"in the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer" Potting shed chat continues here

[funnyperson]

So as agreed (by 2 other people!) I have started this thread for spring gardeners follwing on from the previous thread : Welcome one and all. experts and novices alike and draw up your chairs and join in discussion on all things garden related (and even not garden related)

Hellebores: plant in Autumn probably though there are no strict rules and the nurseries tend to be full of them around February when they start coming into flower. I think it is nicest to have them in the garden before then as part of the joy is how early they are and how ell they go with snowdrops
Ar Great Dixter they are also interplanted with cyclamen which can work well as the cyclamen foliage covers gaps between the hellebores. At other places I have seen them grow with crocuses, aconites and anemones but I'm not as convinced by those combinations.

When you plant them I think it is nice to think of successional planting ie what will flower in that patch when the Hellebores are over. The foliage is evergreen but plants such as alliums and lilies are nice to grow through and will flower in May and June when the Hellebores are over.

My garden is almost exactly the same as yours, clb, except it's about as long as yours is wide!

I've been doing more tidying up in the garden and hacking back the jasmine that should have been pruned weeks ago. I've also planted some bulbs that my mum found in the garage. They look rather wizened and I doubt they'll amount to anything, but nothing ventured ...

Welcome CLB, I look forward to hearing more about your garden. What lovely pictures Bookbook, your garden is gorgeous. How lovely your Dad started your interest .

Both my parents enjoy gardening but in different ways. Dad is a bit haphazard and used to over zealously weed. He accidentally pruned the summer fruiting raspberries to the ground and killed them off. My first memory of our old house was us moving in during summer of 76 and the biggest, juiciest raspberries that needed eating up. It was a sad day when the raspberry canes vanished !These days he is in my Grandparents old house with a city back garden and gardens very traditionally with annuals. He got a bit radical recently and replaced a forsythia with a Date Palm and has been out painting fences recently plus planted 3 new roses. Not bad for near,y 80 I feel. He did say he was going to look at using more perennials as had shingles a couple of years ago and found all the potting up exhausting but now he's feeling better talk of that has receded.

My Mother had a different approach and designed her last 2 gardens with a view to low maintenance and was a thrifty garden shopper using free cuttings as much as she could. she didn't tend to use annuals and encouraged things to self seed a lot. She had various little bits around the garden that I've inherited and this week I've been trying to perk up her potted here and putting up some of her old trellis to train a couple of clematis up. She had a lot of birds in her garden which I also have in mine.

My children despite my best efforts aren't interested but doing my family tree recently I have found we come from farmers on both sides so maybe one day their genes will catch up with them I did no gardening until looking for a distraction during my finals so time yet. Your DS sounds fabulous FP, making sure your Mum has flowers around her.

Just watched GW and Beechgrove. There's a bit on Mecanopsis on Beechgrove this week. My little Kiwi seeds have just started showing above the soil. No idea where I'll put one if I can manage to get one to decent plant size. I need to plant up a trough and two basket things for the deck but keep looking at flowers and walking off so might try again later.

Don't worry sugarplum, both of my parents are keen gardeners but I wasn't interested at all until my thirties! It's surprising how much I have still remembered from them both despite not really being interested at the time!
My grandfathers were also keen gardeners and I now use all their old tools which is nice, it feels like they still have a connection to my garden in some way.

Welcome clb - your garden sounds like a good canvas, and I know what you mean about the excitement of veg. Gardening.

Although I agree February isn't the best time to plant hellebores, as they are in full flower, it's probably the best time to buy them, as you can see what they look like. I love some hellebores, but find the colours on others wishy-washy.

My dad was a keen gardener, but of his time, and liked regimentation. We moved to a house with a garden the planting of which was lovely, with some unusual plants, and over time dad made it really rather boring. The man to whom we sold it, thankfully restored it, (his granny had had the house built and presumably had the garden planted in the 1930s). I understand he had the help of a partner who worked at Harlow Carr, and took lots of cuttings, apparently.

I!m very jealous of those of you who are heading for Chelsea this year having watched the first coverage program.

