Time to take stock and assess what might be persuaded to grow
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
Gardening on the Edge by Diana Wayland
January, as I have said before, is a bleak month. Christmas is over, and the weather can be awful. Which, where I live, usually means hammering winds.
So it is an uplifting exercise, if you already are a gardener, to plan for the new season now. I have usually got most of my seeds already, but I plan what is going where in the kailyard and double check my seed stocks so I can get those I am still short of.
But what if you have never gardened before? How do you start? Where do you start?!
I assume that you do have a garden or, at least, a space outside your home where you could grow plants, either in the ground or in containers. Perhaps you have newly moved into your home, or you may have lived there some time but just not done anything with your outside space and now want to.
If you are new to where you live, if possible, leave the garden for the season, especially if you moved in during the winter. Herbaceous plants will be dormant and shrubs and deciduous trees can be difficult to identify when bare of leaves. Spring bulbs disappear in summer, so it is a good idea to wait and see what starts to come up in late winter. And this is something you can be looking for now, as the earliest ones, snowdrops and daffodils, are already pushing their way up here.
The trick is to be patient. Tidy your new garden. Cut the grass in season and remove weeds – this is a good way to learn which are the weeds to avoid lifting plants you would rather have kept! Look at what your neighbours are growing.
If you are new to the area then taking a look around at what grows wild in your locality can give you a good clue as to what stands a good chance of survival in your own garden. Living, as I do, on a headland, with the sea both to the north-west and the south-east, this was of paramount importance once I had decided I was, against all common sense, going to try to carve out a garden in such a wind-scoured area.
Where I live little grows but grass, rushes – indicating poor drainage, purple orchids, and heather on the moorland. However, we do have the tiny copse of struggling Sitka spruce, a multi-stemmed sycamore, a shrubby honeysuckle that I eventually discovered as being of north American origin, and a big clump of montbretia. Our weeds were nettle, cow parsley, hogweed, creeping buttercup and daisy. As I cultivated, in came a lot of annual weeds like hairy bittercress, chickweed and self-heal.
Further away, though, I spotted Rosa rugosa, gorse, osier (willow) and Fuschia x riccartonii.
Spring brought a plethora of daffodils, snowdrops and wild primroses. Yellow loosestrife, perennial cornflower and Magellan daisy also grow around here, as well as a wild aster.
All these gave me a basic framework of plants I could start with. Weeds often have cultivated forms which should do almost as well, and shrubs that already grow locally can form the framework as well as wind protection. Choosing old varieties also means they are more robust.
Where I live may never be lush, but I am learning every year just what I can persuade to grow here.
