It’s never just about the flowers. The flamboyant attention grabbers (the rude bits of plants, let’s never forget that) might be the gateway drug to a lifelong horticultural habit, but anyone who’s been gardening for more than a single season knows that the garden is a complex web of relationships…
Read moreDay 249: nasturtiums
Nasturtiums are irrepressible, you plant them one year and they come back over and again, wandering out from their anchoring point in the soil and sending questing stems in all directions…
Read moreDay 248: planting combinations
One of the joys of gardening is in trying out different planting combinations. We pour over pictures in glossy magazines and now on social media, visit the gardens of other people when we’re able and dissect their beds and borders to the nth degree…
Read moreDay 247: Eurybia divaricata
I still haven’t got used to this not being Aster divaricatus since the taxonomic boffins changed the names about, but the common name remains the white wood aster and I feel my tardiness is at least partly justified…
Read moreDay 246: Veronicastrum
As descriptive plant names go, Culvers root, or black root, fails rather spectacularly by failing to conjure up a holistic impression of Veronicastrum virginicum, concentrating as it does on the subterranean parts…
Read moreDay 245: Zinnia 'Queen Red Lime'
The annual I have the most fun growing from seed – Zinnia elegans ‘Queen Red Lime’ – has a fascinating flower that’s different every day…
Read moreDay 244: sea kale and rose hips
It takes a hardy character to withstand the harsh conditions by the coast – thin soils, fierce sun and constant buffeting by salt-laden winds, but nature is nothing if not inventive and many plants are perfectly adapted to this situation…
Read moreDay 243: Echinacea 'Green Twister'
Green and pink and... quite honestly, a bit bonkers – Echinacea purpurea ‘Green Twister’ is a refreshingly interesting take on the bog standard pink echinacea (Day 220)…
Read moreDay 242: bunny-tail grass
A delicate annual grass often grown for the vase, where the long slender stems and fat fluffy ‘bunny tail’ flowers of Lagurus ovatus are valued in either fresh or dried arrangements...
Read moreDay 241: Cosmos 'Purity'
There are so many varieties of cosmos now, all wonderful in their own way. But Cosmos bipinnatus ‘Purity’ was the first I grew from seed many years ago, and still today the simple white version outperforms all others…
Read moreDay 240: Too soon to tidy
With the best will in the world, together with a moderate effort at conscientious irrigation, things are getting a bit crispy in the garden right now. I could begin to tidy up the beds and border…
Read moreDay 239: Rudbeckia hirta 'Cappuccino'
If its near relative Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’ (Day 208) can be considered a bit of a perennial workhorse in the summer borders, Rudbeckia hirta ‘Cappuccino’ is most definitely a show stopper…
Read moreDay 238: Dahlia 'Cafe au Lait'
Until recently I would have said that Dahlia ‘Cafe au Lait’ was Instagram’s favourite flower, in terms of a named variety (as opposed to simply ‘roses’ or ‘paeonies’, which always go down well)...
Read moreDay 237: Fuchsia magellanica 'Riccartonii'
Winning the award for the garden plant that sounds most like a delicious dish of pasta, Fuchsia magellanica ‘Riccartonii’ proudly stands half-way up the garden, graceful blooms back-lit by the golden evening sun. I’m not sure that flowering shrubs get the recognition they deserve…
Read moreDay 236: herbs
Somewhere along the way I allowed myself to get distracted from herbs. There were among the first things I grew – rows and rows of chives and a whopping great angelica being the standout memory of my childhood garden…
Read moreDay 235: wild honeysuckle
There’s something a bit fey about wild honeysuckle (Lonicera periclumenum). Not merely that it’s the luscious woodbine of Oberon’s speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but rather a combination of factors…
Read moreDay 234: gardening in the moment
The key, we’re often told, is to learn to live in the moment. Which is all very well, but difficult to achieve for a gardener in late summer when, no matter how full of salvias and big daisies the borders are, almost anything you do from this point on is for next year…
Read moreDay 233: culinary sage
It’s easy to overdo the sage in your cooking; less so in the garden. A walk along the borders at Great Comp should convince anyone that there will always be room to squeeze in one more ornamental salvia, but the culinary varieties make an equally valuable contribution…
Read moreDay 232: layering up
You can safely ignore the traditional advice to buy multiples of the same plant in odd numbers once you get safely into double figures.* Until I’ve had the chance to divide up all the heleniums my resident mollusc population haven’t beaten me to…
Read moreDay 231: Aralia in flower
We’re entering that part of the year when the strange flowers of members of the aralia family begin to tempt pollinators – most familiar to those of us in the UK being those on our native ivy…
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