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.

Well, we think it’s M. sinensis – it could be M. strictus – they are very similar, and are allegedly well mixed up in the trade;  we think ours is M. sinensis, but it doesn’t really have the arching stems that it’s supposed to, so we have our doubts.

We don’t really like grasses – we love their form and the architectural interest they add to a border, we love their texture and the way they sway in the breeze, we love their almost year-long interest and that they look stunning frosted in a winter garden….but we can’t stand the way they seed themselves around.

Look, no seeds!

Some plants are prolific seeders;  foxgloves, campanulas, verbenas and many others all carpet our borders with thousands of tiny seedlings each year.   But they’re easily controlled – one swipe of the hoe and they’re done for.   Grass seedlings are so much more robust;  even if you catch them really young they’re fantastically resilient, and we find only thorough hand weeding will keep them under control.   Unfortunately, we don’t have an army of under-gardeners we can task with this, so ornamental grasses mostly get designed out of our garden.

With one exception of course.   M. s. ‘zebrinus’ is an extraordinary plant.   The conventional husbandry is to cut the old growth down to the ground in late winter;  new growth then appears in the spring, but is clear green.   It grows for several months, and then, just as you’re thinking you’ll need to pull it out because it must have reverted, the yellow stripes appear.   Not only on new growth as you might expect, but along the full length of the foliage (which by this time will be 2 – 3 feet tall).

From  mid-summer until autumn you’ll enjoy an increasingly bold clump of lovely, vigorous, yellow-striped foliage.   Flowers appear in the autumn, and last right through winter, but (and this is the clever bit, at least for the grass seed phobic) the flowers are either sterile, or simply so late that they never develop viable seeds.   We’ve searched many reference sources but can’t find a definitive answer to this, but either way you don’t get seeds, and that means no pesky seedlings!

So there we have it – the best of all possible worlds;  lovely architectural plants, probably the most interesting foliage of any grass, modestly sized so it’ll fit most gardens (there’s a lot of HUGE grasses out there!) almost year round interest, and….no weeding!

More autumn fireworks!

Well we think it’s M. m. ‘Charity’ – the label’s long gone, and there are a few cultivars which look remarkably similar.    It could be M. m. ‘Winter Sun’ (which is dwarfer) but as this one still appears to be growing, and is already bigger than Winter Sun is supposed to get, our money’s on it being Charity!

Anyway…the photo was taken today, and it’s been in flower for a couple of weeks at least, so it’s a bit ahead of schedule.  The schedule appears to be late autumn to late winter however, so there’s plenty of latitude.

It’s pretty much a go-anywhere shrub, which is why it’s used so extensively in amenity plantings, but it’s none the worse for that.   Its spiky evergreen leaves give it year round interest, and as you can see from the picture, its winter flowering really adds a splash of colour when there isn’t much else happening in the garden.

It forms quite a dense thicket once it’s settled in, so it’s a “get it right first time ” plant – relocating anything other than a very young specimen would be a very fraught affair.

According to the encyclopedias its ideal location is semi-shade (good under trees) but it’ll grow pretty much anywhere – we have it on poor soil in a sunny west facing border, and it’s thriving.

Don’t be put off by its ubiquity – common plants are usually common for good reasons!

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!

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!

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 ?

Back in stock, but only just...

You probably can’t imagine how pleased we are to see this flower in our polytunnel.

We know it as Osteospermum ‘Deep Pink Form’, though it’s not at all clear that that’s its correct name – there are several remarkably similar looking cultivars listed in RHS Plant Finder, so a bit of botanical detective work might be useful to see which is which, or even if the different named plants are actually different.

But anyway – we’ve grown this plant for a long time, probably selling thousands over the years, and they’ve all been propagated from a single plant which was originally a gift from Nick’s mum, maybe 25 years ago, so it has a certain sentimental as well as financial value.

The usual routine on the nursery with vegetatively propagated plants is that the parent plants are renewed each year, by discarding or selling the older ones, and keeping back half a dozen of the most recently prop’d specimens to provide next years cuttings.   Simple enough you’d think, and of course it is, as long as you keep parents and progeny apart, and only sell the ones that you’re supposed to sell.    This year somehow we managed to break this golden rule, and the cry of consternation that went up when we realised we’d sold ALL our stock was audible for miles around.

