February Guest Speaker Report
Our speaker this month was the ever popular Kevin Thomas, with a talk entitled Winter Interest In The Garden. Kevin started off with a few slides of pots, tubs, hanging baskets and borders full of colourful summer bedding, to give us a boost at this time of year. He also related the stories of how he has accumulated 4 greenhouses for his new garden!
We were then treated to photos of gardens with stunning autumn colour, in particular Mount Usher in County Wicklow, Ireland, which looked beautiful. Kevin also showed us a variety of good autumn plants, including Japanese Maples, colchium (autumn crocus), nerines (pink being the hardiest),
cyclamen, callicarpa `Profusion` (beauty bush with mother of pearl lilac berries) Arbutus unedo (strawberry tree), enkianthus (Kevin`s all-time favourite shrub) and ginkgo with leaves that turn golden in the autumn before falling. Kevin mentioned that the ginkgo is the emblem for Bute Park in Cardiff and they have champion trees there.
For winter interest there is a surprising amount of plants available, with colourful berries, stems or bark. Trees can make a beautiful focal point in the garden, with recommendations such as birch for their white bark, Acer griseum (paperbark maple) which has peeling, papery chestnut-brown bark,
and Prunus autumnalis which flowers in autumn and winter. There are many conifers which are slow-growing and give colour throughout the year, such as Juniper with bluey coloured foliage, and many golden coloured varieities.
We are spoilt for choice with shrubs, many of which are evergreen and flower in winter with heady scents e,g Daphne, Saraccoca, mahonia and Viburnum tinus. Pyracantha is a thorny shrub best grown as a wall trained shrub, and has berries of red, orange or yellow which last most of the winter. Some deciduous shrubs flower in winter before the leaves appear such as Viburnum bodnantense `Dawn`, winter-flowering honeysuckle, and many varieties of witch hazel. Some varieties of clematis flower in winter, e.g C. cirrhosa `Freckles`. C. tangutica has fluffy white seedheads for winter structure. Dogwoods have brightly coloured stems, as do salix (willow), and look stunning en masse interplanted with grasses, snowdrops or winter aconites. Pittosporum `Tom Thumb` has purple evergreen foliage throughout the winter and low-growing winter heathers can provide ground cover with flowers of white, pink or purple. Hellebores start to flower in late winter with
nodding heads of various colours, and look best planted in raised beds so the flowers can be easily seen.
Pots and tubs can also provide winter colour planted up with violas, winter-flowering pansies,cyclamen and trailing ivy, with tete-a-tete daffodils added for spring colour.
We would like to thank Kevin for another informative, interesting, comical talk. He never fails to entertain! Thanks also to everyone who attended the talk, it was a very good turnout.