A successful landscape needs a garden style which appeals to you, and this is often linked to the house design. It can also be influenced by the kind of plants you like, or by your garden site and its climate.

Garden styles

There is a variety of garden styles, from formal to cottage garden, each with its own atmosphere and character. A predominantly natural or wild garden might look best in the country, or, alternatively, it could turn a town garden into a green oasis and bird sanctuary. A Mediterranean courtyard style would suit a small garden or echo Spanish-style architecture. You may like a formal garden for its symmetry, or an oriental garden for its serenity. Read the rest of this entry »

For your perennial vegetables and fruits, pick a spot separate from or on the edge of (second best) the main vegetable garden. The easiest way to get a bed started is to stake it out the season before you plant. Cover existing sod with a thick layer of newspapers, magazines, or cardboard. A friend of mine declares that covering sod is the best use she’s found for cast-off issues of the Congressional Record. “They’re so thick nothing will grow through them,” she says. So they don’t blow away, pile something on top —hay, wood chips, sawdust, branches, whatever. By spring, the sod will have decomposed and added green manure to the soil without a struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Peas are the ultimate crop for the lazy gardener. Using my wide row method, you can plant them in minutes and come back weeks later to harvest them. There’s no weeding, side-dressing, staking，or hilling. . .there’s just no work at all to growing tasty fresh peas anywhere in any climate.

People in the South often complain to me, “Dick, it’s just too hot down here to grow English peas. They start growing okay when the weather is cool but then it gets hot and the peas don’t produce.” My wide row method solves this problem.

I once brought 2 bushels of fresh-picked peas from my Florida test garden to a class I was giving nearby. I set the peas down in the middle of the crowd and said, “Taste for yourself.” These Florida gardeners sampled the peas and said, “They’re great!” 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 »

Succulents are easier to handle, though some of the agaves have sharply toothed leaves. Crassulas make good tree-like subjects for a desertscape.

C. argentea, the jade plant or money tree, could be combined with an aloe such as A. humilis, the hedgehog aloe, which is predictably very spiny, or with one of the echeverias, which make nice rosettes of fleshy, sharply tipped leaves. Sempervivums are not dissimilar in shape and

S. arachnoideum, the cobweb houseleek, is covered with a netting of fine cobwebby hairs. Among the sedums you can have S. morganianum, which grows down like a donkey’s tail, or S. rubrotinctum, the jelly bean plant, which looks just like that. Senecio rowleyanus is the string of beads plant, which grows tiny strings of green beadlike leaves. Lithops are pebble-like plants that are fascinating in themselves and very much more so when sporting their large daisy flowers. Read the rest of this entry »

Cacti and succulents are not hardy enough to stay out of doors throughout the year but will always benefit from spending the warmer months out in the air and sun. They are perhaps the most misunderstood of all plants. Somehow the myth has grown up that they can live indefinitely without water and this is what many of them must, perforce, do, usually in some ill-lit corner of the house where nothing else would be expected to survive. But water them correctly—not at all between December and March, then one good soaking every three or four weeks until June, followed by weekly watering and even daily spraying—and you will see them in a new light. Neglected specimens from indoors or, even better, well-cared-for plants from a nursery can go out on the window sill in late May or early June. Again, fill the box with gravel, settle in a nice rockscape and plunge in specimens still in their pots. Decorate the scene with finely crushed gravel. Read the rest of this entry »

There is something very evocative about scents drifting into the house from the garden on a warm summer evening. Philadelphus, the mock orange, usually still called syringa, and lilac, which really is syringa, are two of the most potent scented plants that you could contain in a large tub and station near a door or window. But it would take a few years for a young plant to reach a size sufficient to support a quantity of flowers and so the best subjects for a scented window box are likely to come from the long list of annual plants. These grow fast and will flower their heads off if conditions are right. Read the rest of this entry »

You can also grow your own seedlings, or dig them up from your own or a friend’s garden. Taking growing plants from the wild is now illegal and so it is irresponsible to suggest that you look for suitable specimens on the local common, although I cannot see you being marched off to prison if you should carefully lift one tiny 4 inch birch seedling from among thousands in the wild. Wherever you find your seedling be sure to remove it very carefully, bringing as much soil as you can and not damaging the roots. Keep it in a sealed plastic bag until you are able to plant it in as small a pot as will comfortably take it. Don’t at this stage prune the roots, other than trimming any that may have been damaged, but leave it to settle in for a few weeks. Once you see signs of new top growth you can begin leaf pruning, reducing top growth and encouraging the development of side growth. Never strip a tree of all its leaves, for these are essential to the process of photosynthesis by which plants live. Read the rest of this entry »

