Small Garden Design - how to choose your garden style
Plus: tulips and tulip problems, and a tempting hint about a very special garden which I'll be sharing with you next week
Tulips - yes or no?
Before that though, Gardening Minds, I have to tell you that I’ve just visited one of the most beautiful gardens I have ever visited in my entire life
We talk of places ‘transporting’ us - well, this garden took me to another world completely. I’d have loved to have told you about it today, but its magical story deserves more time from me, so this will be featuring in next week’s edition. But in the meantime, here’s a glimpse:
If you’d like to find out more about this secret garden, please do make sure you’re on the list of paid subscribers. It’s very, very special indeed.
Everything is just beginning, we have a sense of what’s happening under the surface as the plants ready themselves, and it makes us feel good.
You may be able to make out the blurs of tulips in that photo, and tulips are very much on my mind here today in The Gardening Mind:
Tulips, tulip fire, and whether or not we should be growing them - the discussion starts here as I take a look at what’s going well, and why others might not be going so well.
Also today, if you’re following along on the Small Garden Design Course, we’ll be looking at the different styles of garden layout which will help you decide which direction to go in with your small garden design.
To remind you that there’s a Zoom for ‘small garden designers’ on Thursday 25th April at 7pm UK time, where we’ll be looking at a system that will help you allocate the right amount of space to each of your different garden areas - terrace, planting etc. In this meeting, I’m also going to be sharing the big reveal of the example garden - the complete Before and After.
You can start this course at any time; all the catch-ups are here.
Remember to join our Sunday Show Us Your Plots Chat - it’s a fabulous chance to share photos of your garden or a green space near you. Our patience is being rewarded as the Northern Hemisphere gardens gradually colour up; for our friends in the Southern Hemisphere, the wheel of the year is slowly turning in the other direction. Whatever, whichever and wherever, do come and join us - you’ll see a post on the Chat starting ‘It’s Sunday 14th April and it’s time to Show Us Your Plots!’.
Our Real-life Meet up : it looks like we’re going to have a jolly crowd at our real-life meet-up in June - I’ve set up a separate Meet-Up Chat (think of it as a WhatsApp group for this event) so that I can get an idea of numbers and talk with you a bit more about final timings, lunch options etc. You can find the Chat link here.
First of all today:
I think we’re about to reach Peak Tulips: let’s take a look at the current tulip situation
What a difference a year makes
This time last year, I was despondent. Due to a lack of rainfall, which we certainly haven’t been suffering from this year, I thought my tulips had succumbed to the dreaded tulip fire which produces brown spots and twisted, withered and distorted leaves. You can read about that grim moment here:
I was reminded about tulip fire by one of our members who was wondering, in this week’s Gardener’s Question Time, whether her tulips were suffering from it. It can indeed be tricky to work out whether or not it’s tulip fire, or whether the distorted shapes are due to other factors, such as lack of rain and then too much rain.
As you can see from these photos, there’s definitely something wrong with the tulips in the pot on the right: yes, they could be suffering from a fungal disease, but I had to confess that I hadn’t changed this compost for a few years, so I really had been asking for trouble. The marks on the border tulip on the left were more than probably due to frost and rain.
There was definitely a problem in the pots, though the jury was out in the borders. A couple of weeks later, I came to the conclusion that in fact the shrivelled and pockmarked leaves were due more likely to a lack of rainfall earlier on. But I knew the shortcuts I’d taken, and I knew I wouldn’t be taking these shortcuts again.