News - Page 128
It's National Beanpole Week – and we're celebrating here in our garden centre at Lymington with a fine range of natural coppiced woodland products for your garden.
You can use all sorts of materials for supporting your plants, but coppiced hazel is a natural-looking and environmentally-friendly choice, as well as supporting local woodland industries. Hazel is a British native tree which can be regularly coppiced (cut to the base) each spring, its long r...
Now is the time to prune buddleja - and you can be really brutal. Cut it right back and you'll encourage loads of fresh growth to explode from the base this spring, and since buddlejas flower on this year's new branches that means lots of flowers.
Best known as the 'butterfly bush' the buddleja is a must-have for wildlife gardens, covered with hundreds of butterflies in late summer, sometimes so densely you'll hardly be able to see the nectar-rich flowe...
The plant of the month for April is the rhododendron, coming into full and spectacular flower from this month onwards. It's a great time of year to go garden visiting and enjoy some of the country's most famous displays: among the best are at Bodnant, in Conwy, Wales, Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire; Exbury Gardens in Hampshire and Caerhays Castle in Cornwall.
Once you're home you can create a display all your own. Rhododendrons need acidic soil to thr...
It's spring! This is the month when all gardeners have a bounce to their stride. It's hard to go indoors when the sun is shining, the birds are singing and the garden is alive with the year's first flowers. Enjoy!
General tasks:
- Watch out for frosts and keep horticultural fleece handy to throw over any plants vulnerable to damage
- Trim back climbers threatening to invade your guttering and eaves, always cutting back...
Test your soil before you sow as one of the easiest mistakes to make at this time of year is being too quick off the mark sowing seed outdoors.
Seed hunkers down to wait for better weather in chilly soil instead of germinating, putting it at risk from rotting or being eaten first. Sown in warmer conditions, though, they germinate quickly and grow away vigorously, often overtaking earlier-sown seedlings.
Every spring is different, and the da...
Prune coloured dogwoods to encourage a dazzling display of those vivid red stems again next year. Dogwoods are among the very best shrubs to choose for winter colour as their young growth has bark in vivid hues which shine out through the coldest months of the year, especially when back-lit by the low winter sun.
The best scarlet is Cornus alba 'Sibirica', but there are more subtly coloured dogwoods too: Cornus stolonifera 'Flaviramea' has lime-yellow s...
Plant a bumblebee garden to help our favourite black-and-yellow insects as they bustle about the garden pollinating our flowers and vegetables. We wouldn't get far as gardeners without them: they're responsible for the glistening displays of berries from autumnal stars such as cotoneaster, beauty berries, berberis and pyracantha; and even more importantly, they pollinate about a third of the crops we grow.
Sadly they're going through a tough time at the...
Buy in vegetable plug plants to fill gaps left by seedlings which didn't quite make it, or to stock up on veg you didn't quite get around to sowing earlier in the year. In small gardens, or when you're only growing for one or two people, plug plants are the obvious solution – instead of trying to find space for seed trays, buy ready-to-plant plugs and pop them straight in the garden. And if you only want a few of one particular vegetable – Brussels sprouts, say – it...
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It is Mother’s Day Sunday so don’t forget! Remember to treat your Mother to something nice to make her feel extra special! We have a lovely gift area in out centre in Lymington where you will be sure to find her something.
You could choose one of our planted arrangements, handy tools kits for the garden, a sweet garden bench or even gift vouchers, but you must remember a card.
Why don’t you bring your Mum down to our centre for a day out? S...
The plants of the month for March are pansies and violas, among our best-loved bedding plants and always popular for their cheery easy-going nature. Take the time to look closer at their prettily-marked petals and you'll find there's more to them than you think: like little works of art, you can find varieties splashed, shaded, two-toned, striped and whiskered, in every shade from near-black to classy shades of bronze, copper and yellow.
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