…if winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 2014 beckons us...

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Okay, so the height of summer is yet to scorch the nethers of those in this wide brown land of Orstrylia, but welcome to the MNettie gardeners of the world. Prop up your sagging fences, evict the rats from your decking, and find a use for that poinsettia.

Will involve yet another 6 am start (sigh)

It was snowing, funnyperson! It was perishing cold, and the garden was very bare, but it was a good opportunity to see its shape and structure and the hellebores etc were lovely.

Hillier sounds lovely too.

Testing if I can post...

Oh thank goodness , I thought I had been suspended as I couldn't post! I have major hellebore envy now. Mine were Hayloft ones that went in last year so aren't going to flower this year sadly.

I've got one hellebore flowering so far from last year's Hayloft planting. Others look like they will too.

Hmm, mine haven't done much at all. When did you put them in Bertha?

Right I am being unfair to Hayloft, I didn't get them from there - wish I had now. I'll just have to be patient for another year.

I think they went in Nov/Dec time last year. They were really healthy and one even flowered last year which surprised me.

Sorted my seeds last night. Just need to make a list of what I'm missing for this year but don't think there's much.

Drove back this evening after the conference, as heavy rain in Hampshire made looking round Hillier gardens tomorrow seem not such a good idea. However I got a pear tree and more hellebores (Hillier double) from their garden centre sale.

I have decided I am going to go for a Piet Oudolph effect in the sloping garden bed out the front now that the wall is rebuilt (allowing for the nerines and raspberries and peacock buddleia and dogwood and Generous Gardener rose and cotoneaster). I've been looking at the gardens on his website and think they are beautiful.
www.oudolf.com/piet-oudolf/gardens

Just need to think up a planting plan.

The front is south facing on clay, slopes down the hill and is small: Maybe 4m long by x2m wide. I'm not sure what grasses he plants.

I think it takes 2-3 years for hellebores to flower, wynken maybe yours will flower later on in the spring.

None of my Hayloft hellebores are flowering: they have grown a bit, that is all.

I thought they took a couple of years to flower and have decided that Bertha's are on steroids and mine and Bearleigh's aren't.

FP would you mind elaborating on the sale part of your post ? How saley are the hellebores there at the moment ? I do love the idea of a peacock buddleia.

Sale over wynken I'm sorry- everything was 20% off till yesterday in store. Crocus still have a sale on though.

I have been looking up grasses and have narrowed it down to 2;
molinia (purple moor grass: transparent in summer goes a honey colour in autumn, makes a sound in the breeze, might go with the buddlea) and eragrostris.

Hertfordshire hellebores are good though pricey: thats where I got many of mine from a few years ago
www.herts-hellebore.co.uk/

They look good FP. I haven't much experience with grasses, only have that black one beginning with O tha I rescued from the knackered shelf last year.

I have been looking at that site and was tempted. I've been to a couple of places this morning and resisted got two in flower for a fiver each so not too bad. Was looking at one of the ones that went in last year and it seems to have done absolutely nothing. One is thinking about putting on some new growth.

Someone gave me some seedlings recently so maybe I'll pot them up into little pots and see if that helps, rather than chucking them out. We planted some on m neighbour's bank a couple of years ago and they seem to have vanished. She's great with plants so I am wondering if they don't like the soil here. Bits do have a tendency to be acidic.

hi there.
if I take cuttings from my neighbours overhanging a wisteria, would they be good to plant out around easter? or what would be the best time?

Dear old friends of the gardening thread, hello hello, it has been far too long...

I have less than four weeks of maternity leave left!! It seems only yesterday I was pacing around wondering if I was being ever so slightly hormonally crazy to think about setting up the birthing pool in the garden so mini-Lexi-the-second could arrive under the blackberry crop...

I have been utterly rubbish at getting out into the garden this winter. January aside which has just been wall to wall wet, the only things I (we) have done have been uprooting everything worth keeping from the front garden in advance of making it a parking space, and pruning and tieing back the blackberry (on Boxing Day). DH has been growing herbs in a windowsill propagator quite successfully. I have alliums and something else delivered in October which I haven't planted, and I bought some summer bulbs from Wilko a couple of weeks ago which are waiting patiently by the back door.

Still, the delay in doing the front parking space has meant that a few bulbs have sent up shoots, so I can rescue them now (snowdrops, aconites, at least one iris).

We made a flying visit to the ILs after school finished yesterday, and visited Hyde Hall this morning. It was sunny and bitterly cold in the wind but the dry garden looked wonderful, all swishy grasses and exposed rock. There were approximately eleventy billion hellebores too - self seeded I suppose as none of them appeared to be labelled.

Hello again Lexi! It actually sounds like you've been impressively busy given you have two young children. I could only make a Nymans trip at the weekend, sadly.

Thanks for identifying Nandina Domestica, Rhubarb. There are a couple of nurseries that stock it near me, so I have an excuse to go on a shopping trip. (I am far more excited now by the thought of a trip to a nursery than to Knightsbridge. How things change).

