SPRING GARDEN MAGIC

Hooray! We’ve turned the cold-weather corner! We’re standing in the spring sunshine! Can you feel your heart skip a beat – in a good way? Yup - it’s that time of year in the garden when the magic happens, and here are three guaranteed spring-blast sparkle-magic moments you can create…

1. The magician’s bouquet: first, walk into your nearest garden center where you’ll spot some seriously good-looking Hydrangeas called Tuxedo®. There they’ll be, sitting in their pots picture-perfect, ready to be gift wrapped and carried out the door like a bunch of florist’s flowers. You could give them to someone, but this time, treat yourself instead. Take your Tuxedo hydrangea home and pop that glorious living bouquet smack in the middle of the coffee table, or on your desk, or beside the front door and enjoy it. Then, to make the magic happen, a few weeks on, take Tuxedo hydrangea outside and plant it into a large container or out into the garden itself. Then stand back because it will quickly grow into a glorious, black foliaged three-foot-high bush which will give you flowers for many years to come. Your potted bouquet just transformed itself into a proper permanent garden shrub. Garden magic.

Bring Tuxedo® hydrangea home and pop it into a cache-pot like this basket and you’ll enjoy weeks of living flowers. This is the red lacecap version.

2. A shade shifter: there’s a rose called Flower Carpet® Amber. It’s pretty special even before we start talking about its magic secret, because it grows fast, stays green (USDA zones 5-10) and flowers from spring through to fall. But what makes Amber really special is the way it looks like it’s more than one rose. To explain, just say you went out and planted Amber. After it had spent some time settling in and establishing itself, it would come into flower. And being a Flower Carpet rose, it would be covered in flowers. First the buds would swell – hundreds of them – and they’d be a lovely deep orange. These would open progressively into sherbet-shades of orange-yellow blooms. And then these flowers would settle into shades of soft pink and peach. So at any one time, the one rose bush looks like there are at least two very color-complimentary roses growing together, one orange and one pink. Garden magic.

Three roses in one: Flower Carpet® Amber gives us orange buds, sherbet early blooms and soft peach pink full blooms.

3. Bare earth to wow: this is the classic spring surprise moment. It’s a wonderful thing to do with children who will probably love gardens from that point on (if they don’t already). Get some bulbs – daffodils, narcissus, freesias, tulips, whatever – and gather together a container and some potting mix. Shake in the potting mix to about half way up the side of the container, and pat it down. Then have your young assistants place the bulbs the right way up across the entire surface of the ‘soil’ (use the internet to help you work this out, or if in doubt, lay the bulbs on their sides). Cover everything gently with more potting mix and again, pat it down. Then keep your pot damp (but not soggy – watch out for overenthusiastic young waterers) and have everyone keep a look out for those first, miraculous spikes of green. It only gets better as color and fragrance follow. 

If you plant your bulbs tightly together you’ll not only get a great display like these tulips, but the flowers and foliage will help to support each other.

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Story Starters from Tesselaar Plants, please contact Judie Brower. For more information on Tesselaar Plants, visit www.tesselaar.com.