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Things to JANUARY

Do

Keep up to date in the garden with our monthly guide to key gardening tasks

TAKE SIMPLE root cuttings Increase your stock of a number of desirable herbaceous plants this winter, using one of propagation’s most straightforward techniques

Taking root cuttings is a great way to propagate herbaceous perennials during the colder months while the plants are dormant. The process is simple and e… ective: it can yield lots of healthy and vigorous new plants from just one parent. Try it with Japanese anemones, oriental poppies, verbascum, acanthus and drumstick Primula denticulata .

You will need

A trowel A pair of secateurs A fl ower pot A frost-free coldframe or heated propagator Soil, grit, water

Method

1 Select a healthy parent plant to dig up. Herbaceous plants with thick, fl eshy roots are good subjects to start with. 2 Sever roots the thickness of a pencil and, using a slanting cut at the base and a straight cut at the top (the end of the root nearest to the crown of the plant), snip them into sections of about 5-10cm. Trim o… any fi brous roots. 3 Push the cuttings vertically into pots fi lled with a compost and vermiculite mix, keeping the cuttings 4cm apart (left). 4 Cover the surface with 1cm of grit and water the pot well. 5 Place the cuttings in a frostfree coldframe. 6 In spring, when the cuttings are well-rooted, separate them and pot up individually. 7 Grow them on throughout summer until they are large enough to plant out.

Checklist

O This is a good time to plant new hedges. Order bare-root hedging plants during winter’s dormant period, or for quicker results try instant mature hedging from a supplier such as Practicality Brown ( pracbrown.co.uk).

O Clean greenhouse glass to ensure plants can make the most of winter’s weak light. Use a garden disinfectant and remember to scour the corners, too.

O Take strawberries potted up in August for forcing indoors now. If you have several plants, bring in half next month to stagger their fruiting season.

O Some summerfl owering bedding plants, such as lobelia, pelargonium and snapdragons, benefi t from an early sowing in January, as they need more time to grow.

At Majestic Trees, we value biosecurity very highly...do you?

In 2019 Oak Processionary Moth was parachuted from Europe into over 90 sites across the UK by professionals that were not so careful about biosecurity, importing oak trees ‘unknowingly’ infested with OPM from nurseries, traders and sourcing services they thought they could trust!

• ADVICE • DELIVERY • PLANTING • AFTERCARE •

Majestic Trees spend months selecting the trees we grow, ensuring they are of the finest quality, clean and healthy.

• grown on our 27 acre nursery to ensure they are free of OPM and other pests and diseases threatening our futures; • each tree is lifted and transplanted up to 7 times; • grown on in AirPots to ensure the finest fibrous root system; • trees are professionally pruned to develop a strong and vigorous crown.

Next time you are looking for trees, consider Majestic Trees. Unlike so many of our competitors, we are not a sourcing service, a virtual nursery or nursery that trades rootball trees we didn’t grow. Take your project’s biosecurity seriously, and ensure you comply with the new traceability and plant passport legislation, by buying trees grown on a UK nursery.

Employer of the Year Grower of the Year: Nursery Stock 2017, 2015, 2011, 2008

Conifers in every shade of green fill John Massey’s winter garden.

F L AT R I D G E COTTAGE

Plantsman’s KINGDOM

Nurseryman John Massey has created a garden that offers rich interest in late winter, by using the conifers, seasonal shrubs and well-bred hellebores for which he is renowned

You can bet that if a garden is photogenic, it is going to be somewhere you want to see for yourself. A walk around nurseryman John Massey’s garden at Flatridge Cottage in the West Midlands is always a memorable experience; one perhaps especially gratifying at this time of the year when our gardening spirits need a lift.

Having a garden for all seasons is often the aspiration, and sometimes the professed achievement, of gardeners with both grand and less assuming plots, but it is a rare thing that’s seldom realised in any meaningful way. Not so here. Far from relying on the obligatory winter plants, using the usual suspects, and falling into winter gardening clichés, this garden in February is full of splendid plants, the crème de la crème. The ideas for their display, and our enjoyment of them, are so fresh and creative we revel in the experience. There’s none of that suppressed undertone of putting up with winter while silently yearning for spring to arrive, making polite asides about ‘seer grasses’ or ‘monochromatic drama’. Winter here is a time to celebrate and enjoy. Even in the gloomy days of February it is a treat.

Geographically this garden is not huge. It’s about three acres in all and set next to John’s business, Ashwood Nurseries. Though the location is picturesque, with the Staordshire and Worcestershire Canal creating an ever-changing backdrop, the land is necessarily flat. Undulations, hills and slopes give a gardener an immediate advantage in the excitement and surprise stakes, but John cannot rely on any such natural features. Instead, he employs ingenious devices to take visitors on an odyssey. New vistas open up around the bend of an island bed, with carefully sited conifers,

Left Nurseryman John Massey, in his garden adjoining the Ashwood Nurseries site. Above Pale lemon Hamamelis ‘Sunburst’. Below Architectural features help to draw the eye in winter.

