view of garden 30.10.11

you have a lot of things growing well there, and is that some pansies i can spy on the right?

wow, you were quick off the mark! yes, I have five troughs'-worth of pansies - some are to the side, and would be better seen in the pic I just uploaded "side garden"; the others are that the front of the tables

were you doing miniature plants at some stage? i seem to remember you looking for little roses?
in my local GC they do miniature plants ~ well quite small and sold in very small pots, not bonsai but possibly the same idea. they are all indoor but i like them, i tried to put a little scene together but i havent got it right yet.

I'm thinking of dwarf rather than miniature; big enough for me to see and to handle, and was indeed looking for miniature roses.

Apparently the only "named" miniatures are Angela Rippon; or they're the only ones I've found so far. They seem reasonably rosilient and reliable, and have scent as well, so if/when I take the plunge I'll dive in that direction.

"scenes" are hard because there's more than just the plant to consider; everything has to be in scale and in harmony, and sometimes the balance is hard to achieve - one element half an inch out of place can be enough.

i dont think i will achieve exactly perfection but if it looks nice and is a bit imaginary i will be happy!!

those roses with scent sound lovely.

post some pics of your scene, please!

There were"about 4.900" hits for "miniature rose Angela Rippon" on Google, here's the BBC Plant-Finder one:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/plants/plant_finder/plant_pages/739.shtml

I use the BBc Plant-Finder a lot, concise, well laid out and readable!

that is a good site ~ i also like that it tells you what skills level you need. will keep that site up.

will try to take photo, its a bit of a tricky one.

lol as and when, and if.

The Beeb site is very clear compared to some other sites - at least it gives you information rather than trying to sell you stuff!

Have you any patio roses Fran. Some of them bloom a long time and don't need too big a container either.

I have some roses, Dorjac; that's about as much as I can say. All bought from Lidl, and the labels don't tend to be overloaded with information. All were tiny when bought, a couple have produced blooms, one twice, but only one bloom at a time. At the moment they're in the "mini-greenhouse", waiting for safe weather, or fairly safe weather, to be brought out again.

I hadn't really wanted roses at first: I'd heard they were very hard work - maybe that's propaganda! but at the same time I love roses, so I when I saw them for sale at Lidl I thought, what the heck, let's find out.

I do need to read up my "how to" rose books; mind you, they do tend to assume one has all the space, and all the resources, in the world! And I want to go the no-chemical way.

I looked through my Garden Expert Rose book - any that didn't have a scent was out straight away ( I want to engage as many senses as possible, and a scentless rose is, I dunno, like flat champagne? looks good but the fizz is missing).

Of course, "miniature rose" can also mean tiny flowers on a normal-sized plant! So I checked them out online, and took out any that were too big. Left me with a short-list that's still pretty long! I need to go through it again and refine and re-refine till I get down to just a few.

Thing is, how strong a scent do I want? If it's too strong, it'll tend to swamp everything else; and given the size of my space, the scent would travel from one end to the other. a single scent throughout the garden would be as monotonous as a single plant all over.
If it's milder, it'll stay more "local" and I can have different scents in different places, to add variety.

But to have stongly-scented roses under the window, to wake up to the scent of roses ...!

Fran, I was reading your profile and thought how frustrating it would be to be a "gardenless gardener" and then I read how tiny your little plot of paradise is, and I thought about how much I moan about my lack of acres of woodland and my overlooking neighbours and I realised that I am extremely lucky to have what I have got! Thank you for that, and keep on enjoying your plants and smelling your roses! :)) x

Oh, and can I recommend 'Bridge of Sighs' to you. It is a miniature climbing rose with lovely pale peach, gently scented flowers and healthy dark green foliage. I just found one last year and love it! Warm Welcome is a nice small one too, but very strong orange colour which might not suit you...but it might!

Very few,if any, of the newer smaller roses seem to be scented Fran. My new patio roses RED DREAM and RAINBOW MAGIC flowered their socks off last summer. Red Dream still has a flower on it....even now. They can be snipped gently back in a confined space to stop them snagging at you. In Spring I will take the top off the soil. Add a layer of water gel crystals and fertiliser beads then new soil on top. A bit of shaping pruning. That should be all that is needed. Rennaisance rose IS scented, but I suspect it wants to be a hunk, and is in a very large container. A smear of fine snow is forming on the front garden wall.......glad I put in the work yesterday to fleece up tender plants and put perlargoniums into shelter.

thanks for the kind words, Karensusan - lol we all think we;re hard-done-by till we find somene worse off!

*s* ideally, I'd have gone for a garden half the size of Epping Forest! but this is my "starter for ten", and it's up to me to make the best I can of it.

My main prob is deciding what to do with the space: I've bought tables to bring the plants up to workable [and visible] height; which as a bonus gives me some hidden storage space underneath.

Now I need to work out what I want to go for: just lots of plants? miniature landscape? several small-ish troughs or box off the whole tabletop and use it as a single bed? Depends how much work is involved!

The tables are rated to take a load of 300 kg, which is why I went for them, so weight shouldn't be a problem.

My other main prob is deciding a theme: I'd love to have a woodland garden, or a woodland-feel garden, but on this scale it'd be impractical. A themed planting would be much harder, as I've got to find small-to-tiny plants that would fit the theme. Maybe just wing it for now and see what works and explore in that direction.

I've been thinking about hypertufa for troughs - I've got enough polystrene boxes and plastic "mesh" crates to pave the garden twice over! - but I've never done anything like that before, so it's a challenge. And it'd have to be done outdoors, and what I've read says it needs to be kept dry for up to six weeks. yeah, right!

I'll check out the roses you mention, thanks very much for those, too

That's the prob with "container gardening" books, Dorjac - their containers are often huge!

