Kathe's Gardener Blog

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Summer 2017

September 2017                  

 My Journey in Gardening   by Kathe Worrell A Welcoming Shade Tree

Most gardens are a journey, not a destination. Like life, we never want it to end. Sometimes people will show me their garden & say, “This is a work in progress”. I laugh behind my lips (with a chortle actually). If it is not a work in progress, then you must have a boring yard or a duller imagination. Yet here I live amidst lollipop shrubs floating above a sea of black mulch & front lawn trees growing out of volcanos. While the tidiness can seem uninteresting, now & then I do see colors of life. Don’t get me wrong, I love it here. I have lived in anarchy & I hated it. Back there, some lawns were never mowed… ever. Forests were clear-cut, destroying valuable wildlife habitats. At summer’s end swimming pool water was dumped into my lively stream, while I was at church so I wouldn’t “see the dirty deed”. Sneaky & deadly to crayfish salamanders & other healthy critters. And then there was the perennial struggle to collect on the snow removal costs. Give me condo heaven any time. When we first moved to Harrogate, I wanted a spectacular specimen tree out front. If you only get one tree, I wanted it to be my true love. Yellow Magnolias were all the rage at the time & I yearned for the one I left behind. Fully aware that the yellows can be problematic in horticultural zone 7a, I went ahead anyway. The variety “Butterflies” was offered & I accepted the challenge. After a rough start, my specimen of desire finally kicked in & bloomed after about four years. Only one year so far has fulfilled the dreaded curse of frozen emerging buds & turning them into mushy brown death balls.  This year we noticed a large crack in the trunk. It has not permeated the vascular cambium & the bark shows signs of edge healing, so I am hopeful. If a tree retains excess water during a rainy year, it can freeze the wet inner core. We all know that water expands when frozen, like in an ice cube tray. Inside a tree it has nowhere to go except to burst through the bark at the weakest point. It looks like a vertical slit the entire length of the tree trunk. I do know better than to paint it or put any kind of “treatment” on it. We will just wait & see. Our little tree presented us with a big surprise this year. It’s first bird nest! Early spring I watched as a large Blue Jay kept flying in & out of the upper branches shortly after leaf out. Though we were away for about a month & missed the avian family event of fledging, the nest remains as a testament to this newly created environment of a suburban neighborhood. My tree had finally been accepted by the wildlife here. We are both happy. Not all tree wildlife is a wanted addition to the landscape. Beware of snakes! That’s right: six foot long black King or Chain snakes. They manage to climb trees looking for bird eggs or the easy pickings of the young. My neighbor has had three & they climb up under the deck on the ledge & curl up to sleep. Hope they are not nesting.  Late summer can be unbearable but if you schedule your gardening visits in the mornings, there is always time for a quick deadheading or to pick a bunch of joy for the vase. While waiting for my Summer Intern Garden Group on Tuesdays, I have taken to utilizing the shade under my lawn tree. I must admit I felt a little funny at first. I had never seen anyone sit under their front yard tree here before, but why not? It is a shade tree, after all. So if you see me sitting out there with an empty extra chair, feel free to join me & catch your breath from your routine walk around the hood. We can sit & gossip about the garden & who knows? … maybe about the weather too.

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2017 Gardener’s Notebook

Identity Crisis of Garden Clubs                  

June 2017   A GARDENER’S NOTEBOOK 

                                  by Kathe Worrell

The other day I took a garden bouquet to my dentist appointment. The Phlox divaricata alone filled the reception area with “clouds of perfume”. The fetching aroma, a cross of lilac & honeysuckle, greeted each new patient long before eyeing the colorful vase of May Day blooms: arching Solomon’s Seal, drooping Aquilegia canadensis, Golden Alexander Zizia aurea, sweet pink dianthus & blue Centaura montana. Needless to say I was treated like a rock star, as usual.

A new young dental tech came into my cubby with a ton of questions about her new house gardens. She sputtered out rapid fire inquiries tumbling over the words in excitement. “Should I water? What is mulch? Why? What happens if you don’t mulch? How will I know what are weeds?” I have always said that in this life, if you are interested enough, you will seek the answers. In a 60 second window, I told her to avoid using chemicals, pull weeds for therapy, and never stop asking questions. I told her to join a garden club & the other dental tech who is quite garden savvy, said, “You don’t understand. She knows nothing.” Before I could protest, the dentist entered ready to inflict his normal level of pain.

