The clocks go forward this weekend and we’ll have lots more time to be in the garden – WONDERFUL! A million jobs are now clamouring for our attention out there. It’s just a question of which one is the most urgent. Some shrubs need cutting back. The grasses need some TLC. And we mustn’t forget those money-saving […]
It’s all very well to have gorgeously colourful plant catalogues dropping through the letterbox with every delivery but have you seen the prices this year, folks? By the time you’ve picked out some bedding for the tubs, and chosen one new shrub, you’ve blown the dosh you were saving for new shoes or fixing that […]
Armand clematis This is a beautiful clematis with a heavenly scent – vanilla by common consent or, as one of my gardening friends says, like the soap shelf at M&S! So why haven’t I chosen it before today? Because it’s usually flowering several metres up and sometimes I don’t even remember it’s there! Ours is growing […]
What are the best plants to grow in a pot? Over the years, we 3Growbags and our fantastic columnist Louise Sims have written about our favourite plants for pots. I thought it would a good idea to collect our thoughts together into a list which may help folk to get ideas for their own container-growing. […]
Whoa! It’s been a chilly week! We got back to pulling on the woolly long-johns even here in the balmy south, and Caroline has been sending us daily videos of snow and ice in the Scottish Highlands. Still, spring WILL arrive for all of us soon, and meantime there is much to be done – […]
We want to talk about climbers today. They are SUCH an important part of the outdoor scene, don’t you think? Especially in small gardens and balconies, where you’d be mad not to make use of the vertical space. But which to choose? We 3growbags have each come up with a suggestion for the three main flowering seasons. […]
Giraldi’s forsythia Whilst our lawn and indeed the bare earth beneath shrubs and trees in the garden are becoming increasingly bedecked with snowdrops, crocuses, hellebores and other spring treasures, I am looking for something a little showy and springlike at head height and this forsythia seems to fill that need. We planted it along time […]
Plenty of welcome signs of approaching spring all around now – about time too! But with those tiny new shoots come a wealth of gardening jobs like sowing veg, cutting down autumn raspberry canes, and prepping your pot collection… Veg shortages? Whoa! Have you seen the headlines about salad and veg shortages for the next […]
What a privilege it was to be invited to the Garden Press Event in London – our chance to learn about horticultural innovations, review new products and have a good old chinwag with other lovely garden bloggers over cups of tea. Elaine and I took our brief to look and learn quite seriously, I wish […]
It’s National Nestbox Week and at last – an element of consensus among the 3Growbags! We all three love giving wildlife a home in our gardens, and early spring is THE time to start a campaign to encourage more to move in. So this week we’re proposing practical things you can put in place now […]
barrenwort ‘Fröhnleiten’ If, like ours, your garden has been subject to yet more frosts this week, then you might have been enjoying such delights as my subject today. I do realise that I might be over enthusiastic about walking round the garden in winter but this is precisely why I love it. This barrenwort is […]
Yes, yes, yes! A walk round the garden in early February may not give you the flamboyance of full-on spring, but oh boy! It’s so heartening to see the rosy noses of peony buds breaking through and bright aconites studding the ground…. You feel that familiar frisson of anticipation for the coming garden season. Coming into […]
I won’t deny that taking my early morning walk around the garden these days, is becoming more of a ‘stock taking’ exercise. Let’s face it, few of us have experienced a year like the last for decades, and I find myself re-evaluating the meaning of ‘hardy’. After record breaking temperatures last summer, a very mild […]
Between minus double-digits and torrential rain it’s been hard to catch those first scents of our New Year gardens so far in 2023. But on our Zoom call this week we laughed about this post on winter scent from a few years back and wondered if you would too… I can’t believe my sisters sometimes….! When […]
Arggghhh, January can seem such a long month, can’t it! It feels particularly so when the weather has been as unpredictable and damaging as it has been recently. Spring still seems quite far away. But it WILL come, and in the meantime let’s cheer ourselves up with some jolly little tasks to prepare for its arrival, like […]
Whether you’re snowed in, flooded out or just bored of hearing about Harry’s frozen todger, there is a sure-fire way of raising your spirits in the middle of January: planning what seeds you’ll be sowing this year. This week we’ll be sharing our own ambitions and tips, and rest assured, there will be inspiration for […]
Yunnan liquorice I love a coincidence and here we have one. Once again most of us are waking up to a very hard frost, or even snow, and I am impelled to go outside into the garden and observe all the amazing shapes and patterns that only reveal themselves under such conditions. And while I […]
January is not generally famed for beauty in the garden, but do have a look at our 3Growbags list of Brilliant Winter Plants (link is below). There are some real crackers amongst them! For me, this month is mostly about anticipation. Can you feel the thrill of a new gardening year? What will we grow? […]
