- With Senior Gardener Steve Candy from Kingston Lacy
- Snowdrop planting. Here at Kingston Lacy, vast swathes of snowdrops have appeared and over the next few weeks we will be planting more to improve the display. These beautiful plants may not necessarily lend themselves to your own Japanese gardens but here we love to plant pockets and clumps of snowdrops around the bases of bamboo. You should plant snowdrop ‘in the green’ (just after flowering) allowing them the best start. Space them a couple of inches apart to give them room and allow them to settle. They should flower the following year in February.
- Refresh paths. Apply generous amounts of fresh gravels and aggregates on paths and walkway, where needed. Clean your stone benches, Torii gates and Teahouses. This will allow you to repaint and repair when the weather is better.
- Think about the finer details. We have been thinking ahead to the 20 year anniversary of the Japanese gardens restoration and in particular the finer details of our Tea garden. First job is to clean the interior of our teahouse to allow us to dress it more appropriately. We use warm water and soap to clean any hard surfaces which then allows us to add Ikebana (Beautiful flower arrangements) to the interiors and refresh the Tatami mats. A gentle brush over should suffice.
- Make a plan. I always like to write down all the jobs coming up over the coming year. There are many ways that you can do this, and everyone has their preferred way. I just like to make notes for important jobs for each month so that I can look ahead and make sure that I complete them all at the best time.
- Give your statuary, lanterns and rocks a gentle brush. You certainly don’t want to remove all of the lovely mosses and lichen that may have found a home on them but a light brush will bring them to light (excuse the pun). You may want to even apply a little live yoghurt to encourage that natural effect to any new lanterns that you may have purchased.
- Another thing that I like to do over the course of the gardening year is to keep a record of how the garden is progressing throughout the year but it gives you a record to go back and celebrate those gardening successes but also to adjust things the following year when the garden looks very different. I take a few photos from fixed points to help with this but you can do it in what ever way works for you.
