Garden Trees - the Fairweather Gardener

I have always planted trees in every garden I've had since student days, now in garden number four The first was a long, narrow, town garden, with an old wall all around the perimeter. We took down three laburnums and planted two plum trees so that was a net loss of trees, though I wasn't thinking in those terms at the time.. However the best thing in that garden was a massive, mature apple tree.  No idea what the variety was but it produced large red and green apples which were superb eaters or cookers.  

The second Garden wasn't so large and when we purchased it, the triangular back garden was unpromising, it consisted of a soggy, sloping lawn with concrete, North facing patio and the only trees were three whitebeam behind the sparse beech hedge, a couple of wild cherry and a lot of leylandii. 

When we sold after twenty-two years there were fewer leylandii, though we kept a hedge of them for the sparrows. But we'd planted lilac, two apples, a pear, hazel, stella cherry, morello cherry, damson, horse chestnut, two Norway spruce (ex-Christmas trees), two holly and no doubt some I've forgotten. Picture shows fruit trees in full blossom in April. 

Hawthorn had begun to occupy spaces in the beech hedge and more wild cherry had taken up residence behind the hedge. And out the back, the landowner had planted more native trees which we enjoyed watching grow into woodland as we lived there.  Our trees helped transform that garden from a slightly boggy area to a woodland edge garden which is what sold it! The purchaser wanted her kids to live with trees. 

In the next garden we took out a four-tree leylandii hedge which was too close to the building plus we needed to make a parking area. Then we took down a big ash tree and a laburnum which were in danger of pushing over the 8 foot high, stone retaining wall. We planted fruit trees, three apples - Cox's Orange Pippin, Braeburn and Egremont russet - also a Victoria plum, greengage, conference pear, stella cherry and apricot.

Where we are now, the back garden is just too small for so many trees. It already has an apple tree which is a very early producer and I think is a Worcester Pearmain. We've already finished harvesting the fruit - began end of July which is early even for Worcesters.  They don't keep well so the freezer is full of stewed apple. There's a rowan tree which began to also produce fruit in July, the weather was so hot and dry.  

We might plant a pear tree against the wall next to the rowan but need to improve the ground, there's a lot of rubble. And with deliberate optimism we've planted an olive tree, which is growing happily. Given the rate of climate change, we hope to harvest edible olives before the decade is out! 

The Fairweather Gardener - A Sucker for Succulents

I've recently realised that I’m a cactus collector, well cacti and other succulents. This seems to have been my unintentional lockdown project. I spent a lot of time potting offsets and cuttings of my houseplants.

The autumn before covid 19 struck, I'd bought a small, three-tier, wooden shelving unit with attractive turned uprights, which was narrow enough to sit on the window board in my conservatory. At first I put a few small cuttings of jade plants (crassula) and a lot of baby spider plants on it. I soon discovered that on a sunny day, I could put the spider plants and one or two other rooted babies outside with a sign, “Houseplants Free to Good Homes” and they’d be re-homed within a couple of hours. 

So the shelving unit now displays some of my small to medium succulents beautifully. On the top shelf is a bears-paw (cotyledon tormentosa), a small jade plant with unusual pointed leaves, a tall, variegated jade plant (crassula ovata variegata) and a long crassula perforata in a beautiful artichoke pot, whose stems are beginning to hang down.

On the middle shelf in a red and green pot is an echinopsis cactus with several babies who need potting on. There's a second echinopsis sharing a low dish with cobweb houseleek (sempervivum) and between the two are my latest editions, four small pots whose occupants I'm not yet sure how to care for so I'm being careful. Two are types of lithops (living stones) which I know can be tricky, one is a string-of-pearls (senecio) which I'm assured is easy, and the fourth is a tiny, unidentified, globe cactus which I'm hoping is as easy as the echinopsis.

The bottom shelf houses another echinopsis, an echiveira (they come in lots of varieties, mostly look the same so I don't know which type this is!) a sad Christmas cactus which I'm nursing but may not survive (I overwatered the poor thing) and some Hawarthia in a strange Spanish pot with crude butterflies decorating it.  