As I left I felt like my head would explode with sage advice & not enough time. Then I heard a little voice inside me say, “You don’t have to do it all. There are garden clubs for this sort of thing.” Therein lies the dilemma; the perception that garden clubs are only for snooty know-it-alls. When I joined a garden club over 20 years ago, I wanted to mingle with others of a similar passion. I was already a Master Gardener & had many gardens in prior years. Yes, I wanted to learn more, but I wanted to get to know other gardeners as well. It became sort of a gardener’s support group, too.

Garden club has helped me grow in many areas. I was managing a business, home, & kids. I needed more. Though I was involved at church, I craved that touch with community. Why not share my knowledge, willingness & ability? Garden club provided that threshold into the world for me. I loved the idea of public beautification: parking lot islands, Hockessin sign garden, nursing home butterfly garden.

For years, I avoided flower arranging because it exemplified a static strict confinement of the true nature of flowers. I thrived on the chaos of a wildflower bouquet. Then I went to a local flower show & the flower arrangements were decidedly unexpected and creative. I noticed for the first time they were called “floral designs”. Something clicked. I harkened back to my art school days & realized that flowers could be ART. The simple add-on of good natured competition just heightened my interest. And so I learn.

My strongest assertion that garden club members were not social climbers still seems right, but I have changed my attitude towards it being a social gathering. It is & it must be social, because we all will need this in the world of self-absorbed screen facetime. I predict that our culture will have the fortitude & intelligence to muster a backlash to the isolation of all this constant technology. Personal live contact will return to feed our very souls. The Gathering of Gardeners will offer that human touch, rather than cold keystrokes. Don’t get me started on robots… unless they can pull weeds & spread mulch.

Getting back to the next generation starting their first garden or inheriting one with their fresh purchased first house, the concept of legacy comes to mind. Historically we have all learned through mentoring. Hopefully this will continue through welcoming newcomers into our garden clubs, whether they know a weed from a flower or what mulch is. Do not close ranks to non-gardeners who want to learn. Are they not the next “society”?

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2 for one

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full glory of Shaving Brush plant

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A Gardener’s Notebook Dec 2016

“Shave & a haircut; two bits” (or 25 cents for all you whippersnappers)! Remember when a barber offered a shave with a haircut? You would recline in the world’s first version of a Lazy Boy chair while hot steamy towels were draped on your face. Waiting for your shadow pores to expand, the barber would take his trusty shaving brush, dampen it, & swirl it around inside the soap mug, creating the perfect lather looking like egg whites whipped in a frosty bowl. Quickly after removing the towels, the soapy bubbles were rubbed across your softened stubby skin like an artist stroking his paint brush. All this for the smoothest shave of your life with the strapping-sharp straight razor carving the snowy white foam as close as any kiss could conjure.

Hold that image for a moment. Imagine the frothy shaving brush as a rare flower, resembling the shimmering erect hairs topped with dots of soapsuds. Haemanthus albiflos (“albiflos” means white flower), commonly called the “Shaving Brush Plant”, hails from South Africa & is a member of the Amaryllidaceae family. Being from the opposite hemisphere, these plants make excellent houseplants, in that they bloom in early winter when gardeners dread the advent of short cold days & need a bit of cheering up the most. Lucky for us these African bulbs exhibit calendar confusion.

I bought this rare bulbous geophyte prized for its unusual appearance & EXTREME tolerance of neglect at a local garden club plant sale this past spring. Brandywine Garden Club puts on an excellent selection of plants for sale at St Alban’s on Murphy Road in north Wilmington. I find that often garden club members will collect & possess the more uncommon & atypical plants. When they dare to share their hoard, I consider it an opportunity as well as an honor. I took a risk, as it was neither in bloom nor familiar to me.

Though I passed up on the long table of Clivias & Mike Riska’s encyclopedic knowledge of them, I spied 2 square pots on the center table: one a large single bulb & the other smaller master bulb with a bulbet piggybacking on the side. As I picked them up to inspect their attributes, the lady that had just put them back, let out an audible sucking up of the room’s oxygen. “Those are mine!” she said. I actually had  been waiting for her to make a decision & knew full well that she was wrestling with her selection. I coquettishly held them both out to her & said “Pick one!” I had forced her hand before she was obviously ready. Oh, dear; too bad. She was not the only one foraging for a prize. She reluctantly grabbed the larger bulb & I happily bought the dual bulbs. Luckily there was a plant stake with the correct name.

