Rachel the Gardener: May 2023

Friday, 26 May 2023

Companion Planting - harmonising foliage

"Companion Planting" usually means planting one sacrificial plant, in order to protect something more precious: for example, planting smelly old calendula (marigolds) around the edges of your veggie patch, in the hopes of distracting aphids and other unwanted pests, en route to your edibles.

But it also means making nice or pleasing associations: I wrote about Tamarisk and Asparagus a while ago, and the other day I saw another unusual but pleasant combination.

The big plant is Senecio (formerly Brachyglottis) which I generally only grow for the foliage, which - as you can see - is silver-white, and rather lovely.

The flowers are great coarse yellow things, they don't look good against the silver, and they very quickly go over, leaving a mass of dead grey foliage underneath them.

So I treat it harshly, I cut it back hard every time I see it, which produces a mass of new growth, which is clean and silver-white, lovely!

(I do sometimes wonder if my various Clients see it elsewhere, flowering, and wonder why theirs never produce flowers....)

This particular photo was taken in early March, so it's not quite looking its best, but even this early in the year, it still has a nice effect.

And in front of it, we have a very nice cultivar of hardy Cyclamen hederifolium, one of the variegated leaf ones, which happens to be a very silvery colour.

Was this a complete and happy coincidence? Or did the gardener (me) choose to put them in this juxtaposition deliberately?

I'll leave you to think about that!

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Friday, 19 May 2023

How to Avoid Living in a Forest of Sycamore

Hasn't it been a good year for Acer seedlings?

All of my gardens are suffering a plague of the dratted things!

Whether it's the more common Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) or the less frequent Norway Maple (Acer platanoides) they are popping up all over the place.

In one garden with a rather old patio, I pulled up over a thousand in one go. Well, to be honest, I lost count briefly in the mid 700s so it might be plus-or-minus forty or so, but however you count it, that's an awful lot of seedlings. And in the following weeks, there were still more to be pulled up!

As for the lawns, they appear to have hundreds of tiny green parasols all over them: but at least all you have to do with those ones, is to run the mower over them and shazaam! they are gone.

So lawns are easy peasy, patios are hard work on the back but very simple to do; but what about the rest of the garden? What about the flowering borders? Well, if you find seedlings in the lawn and/or the patio, you can bet your boots there will be seedlings in the beds as well, so now is a good time to take a careful tip-toe stroll through the borders.

The daffodils are dying down, so you don't have to worry about trampling them: and the herbaceous plants are growing strongly enough that you can see where they are, but not so big that you can't put your feet down between them: it's the perfect time. Best of all, with the recent rain, the ground has softened so that you can pull them out quite easily.

And pull them out you must: don't chop them off at ground level - this only works in lawns because it is done before they have developed a proper root. If you wait until they are ankle high and THEN chop them off, they will regrow from the stump. I use my favourite tool, the Daisy Grubber, to lever them out with the minimum damage to surrounding plants, and I can assure you that I am digging them out by the hundred this year.

Not sure if what you have are Acer seedlings, or something lovely?

Well, they rarely appear singly, but will usually be in a clump - sometimes, in a very dense cluster of half a dozen all growing together.

The first pair of leaves (the cotyledons, to be botanically correct) are long, thin and narrow, with untoothed edges, and are very deceiving, as they don't look the least bit like a tree of any sort, so they are easily overlooked.

You can see them here - left: the long thin leaves at right angles to the toothed ones above them.

The second pair of leaves are miniature, pointed and dainty: elegantly shaped with neat teeth on the margins, and shortly after they arrive, the long thin leaves drop off. These new leaves still don't look as though they would ever grow into a hulking great Sycamore. However, take your eye off them and suddenly you have stout calf-height stems with what are clearly Sycamore (or Norway Maple) leaves, and at that point they are difficult to dig out, as they have sent down long strong tap roots. This is the point at which it is vital not to cheat and merely chop them off!

Acers are not the only trees to do this - Lime (Tilia) are little devils in the same way - but this year does appear to be an exceptional year for them.

Whatever you do, don't give up and just leave them, otherwise you will shortly find that you are living in the dense shade of a Sycamore forest!

Friday, 12 May 2023

To see a world in a grain of sand.....

.... or to see an entire little ecosystem, all alone, with no human interference:

Isn't that great?

Spotted last week, whilst on holiday - yes, shock horror, I do actually go on holiday from time to time!

This is the crotch of a large old Ash tree, and this was about at head height: the crotch formed a little pocket where debris, and water, would collect, and in a while, plants started growing.

I could see grass, a fern or two, some cow parsley, a wild geranium, and a couple of sycamore seedlings, along with what could turn out to be a dandelion - hard to say, with only one leaf to look at - and, of course, moss.

