Beautiful Rose Gardens, featured examples from the major classes that rosarians use to describe garden roses. All roses belong to a single botanical family, Rosaceae, and also are part of the genus Rosa. There are more than 150 different species of true wild roses found throughout the world, spanning native locales as varied as the tropics and the arctic. A few “roses” commonly grown in the garden are actually hybrids between the true roses and other, non-rose species. Read the rest of this entry »

Roses grown in containers require annual repotting to keep them healthy and obtain optimal blooms. Rootbound plants become stunted and produce limited foliage and flowers. If a larger container is not an option, prune the rose severely: remove about a third of its canes and selected roots. This will shock the plant to produce new roots and shoots. Follow these easy steps when repotting your favorite roses: Read the rest of this entry »

“Black plastic has freed me from hours of weeding. I never used to finish that chore,” explains a Massachusetts gardener. “I resisted black plastic because it looks so awful, but we put dirt along the edges and scatter some on top, and that helps. We use three‑ Foot-wide rolls in our entire vegetable garden. We plant a row, lay the plastic, anchor the edges with dirt, plant another row, and so on. The weeding always had hung over me. Now I just hand-weed in the row itself, and we have more time to canoe or play tennis.” Read the rest of this entry »

Clever Tricks

A drop of mineral oil on corn silk will keep out worms. Apply to tip of each ear when silks begin to brown, with a medicine dropper, pump-type oil can with a long spout, or a plastic dishwashing detergent bottle. Do it a total of about three times, once every five or six days. What’s lazy about this, you wonder? When you harvest the corn, most of the silk will come off with the husk for worm-free and silk-free ears.

If you can prevent plant disease with good cultural practices, then you’ll never need to use extra time to fight them: Read the rest of this entry »

Have all the advantages of vertical growing without the bother of pruning and tying: grow your tomatoes in cages. Buy them commercially or construct sturdier ones yourself. Use concrete reinforcing wire with six-inch mesh. (Wire used for cages should have openings large enough for your hand to reach through for harvesting.) For each cage, cut a section of wire five feet three inches long: the three-inch pieces can be hooked to the other end of the mesh to form the cylinder. Each cylinder holds one plant. You can make the diameter of the cylinder larger (three to four feet) and put three plants inside. Open the cylinders and store flat in winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Sayonara, Japanese Beetles

Hire your children to save the garden from Japanese beetles. Pay them a penny a bug. In the evening, when the beetles won’t fly away, the kids can tiptoe along and brush them from plant foliage into jars of kerosene. Bet they won’t even be able to count their catch! Meanwhile, you can relax with a long novel or take in the evening news.

If Japanese beetle grubs are destroying your lawn, introduce milky spore disease, a microbial attack against the larval form of this insect. A little energy invested this year is well spent. Put a teaspoon in the ground every three feet for several years’ protection. It’s death to the grubs, but leaves the earthworm population untouched. Read the rest of this entry »

Raising your own plants is much cheaper than buying from a nursery or garden centre. Although a greenhouse is helpful if you want to raise tender plants, a cold frame also has plenty of possibilities for propagating plants.

Six propagating aids

Apart from a greenhouse and cold frame, there are various other tools and materials which you will find useful for the successful propagation of plants.

• Cutting compost Used for rooting cuttings. Made at home by mixing equal parts by bulk of moist sphagnum moss peat and coarse horticultural sand. Alternatively use equal parts peat or coco fibre and perlite. Read the rest of this entry »

Planting techniques vary slightly according to whether you buy plants in containers from garden centres or bare-root plants (as lifted from the field) supplied by nurserymen. There are also various ways of planting bulbs. Get the technique right and plant at the right time: your plants will then be off to a good start. Some plants will need supports against the wind.

Four planting methods

These are the techniques for planting the major groups ofgarden plants: trees, shrubs, conifers, climbers, perennials, bedding plants and blubs. To get plants such as trees, shrubs, conifers and fruits off to a good start, especially if you have a poor or difficult soil, consider using a planting mixture. Read the rest of this entry »

Three pruning methods for roses

Pruning roses will not reward you with more flowers nextyear. However, it will control shape and maintain health. Wild (species) roses and hybrid shrub roses need no pruning — just the removal of dead wood.

• Bush types Large-flowered (hybrid tea) and cluster-flowered (floribunda) roses are pruned annually in early spring. Remove all weak growth and reduce remaining strong stems to 15-20cm/6-8in above ground level. Cut to outward-facing buds. Make sure centre of each bush is free from growth: shape bush like a vase.
• ClimbersAllow a framework of permanent stems which are trained to their supports. From these stems side shoots grow, which produce the flowers. To prune, cut back old side shoots to within one or two buds of their base in early spring. Tips of main stems can also be cut back, if becoming too tall. Read the rest of this entry »

If money is no object you can now have a greenhouse or conservatory that looks after itself, with the plants watered automatically. On a more modest scale, garden frames and cloches are extremely useful (andcomparatively inexpensive) pieces of equipment: they are of particular value on the vegetable plot for extending the growing season at either end.

Eight types of greenhouse

Today greenhouses come in all shapes and sizes to suit every need and site.

