Chard has a lot going for it. You can plant it as soon as you can work your garden in the spring, and it will provide tasty, nutritious greens for months. Through cold weather or hot, it won’t get bitter, tough, or strong as long as you keep it harvested.

With wide rows you can get basket after basket of chard to can or freeze for the winter. To me, it’s the perfect green for a wintertime meal. It tastes good, it’s nutritious, and it’s a lot cheaper than store-bought greens. 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 »

Birds usually create the biggest problem, but you should look out too for mites and weevils.

• Apple blossom weevil The small white grubs of this tiny brown beetle eat the central parts of apple flowers. Infested blossoms fail to open. Spray with permethrin as the buds are forming or fenitrothion as the buds burst open.
• Big bud mites Tiny mites that live in large numbers inside the buds of blackcurrants. Infected buds are swollen and round, and usually fail to come into growth. Pick off and burn; spray with benomyl fungicide in spring and early summer. Read the rest of this entry »

Verbena is an old-fashioned cottage garden plant that is making something of a comeback. It is really a perennial but is best treated as an annual; the new hybrids have dense heads of pink, white and purple flowers that still retain their scent. Take out the growing shoots to encourage bushiness and dead-head regularly. Verbena is usually sold in boxes of mixed colours and these mixtures are particularly attractive. It reaches a height of up to 10 inches.

Gazania is another perennial most commonly grown as an annual. G. x hybrida at 9 inches has dark green foliage with a grey underside; the daisy flowers are in the yellow, orange, bronze range though you can also have some deep pinks. They like full sun. Read the rest of this entry »

Flower patterns

Fabric designs over the centuries have mostly derived their inspiration from nature and in particular from plants and flowers. It is no different today: the largest choice in wallpapers and fabrics is still in the floral ranges. Even the occasional abstract design is more often than not based on natural forms. We all love flowers and therefore use them as decoration wherever possible. The choice is immense now and there is every style of design available from very smart, small- scale, all-over flower patterns to great splashy chintzes smothered with full-blown summer garden flowers, ideal for curtains. 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 »

Among the hybrids are the well loved types which produce large, well rounded flowers of a heavy texture, with spotted dorsal petals and highly glossed petals and pouches. These come in a variety of colours from lime green and clear yellow to rich dark reds and bronzes with any number of shades in between and various spots and stripes. These are the types which, although many times removed from the species, can be traced back through their pedigree to Paphiopedilum insigne and its many varieties (including the yellow form P. insigne var. sanderae), and also P. bellatulum. It was the combination of these two completely different Paphiopedilums which formed the base for the modern breeding lines. Read the rest of this entry »

Timber is ideal for many projects in the garden, and is particularly useful for decking and steps. Like a stone patio adjacent to a stone house, a wooden deck adjoining a timber building will make a strong link between inside and outside. Timber can be easily worked to shapes that would be extremely difficult to produce using paving. It is light, it warms up quickly and it needs little maintenance apart from a regular application of non-toxic preservative. Never use creosote, which is certain death to plants. Some wood can even be bought already pressure-treated with preservative, further reducing after-care. Remember, though, that timber means trees, and if those trees come from a non-managed source then you are contributing to the degradation of our environment. Please check with your supplier, particularly if you envisage using hardwood species from tropical rain forests. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m essentially a lazy gardener and if there is a way to tend plants at a comfortable height, rather than at ground level, then I’m all for it. But this is just one of the advantages of raised-bed gardening. Raised beds give young plants a much- needed boost, soften the hard line of an adjoining wall, can double as occasional seats, become an integral part of steps or ramps or temporarily provide a children’s sand-pit. You can use them to contain a given area such as a patio or vegetable garden, and remember that the soil in a raised bed can be quite different from that in another part of the garden. This will allow you to grow plants that would not normally thrive in the immediate vicinity — for example ericaceous plants could be grown in an acidic bed in an otherwise chalky garden. Read the rest of this entry »

Natural ponds are invariably informal. If you want to create something similar in your own garden you should first study how water looks without the interference of man. For a start, it will almost certainly be situated in a fold or dip in the land and, although we don’t always have that much space at home, we can at least use the shapes and contours of the garden to ensure that the feature sits comfortably in its surroundings. You can use the spoil from the excavation for this contouring. Remember to keep the topsoil separate from the subsoil, replacing it last as a medium for planting or lawn. Read the rest of this entry »

As a lot of the goodness must seep into the ground from my compost heaps I have had the bottom of the compost enclosure concreted. Instead of having the ground quite level it slopes down very slightly, and along the lower side I have about a foot of vertical concrete (breeze blocks in fact). My compost enclosures are at the top of a ditch, so it has been easy for me to run out three small drains into the ditch. The rich ooze from the heaps drains into receptacles placed to receive it and gives me a constant supply of liquid manure. It is wonderful what a fillip this diluted goo water gives to a plant that is just coming into flower. In the summer the sweet corn particularly is the lucky recipient of this largesse. Read the rest of this entry »

Description: An evergreen climber clinging to surfaces by means of adventitious roots. The woody stem is much branched, the leaves conspicuously dimorphous: on the sterile, trailing stems the leaves are alternate, palmately lobed, leathery and glossy with marked light venation; the fertile, erect stems bear narrow, ovoid leaves growing in a spiral around the axis; the venation is inconspicuous. On the fertile branches no adventitious roots occur. Flowers are yellowish green, in umbels, appearing from August to October. The fruit is a black berry which ripens in winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Description: A perennial plant with a short, vertical rootstock; from it rises a basal rosette of long, lanceolate, often hairy leaves with parallel veins, narrowed to form a long petiole. Several leafless stems longer than the leaves (10-50 cm high) rise from the leaf rosette, and terminate in a short, cylindrical spike composed of tiny, yellowish-white flowers and brown bracts. Plantain flowers from May till September. The fruit is an ovoid capsule containing two relatively large seeds. Read the rest of this entry »