Question of the Week – Pecan Leaf Phylloxera

With garden openings over for 2024, my ramblings around the garden involve a combination of “this is gorgeous!”, “aren’t we fortunate?”, “thank goodness that’s over” and “how can I improve this?”. Already thoughts have turned to potential ‘tweaks’, nothing major, and ways to improve things I don’t feel have really worked – perhaps I will write a post on them in due course…

Edimentals is a new term for growing flowers and vegetables together. Gardens today are often too small to have a separate ‘veg patch.’

Image: Hampton Court Flower Festival. Credit: RHS

Raised garden beds are an excellent choice for gardeners looking to enhance their growing space. The best raised garden beds offer benefits, such as improved soil conditions, better pest control, and easier maintenance. Our expertise at Savvy Gardening stems from years of hands-on gardening in raised beds and thorough research, ensuring that our recommendations are practical and reliable. We’ve narrowed our favorites to a list of six. We meticulously evaluated various factors, including durability, material quality,

What is wrong with these blueberries?

Patrick Biller

This year Chelsea Flower Show was full of interesting trees and shrubs with lots of dreamy woodland-edge planting in dappled light underneath leafy canopies. Native trees such as hawthorns, hazels and silver birch were the favoured choices in many of the show gardens, with a mixture of native and non-native ornamental plants selected for resilience and sustainability. In Ula Maria’s Forest Bathing Garden, white foxgloves, cow parsley and other umbellifers like Baltic parsley (Cenolophium denudatum) and valerian (Valeriana officinalis) were mixed with the simple shade-loving grass Melica altissima ‘Alba’ while Tom Stuart-Smith showcased intricate tapestries of interesting foliage in different shapes and textures. In other gardens, orange was a popular colour in many shades, from deep rusty orange irises to pale orange geums, especially in Ann Marie-Powell’s exuberant Octavia Hill Garden. As always, the Grand Pavilion is the ideal place to discover new and interesting plants showcased by some of the country’s leading nurseries.

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The HGIC Staff recently toured the Festival of Flower Topiary Displays in Greenwood, SC. The topiaries will be on display through July 8th. Plan a visit!

Jasmit Singh Rangr, a Berkeley-based architect, founder of Rangr Studio, and a lecturer in architecture at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, is technically responsible for building his family’s stylish, minimal, cost-conscious home near the Grizzly Peak summit in the Berkeley Hills. But the behind-the-scenes mastermind who made it possible is his wife, Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, a nonprofit, public interest environmental law firm. Anyone familiar with the area’s cutthroat real estate market won’t be surprised to hear that the search for a vacant, buildable lot in one of the most coveted neighborhoods in the West required Dillen to use all of the skills that make her a great lawyer: creativity, a knack for analysis and research, perseverance, and the art of persuasion.

Q: Our 25-year-old Aloha rose has failed to bloom again this season. It used to be in full bloom throughout the month of June. Can you recommend any treatment to restore it to its former glory? A Forsyth

What kind of caterpillar is feeding on this buckeye leaf?