Category: Garden Maintenance
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Lavender Hedges
April is a good month to think about planting your Lavender hedge. Hardy or tender, white through to deep purple, compact or tall & tough, there are hundreds of varieties to choose from (Downderry Nursery and The Lavender Garden have an excellent website to help you choose). Lavenders will thrive in a sunny, well drained…
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Welcome to Aust, a Forgotten Landscape.
A new base for Edwards Garden Services, the village of Aust in South Gloucestershire, a perfect home for Gareth balanced between his Bristol and Welsh roots. A village in the heart of the Lower Severn Vale, always associated with a route across the estuary, now an iconic Grade I listed building, otherwise known as the…
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Tales from the Riverbank
Immortalised in poetry, the River Boyd runs for some 7 miles between Dodington and the River Avon at Bitton, it’s ‘watery sway washing the cliffs of Doynton and Wick’. The Boyd’s industrial heritage is now part of its natural history; the wiers, sluices, mill races part of the landscape inhabited by crayfish, mink, owls and…
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Establishing a New Lawn
Or, the importance of good preparation. I could write a detailed research paper on the history of this new build lawn. The pitfalls of establishment and process of recovery. When to give up and start again or persist with getting it healthy and long term sustainable. The landscape gardeners who put the lawn down were…
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Seasonal Border Maintenance
Gone are the days of ‘putting the garden to bed for winter’ (I’ve always disliked that approach). Even if we are not poking around the borders in the depths of winter, it is there, to be seen, and to be enjoyed both by us and the birds and bugs foraging amongst the seed heads and…
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Organic Lawn Maintenance
Organic Lawn Maintenance – or the Devon Red and Green Woodpecker Edwards Garden Services provides sustainable lawn maintenance programmes, across Bristol, BANES, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire. The British lawn, just another crop monoculture, weed and pest free, a quality product targeting maximum yield from those all-important lawn grass species. For the organic gardener, to achieve…
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Raspberries – Winter Tasks
Autumn fruiting, summer fruiting, mid-season raspberries. How to grow, when to prune? Its just about coming to the end of bare-root planting season but just about time to plant some soft fruits. This time of year I’m more usually making sure all the pruning, tying-in, feeding & mulching has been completed. Autumn fruiting raspberries…
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Coppicing Dogwoods for Winter Colour
Dogwoods (Cornus), Willows (Salix) give the best winter colour on young stems so an annual (or less for some such as Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire) coppice or pollard is recommended. Late February through March, just as the buds are beginning to swell, before the plants stored reserves have been expended on growth that will be cut…
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Pruning Roses
Winter pruning of roses is in full swing. There are a bewildering array of types of roses, from hybrid teas and floribundas (pruned hard to a lower framework encouraging flowering stems on new growth) to ramblers, shrub and climbers, each benefiting from specific pruning techniques. The best approach is to see on what wood (old,…
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Renovating a Beech Hedge in Sneyd Park
An overgrown Beech hedge in Sneyd Park, Bristol. One of a number in the road identified by the local council as needing reducing as the footpath was becoming narrower than the hedge. February is the time for renovating a dormant beech hedge – also before the birds are nesting. They can be slow to recover…
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Pruning Wisteria
Winter pruning Wisteria is one of my favourite jobs. Untangling its vigorous summer growth, pruning summer-shortened shoots to a more compact flowering spur, cutting back leaders to build up a good, well branched structure. The flowering buds will soon be fattening up, distinguishing them from the narrower growth buds Whilst Wisteria in flower…
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Managing a Box Blight Parterre
The Grade II registered garden at Barrow Court, North Somerset features a parterre currently hedged by half a kilometre of Box hedging. Box blight has been present in this historic parterre for many years and has been managed with varying degrees of success over this time. In spite of our best efforts, the box blight…
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Grass Cutting in Abbots Leigh (Wildflowers and Wiggly Walks)
Whilst an immaculate croquet lawn with geometric stripes is always achievable, sometimes a maze and a wiggly walk through a wildflower meadow is more in keeping.
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Maintaining a Box parterre
Trimming box in the depths of winter? Not exactly by the book (crimes against horticulture I hear people shout). Not only the timing, we also use machines to do the trimming! The reason – box blight and half a kilometre of hedging. We (Jim and myself) decided to shift to winter cutting some years ago…