Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
Pink seed strains of Nigella damascena seem to be increasingly fashionable at recent British flower shows. It’s a quirky flower, by any standards. Layered petals wheel around a crazy eye above lacy bracts.
The complex, decorative flower form has inspired many folk names. I use love-in-a-mist, but you may know it as love-in-a-tangle, love-in-a-puzzle, kiss-me-twice-before-I-rise, Jack in the green or lady in the bower. Continue reading “Cottage Garden Plants: Pink love-in-a-mist”
There’s something about this picture of a Lancashire country idyll that I like. The hillside garden looks serene; the house and land on the far side of the wall have a hazy romance. Inside the walled garden, the soil is rich and well-cultivated. It’s winter, and the garden is girded against the twin assaults of rain and freezing temperatures. Continue reading “Gresgarth Hall’s Walled Kitchen Garden In Winter”
Heyrick Greatorex, our first known snowdrop breeder, was responsible for a series of hybrids known as the Greatorex doubles. Unlike the common, bee-made, short, dumpling-style nivalis doubles, Greatorex’s doubles dangle large, skirted flowers from tall scapes. Introduced during the 1940s and 50s (Heyrick Greatorex died in 1954), their vigour has carried most of them through to today… or so we think!
Comments online suggest that Heyrick Greatorex was ‘an ordinary, untrained home gardener’, but whether you’ll accept that depends how you define ‘ordinary’. Continue reading “Heyrick Greatorex: The Founding Father Of Snowdrop Breeders”
It’s March and Becky from The Life Of B is hosting a new, month-long challenge. This month’s topic is spiky and the only real rule is that the main picture must be a square shape. Please join in if you’re feeling at all spiky!
The northernmost of the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens, Harlow Carr, has so much to see that most repeat visitors must feel torn about where to go first. Not me – the Alpine House draws me in like a magnet. It’s show time there, whatever stage of the year. The gardeners tend a stock of plants behind the scenes, picking out tiny treasures when they are at, or around, their best for their turn in the Alpine house spotlight. This week our treats included several primulas, some flowering so madly that their leaves were hidden, others wearing their leaves with pride.
Some of the plants in the Alpine greenhouse are inside because they need protection from cold, wind or rain; others would grow outside just fine. Common species plants are treated as carefully as rare or special cultivars, all raised up on broad, sweeping benches so we can admire them at close quarters. Plants are grown in traditional clay pots, sunk into a mixture of sand and sharp grit to help keep the roots cool and stop them drying out too quickly. Continue reading “From The Alpine House at Harlow Carr Gardens: Ten Tiny Treasures”
Susan Rushton 