In the pot to the right of the shelving are sanseveiria (snake plant), echinopsis and haworthia which have all been in one very overcrowded pot for ten years, I seriously need to free them! Beside them on a stand are another haworthia below, and above a green jade plant in a lovely red glazed pot. This is only about half of my windowsill collection of succulents and that number doesn't include two large, potted gasteria verrucosa which sit on the floor and are flowering in the sun. 

There's also Mama cactus, who was my first echinopsis and has produced all of the others. She's very fierce, lives mostly outdoors, she flowers every summer and lives in a colony with many daughters and grand-daughters. They will shortly be going out onto the patio, when I can find my thickest gardening gloves.

 

The Fair Weather Gardener - My Magnolia

Purple is the colour of my true love’s hair… actually it isn’t and that’s not even how the song goes, but purple is definitely the colour of the flowers on my magnolia. It’s looking healthier than for a while, with at least two dozen large blossoms and the green of the leaves just beginning to show. I feel purple today, maybe it’s my hair that wants to be an imperial hue.

Magnolia is the dullest of insipid paint colours, which can't decide if it's vaguely yellowish or pinkish, so it stays vague, but then no paint can ever catch the dazzling, pearlescent hues, the soft velvet texture or sweet, subtle scent of the true magnolia blossom.

Those purple flowers glow in the sunlight at the side of the garden, if it was larger I’d plant the magnolia in the ground, but there isn’t really enough space so the poor thing has now languished in a pot for ten years. Last year I refreshed the compost, although it really needs a bigger pot. And if I do put it into a bigger pot, it will be too heavy for me to move around. The whole point of having plants in pots is to be able to move them, ring the changes.

Why did I buy a magnolia which I knew perfectly well I’d never be able to plant into the ground? Because of its name, magnolia Susan! 

The Fairweather Gardener - Compost Bin, the Cons

Compost is a constant concern here, I only have space for one plastic bin and a small woodpile. The bin retains moisture and gets cuttings, weeds, trimmings and kitchen scraps and houses plenty of little red worms but also tens of hundreds of big green slugs. 

Ok I haven't got close enough to actually count them but I take my life in my hands when I heave off the lid, struggling with the weight. I feel I have to feed them every day or they will emerge and devour the garden, which is quite small. 

Help!

When May was July, then June Becomes March - The Fairweather Gardener

The sixth of June feels more like the sixth of March and I take full responsibility. 

Paeony, I can never get a good photo of these flowers, 

must be to do with the spectrum of their colour. 

I should try different equipment - yes I know,
a bad photographer always blames the camera!.

Foxgloves au naturel, self seeded. 

Beloved of bumble bees,
their tallest spire is taller than 

me, so well over five feet.

Red Hot Pokers have done better

than ever, 14 spires so far, but they 

weren't meant to flower until

July/August.

However the month of May was hot, sunny,  and  everything has flowered including one of my cacti, which normally wait until high summer.  Will there be anything left in flower by July?

I can probably rely on the lavender, valerian and my red, white and pink everlasting geraniums. They're  now four years old and have never stopped flowering, some stay outside all year, a couple come indoors for the coldest winter weather.  

More enthusiastic than ever before have been the red-hot pokers, the purple clematis, self seeded foxgloves and opium poppies. The tulips were lovely but mostly over by the start of May which is very early, their  bulbs are now drying out quietly beside the garage. The Clematis Montana, paeonies and the apple blossom came and went very fast, it was probably too dry for them. I expect I won't have many apples this year.

Then there's that rose. Ok there are four rose plants in the garden but only one is worth mentioning, the giant rambler.  It's flowering spectacularly even despite being given a very late prune in early March. This powerful plant grows like billy-oh and I love it! Its masses of soft, white flowers dominate the pergola and threaten to demolish the flimsy rose arch. They're scented and even I can smell them slightly; anosmia may be one symptom of Covid 19, but I've had it for years without ever being tested.

I planted out my courgette plants last week.  There are only two of them, a neighbour had put a row of sad little seedlings in small pots onto their garden wall with an invitation to help ourselves, so I kindly took in two unwanted orphans.  I potted them on and they've been growing happily on the conservatory windowsill in the wonderful May sunshine. 

Then I treated them severely by potting them out into a zinc tub in the garden, with fresh compost mixed with organic plant feed. They perked up after thirty-six hours and one even produced its first flower, at which point the weather decided it was still March. So it's my fault! 

