News - Page 114
The new Savage Garden just opened at Inverewe Garden in Wester-Ross, in the Scottish Highlands has many interesting plants on show. Chief amongst the curious specimens on display include plants that smell like urine, eat flies and sport twisted red tongues.
The garden showcases carnivorous plants including the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), whose diet consists of flies and small insects; the trumpet plant Sarracenia flava which uses the smell of uri...
What to do in the garden in July
It’s not so much gardening as refereeing at this time of year: it’s a full-time job just keeping everything in order! Here are a few of the jobs you can be getting on with this month.
General tasks:
- Go slug hunting on damp evenings just before dark and you’ll catch hundreds of the slimy critters. Dispose of them as you wish.
- Before watering, loosen the soil’s surface...
A civil servant and an IT manager are among four would-be designers getting the chance to build their dream garden at the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show next month after winning a competition run by the RHS and BBC local radio.
Four winning designs for a ‘Feel Good Front Garden’ were picked from hundreds of entries across the country.
The winners include IT project manager Lee Burkhill from Manchester, whose design evokes the...
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Add a new dimension to your garden displays by not only planting colourful flowers you can enjoy throughout the year, but ones that will bring in the butterflies too. A wide range of bedding plants, perennials, flowering shrubs and bulbs produce the simple, open blooms that butterflies love.
These act like fuelling stations around our gardens for butterflies, moths, bees and other beneficial insects, providing them with the valuable nectar they need to feed o...
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Take action against carrot fly before they find your newly-germinated carrot seedlings and lay their eggs in the soil around their necks. Those eggs will hatch out into the larvae which do all the damage, eating holes in the roots which are then vulnerable to secondary infections and rotting, ruining your crop. If you can stop the adults laying their eggs in the first place, though, you’ve solved the problem.
Several varieties of carrot are resi...
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Tackle perennial weeds like bindweed, couch grass and ground elder weekly at this time of year, as the moment your back is turned they’ll take over your garden and swamp your precious plants.
These pernicious, fast-growing weeds are every gardener's nightmare, but it's a rare patch that doesn't have at least a few of them muscling their way through the ground here and there. Most of the time perennial weeds are quite liveable with – even those considere...
Gardening is so good for you, it should be prescribed on the National Health Service according to a new study looking into the role gardens play in mental and physical health.
The report, compiled by researchers at The Kings Fund for the National Gardens Scheme, found that gardening reduces depression, loneliness, anxiety and stress, and can help with conditions from heart disease and cancer to obesity. Gardening was also found to alleviate symptoms of dement...
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Downing Street has been dubbed ‘the greyest frontage known to man’ by TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh, who is offering to buy, plant and maintain pots of plants outside the Prime Minister’s residence at No. 10.
Speaking at the first RHS Greening Grey Britain Front Garden Summit, aimed at finding ways to encourage homeowners to replace hard surfaces like concrete and tarmac with plants, Mr Titchmarsh said a pair of statuesque urns filled with flowers would brighte...
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Show off your garden and raise funds for the Red Cross with their new ‘Proud of your Garden’ fundraising scheme.
Open your garden or allotment site this summer and you can make a real difference to people in the UK and around the world affected by emergencies, disasters, and conflicts.
Great ideas for garden openings include a Wimbledon-themed afternoon tea with strawberries and cream; sports afternoons for families complete with traditional egg and sp...
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Britain is a nation of wildlife lovers according to a recent survey of 2000 gardeners which found that almost all of us – 98% - enjoy watching wild creatures in our gardens.
Over three-quarters leave an area of their gardens wild, to be colonised by frogs, toads, beetles and other creepy-crawlies; and around a third spend over £50 a year feeding or caring for the birds, hedgehogs, bees and butterflies which visit.
Over a third of respondent...