Author Archives: thelonggardenpath

About thelonggardenpath

Avid gardener, with garden design ambitions. And when I'm not getting my hands dirty or playing with pencil and paper, I may be found relaxing, watching rugby!

The Green Guru and The Potted Garden

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I don’t know if anyone has found my other blog, The Green Guru. It’s more about my business projects and hints and tips, and less about me and my own garden exploits.

A young family friend is embarking on her first garden, which is steep (it’s in Bristol) and largely decked, so she has asked me for recommendations for creating a garden in containers. Well, it’s a huge topic, dependent on so many factors, most importantly personal taste, and not easy to cover in one text. So I’m using this blog to try to give her some ideas to get started, and to encourage them to create a garden that they all can enjoy.

If this would interest you, I’d love you to have a look! The link is on my page, The Green Guru, above.

I hope you like it!

A Pleasant Surprise and a “Thank You”

I had a very pleasant surprise this morning on my walk around the estate! I was eagerly lapping up all the signs of life returning to the garden. The enlarging clumps of snowdrops, the pink pinpricks of the cyclamen coum forcing their way through the leaves, and the first hellebore buds showing bright flashes of red and yellow. And meanwhile, revelling in all the winter perfume from sarcococcas, Chimonanthes, lonicera and mahonia.

But then I noticed this little beauty – Helleborus bocconei. Its very first flower!

This hellebore was given to me by a fellow blogger, Cathy from “Rambling in the garden”, several years ago (maybe about four?) when she paid us a visit. A seedling then, that she had propagated, but which has not made much progress since. Each year a new leaf would come to replace the old one that died off but that was it. I wasn’t very hopeful of it flourishing. Then today I saw its very first flower!

A beautiful lime green – when you raise the flower head up!

And I’ve read it’s scented too! So now I’ve got to get down on my hands and knees!

Thank you, Cathy! Rewarded for patience!

Fleeting Signs of Autumn

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I posted a photo on Instagram four days ago, of our clump of colchicums, remarking how these delicate flowers, which are one of the first signals of autumn in our garden, are so fleeting. No sooner do they appear than they get battered and devoured by slugs before you can grab your camera. Four days later, I’ve had plenty of time to grab the camera. They’re still standing strongly, with the colour deepening, and the flowers opening in the sunshine.

This is the best and longest display we’ve had yet, thanks to the kind weather we’ve had recently.

The slugs and snails will have to wait a bit longer for their banquet!