for science, technology, medicine…..and horticulture! (By the way, in my last sentence the words ‘Latin’, ‘Greek’, ‘provided’, ‘English’, ‘language’, ‘vocabulary’, ‘science’, ‘medicine’ and ‘horticulture’ have ALL come from Latin.) Verbena hastata has flowers like small spears, Geranium sylvestris likes damp wooded places ……….the Latin tells me! Laura made a really interesting YouTube video on the subject of plant-naming a while ago (link is at the bottom).  Please don’t shy away from finding out what the botanical names are telling you – they can add hugely to your knowledge and enjoyment of the plants themselves. 

• If you’ve got well-established groups of perennial plants, you have probably got a whole forest of shoots coming up now in the centre.  With so many stems competed for light and nutrients, they can become too weak to support the flowers properly and end up splaying out and looking nasty.  Trim some of these shoots off now completely and the remaining shoots will flower and support themselves much better.

• The daffodils seem late this year – remember that as they fade it’s a good idea to take off the dead blooms so that they don’t waste their time making seeds. But do leave the foliage on (don’t tie them up) for another six weeks or so to feed the bulb ready for next year’s show.

• Finish tidying the ferns – the knuckles of new fronds are starting to emerge and it would be a shame to damage them by pruning too late.

Here is the link to Laura’s video about plant-naming.

Can you get tulips to flower year after year? Here’s one that has flourished for Louise for many years after being planted out in the garden, making it a perfect candidate as one of her Great Plants this Month:

We have found a genius device for making sure that you eat your eggs in date order – and now we stock it in our online shop! Do have a look at our smashing egg helter-skelters….

NB If you’re not already a subscriber and you’d like a bit more gardening chitchat from the3growbags, please type your email address here and we’ll send you a new post every Saturday morning.