Geranium sanguineum striatum

Geranium sanguineum striatum

Photographed on our sales benches this morning, Geranium sanguineum striatum (sometimes known as G. s. ‘Lancastriense’) is a ground hugger, never getting more than about 6 inches tall, with foliage dense enough to out-compete any weed!   It’ll spread, but not invade, and in early summer, as you can see, it has lots of delightful light pink flowers.

As with all hardy Geraniums, shearing hard back after the first flush of flowers have faded will produce a fresh clump of foliage in just a couple of weeks, and a second flush of blooms soon after.

It has been awarded the RHS Award of Garden Merit, indicating it’s an all-round good do-er.

If you’re after some effective and elegant front-of-border ground cover, this should fit the bill!

We pride ourselves on the hardiness of our plants.   We are very careful to ensure that everything that makes it onto our sales benches is absolutely ready for the big outdoors, and we are very catholic in our plant selections, to the extent that many varieties of “hardy” plants simply don’t get onto our stock list.

Sometimes customers find this difficult to understand.   We had a conversation with a customer last weekend which went something like :

Customer :  “Do you have any Phormiums?”
Us : “No, we don’t find them reliably hardy”
Customer : (slightly quizzical) “Oh!?”  (and then with a hint of indignation) “I’ve had one in my garden for several years”
Us: “Maybe you have it in a warm spot…?”
Customer “Yes….it is quite sheltered….against a south facing wall….I wrap it with chicken wire, straw and fleece every winter…but last winter saw it off, so I want another!”

Of course we have no problem with this sort of gardening;  if you want a ”Mediterranean” garden, and are willing to go to those sorts of lengths to get one, that’s absolutely cool with us.   We just don’t like having to care for those sorts of plants on the nursery, or explaining to less knowledgeable customers that they’ll have to go to those sorts of lengths to keep their plants alive.

Gaura Ballerina Rose

But we also like to make sure our plant range is as wide as it can be, and we are constantly experimenting to see how maybe-marginally-hardy perennials behave with us.   As a result, our range includes one French lavender, one Osteospermum, one Ceanothus (and even that is under review following last winter!) and until now, no Gaura.

Gaura are always listed as perennials in the catalogues and encyclopedias, but the sage advice has been to treat them as annuals.   Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf refused them inclusion in their book Dream Plants for the Natural Garden with an explanatory  footnote describing them as “…wonderful…but you have to buy a new batch every year.”   And Gaura lindheimii, frankly, isn’t a very garden worthy plant.   It’s gawky habit, washed out pinky-white flowers, and tendency to develop (characteristic, normal, but rather unsettling) purple leaf spots meant it managed only a cameo appearance on our plant list a few years ago, and the genus has been off our radar ever since.

But the breeders have been busy!  A number of new cultivars have been launched in recent years, and tempted by some of the more lurid descriptions in the catalogues, we decided to try a batch last year.   And we like them!   The leaf spots have been bred out, but the colour has been retained, so you get a rather fetching clump of purple-green foliage, and in high summer they’re topped with lots and lots of pink butterfly flowers.   Prompt dead heading will get you a second flush of blooms a few weeks later.   And here comes the good bit – they appear to be really hardy!

The picture shows new growth on a plant that has overwintered in our back garden (there are 2 others, not in the picture, which look equally good).   We have a group of five in our (rather more exposed) front garden, which are also doing well.   Given the winter we’ve just experienced, we feel confident in declaring these guys well and truly hardy!

Our suspicion is that they may not be very long lived perennials (because the older varieties weren’t) but we’ll have to wait to see if the breeders have managed to eliminate those genes too.

In the meantime they’re looking like really garden worthy plants, so if you’ve been hankering after Gaura, but have been wary of their hardiness, have a go with these guys.

It’s been  a funny old year – we seem to have been catapulted from winter to summer by day, but night time temperatures are still distinctly spring-like (just plain cold).   We’ve had mild frosts here most nights recently (Nick was to be seen scraping the ice off Louise’s windscreen at 4.30am on Sunday, although we’ll concede that given the light levels at the time, you’d have needed damn good night vision to bear witness to this). *

Lady in the bath? **

And the plants continue confused – very warm by day, very cold by night – should they grow, or what?    We grow our plants hard here, and although the day/night temperature gradients have been large, the plants seem to be coping admirably – so the magnolia flowers are intact, the cercidiphyllum foliage remains glorious, and the Dicentra continue to delight.

Our picture shows Dicentra spectabilis on our sales benches earlier today, and in spite of Plant Mad Nige’s disdain, they are shrugging off the frosts, and looking wonderful.

They are fully hardy, will grow in any reasonably moist soil (but might sulk in very acid conditions) and like a bit of shade (think woodland margin).   They’ll survive in full sun if the soil is moist.   And they have the RHS Award of Garden Merit.

What better way to brighten up a spring border?

