Garden Centre

Monday, March 31, 2008

Red roses forever?

After centuries of searching, a once impossible dream has been realised. Horticultural experts have created the first true blue rose. You may remember the famous Blue Moon, a rose that was claimed as blue, although most of us would have considered it to be at best ‘blueish mauve in a good light’. Now by genetically modifying rose material with genes from a pansy, and field trials in locations as far apart as Colombia, America, Australia and Japan, the Australian company behind the creation is about to set up a commercial farm with more than 30,000 blue rose bushes, to be located somewhere in Japan. Roses do not have the gene that produces delphinidin, (named for delphinium of course, the bluest of blue plants) the pigment which makes flowers blue.

Why Japan? Because of course the blue rose is a GMO (genetically modified organism) and reproduction of GMOs requires a licence, and those licences are much easier to obtain in Japan than they are in Europe. The company, Florigene, hopes to be able to demonstrate that the genetically modified roses pose no threat to the general rose population or to other plants by growing them in Japan and thus win the right to produce and sell them in other parts of the world too.

Blue rose courtesy of alowan

Labels: blue rose, garden rose, genetically modified plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:06 PM 1 Comments

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Sunday, March 30, 2008

Native plants

Perhaps spring is the one time of year when if we don’t have native plants, we don’t have anything much in the garden. This is because, as you might have noticed, a British spring is unpredictable, unreliable, vicious and confusing. And native plants have learned from experience how to cope with the hell that is March, April and May.

Daffodils have been late this year, and the bluebells, which started early, actually gave up and froze their blooming season for about two to two and a half weeks, remaining green for considerably longer than usual. Violets appeared early too and seem to have sailed through the late snows and drenching rains that assailed them. Plants from the Mediterranean, such as lavender and rosemary, have coped reasonably well, although in some more northern parts the first growth on lavender was nipped off by air frosts last week. The ones that have really suffered though as the imports from further afield: the early clematis, which doesn’t mind some really low temperatures (it comes from the Himalayas) but detests the combination of cold and saturated roots; the syringa has been blighted right along the eastern coast of the UK; and the camellia family, which needs a very good spring indeed to be at its best, has done what it always does in a bad spring – shed all its blossom to be strewn across lawns and gardens everywhere.

So, if you want to have a great display, regardless of climatic conditions, invest in native plants.

Labels: native flowers, native plants, spring flowers, spring shrubs

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:17 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Polish invaders in the plant world

Market experts estimate that about 90% of the plants sold over the Easter weekend, whether from specialist nurseries, in DIY stores or off garage forecourts, actually came to the UK from elsewhere in Europe.

As an example, Britain’s clematis varieties (which we should bear in mind were originally introduced to the UK from the Himalayas by the wife of an Indian Consul General) are being ousted by Polish varieties. It’s happening for two reasons: cost and innovation.

A Polish Jesuit monk began to breed clematis in the 1960s after finding seedlings in the garden of his Warsaw monastery. He created more than sixty varieties which are famed for their colours, disease resistance and hardiness and he worked on them for over a decade before he made them public, giving them names that revealed his dislike of the Communist regime in his country, such as General Sikorski, Lech Walesa and Jan Pawel II. His untiring work, and the ability he had to invest time and money in the plants, has made them a huge success now they’ve finally reached the West.

There is a bit of a downside to this story of European cooperation though. Many of the trees and shrubs that sold in many British nurseries as ‘native species’ actually germinated from eastern European stock, either from seed and acorns gathered in East European forests and that can be bad news for wildlife because trees that come from countries with chillier winters than Britain’s are likely to come into leaf and flower earlier than native ones, and that can mean that our native birds, insects and wildlife don’t get the food they need at the time they need it to feed their young, because when the new generation are ready to consume it, the tree or shrub has already ‘gone over’ and offers no sustenance to them.

Clematis courtesy of Tanakwho

Labels: clematis, spring flowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:37 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Garden in March – a minor miracle

I’m sure that like me, and a lot of the rest of the UK population, you’re gazing out at a garden that looks like it’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. All you hear from neighbours and fellow gardeners is tales of snapped branches, broken shrubs, spring bulbs flattened to the ground by rain and gale.

But in one corner of my garden is a minor miracle – a tiny camellia that somehow survived all the wind and hail and storm and tempest and even carried its flowers, usually so fragile, totally unblemished, through the worst weather of the past twelve months.

It’s an amazing reminder of how resilient plants can be, and how swiftly they spring back from any crisis. It’s also a reminder of the fact that good can come from even the most difficult circumstances. Perhaps those snapped branches are an invitation to get on with some radical pruning that should have been done long ago. Maybe those broken shrubs are an opportunity to invest in replacements that will please you more than the old ones did and as far as the spring flowers are concerned, there’s no doubt that they will be back next year, brighter than ever!

