There are lots of plants that’ll bring colour to your garden in the autumn – but if you make the right choice, some of your insect buddies might add a bit of their own….

Red Admirals love Sedum....

There doesn’t seem to have been very many butterflies about this season, but the Sedum coming into bloom seems to be bringing them in – this one, and two of his friends were feasting on our Sedum ‘Frosty Morn’ today, alongwith several small tortoiseshells (but they were rather more camera shy).

It may be late, but there’s still loads of plants that’ll bring a bit of colour to your autumn borders….

A view across part of our sales areas this morning

It hasn’t rained here for ages.  Really ages.   In fact, we can’t remember the last time we had a period of significant rain – it was probably about a year ago.     Then we had a really cold winter – lots of snow, but not much water in that, then an absurdly warm and dry spring, and then a reasonably okay sort of summer, warmish, calm, and dry.

Watching the weather forecasts this year has been like one of those crazy dreams where you can never quite reach the stuff you need (everyone has those, don’t they?).   There has been lots of rain around, but as soon as it approaches Shropshire on the forecast maps it just seems to evaporate, and the clouds go everywhere but here.

The garden is completely knackered – we don’t water the ornamental garden at all, trying to work with plants that will cope with our always-less-than-moist soil, but even they’ve been defeated by this years conditions.   Our veg plots have only survived because we’ve spent hours (many hours) hand watering.

We could illustrate this with a photo of our parched garden plants, but frankly that’d just be embarrassing.   So we were pleased to have a different photo opportunity this afternoon, when one of our neighbouring farmers decided to harrow his field.   Normally this is an entirely unremarkable event, but today, rather than calmly breaking down the soil and leaving it ready for sowing, the process seemed to have been extended to include sharing a good proportion of the field with the neighbourhood – as we, and anybody else trying to breathe nearby, were consumed in clouds of dust-dry earth.   If it had been windier, the ploughman could have extended his largesse to the neighbouring county.

Dusty

Dustier

There's a tractor in there somewhere...

The garden is knackered, but we’ve been irrigating the nursery – it’s seemed at times as if that’s all we’ve done this season – and there are still huge swathes of late season colour to enjoy. Maybe that’ll be tomorrows photo opportunity.

Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s you couldn’t consider yourself a hip and happening gardener if you didn’t have a conifer bed. Actually, you probably wouldn’t have recognised the need, because there was almost certainly no such thing as “hip and happening” back then – but whatever expression was in use, if you wanted to follow the gardening fashion, conifers were where it was at.

Gardening fashion is as fickle as any other of course, and the 80’s enthusiasms for Adrian Bloom, Foggy Bottom, Island beds and and all things conifer were soon cast aside in favour of the 90’s obsessions with decking, blue fencing, architectural planting and Groundforce stylee makeovers.

The noughties saw a bit of a hiatus in garden fashion, but Monty Don made a valiant effort to set a trend and revive the fortunes of the conifer when he planted one of the front borders at Berryfields(¹) with them;  sadly, it barely got its 15 minutes of fame before Monty crashed and burned from our screens, and Berryfields found itself consigned to TV gardening history.

A conifer for every occasion....

But where Monty failed, the great British weather triumphed – the last couple of winters have despatched an awful lot of the hoped-to-be-hardy plants that were planted in the Groundforce years, and gardeners looking for tougher replacements for their architectural specimens are focusing once again on the charms of the conifer.

We’ve always sold conifers here, but they’ve tended to get mixed up in the general melee of the sales areas, and have never been a proper feature on the nursery.   But no more!   With increased customer interest in them, and National Conifer Week on the horizon, we’ve made some changes – and the Barlow Nurseries conifer department is now open!

All our conifers (except the hedging ones) are now grouped together;  we’ve increased our stock, and now offer all sorts of shapes and colours, in all sorts of sizes – from smaller plants in 3 lt pots, up to well established 15 lt specimens.

So if you’re wondering what to put where that Phormium/Eucalyptus/Ceanothus/Bay/Trachycarpus/Tree fern/etc, etc used to be, we may be able to help!

(¹) Berryfields – actually Burmans Farm, Shottery, Stratford-on-Avon – was the TV garden from 2003 – 2008.