Rhus typhinia dissecta

We’ve blogged about this before (about this time last year!) but it’s such a spectacle that we can’t resist another mention.

Wow!

Rhus are pretty common shrubs, both for garden and amenity planting, and their suckering growth habit can make them troublesome in some locations, but R. t. ‘Dissecta’ is just a bit special – its much dwarfer than Rhus typhinia, growing to just 2.5 mts tall, its finely cut leaves are much more attractive, and its autumn colour, as you can see, is bonfire night come early.

Acers dominate the autumn colour market of course, and rightly so, but they can be difficult to establish and sulk badly if  they’re mis-placed.   This little Rhus will thrive almost anywhere with no special care, so if you want to add a bit of easy and spectacular autumn colour, give it a go….

It also has the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit which means its an all round good do-er, so you really couldn’t go wrong!

Horticulture is nothing if not unpredictable.    Working in an industry which is so very weather dependent, in a country with notoriously unreliable meteorology is perhaps not the smartest move if you want any level of predictability in your life.  And if you can cope with working around the weather and the fact that sales forecasting is little better than buying lottery tickets, you still have to handle googlies like that nice Gordon Brown and his politician pals around the globe conspiring to deliver us the mother of all economic downturns.

It’s safe to say we started the year with absolutely no idea where we might go – the media was awash with doom and gloom about the economy, and horticulture was reeling from the effects of two years in which key sales periods had been, well, a bit wetter than we’d have liked.

We wanted 2009 to be better, but it wasn’t looking great.

Luckily, our spring weather this year was very nice, and while people certainly seemed to be cutting back on big ticket expenditure (holiday companies were advertising summer holidays on television in the summer, which rather implies they’d missed their targets by a country mile) but popping out to the garden centre to buy a few plants still seemed to be on the agenda, and sales were good.

Unluckily, some of our business is “big ticket” too, and we’ve seen a significant drop in border design and installation enquiries……until now.   We can only assume that this is down to the weather – September was remarkably mild and almost completely dry, and apart from a couple of wet days, October has so far been much the same.   People are still using their ‘outdoor rooms’, probably much later into the year than they’d expected,  and seem to be coming back to the idea of gardening on a sufficiently grand scale that they need our help with design and installation work.

Perhaps the economic gloom is lifting just a tad too, tho’ we’re not going to tempt fate by suggesting we may be climbing out of the mire just yet.   We’ll just content ourselves with the thought that right now, our biggest problem is getting all the work done before the weather breaks.

We’ve spent the last few weeks feeling quietly smug about our tomato crop (while innumerable other bloggers were despondently ditching there blight ravaged plants, we actually got a half decent crop – but only because we put ours in a polytunnel!).   But now we find ourselves asking the same “was it worth it?” question about our butternut squash.

The plants were huge (you can see them in the bottom right of the picture here).    Each one – we had 4 – probably covered  3-4 square metres, and this is the crop we got :

That'll be about 2 square metres per squash then

The area they consumed wasn’t an issue – the ground was spare this year anyway – but if they’d been on a conventional veg patch, it would have been a spectacularly poor use of space.

We’re guessing that the very dry September played a part too – there were quite a few small fruits that might have made it to a usable size if they’d had a bit more water to bulk them up – but it didn’t rain for a month, and we clearly weren’t attentive enough with the irrigation.

That aside, if you’ve got the space, they’re an easy, if rampant, crop;  they cover the ground very efficiently, need no weeding (nothing competes with these guys) and in a normal season, would probably yield acceptably, if not well.

You can see from the picture that we had a bit of variation too – all 4 plants were from the same seed packet, from a very well respected seed merchant, and , well, some of them aren’t butternut squash are they??

After an unnervingly dry but very pleasantly warm September,  Autumn is most definately rearing its head.  Most of the rain we missed in September seemed to fall during Tuesday night, so now the ground is as wet as you might expect for this time of year, the nights are getting noticeably longer and colder (the wood burning stove had its first autumn firing last night) and the mornings are distinctly chilly.  No frosts yet, although the night time lows are getting perilously close to zero, and for the first time today we started work in one of the polytunnels because it was too cold outside!

OK chaps, lights out, set your alarms for March 2010

But what days!   After a couple of hours potting up some of next years plants, the sun emerged from behind the clouds and the clothing layers started to peel off.   After another hour we decided we had to make the best of what is likely to be some of the last serious sunshine of the year, and get outside.

So the grand autumn tidy was resumed, and a few more batches of plants were weeded, top-dressed, gently pruned, and finally set out on the nursery beds where they’ll see out the winter.

And it was glorious – we love working outside of course, but I suspect even the most die-hard office junkie would struggle not to revel in autumn sunshine. There’s something very special about grabbing those last few rays of warmth before the sun heads properly south for the winter.   And there’s something special about seeing the stock you’ve carefully nurtured for months (or years!) being tucked up safe and sound for its winter hibernation.

Rain is forecast for tomorrow, but then a few more days of sunshine…bring it on!

Number 4 in our infinite series

Still flowering after all these years...

