May is the month when the biggest surge in growth occurs in the garden and if you miss the first two weeks in May as I did this year then you are in catch up mode for the rest of the month … every year I always swear never go away in May but of course early May in the Mediterranean / Adriatic is too good to miss !
Gardening on the Adriatic is of course hugely different and none more so than the fact in Croatia we have an orange and lemon tree which delivered their first crop this year after six years in the ground.
And the Adriatic sunsets from Gornja Podgora are fabulous !
However I am always glad to get back to our lush growing conditions in Ireland and OK we have a lot of rain to maintain that lushness but nothing beats the greenery of an Irish garden .
I was asked recently to say a few words to a group of graduating horticulturists on everyday gardening and how to approach it as a novice gardener .
Now with internet access we have at our finger tips instant help with identification of plant needs but my advice was to back this up with a small collection of books for reference and dipping into every now and then … a few books that have stood the test of time since their publication in the past forty years and these would be my favourites … Christopher Llyod ‘s the Adventurous Gardener , Beth Chatto’s three seminal books , the Damp Garden , the Dry Garden and the Gravel Garden and our own Helen Dillon’s two books , The Garden and her collected writings from the Sunday Tribune … all these books are full of knowledge and not of the talk down variety but each author has a beautiful style of writing … Dan Pearson is also great and a favourite of mine , a bit lost in the clouds airy fairy but I like both him and his books … all these are books to be read and enjoyed over a lifetime and are timeless in both style and content .
Next my advice was to find your own style , what type of gardening excites you and be the best you can be in that style knowing that throughout your lifetime in gardening , if you have a garden , you will rarely have the soil you need so be prepared for an uphill struggle !
But plants are forgiving and if it doesen’t do well in your initial planting place be prepared to move it and often a metre to either side could succeed … don’t give up on a plant .
The final piece of advice was know your plants , trees and shrubs , study and read up on them , what they need to thrive , right plant right place is the mantra and learn to love semi shade and the absolute necessity for shelter … learned or studied knowledge is one thing but be prepared it will take probably twenty years experience to become the gardener you want to be !
Hosta Time May 2025
Hostas are coming into their best in May that is if they have survived the slugs and snails and of course they won’t come through unless you help them against the slugs … most people know I am a great supporter of anti slug pellets and I make no apologies to the tree huggers and eco warriors on that point !
Susan in Clonmel Garden Centre almost chases you away with a broom if you mention slug pellets and confirmed what I already suspected that the eco approved pellets now on the market have been watered down in recent years due to eco opposition and are not nearly as effective against slug damage … but the slugs are happier and no longer need therapy for anxiety … great isen’t it ?!
Susan explained that the latest anti slug deterrents are jars of crushed sea shells and also told me that studies have shown that throwing slugs over the garden fence doesen’t work and you need to remove them over a half mile away or else they make their way back … I have no such problems with our slug population and am not about to provide a taxi service to a new home a few miles away and for the first few weeks that the hostas start to grow in early April I dose on a daily basis all the hosta areas .
The Chelsea Flower Show in May had an excellent feature on hostas and recommended growing only the tall stemmed variety as apparently slugs won’t make the effort to climb into the leaves and I also find that the thick leaved varieties aren’t that delectable to slugs and survive better which suits me as my favourite hostas are the big sieboldiana versions of Francis Williams and Elegans .
That’s another feature about hostas on sale to day they are all cloned from the sieboldiana family and there are literally hundreds of new varieties with exotic names being produced by the growers each year to satisfy the public’s demand but basically they all come from the same stock originally .
Over the years I have settled on some old favourites from the 1970’s and basically only grow these … Gold Standard , June , Elegans and Francis Williams … and I don’t grow directly in the ground anymore and use large feature pots which I reserve for only hostas … the pots are empty from October to April so have to be impressive looking in their own right .
Every year I buy some hostas that I am not familiar with in half price sales and which seem to have good leaf and upright stems and this year’s find is a hosta that after three years has developed into a really nice shape and size and I would definitely add it to my favourite list in future … Hosta Broadway .
I also have a section of odd pots and buckets of all materials that I have grouped together for the past two years purely for hostas I pick up in garden centre sales and these have thickened up nicely … all hostas are split up every four years in the winter into three large pieces and potted up and this way the original parent hosta can go on for years and you get a new supply of hostas … but I stress you need to inspect the pots regularly and especially underneath for slugs and you also need to position them in semi shade and not in direct sun and keep them watered throughout dry periods .
Ignore your hostas and you will get raggedy leaves , parched looking plants but treat them well and like for me they will be your favourite plant and look magnificent .
Two years ago the RHS and the British Wildlife Trust published an article with the headline “ Slugs can be our Friends ” stating that out of the 40 species that live in our gardens only four , the common garden slug , the grey field slug , the large red/black slug and the common keeled slug attack our plants … the article made headlines and attracted huge criticism from gardeners and while I am sure slugs play an important role in our eco system I don’t want them in my garden where it is all out war as far as I am concerned … Snezana of course is against slug pellets or any sort of weed killer or pesticide so I have to be discreet shall we say when using them … mind you she has no such inhibition or eco morals when it comes to ants around the house and campaigns like Genghis Khan against the poor little things !
Alan Titchmarch writing in Country Life this week with the headline “ Slugs are never going to be my friends ” stated
Apart from going out late in the evening and hand picking the pests (and lobbing them over the hedge onto the country verge), the only things that have worked for me are those rings of copper that resemble a vicar’s clerical collar and which can be pushed into the ground around individual plants to discourage the molluscs from coming any closer. They are reputed (if kept clean) to impart a kind of electric shock to any slug or snail attempting to scale their dizzying height of 1in. Pot feet can be effective if you plant your hostas in large containers, as only those slugs and snails with acrobatic skills — relatively few in number — appear to be able to navigate them.
