My Climate Change Garden » Exotic

Drought Plants : Palm Trees

Debbie — Mon, 16 May 2011 05:12:28 +0000

Palms are perfect for this dry weather as they require hardly any water to survive once established plus they bring something unusual to your garden.

Despite their prominence in hotter climates, palm trees are very hardy plants and most will thrive in the British climate providing there are not weeks of snow and very low temperatures of below -10c like last winter.They are slow-growing but grow up to 20 or 30ft depending on the variety.

Choosing a palm tree
Before you buy a palm tree, you should think about the location where it will be planted, as different species have varying requirements. Additionally, the height of the mature palm tree, as well as the spread of its fronds should be considered to ensure that it fits well with its surroundings. Another major factor is if you are looking for a hardy outdoor palm tree or an interior palm.

If you’re looking for palm tree for your garden, the Chilean wine palm is an excellent choice. With a huge rounded trunk, it can grow up to 15m tall and thrives in bright, sunny areas. Its canopy can spread up five metres and its lovely angular leaves make this palm tree a fantastic focal point for any outdoor space.

For indoor situations, consider a Kentia palm tree. Excellent for bright indoor locations, such as conservatories or entryways, it grows to a height of about two metres and produces flowers in the summer for an extra splash of colour.

Caring for your palm tree
Palm trees are easy to grow and simply need good soil plus protection from frost if not hardy.

When planting a tropical palm tree, the plant should be pre-soaked before putting it in the ground, especially if planting is occurring during a dry spell. The hole should be significantly larger than the root system, as the loosened soil around the palm tree will allow better root penetration.

To get the most from your palm tree, it should be watered and fed on a regular basis. It’s best to apply fertilisers during warmer months when the palm tree is actively growing. Since they are usually shallow-rooting plants, palm trees should also be thickly mulched.

Palm trees don’t require much in the way of pruning and this task usually simply requires the removal of dead fronds and suckers. While fruit-bearing palm trees can be a pretty addition to a garden, the fruit can also be messy, so some gardeners may choose to remove the fruit before it ripens.

Buying palm trees

There are many different palm trees to choose from and it is a good idea to visit a specialist nursery to make sure you get professional advice on the best variety for your garden. Hardy palms such as dwarf fan palm trees, Chusan palm trees and the Jelly Palm, have distinct characteristics and an ability to survive our not-so-temperate winters.

There are many UK nurseries specialising in palms offering a choice of shapes that provide interest whatever the english weather might bring throughout the year.Here are three with nationwide delivery service:

EAST SUSSEX

http://www.athelasplants.co.uk/palm-trees-c17

NORTH LONDON

http://www.paramountplants.co.uk/plant/CHAMAE/chamaerops-humilis.html

RICHMOND, LONDON

http://www.palmcentre.co.uk/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=401

Palm trees are a common sight in many english gardens. Martin Gibbons, who set up the Palm Centre 21 years ago in Richmond, has witnessed how the changing UK climate has made Palms more popular. Read about my visit to Martin’s mecca for Palm trees :

http://www.myclimatechangegarden.com/blog/the-palm-centre-ham-near-richmond-surrey

Exotic and Tropical plant advice

Debbie — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:24:07 +0000

In this guest blog Will Giles, Guru of Exotic Gardening, offers advice on maintaining tropical and exotic plants during challenging UK temperatures.

Will is famous the world over for his expert knowledge of exotic plants – and his colourful exotic shirts! His garden is one of my favourite places to explore every summer. Check out this fascinating blog which will surely tempt you to visit his inspirational garden . http://www.exoticgarden.com/public-opening-times.php

What a devastating winter we have had with temperatures dipping down to some of the coldest on record for over 100 years! For those growing borderline exotic plants, it has certainly been a testing time indeed. Here at the Exotic Garden in Norwich there have been many losses though thankfully not as bad as some exotic gardens have reported.

Many people have said to me, ‘surely this must mean that Global Warming isn’t happening?” This is why we should really use the term Climate Change instead, as different parts of the world will be affected in different ways according to how the world warms up – and 2010 has been ranked as one of the warmest on record! Some parts of our planet will get warmer and dryer while others will become wetter and cooler. As we live on an island we are lucky to have a temperate climate given our northerly latitude, compared to say parts of Canada that have been wickedly cold this winter.

Most of the last decade though has seen comparatively mild winters for the UK and, up until the winter before last, I hadn’t wrapped any of my tender exotics for about seven years, so it was quite a shock to have two consecutive cold ones! Whether this coming winter will follow a short term trend is in the lap of the gods However, I feel that being prepared is the appropriate answer, though in the decades to come, cold winters will probably dwindle back into much milder conditions, hence the current cold winters should be seen as more of a blip in our changing and seemingly more unpredictable weather patterns.