No stock, at all, of one of the first plants that Barlow Nurseries ever propagated or sold.   Arghghgh!

But there is, of course, a happy ending.   One of the pleasures of running a small nursery is that we know a huge proportion of our customers personally, and thanks to Louise’s elephantine memory, we knew at least one garden where some of the last batch of these plants had gone.   And we knew they’d been acquired to enliven a garden that was opening for charity in a few weeks time, so a deal was struck – we supplied some plants for their plant stall, and in return, were allowed to take a few cuttings of the Osteospermum.

So all’s well that ends well – well, we hoped so, but weren’t very confident.   It was mid-summer, hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks, the plants had been planted at the foot of some very hungry and thirsty conifers, and we were there at midday.   If you had to describe a scenario from which cuttings were least likely to succeed, this would have to be a strong contender.   But we were desperate, pressed on regardless, and as sometimes happens, the plants confounded us.

We managed to find 18 shoots which looked as if they just might make viable cuttings, carried them back to the nursery as if they were gold dust, and got them onto the propagating bench in double quick time.   And remarkably from 18 cuttings, we’ve now got 18 plants, the first of which to flower is shown in the picture.

So Osteospermum ‘Deep Pink Form’ lives on at Barlow Nurseries, and stocks WILL be available in spring 2010!

Plant finder lists them as H3-4, although we find them reliably hardy, they form an attractive mat of narrow mid-green foliage, and flower their socks off from june until the frosts tell them to take a break.   Cut back hard in the following spring, they’ll do it all again, and again, and again.  Easy, reliable, very floriferous, an absolute front-of-border beauty.  We haven’t grown it for 25 years for nothing!

No 3 in our infinite series…

How did this beauty fall out of cultivaton ?

Those good people at Plant Heritage (I always liked the altogether more descriptive, if less succinct  ‘National Council for the Conservation of plants and Gardens’) run a conservation scheme aimed at bringing rare plants back into cultivaton.    Usually they are simply plants that have been “forgotten” in the tidal waves of new plant introductions that seem to engulf garden centres these days.

Aster Louise is one such “forgotten” plant which we’ve been growing for a couple of years now – and it really doesn’t deserve to have slipped below gardener’s radar.   It’s lovely late season colour (those in the picture are on our sales benches right now) very floriferous, and most importantly of all, seems completely mildew resistant.   It grows to maybe 18 inches tall, and planted now, each one will be an impresive 18 inch wide clump in the  border this time next year.  As a bonus, they’re wildlife friendly too – today they’ve been smothered in Comma butterflies making the most of the autumn sunshine.

You won’t find this beauty in many nurseries, but look out for it – sometimes the oldies are the best !

Autumn sunshine!

No 2 in our series stretching to infinity…….

If you want a bit of autumn colour in your border, look no further!    We’ve grown the “brand leader” Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’ for years, but never really found it happy on the nursery;  just one of those plants that never seems to thrive in a pot, always a bit sulky, and always goes down with a very disfiguring leaf spot.   So how pleased were we when we tried R. deamii instead!?

Rudbeckia fulgida var. deamii is a little taller than R. ‘Goldsturm’ (although encyclopedias often list them both the same at 60 – 100 cms) but other than that they’re pretty much indistinguishable.   The big advantage is that R. deamii just seems to be a much happier plant!    Always vigorous, healthy and very floriferous.   Those in the picture are actually on our sales area right now (although we have some in the garden too).

It also has the RHS Award of Garden Merit, which means it’s an all round good do-er, so if you want a splash of mid/back-of-border sunshine, these are the boys!

No 1 in an infinite series

Caryopteris x clandonensis Worcester Gold

Caryopteris x clandonensis ‘Worcester Gold’

A plant that needs a sunny spot, and a free draining soil – which is why its looking pretty wonderful in our garden right now I guess – it’s in a south facing border, in an elevated position in our very free draining soil, so it must be pretty much perfectly located.   The yellow foliage is striking in its own right, but when its topped with its lovely lavender blue flowers, its a cracker!

It only grows to about 1 mt wide and 1.5 mts high so it will fit in even the most modestly sized border , and it has the RHS Award  of Garden Merit, meaning its an all round good do-er.

Have you got one in your garden ?