Ben Fink Shapiro | Design: Better Homes & Gardens
20.08.2023 - 04:27 / irishtimes.com
I have killed, and almost killed, several plants since I last wrote about my garden. It was to be expected, really. Everything was going far too well. First, the hydrangea got scorched when I was on holidays, then the centaurea croaked for no apparent reason, and the aquilegia stopped flowering.
Luckily, I had kept the Hydrangea in the pot, so I was able to move it to the shade. I left it there for two weeks but it still looked fairly pathetic, so I decided to do what any novice gardener who hasn’t a clue will do – I lopped off all the dead flowers and scorched leaves and hoped for the best. Gardening, I reasoned, is a bit like dealing with a break-up. You get a mad haircut or colour, which hitherto you had no intention of doing, though you tell everyone you had always wanted to go for it, and you pray it works/heals your broken heart.
Did it fix my ailing hydrangea? The leaves bounced back fairly well, but the flowers haven’t come back as strongly and they have changed colour, becoming more pink than blue. This happens in hydrangeas when the acidity of the soil changes. But just like a heartbreak, I’m hoping time will heal all – otherwise that’s €22 wasted.
[ New beginnings: I am far from the earth goddess I imagined ]
The poor centaurea didn’t stand much of a chance after I moved the hydrangea because the flower bed was a favourite of the neighbourhood cats. Yes, they are still a mighty foe in my gardening adventure. After watching the plant deteriorate for a few weeks, I went for the heartbreak special again and chopped the centaurea right back with the ruthless fervour of the rejected. It hasn’t exactly rallied, but I don’t think it has got any worse. So that’s something.
When the aquilegia stopped flowering at
Ben Fink Shapiro | Design: Better Homes & Gardens
If you're after a completely free-to-enter garden to relax in and explore this summer, then Manchester's Ordsall Hall has it all — a gorgeous garden, a historic hall, and a lovely allotment. Everything at Ordsall is free to explore, making it a must-visit this season. Want to find out more? Our team took a tour this summer to show you what Salford's oldest building has to offer. The Gardens Ordsall Hall has lush sprawling grass to the front of the property… But to the back? This is where you can find their impressive time capsule garden. The rear garden is designed in a traditional Tudor style knot, similar to what would have been grown back then. Rose bushes stand out among carefully pruned hedging. Lavender covers the flower beds.
EVERY GARDENER has their obsessions—or maybe a nicer way to say that might be to call it their “signature plants,” the ones that help define their garden. I confess to a serious issue with gold-leaved things. And last time I checked my friend Ken Druse had more than a few plants with variegated leaves of all kinds of daring patterns and hues that catch your eye in his New Jersey garden.
If you're after a completely free-to-enter garden to relax in and explore this summer, then Manchester's Ordsall Hall has it all — a gorgeous garden, a historic hall, and a lovely allotment. Everything at Ordsall is free to explore, making it a must-visit this season. Want to find out more? Our team took a tour this summer to show you what Salford's oldest building has to offer. The Gardens Ordsall Hall has lush sprawling grass to the front of the property… But to the back? This is where you can find their impressive time capsule garden. The rear garden is designed in a traditional Tudor style knot, similar to what would have been grown back then. Rose bushes stand out among carefully pruned hedging.
Invasive Plant Species in New York pose a significant ecological challenge. These non-native plants disrupt local ecosystems, outcompete native species, and threaten biodiversity.
I SAW NEWS of a new book called “Pressed Plants” recently, and it got me thinking about my grandmother and one of the many crafts she enjoyed way back when. Grandma made what she called “pressed-flower pictures,” bits of her garden that she carefully dried, arranged on fabric and framed under glass. And some of those still hang on my walls. It also got me thinking of the 500-year-old tradition of pressing plants for science and the herbarium world.
Michael Gollop / Getty Images
Fungus gnats are tiny little black flies that love living in damp organic matter (i.e. compost). They thrive in warmer weather, so at this time of year – with all the seedlings indoors – the house is full of them.
Mould (mold) spores are everywhere, they’re inescapable, and moulds love growing in the warm, damp and humid conditions that seedlings need to thrive. If you have biodegradable pots then moulds can rapidly colonize those; but they will happily grow on the surface of compost as well. A lot of the moulds we see won’t do much damage to the seedlings, but some of them will and having mould on the windowsill isn’t much good for us either.
If there’s one thing that makes gardeners gnash their teeth with frustration, it’s watching their favourite plants being eaten by pests. We’ve moved on from the ‘any bug is a bad bug’ mentality, and many chemical controls are being removed from sale amid safety fears, but this doesn’t mean that we have to abandon hope of an attractive and productive garden.
When I interviewed for my last job, the panel asked me how I would cope in a situation where there was more work on my desk than I had time to do. The theoretical answers to that question are easy – prioritise, ask for help, get stuck in. When you’re faced with an overwhelming situation then it’s easy to forget the theory and to spend more time worrying about how you’re going to get everything done than doing anything useful.
In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.