Summer at Last

Cercidophyllum in Autumn

This last week has felt more like summer than the summer did. What a shame it can’t last, but we’ve already been warned that high winds are on the way.

 

Most climbing plants are starting to look a bit shaggy at this time of year and, as this makes them vulnerable to windy weather, this is the ideal time to give them a trim and tidy up. Tie in any loose shoots that might flap about in the wind and damage themselves or any surrounding branches and stems.

 

Perhaps the biggest problem is likely to be the loss of fruit from apple trees, which are still laden with apples. If I have any doubts, I remove the fruit and sort through them before storing them. Any damaged fruits can be used immediately or cooked and frozen. The biggest risk is fruit being blown from the tree and getting bruised as it falls, because bruised fruit has a very short storage life. It rots quickly and infects any fruit it comes into contact with, so I would rather opt for a pre-emptive harvest than wait and lose lots of my lovely crop.

 

The good thing is that this wind is due before autumn has really set in. Once the leaves on the trees and shrubs have started to change colour, they will blow away very easily, but they haven’t yet – so we could get some good autumn colour this year. The ideal conditions for good colour include damp weather, calm days and no frosts, so if we get all of these the vivid leaf colours will last much longer.

My particular favourites include;

-          Japanese maples, for their reds and oranges,

-          North American maples, with brilliant oranges and yellow,

-          North America oaks, which hold their red and orange leaves for a long time, with young trees often holding their leaves until Christmas, and

-          the Katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum), because not only does it have brilliant autumn colour, but as the leaves change they give off the smell of cooked sugar (which is why it’s also called the ‘Candyfloss Tree’. Mmmm ….. and you don’t put on weight while you are sniffing it. 

 

As the days get shorter and plant growth slows down, many perennial plants are already preparing for next year. Almost all of the food they manufacture in these warm sunny days is going to be stored in readiness for a quick start next spring.

I am taking advantage of this by treating perennial weeds (like bindweed, couch grass and ground elder) with a Glyphosate-based weedkiller. They will take in the chemical and appear untreated as they die down for the winter, but it will carry on working away before they go dormant, severely weakening them. Next spring should bring pale, weak shoots that have been partially poisoned. I will spray them again when they are about 15 cms (6 ins) high, and this second application should finish them off. 

See you next week.

Happy gardening!

Show off!

VertiGarden - Display at BallColegrave Trials area

Yes, I know, I’m late again. I should have written this last weekend, but at least I have a good excuse. I spent the weekend at the gardening industry’s most important trade exhibition in the UK, which is held every September at the NEC in Birmingham. This is the event where garden centres and supermarket chains get to see what’s new for next year (and possibly the year after). All the newest plants, products, fertilisers, pots and gifts are there and how the different buyers decide which to choose is beyond me (I strongly suspect price has as much to do with it as personal preference).

 

The other side of this exhibition is the people. Yes, you go along to find out what’s new; to decide which items are worth considering for offers in the newspaper and web site, but you also get to meet friends and colleagues from the gardening industry. You find out who’s doing well and who is struggling: which new plants have bred by whom and sometimes, sadly, who is no longer with us. Interestingly, you never see any of the television gardeners there. You’d think they’d want to be as up-to-date as the rest of us.

 

This year, I can tell you that the green theme rumbles on, with recycling, re-use and composting being the current buzz-words. Stewarts and Haxnicks both boasted that they were the first exhibitors to offer biodegradable ‘plastic’ flower pots – one of them must be right. This move way from plastics is gathering pace and the packaging of many items is now plastic-free or plastic-reduced.

Several new greenhouses being launched at this year’s show do not have any glass in them, just (perversely) lots of plastic. This seemed to be due to the Health & Safety people making the amazing discovery that glass can cut people. If the planet implodes, it’s their fault, then.

 

At these shows my main interest is always the plants and for next spring there are some real crackers in the pipeline, including

-          a new Cornus called ‘Venus’ from Germany, which has massive white flowers and makes a large shrub,

-          Hebe ‘Lady Anne’, a compact shrub with variegated leaves (green with white/cream margins) and rose pink flowers in summer,

-          an early-spring flowering Clematis called ‘Snow Bells’ with fragrant, white, bell-shaped flowers and evergreen leaves,

-          Lonicera ‘Golden Trumpet’, which produces a mass of bright golden honeysuckle flowers with a strong fragrance for summer evenings

-          a new Skimmia called ‘Obsession’, with white, star-shaped fragrant flowers in the autumn and bright-red berries contrasting the glossy, evergreen leaves. What makes it different from other Skimmias is that it’s self-fertile, so you don’t have to worry about having male and female plants to produce berries. This plant can manage the whole process on its own.  

Finally, the Best in Show award went to a new self-contained, vertical planting system called VertiGarden form Kinder plants. Sold as a complete kit, it’s ideal for someone with no garden, but a wall that they can grow plants on.

