Posts under ‘shrubs’

Image by Michiteru Kodama.
Chaenomeles x superba ‘Crimson and Gold’ likes to lie low in the garden. It creeps up to you in early spring and shouts ‘I’m flowering! Pay me attention!’ And you do. Soldier-red flowers with regal gold stamens make you sit up and look. And so do the enormous, fragrant and edible (if [...]

This is the beautiful ‘Silver Anniversary’ standard rose I received for my 21st birthday a couple of years ago. I was finally able to plant it last year when we moved to this garden, and you could see it wriggling its toes with delight at being out of a pot and in the soil.
But now [...]

Image by Michiteru Kodama.
I know I’ve picked some rather well-known Plants to Love for February, but I just couldn’t resist gushing about my favourite spring plants. In case you feel I’ve let you down, here’s a real beauty that not many people have heard of. The Paper Bush (Edgeworthia chrysantha) takes a little bit of [...]

Image by Sharon.
How fabulous - a white forsythia. Abeliophyllum distichum is a beautiful, far more refined late winter-flowering shrub, with almond-scented white star-shaped flowers that blush pink at the centre. Like its yellow-flowered relative Forsythia, it flowers profusely on bare branches in February, although it often beats true forsythia to the first bloom.

Image by Didier Bier
Daphne is another winter-flowering shrub that smells yummy scrummy. And it looks gorgeous as well, bringing lovely warm purple flowers into your garden when everything else hasn’t even started waking up.

I’m pretty relieved January is over. It really is the most boring month of the year, and come February, there’s hope that your shoes won’t forever be full of rain and your hair won’t ping into a horrible, frizzy halo (or that might just be me). So now the new gardening season is on the [...]

Image by Anne Tanne
The woman who planned my childhood garden was one of the best designers I ever encountered. There are too many clever things she did to list here, but one of my favourites was the Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ that she planted by the gate. Every morning in winter as I left for [...]

Image by Tanaka Juuyoh.
It is very easy at this time of year to let things go. The garden never seems very friendly, and everything looks so depressed and bare. In fact, January is one of those months which shouldn’t exist, as it really is miserable.
But if there was one plant to tempt me into the [...]

Image by Danny
Christmas box (Sarcococca confusa) isn’t really a showstopper when you first meet it. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking it a little dull. It looks just like a low-growing, reliable evergreen.
But appearances are deceptive because this is one of the most fabulous winter shrubs you’ll ever meet.

Image by Koizumi
I’ll let you into a secret: quite a few of the Six Plants to Love for this month smell pretty epic. But if you lined them up before a panel of perfumers, Winter Sweet (Chimonanthus praecox) would have the judges fawning and fighting over its scent. But that’s not all. The flowers are [...]

If you’re writing a list of resolutions today, the F&F list of monthly chores for the garden would be a good place to start. They’ll last far longer than that guilt-inducing gym membership or abstaining from chocolate. And they’re much more fun, as well.
Click here for January’s jobs. If you’ve got any of your own [...]

Beauty Berry (Callicarpa bodinieri var.giraldii ‘Profusion’) may be an Autumn shrub, but there’s very little mellow fruitfulness about it. In fact, ‘mellow’ is entirely the wrong adjective to use when discussing Beauty Berries. Their fruits aren’t subtle: they’re the horticultural equivalent of Beyonce Knowles, and I love them for it. And not wanting to be [...]

The first frosts are hanging back this year, like a child hiding behind his mother’s skirts. While this means my parsnips are still hiding in the ground, it is blessing us with a prolonged display of autumn colour.
And what a display there is. Among the sugar maples, lamp-yellow elms and rusty oaks, there are a [...]