Where do hedgehogs live?
24.11.2023 - 08:39 / finegardening.com / GPOD Contributor
We’re off to New Zealand today to visit Lynne Leslie’s garden. We’ve visited before (Lynne’s Garden in New Zealand), and it is always fun to see what she is growing.
Here are photos taken in late spring in my small-town garden in Wellington, New Zealand. I love perennials, vegetables, and shrubs, and I plant them close together to keep weeding to a minimum.
Every year I plant snapdragons (Antirrhinum, Zones 8–11 or as cool-season annuals) and stake them as they grow to protect them from the strong winds we get here on the hill. They flower from winter through to summer, when rust attacks them. I then replace them with other seasonal plants.
Planting evergreen plants under trees gives interest all year, and I tuck in colorful annuals depending on the season. Cinerarias (Pericallis × hybrida, Zones 9–11 or as annual) self-sow, along with primula, then the roses, hydrangea, dianthus, and other perennials come into their own for summer.
The roadside is a riot of easy-care color for dog walkers and motorists to enjoy: roses, gazania, dianthus, euphorbia, daisies, wallflowers, iris, etc.—all sun lovers.
I do love clematis and grow many varieties and colors through roses and shrubs, up metal frames and anywhere else I can fit one in. This is our New Zealand native, Clematis paniculata (Zones 4–8).
Peonies (Paeonia species and hybrids, Zones 4–8) are another favorite, but due to the fact that our winters in Wellington do not get cold enough for them to flourish, I help them along with ice cubes and potassium during winter. This lemon one is the first to flower and has huge blooms.
Cape primroses (Streptocarpus, Zones 10–11 or as an annual or houseplant) do very well outside and also in pots in the gazebo. I watch them
Where do hedgehogs live?
Day 10 of our advent prize draw gives entrants the opportunity to win a DNA’24 DB26 Bread Knife from Savernake worth £199. Please note you must be over 18 to enter this prize draw.
Our eleventh prize is a Gold Smokebox, worth £105 from Lambton & Jackson.
Day 9 of our Christmas advent prize draw gives you the chance to win WOLF-Garten’s Bypass Loppers worth £119.99.
There are a bazillion bigleaf hydrangeas out there. So when a new one comes out, it really needs to stand out from the crowd. Meet Eclipse® bigleaf hydrangea—a unique selection with dark purple leaves that hold their color throughout the gardening season. In summer the dramatic foliage is accompanied by striking cranberry blooms with white centers.
The Isles of Scilly are like an idealised version of England – where the sun always shines, the food is wonderful, there’s no traffic and no one locks their doors! To say the sun always shines is an exaggeration, but they’re among the sunniest and mildest places in the UK – sea breezes mean it’s never too hot or humid and thanks to the Jetstream, they almost never have frost.
Blue moths are not just a mesmerizing sight in your backyard but a symbol of a thriving ecosystem.
Small Space Garden Design Ideas from the Pros Learn how to make the most out of small garden spaces from 4 designers. Elevating Small Space Gardens
Mushrooms in the garden can be an unsettling sight, indicating changes in the soil and in growing conditions generally. While growing mushrooms is becoming more popular as a home interest, fungi can be unpleasant in gardens when they arrive out of nowhere. These unplanned garden guests can also be toxic, so you’ll want to remove them if you have curious children or pets.
You can take an Englishwoman out of England, but you can’t change a deeply ingrained English garden aesthetic. Pom Shillingford has lived in America for 26 years, but she still yearns for the garden she knew as a child — her grandmother’s beloved Arts & Crafts garden in Hampshire, which she remembers always being filled with seasonal flowers. She and her husband David and their three young children moved from Manhattan to the small town of Salisbury in Connecticut in 2013. ‘I had always loved Manhattan, but suddenly I didn’t love it any more and needed to go back to green fields and the outdoors,’ says Pom.
Most ornamental grasses will stay intact through the latter part of the year, providing useful colour and structure in the autumn, when herbaceous plants are dying back. Some are particularly vibrant, picking up on the colours of the trees to echo their shades of russet and yellow, but with lower, softer silhouettes and lots of movement. Using them is easy. Weave them into a herbaceous border, or create more impact in larger gardens by repeat planting, as Piet Oudolf did at Scampston Hall in North Yorkshire, with his sinuous banks of Molinia caerulea subsp. caerulea 'Poul Petersen'. Some grasses are deciduous while others are evergreen. It is the deciduous grasses that can dramatically change colour during the autumn.
Today’s photos are from Phyllis Strohmeyer in northwestern New Jersey (Zone 6A).