Will there be any courgettes? Who knows, I'm not carrying a fifty litre tub full of wet compost and sad little plants indoors and then outside again if the sun comes out.  Sorry if this amounts to courgette abuse but they'll have to take their chances! 

The Fairweather Gardener - April under Covid 19

Heather, tulips, muscari and, fritillaries.

April in the garden, under semi-lockdown.  I do know how lucky we are to have a garden when so many are stuck in flats.  Sitting out here writing is splendid! Everything seems to be flowering, so that and the sunshine has dragged me outdoors.  The Heather has been in bloom since November and is going a bit brown, but several small bumblebees are still finding something to enjoy in its tiny, faded-pink cups.


 The little Tete-a-tete daffs are over.  I’ve just deadheaded them, but the taller
Daffs and Narcissi which I bunged in the earth any-old-where last winter are flowering merrily, most of them seem to be multi-petalled ones and some are two-tone as well, orange and cream or sunflower yellow and white.  Never had those before, they’re very pretty, but heavy heads are dangling on over-long stems. It the prevailing sea-wind gets up it will demolish them.  Life’s too short to stake daffs!



Also flowering are things I had assumed would be dead, having done well last year.  Osteospermums I think they’re called.  Looked them up – Cape Daisies, that’s easier!  They were a birthday present from Josie and it never occurred me that they could carry on, but they’ve hardly stopped flowering since. Should I prune them?  Some are reddish-purple with black centres, others are quite pale, with pretty mauve edges and, again, the back centres.

Rosemary

A small blue tit is serenading from the tree behind my bench, but I don’t think I’m the object of his song!  Amazing what loud song some tiny birds have.  Also have chattering sparrows in the semi-background – sparrows are not really background birds, they seldom blend!  Starlings chirping and whistling from the gutter and a pair of pigeons being enthusiastic with each other on the neighbour’s mossy roof.



Rosemary still has its soft mauve flowers, to the joy of small bees.  Grape Hyacinths (muscari to you!) are everywhere, I put quite a few of them in last autumn, may have overdone it, their leaves apparently grow up to 18 inches long - I nearly measured them, managed to restrain myself!  Like the Snowflakes, which are finished, their foliage is swamping other plants.  I’ve been trimming both of them quite brutally.

Kerria

The red Wallflowers which I nearly threw away last year are now blooming a beautiful fiery scarlet, next to the sunny faces of Dandelion and no they are not weeds, I love them! So do the bees. Marigolds, in marigold orange, are starting to put in their annual appearance and  my Bluebells are up, mostly the Spanish variety but still gorgeous.  Fritillaries with their extraordinary checkered flowers are almost over, the bumblebees have been enjoying those too.



Planted a lot of Tulips last autumn in a trough, after watching Monty Don, who said plant them in layers, the don’t mind being crowded.  They’re coming up now but don’t seem keen to put on a mass display, which is what I was hoping for, some are already open while others are barely above soil level.



Kerria Japonica has been in bloom for several weeks now, very pretty in hues of apricot and above it the Clematis Montana is absolutely smothered in buds as it in turn smothers the garage, so I’ll get my mass flowering there!  After it’s flowered I will have to prune it or we’ll never get the garage doors open.

Camellia and forsythia

Round the front of the house, the rich pink Camellia is past its best.  Its massed flowers are going softly brown and papery now, but the Forsythia is quite splendid.  Beside those two the Skimmia Japonica is palely loitering.  I have a Mahonia in a pot, I might plant it next to the Skimmia for a bit of colour and drama



On the patio right up against the house, various things have been rammed into pots sometimes with strange bedfellows.  Cyclamen in their little pots are almost over, big, rotund seed-heads are forming, I must try to propagate some of those.  In flower are more tulips, scarlet geraniums which have almost kept flowering continuously for three years now, more Cape Daisies, more Fritillaries,  who share a large blue tub with a huge, self-seeded Foxglove, we’ll see what colour that flowers later.

Finally and unexpectedly, I have a pink and paler-pink-striped Freesia and a white Freesia is about to bloom, which I had entirely forgotten I shoved into the pot with one of the perpetual geraniums two years ago.  I had a bunch of Freesias for my wedding posy – I don’t do bouquets!



