April and May are my favourite two months of the year as during this time plants are not only springing into life with new growth, but also presenting us with a beautiful show of flowers in all colours of the rainbow. Even the so-called winter flowering pansies are at their best during April and May; often flowering well into June, consequently people are reluctant to take them out to replace them with summer bedding plants. I do get cross when I see garden centres and superstores offering tender summer bedding plants during the first week in April, these are far too tender to plant outdoors and consequently they must be kept in a light, but frost-free greenhouse, or frame until it is safe to plant them outdoors after the third week in May.
During the second week in April, I planted runner bean ‘St George’. The beans were set in 5cm cell trays, one bean to each cell. The cell tray was placed in a heated propagator set at 35
°F, just enough to prevent frost damage. The beans geminated in eight days and as soon as one leaf is formed, they are potted up individually into 6 inch (15cm) pots, then grown on in my cold greenhouse. If frost is forecast the plants are covered with horticultural fleece. At the end of May, I shall then plant them out into the garden. ‘St George’ is an outstanding runner bean with bicolour, red and white flowers; in the RHS trials, it came top as the most prolific cropping runner bean.
This year the prolonged cold winter as caused the tips of the branches of many evergreen shrubs to turn brown. This is due to late growth, which is still too soft to stand prolonged hard frost. You can carefully prune back and remove the damaged growth and the shrubs will quickly put on a new flush of growth. My evergreen ferns also became very brown during February, even our native hart’s tongue fern looked very jaded. To rectify this I cut off all the leaves during the third week in April, but if you also have to do this, take care not to damage the new fronds, which are just emerging. For the last eight years I grow Chamaerops humilis ‘The dwarf fan palm’ in a pot, which stands in my Japanese garden. I should point out the palm is repotted into a slightly larger pot every second year. This superb, hardy palm will eventually form a trunk just over 3 feet (90cm) tall, its only fault being that as new leaves are formed the older leaves start to die, but are easy to remove by cutting the leaf stem back to the trunk with secateurs.
Let me finish by saying, despite the hard winter, what a superb show of flowers my Rhododendrons have given me. I have forty five different species or
hybrids, which vary in height from 6 inches (15cm) to 8 feet (2.4m) and in all colours but pure blue.