After I got home, I quickly looked up the botanical name & found out its relation to Amaryllis. This gave me a clue to keep it in a shady spot outside for the summer, but not to repot it. It probably wouldn’t bloom unless root bound. I was also careful to cull my compulsion to “top off the soil level”. Amaryllis prefer to expose half of their bulb mass above the soil line. Cherishing my “find”, I certainly didn’t want over nurture it & cause it to rot. After all, this “Shaving Brush Plant” did earn the Royal Horticultural Society’s “Award of Merit”.

My intuition paid off. When I brought it inside the house in October, I kept it cool & on the dry side. Then in early November I noticed one of the thick flat leaves started to bolt. Could it be a bloom already? Too busy for the next week, I missed the first blush, but now it is in full swing & I am enjoying my determination to increase my fold of houseplants only with the unusual.

So, be fearless. Have courage to try something new once in a while. Break out of your winter complacency & let fly your comfort zone. Nothing ventured; nothing gained. And who knows? Maybe you too can discover an ugly duckling that will turn into a beautiful swan.

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NOV 2016 A Gardener’s Notebook

NOV 2016 A GARDENER’S NOTEBOOK by Kathleen Worrell Somehow there seems to be a non-sequitur between watching the verdant garden die-off & imagining your spring bulb design joyfully popping up through the greys of winter. C’ le vie! Such is life. With said ugly brown bulb in one hand & my drill with augur in the other, I must conjure up stalks of straight-up stalks flowing along like a fence ridge around my flower border. Hopefully I will not intrude upon some earlier design plan & the daffodils will share the limited space with swaths of color, organically recalling nature’s drifts of wildflowers.

I wanted to order some fresh faces this year to add to my fervent collection of flowering bulbs. While it is always a good idea to calculate the timeline of blooms, as in a sequential display, I decided this time to consider impact & form. Researching heirloom daffodils because of their resilience & longevity, I stumbled upon a delicious recipe for pairing Thalia narcissi and muscari grape hyacinths. If you plant a narrow “stream” of these white late-bloomers, then edge them with the gorgeous blue little Muscaris, it will reflect a river of rapids surrounded by blue water. As the blues naturalize over the years, the design changes, much like a brook in nature.

Further study took me to an anthology of Vita Sackville-West’s columns about her garden creation within the ruins of Sissinghurst Castle in England. One of her theories was to plant side-by-side those flowers that bloom at the same time, coordinating colors & elevations. This produces impact instead of a scattering of trinkets lost in a sea of mulch. Perhaps her most famous garden “room” is her White Garden. In America we are told to avoid white as pale & forgetful. She took that purest of hues & with repetition, consummated a world class wedding enclave. What bride wouldn’t want to have her portrait taken there? It is a glory to behold, white climbing roses arching over a central iron gazebo, accessible from paths facing the four points of a compass.

Other design issues to contemplate are the residual leftover leaves & stems after deadheading spent blossoms. Either plant your early-blooming bulbs near later-blooming perennials for cover or stage your bulbs like a three act play. Think of the cascade effect. Most very early bulbs like crocus, snowdrops, winter aconite, & rock iris are tiny anyway, so freely plant these gems next to your entry pathway, but far removed from snow shovels, plows & salt. Their leaves are spindly & small, some even variegated, hence won’t interrupt the eye.

Daffodils are poison to deer (& other flowers in a vase), quite hardy for our climate, & come in many new color combinations to please the most jaded of palates. To keep it simple, let’s use the idiom of Acts 1, 2 & 3 for succession purposes. One idea is to plant the earliest bulbs towards the back, progressing forward, so as to “cover your tracks”, so-to-speak. For Act 1, my “go-to” earliest narcissus is “Tete a Tete”, so bright at the end of winter it hurts your eyes & an excellent multiplier. For Act 2, I like “Falconet”: showy colors of orange & yellow, 8 flowers per stem, fragrant & shade tolerant. My Act 3 favorites are “Hawera” for generous naturalizing, “Cheerfulness” for fragrance & “Sun Disc”, small but magical. Just remember to leave some spaces for those tall summer-blooming tiger, Asiatic, or Oriental lily bulbs or perennials to bolt upwards like an umbrella over the lot of them.

