This coming weekend , on Sunday July 23rd , we are hosting the annual Clonmel Lion’s Club Garden Charity Day where all proceeds go to fund some of the worthwhile projects selected by the Lion’s Club committee . This year there will be a marquee with live music , teas / coffee and cakes all made by committee members on sale , Shirley Lannigan will be discussing her new book , The Open Gardens of Ireland , at 4 pm and detailing the immense five years research that went into the project , there will be various activities for children throughout the day and Snezana and I will be giving […]
Browsing through a new garden centre in the Clonmel area , the Tipperary Gardener , I came across a hosta called June , a sport of the variety Halcyon , which has been a favourite medium sized grey leafed hosta of mine for years now … June has a nice subtle cream and gold colour and was Hosta of the Year in the US in 2001 , I have had a specimen growing for the past few years in the front garden and really liked it but didn’t know it’s name and this was the first time I have come across it since … the RHS garden encyclopaedia says it […]
May is the month with the most growth in the gardening calender and if you haven’t got the garden under control by the end of April then you are fighting a losing battle especially with grass and as for weeds it is a battle field out there … blink and both the grass and weeds have grown six inches ! There is great optimism I find at this time of year , everything is fresh looking and there is an entire growing season ahead to look forward to , the hedges are full with wild flowers , hawthorn and wild elder is in full bloom , my favourite time of […]
I consider April to be the best month in the garden as it is the first sign after the cold and wet days of winter that everything is breaking into growth again and I love the freshness and colour and everywhere you look you see life beginning again after the harshness of winter . I felt the joys of Spring earlier this month with a batch of photos one morning within the space of an hour from various parts of the garden , April 4th 2017 . I preach a lot in my gardening blogs that I don’t go in for flowering shrubs and trees as I feel that for […]
Late March colour in the Garden For the past few weeks the newspapers and magazines have been full of advice for gardeners , that is either for the beginner gardener or the majority of non jihadist type gardener who never sets foot in the garden from November to March and it really is a growth industry for journalists and writers who generally dust off their files and trot out the same old rubbish each year at this time . I have great faith in the UK Telegraph writers who are excellent and don’t talk down to the reader unlike the 20 something wannabe garden writers and don’t bang on about […]
February is the month of the snowdrop especially early in the month when it is the first flower in the garden . A tough little plant , its spears will push up even through frozen ground to flower , galanthus is the latin name and there are twenty species but hundreds of varieties but best sown “ in the green ” which is a clump dug up just after flowering and transplanted . The snowdrop does not like wet soil so we have only a few pockets where it grows well and these are close to the house in the front garden and although I like the plant I am […]
Late December and early January has been kind weatherwise and I was able to get ahead of myself with the usual tidying up , repositioning of underperforming shrubs and trees , cutting back of the various perennial miscanthus grass’s and tackling some areas that haven’t been touched for years . One of these was the hedge of native trees along the eastern side of the garden which is the site of a land ditch probably five hundred years old and which because like all irish ancient hedges it was built up with stones cleared from the land and is dry , originally it would have been planted with native oak […]
New Year’s Eve 2016 colour in the water garden The last of the 2016 garden projects took place in late November and saw the digger back in the garden with the sides of the bridge across to the Lower Garden taken down ( again !) to allow it across the stream where finally we got to grips with the area around the new patio as it had been too wet earlier in the year . Peter levelled the area and flattened all the bumps and hollows and finally reseeded it with grass so that from next year the patio will be surrounded by lawns as up until now I was […]
Earlier in November I was able to mark off a bucket list garden that I have wanted to visit all my gardening life , the Alhambra in Granada , the most famous garden in the world which showcases the best of Islamic garden design especially in it’s use of water . A lot of places that you have heard and read about extensively before visiting for the first time can be a bit of an anti climax in real life but not the Alhambra as it was just a mind boggling experience and one which even if not a gardener would still thrill . You can see immediately that the […]
The end of October and the best time for leaf colour in the garden as everything makes one last effort before winter steps in from next week but not all doom and gloom because then it is the time when trees and shrubs with good bark come into their own with the white bark of the silver birch and the red cornus taking us through to next March . If you plan your garden correctly you can have interest there for the entire twelve months and always something to look forward to … which is why over the coming weeks I will be buying and planting dwarf spring bulbs for […]
