Itās bulb season. This will be a two-part column about how to enjoy growing bulbs inside a glasshouse. Most of this advice will also be useful for growing on a sunny windowsill. Next month I will talk about forcing other tender and hardy bulbs indoors. But this month, Iām talking about Amaryllis with Christian Curless, […]
Unlike the costly high-tech carbon capture and storage strategies being proposed to mitigate climate change, tree-planting is free, simple, people-powered ā and proven. Iāve beaten the redwings to it. The crowd has skirted along the edge of the wood and descended on my neighbourās rowans, where theyāre now merrily stripping them of their dazzling orange […]
āIf you can read a book, you can do anything.ā Short of embroidering it on a cushion, thatās a mantra Iāve lived by since my best friend in high school wised me up. Iāve packed in a lot of reading since then, researching the history of garden design and landscaping for the books Iāve written, […]
A year or so ago, a friend was throwing out a dozen ten-foot-long, one inch-diameter, galvanized pipes. I said I would take them with the thought in mind of building an affordable hoop house. Having filled my 300-square-foot heated greenhouse with more than 200 plants, and with more plants than I intended in my unheated […]
Winter is knocking on the door once again and thereās lots to do in the garden in preparation. The trouble is you can never predict what winter will bring and I would like every gardener to be provided with their own personal crystal ball ā particularly now that our climateās so changeable. What will the […]
Whether you want to plant for wildlife or deter burglars, the humble bramble has many attributes I have a long and chequered history with the humble blackberry. As a child I lived on a crescent of houses and in the middle of the crescent was an allotment site, where we had a plot. We didnāt […]
It is annoying when one of your great greenhouse successes of the year is not one you plantedā¦ or even particularly wanted, but so it has proved this year. Call me a party pooper but I am not a big fan of a giant pumpkin. I love Halloweāen and I love the pumpkinās role in […]
So why on Earth would you want to grow this in your greenhouse? Well, because this is a living āpot pourriā. A South American relative of Asters itās delightful though as the disparaging quote from Paxtonās Botanical Dictionary suggests itās neither graceful, compact, neat nor colourful. Thus certainly not a centrepiece, nor a background foliage […]
I hope you have invested in at least one Hartley Botanic Water Butt to collect rain from the deluge that has poured down on our glasshouses over the past weeks. Use the tepid rainwater in the greenhouse on acidic loving plants like Citrus and if you have spare, water under the eaves over winter in […]
