in bloom: kousas, peonies, honeysuckles, a rose

Climbing roses are the perfect plants to add height to a garden. The choice is huge, so take time to find the right climbing plant for you and your garden.

Can you tell what this frosted yellow flower is that is starting to show colour and now getting into full scented blossom? It still thinks it is 2015 and our mild wet weather has contributed to a range of ongoing flowers.

This selection of top ten Roses to grow as cut flowers has been chosen for their scent and the length of the vase life. If Roses are picked as the buds are breaking they will last at least a week and if they are picked fully open it will be several days.

2018 has been a very good year for Primroses and Primula. The cool, wet spring and occasional bursts of sunshine have played their part.

You may wonder how roses flower on 1st April when your favourite flower is just at its summer best

It is mid July and the Roses have performed very well with an abundance of flower, scent and leaf growth. With the June flush over here are some quick tips to boost your Roses for the rest of the season.

A rose is not a rose when it is a Lenten or Christmas rose!

When I first started exploring roses, I thought myself to be pretty educated once I knew the difference between a David Austin and a Knock Out. And then I discovered a whole new world of

When I have garden tours, everyone asks what “that silvery-green tree by the vegetable garden” is—even many experts—because you don’t usually see it looking like a tree.And even though I know somebody changed its name, at first I answer, “Salix rosmarinifolia…I mean…” then stop myself, and get it right.The reason you won’t see this looking like a 15-foot-tall, 20-foot wide small tree is that as with other “shrubby” willows, regular rejuvenation pruning is usually practiced.“Will get leggy unless cut back hard periodically” is the kind of advice you’ll find in refer

Just to be clear: I love herbaceous peonies, or P. lactiflora, the blowsy, fragrant lovelies of most late-spring gardens. But I don’t grow them in my mixed borders; I relegate them to a cutting area, where I have enough for many, many vases-full (but not even one-twentieth of the number Martha has!). I might have 25 plants, all of them from our old friends the Klehms in Illinois, and they’ll bloom in another couple of weeks. But what I am loving at the moment in the garden (not the vase) are peonies the way nature made them.Paeonia mlokosewitschii, more easily referred to as Molly the Witch, is a beautiful pale yellow, and enjoys a spot in a shady, woodland garden. My very big, old plant of nearly a decade ago, purchased at an auction at a bot

WHEN I CALLED Rose Marie Nichols McGee after much more than a decade, it was like we’d just hung up moments before. “Do you still grow Phlomis?” she asked without missing a beat, referring to a mint relative I’d loved early on in my garden’s life, a former Nichols Garden Nursery purchase I’d almost forgotten (since I’d eventually killed it, oops). That’s OK, she said; it got tricky here, too. The nursery, with more than 60 years selling herbs and much more—one of the first places I ever shopped as a gardener—is Rose Marie and her husband, Keane’s, family business (that’s them above), and they’ve seen lots of plants come, and go, and come around again. With a gift-certificate giveaway and an herb-growing Q&A, meet an old friend and some great new and old plants as well–and learn tricks for growing them.

WHAT WE CALL STONE FRUITS all grow on trees in the genus Prunus, and have a hard, stony pit inside them (their seed), with fleshy fruit around it—unlike so-called pome fruits (see below).Apricots, cherries, nectarines, plums (and therefore prunes), and some interspecies hybrids of the above, like plumcots and pluots, are all stone fruits. So are peaches (like the ones in the 1940 harvesting photo by Lee Russell, in the Library of Congress archive, top, or just above in the print from Boston Public Library’s).And then there’s the trick-question one, the stone fruit you think of as a nut. What’s that?Almond, of course: Prunus dulcis.What’s a Pome Fruit?I KNOW, IT’S STONE FRUIT WEEK, but hey,