I am still resonating with the idea of power partners. There are oodles of escorts for daffodils. Don’t forget Alliums for those late bloomers in consort with the Muscaris & Anemone blandas. I avoid most tulips due to critter pub grub & also for their notorious reputation as a one-night stand. Stick with the species varieties like “Peppermint Stick” for return rewards. Most fritillaries are too late, but if you want a really unusual flower pattern in checkerboard (no joke), then try out the F. meleagris. They have a peculiar growth habit of lying down at first, then scooting up towards the sun near bloom burst. The key, as always, is to observe the plant in its native habitat, which is in a meadow of grasses that act as support for their weak stems.

Autumn garden work is important. Do as much as you can now because in the Spring you never have enough hours in the day for the garden.

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Mason visiting Aunt Kathe. so cute.

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Lantana never fails to attract butterflies

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Tobacco? horn worm found on my tomato plant. Red horn so cool.

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A Gardener’s Notebook

October 2016

Fall Container Design I don’t know about you, but my urns outdoors start to look more than a little ragged by now. I have to remind myself that there are four seasons, not one. A container garden offers the opportunity to show off… er… display that season’s theme or bounty. Who says you can’t just tuck a mini pumpkin or three into your fall design? It doesn’t HAVE to be just flowers in a pot.   Ever notice a simply gorgeous planted urn like at Longwood & wondered what made it so spectacular? I’ll bet you saw the scale of it before you identified any of the plant material. Like any good work of art, if you squint your eyes a bit, you become aware of a perspective of the whole. Scale begins with size of container associated with both the shape & height of the stuff on top.  

SCALE & PROPORTION is one of the greatest challenges of container gardening. Traditional formula for a triangular display is 1 to 1½ times the height of the pot & ½ again the width. One exception is a tall narrow pot which can easily carry a 2X height rule. Learn to trust your own eye. Avoid a fully mature planting in a narrow bottom container; it will look top heavy, resemble an ice cream cone & might even tip over. 

COLOR choice can emulate harmony or contrast. A palette of tones of one pigment (e.g. reds & pinks) create a harmonious combination, as does colors sitting next to one another on the color wheel (sunset group=red, orange & yellow or the cooler, misty ones=pinks & purples).   For contrast, complementary hues fit the bill.  Contrast is created when colors that do not share a common hue are used. For example, red flowers & green foliage can be exhausting. When working with pure contrasts (opposites on the color wheel), use the paler versions & soften with foliage.  

AUTUMN colors are pretty easy to figure out. My personal favorite combo is light purple of Aster & blush orange of small mums.  

BACKGROUND/ SITING is rarely considered. Fortunately, our houses are neutral (being cream stucco or grey stone) & provide a non-competitive back drop for our creations. If you have a borrowed landscape such as a distant tree line or sloped grassy knoll, take into account the plethora of greens competing for your view. Try some colorful flowers or silver/ burgundy foliage.  

TEXTURE & SHAPE go hand in hand. “Plants with textured foliage not only stimulate us visually, but also invite us to get up close & touch them”. Who hasn’t walked next to a stand of grasses & gently combed your hand through the slender stalks & caressed the soft seed heads? This intimacy is suggested with the autumnal grasses, artistically tangled in wisps of linear chaos. The beauty of grasses in our fall displays is that you can use them cut instead of taking up room in your pot with their roots. They can dry quite nicely in place, giving you that desirable height, often difficult to achieve with the round balls of mums we seem so attached to. Another idea- use fallen dead wood sticks & berry stems or vines (Bittersweet) or shrub limbs such as Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’, Harry Lauder's Walking Stick.  

AUTUMN SELECTIONS for survival depends on plants that can take a light frost or even prefer cooler weather. Besides mums, the two most common plants are pansies & ornamental kale, which BTW, often last through most of the winter. Osteospernum & lettuce also like it cool. The blues & purples of fall Asters offer a cooler palette for a change with pinky mums or as contrast to the oranges & yellows..  

“The sole aim of ornamental gardening is to excite the senses & bring us pleasure”. Now that’s what I’m talking about. 