• Span-roof greenhouse The traditional greenhouse, with pitched roof (each side of equal size and shape) sloping down to the eaves. Normally has straight sides, although there are models with sloping sides which result in better light penetration. The glass-to-ground types are ideal for growing plants at ground level, such as tomatoes in growing-bags; those with solid sides (to about 90cm/3ft) are good for pot plants, as they retain heat better than all-glass houses. Framework available in aluminium alloy or timber (such as western red cedar). You can now obtain span-roof greenhouses with curved eaves. Read the rest of this entry »

Bulbs and corms are virtually guaranteed to flower, with a minimum of soil preparation, as the flower buds are already formed inside them when they are planted. If you give them the right conditions, they will bloom regularly each year.

Because, on the whole, bulbs and corms are relatively inexpensive compared with, say, shrubs, you can afford to mass-plant them, which certainly creates the best effect. Spring bulbs are so well known that many gardeners do not realize that there are bulbs and corms that can be planted for flowering at other seasons — not just in spring, which is the peak time. Spring-flowering bulbs are planted in autumn, summer-flowering bulbs in spring, and autumn-flowering bulbs in summer. Read the rest of this entry »

Climbing roses will grow in tubs. Choose climbers rather than ramblers, as climbers grow more circumspectly and are less prone to mildew and other problems. The list is endless, but I would not like to be without ‘Zephyrine Drouhin’, despite her tendency to mildew, ‘Handel’, which is cream with rosy pink edges and has handsome bronze foliage, or ‘Maigold’, which is double yellow and beautifully scented. Some roses will flourish only on south walls while others are happy in a west or east aspect and others will even tolerate a north wall. Then there are those that are scented and those that are not, those that have one magnificent flowering and then call it a day and others that flower less prolifically but throughout the summer. Read the rest of this entry »

Window boxes are often impulse acquisitions. You are halted in your tracks by a wonderful display of bedding plants and there is nothing for it, you must have some. No garden? Never mind, there is room for a few window boxes….

Such impulses can be the beginning of a long and enjoyable acquaintanceship with window box gardening. They can also be the reason behind the starved and unhappy specimens you sometimes see as the summer draws on, the unwanted kittens of window box gardening that you cannot give away and that certainly don’t seem destined for a death by drowning. If your first boxes are impulse buys, or if you know only too well that you are one of those people whose early enthusiasm is liable to wane, then hold your horses for a moment and plan. Read the rest of this entry »

Plants have a wonderful knack of not just enlivening a room but actually becoming useful decorative devices that make the most of good features or disguise the bad ones. Any room in a house can have things that need highlighting as well as lots of areas that you’d rather not draw too much attention to. Plants can work for you in solving difficult decorating problems and they are cheaper and a lot more fun than getting in the builders.

Many old houses which have seen years of changes and alterations, particularly to plumbing, may have tangles of pipe-work either exposed or badly boxed in. A hanging basket or container with a good easy trailing species such as an ivy or the grape ivy can disguise the ugliest bits and can even be trained along the parts you wish to hide. Read the rest of this entry »

Other Odontoglossum species which may be tried as house plants include 0. bictoniense, a soft, green leaved species from Mexico which is continuously growing and which produces long upright sprays of up to twenty-five pretty flowers. The petals are green barred with brown, the heart shaped lip is white often suffused with pink. Flowering during the summer, it will continue to bloom for many weeks. 0. pulchellum, has pure white flowers with yellow centres which are produced from oval shaped bulbs which bear two narrow leaves. This species is fragrant and also comes from Mexico. It propagates and divides easily. None of the South American species of Odontoglossum or Miltonia are available these days as house plants. They will only be found in cultivation in limited quantities in botanical collections where they have become collector’s items, or in the stud houses of orchid breeders. Read the rest of this entry »

Cymbidiums, like so many orchids, are widely distributed in the wild. They occur in an area of the Far East which stretches from the Himalayas, China and the southern islands of Japan, through the East Indies to the northern territories of Australia. Most of the species are of botanical interest only, with small, insignificant flowers. Also among the Cymbidiums can be found an extraordinary species of minute plant which grows under the ground and produces small flowers on a short spike about 8 cm (3 in.) high. None of these more obscure species have qualities which make them worth using for breeding purposes.

A typical Cymbidium from which the bulk of hybrids have been raised produces egg shaped bulbs, completely covered by the leaves. These leaves are up to 1 m (3 ft) long and there are eight to ten per bulb. As is typical of orchids, Cymbidiums grow in enormous clumps in the wild, but in cultivation are maintained at a convenient size; Read the rest of this entry »

Description: A perennial plant with thin underground rootstocks on which tubers are formed; the tubers, potatoes, are filled with starchy reserve tissue, and are a staple source of starch in many parts of the world. The profusely branching stems bear alternate, unpaired-pinnate leaves. The five-petalled star-shaped flowers are white, blue or violet, with prominent yellow anthers. The fruit is a globose berry.

Origin and Distribution: The potato came originally from South America, where cultivated varieties were bred from wild species such as Solanum andigenum. Read the rest of this entry »