Hedging your bets (or betting your hedges)

An entirely random thought.

I stumbled on a site that has kept a record of the date on which a hazel bush has come into pollen each year. The theory is that the date a hazel produces pollen indicates whether spring will be early or late (for the sake of completeness, catkins came 9 days later this year than last).

Tags: beech

People seem to think that every newly-planted tree needs a stake. They are sometimes (but not always) right as despite lots of writing to the contrary, staking is not always the best thing to do for your tree.

Here are a few reasons why.  Staked trees:

• tend to have a smaller root system than unstaked ones
• they also tend to grow taller and so are not as well anchored as unstaked ones.

Tags: planting, Staking

A lot of people will tell you to spray the weeds off before planting a hawthorn hedge.

Don’t bother. Use woven polypropylene weed prevention fabric instead. Cut the undergrowth short, put the fabric down where you want to plant the hedge and weigh it down with stones. If you want to be really tidy, push a strip about 2″ (5cms) wide of the fabric into the soil with a spade down each edge and at both ends (there is a good film on how to do this on our site).

Tags: Hawthorn, planting

Everyone knows that escallonia hedges get badly frostbitten.  I mean everybody.  Every book you read says that Escallonia are rather tender plants. Every list of plants that “only grow in the south-west” (it used to be “in the Scillies”) contains Escallonia.  I even read an article in a reputable gardening magazine that suggested you cover your escallonia with horticultural fleece. So you would think that the recent freeze would have made your escallonia red raw with cold.

Tags: Escallonia