So many of our most interesting and useful tender crops and flowers are closely related and in the Solanum family. All the daturas and petunias, brunfelsias and nierembergias, cropping and sweet scented tobaccos, tomatoes and potatoes, peppers, physalis and aubergines, and even that oddly popular Goji berry. I really cannot bring myself to recommend this […]
After several weeks of patient waiting, my tomato plants are now well established. Once the first truss appears, I’ll be transplanting them into 12” pots, to give the soil in the greenhouse border a rest. It’s advisable to change the soil every three or four years, so devise your own rotation system. Try growing them […]
Grafted what? OK, as home gardeners, most of us are familiar with grafting apples, roses or grapes for disease resistance and vigor. But right now, around the world—from Japan to India, Israel to Greece and New Zealand—commercial growers are grafting hybrid rootstocks (bottoms) to single-season scions (tops) like watermelons, eggplants or tomatoes. Within a few […]
By June everything in the garden and greenhouse is growing furiously. Plants are set on their mission to make seeds and gardeners and greenhouse owners across the country and desperately trying to keep up. But in between the weeding, tying in, planting, training and even harvesting, there are still ways to make more of what […]
So, you’ve seen the show gardens and taken in the Grand Pavilion. Now what? Fancy building a Corten steel structure? Planning on filling the back garden with tree ferns? Or do you fancy inviting the cow parsley in? Unlike designers building a Chelsea Show Garden, most people have to grapple with a small space, limited […]
Is it because you can’t buy plants at the Chelsea Flower Show that the urge to shop is so irresistible to most people? Seasoned colleagues tell me they deplore the commercialism of it all, while I keep my guilty secret that I always look forward to shopping at Chelsea. Each year I make a point […]
They say that behind every successful man there is a woman. And behind every successful Chelsea Show Garden there is a shed. Some contain exotic items like rose-water and lime leaves, others are cluttered with boxes of disposable plastic shoe covers. (Chelsea judges don’t take kindly to messy footprints). While the public sees only cool, […]
Today I’ve been turning my attention to plants at the Chelsea Flower Show: first of all there are new plants, and then, there are plants that are new to me! But with only 60ft to play with in London, I have to keep a tight rein on my enthusiasm. Last year’s must-have was Anchusa Azulea […]
They came, they saw, they splashed around in the water (at the Trailfinders Australian Garden), they recited punk poetry (John Cooper Clarke in the Foreign and Colonial Investments Garden), they served up celebrity pizzas (Jamie Oliver in the Children’s Society Garden), then they left. So went the first day of the Chelsea Flower Show 2010. […]
If there’s one easy way to instantly transform the appearance of your house and garden, it’s to add a container or two of colourful plants. Hanging baskets at the front door, patio planters and even just a window box of fresh, flowering plants bring drama and interest to an otherwise bare and boring area. The […]
After enjoying the delights of April when we were greeted by warm sunshine for several days, the weather is now back to erratic, un seasonal, ‘normal’. Even the hot days of April were tempered by cool nights, so any heat that warmed the ground was lost overnight. It did, however, compact spring into a few […]
This is a large genus of dozens of species carrying some of the most beautiful flowers of the world. (These were named after Christ’s Passion as priests tried to associate the curiously formed floral parts with particular items from the crucifixion, erroneously as it transpired that the flowers were not as drawn and there was […]