Autumn already? Maybe not!

Horse chestnut Leaf miner damage

Looking at some of the trees as you move around, you get the distinct impression that autumn is already here. Yes it is just around the corner, but it’s not here yet. If you take a closer look, you’ll see that most of the affected trees are horse chestnut (conker), rather than a range of plants. What we are seeing at the moment is brown leaves being caused by the horse chestnut leaf miner, which has burrowed into the leaf to feed and will still be there now, feeding or hibernating ready to emerge and lay eggs on the leaves next year, to start the whole process all over again. This pest is relatively new to the British Isles, being first recorded here in 2002 in South East England and spreading progressively north and west from that first sighting ever since.

 

Although experts in the UK tell us that these pests will not do any long-term damage to the trees they attack, I hear that in France a considerable amount of research work is going into finding a control that can be applied easily to large trees. Certainly, on the other side of the channel they are very concerned about this pest. We should be too.

 

I would have thought that if the leaves were damaged in this way every year, the general health of the tree would suffer – and a weakened tree may be much more likely to succumb to horse chestnut bleeding canker (which is a killer). When the trees get this, they have about three years left to live. To try and control some of the leaf miner problems, please rake up all of the leaves from your horse chestnuts and compost them in sealed plastic bags until next July. This will allow the dormant leaf miner moths to hatch, but they will die in the bags rather than flying around and laying fresh eggs on next year’s leaves. This will break the life cycle and go a long way to keeping the population of adults down to manageable levels until a control can be found.

 

Of course, some folks may welcome the demise of the horse chestnut. Schoolboys still relish the challenge of collecting and preparing conkers for annual battle, although the game is now frowned upon by the Health & Safety killjoys, who tell us that it is far too dangerous for children. It seems that you can only play it now if you wear a safety helmet, goggles, high visibility jacket and stand in the middle of a field so that no innocent passers-by get killed by flying conker shards. Me, I would regret the demise of another beautiful species of tree if (and it’s possible) the chestnut goes the way of the elm.

 

On a more pleasant note, last week the Royal Horticultural Society held a small and very successful flower show in the grounds of the Inner Temple in London. This show was held to commemorate the first RHS show, held at the Inner Temple in 1908. You may not have heard of this show before, because it moved a few years later into the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. The rest, as they say, is history.

Just another week

King’s Heath Park in Birmingham

I’ve just had another weekend away, this time working on a gardener’s question time-type panel at King’s Heath Park in Birmingham. It’s the fourth year I’ve worked at this venue and it’s one of the most enjoyable shows I do. It’s organised and managed by Birmingham City Council parks department and they do an excellent job, not just with this show, but also throughout the year, providing a well-maintained green space for the local residents. During the show, a presentation was made to a retiring parks manager who has completed 50 years service. He received an engraved long service medal, a certificate and letters of congratulations and thanks. He must have been very good at his job and popular with his colleagues, as many of them turn up to be at the presentation even though it was a Sunday and most of them were not due to work.

 

Over the two days of the show, our team of experts provided four hours of clear, precise and accurate gardening information, as well as sharing some entertaining moments with the packed audiences. An interesting thread running through the two days was the number of plants showing symptoms of problems as a result of the very wet summer we had last year. The results of torrential rain may not show immediately on the plant, but as declining health caused by having waterlogged roots.

The reason that I mention this is because this summer is not much better and unfortunately, many plants that were damaged by waterlogging last year will be suffering even more with the ‘summer’ we are having at the moment.

Yes, I know, I’m banging on about the weather yet again, but it has such a huge bearing on how we garden and what we grow. You may recall that some 5-6 years ago ‘dry gardening’ was all the rage. Many people, the BBC included, were telling us to use plants that could cope with the dry conditions we could now expect every year. Here we are, just a few years later, at the end of a second wet summer and many of those plants are dead. No doubt our trendy garden designers will conveniently invent a new fad to replace the poor drought-tolerant plants that have fallen victim to global raining. If only they would train in horticulture before spouting on!

 

This coming weekend brings one of the highlights of the gardening calendar; the National Amateur Gardening Show (NAGS) held at the Bath and West Showground near Shepton Mallet in Somerset. This show hosts one of the most important (and very competitive) dahlia shows of the year, with entries from most of the top-flight dahlia growers. For me, however, the star attraction will be the Giant Vegetable competition, with exhibits which often result in world records being broken. Some types of vegetable look amazing and others border on the obese. Pumpkins have to be lifted off lorries with a fork lift truck because they weigh around 900 pounds; there are marrows the size of small submarines, cabbages so large you could use them to hide your wheelbarrow and carrots so big they would scare a hungry rabbit to death. Well, yes, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but not much. 

See you there!