*   The plant fair season is under way, and Sunday saw Louise heading off to spend the day selling plants to tourists and plant hunters at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.   Our most distant event of the year (repeated in September) which means a 5am departure, and a 16 hour day.   Sometimes it’s tough in horticulture!

**   One of the common names for Dicentra, based on what the flowers look like if you hold them upside down, and squeeze.   And use your imagination.

Looking good on the sales benches right now….

Brunnera Jack Frost

If you have a shady spot in your spring garden, these chaps wil light it up for you….the attractive silver-marbled foliage only grows to maybe 15 cms / 6 inches high, and is topped for many weeks through spring with lots of delicate forget-me-not blue flowers.

The plant expands slowly year by year to provide lovely ground cover, lasting from spring to maybe mid-summer (by which time the foliage will be looking a bit tired, and can be cut to ground level – if you’re that tidy a gardener!).

Brunnera will do best on reasonably moist, humus rich soil, in part or full shade – think woodland margin, where they’ll enjoy the summer shade of deciduous trees.

And finally, spring has sprung.   Buds are swelling, even bursting, the willow tree in the garden is finally showing green (a full month later than we’ve got used to in recent years) birds are waking us up at about 5.30 each morning with an almost pre-dawn chorus, and we’re running out of space in the poly-tunnels….

To infinity, and beyond....

One of our experiments this year was to grow a few Fritillaria imperialis.   We saw them planted en-masse in Roundhay Park in Leeds many years ago, and have been meaning to grow some ever since.  We’ve never grown them before, either in the garden or in a pot, so this is uncharted territory.

And boy do they grow!   We put them in deep 4lt pots last autumn, and after the extraordinarily cold winter we’ve just had, were expecting them to have turned to mush by now.   But no!   A couple of weeks ago we noticed them them sticking tentative green shoots out of their compost, and since then, they’ve been rocketing skywards.

They’ve got to grow quickly of course – they flower in May, by which time they’ll be 4 ft tall, so there’s no time to lose.   But it’s still surprising to see them noticeably taller each day.

We can already see that they’d need very careful management in our garden – it’s windy here, and these guys grow fast, but soft, so they’d need staking and tying in very regularly.   Probably more regularly than we’d manage.   But if you have a reasonably sheltered spot, or the inclination to give them almost daily attention, they are very impressive plants.   They look lush and exotic, almost as if they belong in a jungle, but are evidently bone hardy.

We’re looking forward to seeing them flower, but as so often happens around here, we fear they’ll all be sold long before that happens!

It has to be said that our looking good list is a bit short at the moment.  Lots of the stuff that would have been brightening up the sales area by this time in recent years is being very sulky this season, and not yet looking its best.   In fact, not really looking much at all;  there are signs that things are beginning to move at last, but the season is lagging well behind what we’ve become accustomed to, and last years blooms are little more than fattening buds right now.

Skimmia Kew Green

But one or two plants just seem to shrug of whatever the weather throws at them, and Skimmia x confusa ‘Kew Green’ is looking as good as ever.

We first saw this in a garden situation at RHS Rosemoor, where they’re planted as an understory below trees (Betula utilis probably, which are planted in abundance there, but we can’t remember for sure).

We copied this idea in our own garden, under trees which have a much denser summer canopy than Betula, and they’re doing remarkably well, growing slowly, but thriving in the dry shade.

Those in the picture are on our sales benches, but looking pretty much as one with those in the garden.

It has the RHS Award of Garden Merit (all the best plants do you know) grows (slowly) to maybe 1 mt tall, and 1500 cms wide, and has clusters of small greenish-yellow flowers in spring (the buds in the photo will burst soon!).      It needs a shady spot, but copes with pretty much any soil.

Is it a sign of incipient senility when you can remember the tag line for a 1970’s corporate PR campaign, but you can’t remember why you came into a room?   I’m sure I came in here to do something other than write this….

Anyone who posts a reply naming the “ideas in action” corporation gets the Barlow Nurseries “Daft stuff lodges in your brain too then” Award…

Ilex x altaclerensis 'Lawsoniana'

Our own version of ideas and action is shown in the picture.   We visited Westonbirt Arboretum last autumn (and never got around to completing the blog of the visit, which is still languishing in the drafts folder).  We were looking for inspiration to extend the range of trees and shrubs we stock on the nursery.  Boy, we found loads!

We now have several Westonbirt inspired additions to our sales tables, one of which is Ilex x altaclerensis ‘Lawsoniana’.   It’s a very dense holly with bold yellow leaf variegation, and almost spineless leaves.   It’s female, bearing red autumn berries.   It grows to maybe 6 mts (20 feet) tall, but will take a long time to get there.

We were particularly impressed with it because its growth habit is very dense (we’ve grown Ilex x altaclerensis ‘Golden King’ for years, but that has a much more open habit) and its leaf variegation is a very strong yellow.  It will grow  in pretty much any soil, and any aspect.  Just the thing to brighten a dark corner, or lift a dull shrubbery.

