Peonies best left alone while others need TLC
THE ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ peonies I planted earlier this year have produced lots of leaves but no flowers.
Peonies don’t like to be disturbed so it will probably take them a while to settle down and start flowering, but once they do they should keep going for the next 50 years or so
Peonies are among the longest-living of our garden flowers and some of the least demanding. Give them a favourable spot and they just carry on doing their stuff with minimal intervention.
Other plants need more nurturing. Heucheras, for instance, are best divided every two or three years and irises perform better if their rhizomes are regularly dug up and replanted.
It takes time to learn which plants are best left alone and which respond to being fussed over and sometimes the only way to find out is by getting your hands dirty, digging things up and moving them around to see if they thrive in other parts of the garden.
I was quite keen to move the smaller of the two camellias that grow in my front garden as it just hasn’t flowered this year, but then I asked nurseryman Ken Cox for advice and he told me not to bother.
“It’s probably a Japonica’, he told me. “These need longer, hotter summers than we get in Scotland to produce the following year’s flowers, so it doesn’t matter where you put it, you still won’t get flowers.”
Could he really. tell all that without looking at the plant? I wasn’t sure, but then a few days ago I was weeding around the base and found an old, faded label hanging from a low branch. Sun and rain had bleached out the picture and most of the wording, but the only lettering still legible spelled out ‘Japonica’ and I had to concede Ken really knows his stuff.
While I was busy in this part of the garden I had a good chance to get to know the soil and I’ve decided it may just be suitable for tulips after all.
Originally, I’d dismissed all chances of growing them in anything other than pots as most of the garden sits on heavy clay, but it turns out the soil in this section isn’t quite so heavy and, during the recent dry spell, I had to water it regularly. It also gets far more sun that I’d anticipated.
For the moment it’s foxgloves that are putting on a show, towering over an abundance of tiny strawberries. Sometimes it’s the things that just blow in of their own accord that give me most pleasure and these are definitely amongst them, adding an element of wildness to the garden and springing surprises where I least expect it.
One of the best of these surprises has been the crop of ox eye daisies that have recently appeared on the compost heap. I already had plans to grow them on the bank that runs down one side of the garden so their arrival is a timely reminder to get planting.