Category Archives: Gardens

April’s cold weather shows its time to fill our gardens with hardier plants, say experts

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Top gardeners advise use of tougher varieties that can cope with extremes of heat and cold as conditions disappoint growers

Gardeners are being urged to grow plants that can cope with extreme heat and cold after the Royal Horticultural Society was bombarded with letters from members asking why species they had cultivated successfully for years were now dying.

“It seems to be because of the temperature fluctuations,” said Nikki Barker, a senior horticultural adviser at the RHS. “We’ve gone from severe drought with an initially very mild autumn that turned cold. It’s the combination of weather patterns rather than one single event. And plants find it hard to deal with that fluctuation.”

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‘No Mow May’: UK gardeners urged to let wildflowers and grass grow

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Public asked to put away lawnmowers next month to deliver big gains for nature and the climate

A top 10 of the most common plants in British lawns has been revealed as conservationists urge gardeners to let their grass grow for the month of May.

Scientists at the charity Plantlife are asking the public to look out for wildflowers and other plants in their lawns as they put their lawnmowers away for a campaign labelled “No Mow May”.

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Have you seen this bug? Scientists call on Britain’s gardeners to track elusive aphid

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The elusive giant willow aphid goes into hiding in spring. Now the Royal Horticultural Society wants volunteers to help find out why

Gardeners have been urged by scientists to help find a mysterious bug which disappears in spring and reappears at the end of summer.

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is asking people to send in sightings of the giant willow aphid (Tuberolachnus salignus) so that they can find out where it goes and how it interacts with garden plants.

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Smells like dead rats: crowds flock to catch a whiff of blooming corpse flower in Adelaide

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Titan arum emits a foul smell to lure pollinators, but at the botanic gardens it attracts thousands of visitors to witness the rare flowering

A corpse flower, which emits a stench that can travel for kilometres to lure flesh flies, sweat bees and carrion beetles, has just bloomed in the Adelaide Botanic gardens.

It only blooms once every few years, and only for about 48 hours, to attract insects that have already wallowed in the pollen of another corpse flower.

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Britain’s grasslands and dormice under threat from mild autumn

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October’s summery temperatures are ‘confusing’ plants and throwing off fragile ecosystems

Britain’s rare chalk grasslands and dormice are under threat from the mild weather this autumn, and some plants are “confused” and have flowered multiple times, experts have said.

This October, the UK has experienced temperatures more normal for spring or summer, with highs of 19.5C recorded this week, and more warm weather forecast for coming days.

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England’s gardeners to be banned from using peat-based compost

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Sale of peat-based compost for use on private gardens and allotments to be outlawed within 18 months

Sales of peat for use on private gardens and allotments will be banned in England from 2024, the government has announced.

Environmental campaigners have long called for stricter laws to restore peatlands.

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Build an ark and ditch the pots: how to save your garden in a drought

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As official drought is declared in parts of England, here are some measures to preserve and future-proof gardens

With British gardens facing record temperatures, drought and hosepipe bans, it’s time for emergency measures. It’s particularly important because during drought, additional mains water is drawn from wild sources, affecting struggling wildlife. Here are some of the things you can do.

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National Trust tells of bats in distress and water features drying up in heat

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Charity says extreme conditions a ‘watershed moment’ and it is planning for long-term hot weather

The National Trust has reported significant effects across its estate from the recent extreme heat including bats in distress, heather struggling to flower and historic water features drying up.

At Wallington in Northumberland, bats were found disoriented and dehydrated in the daylight during the hottest days this summer, while in Cambridgeshire, a waterwheel that powers a flour mill has had to stop turning due to low river levels.

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Blooming Essex garden points to future of horticulture in a heating UK

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RHS Hyde Hall has made a virtue of its position in the driest county in England by embracing adaptable plants

It has not been artificially watered for 22 years, yet this garden, on an exposed slope in Essex, the driest county in the UK, is bursting with bloom.

A dry bed at the Royal Horticultural Society Hyde Hall dominated by cool greys and pale greens, and full of Mediterranean, Australian and African shrubs and flowers, could this be the future British garden?

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‘Park in sky’ to open in former Grade II-listed Manchester viaduct

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National Trust garden at Castlefield Viaduct is inspired by New York public park and features 3,000 plant species

A “park in the sky” at a former viaduct in Manchester is to open at the end of the month, the National Trust has announced.

Situated along the Grade II-listed Castlefield Viaduct, the 330-metre temporary park is inspired by New York’s High Line public park, and features 3,000 plant species in gardens created by architects and community groups.

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RHS garden with burnt-out cottage ‘shows Ukraine’s spirit cannot be erased’

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Victoria and Oleksiy Manoylo, who were in Milan when Russia invaded, have poured their trauma into garden

A burnt-out cottage decorated with embroidered cloths and surrounded by swaying barley, designed by a Ukrainian couple unable to return to their war-ravaged village, is set to be one of the unexpected highlights of the RHS’s largest flower show.

Victoria and Oleksiy Manoylo, landscape designers who were at a garden festival in Milan, Italy, when Russian troops invaded their village near Bucha and destroyed their home, have poured their trauma and defiance into the garden, which will feature at the RHS Hampton Court Palace garden festival next month.