I've gone on about scent because with my vision, a single plant wouldn't look too impressive; I'd need a mass planting (even a mini-mass) to make an impact - but a single scented flower would make itself known to me!

But I'd not want a scented plant that took up too much space at the expense of other plants. The planter's got to be moveable (more,moveble by me!) which cuts out so much just on taht basis.

I want to get night-scented stock for wall troughs under my bedroom window, and maybe day-scented ones for under the lounge window.

My very favourite rose is what I call the "velvet" rose - a very deep red, with velvety petals, and a gorgeous scent. There are so many rose-growing sites, sigh, too much inforation isn't always a good thing! I die read that scent takes up a lot of a rose's energy, so breeding for scentlessness (it that's a word it shouldn't be!) gives longer-lasting blooms.

I'll check out the roses you name, thanks, dear!

In my evergreen corner with the water feature, I use some staging which I bought from Lakeland...don't know it that would be any use to you...but check them out. Here's the effect in my garden. You might be able to get something similar.

http://www.growsonyou.com/karensusan63/blog/16965-the-heuchera-garden

The staging is quarter-circle shaped so two straight sides and a curved front which works brilliantly with the water feature. Would be good to have some water Fran....adds to the atmosphere and brings your auditory senses to the fore.

I'm thinking...trees in pots..acers...and Arbutus for evergreen colour, flowers and fruit. I think you could have your woodland up there! A slower growing Eucalyptus such as Eucalyptus Paucifolium would work also...and maybe even a tree fern? Certainly a Fatshedera would be lovely. Oh, no, I'm off! Sorry, you enjoy!! :))

I bought some plant "steps" - 3-tier plastic stands, on eBay - straights, they also do the semi-circular end pieces as well, but wasn't sure I'd ned them yet.

The prob with them is that the shelves aren't really taht deep; I found on the second one that I could turn them around and get a bit more depth, but I can only use relatviely small pots - unless (just occurred to me) I put them facing and bridge them with deeper wood!

*s* Lakeland's chanced since hte last time I used it! "plant staging" got zero results; "staging" got me a load of kitchen knives, plus, for some reason, a "divided feeder" for young children; "garden" got me tinfoil and "plant stand" got me "oven rack soaking tray"!

This is what cheeses me off about search engines: I've had some lulus from Amazon (because I bought a garden sieve they recommend a pair of earrings!) - I complained to one site, and they said that the search engine only searches for the first word - great, I was looking for DVD storage racks; whichever word I put first I got zillions of irrelevant items.

and the rose search isn't going as smoothly as i'd thought: no site has more than one of the named roses on, and very often that's buried in a welter of irrelevance: "rose red dream" brought up every plant that had one of the words in its name, which was quite a few; and Google topped that with "I dreamed of red roses, what does this mean?" and another site offered me a red kite. red watering can, red everything else

Still, I've found most of 'em, now I need to find the rest, and then find decent details for each!

ps I thoguht that jagged-edged thingy was what you meant, and I couldn't figure out where the plants went, until I realised that was hte wter feature!

lol! thanks for adding me as favourite Fran! :)

For the roses, just search Goy ...they are all on there!

durrrrr, it's so obvious once someone points it out!!!

lol...and see my comment on heuchera garden blog re the stands. :))

seen it, thanks, dear. But what I want for the roses is descriptions of height/spread, care, as well as pics. Ah well, nothing worth while was ever done in half an hour!

Thats very true Fran...at least you now know what they look like. Try www.davidaustinroses.com ; http://www.classicroses.co.uk and www.roses.co.uk you should be able to find most things on there. :))

thanks, will do!

did!

two of them had nothing but a "warm welcome" for me; the third had rnaissance and bridge of sighs - none of them had Red Dream or Rainbow Magic. but at least thta's three I can check out!

:) Good news! Keep searching!

What's with the shopping trollies LoL! You could always plant 'em up!

grins, that was the intention, and might still be. but the big one is a bit too deep, and the shallow one has those annoying front wheels that only go a little way then lock; i have to lift the front and drag it.

besides, I'd need to insulate the sides and bottom to give some protection to the plants - might slap some 'tufa on!

or, of course, I could make a lid for one of them and put all the bird feeders inside; they should be fairly squirrel proof!

You could fill them with rocks and have a rockery!!

hey, good one!!! mind you, I'd have to pplace them first, cos I doubt they'd be portable once loaded. And assuming that the baskets will take the weight, constant load and being out in all weathers, not exactly what they wree designed for ...

Worth a try!

lol indeed, it's not as if they cost me anything except the aggro lugging them from outside the block, where I found them (honest, m'lud!) to the inside

True, I did think about that!
When I pick up stones from a beach or river, I know that it's illegal!!

well, they were both dumped, so you could say that I was recycling them - don't know how far that'd get me, though. The large one was dumped in the street outside my bock; I was staggering home wtih too much shopping (I always forget that everything I buy has to be bussed home!), put the bags on the wall for a breather, saw something that looked like a trolley over by the kerb, went ove to have a look, thought, it's bound to have a wheel missing, but it didn't, so I gratefully loaded bags in that and wheeled 'em home the last bit. If I had the nerve I'd take it shopping with me, but the shop it came from might want it back!

of course, were I an honest and upright citizen, I'd have reported it to them and they could have come and got it - but I'm only doing to them what they do to us!

I think they could be quite a feature!

I did think of this years ago, before I got a garden, and when i did get one, that was enough to make me forget. I did wonder, back then, about getting metal braces on the overhanging front to help support the basket; but we'll see - *s* I envisioned a pair of them, one to each side of the door, but able to be trundled about to stay in the sun