Guides & Tips

Here are a few answers to common questions about our Mail Order Service. We aim to sell plants that are large enough for you to dig a hole and plant them straight away.We supply plants that are the same as you would get if you came to the nursery.Not every plant we...

Have you noticed how good they are this year?  There’s more flower and the leaves have much less fungal rust than normal.  Overall, they simply look super.  These days they’re rarely planted.  The ones you see have probably self-sown over generations from plants sown...

Ed (my son) has taken over Steve Eyres’ collection of tender Nerine sarniensis cultivars.  Steve had to move house and no longer had anywhere to house them.  It’s a bit of a responsibility. Nerines are those astonishing sparkling lily-like flowers that flower autumn...

They mostly come in yellow but if you weed out the yellow ones you’ll get oranges and reds.  However, whether they’re yellow, orange or red lots of gardeners complain about them because they’re voracious self-seeders, seeding across gardens destroying colour schemes. ...

(Reproduced from ‘Cotswold Garden Flowers’ catalogue 2004 and amended under lockdown in April 2020.) Winter is coming as I write on 13th October.  Gardeners are a special group of people who do not live for the moment – what drives them on is the future.  When they...

Years ago – maybe as far back as 1985 – Anne Jenner took a census of HPS members favourite plants, or maybe it was their most wanted plants or what they were growing, but anyway, she took a census and to her surprise euphorbias were right there at the top of the...

ALLIUM TRIQUETRUM It’s very beautiful, immensely invasive, a problem weed in the west of Britain and, I’ve discovered today, wonderful in pesto. Mine arrived on the nursery God knows how.  I try to dig it up and pull off the seed heads before the seed is released but...

What’s not to like? Late winter and early spring are dominated by yellow flowers and here’s a red.  OK mixed with yellow it might offend some people, but I reckon the biggest reason it’s avoided is snobbery.  People aren’t satisfied with its effects.  They don’t grow...

Ed Brown looks at what to look for when selecting potential new Dahlia varieties.