GARDENER'S WORD - IDEAS AND TIPS

It's November 25, 2017 and for anyone who might think that snow has come quite early this year I can tell you that not only did snow arrive on the Pennines of West Yorkshire on 9 November 2016, but a large amount of snow descended around 18 November 2016 too.  I got quite a surprise when I looked out of my window yesterday evening, into the darkness, and thought I was imagining the white stuff reflected back at me in the light from the kitchen window.  My snowy West Yorkshire garden - November 25, 2017 Above, in my unheated garden room, the temperature has dropped to 2.2 degrees.  However, the lower thermometer reading shows that so far the temperature within has not dropped to, or below, freezing.  I have my pelargoniums , the Jade Plant (Crassula Ovata), and my little bay tree (Laurus Nobilis)  in there (for now) but they are covered with garden fleece.  It's all very experimental and I am hoping that no harm with come to those plants....

Although I've grown a lot of different roses in my time (not so much nowadays) I cannot recall ever growing an apricot colour.  The nearest I got to that was Just Joey , a hybrid tea rose. Just Joey, a hybrid tea rose I believe Just Joey was named after the wife of the Managing Director of Cants of Colchester, Joey Pawsey.  I can still remember the lovely fragrance that Just Joey had even though I have not grown it for more than 20 years.  Just Joey is highly recommended on the David Austin Roses website , and also has the RHS Award of Garden Merit.  It was the World's Favourite rose 1994 (which would have been about the time I grew it).  It was registered in 1972.  Just so you know. 

Although it's been a while since I last had a flower on my garden's buddleias (I grow Buddleia Davidii Nanho Blue and Buddleia Davidii Empire Blue ), the Nanho Blue has some beautiful silver and quite hairy leaves on the tips of its branches.  I wonder if they will last throughout winter as the shrub's large green leaves are being shed.  It looks really pretty but, alas, the shrub will need pruning in spring to stop it getting over large and keep it in shape.  Right now it is in a container but I think I ought to find a way to plant it in the garden next year. Buddleia Davidii 'Nanho Blue' silver leaves Buddleias can tolerate hard pruning and it just encourages them to make more flowers.  Davidii flower on present year's growth, hence spring pruning.  My Empire Blue does not have these silvery leaves.  Buddleia Davidii Empire Blue

I was mooching around Skipton in North Yorkshire today with a friend.  It was bitterly cold and much of the time we were indoors having warming coffee and fruit-bread toast.  We looked around charity shops, and inside a sheltered arcade. It was there where I discovered a small stall that I had never seen before, where various kinds of wood carvings were being sold.  I had to have this one, this interesting face of wood which looks like a Sikh to me with his moustache, beard, and turban.  I thought at first that it must be resin but no, it's carved from a big branch of wood.  Inexpensive too.   Tree Man (Sikh) wood carving I was told that although the outer surface was varnished that the rough other side was not and that it must not be varnished as the wood must be allowed to breathe.  This was information for external use but my tree Sikh will sit (or hang, there is a loop at the back) quite happily and protected within the safety of my...

Good grief, it's cold out there today.  I went outside into my little garden and removed the last of the hosta leaves which had died back and shrivelled up.  My hands were freezing.  I noticed, while removing the hosta leaves, that there were tiny 'spears' of next year's leaves just poking up ever-so-slightly out of the surface gravel.  I quickly covered them up.  It's not time for them to be so brave, winter is coming and this weekend we have been forecast some wintery conditions here in the north of England, although they are speaking of rain and wind (bit like summer really) and low temperatures, not snow.  It is time for the tuberous begonias to be protected and overwintered before I forget and damage is done.  I've grown the begonias in individual pots this summer and have allowed the stems and leaves to die back somewhat as I understand that the leaves feed the tubers (just as daffodil leaves feed the bulbs).  Most of th...

As mentioned in my previous post about the metal wind-spinners at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) garden centre in Harlow Carr, it was gloriously sunny this morning and while I didn't visit the actual RHS gardens, I did take a couple of photos from where I was standing in the garden centre.  It looks really beautiful at this time of year, especially in the sunshine, with the trees in all their tones of orange and red, and the tall grasses in the borders are really effective.  RHS gardens, Harlow Carr, North Yorkshire, 10 November 2017  RHS gardens, Harlow Carr, North Yorkshire, 10 November 2017