Our other Westonbirt-inspired lines will appear here soon – when they start looking good (they’re deciduous, so a bit unremarkable right now!).

Surely a sign that Spring is just around the corner?

The gardening blogosphere is positively awash with snowdrops right now, so it seems a shame not to join in….

We’d actually forgotten these guys were in the garden;  we remember seeing them when we first moved here, but then left that area to fend for itself, and the self sown holly thicket that we’ve just cleared grew and grew, and engulfed them.  So it was a real joy to realise that they’re still with us.   They must have had a pretty hard time competing with a dense canopy of holly, so they stand as testament to the resilience of the species.

We make no pretence that we’re any sort of galanthophile, so have absolutely no idea what variety they are – it seems unlikely that whoever planted them would have been any sort of connoiseur either, so we presume they’re the common or garden Galanthus nivalis.

And jolly charming, and very welcome they are too.   With precious little else happening in the garden at the moment, it’s reassuring that mother nature is out there following a schedule, even if most of the country’s gardeners have rewritten theirs pending better weather.

Today this field, tomorrow......

The real snowdrop surprise came when we peered over the rudimentary fence that separates our garden from the adjacent field, and saw that our little colony seems to have made a bid for freedom, and established an outpost next door.   These little guys really are surviving against the odds – the field is under regular cultivation growing maize, wheat and potatoes in rotation, and is ploughed and sprayed repeatedly.   This little colony is surviving in barely a yard of field margin, where the fence angle prevents the tractors getting right up to the edge.

So while we might be charmed by their delicate beauty, we can’t afford to let our guard down – snowdrops clearly have their own agenda, including world colonisation if the opportunity arises.

Their only problem seems to be that given a rate of progress which needs to be measured in feet per decade, it could take some time!

As the winter we’d rather forget crawls painfully slowly to its denoument (and the Daily Express confounds yet again with an inexplicably gleeful headline warning of another cold snap next week) mother nature finally slaps an ace on the table and delivers something to cheer us up….

Light at the end of the tunnel

Rather late in the day of course – these guys usually wow us in early January – but we can understand their reticence given the Siberian weather we had this year. And they’re here now, so let’s just applaud their appearance.

This is Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Pallida’, and has just come into flower. It’s cousin H. i. ‘Jelena’ (a wonderful burnt orange which we were waxing lyrical about a year ago) seems to be a week or so earlier.

If you’re near RHS garden Rosemoor there are some spectacular specimens in their winter garden. Although ours are considerably smaller (well they’re the RHS after all) we keep reminding ourselves that Rosemoor is actually a very young garden, so it won’t be long before ours catch up!

If you’re nearer us here in Shropshire, there is a national collection of Hamamelis just down the road near Wolverhampton.

Discerning gardeners will always hear alarm bells when plant encyclopedias include words like “vigorous” and “suckering” in their descriptions.   And rightly so; such terms are usually extreme horticultural diplomacy – what they really mean is “beware, this plant has ambitions beyond the scale of your garden, it wants to take over the world”.

Kerria japonica (”Batchelors’ Buttons” is probably the most common of its common names) definitely falls into the “plant with caution” category.   Its a super plant – vigorous slender stems hold attractively toothed and veined deciduous mid-green leaves, and in late spring it’s clothed with loads of bright buttercup yellow flowers.   It’s up there with Forsythia in the spring colour charts.

The weeds have long since given up and moved out...

But you know there’s bad news coming don’t you?   And the bad news is that it’s not a plant that wants to share its space.  Put it in a spot that it likes (and that means almost anywhere) and it will spread, big time.   The picture shows a thicket in our front garden, planted as a single 3lt shrub only 3 years ago.   Its now covering an area maybe 2 mts x 2 mts, and advancing!

It’s very easy gardening, and if you have the right spot, we’d recommend it heartily.   It’s used extensively in amenity plantings (office block shrubberies, supermarket car parks etc) and is particularly good on banks where maintenance is difficult, because essentially, unless you’re worried about containing its spread, it’ll look after itself. It’s vigorous enough to out-compete weeds very promptly.

So if you have a “difficult” spot in your garden, Kerria japonica is likely to fill it nicely for you.   And in fact, although it grows like topsy, it isn’t difficult to control.   We’ll set about ours in late winter by going around the perimeter of the clump with a spade, and digging out the shoots which are exceeding the plants’ allotted space.   The suckers by which it spreads grow just below the soil surface, so it’s not difficult digging. Repeat every 2 or 3 years and this should keep it in check.

If you want to reduce the density of the thicket itself, prune the 2 – 3 year olds stems back to ground level, leaving just the newer (and frankly, more attractive) stems to flower. This greatly improves winter interest as the bare stems are attractive in their own right.