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Warm up your garden with a winter-long riot of cheerful pansies. Eye-level pansies! Don put together a colourful hanging basket using ‘Cutie Cat Merlot’ from the new Cutie Cats series of pansies. Follow these steps to create your own pansy basket Cover the...
Dietes – Plant of the Week One of the great things about our Plant of the Week is that it is virtually unkillable. A great choice for lazy gardeners! Plant Details Common name: Dietes Botanic name: Dietes iridioides Description: A clump-forming, rhizomatous...
Standard plants, otherwise known as ‘balls on sticks’, are not hard to train. Standards make great container plants and are usually expensive to buy, but it is very easy to create your own. Some standards are grafted but this is not necessary for many...
This week’s Plant of the Week is one of Don’s all time favourites, the sasanqua camellia. Plant details Common name: Sasanqua camellia Botanic name: Camellia sasanqua Description: Small evergreen tree or large shrub from Japan, which grows to around 6...
The entrance to your house is very important. It should be welcoming, interesting and inviting. The owner of the house shown in our segment tried to make the front steps of her home look good, without success. She found it particularly hard to find plants that would...
Succulents look fabulous with their amazing diversity of leaf shapes and colours. They create strong focal points in minimalist designs and their evergreen foliage makes them ideal for small urban gardens. Succulents store water in their leaves, stems or roots to help...
Paula O’Hara loves her muehlenbeckia ‘hedge’ and enjoys clipping it, but her next door neighbour, Merry Howie, told Don that the vine is a curse because it creates so much work. Merry admitted that the job of trimming the hedge might be easier if her...
Plant details Common name: bloodleaf Botanic name: Iresine herbstii Description: a soft-wooded, subshrub from Brazil, growing to around 1m (3′) tall with an open, loose habit. This frost-tender plant is grown for its beautiful foliage. The waxy leaves range in...
Don visited Ann Goldstone, who has a problem with her wisteria. The wisteria was planted 8 years ago, but has never flowered. It shares a garden bed with standard roses (Rosa ‘Iceberg’), which are watered well and fertilised every 6-8 weeks. Don’t...
Muehlenbeckia Paula O’Hara planted a climber (Muehlenbeckia complexa) on an ugly, cyclone wire fence. In just 12 months the vine had almost covered the fence, and in three years she had an ‘instant’ hedge! The only problem is that muehlenbeckia is...