Today I drove over to one of my favourite places, Bettys and the RHS garden centre at Harlow Carr in North Yorkshire.  I had brunch at Bettys then a mooch around the RHS shop, the RHS greenhouse, and then their garden centre.  They have these wonderful free-standing metal wind-spinners on display now.  They cost a bit (one was £195) but they are large and very eye-catching in the sunlight.  See video below.  Not sure that they would stand up to the winds I get in my garden; they'd need setting in concrete or they could spin off, up, and away.  Metal Wind Spinners at RHS garden centre, Harlow Carr - November 2017 Below is my brief iPhone video of the RHS metal wind-spinners in action which I've uploaded to YouTube.  Aren't they great?  (I know, I know, I know, I should have held my phone horizontally!  I've had to rotate the clip via Windows Movie Maker) 

Over all the UK has had some pretty awful weather in recent weeks but the last day or two is making up for it, in my garden at least.  The garden room is reaching 20+ degrees celsius in the sunshine, and I've had a very small but very welcome crop of autumn raspberries from my Polka canes.  As previous posts explain, I grow Polka raspberries as a double cropper so that I get fruit in summer and autumn.  What fruit I get in autumn depends upon the weather and the recent storms did give the canes a good old thrashing.  Still, a bit of sunshine like we have been having lately and the small green raspberries plump up, redden, and ripen.  They taste great.  Polka raspberry The hanging baskets are still in flower although the plants are looking a little battered and soon decreasing temperatures will put an end to them.  Meanwhile, I'm enjoying seeing them.  Also the penstemons are still flowering.  All those years I thought penstemons w...

Last Saturday, 21 October 2017, Storm Brian followed Storm Ophelia and left my garden unscathed, thankfully.  It mashed the few Polka raspberries that were on the cane, but that's no great loss.  Not so lucky for many, especially in Wales and on the west coast of the UK where the sea crashed onto land adding to devastation caused by wind and flooding.  Stormy weather often brings interesting skies here on the Pennines of West Yorkshire and I had to take a photo of this yesterday morning.  I used my Canon EOS for this one and the image has not been edited in any way whatsoever.  Glorious colour, I think, against a conifer and trees (now devoid of leaves).  Also the birds were out in force.  No doubt glad to have survived and singing their little heads off!   See image below.  It always amazes me how, in high winds, tiny birds managed to sit on the bird feeders and eat.  Why don't they blow away? Sunrise on 23 October 2017, over ne...

I always find it difficult to cut my garden's roses to bring indoors.  For one thing, my roses ( Wild Eve and New Dawn ) don't always have stems suitable for cutting and making a nice display in a vase.  For another thing, the flowers last an awful lot longer when left in the garden unless a storm comes along and even then they often just go with the flow and weather the weather.  Today, mooching in a Marks and Spencers store, I bought yellow and red long-stemmed roses, half price, with a sell by today's date.  I am hoping they will last as long as the dark red ones which I bought over two weeks ago for half price.  There's a trick to making them last...  Yellow and Red roses from Marks and Spencer ...Every few days, I cut an inch of so off the bottom of the stems of my cut flowers (any cut flowers).  Cutting the stem at a very sharp angle exposes a larger area for water to be draw up to the flower's head.  I use flower food which often...

There's definitely a chill in the air this morning, foggy too, and for me that's a reminder that frosty nights and days are on the way.  Winter!  Under my living room window I grow a trough of pelargoniums (often called geraniums) which I plant each spring.  Pelargoniums originally come from South Africa, I understand, and they are not fully hardy.  Certainly they are not hardy enough to cope with the harsh winter sub-zero weather that we can get here on the Pennine Mountains of West Yorkshire.  They don't like to be frozen or waterlogged.  They like sunshine and warmth (a bit like me really).  So, the other day I gently dug them out of the trough and planted them into pots and placed them under the shelter of my garden room's overhanging roof.  They'll be happy enough there for a little while longer, facing south-west, and when the weather becomes harsh (and I expect it will) I can pop them inside the unheated garden ro...

As the year winds down into winter, so do I.  I'm no winter gardener (I hibernate) and there is so much that needs doing while the weather is still mild.  As lots of gardening work all at once can be rather overfacing (not getting any younger, you know) I have to do it little by little and what does not get done, well, does not get done!  The weather has been strange across the UK; episodes of sun giving relief, downpours of rain causing flooding, and winds that create havoc for many on the roads and elsewhere.  While we in the UK are doing better than many poor souls across the world right now, coping with wars and disasters, we did get downgraded Hurricane Ophelia swinging east across the Atlantic a couple of days ago.  She devastated areas of Ireland, then followed that by smashing into the UK's west coast causing loss of life (3 people) in Wales.  When storm Ophelia arrived where I live, high on the Pennines of West Yorkshire, the wind was sti...

