- If your pots or containers are starting to look a little tired or you just fancy doing up some new designs for your planters I’ve put together a great list of easy to grow shrubs that are very well suited for containers or equally happy out in your garden beds and borders.
- The first one is an award winning plant. It's a Buddleia known as Butterfly Candy and it’s naturally dwarf - so suitable for smaller gardens and is a real show stopper in pots or containers. The flowers have a light, sweet fragrance and are extremely attractive to pollinators with a range of colours - great for biodiversity and very easy to grow with little or no maintenance required. Pop it into a pot by itself with some multipurpose compost - jobs done easy peasy!
- Just coming into colour now is Hellebore 'Pirouette' a clump-forming, evergreen perennial, growing to 40cm tall, with dark green leaves. Flowers are produced abundantly from now to mid-spring, opening from pink buds the flowers emerge white tinged with pink and darken to a deeper pink as they age - a great plant for a container.
- Fuchsia can be a great addition to a container or pot display the variety Delta Sarah is a newly introduced hardy Fuchsia, that produces lots and lots of large, white and violet-blue flowers. It's a free flowering small shrub and those unusual flowers really stand out. It flowers right up to October and will grow in sun or partial shade, growing to about a foot to 2 foot. It makes a fantastic pot plant. Calluna Beauty Ladies are a variety of heather that are nice and compact with tiny, urn-shaped flowers in shades of red, pink, purple, white, and yellow. They’re really easy to grow, evergreen and are drought tolerant, best grown in ericaceous compost or acid soil. They can be bought as single colours but in recent years growers have put 2 or 3 different coloured plants together in the one pot and they make a great combination with complimentary colors - very little minding required - can be part of a mixed arrangement, perhaps with some cyclamen and trailing ivy, or used as a pot filler by themselves. Great for late Summer, Autumn and into Winter - long lasting and easy to grow.
A few jobs for the week ahead;
- If you have camellias and rhododendrons make sure you keep them well watered at this time of year while their flower buds are forming - Especially ones in pots and containers which don’t really benefit from rainfall
- Keep an eye out for Potato blight when the weather is warm and wet - remove any badly affected plants to prevent spreading the fungus and spray with blight preventative spray
- Keep deadheading bedding plants every couple of days to encourage more flowers
- Hoe and hand weed any beds and paved areas to keep on top of weeds and prevent them going to seed and spreading more weeds - they should wilt quickly in this warm weather
- Take summer cuttings of your favorite shrubs
- If you have bare ground from any recent harvests and don’t plan to sow another crop you can sow some green manure - this will help prevent weeds filling the area and improve the soil - Mustard Seed or Phacelia are great choices for green manures