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The Fairweather Gardener - November

I hardly went out into the garden in October, except to note that the bird-feeders are constantly empty within 48 hours of being filled, it's the starlings wot does it! I have a bird table and hang the feeders under our large pergola, because otherwise the gulls would eat everything they could get at, including the small birds who I'm trying to encourage. Not seen a huge variety of species in the garden so far, wood pigeon, sparrow, wren, starling, dunnock, robin, blue tit, great tit, coal tit, crow, goldfinch and a poor garden warbler that the cat brought in. I miss the garden we had before, it backed onto woodland and I counted over 40 species there, not counting the peacock because he was strolling up the road, I didn't seen him from or in the garden!

I did go-a-gardening today, sunshine was nice after all that rain and all the weeds were wet so pulled up easily. I put most of them in the compost bin, which is heaving with red brandling worms as well as woodlice, snails and big leopard slugs. However the couch grass has gone into the big bag of leaves for the tip.

Said leaves are mostly from the neighbour's tall sycamore, one branch of this is trying to take the roof off my garage, must finds a man with a ladder and a big saw. I've collected several bags of leaves to make leaf-mould but am worried that I've collected all the seeds up with them, will I just have bag's full of saplings? Then I'd feel guilty that I wasn't growing them on as trees, the planet needs trees but my small garden can't accommodate a thousand sycamores.

Another recent job was to sweep the patio and clear the path of leaves and growing things. I won't call them weeds, they include campanula, moss, dandelion, foxglove, geranium and oxalis. All are welcome in the right place, but I do need to keep the path clear for my mum who arrives in a wheelchair these days. I allowed one foxglove to stay overhanging , I love them and it's taken up residence right by the low wall where the path widens out so shouldn't be a problem.

What's flowering? Geraniums, chrysanthemum, hydrangea, kalanchoe, winter jasmine, cyclamen, not as much as at this time last year, that long hot summer kept things going well into winter. I've moved some to the geraniums indoors and must remember to do the same with the kalanchoes tomorrow. On the plus side, in my small conservatory my Christmas cactus has just begun to flower and one of my jade plants has produced tiny, aromatic, white flowers.

The Fairweather Gardener - We're Having a Heatwave

We've had absolutely no rain and some very hot weather for the past six weeks at least. This could be described as the ideal summer, but it's far too dry for farmers and too dry for most UK gardens. Temperatures in the high 20's C have been recorded most days but one notable Sunday, the first of July, when the met office admitted it could be 32 outside, that was in the shade on my patio.  I put out a cheap thermometer and it shot up to 39 in the sun. That's over 100 degrees in old money! Even the cats stayed indoors.

So what's in flower? More than I expected, there are daisies and day lilies, miniature roses and oregano, clematis and thunbergia - also known as Black-eyed-Susan! Grown from seed, the marigolds and viola are just coming out. Also from seed, nasturtiums in pots were doing fine until the small white butterflies found them, now they are a scene of devastation, I think the caterpillars are running out of leaves. Should I take pity and transfer them to the remaining nasturtiums under the apple tree? And I have numerous pots of vivid, gorgeous red geraniums  - yes I know I'm meant to call them zonal pelargoniums, but I refuse!

My small lawn is completely brown and crispy, not a single blade of green. The plus side is that I don't have to mow it, I expect it will come back once we have some significant rain; this will happen at some stage, we are in England not the Sahara and grass rhizomes are very tough. The other plus is the ground elder has vanished. I kept mowing it in the lawn and rooting it out in the beds but it's an everlasting task. I don't suppose it's gone forever, some roots will survive even in bone dry soil, but I'm pleased for now that it's reduced so much.

The interior of the compost bin is dry and dusty, even though it's in the shade. The tiny fruit flies which normally swarm up in a miasma when I open the lid to tip in kitchen waste are growing sluggish. Slugs and snails have hunkered down, though some are still alive enough to know when I've watered the cucumbers in their gro-bag.

For over a week the sun was too much for those cucumbers, every day they wilted even though I was watering three times a day. I even tried shading them with a light-filtering parasol but it didn't really help. We've had a few small crisp cucumbers from them, though the skins are tough, and a couple more still on the plant. I haven't grown cucumbers before, a neighbour gave me two seedlings. They're short cucumbers and taste very good, but a lot of effort and a lot of water for ten small cucumbers, don't think I'll bother again.  Prickly pears might be a more appropriate crop for the weather! Is this continuous hot, dry weather a sign of climate change? Well  one swallow doesn't make a summer and one summer doesn't make global warming, but overall the signs aren't good.

