This is a petrocosmea, a ground-hugging, rosette-forming relative of the African violet, hailing from the mountains of Western China. In its natural habitat it has a nice, orderly life, bathed in cool mist, languishing in the shade. Each plant produces an ever-expanding, mathematically perfect…
Amaryllis belladonna: Jersey lily, naked lady, belladonna amaryllis We gardeners spend so much time and energy trying to cultivate plants which aren’t 100% suited to our gardens. We slave away, attending to our tender treasures’ every need, hoping and praying that we might be…
Succulent plants are not everyone’s cup of tea, but one which attracted a lot of admiring glances when we opened our garden for the National Gardens Scheme was Aeonium arboreum ‘Zwartkop’. It’s hardly surprising given its height (hence arboreum, meaning ‘tree-like’) and the colour of the…
For a while in the nineties, when television programmes such as Home Front and Ground Force ruled the air waves, tree ferns almost became a gardening cliché. They were saved from turning into the plant equivalent of prawn cocktail by their relative expense; a good quality, legally harvested…
It’s not often that I make time to really study a plant or flower in detail. Last weekend, whilst staying with family, I seized the opportunity to have a closer look at Acanthus spinosus, commonly known as spiny bear’s breeches. The plant’s leaves are believed…
For the most part, the experience of gardening is a succession of small triumphs and minor failures, all of which make us stronger people and better gardeners. Of course our patience is sometimes tried by storm and pestilence, then just occasionally we get to enjoy…
