A miserable day for visiting any outdoor event but a lovely garden, friendly folk and great cake made up for the cold and miserable drizzle in the Ashton’s garden.
Thanks to Margaret and Bill for the visit and Wanda for the photos. Well done
Hello everyone. Gardening is not far away, especially planning the garden. No doubt we all lost some of our favourite plants, l lost 50% of my tropical collection and the remaining ones that survived l am waiting for a sign of new growth.
We should be noticing an improvement next month so it’s a good time now to find a nice day and dig over the border lift and divide clumps of perennials. Any spare we could exchange between ourselves especially as we are going to notice a big rise in prices at the garden centres. l have ordered some new seed varieties l am going to sow hopefully I will share them with you .
We were due to visit Norman’s tropical garden on Monday but unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances we have had to cancel the visit. We are hoping to rearrange soon.
At the start of June we were warmly welcomed back to Brenda (McKenzie’s) and then Maureen’s (Ward’s) great gardens. Brenda’s garden always looks good and her borders were full of colour with some new planting having taken place. Maureens’ a real plant womans’ garden; we greatly enjoyed Maureen sharing some of her extensive horticultural knowledge and saw the (literal) fruits of her labours throughout the garden and vegetable growing areas.
On 1st July we were delighted to be invited to visit our President, Bill Howarths’ new courtyard garden. This was absolutely lovely as you will see from the photographs below. Bill moved into his brand new house about 3 years ago and at that time the ‘garden’ was just a roughly planted (by the builders) lawn with no other plants. Continue reading
On 4th April the Practical Gardening group happily took up Bill and Margaret (Ashton’s) kind offer to revisit their beautiful garden in Blundellsands. As always we were made very very welcome and all enjoyed seeing the garden in the Spring and comparing this to last Summer when we previoulsy visited. The garden is beautifully planted and maintained – we all marvelled at Bill’s lawn edges (and lots of other things) which are all sharp and ‘clean.’ The photos speak for themselves – but in the flesh the garden is even more gorgeous than the pictures suggest. Thank you Bill and Margaret again from us all.
We started our Feb meeting – our first of 2019, by 
sharing what had done particularly well in our gardens over the winter months, with one member having Marigolds in flower right through the winter and another sharing that his Camelia Donation (right) was already blooming and was beautiful., Pinks, daphne, white currants, camellias, snowdrops, crocus, daffodils and other bulbs were in flower already and doing well in many members gardens (chicken wire can be used to keep birds off bulbs if needed). One member had brought a very effective flower arrangement made up from her garden with witch hazel, rhododendron, heather, red cornus stems, Japanese anemone heads and winter flowering jasmine to further demonstrate the range garden flowers and colour available already. Continue reading
At our September meeting we widely discussed the impact of this year’s hot weather on our gardens with many of the group having lost plants etc and/or the lawn being badly affected. It was agreed that watering the garden had had little impact and most had found buckets of water to be far more effectiv
e in soaking the soil around plants. Buried upside down plastic bottles full of water with ‘drip holes’ had been found useful in getting the water deep to the roots of plants in pots as had ‘weeping’ hose pipes which feature lines of regular holes to slowly water the area. Plants variously affected /lost to the weather had been hebe’s, sweet peas and roses in particular. One member had a rose which had totally changed from its’ usual’ colour of white to orange which was felt to be a possible kickback to its hybridisation. Members had however had great success this summer with runner beans, Continue reading
We met twice in July and took advantage of the beautiful weather to visit two local gardens by prior arrangement, with a view to learning from what we saw there. The first, in Windsor Road, Southport, like the garden in Saxon Road we had visited the previous month, opens under the NGS scheme for charity. It was a cottage garden full of Continue reading
We started our May meeting discussing what we are currently enjoying in our ga
rdens. This included Azaleas, Camellias – ‘Donation’ variety reported to be gorgeous but were just finishing, Tulips, Iris, Magnolias Soulangeana and Stellata, Welsh Poppies, Geums, Centaura, Scabious, Skimmia plus many more. A Chilean Firebush Embothrium coccineum ( -photo right) was much desired by one member. Apple trees and any number of veg varieties are also being grown by some members
Based on a past recommendation within the group, another member has purchased a waspinator-