Labels: camellia, garden recovery, garden storms, spring shrubs

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:34 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Garden tasks after the storm

How did the great storm affect you? On the south coast, but on top of a hill, we had gale force winds and heavy driving rain, followed by two bouts of intense hailstones, all finished off with a brief lull that ended in icy sleet. The effects on local gardens have been pretty dire:

The ‘foreign’ fruit trees (peaches, nectarines and apricots) come into flower much earlier than the native ones, because they still think they are in warmer climes. As a result, every tree I’ve seen in the past two days has been completed denuded of blossom, whether the flowers were open or still in the bud stage, and whether or not they were protected by horticultural fleece. There’s not a huge amount to be done for them now, except wait and hope that a few remaining buds will open and then to go round and hand pollinate what little blossom there is with a paintbrush.

The blackberries, loganberries and tayberries spent the storm whipping their new growth around, or snapping it back to the stem where it had been tied in. For these soft fruit plants, it’s important to go along and check whether any breaks in the stems and shoots are clean and to prune back where necessary; long jagged tears in the shoots are in invitation for disease and rot to enter.

Lots of greenhouse panes got cracked, often by other things in the garden flying into them, so there’s a lovely job! I’ve temporarily pasted cardboard over holes and cracks and now I’ll have to get replacement panes and install them.

Still, it could have been worse – at least our garden isn’t flooded.

Labels: fruit trees, march garden tasks, spring storms

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:57 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, March 8, 2008

Garden Tasks - March

Little as I like it, this is spring cleaning time, and my first task of the next week or so is to clean off our patio and paving.

Because we’re trying to be as organic as possible, the initial project is to get an old kitchen knife and use it to remove all the weeds and moss that are growing in cracks in between slabs and cracks. Many plants can be killed by an application of boiling water, and where we have really stubborn monsters that we can’t get right down to the root of – like dandelions that spring up in the smallest crevices, we give them a lovely dose straight from the kettle, making sure, of course, that the run off won’t kill anything we want to keep!

Then it’s a much more pleasant job – planting up containers with spring bedding. Such plants, from garden centres, nurseries and even supermarkets, are available at pocket money prices, so I really let rip with the pansies and polyanthus at this time. It’s always worth planting your spring bedding into the garden when it’s ‘gone over’ if you have nooks and corners that need filling up – our polyanthus get to find a new home near the compost bins where they seem to thrive and last year, were actually in flower before their forced cousins appeared in the shops! They won’t be as big as the greenhouse grown types, of course, but they still give a splash of colour year after year.

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:10 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Early shrubs for march colour

There’s not a lot you can rely on in March, in particular the weather, but one thing that’s certain is that the Ribes sanguineum (flowering currant to get non-botanical about it) will be showing off. The sanguineum should have red to reddish pink pendant flowers on more or less bare branches. There are some white varieties but I’ve never understood why anybody went to the trouble of creating them, because there are plenty of early flowering white shrubs around, but very few pink ones and the Ribes is both the earliest, the hardiest (it’ll push through ice to open its blooms) and the pinkest. The smell once the sun gets on it is not to everybody’s taste – it is a little like cat urine, but the colour of the flowers makes it more than worthwhile, just don’t plant it right outside your door!

On the subject of those white blooming shrubs, there’s the white virburnums which gleam through any weather and look especially good underplanted with bright pink winter-flowering heathers, and the fat silver-white buds of all the shrubby willows – my favourite is Salix hastata Wehrhahnii which has pure white catkins in early spring that become deep yellow as the pollen develops and are as rounded and pretty as the rarest alpine flower.

And if you can bear them, the forsythia will be in bright yellow flower. I’m not a forsythia fan, mainly because the only varieties you ever seem to see are those screaming yellow ones, although there are some really lovely paler cream varieties.

It always amazes me to step into my garden at this time of year and see just how bright it is – there’s really no excuse for not having some colour by March and if you invest in these early shrubs, you’ll find they require little care and reward you with a blaze of brightness just when you need it most.

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:26 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, March 3, 2008

Growing plants from seed – a setback with Romneya

You may remember me raving about the Romneya Coulteri a few months ago? It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous perennial, inclined to be invasive, but that doesn’t matter as I’m going to grow it in a large container. So, having obtained my ‘difficult to get hold of’ seeds, I trotted off to look up the propagation method necessary and what did I find?

This is a difficult species to propagate - it involves burning pine needles on top of the seeds. Romneya is from fire-prone southern California chaparral, so this is not surprising.

Uh oh. Off I went again, to find another source that might help me … Since this plant's seeds are triggered to germinate by smoke, one way to get them to germinate faster is to sprinkle them lightly with moist soil, cover that with pine sawdust, and light the covering (don't use any accelerants). Burning that continues for at least 15 minutes is best. Water when the fire is out to wash the smoke chemicals down to the seeds, since it is the smoke rather than the fire that induces germination. A less effective way is to burn pine sawdust, mix it with potting soil, moisten, and plant seeds in this mixture. A third method is to smoke the planting medium with burning pine sawdust. Even so, the seed can still take several months to germinate.

Oh dear. So it’s very difficult to germinate, takes months to let you know whether you’ve succeeded or not, and then takes over the entire garden if you have! It’s a good thing I like a challenge.

Speaking of which, I tried to rake the lawn today, to get rid of some of the dead grass before mowing – but I had to stop because hailstones the size of peas started landing on me!

Labels: germinating seeds, growing plants from seed, invasive plants, romneya coulteri

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:58 AM 1 Comments

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