Weekly catch up with garden & propagation

This Week in Propagation with Growing Manager Annie-Rose

Mel, Rob and I started the week by getting our waterproofs on, bringing out the pressure washers and giving the nursery a well-needed spring clean.

While we were making sure everything was sparkling, Debbie was busy foraging through the tunnels, collecting cuttings from the new growth that’s beginning to appear on the plants in the growing-on area.

We’ve also been joined this week by intern Connie, who has spent time with Emily and Debbie learning all things propagation. It’s been great having her as part of the team.

Some of the team also went out with Sean, who led a plant identification walk around the garden, focusing on bulbs and sharing his knowledge of the many varieties currently emerging. Meanwhile, Kathy and Miya have been focusing on potting up the cistus, which we hope will be ready for sale over the coming months. My personal favourite is Cistus populifolius. It forms a dense bush of very attractive foliage, with pointed, fresh-green aromatic leaves that have deeply ruffled edges. In spring, each shoot tip carries a handsome cluster of large round buds enclosed in red sepals, almost as attractive as the chalk-white flowers that open from late spring into summer. A real favourite with bees.

Angela has been keeping our online department ticking over, packing some of our March pre-orders, which will be arriving with you over the coming weeks. Hopefully we’ll be lucky and the sun will keep shining, and all the plants we love and care for will be enjoying the sunshine just as much as we are.

Annie-Rose Smith

This week in the Garden with Cathy.

After what has felt like a long grey and wet winter the sun finally arrived this week along with warmth and it felt like spring. Gardening can feel hard in the cold and grey when summer feels long gone and plants are dormant. Now the growing season has begun in earnest, every day there are new arrivals pushing out of the soil and we are full of excitement for the year ahead. It was great to have our first intern of the year Jana Feigl working alongside us in the sunshine.

The week began with pruning the lonicera and akebia on the shop front, these had become too large for the space and were growing out and up too far. We took them back to a framework on the wall to give the beds below more space.

We have moved into the Reservoir Garden to cut back and weed the central area. We weed and edit self-seeders to start with, this leaves a framework of perennials to come up this season. The next step is to chop and drop the old perennial growth, this acts as a mulch on the soil to break down over time improving the structure while protecting the soil surface. Some material we break up by hand if it’s brittle, some we use snips and some is sheared into small pieces. This has a tapestry effect below the new lush green growth of emerging perennials and bulbs.

Always learning as a team we had an ident with Head of Horticulture Steve looking at narcissus. There is so much variety and some are harder to tell apart than others, it was great to see them side by side and spot new ones we had planted in the Autumn. Favourites included Narcissus cyclaminius and Narcissus rupicola, both of which are tiny.