Mayday! Mayday! Celebrate this spring spurt in garden growth
As the first buds and leaves emerge after the winter slumber, our expert Agnes Stevenson ploughs ahead with plans for her borders and summer pots
If you got up early this morning, you might by now be wearing a floral garland made from leaves and blooms plucked fresh from the garden. May Day rituals stretch back a long time and I love the idea of celebrating the young growth that appears in spring, even if wearing a floral crown is a guaranteed way to have a caterpillar crawl down your neck.
The speed of growth at this time of year is exhilarating and my garden is changing rapidly from one day to the next, with tulips taking over from the daffodils and the tips of the hostas just starting to emerge.
The spireas are beginning to leaf up while, in the greenhouse, the cuttings I took from these in the autumn are showing new growth. Once they are big enough I’ll use them to plug a few gaps in the borders where I’ve evicted so much as part of my big overhaul.
I’ve not stopped moving things out of here yet and next to go will be the shrub roses as I’ve decided to move all of these into the bed in front of the south-facing wall, underneath the winter-flowering cherry tree. This is a sunny and protected spot, which the roses should love, but it also has a tendency to become waterlogged, which won’t suit them at all. So, as well as digging in as much organic material as possible to improve drainage, I’m going to plant the roses on mounds so they won’t be left sitting in damp puddles.
Eventually, the pink-flowered Clematis “Princess Diana”, which I’ve planted at the bottom of the tree, should flower at the same time as the peach-coloured roses and I might even drop in a few pots of lilies to make for complete summer overload.
I started growing things in pots when I had a tiny garden, but even now I have more space than I can keep on top
of, container gardening is a pleasure I can’t give up. One of my earliest gardening successes was by filling a pot with a couple of lavenders and surrounding these with Dianthus “Raspberry Parfait” and it is still one of my favourite combinations. I also love osteospermums for their non-stop flowering, which can last for months. I find if I move pots of these to a sheltered spot over the winter I can keep these going from year to year, using them to take fresh cuttings.
Osteospermums, along with pelargoniums, are forgiving plants that will withstand the challenging conditions of growing in pots. Both can cope with spells of drought and then bounce back again but of course it is much better to care for them properly, planting them in freedraining compost, giving them the occasional liquid feed and not allowing them to dry out.
And pots can dry out quickly, even at this time of the year, so if you have any with permanent planting in them, check them now. Don’t wait to water them until the leaves start to droop.