Latest news with #honeysuckle
Telegraph
2 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
Ask the head gardener: How can I get my honeysuckle to flower?
Dear Tom, How can I get my honeysuckle to flower? It's Lonicera periclymenum 'Serotina' on a south-facing trellis about 7ft tall, with a fence next to it. It has shade at the roots from other planting, and the soil is clay but has been much improved with compost, manure, and so on. I've had it for about 10 years and it makes lots of foliage, but little in the way of flowers. I cut it back in the autumn to keep it in check. What else can I do? –Rosalind Dear Rosalind, I think you have certainly been patient with your honeysuckle; how frustrating that after 10 years you've not seen many flowers. Honeysuckles can be tricky to grow, being prone to mildew in times of drought, often producing lots of top growth with bare stems towards the base, not to mention their erratic flowering. There are many issues which can cause Lonicera not to flower and it could be one, or a combination of the following: Fertility Excessive feeding can lead to leafy growth; the plant does not feel the need to flower and reproduce itself through seeds, as life is good with little stress or threats. The priority for the plant is to get as big as it can, as quickly as it can, feasting on all that lovely fertility. I suspect that your clay soil is very fertile and is encouraging your climber to produce foliage and few flowers. I would avoid adding any more organic matter to your clay soil; simply provide a mulch layer with gravel or larger pebbles to shade the roots and conserve moisture, without adding any extra fertility, which promotes leaf growth. Pruning Honeysuckles can fall into two main groups, depending on their flowering times. There are those that flower in early summer, which should be pruned immediately after flowering, and those that flower in late summer, such as your 'Serotina', which simply need a light trim in the spring. Reduce the plant by about one third to keep it tight against your fence. Pruning at the wrong time would be detrimental to the flowering performance of your honeysuckle, but I do not think this is the case, as your pruning in the autumn would not compromise the following year's blooms. Light levels Flowering lonicera need high levels of sunlight to encourage flowers, and your south-facing trellis would certainly provide that. For other readers who suffer with a similar issue, a lack of sunlight may be a factor as to why their honeysuckles are not flowering. Moisture Excessively dry soils would also cause a honeysuckle not to produce flowers. Although clay soils sit wet during the winter months, just make sure that your clay soil is not drying out excessively during the summer. If this is the case, then water your climber during dry periods, especially when flower buds are developing. Fertilisers Fertilisers such as sulphate of potash will increase the levels of potassium, which will promote flowering but also add other nutrients such as nitrogen, encouraging more leafy growth, so proceed with caution. An application of sulphate of potash at the beginning of the growing season, at the rate of a handful per square yard, may help to encourage flowering, but don't overdo it. Replace Finally, probably the most fatalistic view is that some varieties are better performers than others. Although 'Serotina' has an award of garden merit, which is usually a benchmark that I would recommend using as a plant buying guide, an alternative cultivar you could try would be 'Graham Thomas', with white flowers that fade to yellow, in the hope that you might get more success. Alternatively, a Clematis viticella type or a Trachelospermum might be worth a try.
The Guardian
24-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
I'm feasting on the contents of hedgerows like a horse in plimsolls – and I've never felt so healthy
I had a daughter during one of the bone-cold early months of this year, which means that my full-time job is now to produce a yield. Between the hours of dawn and midnight, with a few lactic minutes in between, I am a feeding machine for a new person. And it is this, perhaps, that has led to my somewhat strange new eating habits. Pregnancy may traditionally be the time associated with cravings and aversions – the old cliches of sardines and jam, coal and creosote, bread and crackers. But here, in my postnatal feeding frenzy, I'm eating nettles by the handful. I am chomping on sticky weed. I have been biting the heads off dandelions (bitter – like really serious dark chocolate) and sucking the nectar from inside honeysuckle. This recent chlorophyll gala has, of course, coincided with England's greatest month: May. Some of us love the look of May, some of us enjoy the smells. But for me, this year, the greatest heady, verdant, leaf-rich pleasure of my life is to eat May by the bushel. The sheer amount of dilute dog pee I'm ingesting must be through the roof, I suppose, but I don't really care. The number of edible plants and flowers in Britain right now is dazzling. My latest love is a plant called hedge garlic. Or, if you're in the Midlands like me, Jack by the hedge (he sounds like the villain from a Grimms' fairytale, or the kind of singer-songwriter we all regrettably slept with in our twenties). Alliaria petiolata, to give it its Latin name, is a wild member of the brassica family and has a thin, whitish taproot scented like horseradish, triangular-to-heart-shaped leaves and small white flowers. Friends, once you see it, it's everywhere. You can eat it from towpaths and bike lanes and public parks if, like me, you're not embarrassed to be seen bending down beside a lamp-post and pulling up your lunch. If you don't live in the sort of lush, woodland world where wild garlic covers the ground like concrete then hedge garlic is a fantastic alternative; the taste is oniony, garlicky and even a little mustardy. Of course, like absolutely everything that grows wild, it has a toxic lookalike in the form of lily of the valley. In fact, once you start Googling, pretty much everything edible seems to have a potentially dangerous twin, from mushrooms to flowers to roots. Buttercups are extremely poisonous, as are daffodils. So please make sure you are referring either to an expert or a very well illustrated book before you start to chow down on your local undergrowth, and it's a good idea to wash anything you pick in salt water to get rid of insects, as well as dog wee. But to be extra safe you could stick to these few, extremely identifiable friends: nettles (both the leaves and the seeds), dandelions, clover, sticky weed (that plant that people squished against your school jumper when you were little and is sometimes known as cleavers) and daisies. A friend of mine serves up slices of bread and butter topped with daisies to her small children as a mind-bending treat. She is yet to be burned as a witch. Of course, I am in the incredibly privileged position of living somewhere in which food is, to a greater or lesser degree, widely available. I am able to boil rice and buy eggs and stock up on strawberries because I am a relatively wealthy woman living in a country that has not quite, as yet, cut itself off entirely from global food markets. I am not eating undergrowth out of necessity, and for this I am grateful every day. Am I worried about the sewage in our rivers and the microplastics in our soil and the pesticides leaking into our ponds? Of course I am. But it is also true that Britain right now is a lush and emerald salad bar that I cannot hold back from. Pesto, bhajis, soups, salads, pizzas, pakoras, fritters, sauces – I'm putting these plants in everything. I'm literally mowing down the greenery around my house, munching through the stalks and leaves like a small, pink horse in a pair of plimsolls and I don't care who sees. Because my iron levels are up, my skin is good and it's all gloriously free. Just imagine what I'll be like when the apples and blackberries arrive. Nell Frizzell is a journalist and author