In the early spring of 2016 I bought and tried to grow a Crassula ovata  sometimes known as a Jade or Money Tree/Plant.  I failed miserably.  So did the plant.  It was not happy in my home and I never could work out whether I was not watering it enough, watering it too much, if it was too hot, too cold, not enough light, whatever.  It kept drooping and after a long while of pandering to it, I chucked it onto the garden and chopped it into the soil.  Done with that!  This year, in July, I bought another (after all, in a previous garden in the 1980s , I had grown a magnificent one in the conservatory) and by that time I had my new but unheated garden room built and wondered if a Crassula ovata might fare better there.  It has.  It has almost doubled its number of leaves since buying it.  Crassula ovata - 01 October 2017 The label says: Crassula ovata (Money Plant) prefers a light position with temperatures of betw...

I drove over to the RHS at Harlow Carr today and had a mooch around their shop and garden centre, like I often do.  They had some lovely plants for sale but my garden is packed out with perennials and I didn't dare buy more.  They had some (what I think are) chrysanthemums in pots which are the same type as a plant which I grow in my garden.  Annoyingly, seriously annoyingly, I couldn't find any record of my plant mentioned in my blog or even the label.  Possibly somewhere hidden amid all the penstemons and what have you, there is a stray a label.  Mine, which I grow in the sunny garden border, grows in a delightfully compact bouquet-shape.  I hope to divide it at some point in the next year or two and have more of them.  Compact chrysanthemum plant in my sunny garden border - Sept 2017 Chrysanthemums in my garden - Sept 2017 I seem to have a fondness for bluish-pink and purple flowers.  Below, pot grown chrysanthemums ...

Autumn is upon us with chillier nights and mornings.  I've emptied and taken into the garden room the Smart solar-powered pitcher cascade which is not frost proof.  There are lots of things that need doing to wind up the garden for winter but I am taking it slowly, step at a time.  Today I picked more alpine strawberries.  They really are beautiful little berries.  When ripe they have such an intense, almost perfumed flavour, that I really love.  Getting to them before slugs is the challenge so I have placed my plant, which I grow in a largish pot, onto a plant trolley to keep them higher off the ground - dangling in mid air, the berries have more of a chance.  The birds seem to ignore them.  Good.  The berries are best picked when fully red and eaten straight away - lovely with breakfast cereal.   The alpine strawberry plant is fully hardy and here on the Pennine Mountains of West Yorkshire, I get flowers and fruit from late spr...

Last year I planted Buddleja davidii 'Empire Blue' and didn't take a photograph of its flowers.  Perhaps I bought it when it was not in flower.  Anyway, this year, despite there having been many flowers, I almost forgot.  Flowering has almost finished now but yesterday I remembered when it was raining and blowing a gale.  I managed to take a fairly decent shot of one of the remaining purple flowers, and a not so great photograph to try and indicate to you the rather ethereal growing habit of this delightful shrub.  The leaves are a grey green and pointy on slender branches and they sway around beautifully in the breeze.   Buddleja davidii 'Empire Blue'  This summer I have been carefully deadheading the flowers on buddleias  to promote more flowers.  Davidii are summer flowering buddleias and it is best to prune them back in early spring as they flower on growth made that same year.  If you prune them too early, like now...

A friend from Devon came up to visit me in here in West Yorkshire this week and wanted to see the charming old parsonage where the Bronte family lived in the 19th century.  Many people will know about the Brontes: about Charlotte who wrote Jane Eyre, and Emily who penned Wuthering Heights, and less well known Anne who wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  Shockingly, perhaps, I had never been there, inside the parsonage.  So we went and the rooms were smaller than expected and in many ways quite modern.  Dare I say it?  Yes I dare.  I was more interested in the gardens, and I took some photographs with my iPhone from the shelter of the house, seeing as how it was raining cats and dogs.  I've added a couple of links for those who wish to see more about the house and the family. Statue of Bronte sisters taken from an inside window - Sept 2017 Bronte Family (Wiki link) The Brontes and Haworth (Bronte.org.uk) I can just imagine them strolling arou...

Although the internet states that it is officially autumn in the UK on 22 September 2017, the weather doesn't seem to know it.  Now I'm wondering what this winter will bring.   No, now hang on, wait a minute, because... Rainbow in West Yorkshire - image dated 01 Sept 2017 ...the UK Meteorological office (external link) kindly informs us that meteorological autumn begins on 1 September.  And astronomical autumn begins on 22 September.  We've had an on and off decent summer and the change to autumnal weather has been gradual, commencing with a nip in the air in the morning and sunshine diminishing as clouds take over during the day.  Before the rain came about three days ago, a rainbow appeared in the relatively near distance and since then it has rained spasmodically.  In a nutshell, it's miserable.  I like to keep a kind of record of the weather on my blog - when it freezes, when it's sunny, when it snows, and so on - b...