Garden plants

We’ve had a lovely musical weekend away with the Cobweb Orchestra in Sedbergh, a school village which is overlooked by the Howgill fells in North Yorkshire, and have come home tired but very happy!   While there quite a few of my friends commented on the blog and were very encouraging for me to keep at it…

Before we went away, I uploaded a lot of pictures of plants that have grown in our garden and some of them are even still there….  Once upon a time when I worked at Bradley Gardens in Wylam I learnt all the latin names for my plants.  Unfortunately, over the last few years, I have forgotten them.  So, if anyone sees a plant that I haven’t labelled,  and they know what it is, please do let me know.

Here is the link:

https://pygardens.co.uk/plants-in-the-garden/

Today is lovely and sunny although there appears to be quite a breeze in the garden.  I am going to send my son John out to take some photos.  He is very good with a camera, so I am hoping to get some good shots to post.

Mark is back at work after the Easter holidays, so gardening will be slowing down for a while, although Mark is keen to get out for an hour each day when he comes home.   He still has some cutting back to do in the left hand bed and we need to think about our next make-over under the silver birch.  We have Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’ growing there, but have discovered it is really quite rampant once established.  It has taken over quite a large area.  I’d like to keep some of it and plant some into a different area, and see how it does there.  So, we will have some fun shopping in the Tyne Valley Garden Centre, which is just a couple of miles from our home.  We need to buy some shrub fertilizer as well……

I need some inspiration as to what low growing shrubs we can plant.  Any suggestions?  The bed is south facing, sloping down from the East to West  and  is dry – as it is under the mature Silver Birch.  The existing plants in the bed seem to grow well, so I am confident that we can establish some new plants successfully.  We will mulch with wood chippings, which seem to have worked well in the other overhauled bed.

We also need to tackle all our patio pots as well.  These are a mixture of plants bought especially for the pots (ie spring flowering rockery plants) or plants and shrubs that have been taken out of the beds – for example, we have an azalea which had been planted in the lower bed on the right, but the colour clashed with the new plants.  So I need to decide where to relocate that.  On the other hand, maybe I should just keep it potted, but get a nice pottery pot, rather than the plastic green pot it is in at the moment!

I will talk about my bamboos and grasses another time, but they are, in my opinion, wonderful plants.

I also love herbs and keep trying lavenders – some very successfully, others less so.  I try to prevent them becoming leggy, by careful pruning, but after a few years they are mostly past their best.  However, I have a successful box of small lavender which we cut like a small hedge and that flowers well and has been in situ for a fair while.  All my Rosemary plants died a couple of winters ago, which was very sad.  Not as sad as when the Ceanothus went though.  I think I will plant a Ceanothus in my new bed……

I have a shelf full of gardening books, and I think it is time to take another look at them.   I could just research on the internet, but I do have some lovely books just waiting to be opened up once more……

Here is the link to the plant pictures once more

https://pygardens.co.uk/plants-in-the-garden/