Our autumn bring & buy is 7 & 8 October. Don’t miss an opportunity to refresh or rethink your winter and spring garden. Check websites, books, catalogues and newspapers for ideas. Approach the Bring & Buy with a creative spirit. And don’t forget – it’s Bring not just Buy. Bring cuttings, seeds, corms and bulbs to share with others.
Let’s face it, it’s not THAT difficult to have a good looking garden or pots for a few weeks during the year -if you saunter down to the garden centre and buy a load of plants. It’s a lot more tricky if you create pots and borders from the plants you already have. Or if limit yourself to neighbours’ swaps and local tabletop sales.
Fortunately, LHS has not one but two Bring & Buy sales a year.
At this year’s Spring sale, I snapped up a hardy blue geranium, a Tradescantia Pallida, chives and a strawberry plant at the Hut.
The geranium has, I admit, yet to flower. Either it’s in full peep/creep/leap mode and currently in Year 1 (best case scenario) or it’s really not happy. However, it’s not dead. I’ve moved it from where it was, possibly, being inhibited by a curry plant (itself a free cutting from Brockwell Park Community Gardens). Next year I’m hoping for a long season of blue.
The strawberry bloomed and fruited, somewhat to my amazement. It will become stalwart ground cover in a sunny spot, I hope. The chives replace those I accidentally dug up last spring and the flowers will fill the spring/summer gap nicely in another patch. Not to mention their culinary usefulness. I sometimes use a lot of chives when I’ve forgotten to buy (not having an allotment…) onions.
The tradescantia been a triumph. I stole an idea I’d seen in a gardening magazine and added it to the summer show pot of dahlias, crocosmia and rudbeckia. It looks stunning with hot reds, oranges and piercing yellow (definitely not the pastel shade of yellow). Bonus. Bits that broke off root easily in jars of water and form new plants for autumn displays.
One tip is to get to the Bring & Buy early if possible. But if you can’t come first thing, there will be a good selection of plants as people – including you of course! – bring plants throughout the session.
