Landscape and horticulture expert

Add your garden event to the Landscape Juice garden network

Do you have a gardening event that you wish to publicice or perhaps a gardening or allotment group that you need to boost the membership to?

Why not add your details to our 'Facebook' of gardening over at the Landscape Juice Network?

The great thing is, because we have thousands of visitors pass through during the week, your event may get that little bit of exposure you may not get if you pop an ad in the local paper.

£5 million leonardslee gardens for sale

How would you like to own a rockery, created by James Pulham, the Edwardian landscape gardener,
or, perhaps the treasured collection of ‘Loderi’ Rhododendrons which were planted by Sir Edmund Loder?

This may be your chance to own one of the most unique Grade I listed gardens, one of only 163, in England because Leonardslee, the home of the Loder family since 1889 has come on the market.

The sale is being handled by Savills

Royal Horticultural Society dates for 2008

If you are an avid visitor to RHS events, you might wish to bookmark this page for reference.

Coming soon is the London Orchid Show at Royal Lawrence Hall, Greycoat Street, London SW1.

Orchid exhibitors will be flying in from Taiwan, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil with a promise to bring in some new varieties.

National Garden Scheme - Gardens to visit in March

Spring is nearly here (well at least it might show it's face once the storm passes on Monday) and I bet you are itching to get out and about and take in a few gardens. Knowing what is open and where to go can be a dilemma.

Fret not, because the National Garden Scheme has compiled a list of gardens to visit in March.

Tree identification tours at Kew Gardens

A new tree identification tour has started at the world famous Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The tours take one and a half hours to complete with one of the Kew tour guides and will cost £5.00.

Each tour, which starts at 11.30 every Saturday morning from the Plants and People Exhibition (opposite the Palm House) is limited to just 15 people so you must pre book a place. Tel: 0208 332 5604 (weekdays only)
Email: tours@kew.org

Sheffields Winter Garden - a sweet smell of success

Think of successful garden attractions and what comes to mind? The Eden project and the Lost Gardens at Heligan are probably the two most popular and of course the National Botanic Garden of Wales. Lets not forget Kew and Wisley Gardens.
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There is one garden that very few gardeners have heard of but, after five very successful years, the Winter Gardens in Sheffield are celebrating their sixth million visitor.

The Brogdale fruit collection

Faversham in Kent is the home of the Brogdale Trust national fruit collection. The site boasts 150 acres dedicated to varieties of different fruit and is renowned worldwide - is thought to be the largest collection of it's kind anywhere, with 1880 varieties of apple and 469 and many other different fruits.

Using horses for courses at the RNRS

Earlier in the week I covered the debacle at the Royal National Rose Society - the gardens are faced with financial crisis just six months after a £500,000 makeover.

The latest news to come out as the departure, by mutual consent, of head gardener Neil Oakman is announced with revelation, by the new chief executive Roz Hamilton, of a lack of horticulture qualifications of the outgoing rose gardeners.

Hamilton is quoted as saying (source hortweek) “Neil was not a rose expert. It’s no secret three gardeners have left. None were rose experts. There is an argument that that’s a shortfall on us as a society. It is a specialist area and not something that can be learnt overnight. We have to have appropriate staff - That’s where a lot of the disagreements have come from.”

The Telegraph UK glasshouse tour

If you are a glasshouse nut then you might be interested in ten glasshouses that the Telegraph has listed to visit.

They are:

Bicentenary Glasshouse, RHS Garden Wisley, Surrey

Bicton Park, Devon

Eden Project, Cornwall

Glasshouses at Birmingham Botanical Gardens

Hampshire Hydroponicum at Houghton Lodge, Hants

National Botanic Garden of Wales, Carmarthenshire

National Rose gardens crumbles and teeters on the brink

October 2005 was the "dawning of a rosy future" and by January 2006, after the appointment of Neil Oakman as head gardener, success seemed mapped out for the Royal National Rose Society Gardens in St Albans.

Journalists were invited to follow the story of the re-birth and developments of the beautiful gardens and in May 2007 Peter Seabrook open the newly revamped £500,000 gardens in a splash of publicity.

But now, it is all falling apart as gardeners leave en mass under disillusionment and disbelief that the plan has gone awry.

Dundee Botanical Gardens gets it's business head on - eventually

Now call me a cynic but what have the managers been doing all these years at Dundee Botanical Gardens?

I caught up with a news item posted on the Greenfingers website with the headline: University promise not to close garden.

The news item has been instigated by rumours that the botanic gardens might have to close after a reputed funding shortfall after the government pulled the rug on the £75,000 grant.

The statement from Professor Peter Gregory has left me feeling stunned and I quote "In agreeing this set of recommendations, the working group have deliberated exhaustively over a period of six months."

and

"I have to thank all members for their contributions, their enthusiasm to find a way forward, and their commitment to finding a mutually acceptable solution that will secure the sustainability of the Botanic Garden for the future."

Look, without meaning to sound too rude, professors should stay clear of business and stick to professing because the solution to all the months of head scratching?

............and I quote the Greenfingers news item:"The garden will now be charging for car parking, selling more consumer goods and becoming more energy efficient in a bid to meet running costs."

Royal food taster required

If I were Camilla I would not let hubby Prince Charles prepare the breakfast in the morning without a member of the royal household testing the food in advance.

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