Tag Archives: planting

Progress!

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Last time, I posted a photo of our front ‘garden’, showing how we’d just begun to clear the thick covering of gravel to reveal the earth that once supported a garden. I’m happy to be able to report that the gravel is gone (well, almost, and only in the front garden – the bad news is there’s more in the back!) This is how it looks now…

And this is how it looked at the time of my last post…

We’ve put in two trees. The first is a Sorbus aucuparia ‘Eastern Promise’ (Rowan), which comes with a bit of a story. It looked very healthy, and came in a very large pot. It wasn’t until we took it out of the pot that we discovered it had next to no roots! It was obviously field grown. They’d lifted it (very badly; hence the lack of root) and put it in a large pot, and sold it as if it was pot grown. The tree is about 10 feet tall, with lots of juicy buds ready to break in the spring. I don’t hold out that much hope of it growing some roots in time to support that top growth.

Still, I don’t like to throw plants away, so I put it in and staked it well, and we’ll keep our fingers crossed. I complained to the garden centre we bought it from, and the good news is, they gave us a full refund. Who knows, the tree may even pull through, in which case we’ll have got it for nothing. Talking about getting plants for free; the other tree is a sapling of a field maple (Acer campestre) which set seed in our last garden. We potted it up and took it with us. Field maple is a small native tree, typically found in hedgerows, but attractive, and with good autumn colour.

The Field Maple – hopefully the chicken wire should deter any rabbits or deer that might think about having a nibble.

And we’ve planted a beech hedge along the front and side boundary. It doesn’t look much at the moment, but give it time. One hundred bare-rooted beech plants, mostly for the front garden, with some for a short stretch of boundary at the back. It’s the best way to buy deciduous plants. They’re field grown, and lifted during the dormant season, bagged up in bunches and sent off to the customer (in this case, us). There’s generally no soil around the roots when you get them, but they’re wrapped up in a big plastic bag, which conserves enough moisture to stop the roots drying out too much. Current thinking is that buying plants bare-rooted is more sustainable, because there are no plastic pots involved. It’s a shame about the plastic sacks they came in, but that’s probably a lot better than 100 plastic pots. It’s a cheap way of creating a hedge too – these worked out at 95p a plant.

In the spring, we’ll sow some grass – possibly wildflower meadow – to green up the rest of the space. So that’s the front garden dealt with for now. Next comes the back…

text and images © Graham Wright 2020

Singapore Memories

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The cold, wet, grey, dark conditions at this time of year can be quite depressing. To cheer myself up, I’ve been looking through my photographs from a visit to Singapore earlier this year. Prepare for an image-heavy post!

This is the magnificent Torch Ginger (Etlingera Elatior) Some of you may think I’m sad, but for me, coming across these in the Singapore Botanic Gardens was akin to a religious experience.

The (relatively) new Gardens in the Bay are the star attraction, with enormous glasshouses containing a cloud forest and a flower dome, and ‘super trees’ lit up with a spectacular light show after dark. But for all their splendour, I got more out of the older, less showy, Botanic Gardens.

The ‘super trees’ in the Gardens in the Bay – very impressive, but as much about technology as plants.

The Bukit Timah gate of the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Imagine you’ve just a had a tasty lunch, followed by a great coffee, in a nice café over the road, the weather is beautifully warm, and you’re about to spend the afternoon wandering through the Singapore Botanic Gardens…

Hymenocallis speciosa – Spider Lily

As you might expect, orchids were everywhere, in both gardens. Here’s a selection:

The above is one of my favourites, labelled as ‘Papillionanda Ernest Chew’. And below – not so pretty, but very eccentric…

And finally, this is another ginger – Hedychium coronarium (White Ginger Lily).

