gardening tips Archives

3 flowers for your spring garden

Hooray! We’ve turned the cold-weather corner! We’re standing in the spring sunshine! Can you feel your heart skip a beat – in a good way? Yup – it’s that time of year when the garden magic happens, and here are 3 flowers for your spring garden…

1. The magician’s bouquet: first, walk into your nearest garden centre where you’ll spot some seriously good-looking Hydrangeas called Tuxedo®. There they’ll be, sitting in their pots picture-perfect, ready to be gift wrapped and carried out the door like a bunch of florist’s flowers. You could give them to someone, but this time, treat yourself instead. Take your Tuxedo hydrangea home and pop that glorious living bouquet smack in the middle of the coffee table, or on your desk, or beside the front door and enjoy it. Then, to make the garden magic happen, a few weeks on, take Tuxedo hydrangea outside and plant it into a large container or out into the garden itself. Then stand back because it will quickly grow into a glorious, black foliaged three-foot-high bush which will give you flowers for many years to come. Your potted bouquet just transformed itself into a proper permanent garden shrub. Garden magic.

2. A shade shifter: there’s a rose called Flower Carpet® Amber. It’s pretty special even before we start talking about its magic secret, because it grows fast, stays green (USDA zones 5-10) and flowers from spring through to autumn. But what makes Amber really special is the way it looks like it’s more than one rose. To explain, just say you went out and planted Amber. After it had spent some time settling in and establishing itself, it would come into flower. And being a Flower Carpet rose, it would be covered in flowers. First the buds would swell – hundreds of them – and they’d be a lovely deep orange. These would open progressively into sherbet-shades of orange-yellow blooms. And then these flowers would settle into shades of soft pink and peach. So at any one time, the one rose bush looks like there are at least two very colour-complimentary roses growing together, one orange and one pink. Garden magic.

3. Bare earth to wow: this is the classic spring surprise moment. It’s a wonderful thing to do with children who will probably love gardens from that point on (if they don’t already). Get some bulbs – daffodils, narcissus, freesias, tulips, whatever – and gather together a container and some potting mix. Shake in the potting mix to about half way up the side of the container, and pat it down. Then have your young assistants place the bulbs the right way up across the entire surface of the ‘soil’ (use the internet to help you work this out, or if in doubt, lay the bulbs on their sides). Cover everything gently with more potting mix and again, pat it down. Then keep your pot damp (but not soggy – watch out for overenthusiastic young waterers) and have everyone keep a look out for those first, miraculous spikes of green. It only gets better as colour and fragrance follow. Garden magic.

Garden magic — If you plant your bulbs tightly together you’ll not only get a great display like these tulips, but the flowers and foliage will help to support each other.

3 essentials for garden design

There’s a simple secret behind the great gardens – they hook us in via our senses. If you think your garden is a bit ho hum, here are 3 essentials for garden design that will transform your garden into a joyful space full of fragrance, movement and colour.

1. Perfume: Even blindfolded, you should be able to tell that you’re in a garden. You should be able to enjoy the plants growing around you via deep, delicious breaths. Take a few good lungs-full and if you can’t detect a perfumed breeze, better head off to the garden centre. To make your life easier, spend ten minutes doing some internet research to put a list together of perfumed plants like lilac, roses or viburnum. Can’t be bothered doing the research? Then just ask for the queen of all fragrant plants, Daphne Perfume Princess™. Daphne is a small evergreen shrub that covers itself in waxy super-fragrant flowers in late winter and early spring. Daphne Perfume Princess is the extraordinarily well-bred version of a daphne, one that every garden should include because she’s luscious, lovely and easy to grow. Oh, and you’ll be completely astonished at the heady perfume she’ll toss out onto the breezes.

Nothing makes as big an impact as walking through a fragrant garden and a plant like Daphne Perfume Princess™ will completely transform a walk down even the most ordinary garden path.

2. Movement: Each time you look out the window at your garden, does everything look like a pic rather than a video? Nothing’s moving? Even when there’s been a wind warning? There are a lot of gardens like this simply because static landscapes are usually low maintenance if also pretty dull. So if you have a space filled with topiary, yuccas and succulents, here’s how to make that cardboard cut-out landscape dance. Plant strappy plants. Grasses, cordylines, agapanthus. Whatever looks good to you is fine as long as it’s flexible enough to wave around in the breeze. Dot them through your landscape and when you next look out the window, you’ll be looking at a garden that’s come to life.

3.Colour: So many gardens are filled with a predictable set of green plants as part of a plan to be safe and inoffensive. Which is fine until you start to feel starved of colour. This is the easiest garden fix of all. Drive to the garden centre and fill your car with whatever takes your fancy. Seedlings will give you instant colour even if they only last a season: pansies, poppies, sunflowers, marigolds and sweet peas. Flowering shrubs will hang in there for the longer term: roses, camellias, bottlebrushes, hibiscus. Or use foliage colour rather than flowers: coleus, bromeliads, cannas (Tropicanna® cannas are the best). Plant your new bright plant friends in wherever there’s room and the original green framework will help bring the look (and the various colours) together.

Canna Tropicanna®, with its bright, multi-coloured foliage, is sure to add colour to your garden.