Slugs eat a huge variety plants or at least snack on them and in our garden slugs attack all new bedding annuals as well as anything fleshy in the vegetable bed such as melons or cucumbers and I have no problem with that and kind of accept that they have a place in the garden but the one plant that causes huge upset for gardeners are the hostas when destroyed by slugs and the one question always asked by visitors to the garden when they see the hostas is how to keep slugs away … Gerry Daly , Editor of Irish Gardener , was having a coffee here with us during a visit to the garden and I asked him how he dealt with slugs and he made no bones about using slug pellets “ if you want to have hostas but of course you can’t say that in the magazine ” .
As gardeners we give a lot back to the eco system and if hostas are our passion as they are mine we are entitled to protect them and it is not as if slugs don’t have enough food in our gardens already so they can bugger off and leave my hostas alone !
The RHS Chelsea Flower Show traditionally the last week of May is beautifully covered each day by BBC 2 in a one hour daily show of the great and good of the UK gardening scene presided over by Monty Don … great to watch and see all the latest gardening design . I religiously watch it every year and most years it is entertaining with various luvvies and celebrities being interviewed about their gardens and how they love nothing better than getting down and dirty … each year it gets more disappointing and none worse than this year when even after millions being spent on the various show gardens there was absolutely nothing special to remember .
Monty of course is the BBC’s and Royal Horticultural Show’s darling and this year he had entered a garden design by invitation based on a dog’s garden where he let loose a few dogs and they galloped through the planting and where the dogs ran Monty laid down paths … of course Monty got a deal from the RHS that his garden would not be judged so you wonder what was the point … and the garden sank without trace despite the BBC’s best efforts to talk it up beforehand … perhaps he should have thrown a fistful of snails out and their crawling about could have been the pathways … and you know if he did Monty has such adoring fans they would have thought yes what a brilliant way to design paths ?!!
A lovely man Monty and good luck to him with his schtick !
Apart from the magnificent hostas there are some great displays of semi wild flowers in the gravel garden such as valerian and the beautiful foliage of the alchemis mollis which takes a huge amount of abuse when I cut it back hard and walk over it occasionally by mistake but comes back every year looking fabulous with water droplets catching the sun .
A few years ago in the front garden a beautiful mature mountain ash variety sorbus Lutescens moonbeam blew sideways in a storm , didn’t fall over completely more a leaning tower of Pisa effect which still showed off all the beautiful cream leaves that Lutescens is known for … I staked it and it grew away and over the years the new growth sort of uprighted itself but last year with the new design in the front garden where we removed a row of dogwood shrubs in front of the Lutescens now the new exposed shape looked a bit off in a more prominent way plus it added quite a lot of shade .
This week we did a review of the tree in full leaf and realised it didn’t add anything to the new area rather it shaded it and the awkward branch cut across in an intrusive way … out came the chain saw and Snezana cut away some heavy branches from the sorbus and while it is not good practice to hard prune any tree with it’s foliage in full summer growth , still the end result looked better and allowed more light into the area and we are very pleased with the dappled glade like result.
Gardens evolve over the years and we as gardeners need to be able to do the same and if a particular area is not working as well as it should or as you have envisaged it you have to be open to change and with this in mind I moved a mahonia in late May to a place deep in a border in the Front Garden … I had never been happy with it’s previous position in a front bed since first planting it five years ago as it really is a back of border type shrub … end of May was a bit late to be transplanting a shrub but it had finished flowering in early April and I fed it and kept watering it in for a few days in it’s new more shady spot so hopefully it will be OK .
I am not big into growing your own vegetables , too labour intensive and am quite happy to buy from the supermarkets or small vegetable shops like the excellent one we have in Clonmel however for the sake of it we have a small raised bed where Snezana grows garlic and I plant a few herbs such as thyme , lemon grass , chives and rocket .
Rocket would be my favourite salad and I bought a pot of it for the first time two years ago which grew really well but to my surprise (as I thought rocket was an annual) it kept growing throughout that winter and even got better when cut back … this week in Clonmel Garden Centre I discovered the reason … there is a PERRENIAL version of rocket and I have now planted it in a pot by the front door … herbs should be planted close to the house for ease of access and I am delighted with my new rocket discovery !
Old colleagues visit the Garden May 2025
Tom Walsh and Austin Rowan , old Customs and Excise colleagues came to visit in May … Tom from my days in Waterford Port in the early 1970’s and Austin from Rosslare Harbour days in the mid 1980’s . Both went on to greater things in their careers , Tom leaving the Revenue Commissioners to become a lawyer and writing The Customs Code of the European Union which has become the standard book on Customs Law , The Customs Code of the European Unionand being awarded a Ph’D while Austin transferred to the EU in Brussels where he headed up the tobacco investigation division with huge success and became the EU’s acknowledged expert on world wide cigarette smuggling .
We have always kept in touch over the years and our catch up travelled down many lanes of memories recalling brilliant colleagues , rogues and scoundrels !
New arrivals to the Garden in May 2025
We are lucky enough to have a family of water hens that live in the garden along the stream and each year we catch glimpses of their newly hatched chicks swimming in little flotillas in May / June .
Colour in the Garden May 2025
The delightful months of June , July , August and September stretch out ahead of us , enjoy !
Leave a Reply