Embracing the alchemy of decay will enhance the life – plant, soil, wild and human – in your garden. It was a gamble, but it was also a back-saving, pragmatic experiment from which the wilder life in my garden and I are now reaping rich, dark rewards. Wood – as chips, mulch, paths, poles, stakes, twigs, […]
The Opus Grand Botanic
I’m not keen on plant names being changed generally, because it can be very confusing. I never look at cimificfugas, tall autumn bottlebrushes with divided rich-burgundy foliage, and think of them as being remotely the same as rather boring, berried woodland acteas. The fact that a botanist has peered into their DNA and found it […]
The time to finally give up on the greenhouse vegetables is coming, but for me it’s not here quite yet. The temperature has dropped and when I pop down the garden each morning it is now with a cardigan on, but I am still picking tomatoes and aubergines regularly, for now. Although it hasn’t been […]
Golden leaves are beginning to cloak the upper slopes of the Rockies, and with the aspens turning so turns the season. As the British poet, Philip Larkin, would have it, “Autumn has caught us in our summer wear.” Just like it’s caught generations of gardeners before us. Turning to my treasured 240-year-old edition of the […]
Filling the garden with great plants can be a costly affair, but it doesn’t need to be. There are lots of fabulous garden plants that can be grown from seed, and not just the usual annuals. Pollinator plants There’s a group of plants that are called biennials. It just means that as opposed to annuals, […]
If you were a greenhouse gardener one hundred and fifty years ago you could have been growing twenty seven different species of the beautiful Spider flower. Listed in Paxton’s Botanical Dictionary as Cleome with another eight registered under the apparently near synonymous Gynandropsis there were three dozen or more available. Seventy five years ago Roy […]
Early in the month, especially if it is warm and sunny, sow trays, pots or old growing bags with ‘cut and come again crops’ to harvest through autumn and into winter, think land cress, oriental salads, like pak choi, mizuna and mibuna greens plus lettuce, lamb’s lettuce, chicory and radish. You can also use what’s […]
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