The Fair Weather Gardener - British Flowers Week

It's British Flowers Week from 18-24 June 2018. Every day seems to have become something-or-other day or week and we all wisely ignore most of them and get on with our lives. My take is to stick a comment on my FB feed if a particular one catches my attention, it's usually for being daft! However this one caught my attention by making me think about the flowering plants in my garden; how many are endemic species?

Started at the Covent Garden Flower Market in 2013, the official week is a promotion for florists and flower farmers around the country who grow and sell UK blooms, in the UK, as opposed to the giant flower markets in Europe. It could be interpreted as a bit Brexit-ish, but has a point, the international movement of billions of blossoms around the world is not strictly necessary - we can grow plenty here.

The current situation is obviously deleterious to the environment, you can't put flowers on a ship from Kenya to the UK and expect them to survive the journey in good condition, so they're air-freighted. Flying, as we all know, is bad for the environment. On average a plane is said to produce over 50 pounds of CO2 per mile of flight, although Eurocontrol International claim that aviation creates less then 2% of climate change gases. I'm trying to present a vaguely balanced argument here!

Back to the plants. I'm not a florist, just a gardener, but apart from the foxgloves, which are almost over and the glorious oxeye daisies, I wasn't sure which of the flowering beauties in my garden are native and which originated far from British shores. Much research is needed.

The Fair Weather Gardener - Triffids

Things that I don't recognise still come up in the garden. The latest, looking like triffids, appeared in April, pushing up through the undergrowth by the pergola. Several stiff stems with dark blueish green leaves arranged regularly up the stems. I believe the term for the leaf appearance is glaucous, good word! So, glaucous leaves, stiff straight stems and once three feet high, it produced thin branches with softer bright green leaves.


My triffids were interesting looking and quite architectural so I left them for quite a while as I didn't know what they were. The soft green leaves became bracts around tiny yellow flowers, which insects seemed to like, so I continued to leave the triffids alone. Hover flies seemed especially keen on the miniscule flowers and last weekend I saw my first wasp this year, also showing great interest in the triffids.


Then the flowers began to produce large, green berries, each with three lobes. At this stage I decided I really should take them more seriously, they were about to produce seed, did I want them to spread? I'm not in principle opposed to immigrants, but the garden's quite small so invaders are another matter, I have enough trouble with hops and ground elder.

I asked a few people, posted a pic on Facebook, but nobody seemed to know. So in depth research was in order. How did people ever do this type of thing before the internet? Google is an amazing research tool, almost everything you can think of is out there, somewhere in the aether!

After a few hours going through a range of search terms and looking at hundreds of photos of plants with green leaves, I came across the euphorbias. Now I've admired euphorbias in other people's gardens, but the triffids didn't much resemble any I could remember seeing, until I saw a photo  labelled Euphorbia Lathyris. So my triffid is Euphorbia Lathyris, otherwise known as caper spurge, also known as the mole plant because it's said to repel moles - old gardener's wives tale?

Caper spurge facts - it grows over much of Europe and Asia but has probably been introduced to the UK. It's now widespread and often comes up in abandoned ground. It's a biannual so that makes sense, it likes to be undisturbed. I remember seeing the stems and glaucous leaves last year, but the bed was overgrown and anyway they weren't nearly so tall, so I didn't register that they were something unusual.

The other important facts about caper spurge: when ripe the seed heads expel seeds quite explosively, scattering them far and wide. Also the berries, which are said to look like capers although I can't really see it, are very poisonous and the milky sap is also poisonous and corrosive, causing skin irritation and serious harm if it gets in your eyes. In days of yore, beggars were said to have rubbed the sap into their skin to cause sores and so get more sympathy - another old gardeners tale? 

Anyway the caper spurge is now in the bottom of a garden bin, waiting to go to the dump. I compost a lot of things but decided this toxic plant might be unsuitable. I did enjoy watching it grow and I've no doubt that there are more triffids seeds lurking in the soil, just waiting to spring up. I might once again let them grow for a couple of years before they seed, because they're interesting plants.


h

the Fairweather Gardener - Mini Beasties in May

Plenty of bees around now which is good, my foxgloves are just flowering and the bees love them. Also hover flies around, which are not only good pollinators but have nice fierce larvae, which the same as ladybird larvae will happily munch through loads of aphids. I like hover flies.