Gardening at this time of year is not always a pleasant experience. It can be cold, wet and miserable. Even with gloves on, hands get cold to the point where they hurt – particularly when you come inside. Everything gets covered in mud – tools, gloves, boots. It’s tempting to think that there’s nothing to be done in the garden, so as not to have to go outside, but it just isn’t true. I’ve been busy pruning deciduous trees, planting bare-rooted hedges and trees (especially fruit trees), clearing the rest of the leaves, digging over soil in preparation for planting and mulching. Even the weeds are still growing, though they shouldn’t grow so much as to be out of hand by the spring. So maybe we can leave those for now…

Words & images ©Graham Wright 2018

Autumn Gardening Tasks

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It’s come round to the time of year when the lawn mower morphs from a tool for cutting grass, into a vacuum cleaner for fallen leaves.

Autumn seems to have pounced on us this year. I can trace it back to a day about a week and a half ago, when the air took on a chill, and the heavy dew on the grass lasted the whole day. The trees seemed to start turning in an instant response, with leaves colouring up and beginning to fall.

By then, the asters were barely into bud, but the sudden change seemed to kick them into action, and they’re now fully out and looking good. Asters are pretty much the last summer perennials to flower. When everything else is going over, their leaves are fresh and vital, their intricate daisy flowers in purples, blues, pinks and white, are pristine and vibrant – oases of shining beauty among a sea of decay. If you want to extend your garden’s flowering season into the autumn, you can’t do better than to plant some asters.(1)

Aster novi-belgii ‘Audrey’ – for the bad news, see note (1)

We typically think of autumn as a time of tidying and clearing up – clearing leaves, cutting back dead foliage and flower stems on perennials, pulling up spent bedding plants, taking out tomatoes and cleaning the greenhouse. But it’s also a busy time for more creative tasks. Now is the time to plant spring flowering bulbs, in pots and in the ground. Daffodils need to be planted as soon as possible, but most tulips can wait until November – in fact it’s best not to put them in the open ground until then, particularly if you have heavy soil. It’s a good idea to cover bulbs with wire mesh to stop rodents digging them up (easier to do with pots than for those planted directly into the ground).

Now is a good time to divide many perennials, although some people prefer to wait until the spring to do this, as there’s a danger that the reset plants could be killed by the cold weather. On the other hand, doing it now gives them a chance to establish a good root system, so they’re ready to get growing in the spring. And it’s easier to see what you’re dividing at this time of year, because by the end of the winter, perennials often don’t have much showing above ground.
Aster novi-belgii ‘Climax’ – again, see note (1)

And of course, autumn is a great time to plant roses, as well as most other shrubs, and trees. The soil is still warm (even if the weather isn’t) and reliably moist, giving them a chance to develop their root system so that, as for the perennials, they’re ready to start into growth the following spring. And woody plants can be bought bare-rooted, which is much cheaper than buying potted specimens – particularly relevant if you have a lot of plants to put in (say, for a deciduous hedge).

When it comes to the autumn clearing up, there are decisions to be made. Ideally, fallen leaves can be collected up and made into leaf mould. If you’ve got a lot of leaves, you can make a leaf mould bin by wrapping wire mesh around four wooden posts set out in a square. If you don’t have enough leaves for this, or anywhere to put it, you can fill a black plastic bag with leaves, tie it up, put a few holes in it with a garden fork, and leave it somewhere out of sight. Either way, you should have leaf mould by this time next year.

However, for some plants that are diseased, such as roses with black spot, apples with scab ,or quince with leaf blight, experts suggest collecting the leaves and burning them. The theory is that if you compost them, the spores of the disease may survive and re-infect the plant the following year. The problem comes where your leaves have blown about and intermingled – you can hardly sort them one by one!

The other decision is whether or not to cut back the dead foliage of perennials. Some people can’t bear to see them making the garden look untidy over the winter. Others think that they can look attractive, particularly when the frost is on them, or when they’re backlit by the winter sun. And they do provide homes for insect wildlife to spend the winter. Personally, I tend to wait until the spring to cut back the dead growth.
Canna Neubert, taken only a few days ago – who said the summer was over

(1) In what appears to be an ongoing scheme to make our lives difficult, botanists have recently re-classified some (but not all) asters, and given them the new name ‘Symphyotrichum’. Maybe they’re jealous of our ability to speak horticultural latin. Or perhaps they’re just trying to justify their own existence. It seems to be the later flowering novi-belgii group that have been renamed.


Words and pictures copyright Graham Wright 2017