Happy New Year, everyone! Let’s hope it’s going to be a fabulous one – at least for our gardening exploits! This week we’ve been thinking about how we can improve our gardens by choosing plants that flower at just the right time for us. For old hands like me and Laura this will involve some minor tweaks […]
Dogwood ‘Anny’s Winter Orange’ Getting on for a year ago, I was striding through the rain towards middle growbag Laura’s front door and not for the first time I stopped to admire ‘Anny’s Winter Orange’. Then as luck would have it, Laura rang me a couple of days later to say that she had spotted a couple […]
No gardening chat and banter this week – our Christmas offering is some jolly gardening puzzles, a nice little plant ID exercise, and we finish with terrible festive jokes. Hope you enjoy them! You’ll be pleased to hear there is a link at the bottom to the Answer Sheet, for when you get stuck. We won’t […]
Crown of thorns I have a confession to make, and I may lose friends saying so, but I am not a fan of poinsettias! To me they are the battery chickens of the horticultural world: propagated en masse, probably at great cost to the environment, and about as original a Christmas present as a chocolate […]
Wow! We all know it’s bleak midwinter now, don’t we? Even in my sheltered southern garden, ‘snow has fallen, snow on snow’ and the earth is definitely ‘as hard as iron’. At least, I won’t have to do any digging for a while! There are still some gardening jobs to give you a break from making […]
Is anyone else feeling ready to move on from baubles and tinsel? They are, of course, re-usable but after hauling them out of the Christmas Box for 30 years or so, it feels as though life has moved on a bit, doesn’t it? It might be the cost of living… it might be climate change, […]
Marguerite ‘Jamaica Primrose’ The temperature dropped just below freezing in our barely heated greenhouse last night; this is hardly surprising as outside in the garden it was minus 6.8 degrees, and this, after the warmest November on record. But what a cheery welcome I received as I walked, with some fear and trepidation, through the greenhouse door this morning. Understandably all the other plants looked a little pinched but not this amazing marguerite. […]
How can it be December again! Cliché alert, but where did that year go? It feels as if it was just last week that we took down the Christmas tinsel. Never mind, we can do this. Let’s just make sure our festive to-do lists include some gardening tasks like planting tulips, bringing plants in for decoration […]
Gardeners World, Garden Rescue, The Beechgrove Garden, Gardener’s Question Time? There are so many opportunities for us to go on enjoying gardening from the comfort of our sofas now the weather’s turned bad. But which is your favourite? We each have our own of course! I’m going to get in early and say right here […]
It was the sweet scent on the air that first caught my attention when Growbag Laura and I wandered around Derry Watkins’ inspirational garden near Bath: the sort of scent that demands that you discover its source. I wasn’t really expecting it to come from an aquatic plant but was led in the direction of a small pond, almost covered by a carpet of […]
Arrgghhh, it’s becoming harder and harder to duck and weave around the juggernaut that is The British Christmas! But while we’ve still got some modicum of sanity, let’s get on with some pleasant little gardening jobs like making leafmould, choosing some shrubs for screening and making more lovely oriental poppies………. Leaf-mould for a lovely garden […]
One of the many exasperating habits of both my sisters is their lackadaisical approach to the scientific names of the plants they talk about. Elaine likes to wallow in the Latin meanings but loses interest the moment things get technical, and Caroline, well she doesn’t even try. Today we’re looking at the scientific names of […]
wedding flower Beth Chatto was one of the best known and most inspirational gardeners of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and consequently her garden and nursery have become a sort of plant mecca to the rest of us. But it was her late husband Andrew’s lifelong interest in ecology that helped to establish the ‘right plant, right place’ mantra to which she adhered, and to which we […]
November can be rather a miserable month, but we’re not miserable, are we! We can enjoy the relative calm in the garden as it settles for winter. The pressure is off, and we can quietly start preparing for an EVEN better horticultural year in 2023. So how about sowing some peas, pruning some branches or […]
When we opened an online shop to help with the costs of running our blog, we wanted to stock it with great gardening gifts. But what would these be? Quality garden tools (me, obvs), books, cards and pretty kitchenware, (Elaine), edible birthday cards for dogs (Caroline ?). This week we’re explaining why we thought our […]
glossy abelia At a time when every gardener I talk to is commenting on unusual flowering events in their gardens, I have been enjoying a shrub which reliably performs at the same time every year, no matter what the weather throws at it! No photograph seems to do it justice but its common name, the glossy […]
It’s planting time! Trees, shrubs, roses, wallflowers, garlic…….there’s a myriad of things that you can plant out now. Do it before the ground starts to freeze or become too waterlogged to attempt it. It will give them such a headstart next spring when everything starts to move again………. Wonderful wallflowers One of my major joys in spring […]
What are you going to do with the tender perennials in your garden? They have delighted you all through the summer and early autumn, for sure. But the sun is soon going to start tucking his hat into the drawer for the winter, and your frost-prone beauties will start feeling the chill. Living as we do in […]