I’m all for transparency, and not just in the late summer or early autumn border!Over the last few weeks I have been looking long and hard at such plantings and have come to the conclusion that relentless clumps of Rudbeckia, Helenium, Eupatorium, Persicaria, Ligularia etc, do not always fit with the average garden plot. Okay […]
If surprise and wonder are your shtick, take 13 minutes out of your M6 journey north or south and get along to Larch Cottage Nurseries just south of Penrith. I know, it sounds disarmingly underwhelming, and believe me the little terraced cottage entrance compounds the deception, for you have in fact found the horticultural equivalent […]
Highdown Gardens isn’t your usual garden visit. When Sir Frederick Stern was looking for a safe curator for the eclectic range of plants he had successfully established in a chalk pit above Worthing on the Sussex Coast he eschewed what might have been the more natural choice of the National Trust (they must be spitting […]
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 […]
December can be short on flowers. Early bulbs, sweet scented winter flowering shrubs, and most hellebores come into their own from January onwards; but for this time of the year, my subject today is in a class of its own. I can honestly say that there is hardly a month when it is not in […]
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 […]
NOVEMBER: Berries, hips and leaves. Autumn is restful and harmonious; and if the sun shines in November, the crystal clear light is unbeatable. It is restful because unlike in springtime, there is no panic about getting on with jobs in the garden … we have all winter. One of my sisters once said to me […]
Salvia leucantha known as Mexican bush sage, is a sub-shrub reaching to about a metre in height. I grow mine in my autumn border but it’s also a really good choice for a container because long before the flowers appear, indeed showing no hint of what will come in October, the foliage alone, with […]
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 […]
Now I am not a big fan of dahlias, for me the flowers are too brash and the growth rather ungainly: but here I’ll make an exception. This plant is a species, (and I hope you were paying attention to Laura’s piece and video on plant nomenclature!) so comes true from seed and is a […]
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. […]
Now I bet you don’t know what a forb is, and nor did I until I sat down to write this piece, and it could be a good one if you play scrabble. It is a herbaceous flowering plant other than a grass. My chosen plant is a pennisetum, and I was reading a small […]
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 […]
I must start by mentioning the garden where I first saw this month’s plant. A few years ago I took my mother on a little garden-visiting jaunt to South Wales and we came across a game of a garden nestling in a beautiful and secluded valley with breathtaking views. Tucked into the hillside, it was […]
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 […]
I love propagating all plants, but above all I have a particular fondness for trees that I have raised from seed. So much is invested: the collection, the sowing, the waiting, the watching, the watering. Then by magic, or so it seems, a tiny green shoot appears, and others soon follow. So a few years […]
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, […]
I just love mallows, and can’t understand why they are not more popular; they have so much going for them. As a genus, sphaeralceas are sun loving, mostly hardy and very free flowering from mid-summer through to late autumn. They are undemanding but need well drained soil. We are on clay, so I often add […]
‘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 […]
I’ve known bonica for a long time as I first took notice of it in my mother’s garden many years ago. She grew masses of roses and therefore had that understanding of their ways that can only come from growing them. I remember wondering, when she and my father downsized, how on earth she would […]
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 […]