How resilient is your garden?

MARK BOURDILLON / Netflix

On the hunt for the ultimate garden centre or service in the UK? It's not just about jazzing up your garden – it's all about crafting your very own green paradise! 

If you look up garden ruins or follies in the dictionary, you will be told that they are ‘costly ornamental buildings with no practical purpose.’

When not in flower, it’s fair to say dahlia plants rarely command a second glance. In fact, to the uninitiated, they could be easily mistaken for potatoes, not that surprising when you consider that these two fast-growing, frost-tender tuberous species share a surprising amount of common ground regarding their geographical range in the wild and their fondness for a certain set of growing conditions that includes a rich, moist but free-draining soil in full sun or light shade. But the comparison ends there. Unlike potatoes, which are valued solely as a tasty food crop, dahlias are generally prized for the otherworldly beauty of their often large and vividly colourful flowers.

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For my Masters dissertation last year I did some research into gardeners who choose to grow unusual edible crops. I settled on two species to investigate, achocha and oca. In the past I’ve written about how to grow achocha – it’s a nice, easy plant and in a temperate climate you should have no problems getting a significant yield. You may have more of a problem dealing with the glut….

Mrs Green has set herself a new challenge this spring – she’s aiming to grow her own luffa (or loofah) to use as zero waste pan scrubbers. Never one to shy away from new plant experiences, I’m going to join her!

Header image: <a href=«https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pink-water-lily-lake-goldfish-142067443?src=» http:>NagyDodo/Shutterstock

I met the Duke of Edinburgh a few years ago. Shame I was stuck in front of a computer at the time, and not somewhere more exciting like the Chelsea Flower Show. Meeting human royalty might be a rare occurrence for most people, but you can surround yourself with royal plants and get that regal feeling every time you step into the garden. To illustrate my point, let me share with you an old joke….

When I woke up yesterday morning, it was misty. We’re approaching the middle of October, which is the usual time for the first frosts of autumn in my part of the UK. People in different areas are already reporting the arrival of the frosts on Twitter. This means it’s time for me to pop out into the garden and bring in my lemon tree (which I grew from a pip, several years ago). It has been enjoying the summer weather in the garden, but it’s only really hardy down to -10°C. I’ve nearly lost it a couple of times, and it has died right back to nothing, but somehow it always manages to come back.

Grafting is a time-honoured technique for growing fruit trees – it allows gardeners and farmers to choose both the variety of fruit they want to grow, and the rootstock they want to grow it on. You can even graft more than one variety of fruit onto one rootstock, giving you a ‘family’ tree that saves space and spreads the harvest time, or gives you both ‘cookers’ and ‘eaters’ from one tree. Grafting vegetables, on the other hand, is something relatively new that has burst onto the home gardening scene in the last few years. Last year T&M gave us the opportunity to grow the TomTato, a tomato plant grafted onto potato roots that grows both tomatoes and potatoes – catchily nicknamed the Ketchup ‘n’ fries plant. This year they have added a new dual-purpose plant to their range: the Egg & Chips plant grows both aubergines (AKA eggplant) and potatoes.

There can’t be a more iconic symbol of Halloween than a witch riding a broomstick. In olden times it wouldn’t have been a problem to wander out into the woodland and cut a stout pole and then find sticks to make the sweeping end, and then you’d have yourself a fine broom, or besom. I suspect most of them were used for more mundane purposes – they are jolly useful things to have to hand.