Preventative Pruning of Sedum

 

Ladies, are you troubled by your Sedum flopping about all over the beds?

Gents, do your friends laugh at the way your Sedum plants are laying down, instead of standing proudly to attention?

Are you tired of having to prop them up with canes and string?

There's no getting away from it, once Sedum become well established, they get a bit too big, and by late summer they are flopping outwards under their own weight:

 

... so here's a reminder to get out there and do some Preventative Pruning!

What's that? I hear you say.

Well, in a nutshell, if you do a bit of sneaky pruning to your Sedums now, you can avoid the whole "flopping over the path" mess.

Have you heard of ......

 

 

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Arum maculatum: how to get rid of them... the easy way

 I've yet to meet a garden owner who actually likes this plant:

 

The proper name is Arum maculatum, which always makes me think of eye problems (macular degeneration, I think), or Arum italicum if you have the version with white marbled leaves: commonly known as Lords and Ladies, Cuckoo-Pint or, if you went to school where I did, Waggling Willies.

They grow from underground tubers, and pop their early leaves up at this time of year. Then you get the amusing flowers: then in autumn the seeds turn a glorious shade of orangey red.

...but hearken to the warning in the seeds! Red for danger! Each one of those red seeds contains between 4 and 8 individual seeds, and the red pods are packed tightly together, resulting in what is called a generous self-seeder, which can quickly become a real pest in the garden.

They are also toxic (in fact, all parts of this plant contain irritant chemicals, thus not endearing itself to me), but frankly, as a gardener, it's the warning about rampant spreading.....

 

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Hebe: Big Brave Chop!

 

I am very proud of one of my ad hoc Clients: they have an overlarge Hebe, a large-leaved one, which was getting huge.

Last year, at one of my monthly visits, Mrs Client asked what could be done about it, and I said that at some point, we would have to be brave and give it a big chop, to "re-set" it: it was going to continue to grow in size, and it was getting rather sparse.

 

She looked at me with the puppy eyes - no, not the usual "oh go on, pleeeeease!" puppy eyes, but the "oh no, not the rolled up newspaper..." ones. I get this a lot.

 Clients are often, quite reasonably, worried at the prospect of doing something drastic to one of their precious plants. Unlike me, they don't do it all the time: they don't see the results, so they don't have my confidence that it will "grow back". And it's a particularly tricky situation when it's a precious plant, one which was given to them by a favoured relative (in this case) and where they don't know the cultivar, so they can't just go out and buy another one (again, in this case)...

 

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