You are right about some Hellebores having quite understated colours. One of the things I have noticed though is the way the light shines through the very fine translucent flowers which makes them shimmer. So the colours dont shout out it is true, but they can be very lovely.
I think they are best planted on a raised slope or bank so that one can look up at the flowers which otherwise tend to flop down a bit

Agree its nice to have a bit of one's parents in the garden

This Chelsea thing reminds me of the first time I had leisure enough to even watch the tv coverage. Having watched a programme, some years ago, I decided it would make a great day out for all the family and got DH and the two quite small DC into the car in the pouring rain eventually by Saturday 3 pm, not having bought any tickets of course but thinking one could get them at the gate. Needless to say we arrived about 10 mins before closing and were told by a very grumpy lady ( we didnt look very smart) that tickets were not available , so I then politely enquired about the sell off ( which I had heard about on the programme) and she got even grumpier and said the gardens were all being dismantled and we couldnt buy anything anyway. So I got cross and said we had heard about it on the telly and had come a long way expectantly in the pouring rain specially so she relented and led us to the back of some garden or other and showed us some pots of plants we could have for free if we wanted which we duly took. I haven't a clue what they were and they died anyway. As you can imagine the family were terribly embarrassed during the whole of this process. DH, who was a prize prat, muttered something about his sister in law going every year and having a ticket on the way back in the car.

I was reminded of this today when watching the preview, as nowhere did it mention that tickets were generally sold out months in advance online and not available on the gate. There are still some tickets online for Saturday at a mark up of £100 per person.

I was reminded

Oh dear I don't mean one should literally have a bit of one's parents in the garden but something to remind one of them

Hello, do you mind if I join you on this marvellous thread? I have been lurking for quite some time on this board and have really enjoyed reading about all of your gardens.

I'm a relative beginner, mostly owing to the crazy price of property in the south east. For the first 20 or so years after moving out of the family home I spent my time tending houseplants, window boxes, tiny sunless yards, a sun-baked balcony, and a garden of Japanese knotweed.

But a few years ago we finally bought our own house with a front and back garden, and for the first time ever I am thinking about the longer term, what I would like to grow and what might be nice in a few years rather than what I can take with me when I move. Which is really exciting but also a bit daunting, after so many years of essentially container gardening.

I also work almost full time and have a long commute, so I have plenty of time for reading on my phone, but rather less time for actually doing anything in the garden.

Our gardens are a north-facing back garden about 45 feet long, which doubles as a pitch for football-mad DS1, and south-facing front garden which is small, but at least I am free to plant things there that would not cope well with a badly aimed football bouncing off them.

At the moment my strategy is to grow springy and vigorous sorts of things in the back, and try not to worry too much about what happens to them. Hellebores, grasses, various herbs, hardy geraniums, shasta daisies, polemonium, forget me nots, ceanothus, achillea, vinca, campanula and aquilegia are growing there at the moment, and a climbing rose and honeysuckle on the back fence. And we have a small cherry tree and apple tree (minaret) in a corner away from the main pitch area.

The front garden is really my project for now. It's a bit of a mess at the moment. It was almost completely empty when we moved in (previous owners apparently grew a lot of annuals), and has filled up with an assortment of plants that I've been given or salvaged from B&Q's shelf of half-dead things, but nothing seems to be in the right place and there is a crazy assortment of colours. It's only a small area, about 6 x 4 metres of garden not counting the driveway, and I'd really like to start again and plan it properly.

While musing out there today I was slightly alarmed to spot a rosemary beetle, as apparently they like to eat rosemary, lavender and thyme, all of which thrive in the sun-baked spot by the front wall of our house. Apparently I'm supposed to spray them with insecticide or shake them off the plant and squash them, but I'm pretty rubbish at killing garden pests. Will I regret it if I leave them alone?

Your garden sounds beautiful
Flick the beetles off.
I did this with two lily beetles (Well maud flicked on off actually) and so far they havent come back.

Welcome, Vermicular. Anyone who regularly buys plants off what we have dubbed the Shelf of Doom is going to fit right in here!

You may, I fear, regret it if you don't zap the rosemary beetles. They killed my large and well-established rosemary. Likewise, funnyperson has a kinder soul than me and reprieved the lily beetle, but these are the two pests I do squish because they do such damage. The sawfly that wreck the Solomon's Seal, the viburnum beetle and all the others I put up with, and my efforts against the slugs and snails are almost completely ineffectual.

