HELEN YEMM THORNY PROBLEMS

This week, how to bring a honeysuckle back from the dead, wedding floristry tips and get the most from winter jasmine

Another long-suffering gardening mother is being dragged kicking and screaming by her daughter into the primped and perfumed hell of wedding floristry, or so it would seem from an email I received from Jenny (not her real name). Her Demanding Daughter wants her to grow flowers for her (small) wedding in late July. Jenny is a keen veg grower, but for flowers she needs some inspiration.

Oh dear, this is not really my area of expertise, but I have dealt with this subject in the past, and it appears that the most successful and rather obvious tip I gave a reader (I had feedback, which is always gratifying) was to keep things simple and go for lots of a few tall white-flowered varieties that can be bulked out with evergreen and white/cream variegated foliage, plucked from the garden, or the gardens of generous friends. July is hydrangea time, furthermore. My own massively abundant white Hydrangea ‘Madame Emile Mouillère’ provided successful wedding-plunder for a similarly lumbered friend a few years ago.

Time is on Jenny’s side, and she could grow some substantial annuals from seed – for example, cosmos, nicotiana and some of the posh umbellifers such as Ammi visnaga. (Try the White Wedding mix from chilternseeds.co.uk). This might be enough to keep her gardening honour intact and satisfy DD. Supermarket white lilies could be a godsend, too.

In the weeks before Christmas, Jane Willett says she picked a surprising variety of little things – fuchsia, marguerites, even little roses, that were still in flower in her garden. Small posies lit up her cottage and to

TIP OF THE WEEK

them she added stiff sprigs of shining yellow winter jasmine, from a rather unloved and unlovely slump of a plant that grows against the base of her house wall. Jasmine is so useful in winter, she says. How can she get it to flower more prolifically?

“Give it a proper going-over” is the answer. Winter jasmine, which unlike its scented summer cousin does not climb, can and should have the stems that have flowered pared back in February. Neglected plants can be “renovated” then too.

During the growing season winter jasmine always makes long shoots that produce flowers the next year. Jane should take the opportunity to brutally cut out the old unproductive wood, saving some pliable branches of various lengths with which to

create the foundations of a new, improved shrub. These shoots, if given some horizontal wires behind which they can be fed and fanned out, will automatically arch forward and downwards. Next winter at this time she could well be cutting sprigs from a floral cascade. Pruning every year after the flower show is over should be really easy, too.

REACH FOR THE SKY Honeysuckle naturally seeks out sun in order to flower well