While most gardening priorities at this time of year involve bedding plants, hanging baskets, and setting out tender vegetables, it’s also important to spare a thought for the perennial plants that will be delivering colour and interest to our borders later in the season.

In recent years it’s become popular to use the annual beano that is the Chelsea Flower Show as an alliterative reminder that it’s time to take the secateurs to the taller (and potentially floppier) late season flowers in the herbaceous border, and do the Chelsea Chop!

Short back and sides, sir ?

Tracy DiSabato-Aust managed to stretch this to a whole book, but for those of you who are more inclined to garden than read, here’s the Barlow’s Digest version of the technique.

To do the “chop” you remove the topmost few inches of growth (yes, all the flower buds!) from plants such as Sedum, Rudbeckia, Helenium, and Heliopsis, so that they’ll re-shoot from lower down their stems, and make squatter, more robust (and self supporting!) plants.   It will delay flowering by a couple of weeks, but that sacrifice is more than compensated by the fact that the plants won’t fall over, will not need staking , and will actually have more flowers.

Our picture shows 2 Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ in our garden, one chopped, one not (but soon will be!).    If you’ve never done it before, it’s definitely a grit your teeth, cruel to be kind sort of moment;  but you’ll have forgotten all that angst by September, and you won’t be looking at your borders wishing you’d spent more time staking and tying!

Spring in the tree aisles

It’s spring!

Leaves are unfurling, colours are zinging, the blossom looks lovely….we know this because we can see the tree aisles on the nursery from the house, and this is the view we get when we fling back the curtains each morning.

May is definitely the best month of the year!

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.

Busy, busy, busy….but never so busy that we could ignore this glorious end to the day.

The view from our front window at 8.30 this evening.

Except to say – the swallows are back!    The blogosphere has been awash with reports of swallow sightings for weeks, and we were beginning to think the family who we’ve become accustomed to sharing our summer garden with had had a better offer, but at the weekend they finally returned.  Hovering at the back door, investigating whether our back hall would be a good nesting site, dive bombing the cat as she crosses the garden, and no doubt eventually, as usual, deciding to nest under the lych gate.

Not the variety or colour we ordered, but stunning nonetheless!

And the cuckoo is back too!   Unusually, our tardy swallows were beaten back here this year by the cuckoo, who’s been joining in the dawn chorus for a week now.

Spring has sprung!

As mad May approaches, activity on the nursery is ramping up, and threatening to move from “frantic” to “maybe we can spend less time eating or sleeping…” The sun is shining, the grass is growing (dammit) and the countryside is developing the spectacular lime green glow that comes with the youthful vigour of newly unfurled foliage.

All’s well with the world!   Enjoy!   (And don’t the tulips look lovely?).

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.

Many years ago, when our children were pre-school, and CBBC ,cbeebies, the cartoon channel and digital television were just TV mogul’s pipe dreams, we used to resort to recording what meagre offerings terrestial TV sent our way, and the kids would watch stuff again (and again) when there was nothing on live.   Amongst other things, this accounts for our ability, even now, to recite most of the dialogue from (the original, Gene Wilder version of) Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory….

One of the more obscure delights to emerge from the VHS machine at this time was a 1936 MGM Happy Harmonies cartoon which told of a band of subterranean elves whose job it was to add the colours of spring to the world each year, and how they fought an epic (and somewhat chaotic) battle with resurgent winter before spring was finally sprung.

In our family folklore, this has always been referred to as “The Colours of the World” although having just searched it out on YouTube (is there anything you can’t find on YouTube?) we were surprised to see it’s actually called “To Spring”.   And every year, when spring falters and our eccentric climate stumbles back into winter, the cry goes up “It’s like the colours of the world!”.

That cry is starting to sound a little worn right now, as spring 2010 splutters and falters and….well, lets just hope things are about to improve.   Easter weekend lived up to it’s reputation for meteorlogical variability, but the forecast for later this week is looking promising, and the long term forecast for April looks typical, if not actually great.   Most things on the nursery and in the garden have got buds just itching to burst, so surely any day now we’re going to see a splendid spring, aren’t we?

And if you have 9 minutes 39 seconds to spare….

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!

We write editorial to accompany our regular advertisements in our local free advertising magazine Nova News.   The print deadline is about a month before publication date, so writing topically about gardening is a bit of a challenge, if not a gamble, especially this year.

Anyway, here’s the editorial from the current issue, which publishes this week….

There doesn’t seem to be much agreement on when Spring actually begins.  According to the Met Office it’s March 1st;  sun watchers will tell you it didn’t start this year until 17.32 on March 20th (the vernal equinox);  Gardener’s World viewers are never quite sure when it’ll start (or if after it has, if it’ll be cancelled because of the snooker).     Others might tell you Spring hasn’t arrived until they’ve heard the first cuckoo, or the roar of the first lawn mower, but whichever definition you follow, you should have a spring in your step by now, so enjoy!   It’s the best season of the year!

Poised for action....

After the winter we’ve just endured we’re surprised and delighted to find sun or our backs at last, and have been marvelling at the resilience of the plant world – our picture shows a rhododendron bud poised to deliver a burst of colour to the garden, and apparently entirely unphased at the arctic temperatures it’s just endured.

And we’re looking forward to a wonderful summer;  it seems only reasonable to expect that after a “proper” winter we should get a proper summer, and  we’re gardening like crazy so we’re ready.   We’ve been frantically sowing, taking cuttings, potting up and potting on for some weeks now, and the nursery is at last shaking off winter, and waking up!

We’ve been busy in the tree department too, and have added new aisles so we have an even bigger selection to choose from (450 trees at our spring stock check!).    And we continue to extend our range of shrubs and herbaceous plants, trying always to include species that you won’t find in many other places, so if you’re looking for something a little out of the ordinary, call in!

If some of the plants in your garden haven’t made it through the winter, don’t be too despondent.   It’s an opportunity to ring the changes!   And if you some of your plants look as if they only made it through winter by the skin of their teeth, listen to what they’re telling you – they’d like to be somewhere warmer, or perhaps freer draining , so give them what they want.  Uprooting a plant and shifting it to a new site in the garden isn’t actually as daunting as it sounds, and the plant will likely thank you for it and perform much better in future years, so get the spade out, and do a bit of re-styling!

And if some of your plants need a bit of a post-winter tidy – be bold!   Most people are worried about pruning and tend to be overly cautious; don’t be – cut dead shoots and branches right out, and if that leaves the plant unbalanced, prune what remains back to buds that look as if they will grow in the right way to re-balance the plant.   Be decisive, and let the plant know who’s boss;  make it do what you want, and it will thank you in the end.

And finally, If you enjoy garden visiting, the National Trust property Dunham Massey in Cheshire ought to be looking good right now.    A new 7 acre winter garden was installed last year, and it includes 200,000 spring bulbs, many of which should be doing their glorious thing just about now!