Daily details from the garden to bring you inspiration throughout the year
I remember one of my gardening lecturers telling the class that you’d have to be bonkers ever to buy a pot of Verbena bonariensis, given that it seeds so freely about. As much as the nursery trade might hate to admit it, he was right – on one level at least. But in order for battalions of tiny seedlings to transform themselves into airy thickets of mauve blooms, each cluster of flowers bobbing about on a wiry green stem, you need to practise a certain degree of strategic negligence when it comes to weeding. I’ve certainly fallen foul of this, and had cause to wonder where my verbena’s all got to come summer. It’s all very well adopting a wildlife friendly, laissez-faire attitude for 364 days of the year, but if you find yourself suddenly siezed by the urge to “tidy up a bit” on day 365, you’ll go and mess the whole thing up, and the same goes for your garden’s stock of nigella, and even of hellebores. The solution is to preserve some pockets within your beds and borders in which you resist the temptation to meddle – from, let’s say, October to April – even if you spy a very obvious weedling. Either that, or scrunch a few seed heads over a pot of damp compost in the autumn, and leave until the seedlings are big enough to handle, at which point you can lever them out with a pencil for planting on in their own (9cm) pot. That won’t be for a good while for the ones in the photo.
A year of garden coaching
To find out more about my my 12 month online garden coaching programme, please visit the website, where you can read more details and add your name to the waiting list to be the first to hear when enrolment opens up again in the autumn.
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Hello! I’m Andrew, gardener, blogger, podcaster, and owner of a too-loud laugh, and I’m so pleased you’ve found your way to Gardens, weeds & words. You can read a more in-depth profile of me on the About page, or by clicking the image above.
