The Genus Garden

It’s that time of year again and the search for Christmas gifts at full throttle.  Gardeners past enjoyed a now familiar set of innovative products bought as special gifts.  During...

With the Genus borders planted up with tulips and wallflowers we were finally able to get on with mulching. This has been an annual operation  since we moved here over ten years...

We had our first real frost last week.  Not a surprise for late November but still a bit of a shock.  It turned out to be a day of bits...

The first thing you learn when using ‘black’ plants in the garden is that they’re rarely black; dark reds, purples, and sometimes dark blues are usually the norm.  Despite this,...

‘Hands up who likes blackfly’?  No, we don’t either.  They often appear suddenly in the garden and can cause several problems that need to be dealt with.The bean aphid Aphis...

We love Aeonium ‘Zwartcop’.  It’s a tender branching succulent that can grow up to 1.2 metres high and is a perfect specimen to have as an architectural centrepiece in pots...

Good weather last week enabled us to get several hundred tulips planted in the borders at Genus HQ.  This week we overplanted the tulips with the wallflowers that were sown...

We’re planting several hundred tulips this week.  Hooray!! They arrived several weeks ago but we’ve been trying to make space in the beds to plant them.  We’ve gone for some...

Ornamental grasses are extremely popular with gardeners in the UK.  With their height, movement, and colour they easily earn their place in any garden.  Last week could well have been...

Some days at Genus HQ have to be more about the infrastructure than the plants, so this week we put aside a day to complete a few practical tasks that...

It’s getting colder, the leaves are falling fast and it’s time to tidy up dead and tatty growth and prepare for winter. Protect slightly tender herbaceous plants like penstemon or Verbena bonariensis...

Ordering  spring bulbs is an exciting job.  An evening in with the fire lit, a cat on your lap, and bulb catalogues spread all around.  Perfect!!  But it’s not until...

It’s at this time of year that we realise the garden here at Genus HQ, whilst still retaining colour in the flower borders, is lacking colour elsewhere, particularly in the...

New french doors at Genus HQ have replaced a window and necessitated the removal of a grape vine that was originally trained over it.  Groundworks had disturbed the roots, grapes...

The north facing wall of the cottage at Genus HQ has a number of climbers but in autumn the ‘orange peel’ clematis ‘Bill MacKenzie’ shines a light into this shadier...

Autumn is the time to clear up the garden and begin soil preparation and bulb planting for next spring. Tall shrubs like buddleia which will be pruned hard in spring,...

With over 2,500 moth species in the UK we thought we’d try and see what lurked in the Genus HQ garden at night.  So we set up a light trap...

You may remember our disappointment a few weeks ago when we wrote of the sorry state of the garden at Genus HQ after the winds and rain had battered the...

Plants are like children.  There are the naughty troublesome ones that require constant supervision, the loud shouty ones that are actually quite delicate, and the ones that just quietly get...

Forward notes are a wonderful thing.  There’s always so much to do in the garden that without some planning important jobs would be missed.  And so it was this week...

We mentioned late season colour last time and we also mentioned that our focus was on our spring borders which have been lacklustre for the last few years. Consequently the...