Gardens on tour!
Summer time, holidays and the chance to cast garden visits a bit wider. We’ve selected seven inspirational gardens for Country Gardener readers around the country which offer something really unique and special.
Features
Lilies – very difficult to ignore!
There are about 100 species of lily available to gardeners with large, spectacular often fragrant flowers. They cover a whole range of colours including whites, yellows, oranges, pinks, reds and purples. Gill Heavens looks at a few of her favourites of Division 9 classification of these wonderful plant varieties.
Subtlety is not something normally associated with lilies, whose Latin name is the relatively simple to remember - Lilium.
Top 10 cut flowers to grow at home
A vase of fresh flowers cut straight from the garden can instantly make a house feel more like a home. So it’s surprisingly that more people don’t try growing their own cut flowers. There are plenty of cut flowers that you can grow at home, but if you need some inspiration take a look at our top 10 favourites.
You don’t need to be a florist to get the best from your cut flowers either. There are lots of handy tips that you can employ to make your blooms last longer. Here are a just a few to get you started.
Colour in the late summer garden
Don’t say goodbye to the colour and wonders of your high summer garden. With a bit of planning you can still have vibrant colours right through to early autumn and beyond
How often have you hear gardeners say ‘Oh my garden looks its best in spring’.
Late-summer drabness is often taken for granted and by July we are saying there’s nothing to look forward to.
Which is of course nonsense. Why waste your garden's best performance on the matinee? Hold it back for the main event: August, when it's warm enough to sit out and enjoy it.
Worming your way to great compost!
Elizabeth McCorquodale looks at the efficient and hugely popular method of turning kitchen waste into high quality compost with your own wormery
For those of us who don’t generate enough garden waste to feed a compost heap or have no space to put one, a wormery is a very efficient method of dealing with kitchen waste and garden debris and as a bonus it provides a free and renewable source of garden soil conditioner into the bargain.
King of the soft fruits
A single, well established healthy blackcurrant bush will yield 10lbs of fruit every year and will stay productive for 20 years. It is what makes it one of the most popular of all the soft fruits grown in our gardens.
Blackcurrant bushes are very easy to please. And boy do they show their appreciation of being looked after!
Ten pounds of fruit per bush is a very generous supply of blackcurrants from which you can make countless jars of jam from, and the fruits are also ideal for freezing, juicing, adding to yogurts and so on.
Heavenly honeysuckles
Gill Heavens picks her favourite honeysuckles as she enjoys plants which provide form and structure in the garden throughout the year and bestow intoxicating beauty.
Country Gardener Advice
Providing gardeners with help on a range of gardening issues, problems and opportunities.
When rainfall becomes scarce
Whether you are growing plants in pots or in the ground watering is an essential part of summer gardening. When rainfall dries up you’ll need a strategy on how and when to water.
Watering is an essential and life dependent part of gardening in the summer. Water is vital to hydrate plant cells to aid plant processes including growth yet at the same time water is lost from the leaves. This is called transpiration. This means that plants rely on a good root system to constantly draw water from the soil.
The creeping menace of the Turkey Oak
Mark Hinsley sees problems with the infiltration into our countryside of an Eastern oak which falls well below the standards set by its English counterpart.
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