Garden centre tips

If walking into a garden centre overwhelms you, this is what’s going on and here’s how to sort it, with a few garden centre tips. To start with, there are a lot of plants to choose from. Then it’s about the fact that plants are living things and no-one wants a fail (aka dead plants). And finally it’s about wanting to choose plants that will look good. So, yes, your buttons get pushed, but here’s how to deal with it…

1. Break it down: When we walk into a garden centre we’re faced with a sea of plants. With too much on offer, where do we start? The trick is to take a deep breath and remember everything is organised to make everyone’s life easier. All the trees will be together, the shrubs, the pond plants, indoor plants, the seedlings. So find your area of interest and don’t worry about the rest. Now for the next step.

2. Good looks: To stop yourself taking home a boring plant, or worse, something that’s just ugly, take a good look at the selection on offer. A really good look with a bit of internet cross checking via your phone. For example, say you’re after something like a coprosma to plant into a container beside your front door, you could pick up a standard green version, something old-school which is ok but tends to grow into a rangy mess over time. Or you could spot the Pacific™ Coprosmas that have two-toned really gorgeous foliage and a great growth habit. Now to step three…

If you take the time to look, you can find beautiful options in amongst the sea of plants on offer at a garden centre. Why settle on the basic green of Coprosma repens (left) when you could have Coprosma Pacific™ Sunrise (right) instead.

3. Take only the strong with you: Be sensible and leave the delicate fussy plants to the experts or the nurturers. Your mantra should be survival of the fittest, so whip out your phone again and do a bit more online checking to see if the plant you’re considering will happily thrive with minimum care. For example, a quick search with ‘Pacific Coprosmas’ brings up phrases like ‘super-low-maintenance’ and the fact that they can be planted ‘in positions with high wind or salt spray’, both signs that these plants are not only lovely to look at, but tough too.

Gorgeous and tough enough to look this good on a hot, dry front stoop: Coprosma Pacific™ Sunrise at left and Pacific™ Sunset at the right. Bred in the United Kingdom, these coprosmas are compact in height, hold their shape well, and keep their colour year round with their pink or red highlights glowing brighter in the colder months.

How to use bold foliage

Bold coloured foliage in a garden can be tricky to get right. But you’ll get wow results using these three little bold foliage tips to pack a punch. Be warned: if you’re a fan of pastel hues and safe mid-greens, what follows may surprise you…

1. Shake it up but keep it linear: in other words, grab a stack of plants with coloured leaves but make sure they are all strappy plants. Think cordylines such as Festival™ Burgundy (also known as Red Fountain™ in the southern hemisphere) and Black Knight. Or lomandra Lime Tuff and dianella Cassa Blue. In a perfect world you’d be starting from scratch with a completely empty garden bed that you could fill with a mix of these. Whether you plant them randomly to create a patchwork effect, or in blocks of colour, in a few short weeks the results will look stunning.

Here, tones of gold dominate in a strappy-only-planting scheme: fine lomandra with broader leafed phormium.

2. A colour punch: how punchy obviously depends on your personal taste but start with something like the burgundy hues of a hero plant as an anchor-point, then pick a flowering favourite to plant smack up against it. Great colour combos to consider are: red and white (cercis Forest Pansy and white Flower Carpet® roses), deep burgundy and silver (Burgundy Spire™ cordylines and silver birches), or any burgundy foliaged plant against an acid pop of yellow. This type of treatment is perfect near an entrance where planting tends to get a lot of attention. Consider painting your front door to pull the whole look together.

3. A pop feature: if you’d like to dip a toe into bold plantings, but don’t really want to rip out part of your existing garden as an experiment, this pop option is perfect. You simply apply some of the above theory but plant it into a large container or garden urn. Create something startling, then when you position it in the garden, it will hold its own against your existing plantings. Your newly planted container is the star so think about elevating it on a plinth, column, or a handy garden retaining wall.

Designing your garden with striped foliage

On the catwalk, designer Kenneth Ize uses the power of stripes and colour…

At last! Stripes are in – and that’s everywhere you look, from the catwalk to wallpaper, to the garden centre. Which is brilliant news, because stripes are fun. Stripes are easy to work with and get right. And stripes look terrific. So let’s cut to the chase and talk about how to go about designing your garden with striped foliage.

Technically, plants with foliage that’s striped are known as variegated plants. It’s useful to know this because it makes it easier to chase things down online. And if you ever see a plain-leafed plant you like at your nursery, you can ask the staff if it comes in a variegated form. (For example, there are nice every-day green leafed cannas and then there’s the astonishing in-your-face-rainbow-bright-striped Canna Tropicanna®). There are even special interest groups for variegated plants if you want to delve deeper into the world of striped multi-toned foliage.

designing your garden with striped foliage — Canna Tropicanna® in all its stripy, back-lit glory.

When you do start looking at fancy foliage plants (and you will), it won’t be long before you come across a warning: something along the lines of, “a little goes a long way”. This is a conservative take on things, a belief that foliage that contains more than one colour should be used as a freakish highlight amongst a more traditional landscape planting. If you agree, then follow this advice. Or you could be bold and gather together as many variegated plants as you like and plant them all together – in the garden or in a mega-sized container.

Honestly, having just one heroic stripy plant is also an ok move, just make sure that its supporting plants don’t steal the limelight. To make everything look terrific, the trick is to pick out the toning colours or shades and find plants in these shades to surround your hero.

And now, two practical housekeeping tips:

Often stripes and other variegation is brightest when the light levels are ideal for the plant. So do your homework, find out what light levels your plant really enjoys, then grow that plant in its happy spot.
Also, variegation is not often passed on from parent plant to child via seed, so if you’re keen to propagate more of your lovely stripy plants for yourself or friends, take cuttings.