When I first started working with roses and discovered I was going to need to distinguish between 30 or 40 pinks and know their names, I resorted to flash cards: the kind young children use to learn words. In no time at all I was well on the way to a lifetime of floral nitpicking. Is a the shape of a double flowered rose technically a shallow cup, recurved, a pompon or a chalice? That kind of thing.
So I often notice when people mistake a peony or a camellia for a rose, even if I’d have to concede that the colours and forms of their flowers can be essentially the same.
In January, dogwood steals the show in Harlow Carr’s Winter Walk
We set off for Harrogate on a whim, inspired by the weather forecast, and booked into a hotel within walking distance from the RHS’s most northerly garden, Harlow Carr, a favourite haunt. The idea was to wake up next morning to find an artistic covering of snow or a hard frost – the added winter garden ingredients only nature can provide.
The forecast had been an exaggeration but, luckily, it turns out that a winter wonderland doesn’t need snow: it can cloak itself just as wonderfully in reds, oranges, browns and greens.
Early bulbs are starting to appear, including these snowdrops (Galanthus elwesii ‘Mrs Macnamara’).
We were too early to see the thousands of snowdrops, cyclamen, irises and eranthis hyemalis that will be at their peak in February and March. A small number of the advance guard could be spotted in flower in the woods, along the Winter Walk or sheltered in the glasshouse, giving a hint of the pleasure to come. But if you find yourself wondering whether a winter garden really has anything much of interest to offer in January, other than peace, you’ll find plant after plant lining up as if to say: ‘You misjudged me. You doubted there would be colour.’
Some plants have to wait for flowers to become colourful. Others, like this coleus, don’t. Purple, bright pink and cream splashes and veins do their best to crowd out the lime green, creating a bouquet on every leaf. Some varieties actually do flower very well, but for me, the tall spires of salvia-like flowers merely gild the lily… er, make that gild the coleus. Continue reading “Leafy Coleus With Beautifully Patterned Leaves”
If you live in one of the places where trees and most plants are shutting up shop for the winter, and your gardening thoughts have turned to plant catalogues, here’s food for dreams.
An interior designer might see these reclaimed pots from Yew Tree Barn as the perfect accessories for a cottage-style home, but when a gardener looks at them, they see a range of plant possibilities. It all depends on your personal plant fascinations: you might plant fancy auriculas or culinary herbs in the medium sized pots and mother-in-laws-tongue, Christmas cactus or cyclamen in the larger ones.
Those tiny clay pots with saucers intrigue me. Too small for most plants, they would dry out so quickly to need assiduous watering for anything other than miniature succulents. I’m not sure I’d want to trust seedlings to them, but wouldn’t they look cute with green, variegated and silver thyme spilling out, artfully staged for one of those impractical but bewitching Instagram shots? Continue reading “Food For Dreams: Reclaimed Terracotta Pots”
Susan Rushton 