Garden News | March 2024
Hope and renewal. These are the two words that spring to my mind as we welcome in March and another spring season.
For the gardens at Leonardslee there is hope for a bumper flowering season ahead and a relief from the ceaseless rains that seemed to dominate the winter. Renewal comes in the form of new planting, new bulbs flowering and rejuvenation of our plant collection in the form of pruning. More on that later.
Looking back on another mild, wet winter (but with brief periods of intense cold) it does seem that we can expect these kind of conditions every year going forward. For the gardens this means we have a lot of plants flowering and growing considerably earlier in the year than they should be, which makes them vulnerable to damage by late frosts. The mild conditions can also mean an increase in pests and diseases surviving the winter to attack our plants in the spring. We are always looking at ways to safeguard our existing plants as well as planting with the future climate in mind, to ensure Leonardslee continues to thrive for decades to come.
Last autumn we bulked up our spring bulb display in several locations, including filling in gaps on Daffodil Lawn to improve the already eye-popping carpet of wild daffodils Narcissus pseudonarcissus. We also planted many hundreds of new bulbs in the lawn near the afternoon exit gate into the car park, some of which will start flowering this month. This includes the pale-flowered Narcissus ‘Thalia’, two varieties of Crocus and tall Camassias which will flower later in the spring.
The Rock Garden bulb display should be even more colourful this year as we have added several varieties of Grape Hyacinth Muscari, six new varieties of dwarf Narcissus – including ‘Paperwhite’ which is strongly scented – and also more Dog’s-tooth Violet Erythronium which will have pretty pagoda-shaped flowers in yellow and purple.
Renewal with in our gardens
Rock Garden in autumn
On the theme of renewal, you may have noticed that we have cleared a large section of the shrub bed just opposite the Welcome Hub, by the Rock Garden entrance. This prominently positioned bed was looking very tired and had limited seasonal interest with only a handful of over-mature and sickly Rhododendrons filling the space. We have an exciting plan to rejuvenate the space with lots of new plants going in later this spring – a mixture of choice shrubs and under-planting that will bring colour and scent to this spot throughout the summer and into autumn. We are currently improving the soil to prepare for planting so watch this space!
If you’ve ever wondered when is the best time of year to hard-prune flowering shrubs, especially Rhododendrons and Camellias, then I can tell you it is March, right now! It is a busy time for the team here as we tackle the task of rejuvenation pruning; we have to carefully select which plants need a prune, which is not always straight-forward. Shrubs that have become too leggy, so that the flowers are lost way above head-height or that are growing over paths or smothering other plants need to be hard-pruned down to about a metre high so that they can have a fresh start. This lets in light and air, brings flowers down were they can be appreciated and frees up space so that other plants can thrive. It is vital to mulch and feed pruned plants so that they have the energy to regrow and are better protected from any droughts later in the year. But we can’t just hack back anything. While almost all Camellias can be cut down now without issue, some of our Rhododendrons that have very smooth or flaky bark would be incapable of re-growing if we cut them back, so we have to choose carefully and leave these ones alone.
Rock Garden in spring
Gardening Team Plans and Recommendations
We are planning to undertake this hard-pruning in areas such as Camellia Grove, the Rock Garden and along Middle Walk.
I’ll leave you with some recommendations of plants to enjoy this March. The many Magnolias are the highlight of the month – our champion Magnolia campbellii in the Dell is a sight to behold with its enormous pink blooms, as is the champion Magnolia sprengeri ‘Diva’ just below the Clocktower Kitchen with its huge low spreading boughs. Rhododendron ‘Seamew’ has its big rounded trusses of white, lightly scented flowers out this month, it is an extremely rare Edmund Loder hybrid in our National Plant Collection and can be found by the drive opposite the entrance to Camellia Walk. Then one of my absolute favourites is Rhododendron lutescens, a very pretty species from China that is covered in hundreds of small but intensely yellow butterfly-shaped flowers, there is a good specimen on the path below the café.
I hope you have a great time on your next visit, hope to see you here soon.
Elliot Chandler