Male orange tip feeding on cranesbill flowers

Early in the month the butterflies began to appear, the first one I saw was an orange tip, flew up from the geraniums and away over the wall. They're quite unmistakeable, or the males are, the females are more discreet and have no orange tips, so they look more or less like another white butterfly.

Next, there were a few nests of untidy silk with small caterpillars in them. The first one I found was on the car, which was a bit weird. Then one or two appeared in the garden on the apple tree and I started finding small brown hairy caterpillars in random places. I wasn't worried until the cat sitting on my lap suddenly stood up and stated intently at my shoulder. I found a caterpillar on my collar, I just brushed it off, but too late. I came up in a horribly itchy rash all round my neck! Online I found a few hysterical headlines about toxic caterpillars. I took a closer look at mine, they're brown tail moth caterpillars, not toxic, they just have irritating hairs. So I kept away from the apple tree until they had dispersed.

Brown tail moth nest with caterpillars hatching -

photo from the Forestry Commission

Loads of ants, there are some tiny ones living under the patio by the house, which is fine, they excavate little piles of sand and I don't mind, I just sweep it away from their holes and down between some other stones. But I do have to discourage them from coming into the conservatory, found several in the cat's food bowl. Am keeping the floor cleaner and have blocked a couple of small holes from the outside. It's working so far.

Lily beetles mating on the stem of my fritillaries -

blooming cheek!

My current garden infestation is spiders - tiny ones just hatched out and clustering in small mobs in unexpected corners. Slightly larger, more independent minded ones are hanging out all over the clothes lines. My laundry will soon be covered in silk or, more problematically, the remains of dead flies etc. I do have a bit of a spider phobia, but can live alongside them most of the time without freaking out.

Every time I move a flowerpot the woodlice hurtle around in panic and sometimes a few springtails too. I just let them disperse, they're quite harmless. Wish I could say the same about the snails. There are hundreds, I sometimes gather them in handfuls and lob them into the vacant, nettle filled lot behind the house, but I know its a waste of time.

None of the creatures in my garden are going to be fed or sprayed with anything toxic, not even the pretty scarlet lily beetles which have devastated my poor fritillaries this year.

The Fairweather Gardener - Springtime in an Inherited Garden

Magnolia flowers

Springtime is exciting! There are at least 16 varieties of flower in my garden at the moment and I've done nothing to encourage any of them since last year.   As I've lived here less than three years I'm still discovering things as I get more on top of the place, which was hugely overgrown when we arrived.

These are all native - I mean as opposed to being introduced to the garden by me :-

Heather, a largish (for heather) bush of dark pink flowers has been in flower since early December. It's nearly over now and going brown, I may need to prune it.

Camellia, covered in vivid rich pink flowers has been flowering since the end of the cold spell in March, the flowers are browning now and starting to fall, but still lovely. I thought I didn't like pink ...

Forsythia is a glorious blaze of rich yellow spires up to eight feet high, after having not a single

Forythia

flower last year - I had pruned it heavily so probably my fault, never had Forsythia before so I didn't know.

Kerria Japonica Pleniflora - is covered in pretty yellow multi-petalled flowers and I didn't even know I had this shrub! Last year I cut down a load of winter Jasmine in the corner where this has appeared.

Snowflake - white flowers like tall snowdrops on very long stems, these have been in bloom since January, almost over now.  The problem is they produce huge amounts of tall, densely packed leaves which swamp smaller plants, so I'm cutting them back as they finish flowering.  I will dig quite a lot of them out as they're spreading, unbidden.  There was a small clump of proper snowdrops too, much prettier but they didn't flower for so long - I still prefer them and will transplant some more.

Hyacinths in white and pink have been planted (not by me) in random parts of the garden - they keep falling over but do smell nice. I'd guess they were originally gifts, in pots, planted out after flowering.

Bluebells, the gorgeous little cousin of the hyacinths, are just coming out - a few of them are white and some are even pink - don't as me why! Pink is just wrong.

Tall Daffodils are just finishing and being eaten by snails.