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The magic of mushrooms: how they connect the plant world

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After years in the wilderness, fungi are finally getting the attention they deserve from gardeners, scientists, designers and doctors

Joe Perkins, like most gardeners, has typically been more animated by what’s going on above the ground than below it. The quality of the soil was important, no question, but what was really going on down there felt mysterious and impenetrable. As for fungi, it usually meant one thing in a garden, and that wasn’t good news.

“On a domestic level, our relationship and understanding of fungi in the past has very much been that it’s something about decay, it’s about disease, and it’s something that we don’t particularly want in our gardens,” says Perkins, a 45-year-old landscape architect based in Sussex, who won three awards at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2019. “It’s fair to say that, as gardeners, we’ve not always fully understood – and I still don’t – the importance of these systems.”

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Muscle strengthening lowers risk of death from all causes, study shows

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Half an hour a week of activities such as gardening, sit-ups or yoga could help reduce the risk of dying from any cause by a fifth

Half an hour of muscle strengthening activity such as lifting weights, push-ups or heavy gardening each week could help reduce the risk of dying from any cause by as much as a fifth, according to a new global analysis of studies conducted over three decades.

Health guidelines recommend muscle strengthening activities, primarily because of the benefits for musculoskeletal health. Previous research has indicated a link to a lower risk of death, but until now experts did not know what the optimal “dose” might be.

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Roots to knowledge: the best gardeners to follow on social media

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There is a wealth of exciting growers, collectives and designers whose posts aim to broaden know-how and help the would-be green-fingered to cultivate their passions

Alessandro Vitale has become an Instagram and TikTok guru for urban gardeners growing their own food. The Italian tattoo studio manager films his experiments in vertical farming and organic gardening for fun- and information-packed posts. If you’re wondering about the username, it’s a reference to his chilli obsession – he has seeds for more than 600 varieties.

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Taming the Garden review – fascinating study of a billionaire’s destructive folly

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Salomé Jashi’s film follows the journey of hundreds of mature trees as they are uprooted across Georgia to populate a rich man’s garden

Like a sad, greedy king in some fairytale or parable, the Georgian billionaire and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili set out, six years ago, to buy and uproot hundreds of magnificent mature trees and transport them at colossal expense and difficulty across Georgia to be transplanted in his own huge private garden. It sometimes involves taking a tree by water, along the Black Sea coast – a truly surreal image.

Salomé Jashi’s fascinating and deadpan film shows, in a series of tableau-type shots, the effect that these purchases are having up and down the land. Local workers squabble among themselves at the dangerous, strenuous, but nonetheless lucrative job of digging them up. The landowners and communities brood on the sizeable sums of money they are getting paid and Ivanishvili’s promises that roads will also be built. But at the moment of truth, they are desolate when the Faustian bargain must be settled and the huge, ugly haulage trucks come to take their trees away in giant “pots” of earth, as if part of their natural soul is being confiscated. (Surely at least some of these trees will have died en route, although this is not revealed.)

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New rose named after one of UK’s first documented black gardeners

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John Ystumllyn was abducted from west Africa in 1746 and taken to Gwynedd, north Wales

One of Britain’s first known black gardeners has been honoured with a rose named after him in celebration of his life.

John Ystumllyn, whose original name is unknown, was abducted as an eight-year-old boy in west Africa around 1746 and taken to Gwynedd, north Wales. There he became a servant in the household of the Wynn family of Ystumllyn, whose estate he was named after, and learned horticulture in the gardens.

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A garden at Ground Zero: what I learned growing an oasis in the shadow of 9/11

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Soon after 9/11, I moved into an old building by Ground Zero. First step? Plant an unlikely patch of green

If you listen, I mean really listen, you will hear your garden speaking to you. Mine, which sits on a 10th-floor Manhattan terrace, a stone’s throw from where the World Trade Center stood, first spoke to me on a crisp September morning 20 years ago. I had jury duty that day and decided to walk the two miles south from my home in Greenwich Village down to the courthouse in the financial district.

But when I turned south on to 6th Avenue, I looked up to see see an orange hole flaming at the centre of the tower ahead of me. A woman nearby fell to the pavement, screaming something about a plane. It didn’t seem like a good day to go downtown; yet something compelled me to continue south. When I arrived at a gas station on Canal Street, a boom sounded and a puff of smoke issued from just behind the tower. “What was that?” I asked a taxi driver, filling his tank nearby. “Well, see those two buildings are connected with pipes,” he said with the unquestionable authority endemic to New York cabbies. “When you get a fire in one it spreads and you get a fire in the other.” Makes sense, I thought, and pushed southwards.

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Get off my lettuce! Three quick ways to deter snails without poison

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Copper, coffee and beer come together in a cumulative effort to keep pests out of your patch

Anyone who has ever had a tree get in the way of a breathtaking view or pending development approval will know the consequence of a copper coin – come on, we’re all aware of this nasty poisoning tactic! But did you know that copper can be used to kill other stuff too, like pesky snails and slugs?

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