Help with Hanging Baskets – video
We came across a most useful video on YouTube entitled How to Create Perfect Hanging Baskets throughout the seasons. Having put some hanging baskets together we came to realise there is more to success than meets the eye, this video has given us insights to hang on to.
Most gardens require some level of year-round maintenance, and whilst these fundamentals are key to keeping a garden looking neat and tidy, it’s the finishing touches that can make your garden a truly beautiful haven to enjoy every time you step in to it. Whatever season or sized garden you’re planting for, hanging baskets and planters offer you a really simple way to dress your garden with bursts of colour and fragrance the whole year through.
Whether you’re looking to dress-up a country estate, town garden, urban balcony or roof terrace, the Blacksmith range of wrought iron hanging baskets, wall mangers, troughs and planters come in a wide choice in sizes and styles, that once planted, will add whole new floral dimension to your outdoor space throughout the seasons.
In this short film wellknown gardener and horticulturist Martin Fish shows you how to achieve seasonally beautiful hanging baskets.
Tips To Remember:
- Use a multi-purpose compost; this has a light texture and will encourage growth for a broad range of plants
- Use a slow release fertilizer to provide feed for the plants for several months
- To the compost add some water retaining gel to help keep the compost moist and plants watered
- Keep the soil about an inch below the rim of the basket to enable to you to water your basket well and to prevent compost spilling
- You must remember to keep your plants well fed so, feed monthly with a liquid feed to help promote a full and showy bloom throughout the season.
Summer Basket Plants
- Trailing Lobelia – Masses of frothy flowers that will go through the summer
- Geranium – Gives the basket its height, with pink flowers
- Helichrysum – Delicate silver/grey foliage plant
- Scaevola – Delicate unusual flat shape flower foliage plant
- Trailing Petunia – Bright pink flowers
- Begonia – Pink flower, glossy foliage plant used for bedding to fill the spaces within the compost and give that fuller effect
All Seasons Basket Plants
- Selection of Evergreens – Coneflowers, Variegated, Grasses, Sages, Heathers
- Trailing Plants – They will grow over the edge with their graceful habit
- Ajuga – Grow blue flowers in the spring, these remain looking good 12 months of the year
- Crocus and Daffodils – Bulb plants that will push up through spring
- Edible Crop Baskets Herbs Basket – Marjoram, Thyme, Parsley, Chamomile
- Fruit and Vegetable Baskets – You can grow lettuce, tomato or strawberries
Happy Gardening!
THE SWEETNESS OF SWEET: WILL COTTON …
… at the RONCHINI GALLERY from 25/06/2014
‘Sweetness taken to an extreme degree, as it is in my paintings, becomes cloying, even repulsive and that’s where it gets interesting for me.’ Will Cotton
This week I was drawn to the show of paintings by WILL COTTON at the Ronchini Gallery off Bond Street by the featured picture of the young girl riding a dolphin cloud of melting ice cream amongst cotton woolly waves. I was curious to see how it was done, believing the work be a computer manipulated photo of a set mixed with painting – when I discovered it to be an oil painting.
The Ronchini Gallery show comprises just four works, immaculately produced, which have taken the artist one year to produce. His handling of paint is very light, sensual and skilful and the sentiment reminiscent of the work of Jeff Coons in the desire to seduce us as viewers. I enjoyed the strangeness and pastiche with the “sweeter than sweet” kitsch of his work. Another painting shows large spun sugar like clouds of pink, evoking Titian and Italian Romanticism fluffed with confectionary.
Art that challenges our ideas of good and bad taste or aesthetics inspires change and alternative points of view. I was interested in the subject matter and motive as in the late 1970s I made edible costumes and head dresses from perishable food and cakes, food sculpture, motivated by the female diet obsessions of the era. Later I worked for the Parisian photographers Pierre and Giles producing kitsch setting for their photography and pop videos, which they heavily Photo-Shopped into wonderful idealistic and tongue in cheek fantasies.
Although there are only four pieces in Will Cotton’s show there is also a book of his other questionably “delicious” work.
One to watch.
Pop in if you are passing!
Will Cotton, Ronchini Gallery, Dering St, London, W1 25 June – 9 August, 2014.
Anne Tilby, Mixed media designer and artist, Tilby is an experienced production set and costume designer for film, tv, film theatre and opera http://www.bigfrieze.com
In Balance 