Primroses, the pure yellow variety, very pretty rosettes of leaves too, but I need to control where these appear they can cause allergies.

Tulips in yellow and red - some even striped - are dotted around, I may try to move them into clumps for better effect - or just plant lots more.

Grape Hyacinths - or muscari to you!  Delightful little purple/blue flowers beside the path and also
  popping up in unexpected places. And the bees like them too.

Muscari

And the following I have planted in containers and pots:-

Rosemary - there are two small bushes in separate pots just starting to flower, I've also planted one in the ground as I want a decent size shrub by the lawn - this one not flowering yet.

Miniature daffodils (Tete a tete) are still doing quite well in their pots, away from the snails. I'll put them in the ground later.

Magnolia 'Susan' - a shrubby variety with long slender purple flowers - it has survived in a pot for 8 years in the cold north, is now burgeoning in the south, though still in its pot. Should I liberate it? I'm tempted but not sure where to plant it.

Fritilleries - I planted these as bulbs early last year in pots and tubs, they've come up for the second year running and were looking wonderful until the sun came out. Then I saw a few holes in the blooms and thought damned snails. Today I saw the beautiful scarlet of several lily beetles... two of them were mating. Oh well, the fritillaries were fun while they lasted. I refuse to use insecticides.

Fritillaries and viola

Viola - super little variegated purple and white ones which I planted in springtime last year, in the same tub as some of the fritillaries, and they haven't stopped flowering ever since!

Hydrangea - a deep pink one which starts as variegated buds, very pretty, bought in Morrison's. Deserves to be planted somewhere...

Oxalis - pink flowers just beginning to come out. But it's very invasive, I keep trying to pull it out... oxalis you have been warned!

French Lavender which I was given and will plant somewhere, at the moment it resides in a small ornamental watering can.

White Heather is lucky. It's in a pot and I will plant it once I've decided where...

... and then around the lawn there are glorious golden dandelions which the bees are very keen on, and lovely little white daisies with yellow centres and deep pink rims to their petals. You might call them weeds, I just weed around them.

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The Fairweather Gardener - To Weed or Not to Weed...?

When approaching the gardener’s eternal task of weeding the first question is, what is a weed?  The simple answer is, a plant in the wrong place. Nettles are great wildlife habitats under hedges and on road verges, but do they belong in a strawberry bed? Probably not, although I’ve been known to let a few flourish between my tough old blackcurrant bushes and the big leylandii hedge. Grubbing most of the nettle roots out every autumn stopped them spreading.

Campanula on the steps

That leylandii hedge was another matter. I didn’t plant it, I didn’t like it, I definitely didn’t want to have to trim it three times a year, though somehow it got cut. So was that a weed? To dig it out would be a massive project and the wildlife loved it. Sparrows and wrens and spiders nested, so it served a purpose. I partly screened it behind a pear tree and a hazel, do I didn’t have to look at it too much.

Now I have a newer garden, smaller and 250 miles south. Actually it’s an old and overgrown garden, though new to me. Dandelions and nettles are the least of my problems, in fact there aren’t any nettles. I spent my first season here, which was spring into summer, battling massive brambles which took over a corner by the conservatory. They were so strong they were forcing their way through the seals on the windows and into the conservatory itself. These were undoubtedly weeds! And l have discovered that there’s more than one type of bramble, my Sussex ones have very tough stems and stiff, hooked, red thorns. I needed thick clothing and even thicker, leather gloves – they still got me. They made the West Yorkshire brambles I was used to seem like wimps.

overgrown with hops

The following season – summer into autumn, I realised there was a problem even bigger than the brambles, and much harder to get rid of. Hops. Not a calm little golden hop which you can see growing along civilised little picket fences beside charming, whitewashed cottages, this was a massive thug of a tough, green, bristly hop. And don’t tell me to make beer, the hop was smothering a grape vine and I prefer wine. To begin with I couldn’t tell the difference between the hop and the grape, their leaves when young look quite similar. It’s taken me two years but I now do know.

