Four pieces of interesting nursery news – two from North America and two from Britain.

Rick Lupp’s Mount Tahoma nursery in Washington State has announced the end of print catalogs. This is one of the country’s little treasures featuring thoughtfully chosen rock plants and woodlanders with, in particular, a huge range of primulas of all kinds, including the superb ’Early Girl’ (left), an increasing range of epimediums and some species from China never seen in gardens before – including a creeping honeysuckle.

So from now on the website does it all. This will bring a saving to Rick in terms of time and cost – and of course it will save paper too. The 2008 list has just gone live. You can find Rick Lupp’s Mt Tahoma Nursery website here.

Altogether more glitzy and more dramatic in its look (and launching recently with a website and no print catalog), GreatGardenPlants.com features mainly new and recent introductions – of all kinds from vines to ferns. With respected breeders and growers TerraNova Nurseries and Walters Gardens in the background, they list 46 daylilies (including ’Spiritual Corridor’, right), 39 hibiscus, 13 echinaceas, two lovely new brunneras and lots more. Take a look at the GreatGardens.com website.

Meanwhile, back in Britain…

Blackthorn Nursery has announced that after this coming spring season it will be closing to retail sales. This is the nursery that created ‘Party Dress’, the first double hellebores in a host of colours, and has bred superb new daphnes and epimediums, phygelius and other plants. After 32 years running the nursery Robin and Sue White just want a quieter life and to concentrate on the garden and breeding new plants.

And finally a not-quite-brand-new nursery in the English Cotswolds – FuturePrimitive Plants. I only came across this nursery recently but I’ll be stopping by this year. Concentrating on new and recent introductions, hardy orchids and a range of aspidistras to grow outside are special features – along with the new orange ‘Tiki Torch’ echinacea and variegated Bergenia ‘Solar Flare’ (left). You’ll find the FuturePrimitive Plants website here.

Back in the spring I asked you to look out for a healthy virus-free plant of this wonderful dahlia, Dahlia 'Ragged Robin' – it was bred in Britain at Avon Bulbs and sold by Heronswood in the US (but no longer). All the plants everywhere now seem to be virused and the breeder is looking for a healthy plant from which to propagate clean stock. You can find out more in the original post. Leave a comment on this page or email the nursery if you have news of healthy plants of Dahlia ‘Ragged Robin’.

I was in a nursery in New Jersey the other day, just browsing around,… imagine my shock. Echinacea ‘Twilight’ – the price tag said $27.99! (That’s about £14.) OK… the two-stem plant was in flower (though past its best) in a big pot… but that seems an extraordinary price even in an affluent NJ suburb. The same nursery was just taking delivery of a batch of Lythrum salicaria ‘The Rocket – that’s a pink flowered form of… purple loosestrife.

The day before I’d been at a much smaller nursery, Catskill Perennials, where their echinaceas, in slightly smaller pots, were priced at $11 (c£5.50). That’s more like it. And the only purple loosestrife in that part of the world is in the roadside ditches.

Next Saturday I’ll be at the Summer Garden Party at Foxtail Lilly, Tracey Mathieson’s delightful country garden and barn shop in Oundle, Northamptonshire.

Featured last year in The Garden, the Royal Horticultural Society’s monthly magazine, the relaxed but imaginative planting style has attracted great attention and the shop, set in a 19th century barn, combines an interesting selection of plants with bouquets of cut flowers, many of which are grown on site. Vintage gardenalia and small antiques are also on sale alongside crafts made by local craftspeople and a choice selection of Tracey’s favourite gardening books.

Come along on Saturday 28 July, from 2-5pm, to enjoy the garden, relax with drinks and light refreshments, look round the shop and perhaps win a free signed copy of my RHS Encyclopedia of Perennials.

I hope to see you there.

Read my previous post on this lovely garden here
Download the article on the garden at Foxtail Lilly here
See exactly where Foxtail Lilly is located here
Check out the Foxtail-Lilly website here

Garden writers often discuss plant names and how to make sure we use them accurately and according to the International rules that govern their use. Only last month many garden writers were involved in a detailed discussion of the subject.

So there was I in Lowe’s the other day (for British readers: Lowe's is like a monster B&Q), looking over their stock, and they had rows of dahlias, salvias, helichrysums and more - not one of them with a name tag. Every one was labelled with the same generic tag saying “Assorted Annuals”.  The fact that most of them were perennials, although not all hardy up here in zone 5/6… well, that’s another issue.

But how unhelpful could they be? Here are we writers trying to get the names exactly right so that everyone knows precisely which plant we mean – and Lowe’s take the easy way out and don’t even bother to try. What’s more, at $3.58 these plants are too cheap – give us a decent tag, charge $3.98 and they’d still be cheap. Charge $4.58 and they wouldn’t be expensive. Another case of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, I’m afraid.