I have been very busy at work in January and today was the first time I have had a look at some cuttings I took in a hurry last autumn, not taking much care. Excitingly, there are buds on both the rose and the clematis cuttings.

Planted up 2 pots with primroses for mum this morning after dropping off the pear tree for her (doyenne du comice) and then went home and watched tv most of the day. Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly tap dancing with jazz piano music, together with warm cups of tea and various home made savoury pancakes were irresistable as it has been wild and windy outside.
Yes, new iris leaves are coming up here too lexi . Monty mentioned in one of his programmes that one is supposed to expose the iris corms so that they get as much sunlight as possible. However this time of year I tend to leave the corms covered a bit for fear they might get frosted over. What do you do?
Do you feel sad to be going back to work. I hated going back after my maternity leave mainly because I didn't want to leave my lovely adored children. I still look back on the time as very very special and the longest period I ever had off with my children. I worked full time always until recently, as it was the done thing according to all the high achieving money conscious people around me. Looking back I wish I had gone back part time and taken advantage of my employment rights to doso. My career wouldn't have suffered much and neither would the family finances really.

I spent a bit of time on Operation Hedge, an ongoing business where I try to tame my completely crazy inherited border fence without ending up with holes in it. It has small and broadleaved ivy, two types of holly, forsythia, an apple tree, what I think is a strawberry tree, a small-leaved evergreen Actual Hedge plant, something I think might be yew, and a leggy rhodedendron! So i have been trying to gently remove dead bits, weave leggy bits back into the hedge, and curtail enough of the holly and ivy suckers to ge some semblance of shape. It was ifnored for ten years by the previous owners, but I think it's so well established that putting new hedging in would be hard to do as there are'n't any real gaps so much as slightly bald bits. Is it possible to put hedge whips into an established hedge to thicken it up a bit,or does that not work due to the competition?

And have planted lots of spring bulbs that were reduced. Just waiting for all my winter planting things to wake up now!

I think you can put young hedge plants in the gaps. Your hedge sounds quite eclectic. Perhaps you could put in some young plants of daphne or winter jasmine, both of which grow to hedge height and can be pruned to hedge shape and would add in colour and scent. But is it a hedge or is it a tangle of plants up against a fence? I think of a hedge as having air on both sides of it. ie no fence.
Here is an interesting range of traditional hedge plants
www.readyhedgeltd.com/readyHedge.htm
here is nice video on planting a mixed country hedge

I'm now very proud of my baby hellebores . Oddly they are planted at the shady end of the long bed where everything else dies. It's overhung by next doors lime tree and yew so the soil is a bit weird. Still got a big gap behind them up against the corner of the fence that I need to find something for.

Sooooo much rain last night but mostly sunny today. Garden is a swamp though so can't do anything in it and the drive is still one big puddle. It really needs to stop raining.

In my garden the japonica (quince) flowers the same time as the hellebores usually and copes with being shadowed by mm Alfred Carriere the rest of the year. I don't know whether it would grow under lime.
I am thinking of planting lime (tilia cordata) between mum and dad and their very very horrid neighbours who want mum to pay for their fence which blew over in the storm over christmas. £380 if you please in advance with other threats to take mum to the council because they don't like her fir trees which have been there since before the neighbours moved in.
Dad rang in a panic as he could see standing water in the rose bed from outside his window and thought flooding was imminent. It isn't, but the water can't be that good for the roses.
Sowing sweet peas today.

There was a wonderful Daphne Bholua at Hyde Hall yesterday. I think it would be lovely in a hedge, as long as it was a higgledy piggledy hedge, not one that needs to be cut to a flat top and sides. My mum went on a ledge laying day to be able to maintain their mixed hedging around the fields on their smallholding in Devon. You get a youngish stem, bend it where you have the gap, hack it to half-break it, which I think also stimulates new growth, and peg it down with pruned branches that have stem junctions strong enough to be a sort of hook. Humphrey probably knows this stuff, or MrCobbler...!

Funny I am feeling sort of quite ok about work really. DH was made redundant last year when his company was taken over. It was quite well paid off, and gave him some breathing space to think about what he actually wanted to do (look for another corporate IT permanent job, do contracting, freelance...) and it turned out what he really wanted was to make me a balanced and nutritious packed lunch every day when I was pregnant and commuting an hour each way into London. Particularly as last April I was promoted so really need to show my mettle in the new grade. We decided recently that both of us being in work FT would happily cover the cost of 2 FT childcare places (well, one nursery and another before/after school club) but leave us precious little free time to actually spend together, and we'd be paying to mitigate things like housework and proper cooking. Then the unpredictability of having to take days off due to little bugs, D&V exclusion periods, and so on. It would just mean we were always juggling and never getting quality time. So, he's going to be the SAHP for a while, which does feel a little odd (the cultural propaganda of it being the mother's role runs deep!) but it will work for us, I think, because he's coming at it like a project that he wants to Do Properly.

I popped out with the bins this morning in my pyjamas and found lots of chionodoxa and crocus shoots amongst a thick layer of leaf litter at the edge of the decking, visible from my sofa in the kitchen extension. Oh, spring!