Hypericum winter pruning - maybe not quite yet?

 Back in January of this year, I wrote a brief article about pruning that most bomb-proof of what I call “builder shrubs”, the Hypericum - variously known as Rose of Sharon (which is pronounced Sha'ron, emphasis on the “ron”, as opposed to Sharrin-to-rhyme-with-Darren), St John's Wort, and so on.

One of my lovely Patrons asked me how it had flowered this year, after being chopped so brutally back in mid winter, so here's an update.

The previous article dealt with the harsh (but necessary) winter prune: this is the original shrub:

 

... which is how it looked last winter, before I took the secateurs to it.

Ten minutes later, this was all that was left:

 

 

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“What did you do, at the weekend, Rachel?”

... said one of my Clients, yesterday. I was a bit nonplussed by this, my Clients don't usually enquire about my out-of-work activities, we normally just talk about their gardens!

But with increasing age - theirs, not mine - I have found that my senior Clients do develop an interest in what their assorted “staff” do in the rest of the week: and I mean people like cleaners, chiropodists (yes, I know they have a funny name now, but they'll always be chiropodists to me), physical therapists, hairdressers - as the Clients are less able to get out of their houses, they become more reliant on “staff” to keep them interested.

In fact, one delightful elderly couple (I was with them for 15 years) used to say that once they were both housebound, they looked forward to my weekly visits with positive excitement, because I would “bring new topics of conversation into the house”. After being together their entire lives, they were running out of things to talk about, they said!

So, in case you are interested, this is what I did last weekend:

 

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“Help! The roses are growing over my window, again!”

“Help! The roses are growing over my window, again!”

That was a plea for help, last week, from one of my “irregular” Clients, I go there about once a month through the summer, and I always have to take my long snippy-snips, because the cottage has a lot of high-level roses which always need dead-heading.

This particular one:

 ... is only a Dog Rose, so the flowers are quite small, and they don't repeat-flower, meaning that only get one flush of flowers and that's it for the year.

However, they do produce rather lovely hips (or is it haws? I can never remember...) which are already forming, as you can see: and they persist right into mid winter, usually - unless the birds get them!

 

 

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Growing older in a garden: de-thorning roses by a door.

 

Recently, I wrote about Growing Older in their Garden, an article about the ways in which we, the professional gardener, can help to make gardens easier for our ageing Clients.

And the other day I was reminded of this small contribution which I made, to help my Client enjoy her garden.

This particular Client lives in a genuine chocolate-box cottage, with roses all round the door, which always sounds lovely - and is, until they start encroaching on the doorway, which these ones were.

Rip!

Snag!

Ouch!

The problem, of course, is the thorns.

Now, at this point I usually become a real botany-nerd, and deliver a lecture about how, despite what Shakespeare said about the rose having thorns only for he who would pluck it, rose don't have thorns, they have prickles. And yes, that means that I should have titled this article “de-prickling” not “de-thorning” but, well, what can I say, de-thorning sounds better.

What's the difference? Thorns are modified stems, they are deeply attached to the plant, and are “living”. Prickles are mere outcrops of epidermis: they have no vascular bundles, which means that they are easily detached, and are like our fingernails, in that they are attached to us, but they are not “alive”. That's a bit of a simplification, but you get the picture.

Does it matter?

In this case, yes: prickles are easy to remove, you just push them over sideways and they snap off, with no damage to the stem, no open wound, no access route for infection.

 And quite often, I will deliberately.......

 

 

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