Only so much as whisper to a serious bonsai enthusiast that you are thinking of growing bonsai trees in a window box and you will probably be greeted by howls of protest. But if you are unfamiliar with the art of growing bonsai—and it is an art, and no less surrounded with ritual than the Japanese tea ceremony itself—you could make a very creditable start with a few small subjects on your windowledge. These need not be expensive but they will give you the opportunity to practise some of the bonsai techniques and to see whether the conditions your window ledge offers are right for these rather demanding subjects. If they are, and you have been bitten by the bug, you will feel more confident about treating yourself to more mature, and more expensive, trees. If the enthusiasm wanes, or your lifestyle does not admit of the frequent watering necessary in very hot weather, you will still have had the pleasure of creating a tiny forest of seedlings, or a mini landscape of rocks and trees. Read the rest of this entry »

Back to simplicity and the simple country feel of wood and brick and lots of fresh air. If you prefer Indian rugs, or dhurries, on faxed floors or deep-pile carpet and crisp cotton sheets to satin ones then your plants should look countrified too. Pelargoniums look right whether indoors or out and at one time few cottages didn’t have their pot or two of cheerful flowers on a window-sill. Busy lizzies are another good old-fashioned sort of plant, often badly grown and allowed to get leggy and sparse. They do like plenty of light indoors but not direct sunlight and as they are really very easy to propagate from seed or cuttings there is no reason why you shouldn‘t have a regular supply to fill your window-sills. Read the rest of this entry »

sandton smile

This rose would fit as well into the new category of Landscape roses — one of the reasons it was selected from many candidates to represent the up-market garden city, Sandton. Pointed buds half open into shapely, fragrant blooms that further unfold into curly semi-double flowers, at all times displaying a clear, soft salmon-pink. The bushes spread their huge clusters sideways to cover an area of about 2 m2, making space for a continuous supply of new stems all carrying clusters of highly perfumed, pickable blooms.

shocking blue

Medium-sized buds open into double blooms with 32 firm petals. The colour is not really ’shocking’ or ‘blue’, but a rather unusual mauve- lavender in the bud stage, maturing into shades of silver-blue as the blooms are exposed to daylight. An outstanding cut flower that is stunning in arrangement with yellow blooms; the yellow ‘Friesia’ is an excellent foreground companion. Vigorous, healthy and prolific growth with new, deep-purple foliage and glossy, deep-green leaves. Highly perfumed. Read the rest of this entry »

Glamis castle

This is a charming white performer. Indeed, when the 60-cm- to 70-cm-high bushes are in full bloom, flowers almost completely conceal the leaves. Compact bushes produce flush after flush of clear-white, highly fragrant and typically double, open, cup-shaped flowers. These roses can be planted to form borders, in groups and in containers.

l’aimant

This charming, medium-high growing rose has the characteristics of a free-flowering Floribunda. In never-ending supply, the double, salmon-pink blooms exude a powerful, sweet perfume. Indeed, the name links it with ‘L’Aimant’ perfume by Coty. It must have inherited its healthy, crisp and heavily veined foliage from its progenitor, ‘Margaret Merril’. The performance of this novelty rose is most gratifying — it is a joy in the garden and makes the perfect gift for those who have romance in their hearts Read the rest of this entry »

English Bush roses have the upright and formal growth habit of conventional Bushroses, e.g. ‘Peace’ and ‘Queen Elizabeth’. They should be planted in beds or rows and can be mixed with Hybrid Tea and Floribunda roses. Their blooms are of the cup, quartered or cabbage shape associated with yesteryear’s roses. Blooms are produced on good stems and can be cut, when fully opened, for arrangements. Petals of several varieties start dropping within a few days, particularly the fragrant varieties.

Winter pruning is carried out as with all other bush roses: thin out completely and leave three, or preferably four, basal stems, cut back to about 60 cm. Read the rest of this entry »

As with David Austin English Bush roses, these Shrub and Climbing varieties are characterised by the shape of their blooms — the quartered, highly perfumed blooms of old roses. These sumptuous blooms, combined with the graceful growth habits of Shrubs and Climbers, make this category of roses particularly appealing.

These varieties grow between 1,5 m and 3 m high when self‑supporting, but long climbing shoots can be trained to a height of 5 m on walls, pillars and pergolas. Since they willingly push out basal shoots, winter pruning consists of removing older stems from the centre. Basal stems often grow to a length of 2 m and more. They can be pruned, or if left unshortened, they will arch gracefully and carry blooms along their entire length.