So What To Grow?

Many nurseries have sprung up in recent years selling borderline to tender exotics retailing plants that may only take 5 to 6 degrees of frost, so this winter has killed most of those outright unless protected or brought into frost free conditions. Of course with a very deep pocket plants can be replaced every spring and I know a few exoticists will still do this! For most of us though, caution is probably the best route to take by growing plants that look tropical, i.e. with big leaves, or as I do, interspersing with tender plants during the summer month.

Never-the-less,there is nothing wrong with growing borderline plants if you are prepared to protect them during the winter months. I recently took the wraps of my *Musa basjoo* and found that despite the effort put into their protection; most of their stems had been cut to the ground. Thankfully though this a tough banana which usually reshoots from the ground hence its common name the root hardy banana is appropriate. From an established rootstock they will grow back up to 6-10ft in one season if well fed.

If you have shrubs which look, well – dead! Don’t give up just yet. If you scratch the bark with your thumb nail and it is brown keep going down until you find green showing through underneath, then cut all the dead foliage and stems foliage off above that point. If it is something with a bark covered stem such as Cordyline’s, wait until at least the end of May or early June before discarding them as new shoots will usually appear around the base of the stem and often several feet up, where you can cut/saw off all the dead growth above that point. Unless a small plant they will reshoot like mad,because of their extensive root system.

Phormiums have taken a beating over the last two winters, with some of mine having about 80% of their fronds flattened by snow and withered by frost.These can be cut down to within 6-12ins of the ground and fed, where they should slowly regenerate during the summer, though old specimens are very slow to regenerate indeed. Like me though this might be too slow, hence digging them out completely and planting with new ones or something completely different might be the only answer and a great excuse to try something else!

On the softer perennial front though, plants such as members of the Ginger family have been growing happily outside for the past 15 years in my garden with little or no protection. If about a foot of straw is placed over the top in the autumn with some plastic sheeting pegged down over the top, they will survivie all but the most severest of winters.

Tree ferns, the most commonly grown being *Dicksonia Antarctica*, have certainly taken a beating this winter, especially in exposed positions with desiccating winds. I have heard many reports of the central crosiers (the growing point) having turned to goo, which means they are most likely dead!I stuffed mine with a thick layer of straw which seems to have worked well with a minimum of -11C, though this is the first winter that all of the fronds have turned brown, which have since been removed.

Many palm trees have failed this winter and I have lost several. The toughest though seems to be the good old windmill palm *Trachycarpus fortunei* which copes with temperatures down to about -17C for short periods; hence I will be planting more of these in my garden.

http://www.athelasplants.co.uk/search/trachycarpus-fortunei

I’m sure you will have many questions about plant losses not covered here, so let me know and I will try and give you a pertinent answer. The main things is don’t give up and think positive – and let’s hope it’s a really good summer….

info@exoticgarden.com

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Encyclopedia-Exotic-Plants-Temperate-Climates/dp/0881927856/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1301262056&sr=8-2

Frosts and Fruit trees

Debbie — Mon, 03 May 2010 22:08:17 +0000

There is a ground frost predicted in SE england tonight -with temperatures dipping as low as 1c. Just popped my head outside to see a clear and very stary night which looks beautiful.

Not good news for any tender plants, especially the blossom on fruit trees which is always at risk during April/May in the UK with our unpredictable weather. Whilst visiting a local nursery today I was impressed by the range of fruit trees on sale including grapefuruit, orange, lime, and kiwi.

Take a look at these sites for more information about growing fruit trees in the UK

http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/basics/techniques/growfruitandveg_growingfruittrees1.shtml

http://www.orangepippinshop.com/article.aspx?articleid=100019

http://www.globalorangegroves.co.uk/

If you live in Australia and want to select fruit trees then check out a clever new online service which provides local climate information for your area.

It stores the climate profile of the 40 most common fruit tree crops with over 700 cultivars of these crops covering all climate zones of Australia. These profiles have been converted into chill unit ranges for all fruit tree cultivars (cultivars for tropical climates will have very low or zero chill factors). The site stores local climate information and when you choose your nearest weather station for your orchard, the web site creates a chill unit profile for your garden and can be further tuned for your micro climates.