The thuggish hop bind was also binding its way around and through a fence above a six-foot retaining wall, it was crushing a small , sorrowful apple tree, trying to demolish a huge, beautiful rambler rose and flattening everything in between. It had to go. I slashed and dragged and tugged and disentangled. I filled sack after sack and took to the tip. Hops have incredibly tough roots/rhyzomes which go everywhere just under the soil and pop up little shoots wherever you’re not looking. And if you chop then up in the soil they have no problem whatever, I’m now in my third summer of hop destroying. Give me ground elder any day – and yes I’ve got that too!

After all the battles, one of the pleasures of a new garden is watching what unexpectedly comes up. I’ve never seen red valerian before, when it sprang up in awkward places I thought it was a strange seaside weed and I didn’t even know what it was called. Gardeners World list it as a weed, however it is interesting to look at and has some lovely names - kiss-me-quick, fox's brush, devil's beard and Jupiter's beard! It seems to love dry places and I’ve encouraged it in a couple of places, especially around the stone steps at the front of the house. The other plant there was a small, dense and ferocious climbing rose with misleading little pink flowers and vicious thorns, which had been deliberately twined around the railings and handrail – making them unusable as a support for human-kind if you valued your hands. So the strange valerian stayed, the snarky little rose has been cut right down. Which was the weed?

Of course the garden has all the usual, more unassuming weeds; groundsel, bindweed, goose grass, milkweed, sow-thistle, plantain, scarlet pimpernel, buttercup etc. All easy enough to pull out of the sandy soil if necessary. Apart from the afore mentioned ground elder I'm in luck, I haven’t found the tougher stuff like docks or either of the two banes of a former garden, creeping cinquefoil and wood avens. Creeping cinquefoil is quite a cheerful little thing, looking a bit like a small strawberry plant with yellow flowers when you first see it, but don’t be fooled. Turn your back and its runners have covered half the garden and set deep taproots which have to be dug or pulled out whole or they joyfully re-sprout. Mowing only encourages them. Wood avens has similar leaves but less initial charm and sheds its sticky seeds everywhere; if you let one seed this year, you’ll have two hundred next year.

How many weeds here? Dandelion, bramble, bindweed, goose

grass, couch grass and the elephant in the garden... ground elder!

I only have a little lawn now, small enough to be kept under control with a strimmer and hand weeding. In every lawn I’ve had, I always leave a certain number of dandelions because I like them. They cheer me up especially in early spring when the grass sulks and everything around is bare. I’ve always admired their stunning yellow flowers, fluffy seeds and toothed leaves, they are beautiful plants and great for insects; they spread like weeds... They’re also quite happy growing out of the cracked concrete on the patio, no matter how often I think I’ve pulled them up.

And I positively encourage daisies in my lawn, childhood memories of collecting armfuls of these delightful little flowers may be colouring my judgement! Anyway, the only time I really tried to have a weed-free lawn, some 20 years ago, I used a product called Feed n Weed. Everything grew twice as fast, weeds and grass, so the only result was far more mowing. I don’t like mowing.

So grass is a weed too, in the flowerbeds, under the lavender and beneath the new pergola. The grass here is couch-grass which is easy to pull, some oats have sprung up and some very tall, tough grass which I think has come from some birdseed. Then there’s the pink oxalis which isn’t really wanted there, it’s another one which springs up in determined clumps all over the place and has tough roots. Then there's the purple campanula which I’ve never had in any other garden. Here it grows prettily along the edges of paths and up the steps but is not really invasive, I don’t have to weed it out. I just trim it back if it’s coming out too far and pull the top off at the end of the season. I’ve decided that’s not a weed.

the amazing alien poppy

The last new ‘weed’ I’ve found is a poppy. We have moved a small amount of soil and rubble to an area by the front of the house where we eventually want to build the ground up. It’s hidden from the road by the steps (denuded of small angry rose) and a fuchsia bush, so I don’t look at it much. But it’s visible, just, from the front window, or rather the three foot high poppy plant which unexpectedly sprouted up from the debris is. Unlike the small, jolly yellow and orange poppies with green stems and leaves which I’m used to, this giant has silvery grey foliage and produced four huge many-petalled, carnation-like flowers in a delicate shade of mauve. It must have been seeded by birds, there are no poppies elsewhere in the garden. Neighbours down the road have purple poppies in their front gardens, but none with the same many petalled form.  This amazing weed now has four huge seed-heads developing, I’ll keep the seed. I wonder if they’ll come true to type, or if they are just some kind of wonderful alien mutation.