Grow your own has been on-trend for a while now, but this year with all the uncertainty of Brexit and indeed the increases in food prices, growing food for the table is ever more popular. You don’t need an allotment to grow veg. You don’t even need a veg patch. A raised bed or some […]
WELLNESS ‘UNDER GLASS’ – Hartley Botanic’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show tradestand – stand number 33 – Designed by Tina Fraser of Valentine Wyatt Garden Design – Landscaping by award winning RHS Chelsea stalwarts Stewart Landscape Construction English Greenhouse and Glasshouse manufacturer Hartley Botanic is to showcase a wellness focused tradestand at RHS Chelsea Flower Show […]
Imagine walking into a leafy greenhouse. There you find a group of plants, suspended in space, each growing out of a rounded ball of moss, and dancing lightly in the breeze—an utterly exquisite show. You’re looking at kokedama, an elegant Japanese bonsai technique for showing off superstar plants. Several years ago, Chance Justbe, a Pacific […]
In any glasshouse or conservatory there are shady spots where the majority of herbaceous plants would not flourish even those we often choose for such places. As light levels fall choice narrows further becoming dominated by ferns and then only where it’s also moist enough. Well Selaginellas are not actually ferns, neither are they club-mosses […]
Sow broad beans, spinach, cabbage, calabrese, kohlrabi, cauliflower, lettuce, peas for pods and shoots onions, salad onions, turnip, radish, beetroot, leeks, leaf beat and chard under glass. From the middle of the month onwards, sow dill, basil, coriander indoor cucumber, courgette, squash, sweetcorn and tomatoes for later transplanting outdoors. Protect peas, broad beans and sweetcorn […]
As ecological crises mount, we need to take a closer and more honest look at what we’re doing in our gardens. It’s not as green out there as we think. Red lights are flashing everywhere. Natural emergencies abound. A collapse here, a crash there, a pollution calamity unfolding (air, water), climate breakdown accelerating… the more […]
This morning, as I waddled in my full-length puffy coat down the front walk amid the slabs of gray ice in my garden, I saw something amazing and heartening: the bud of a hellebore, trying to bloom under a dusting of snow. It’s a bold move for a flower, at 9 degrees F in early […]
It is all change down at the greenhouse this month. I wrote here a couple of months ago about the changes at the bottom of the garden, in essence: we gave up the allotment, pulled down the massive shed at the bottom of the garden, and have built raised beds to grow things in. While […]
With spring in the air a place to plant, pot up and generally potter is a fabulous garden haven for the gardener. It doesn’t have to be a shed, but traditionally the gardeners of the house (back in the days of larger estates and kitchen gardens) had a large shed or work room where they […]
The sun has broken out, the snow is melting on the garden paths and I am thinking warm thoughts to hurry it all along. Among them I recall sitting with Rosemary Verey in her grotto cum conservatory on a cool English spring day, which leads to memories of the many women I’ve worked with, learned […]
I do love plants with silvery foliage, the trouble is they’re difficult in Cold Aston because we get a lot of rainfall dumped upon us and silvery plants hate wet. They would much rather grow on thin soil in places like East Anglia – where rainfall is far lighter. However I’ve developed an area, underneath […]
Fan palms, Livistona chinensis & L. rotundifolia, are tough enduring specimens for frost free greenhouses, conservatories or even as house plants. These endure considerable neglect yet make highly decorative foliage displays year round. Although flowering and even fruiting does happen this occurs when mature- by which time these could be 30 feet for the chinensis […]