This is the invention of a passionate organic gardener. Peter Kearney runs the online gardening site at City Food Growers where he hosts this brilliant system. He has plans to launch a UK version which would be really useful given our varied climate, particularly frosts like tonight.

http://cityfoodgrowers.com.au/blog-latestposts.php?catid=73

Less Growing Days highlight hardiness issues

Debbie — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 06:17:36 +0000

Has anyone noticed the decidedly Autumnal feel in the morning and evening now that the days are getting shorter? This is a sure sign that growing days for many plants are starting to reduce.

Sad to think that very soon I will be starting to protect some of my exotic and tropical plants in the garden so they can survive the English winter. Hoping that we will not have a repeat of the last two winters when many previously categorised “hardy”plants were destroyed by continual low temperatures which reached as low as – 12c in some parts of the UK.

Growing tropical, exotic and mediterranean plants is a rewarding experience but making sure they survive our wet and sometimes cold winters is one of the biggest challenges for UK gardeners.This is complicated by the fact that many parts of the UK experience completely different weather patterns during the winter.

Cornwall, located in the SW of England, is one area that seems to provide conditions that enable these plants not just to survive our winters but actually do extrmely well. Perhaps this is why Phil from Trebrown Nurseries in Liskeard is such an expert on the subject. There is an excellent plant hardiness map on their site although it only goes to 2000 and does not yet include the record low temperatures of the harsh 2009/2010 winters. http://www.trebrown.com/hrdzone.html

Here is Phil sharing his thoughts on hardiness and growing days :

The map is very much an underestimate due to the data being an average record of 40 years.

If we’d only focussed on, let’s say all the years post 1979 then the map would be very different, as the climate is much warmer today.

We plan to revise it in 2010/2012 for records up to 2010. It will be interesting tosee if the records from the last decade show significant changes to the map.

Of-course the map doesn’t really tell us much regarding what can be grown here. No zone map can be accurate due to the fact that it doesn’t take into account the number of growing degree days for a particular latitude. This would be different for different species. UK summers are short in comparison with other similar world-wide zones. Although our summer day length is long, they seldom reach high enough temperatures to count as Growing Degree Days (GDD) for truly tropical plants. A GDD for a particular species is a day that can be counted as a day that that plant grew. Quite often a zone 9 or zone 10 plant will put on no growth whatsoever during the whole year here in Cornwall.

We have a very strange climate here in the UK. There is very little change between our
cool summers and our mild winters. Very little temperature swing compared to almost everywhere else in the world outside the tropics. For this reason plants can manage to pull through our winters but then sit waiting for the summer heat which almost never comes. Therefore we should be looking for plants that can put on growth at low temperatures, high elevation tropical plants make reasonably good candidates. It’s not
possible to make a map to reflect this information, because every plant has it’s own ideal temperature Growing Degree Day.

At some stage we will include the minimum GDD temperature for each species contained in the species’ growing information on our site. We have quite a lot of information on file here, and all this information will eventually be placed on the Trebrown.com website.

Currently there is an interesting article about Growing Degree Days (GDD) on our server here:http://www.trebrown.com/documents/climate/climateadaptedness.php

Angels Trumpets

Debbie — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:34:07 +0000

Latin name: Brugmansia

Description: These fabulous plants are a must for the exotic garden with their ridiculously large flowers. There are many species and countless cultivars worth trying in the garden. Often mistakenly called Datura, there is nothing like Brugmansia for scent. The name Angel’s Trumpet refers to the large, very dramatic, pendulous trumpet-shaped flowers 14–50cm long and 10–35cm across at the trumpet end. They can be white, yellow, pink, orange or red, single double or treble petalled. Most have an intense almost narcotic scent that pervades the garden in the evening.

Hardiness: Tender, must be brought into frost free conditions for the winter months, which is a small price to pay for such fabulous plants

Height: 5-10m in the wild, though more like 1.5-3m in temperate climates

Position: Full sun to light shade

Soil: Moist, humus rich, well drained soil

Water: This plant loves lots of water and without it they soon lose their leaves and look ill. If planted close to the house, let your bath water run over it

Usage: As a focal point or plant in an enclosed courtyard where you can enjoy the intense scent in the evening

Arum Lily, Calla Lily

Debbie — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:02:29 +0000

Latin name: Zantedeschia aethiopica ‘Green Goddess’

Description: Highly attractive lily with large, lush, lustrous green arrow-shaped leaves. The flowers appear at the top of tall stalks from spring into early summer and are in the form of a modified leaf called a spathe, enfolding a fleshy yellow spike. ‘Green Goddess’ is a very desirable cultivar with green flowers.

