Taken from Lynne’s weekly column ‘Ask Lynne’ for the Western Mail. 2nd July 2016
Handle with Care
Last week I wrote how some garden plants can be potentially dangerous for your pets. One reader emailed to ask me to mention the dangers of some plants for gardeners too, as they had just had an unpleasant reaction to their beautiful Freemontodendron, which adorns the front of their house.
`California Glory’, is a spectacular, large, evergreen shrub from California with deep-yellow, single flowers, up to 3in in diameter, which are produced from May until September. It will stand up to 15 degrees of frost, provided it is planted against a south-facing wall and can grow to 25ft tall, so is best placed against a house at least two storeys high.
The flowers, which fade to orange, are divided into five parts, with a dainty, pointed tip to each, and prominent dark-yellow stamens. They are stunning and all in all it is a shrub that works hard for you in the garden. But it does have a dark side, which is why Mrs Parfit wrote in.
The thick, flannelly leaves are green and mainly three-lobed, like a field maple. They look soft and furry but both the silver undersides of the leaves and the young shoots are covered in tiny downy hairs, which are a real irritant and can cause itching and rashes.
To prune the shrub, please cover up accordingly and also wear goggles, as it can be very painful if you get the tiny hairs in your eyes, as Mr Parfit found out.
Ironically the shrub is an enthusiastic grower so tends to require regular pruning. It also has a disconcerting habit of dying after a few years, either wholly or in part (as do abutilons and ceanothus) – although you may be tempted to shorten it’s life even more if you are a victim of it’s hazardous hairs.
Treat your Tree
Do you have a tree that is special to you, your friends and family or your community? If so, the Woodland Trust are running a competition to find the 2016 Tree of the Year in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Supported by the People’s Postcode Lottery, they’re offering the winning trees in each country a £1,000 ‘Tree LC’ pamper package, plus all shortlisted trees that receive more than 1,000 votes, a £500 ‘Tree LC’ pamper package.
The ‘Tree LC’ pamper packages are intended to help protect, support and celebrate a better future for your special tree. They can be used to cover the cost of necessary tree work or to help prescribe a more prosperous future for your tree through:
Tree surveys or professional management advice, tree work such as pruning, fencing, haloing, mulching for root protection and/or removal or management of competing vegetation, providing interpretive or educational materials, signage or digital information that helps to build support for your tree or enabling community engagement activities to help support and protect your tree.
Nominations are open to any living tree in the UK and any individual, group or organisation can enter a tree until midnight on Friday 29 July. The winning trees from previous years will be excluded from nomination. An independent panel of experts in each of the four countries will choose a shortlist from the entries submitted and winning trees in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be decided by a public vote between 19 September and 9 October 2016.
Later in the year, each country’s individual Tree of the Year will go on to represent their nation in the 2017 European Tree of the Year competition, organised by the Environmental Partnership Association.
Go on – treat your tree!
Offering Support
Well June was indeed Flaming June for gardeners but for the wrong reasons. Heavy bursts of rain have battered a lot of the tall herbaceous plants in the beds and borders and the ones at the front, in particular, will probably be lying dejectedly over your paths and lawn edges.
Don’t despair – although it is always good to stake and support before the plants are flattened, with a bit of patience (and help), you can encourage them to stand tall again. Try not to go for the ‘just tying string around the middle’ look – they always look like someone whose belt is too tight – but take a little bit more time to push twiggy sticks into the clumps for support to look a bit more natural.
Don’t forget that you can always cut flowers for the house, as often many herbaceous plants will have a second flush of blooms later on in the year. And don’t be too despondent – the weather is supposed to be drier than average for July, so we may just have a summer yet!
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