Garden news
Post categories: exotics, flower arranging, garden visiting, greenhouse growing, inspiration, news, tv and radio
|07:00 UK time, Saturday, 9 April 2011
In the news...
Congratulations are due to the scientists at the National Botanic Garden of Wales who this week laid their claim to be the first country to produce a DNA barcode for every one of its 1,143 species of native plants.
Campanula patula
So what, you might ask? Well: the project has implications for wildflower conservation, honeybee populations, forensic science, the trade descriptions act, hay fever sufferers, livestock management and tackling climate change. And you thought plants were just there to look pretty.
Venus Flytrap
If you're one of the growing army of fans of carnivorous plants – from pitcher plants, capable of eating a mouse, to spiny venus flytraps and pretty sundews (brilliant for controlling whitefly in the greenhouse, by the way) – do check you've bought them from a reputable source. A report this week revealed the main threat to the survival of carnivorous plants in the wild is not habitat loss, or climate change, but unscrupulous plant collectors who raid wild populations for specimens to sell to gardeners.
Elsewhere on the web...
It was a week for feasting your eyes: mostly on ravishing photographs of spring flowers, courtesy of Greenforks, John Grimshaw at Colesbourne Park in Gloucestershire and Dawn Isaac who's been experimenting with a sweet little rainbow cutting garden for kids.
And to cap it all, it was the heartbreakingly pretty Cornwall Spring Flower Show at the Boconnoc Estate near Lostwithiel last weekend: all brilliant sunshine and a riot of camellias, daffodils, rhododendrons and hellebores. The Eden Project made a living room out of flowers, while the head gardener at Trewithin was celebrating first prize in the 'Five Foot Run', rising magnificently to the challenge and creating a massive edifice of flowers from every spring flowering shrub you can think of (and quite a few you can't, I'll bet).
Good listen of the week: Ruth Sanderson learning how to pick rhubarb on a pick-your-own farm in Staffordshire for BBC Radio 4's Farming Today. There are some good Victorian rhubarb-growing tips, too: especially if you have an open fire. I'll say no more.
Out and about...
The kids are at home, Easter is on its way and it's spring: if there's ever been a week to enjoy being outside in the garden, this is it.
It may be a couple of weeks yet till Easter, but celebrations are starting early: this week there are bunnies to be found hidden among the shrubberies at Waterperry Gardens in Oxfordshire, and clues to be solved on an Easter egg trail through the spectacular 26-acre gardens at Powis Castle near Welshpool.
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, meanwhile, is turning the spotlight on to the cocoa tree by turning itself into a chocaholic's paradise: there are Easter eggs, chicks, bunnies and – the pièce de résistance – an entire sculpture garden made from chocolate.
If your feet (and your wallet) have recovered from last week's RHS Cardiff Flower Show, it's time to be off again: this time to the North of England's celebration of all things horticultural at the Harrogate Spring Flower Show. It should be a real knees-up this year: the organisers, the North of England Horticultural Society, are celebrating their 100th birthday.
Comments Post your comment