Hardiness: Takes several degrees of frost if well mulched during cold snaps. The foliage dies to the ground in the autumn. In very cold areas the tubers can be dug up and stored frost-free. Can also be planted in a pond as a marginal and works well in containers which can more easily be kept moist in dry weather.

Height: 50cm-1m

Position: Full sun to dappled shade

Soil: Moisture retentive soil preferred, so best mulched well in dry periods

Water: Water well to establish, mulch, then sparingly after that if they go floppy, otherwise plant as a pond marginal

Usage: Good for brightening up dull corners, where the flowers really stand out

Bank Holiday Garden Visit

Debbie — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:40:34 +0000

Looking for plant inspiration over the Bank Holiday weekend?

Try visiting a truly inspirational garden located in the centre of Norwich in the East of England which is open to the public on Sunday and Monday.

Will Giles’ Exotic Garden blossomed during the July heatwave and is now enjoying the monsoon style rains that have arrived during August.

In his own words the garden is “just reaching its peak with gigantic foliage and sumptuous flowers to tease the senses.”

Here is Will’s latest blog to tempt you.

http://www.exoticgarden.com/blog/the-garden/august-bank-holiday-weekend-%e2%80%93-rain-or-shine/

Bank Holiday garden visit

Debbie — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:00:19 +0000

If the heavy rain is getting you down and you yearn for some colour and heat in the garden this weekend, take a trip to Norwich in East Anglia to sample the delights of a subtropical garden in a temperate climate.

Will Giles opens his wonderful Exotic Garden every Sunday from late June until 23rd October between 1-5pm and I can assure you it is an experience you do not want to miss. I was there a few weeks back and the heavy rain has brought a spectacular lushness to the garden.Even though Will lost many of his larger exotic specimens such as phormiums and a few bananna plants to the heavy frosts and snow of winter 2010 ,the garden has taken on an exciting new look this year as Will has cleverly mixed impressive tropical specimens with huge blousy dahlias and a host of other delights.

VISIT THE EXOTIC GARDEN IN NORWICH THIS BANK HOLIDAY SUNDAY

Here is the description from Will’s web-site to inspire you to make the journey to this unique subtropical garden.

“ Will has experimented with plants from the extremely hardy to the ludicrously tender, endeavouring to find a balance of plants that grow well in his one acre microclimate and fit into his ideal of a lush sub-tropical setting.

He has developed a wondrous paradise for himself and the many visitors that flock to the garden during the summer months. Unlike many other gardens, this haven of fantasy has been crafted by Will and voluntary helpers, on the smallest of budgets, using reclaimed materials where possible and a lot of hard work. This is a hands on creation, giving the Exotic Garden a very personal identity – that of a true artist at work.”

To discover this tropical oasis visit http://www.exoticgarden.com/public-opening-times.php

Bears Britches

Debbie — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:58:46 +0000

Latin name: Acanthus mollis

Description: These beauties are grown for their dramatic foliage and handsome upright flower spikes that fit in well with exotic style gardening. Acanthus mollis is a stately, semi-evergreen perennial with long deeply toothed, soft spined, glossy bright green leaves up to 60cm long by 30cm wide. Spikes of funnel-shaped white flowers, flushed light purple are borne in summer. Acanthus spinosus has more spiky foliage but equally attractive.

Hardiness: Hardy

Height: 1.2m

Position: Full sun to dappled shade

Soil: well drained, humus rich soil

Water: Drought tolerant once established

Usage: Gives a very lush feel to the garden, where you want blocks of green suffused with handsome flower spikes

Bird of Paradise, Crane Flower

Debbie — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:50:51 +0000

Latin name: Strelitzia reginae

Description: This must be one of the best known plants in the world, so why not try one in your garden! It is an evergreen, clump-forming perennial with long stalked, tough, leathery, blue-green leaves. The large beak-like flowers have three brilliant orange sepals and three vivid purple-blue petals in boat-shaped red-edged bracts from winter to spring. For the rest of the year it is a glorious and very tropical looking foliage plant.

Hardiness: Will take a few degrees of frost, for very short periods only, hence is excellent in warmer cities like London, especially if planted in a favourable location that is protected from desiccating winds. Otherwise, enjoy it flowering in your house/conservatory during the winter months, and then give it a holiday outside for the summer.

Height: 1-1.5m

Position: Full sun

Soil: Well drained gritty poorish soil preferred. In containers, they are best left to get pot bound for the best flowers. Given lots of food they won’t flower

Water: Tolerates drought well and will get enough water from summer rains

Usage: In a position that shows off its colour and architectural shape for best effect