Yes, Vermicular, I think you should probably harden your heart against the rather beautiful rosemary beetle. They destroyed my lavender and rosemary last year. Someone told me they attack perovskia too. I've bought a fresh rosemary plant this spring and am trying to remember to check it over daily, as I look over the lilies for the lily beetles.

Your back garden sounds lovely and it'll be fun bringing order to the front. It's the same arrangement we had at our old house. In our little S-facing front garden, the biggest successes were a big, dramatic Melianthus major, a couple of Daphnes and, best of all, a Trachelospermum jasminoides by the front door which seemed to flower all summer and the delicious smell of which floated through our bedroom. Haven't really managed to get one going in the back garden of our current house .

Thank you for the welcomes .

That's interesting about the trachelospermum jasminoides, clb. I've been nurturing one in a pot for a couple of years that was destined to go along the fence, but the fence still isn't ready so I've put it in a big tub against the back wall of the house, which faces roughly east. I hope it thrives. ::nervous::

Anyone who read my earlier post about my Rose, Banksaei Lutea, and the advice from fellow MNetters and the grower well....

Today I have seen 4 flowers on it and I am so excited.

Thank you for the words of welcome! And oh dear, I am going to have to toughen up aren't I? I went out this evening in search of beetles to pick off, and was slightly relieved when I couldn't find a single one, so nothing had to be squashed. It's a shame they cause so much damage as they are really very pretty to look at.

I am not having a good time with exotic creepy crawlies. Last weekend I was clearing some junk out of the garage and discovered an unusual shiny brown spider which turned out to be a false widow. I didn't squash that either, but flung it far over the back fence into the field behind our house. Then ended up nervously searching the garage in case any more had set up residence among the children's garden toys or under bike handlebars.

In less alarming matters the cherry blossom is looking lovely. I think the peony is going to repeat its trick of flowering just as we disappear for the half term week, so we leave it with buds on and return to petals strewn all over the ground. Oh well. My neighbour assured me it did look lovely last time.

kwirrell thats good about your rose, but what advice did you implement to achieve success?
So much is flowering with the warm weather and the rain.
Near here we have a bit of path and grass and trees left over from an old wood on the way to the station. Yesterday I took that short cut and was pleasantly surprised to see the hawthorn in blossom, with masses of tall white cow parsley flowers waving in the breeze beneath and on the grassy floor, innumerable daisies all with their little blooms open.It is most interesting to see what grows in neglected clearings and I do hope the council doesn't come and mow it all down
It was beautiful, and I felt quite silly really , having completely failed to germinate ammi seeds (yes, Sarah Raven!) on my window sill !

I'm awake as the birds this year are really very musical and vocal. I put this partly down to an abundance of earthworms. Last year I added earthworms from an online shop to the compost heap.They got mulched with the compost into the rest of the garden with the Autumn and spring mulches and have multiplied, keeping the birds very happy indeed! The worms are good for the soil and also help keep slugs at bay, not that we are entirely slugless!

www.earth-ways.co.uk/resources/slugs/

The only advice for my Banksaei Lutea was patience. It is such a vigorous grower and prolific flowerer that it's early years are spent putting down strong roots to support it.

So Although In two years it has covered the fence with very healthy growth, nay a flower was to seen. I had resigned myself to another couple of years.

The fence has white Montana Jasmine, blue unnamed clematis and a lovely white rambler which last all year. Hopefully you can just see Lutea poking its way through

Not Montana Jasmine, no idea where that popped up from. A white Montana and a blue clematis as well as the white rose. I thought the pale yellow would be a nice addition.

That's so pretty, Kwirrell.

vermicular I've got a north facing clay garden too!

funny did your Acanthus Mollis Rue Ledan come back ? I had 2 that kept leaves all winter and a third that I thought dead, a leaf appeared about a month ago, I moved that plant. Yesterday I spotted another leaf in its old location so now I have 4 plants!

I sowed 1000 very easy ladybird poppy from Sarah Raven last year, -not one germinated.

My rambling rose of unknown variety has no leaves yet, last year it was beautiful , I don't think it's dead, wood is still green. A friend said I should cut it right back, but then it won't flower this year, what to do?

kwirrell lovely picture

Lovely Kwirrel, my rose isn't as obliging ! I might have to move it so that will be mord years to wait. My Acanthus rue laden is in its third year and i'm hoping it might do a bit more this year.