Find out what the propagation and garden teams have been up to this week.
Weekly catch up with garden & propagation
POSTED 19th June 2025
Propagation Team
It’s feeling ‘HOT HOT HOT’ in the growing department this week.
With the sun shining bright, the team has been working tirelessly to ensure all our plants are thriving in this glorious summer weather.
Sol and Miya have been tackling the stockbeds, keeping weeds under control and making room for new plantings. Our stockbeds are currently undergoing some exciting changes, so keep an eye out for updates throughout the year!
Tina, Hollie and Kirsten have been hard at work with plant maintenance, cutting back, weeding, and keeping a close eye out for pests and diseases. This daily routine at Beth’s helps us maintain the highest standards for our plants.
We’re also excited to welcome Kathy back from her holiday! She’s joined forces with Lelia to pot up our beautiful cuttings and seedlings. Did you know, every single one of our plants is potted by hand? That’s over 1,000 plants a day, each carefully selected for the next stage in its journey.
Meanwhile, Mel, Hannah and Annie have been busy in the tunnels, cutting back, checking root systems and preparing plenty of lovely plants for sale, including Tricyrtis ‘Empress’, Verbena bonariensis ‘Lollipop’, and Knautia macedonica.
In the picking and packing department, Callum, Pete, Ben and Angela have been making sure your orders are dispatched promptly and arrive healthy and happy.
Lastly, we had intern Benjamin join us for a day in propagation, lending a hand to Debbie and Emily with cuttings, seed cleaning and pricking out seedlings.
With everything coming into bloom, a sea of colour is spreading across the stand-off and nursery areas. If you’re nearby, why not pop in and see the display for yourself? It’s well worth the visit!
Garden Team
With temperatures soaring, we try to plan our workdays so that, where possible, we can finish certain tasks or areas before it gets too hot, seeking out shade later in the day.
As philadelphus, deutzia, weigela, kolkwitzia, physocarpus and spiraea finish their early summer parade of blossom, we remove their old, flowered stems to encourage new strong, healthy shoots which will give us a wonderful display next year. Pruning is also done to maintain the shrubs’ size, shape and to reinvigorate the plants. Sybille and Benjamin tackled a large tree heather, Erica arborea, working together to reduce its height and width, also thinning its centre slightly to open it up, allowing more light to penetrate and encouraging new growth. Tree heathers often require very little pruning but can tolerate a hard cut back if they’ve become straggly.
Our Visitors Centre’s blackboard and plant ID - showing people what to look out for in the gardens - is changed on a weekly basis. It’s our intern Benjamin’s last week with us – it’s been great having him here. This week he spent a second day with the propagation team, working with Debbie doing cuttings.
We collected a couple of soil samples from the new land we’re leasing adjacent to the gardens, to better understand the types and quantities of bacteria, fungi and other microbes present. Images and short videos are kept and can be analysed again later, with expert help.
We’ve continued to cut back melica and trimmed a large swathe of vinca before the cyclamen leaves beneath emerge. Removing the seedheads of Arum italicum subsp. italicum ‘Marmoratum’ is an ongoing task. We’ve also been pulling out Smyrnium perfoliatum, leaving only a few to seed. Perfoliate alexanders are classed as invasive, yet have never presented a problem in our garden, but we take measures to control them and ensure they don’t spread into the wild.
It’s getting a bit late in the season for Chelsea chopping but it’s been an incredibly busy spring, both for us and Debbie, who does all the cuttings for the nursery and deals with the material as we chop e.g. aster, symphyotrichum and phlox. Fortunately we tend to have long mild autumns so the plants will have enough time to grow and bloom before the cold weather sets in.
One of the key plants in our Gravel Garden is Stipa tenuissima. Having received a hard cut back in early spring, we’re now rewarded with fresh, feathery plumes that sway in the breeze. A perfect companion to seaholly and Catananche caerulea. In the next week or so Genista aetnensis, the Mount Etna broom, will look spectacular covered in bright yellow pea-like blossom, filling the air with their sweet scent.
COMMENTS