Once spring flowering is over, the main stems can be cut back to about 1.2 m, which will encourage a new flush of blooms. Alternatively, the stems can be shortened in winter, which will increase the length of the flowering stems and size ofthe blooms. Read the rest of this entry »

jhb garden club

A lovely, neat Shrub covered with abundant delicate, single blooms of an exquisite soft coral, which dance like butterflies in the wind. Should hard rain spoil the delicate open flowers, it takes no longer than a day for new flowers to unfold. A hot favourite among gardeners for free form landscaping and planting in pots and tubs.

memory bells

The plant builds itself up with short sideways-growing stems bearing dense clusters of flowers at the tips. Small, round buds unfold into pom‑ pom-type double blooms of clear, strong pink, with quartered centres. A superb rose that looks stunning in a pot or on a short Standard stem; healthy and needs no spraying to perform. Read the rest of this entry »

A window box, being long and narrow, is not the easiest shape to plant effectively. Some people make the mistake of planting a single subject and setting the plants in a row. Try to avoid this: it will look too regimented and unimaginative. Aim for more shape in the design by using a mixture of plants of varying sizes and habits.

How much a window box is covered by plants should be determined by the box itself. If it is highly attractive, then it will be a pleasing feature in its own right and should not be covered by plant growth. However, a plain box is best covered with trailing plants.

There are various ways of arranging plants in window boxes. You could go for the pyramidal design: the tallest plants are set in the middle, with shorter and shorter plants grading down to each end. The ends and the front could be planted with trailers if desired. Read the rest of this entry »

Plants chosen for hanging baskets and wall pots are usually temporary bedding plants that bloom for one particular season, generally summer. There are some permanent plants that can also be used, if desired. Bear in mind that in areas where the temperature drops below ^—4.5^°C/25^°F it can be difficult to winter any plants in baskets or wall pots outdoors because the soil quickly becomes frozen solid in freezing weather. If you wish to overwinter planted baskets and pots, keep them in a cool but frost-free greenhouse.

Many people plant glorious mixtures of summer bedding plants in baskets and wall pots: trailing lobelia, sweet alyssum (Alyssum maritimum) with its masses of white flowers, and petunias, with perhaps zonal pelargoniums or bush fuchsias in the centre, maybe with silver-leaved cineraria. There is nothing wrong with such designs and indeed they look most attractive in an English cottage-style garden, but the trend is towards simpler designs using fewer plants, and even towards single-colour designs coordinated with the house colours. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you are happy with the approximate position and the size of each feature, you can fill in the detail by firming the design up and finalizing the list of features you want to incorporate. It’s worth bearing in mind that the `hard landscape‘ areas of paving and walling will take the lion’s share of any budget. Plan these to link sensibly with the adjoining house. If the building is of brick, then brick might also be used in part of the patio or to build raised beds; if the floors inside the building are stone then this could be run outside to form a patio that will link the two elements together.

As has already been emphasized, simplicity is so often the key to success. By keeping the materials used for hard surfaces to a minimum, you are far more likely to achieve a harmonious result. Of course, a large expanse of garden covered in a single material may look visually heavy — especially if you are using new bricks or concrete paviors — and in such instances it can be a positive benefit to mix materials: Read the rest of this entry »

Paths and patios are the hard landscape ‘bones’ of your garden and provide the design framework around which the softer elements of lawns, planting and other features can be positioned. They are crucial to your enjoyment of the garden, providing areas for sitting, dining, play and many other activities as well as access to other features. Simplicity and strength of purpose are all-important in this part of the design. You should choose your materials carefully from the vast range available, taking your time over the choice and thinking about the visual and cost implications. Paving is perhaps the most long-term investment in your garden; make sure it is right for you and your situation before you buy. Any paving close to the house will relate strongly to it, so this should also influence your choice. Look around your area to see what materials predominate locally, and use them for the most sympathetic result. Read the rest of this entry »

A patio is very often the hub of activity around which the rest of the garden revolves. In some cases, such as a courtyard or tiny town garden, it can take up almost the entire area available, with planting softening the edges of the plot. In a larger composition it may share the space with sweeping lawns, borders, raised beds, vegetable plots and a range of other features.

As well as providing a site for sitting and dining, most patios have to cater for children’s play, household chores and the repair of anything from bikes to car engines. We have already seen that you need ample space and have looked at the wide range of materials available forconstruction. If in doubt, and you can afford it, always make the patio larger than you initially think; it will be well worth it later on. Read the rest of this entry »