Monthly Archives: April 2025

More on the Plant Sale at the end of this month

12 April 2025

These are the plants we have already for our Plant Sale on April 26 (on the verge between the car park for the Linslade Memorial Gardens, and the Gardens’ hedge).

The plants are generally small-flowered and unshowy, but they do attract bees and other pollinators, and most of them are perennials (that means they’ll go on growing in your garden / window box / other container) for several years.

The ones that aren’t perennial are foxgloves and verbascum, which are biennial – that means they spend the first year making a rosette of leaves, which produces a flower spike (or two) the following year, in about May-June. If you let the seeds ripen you’ll have more than enough to start the whole cycle over again, so although they’re not perennial, if they like where you put them, they should keep going for years.

Garden flowers:

Bearded Iris; Iris pallida; Hardy geraniums – Geranium macrorrhizum, Geranium ‘Kashmir White’, Geranium ‘Cloud Nine’, Blue species geranium; Geranium ‘Bill Wallis’; Purple toadflax (Linaria purpurea); Sisyrinchium; Lambs’ ears (Stachys byzantina); Mullein (Verbascum); Verbena ‘Bampton’; Veronica spicata ‘Red Fox’; White pulmonaria.

You can find details and photos of these plants on the RHS website

Herbs:

Oregano; Golden oregano; Lemon balm; Garden mint;

Wild flowers:

Cowslip; primrose; foxglove; Water avens (Geum rivale); Mush mallow

Others:

Bowles’ Golden Grass (Millium effusum) – we need grasses too in a wildlife bed; some of the solitary and bumble bees nest in grass, and it provides cover for insects and small mammals. This one glows bright green for most of the year, lighting up the flower bed in winter.

Aloe vera – not a bee magnet, not even good for habitat, just an addition as a blatant fund raiser, they’re popular house plants but can be hard to find

Weeding and tidying up

08 April 2025

Or rather, why we haven’t done it yet.

Last year about this time, we explained why we don’t cut back all the old plant stems in the autumn, as people used to do to make their flowerbeds look emptier and tidier over the winter (spoiler: it’s because insects and small mammals need places to hibernate in, and dead leaves on the ground and hollow stems in the air seem to be just the thing).

We have cut most of the old stems down now, but we’re still not weeding thoroughly – this isn’t just laziness! A lot of the flowers we encourage here are ones that have self-seeded, and too many of them haven’t germinated yet. So if we weed to bare soil between plants, we’re destroying a lot of plants we might like to keep.

The warm weather over the last couple of weeks has really brought a lot of plants on faster than usual, so we’ll be starting to tidy up in earnest for the rest of this month, and sowing seeds where we find any bare patches.

And perhaps most importantly, we’ll be lifting even the useful wild flowers like Geranium lucidum [find photo] in the third bed up from the memorial itself – that’s the bed the preschool children will be planting their peas out in when they come back after the Easter holidays, and we need it to be ready for them then.

Geranium lucidum in the preschool bed
Geranium lucidum

We’ll leave a couple of plants – there’s a large viper’s bugloss which will be a real bee magnet later in the year – but mostly we’ll be clearing more space for them. It’s a big ask to avoid digging up lots of plants by mistake when you’re only 2 or 3 years old!