It rather reminded me of those gardens-in-a-bottle that you sometime find: quite self-contained, do you know the sort of thing? I had one, for several years: some of the plants grew too large for the bottle, and although I was careful not to overwater it, it eventually succumbed to mould.

This one, however, will probably flourish, for some time, at least, because it's open unto the trees and to the sky (second poetry reference in one article, I should go away on holiday more often!) so mould won't be a problem: although I think the cow parsley and the Sycamore might turn out to be too large... and of course, it won't have any human interference, as it is quite literally in the middle of nowhere: so it won't get weeded, or weed-killed.

I do rather like the idea that no-one planted it, no-one tends it: it started of its own accord, and will continue to grow until, well, there's no reason for it to ever stop growing, really: even if the tree were to die and eventually fall over, the rotting wood would just be more nutrients for this tiny little garden.

If some of the occupants become too big to be supported, they'll die: and more weed seeds will drift in from above, to take their place.

Rather lovely, I thought.

Friday, 5 May 2023

Blubells: what if you can't get at them to dig them out?

Recently I wrote about how to get rid of Spanish bluebells: and this generated questions from a couple of people who would like to get rid of them, but can't dig the bulbs out.

In one case, they are in the middle of a heavily planted bed: in another, the owner has tried, but the bulbs are too deep to get out. In yet another, they are not easily accessible.

Fear not! Help is at hand!

I have two out of three of these issues in my own tiny back garden:

I have invading Spanish bluebells around the base of a tree, and round the back of my water butts, so I can't get round there with a fork, and even if I could, the tree roots would prevent me from digging them out.

Here they are - left- and as you can see, not very accessible. And yes, the fence needs repainting, but I'm waiting until the weather warms up a bit.

Partly because I don't like doing standing-still jobs when it's cold (when working, I get nice and warm, but not when more or less standing still), and partly because paint seems not to stick as well, when it is cold, or when the wood is not thoroughly dry.

So that job can wait for a while!

The bluebells, however, can't....

My other problem was an area where I'd planted Anemone blanda, the small wood anemone, to give a splash of colour at this time of year, at the end of my Sugar Cane hedge.

At this time of year, the perennial Sugar Cane (Miscanthus sacchariflorus) are cut down to nothing: the tulips are up, but not yet flowering, so the blue Anemone were nice, just there.

I planted some tubers about 15 years ago, and have been nurturing them ever since: all went well until about six or seven years ago, when the Spanish bluebells started invading.

Obviously I can't dig them out, because it would disrupt my much-loved colony of Anemone.

So, how do we deal with Spanish bluebells in this sort of situation?

By just pulling off the leaves, as soon as they are long and thick, but before the flowers have formed.

Wear gloves, obviously (see previous post regarding issues with the sticky sap), and it really is that simple - just grasp each tuft of leaves, and rip them right out of the ground! The longer the piece you pull out, the better: but even if they rip off at ground level, you are preventing them from feeding the bulb, which means that next year, the bulb will be smaller, and will have less resources for growing.

If you are persistent, and do it every year, they will eventually die of exhaustion.

As you can see by this photo - right - I have succeeded:

There are the Tulips to the left: there's some ivy and a few odd ephemerals which I haven't yet pulled out, but no Spanish bluebells.

This shows that it is indeed possible to remove unwanted bluebells, even if you can't physically dig them out.

Now I have to go out there and pull out that one stray Muscari flower, before it sets seed!

Monday, 1 May 2023

Spring 2023 - the Death of Hebe

I don't often write "date-specific" posts, as this blog is intended to be a reservoir of reference articles, that people dip into when they want information.

But this year, 2023, I am finding huge numbers of dead Hebes.

Here's a typical example, left: what is normally an evergreen shrub is all brown and dead looking.

Sometimes you might find a little bit of greenery here and there, but generally speaking, once they are this far gone, it's better to dig it out, throw it away, and buy a new one.

Why is this happening?

It's purely down to the weather: last year we had drought, floods, unseasonal cold, unseasonal hot: this winter was mild, mild, mild, then suddenly we had hard frost: then it got mild again (I considered going back into shorts in March!) then frost again.

No wonder some plants just can't take it.

If you read the Met Office reports, this winter has actually been a mild one, but they are talking about average temperatures: and it's not the average that counts, it's the swings from mild to frosty, to mild, to frosty again, that cause the problem.

Just a few weeks ago I wrote about Salvia suffering in a similar way, and for very much the same reasons.

So if your Hebe have gone brown and look as though they are dead - well, they probably are, but you are not alone, and it's not your fault.

I'm not entirely sure that even covering them up with horticultural fleece would have helped, even supposing that we had known beforehand what the weather was going to do.... so it looks as though the garden centres are going to do a roaring trade in Hebes for replanting!

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