[Sorry for the recent break in transmission, so to speak: busybusybusy… extending the deer fence, building a dock, lots of garden and desk work. Normal service now resumed.]

Over on the right there, you’ll see Cotswold Garden Flowers in Worcestershire listed amongst my favourite British nurseries and on my recent trip to England I had the opportunity to pay another visit.

Run by Bob Brown, a man of deep knowledge and strong opinions, his mail order catalogue is one of the most fascinating and amusing that you’ll come across and his nursery is packed with good plants – familiar, unfamiliar and sometimes a little strange. He’s chairman of the Variegated Plant Group of the Hardy Plant Society in Britain, which gives a big clue to one of his many enthusiasms.

Yesterday I went with my Mum to buy some shrubs and sweet pea plants at her favourite garden centre. Twenty five years ago Garsons, in Esher, Surrey, started as pick-your-own farm and my parents were early customers. Over the years Garsons have added an excellent farm shop, huge garden centre, a water garden centre and a restaurant and my parents have been regular shoppers. And the place is always changing.

For some years they’ve been building up their range of gifts and this year clothes feature strongly. Their Christmas displays are huge and spectacular and last year they went for Halloween in a big way.

So they’ve developed a range of income streams, to cope with the unpredictablities of selling plants and pick-your-own, while at the same time keeping the quality and price of their plants very competitive. Eight or ten years ago, as Gardening Correspondent of the London Evening Standard, I drove all over London buying plants of Forsythia ‘Lynwood’ to find which garden centre had the best plants at the best price. Garsons came out top – especially impressive with the Royal Horticultural Society’s plant centre at Wisley just a few miles down the road.

The new edition of the Royal Horticultural Society’s PlantFinder is now out both in book form and free online.

This is one of the most important horticultural works ever published – and a new edition appears each April. This year it lists over 75,000 plants, with 4,000 new entries in this edition, all with the correct, up-to-date, botanist-verified names. For British and European gardeners primarily (though not exclusively), it also lists which nurseries sell each and every plant.

No serious gardener can be without each annual edition. Need I say more?

In Britain the RHS PlantFinder is available direct from the RHS. It’s also available from amazon.co.uk. I urge you to buy from the RHS as this will more effectively support their work – that is, they make more money that way.

In North America, the RHS PlantFinder has not been available from amazon.com for some years. You can order it from the RHS, but I’m afraid they'll have to charge you about $15 shipping. But remember, it’s free online.

And perhaps this is the point to say: I enthusiastically commend the Royal Horticultural Society for continuing to make their PlantFinder available online to everyone at no charge. Making such information available free to everyone helps unify plant names – which makes life so much simpler for all gardeners, amateur or professional.

Update:...

Plant Delights Nursery is one of the best on the country. Founded and run by plantsman and Tony Avent, who peddles strong, often controversial, though well-respected opinion along with his extraordinary plants, Tony’s just sent out a list of his bestselling plants, a Top Thirty for this spring.

There are some great plants on this list – and some I’d never heard of, perhaps because his mail order catalog never came this year. I’ve pasted in the full list at the end. The top seller is  Colocasia gigantea Thailand Giant Strain, a monstrous and dramatic tropical wonder for warmer areas. It's straight from the wild in Thailand, and much larger than the form usually seen.

At the recent RHS flower show Alan Street of Avon Bulbs explained to me a problem they have with their wonderful Dahlia ‘Ragged Robin’.

Spotted as a seedling on the Somerset nursery in the early 1990s, 'Ragged Robin' is a prolific dahlia with bright red single flowers and slender wavy petals. There’s nothing quite like it, and it rapidly became popular in Britain; I was also very impressed when I saw it inthe USA, at Heronswood, the wonderful garden of Dan Hinkley in Washington State.

The problem that Avon Bulbs have is that their stock of this lovely plant has been infected with virus disease. The result is that it flowers far less generously than it should and rooted cuttings often fail to make tubers so it’s become impossible to carry plants over from one season from the next.

So they’d like to know if anyone out there is still growing healthy and prolific stock of ‘Ragged Robin’ – and if so, could they please let Avon Bulbs have some! They can propagate it again and make it available. The alternative is to try to create it again. Avon Bulbs only grew three dahlias at the time the self sown seedling was spotted: ‘Bishop of Llandaff’, D. coccinea and D. sherffii – so the parentage can be guessed at. But if someone still has healthy stock it would be so much simpler.

This is a wonderful nursery and Alan, and his colleague Chris Ireland-Jones, would greatly appreciate your help. Leave a comment here, or email the nursery, if you have any healthy plants or useful information on Dahlia ‘Ragged Robin’.