As gardeners, engineers, cooks, & artists, it is mandatory for us to be resourceful. After the mid-summer flower-shearing, I often take the best cuttings & start new plants in styrofoam cups. Puncture 5 holes in the bottoms using a wood skewer (3 at a time). Fill with “Seed Starting Soil”, insert cutting, water in, & top off the craters. Keep in a shady area outside or in a porch & check on them every other day to keep moist. I did this with Million Bells & my ‘Blue Daze’ Evolvulus. They easily rooted & are now ready to use as the “spill over” plants. All free, Do the same with lettuce seeds to tuck in as filler. And don’t forget those big dried hydrangeas; always a good choice because you don’t have to water them!

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black swallowtail caterpillar

Calla Lily and calla pod

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Summertime

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Queen Anne’s Lace and Black Cherry Tomatoes

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Summer’s Bounty

SEPTEMBER 2016     A GARDENER’S NOTEBOOK      BY KATHE WORRELL

Pick. POP! Squish! Explosion of summer’s primal gravy quenching my thirst with tiny acid seeds draped in nature’s sweetness only a cherry tomato can combine. My new experiment in container vegetable growing on my little deck has proven fruitful. Not sure which variety would thrive, indeed survive, within the confines of a pot, I chose a basic no-name cherry & a new variety for me, “Black Cherry”, a gift from a friend. The Spring this year was intolerably long, cold, and wet, so I waited rather late to put them out. One positive aspect of container gardens is that you can drag them back into the house should a chilly night threaten.

However, much to my chagrin, when the heat finally did come on, these 2 pots quickly engaged the photosynthesis process & the straggly seedlings sprang forth like the Longwood water fountains. Before long the useless suckers begged for mercy, but my trigger finger started twitching & “Off with their legs”, at least to the crotch connection to the main stem. Oops! I accidentally cut one off that had a half dozen flowers, such pert & pretty golden stars beneath the canopy of scalloped leaf. “Hmmm. Let’s experiment with this little beauty”, I said to myself. I thrust it deeply into a foam cup filled with seed-starter soil. Sure enough, the entire stem below soil surface became strangely pimply with root spikes. So Mad Max cool.

Don’t we dream about these sultry summer days all through the winter? The sun was hotter than blue blazes one day when I walked out on the deck & every tomato leaf had curled up like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Uh-oh, the soil was dry as a bone & I knew it was time to take action to save my crop.

In England they call it “potting on”.  This is a delicate operation when the repotting into a larger pot involves so many fragile dainty blossoms destined to become real tomatoes if kept intact. I took my time & though awkward at times, I managed to pop them out of jail & roll them into their roomy new home cushioned with fresh soil. It worked! Though the Black Cherry is a little cattywampus, I liken its shape to an overgrown bonsai with artful trellising.

Now I pick several everyday while I graze through my grooming routine on the deck. All the containers are bulging with end of season roots so they need watering each morning. Deadheading is essential for rebloom. Flowers seem to respond with colored fervor to be freed from the arduous task & energy draining commission of setting seed after petal fall. It is my Zen time in the garden. I do love this stage when everything is alive & teeming with eye candy.

Don’t know if it was all this extra rain or what, but the Queen Anne’s Lace this year is spectacular. I’ve already started to gather up my plunder for kitchen bouquets & for hanging upside down to dry the full seed heads of matured past prime blooms. They resemble a massive ball of spider webs on the edge of imploding at any moment. Later these baseball globes of wonder will supply me with the opportunity to scatter these graceful creatures of nature on some forgotten barren spot.

Today I took some of the smallest blossoms, nipped their stems & laid them out on some acid free card stock. Easily layered, I pressed the flower sandwich with a sheet of heavy glass & a weight. I did some leaves of this native carrot as well. These should bring a burst of joy mid-winter when I take the pressed flowers and adhere them to my home made valentines.

Another experiment for drying was to mix up my own version of the expensive silica gel. I mixed 1 cup of corn meal to 1/3 cup of Borax (any 3:1 ratio). I poured about ¼” layer onto the bottom of a cookie tin. I took some fresh cut barely opened Queen Ann’s Lace flat heads & twisted them upside down into the dry meal just to anchor them slightly. Then I gently spooned my “recipe” on top until covered completely all but the stem. With layer one complete, I nipped the skinny stems close to the surface, but still protruding. In a few days I will lasagna-layer some again.

