Bedding display will be a real sweet treat!
Ihope this year will be a lot better than 2020. I’ve started 2021 thinking about my plans for the new gardening year.
Seeds have arrived. I decided I’d like to do a peaches and cream bedding scheme with touches of violet and blue. The seeds I chose are coral busy lizzies, sky blue and violet petunias, lemon antirrhinums, vanilla marigolds, blue ageratum and ‘Victoria’ salvias.
I entered a photo of the front garden in the Brookside Nursery photo competition and was delighted to win £100 to choose plants. I’ve chosen some ‘Illumination’ lemon begonias – they give a beautiful display. Other plants that took my fancy include trailing geranium, calibrachoa, coleus and begonias ‘Glowing Embers’ and ‘Elegance’.
I’ll be ordering our new arbour soon – it’s cream and sage green. When it arrives it’ll take the place of the arbour at the end of the path down the garden and hopefully the plants either side will get more light as the old arbour is quite large.
My friend Sue, who lives in Germany and grows many tomato plants each year, has kindly sent me some tomato, chilli and pepper seeds. The tomatoes are ‘Ania’, ‘Annie’s Singapore’, ‘Cherokee Purple’, ‘Fruit Punch Cherry’ and ‘Green Frosted Doctors’ – great names! I love growing all these different varieties.
Plants looking good at the moment include the Viburnum bodnantense, which flowers for weeks, skimmias, sarcococca, which is smothered in scented, small, white flowers. I’m patiently waiting for the chimonanthus to flower – when it flowers does vary by about four weeks depending on the winter we have. The garden gets its winter structure from all the evergreens of different shapes and shades of glorious green.
A few years ago I planted a small-flowered winter clematis – ‘Freckles’, I think – but it didn’t seem to bloom well. When I was looking at the chimonanthus that it climbs through, I noticed lots of flower buds – a lovely surprise!
Cuttings of salvia ‘Amistad’ are doing well – I’ll pot them up soon. I’ve also got rooted cuttings of ‘African Blue’ basil on the windowsill as well as streptocarpus cuttings, which I’m pleased about as I nearly lost last year’s cuttings by inadvertently leaving them in the greenhouse for a few weeks – they looked very poorly by the time I realised. I nursed a couple back to health and grew them on through the summer, then took more cuttings.