Erigeron karvinskianus, Australian daisy.

You either love or hate it – one customer this year refused to allow it in their garden on the grounds that it looked like something they’d spent their lives trying to eradicate from their lawn – but we love it!

It only grows to about 6 inches high, spreads to maybe twice that, and flowers and flowers and flowers.  The one in our picture (in our front garden) started in flower in June, and is still flowering its socks off now.    It will keep going until the first hard frosts tell it it has to take a break.

The RHS list it as being Hardy 3 (only reliably hardy in certain parts of the UK) which just goes to show you don’t have to  take these things too seriously – specimens have survived in our (chilly Shropshire) garden for years, and we routinely overwinter them in pots on the nursery (a much tougher test than being cosied up in a garden border).

The flowers emerge white (so for a few weeks in early summer they do look just like lawn daisies) but then fade to pink;  new flowers emerge long before the older ones die, and so for most of the season you have both white and pink blooms on the same plant.   They are “self cleaning” (thank goodness) so you’ll never have to think about dead-heading.

All in all, an effortless plant that will bring colour to your border for many months each season, and go on doing so for years.   It’ll self seed around the garden if its happy – charmingly, not thuggishly -so it even does its own propagation.

If you’re looking for the worlds easiest front-of-border perennial, this could be it!

Number 1 in a series of well, 1, probably

This was going to be step by step “how to” blog, but then we realised it just didn’t need that much explanation, so here’s a picture….

All mod con's (but only if you're a ladybird, or lacewing....)

Mostly the contents are bamboo canes cut to the depth of the box (a surprising number of bamboo canes actually).   The rest of the stuff is old branches with holes of random sizes drilled in them, and rolled up corrugated cardboard.

Hang it pretty much anywhere in the garden, and wait for the guests to arrive!

Do our beneficial insect buddies need our help to find places to while away the winter months?   We suspect the answer is probably no, actually.   There’s loads of perfectly good natural nooks and crannies around the nursery and garden for them, but …. it’s a fun thing to do, it makes use of something that would probably otherwise end up in the kindling box, it looks nice (well we think so anyway) and if there is just a slim chance that we can increase the population of insect good guys by doing something as simple as this, why not ?

I’m not sure exactly what jobs the seven dwarfs did in the Snow White story, but  I seem to remember it involved lots of enthusiastic wielding of pick axes and wheelbarrows, and there were seven of them, so if anybody knows where they can be contacted, we’ve got just the job…..

Do we have to move ALL that.....

The mechanical assistance (thank you Mr Caterpillar) has done its job now and left the scene;  virtually all the digging out is done – there’s a bit of scraping and levelling to do to get the bottom right, but the structure of the hole is established.   Unfortunately (and this is where seven enthusiastic manual workers would come in handy) we now have to distribute and grade the spoil around the garden.   About 20 tonnes we guess, and just spades, and wheelbarrows, and two people to do it.

But we’re not outfaced!  We’ll pace ourselves, and do an hour or two each day until its done (Nick was imobilised for a few weeks in the Spring having pulled a muscle in his back, and is NOT going back there, so softly softly is the motto!).

Meanwhile, Louise takes much delight in showing customers “the new hole that Nick’s dug in the garden”.  Mostly their reactions are limited to a polite “its a good size isn’t it!”.  We just hope that isn’t code for “Jeez you guys are crazy, that’s bloomin HUGE!”

And we hope that isn’t the expression that springs to mind when we see the quote for the butyl liner.

Did we store the kryptonite too close to the seed packet ?

Every now and again, amongst the zillions of plants we grow, something strange rears its head, and stops us in our tracks.

And right now we have a delphinium doing just that – it appeared in a batch of dark blue Magic Fountains series delphiniums a few years ago; we put it to one side, and it’s been minding its own business in a corner of the nursery ever since.  It’s flowered reliably each year, twice each season if we remember to dead-head the first blooms promptly enough (our photo was taken today, and shows this years second flush of flowers).   Apart from the flowers, it behaves pretty much like any other delphinium – it seems to be hardy, perennial, and we think it has a certain charm.

We’re going to try to propagate it next year, so may have some for sale in 2010, or perhaps 2011 (you get long planning horizons in this game!).

Do you like it ?

Herbaceous kindergarten

Just as one season draws to a close, another looms on the horizon, and here we go again….

Although the late autumn season sees a resurgence in interest in evergreen shrubs and trees, it also sees the end of herbaceous plant sales – the plants themselves realise that it’s time to take a break, and retreat underground for a winter rest.    But while the older plants go on their subterranean sabatical, there’s a whole new generation limbering up in the wings just waiting for their chance to bloom.

No sooner does one season finish than another one gets under way.   Our picture shows a few of our next generation – some of the plants we’ll be selling next season.   If the volume of seed and young plant catalogues currently dropping onto our doormat is anything to go by, there must be gazillions of others lined up in other nurseries across the UK and continental Europe too.

The plants in the picture will have to grow a bit first of course, but that’s what we’re here for!   Little green things right now, but colour in your borders next year!