Years ago my mother gave me the best Christmas present ever- a food dehydrator. Of course I mainly used it for flowers, but oh! The Queen Anne’s Lace always came out so perfect. The very next Christmas I smothered our tree with intricate lacey drieds resembling snowflakes, reflecting a white Christmas that we always sing & dream about. And they were all FREE! Imagine that.

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Shasta Daisy ‘Becky’ & morning glory

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Botany 101, Yarrow, & Brad Pitt

JULY: Botany 101 ...............  A Gardener’s Notebook............ by Kathe Worrell Put your science cap on for a minute. Plants were important to physicians as remedies for thousands of years & because each plant was considered a drug with a unique ingredient & dosage, these early practicing botanists needed names to be specific & consistent. Though Linnaeus is credited with creating the present bi-nomial system in 1750, it was actually in 78 A.D. that Dioscorides, a Greek physician, that first came up with the first written & illustrated list of plants from the eastern Mediterranean. This list was so extensive, it was used exclusively by physicians for the next 1500 years.

Enter Carolus Linnaeus who realized the danger of describing a plant by its common name when that name could be applied to several different plants in each area. His system introduced the idea of a bi-nomial (bi=2 & nomial=name of) scientific name for each plant. Two words to state the generic or GENUS name, then a descriptive or specific word = SPECIES or some general characteristic, both in italics (does this mean in Italian?). In technical articles, a third word is added (not in italics) as an abbreviation of the name of the describer or plant hunter OR use apostrophes to encase a ‘cultivar’ or ‘series’. Are we confused yet?  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

For JULY I thought it might be fun to learn a few basic Latin words. You will be surprised how much you already know. Many English words have a Latin base. For instance, bi=2 & tri=3. “Folia” anywhere in a name is talking about leaves or “foliage”. See? Easy peezy. When you see the term “microfolia” , of course you recognize the meaning to be “small foliage”. “Micro”, however, comes originally from the Greek “mikros” or small. Technically, you will be happy to learn that not all scientific botanical names are from the Latin. Some older species are actually Greek based. Which brings me to this month’s FOCUS PLANT:

Achillea - The genus was named after the Greek mythological character Achilles (the hunky warrior played by Brad Pitt in the movie “Troy”). According to legend, Achilles' soldiers used yarrow to treat their wounds, hence some of its common names such as allheal and soldier’s bloodwort. It is said that Alexander the Great always carried this plant on his campaigns because they held pain relieving properties & the leaves could stem the flow of blood. Consequently, Yarrow was originally called “herbal militaris”. Also known as “Nosebleed Plant”. The binomial name today is Achillea millefolium. Anyone care to guess what “millefolium” could mean? Hmmmmm.. sounds like “million”. At first I thought it referred to the quantity of tiny flowers, but it could also mean the million of cuts in the feathery leaves. What do you think? North American natives called this plant the feathered leaf.

  Yarrow and its North American varieties, was used in traditional Native American herbal medicine by tribes across the continent. The Navajo, Miwok (in California), Pawnee, Chippewa, Cherokee, & Zuni peoples all used yarrow mostly for pain remedies. The blossoms and root are chewed, and the juice applied before fire-walking or fire-eating. A poultice of the pulverized plant is mixed with water and applied to burns. Recently it was reported that treatment with Achillea millefolium may attenuate disease severity, inflammatory responses, and demyelinating lesions in a mouse model of Multiple Sclerosis. Do not try any of these remedies, for safety sake, & especially NOT before any fire-walking or particularly any fire-EATING.   Most unsafe.

My Achillea is blooming throughout the month of June & provides an attractive helicopter pad for butterflies & dragonflies. (Why do dragons sleep during the day? So they can fight knights.) While the common variety is a golden yellow, mine is an hombre of pinks intensifying or fading each day. Pure delight. Left alone, their desiccated heads continue to sway through the fall & can be harvested as a dried component for arrangements & wreaths.

Many gardeners populate their flower beds with nostalgic plant names for some life event or time. I like to pick plants with names that remind me of places to which I have traveled. I fondly remember a daffodil ‘Avalon’ (NJ beach), a Longifolium Asiatic lily ‘Algarve’ (trip to Portugal),  Long Island daisy, Hillside pink Sheffield (England) mum, Centaura montana & a yew ‘Duke Gardens’. My latest passion is my new ALPINE rock garden bed. Can you guess the destination of our next trip (the Alps?) ? A Swiss Christmas! Sweet!