Above Cornus stems with clipped Prunus lusitanica in containers. Left Creamy-pink Helleborus x nigercors ‘Emma’ flowers in February and March.

intriguing and unexpected close up in their intimate detail, then giving way to a wider view – another experience. It might be a bed of grasses adding an accompaniment to the scene or a company of whitetrunked birch with snowdrops and cyclamen around their elegant ankles.

Elsewhere, architectural devices are employed to lead visitors through to further delights. In some places, formal stone columns mark the route, or the eye will be led through windows in a cloud-pruned holly hedge framing a collection of witch hazels, their sci-fi, spidery flowers releasing a perfume that mingles with the fragrance of Daphne bholua .

There are dingles full of ferns – many of them evergreen – that are a treasury of texture, form and colour. Who would have believed there could be so many greens? Another group of plants takes up the green theme, throughout the garden and particularly on the Rock Garden. John is mad about conifers; he

constantly extols their virtues and practises what he preaches. Conifers of every shape and texture and of every shade of green abound – a living lesson to those of us who blithely dismiss them as boring.

Accompanying the conifers and a collection of low-growing shrubs in the Rock Garden is a host of choice alpines, bulbs and corms, including a large colony of Cyclamen coum , their dinky orbicular leaves edged with silver or wholly pewter and all at their best in winter.

‘Adam’s Garden’, meanwhile, is a new feature, comprising a large collection of Cornus kousa . John was planning and planting it with his young

gardener and protégé Adam Greathead. Sadly, Adam did not live to see its completion. He died unexpectedly in November 2017 and the garden will be a memorial to a young man of whom John says: “I miss him terribly, but I know he will live on in our garden.”

A wander around the garden at Flatridge Cottage in winter, or, come to that, at any time of year, is a lesson in plant selection. Nothing here is an also-ran. John is in touch with plantspeople and nurseries all over the world and when his discerning eye is cast over a batch of plants, he has a knack for selecting. In his usual modest way he attributes many of these choices to advice from his numerous horticultural cohorts. Many of the plants here, however, have been bred on the premises. John is hugely respected, not only for his encyclopedic knowledge and his talent, but also for the inspirational love of plants that pours from him whenever he speaks of them. But even if you’ve never experienced the joy of hearing him, the garden says it all. Pay a visit and it is doubtful you will ever feel the same about the winter garden again. n Above left Dainty Narcissus ‘Sweet Sue’ is early to flower. Above right One of February’s finest combinations: the pink flowers and patterned leaves of Cyclamen coum and snowdrops. Left A plant in John’s vast hepatica collection. Bottom left The sweetscented blooms of winter-flowering Lonicera standishii.

Plants of the Month FEBRUARY

A cherry tree smothered in delicate, pretty blossom is a sight for winterweary eyes come spring. And many are suitable for small gardens

Prunus x yedoensis

If you can choose only one cherry and you have enough room for it, go for Prunus x yedoensis. It’s the unocial flower of Japan and its almond-scented, blush-white flowers signify the start of hanami – the Japanese celebration of cherries flowering. It’s a graceful tree with spreading branches that are early to bloom – the first of its blossom appearing in March and lasting into April. Its green leaves turn yellow in autumn, when they contrast with its black fruits. Ultimately, this cherry will grow to around 6-10m tall. As with all cherries, it needs a well-drained, fertile soil and plenty of sunshine. It shouldn’t need much pruning, but if you need to remove the odd branch, do it in summer to avoid silver leaf disease.

Prunus cerasifera ‘Nigra’

This popular cherry, commonly planted as a street tree in the 1950s and 1960s, has purple leaves that provide a striking contrast to the single, sugar-mouse-pink flowers that open from deeper pink buds and turn white as they fade. In the meantime, the bronzy young leaves intensify in colour as they mature to a rich, dark maroon-purple. Before falling in autumn, they turn red as a final flourish. As you might expect from a tree recommended for planting on our streets, Prunus cerasifera ‘Nigra’ is a tough customer that’s tolerant of a wide range of soils and conditions, but it thrives best in well-drained soil and sun. When it’s fully mature it will reach a height of between 5m and 7m, with a rounded shape.

Prunus ‘Tai-haku’

IMAGES

SHUTTERSTOCK For larger gardens, ‘Tai-haku’, the great white cherry, is showstopping. This 8-10m tall cherry has an impressively wide habit that makes for a mesmerising sight when it is covered in white spring blossom. Cherry enthusiast Collingwood Ingram (also known as ‘Cherry’ Ingram because of his passion for these plants) reintroduced ‘Tai-haku’ to Japan in the 1930s, after it had died out there some years previously. When a Japanese cherry expert showed him a painting of the lost cherry on an 1830s scroll, Collingwood recognised it as the one growing in his garden in Kent. He sent cuttings to Japan on the Trans-Siberian Express, helping ‘Tai-haku’ take root once again in its home country.

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