GARDENER'S WORD

I know I am English and rumour has it that we are supposed to talk about the weather all the time, well it's true and I offer no apologies.  While we aren't suffering the deadly volumes of snow that the people of Buffalo, New York, are suffering, we've had days of miserable grey skies, fog, and rain.  My garden is covered with soggy, rotting, leaves and the slugs are having a field day.  I swear they are like Gremlins in the movie of the same name, and multiply at a crazy speed when wet.  Today, rain has held off and we've even had a little bit of blue in the sky and weak sunshine.  I took advantage.  I've taken down the hanging baskets filled with Swingtime and Southgate fuchsias which have been fantastic for months on end.  As soon as we get serious frost, it could quite easily kill them.  To be honest, I'm not exactly sure how tender or robust these two types of trailing species are.  Sadly, they were still flowering and it seemed li...

I seem to be behind in my autumnal chores this year.  When the weather has been fine, I haven't felt like doing it.  When it's been miserable, I have been raring to go, but won't.  For one thing, if anything will set my back off, it's cold weather.  Does that sound like a good excuse for being lazy?  I think so.  Today is mild though.  It's cool, but fine.  After dilly dallying for a few hours this morning, I started on the jobs.  The first job was to treat the marble table.  It's a must, and something that cannot be put off too long.  If the table is wet, and the temperature drops below freezing, the marble can crack.  First of all I hosed off the grit and leaves, then applied a specialist marble cleaner .  The cleaner, and the protective liquid is very expensive but both those bottles are enough to last for years for my marble table which is 43" dia.  While the table top is drying, which it has to before I...

My garden is sodden at the moment with all the rain we've been having the past few days so, to avoid standing on saturated lawn and borders, and causing damage, photographs will have to wait for another day.  Sunshine is forecast for tomorrow, at least part of the time, but until then I thought I would share some photographs of trees, my favourite plants.   Do the world a favour, save the bees and plant some trees . Trees at Temple Newsam, West Yorkshire, August 2014  Trees at Temple Newsam, West Yorkshire, August 2014 Thorpe Perrow arboretum , North Yorkshire, June 2013 Prunus serrula - RHS gardens, Harlow Carr 2014 Oak tree, RHS gardens, Harlow Carr 2014 Trees at RHS gardens, Harlow Carr   

I see the Welsh Poppy (Meconopsis cambrica) growing quite often in local gardens, in positions where I can tell that the plant has sown itself.  There's one growing alongside a house drain, where the bathroom water flows.  Some Welsh Poppies found their way into the narrow strip of soil under my living room window and I thought, aaaah, sweet, let them grow.  Well, they are, but you try and pull one up.  I swear the root of one large plant headed for Australia and tied a knot in itself when it emerged from the other side.  That's an exaggeration, a homonym, but they are real toughies and not as easy as you might think to pull up.  Of course, it's not surprising that they are toughies, delicate looking survivors.  Although I have pulled up most of the ones growing at the front of my home while they were still small, I caught this little yellow flower on camera today.  Sneaky plant had grown without my noticing.  I shall leav...

I don't know whether I have mentioned this before, I think I have, that last year I grew two trailing pelargoniums on either side of my front door, in small wrought-iron corner baskets.  They did ok but I thought they had died over winter.  When I removed the baskets this spring with the intention of replanting them, I found that the poor little pelargoniums were struggling to get a grip on life.  I empathised!  I replaced the compost and replanted the plants which were mostly woody with the tiniest amounts of green showing.  Happily, they both survived and were doing very well except that yours truly, I, went and snapped the trailer part off one of them the other week while watering it.  It still has leaves, and again has survived, but there are no flowers.  On the other side of the door, its fellow pelargonium has produced lovely red blooms.  Red trailing pelargonium, grow in a corner basket I think, for the amount of flowers produced...

I mentioned back in a post in September that clematis Arctic Queen had collapsed and picked itself back up again after I cut the whole thing right back to its base.  While I hoped that the climber would grow again and maybe produced one or two flowers this year if I were lucky, I never expected that it would grow back to full height, and produce lots of buds and flowers which are continuing right through autumn towards winter.  But it has. Arctic Queen in a south-facing container, November 2014 Although I have had to move this climber a few times to try to try and ascertain where it is happy - it's a fickle thing - it seems to be content on my front porch/doorstep, facing south, protected a little against the wind which blows across the Pennines.  It looks really pretty when I approach the front door of my home.   I think that one of the reasons that it has recovered and done so well is that we have had a mild summer and are having a mild autumn....