Search - Articles

, your safest bet is the white double Dianthus 'Mrs Sinkins' which smells like the wrists of wood nymphs. It's one of the old garden pinks (great scent, short flowering season, most of them about 30cm high) and was originally bred in 1868 by John Sinkins

. Then it was mostly about greenery, this time it is about flowers.Everything is beginning to explode into colour. Looking out of my office window there is a sea of pink as the Geranium psilostemon and Centranthus ruber are particularly rampant. There is a lone spike

of flower on Rosa 'Penelope'.Dahlia 'Hillcrest Royal': not a pink for the fainthearted. It is a full-bottomed swaggering pink that can really enliven a dowdy corner where the other plants are suffering from a bit of post-summer tristesse.Dahlia merckii

irises.I digress; my favourite roses at the moment are the Hybrid Musk roses. They were mostly bred by the Rev. Joseph Pemberton in the early 20th Century and make great shrubs and small climbers. They are soft coloured, like cowrie pink 'Penelope', clean

sink is the flowering currant with its limply hanging pink flowers. Not only is it extremely boring but the slightest contact with the leaves releases an unmistakable smell of cat pee. (I could just about accept Ribes sanguineum King Edward VII if I

spinning wheel and fell asleep for 100 years.But I learned about a different type of spindle on a field trip to Kew Gardens, in the autumn of 1984. I remember the moment of revelation very well. At the time I was enrolled on a 10-week gardening course (my

with many fingered leaves, which turn yellow and red in autumn. The flowers are white with yellowy centres and these are followed by pink-stained, white berries that hold for most of the winter.Number two: Malus tschonoskii. Nearly perfect for all

as cut flowers). I saw them at the base of street trees, gleefully mixed in with bright chrysanthemums and lipstick-pink cyclamen. Not  a very conventional mixture but certainly striking.There are variations: this one has a good solid evergreen box edge

m, flowers May/June.Allium 'Globemaster': a huge and spectacular mauvey number, with tight packed petals. Height 0.8m, flowers May/June.Allium hollandicum: probably the most popular variety. Dark purple, perky tennis ball sized flowerheads. Height 1m

and a sprawling midnight-blue sage. A spectacular display.The Korean chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum rubellum) is as tough as old boots. They were originally bred in about 1930 and can take temperatures down to about -20ºC. They grow about a metre tall