Help! Aliens in my garden!!

You might have seen this article today on the BBC, UK bans sale of 5 invasive non-native aquatic plants.

The BBC actually do a pretty good job of covering gardening and environmental issues and I’ve regularly seen things here that have made me think, “I really should write about that.” So now I am.

There are a few things in this article that bear repeating or refuting.

“A Defra spokesman told BBC News that it was the first time that non-native plants have been banned from sale in England.”

Really? That seems astonishing to me. The UK, as an island, has a lot of local, native plants that can be adversely affected by other species. While we’ve traditionally been an importer of other species from Imperial days, we’ve known about the risks of a large number of plants and animals for a very long time.

Japanese knotweed has been a top offender for years and its use has been seriously restricted, if not actually banned, for years. In fact, the location of infestations has been kept secret to ensure that the curious don’t go to find it.

If you look up Japanese knotweed on the BBC web site, you’ll find 63 articles dating back to 1999. We’ve known about these problems for ages, so why is Defra only acting now?

“The plants to be banned from April 2014 are water fern, parrot's feather, floating pennywort, water primrose and Australian swamp stonecrop.”

What exactly is wrong with banning them tomorrow? Or yesterday?

“Environment Minister Richard Benyon said tackling the impact of invasive species costs £1.7bn each year.”

Hmm. That’s the same number used in this article from 2 years ago.

“The plants have been listed in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, but it was only illegal to dump the plants into the wild.”

Good thing there’s no illegal dumping in this country…

“It added that a recent study carried out in England showed that there were 2,721 non-native species living in England, of which the majority (1,798 or 66%) were plants.”

As a garden designer, I find this statistic particularly alarmist. We’ve been safely importing and breeding foreign plants in the UK for hundreds of years. Some of my favourite plants are non-native. Anyone ever eaten a potato?

In fact, you’ll really struggle to buy only native plants for your garden these days as your local garden centre is full of them. Here are a few of my favourite aliens (Acer palmatum 'Bloodgood', Camellia japonica, Agapanthus inapertus) all of which you’ll find safely inhabiting gardens around the UK.

  

Overall, banning the import and sale of species that are clearly damaging to the local environment is the right thing to do. We really need to be doing it a lot faster than this.

First bulbs of spring

Was driving down Oak Avenue in Hampton today and saw my first naturalised bulbs of the year.

Bulbs are one of my favourite things. The fact that they just hang out all winter for the first bit of warm weather and then appear out of nowhere with a fabulous show.

The bulbs in the park on Oak have been there a long time and have a nice natural feel to them. There are good and bad ways to naturalise bulbs and this is a pretty good one. In the next few weeks we should get the annual bulb show on Hampton Village green. I'll take a few pictures of that because it's a great example of how not to naturalise bulbs...

I was driving and couldn't stop to take a picture, so here's a nice picture of some other naturalised daffs instead.

Plant Pick: Spiraea japonica MAGIC CARPET

Yesterday I mentioned that I’d been out trimming my Spirea. To be accurate I should have said Spiraea japonica. The particular variety I have is called Magic Carpet which has an RHS AGM.

This plant contains a range of very strong colours throughout the season so isn’t for the faint hearted. From bright red and green of new leaves to the almost lurid pink flowers it produces in mid summer.

[Note: the first 2 pictures are not of the Magic Carpet variety, but have the same visual impact.]

What I really love about this plant other than its dramatic effect is how easy it is to maintain. Trimming it takes about 10 minutes every year or two. All you need to do is to trim it back to the size and shape you want it to be in. Just remember that it will put on about 8in/20cm of growth all round before mid-summer.

Remember to do your trimming in December or January before the new growth gets too far along. I gave mine it’s winter pruning yesterday. It’s looking a bit sad for it, but I know it will come back strongly this summer.

And finally, sunshine!

It’s been a pretty interesting 2013 so far; starting way back in December! Rain, grey, cold, snow, ice. All the sorts of things you’d kind of expect during December and January in greater London, but not this contantly. But even with reasonable expectations, the weather has been a lot worse than any of us needed for the past 5 weeks.

But suddenly, today, we seem to have had a reprieve! The temperature was up to 5C. The sun was out. And amazingly the first signs of spring were showing!

I have new red shoots on my roses, colour on my Spirea, and plump buds on my Camellia ready for spring.So that meant it was time to get outside, see how plants have fared, and start the cleaning, preparing, and trimming for the new year.

Overall, in spite of the recent cold, things seem to have fared pretty well. Most of the plants look in reasonable condition and I’ve only lost one pot to the recent freezing weather.

I started with my rose which I’ve been slowly training into a fan over the last couple of years. Today it’s had a pretty good trim, removing some large, but inconveniently growing stems and trimming smaller ones from the fan. I’ve found that with this particular rose the act of lying the main branches horizontal has a dramatic effect on its growth and flowering, like most climbing roses.

This poor thing was first installed in a location that was far too shady then forcefully moved to a new location where it struggled for a while. It’s a Dublin Bay rose and, with good training, can produce a huge number of impressive red flowers throughout the summer. The blooms have a really classic rose shape but no scent at all.

Here’s one of the better flower pictures from last year.