Frost has arrived but these alpine plants in a container in the front garden don’t mind ! Sempervivums and sedums I am currently planting a new mixed border bed which I opened up in September opposite the other new bed , the pampas/ miscanthus area and running almost the same length about four metres away and the reason being that it creates a grassy avenue of a walk between the two new beds and immediately adds interest to what previously was the top end of the field so now when you come around the corner you see the gravel path to your left , beside it the new miscanthus bed […]
Monthly Archives: November 2013
My Gardening Week November 23rd 2013
The first hard frosts of the winter hit this week and while the autumn colours of the trees are still magnificent there is that drab damp feeling beginning to envelope the garden which is why I find the more primary colour you can inject into the garden through garden furniture etc. helps lift those gloomy days . I can’t claim credit for the yellows and blues that our wooden garden furniture now sports as I was force fed into those by Sanna . This injection of colour had started innocuously enough a few years ago with the purchase of the odd red and black ceramic pot in the garden centres […]
The Gardener as Photographer
You don’t need to be a photographer to be a good gardener in fact you don’t need to even have a camera but it helps enormously to display your garden at its best moments throughout the seasons if you can take some nice photos and for me gardening and photography go hand in hand . My second hobby after gardening has been photography and I quickly progressed from my first instamatic kodak camera to a compact canon back in the late 1960’s until I made the step up to 35 mm with my first SLR which was a Pentax . Back then there were five major camera systems, Canon, Minolta , […]
A walk in the Garden Sunday November 17th 2013
My Gardening Week November 9th 2013
Planted up a new large terracotta pot for the front gate which Sanna had fallen in love with yesterday at Glenconnor Garden Centre . I will fill it with winter flowering pansies for the time being and in the spring will decide on which plant to put in permanently which at the moment is between a small Japanese maple or a large leaved hosta such as the Empress Wu which I bought last week in Johnstown Garden Centre . The position of the pot is in light shade under trees so this would suit a small maple or hosta which I would be watering / feeding on a regular basis […]
My Gardening Style
I try to always use trees and shrubs that contribute a combination of good leaf colour and bark so you get a plant of year round interest and I always use this immediate back garden area to demonstrate to visitors how colour and interest can be achieved without a slavish devotion to flowering shrubs etc. I do admire nice flowering shrubs such as magnolia or rhodoendrom but generally I am not a great lover of flowers or flowering plants as I find the return disappointing as you normally get only three weeks in flower and then you are stuck with this drab looking plant for the rest of the summer .. there […]
Recommended Garden Centres from a personal point of view
As I garden In the Clonmel area I have always regarded Glenconnor Garden Centre as my local and first bought plants there in the 80’s for my garden in Rosslare from Terry who stocked plants that were difficult to find anywhere else . Nowadays like all garden centres they have to rely on the restaurant and peripheral sales of barbeques , Halloween and Christmas paraphenalia to survive and while Terry’s son, Chris , has stepped up manfully and Sharron is a pleasure to deal with , Susan as Plants Manager has a huge gardening knowledge and has kept up the tradition of sourcing unusual plants so I rarely miss a week without […]
This week in the Garden
This week in the garden 25th October …. The season for tidying up , shifting trees and shrubs , dividing perennial plants which is what I have been doing all week . I moved the remaining five apple trees from the top field from their original site as I feel it is drier in the new location , a matter of about 15 meters but a meter can sometimes inexplicably make a difference as to whether a plant thrives or just stays alive and in the case of these apples I feel the wetness was causing them to stand still , we shall see as trial and error is a […]
The Petrovska Garden Story … developing the Garden from the beginning in April 2006 to present day …
We started to build this garden fifteen years ago , the first sod was turned in January 2006 and although a garden is never standing still …or shouldn’t …. this essay , book , call it what you like , is to docuement the developement of the garden and grew out of a presentation I was asked to give to the Clonmel Horticultural Society about the creation of the garden in January 2016 . We bought this house with almost eight acres of land at Old Spa Road in 2000 having decided to return to Clonmel , my home town after 40 years working both in Ireland and abroad with […]
Gardening Philosophy
To maintain a life long interest in gardening you need a philosophy , a theme if you like , that you work towards , not a topical trend as for example heathers … who plants the big expanses of heathers coupled with tall slim line conifers now ? You start out like every budding gardener with annuals and build up to perennials and basically you learn about plants , what they like and dislike , soil conditions and how not to fight nature and try to force plants to grow in impossible locations but then you begin to learn that on the right plant right place principle there is a […]