Heuchera, also known as Coral Bells, is a traditional foliage plant and today it brings with it many different varieties, some of which come in the most amazing colours. Heuchera plants create round mounds and they have a woody crown at the base with bell-shaped flowers on the ends, which is where their common name of coral bells derives from. The leaves are evergreen in milder parts of the UK, even if they get covered…
Lupin flowers produce some of the most breathtaking masses of colour. They have sturdy, erect spikes from which flowers are produced and the fan-shaped foliage emerges horizontally. The flowers are very similar to those you would find with sweet peas because they grow in densely packed groups. The colour of the flower spikes ranges from pink to white, deep blue, purple and even yellow. This is a fairly long-lived perennial that doesn’t require a great…
Sweet peas are, as their name suggests, very sweet not only in production but in fragrance, however, it’s the annual varieties that are known for their amazing scent. You can also get perennial sweet peas that come back year after year, but many of these aren’t that fragrant. Thankfully growing them is quite simple. They are easy to grow from seed, planting in autumn and overwintering them in a cold greenhouse or cold frame. You…
Apple trees should be pruned yearly, usually between November and early March when it has dropped all of their leaves for the winter. You want to remove around 10-20% of the overall canopy evenly, and this should only consist of around 10-20 cuts. Remember that around 10-20% of the canopy is between 10 and 20 cuts in total. This idea is to remove some of the previous year’s growth but leave plenty of growth that…
A handful of tips to control the weeds in your garden before they become a problem Effective weed control is paramount and preventing weeds in the first place is actually much easier than trying to remove them. A few ways to help prevent weeds include using a mulch to block out sunlight, only watering the base of plants and not the whole flowerbed, spraying weeds when they are just seedlings instead of letting them establish,…
