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Showing posts from 2016

A - Z of coastal tolerant plants continued

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Buddleja - attract the butterflies and beast to your garden. to stop them from seeding, deadhead as soon as they've finished blooming.Cut back hard in spring. After a severe salt storm they may appear dead but have faith, they will return. look out for the deep deep purple - it is pure heaven. Broom - a lovely colourful splash to cheer the heart. Comes in all colours. By Alexis CESAR - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 , https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41192228 Bergenia is one of those plants we tend to ignore but a large clump can create a splash of colour in a tricky area. By Christian Hummert (Ixitixel) (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons And bluebells of course. They grow all along the cliffpath here so I am hoping to buy some English ones to have in the garden to grow alongside the snowdrops, daffs and crocus. By MichaelMaggs (

In June the red rose blooms ...

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Pat Austin and the pink ones and yellow ones, and orange ones. May and June were beautiful months - plenty of sunshine but not too hot, not too cold - Goldilocks sort of weather. We have had some nice surprises, a lovely philadelphus, some rather pretty roses and of course, I've been shopping. This year I am keeping my new roses in pots until I decide if they are going to tolerate it here. I bought a couple of Harlow Carr, Charlotte, Sceptered Isle, Abraham Darby and a lovely pink one that had lost its label. I was very glad to find one of our favourite roses, Compassion, growing nicely up the fence, and there is also a vigorous and very pretty rambler romping through the trees. The pots of fuchsias and lobelia I planted up early in teh spring and now in full flower and the strawberries are over. Courgettes are an everyday addition to our table and the tomatoes and cucumber won't be long now. I can tell from the front gardens near by that roses do well

A New Year, A New Garden, A New Challenge

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Five days before Christmas we moved to a new home with a smaller garden, close to the sea at Aberporth. For twenty years we'd gardened high on a hill on a smallholding in Ceredigion. It was a garden  prone to high winds, heavy frosts and the biggest slugs you ever did see. The summer temperatures varied from zero at night time and 28 during the day and as for the winter - well, it was a lot colder then. This meant we were restricted to what we could grow. I dreamt of tall, stately cottage garden plants like hollyhocks, delphiniums, but I soon learnt that was not be. We made the garden at Ael Y Bryn beautiful but it was big, too big for John and I to manage as we reached our middle years. It was terribly sad to leave it but w e look forward to the challenge of a new, more manageable garden and although we've been here for just six months we are already learning lessons. This new 'easy' garden isn't going to be as straight forward as we thought. When we