Johannesburg - It has been a warm winter and daffodils are already blooming. August is a great time to take those dreamy armchair gardening ideas and start putting them into the foundations of a great summer garden.
The Garden World Spring Festival, which runs through August, includes more than 30 new and revamped designer gardens. All the displays view the garden as an outdoor room to be filled with colourful plants, eye-catching furniture, food plants and decorative containers.
A makeover
Visit the show any time this month and use the ideas gleaned from top designers to revitalise your garden. See how to install a hot tub or create a waterfall that cascades into a plunge pool. Deck out your patio with colourful all-weather chair covers or fill sunny containers with colourful food plants such as Swiss chard Bright Lights.
Think ahead by installing a rain tank. Disguise the tank by padding it up with shade cloth filled with potting soil and plant pansies in pockets to make a vertical garden. If you are ambitious, recycle old pallets into a food garden.
Beyond the spring show in Honeydew, there are hundreds of other ideas you can implement in your garden this month. For a sleek modern look, accentuate the colour of metal outdoor tables and chairs by painting a patio wall and planter boxes pewter and growing silver-grey and maroon foliage plants in the boxes.
Draw attention to a patio with a grouping of cobalt-blue pots filled with orange nasturtiums and deep blue mini petunias; stand large forest-green containers with white hydrangeas on shady patios; grow succulents in recycled tin boxes, bowls or baths.
A coat of paint
Paint a feature wall in a courtyard terracotta or add a central fountain surrounded by pots of dwarf citrus trees and red pelargoniums. This will give you an attractive place to serve al fresco meals.
Show off the dusty pink bracts of Natalia bougainvillea by growing it to frame the grey-blue exterior walls of a house.
Grow plants with architectural foliage, such as silver-grey artichokes against a maroon wall.
Paint a summerhouse or tool shed buttercup yellow, and on either side of the path leading to this, group clusters of lemon and mauve flowers. Or paint the walls lilac and add window boxes of yellow petunias, mauve ageratum and purple lobelia and line the pathway with blue-purple salvia, yellow roses and mauve catmint.
Use garden furniture as a colour accent to blend or contrast with plantings; cinnabar-red chairs among tawny grasses, for example.
Flower power
In the garden, splashes of purple add depth to pastel colour schemes. Give peach-coloured dahlias and lilac angelonia a carpet of purple verbena. Blue-purple cabbages are decorative enough to be included among flowers, and work well in a border with white iceberg roses, white dianthus and lavender bushes.
Design a broad ribbon planting of burnt gold coastal dune salvia (Salvia africana-lutea). Plant a container with sumptuous purple Salvia splendens or interplant purple petunias with orange marigolds. Partner red roses with purple agapanthus.
With their many tints and tones, orange flowers offer exciting possibilities. Try combinations of orange flowers with bronze fennel or maroon Phormium tenax. Cool down orange blooms with lime-green foliage or give them an edging of black mondo grass (ophiopogon).
Some of our most attractive indigenous flowers come in shades of orange. Think of watsonia, bulbinella, protea, Bauhinia galpinii, phygelius, dimorphotheca, ursinia, nemesia, leonotis, red-hot-poker, aloe, Cape honeysuckle, gazania, gerbera and crocosmia, then think of combining them with blue and purple agapanthus and mauve-purple flowered polygala. A vivid combination for shady parts would be orange clivias and purple streptocarpus.
Chartreuse, a colour halfway between yellow and green, has many uses in the garden. It can be found in Justicia chartreuse or the sweet potato vine. Yellow-green foliage will lighten a dark corner, provide contrast among darker shades of green, is magical when combined with purple or burgundy, and striking with black.
Part of the fun of gardening is trying out new ideas, ways of combining imaginative plantings and glorious colours and spending time with family and friends in the beautiful garden you have created.
Visit the Garden World Spring Festival. Ends September 1. Seven days a week. 8am-5pm. Garden World, Beyers Naudé Drive, Muldersdrift. Entrance to the Designer Gardens is R20. Children under 12 free. Call 083 997 6142. Visit www.gardenworld.co.za.
GENERAL GARDENING TIPS
It was a warm winter and spring has come early. Give spring bulbs that have flowered an application of bulb food to be stored as nutrients for next year’s flowers. Sprinkle seed of quick-growing linaria among spring bulbs to hide any yellowing foliage.
Use colour imaginatively in containers this spring. Combine pots of blue kingfisher daisies with orange clivias. Use colour bags of pansies and violas to fill corners. Rhododendrons, hellebores and azaleas also put on a spectacular display at this time of year.
Pull off withered leaves on bearded irises and lightly fork in superphosphate and a dusting of agricultural lime. If iris flower stems start to curve, it can be an indication that they are not getting enough water. - Saturday Star