Hints and tips:
...These are not the carefully chosen close-ups of frost sparkling on seed heads that grace gardening magazines, so much as depressing snaps of the garden at its worst....
...In the March lockdown, I appreciated the lavender-purple flowers on Iris lazica, a robust fan-leaved iris which I much recommend. On lockdown’s fourth anniversary, lazica’s flowers are already fading....
...At home I grow the snake’s head iris, Iris tuberosa, with long grassy leaves and flowers in a blend of green and black....
...On January 4, the first flowers appeared on my Iris Lady Beatrix Stanley, just in time to be wrecked by heavy rain. Their first appearance usually occurs in late February....
...We are having a bonanza, after the months of cold, wet and difficulty: Buff roses, dark black flowers on iris Black Knight, marvellous blue on iris Mer du Sud, elegant white and yellow on tall Iris ochroleuca...
...Designers seemed to think that clumps of hardy geraniums, poor forms of Iris sibirica and repetitive thistly cirsium sufficed for their “plant material”....
...Among them were Antonia White (Frost in May was the first of the series), Vera Brittain, Stevie Smith and Rosamond Lehmann....
...Deutzia Strawberry Fields and Iris Alford are two of her favourites, to which I would add the pale pink and white Pride of Rochester, a lovely variety....
...Others were in odd places, none more so than the dark blue Iris unguicularis Bob Thompson, which has disappeared from the RHS Plantfinder but not from a bone-dry strip of ground beneath the overhang of my...
...Even smaller are the reticulate iris, such as vivid-blue Harmony and white-and-purple Painted Lady, which reach just 15cm tall and flower in late winter and early spring....
...Her perfumes are now sold in London, Paris, Dubai and Doha, and Sadie Frost, her daughter Iris Law and Rhys Ifans are all La Maison Hédonique devotees. Rhys Ifans?...
...Burberry tried to relaunch its make-up division this year with a major campaign headed by model Iris Law, daughter of actors Jude Law and Sadie Frost....
...Absent, surprisingly, is Iris Murdoch, who loved wild swimming and whose characters take a memorable dip in the Thames in Under the Net (1954)....
...In summer the garden was chocolate-box pretty and in winter, when clay was frozen into submission, it became a glittery theatre of icicles and frost....
...Pennard’s experts urge you to order now, so that the potatoes can be “chitted” in a cool, frost-free place....
...Photographs: Gap Photos; Jonathan Buckley/Gap Photos; Manfred Ruckszio/Alamy; RBflora/Alamy; Robert Mabic/Gap Photos; Rosalie Frost/Alamy...
...Available in various heights, the birdbath pictured here has a high-fired ceramic, frost-proof top with an oak base....
...… Established in 1851, Kelways Plants in Langport, Somerset, is one of Britain’s oldest nurseries and most famous for its peony and iris varieties....
...Crocosmias are members of the botanical iris family and grow from a cluster of small corms, best bought when growing in pots....
...● In general, outdoor edible citrus need frost-free (zone 8 and above) growing conditions. In autumn bring potted citrus indoors into a frost-free conservatory, glasshouse or orangery....
...Readers in frost-prone Scotland may be thinking that anyone in a milder climate can be exotic with plants that surprise a visitor on a sweaty American day....
...It is extremely vigorous and only survives the winter in a frost-proof greenhouse....
...They are at risk nowadays to cruel Mother Nature because a single night of serious frost can brown all their blooms if they open too soon in the season....
...It will have to be sown in a greenhouse and then potted on individually until the frosts have gone....
...The warm, clear days are followed by nights of low temperatures and sharp frost....
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