Winter Garden Tips

Hellebore and cornus for winter colour...And don't forget the fresh mulch!

Regents Park Gardening

Avenue of Crocus in Regent's Park. Looking lovely

Plant Tips North London

Ordinary snowdrops increase like mad so divide them and spread under trees and shrubs

Highgate Lawn Care

Lawn tip: Now is the time to rake thatch and moss out of lawn with a wire rake or machine

Highbury Garden Maintenance and Pruning

Pruning back the #pleached trees in a client's #garden and training branches to the frame creates a natural privacy screen.

Highgate Garden Maintenance: Time to hard prune Ivy

Garden tip: Now is the time to hard prune Ivy that is getting too thick, before bird nesting starts!

London Garden Improvement and Maintenance: Mulching

Is your garden full of weeds? Laying mulch kills weeds and improves flower growth.

Lawn Care: North London

Lawn tip: If any perennials have spread too close to the lawn edge: Lift, divide and replant where needed.

Belsize Park Garden Maintenance

Love a neat garden but hate gardening? We’ll make your outdoor space work for you!

Book a Garden Clean and Clear

Spring is coming! Is your garden ready? Book a garden prune and clean today

Patio Cleaning in Hampstead

Has your patio turned green over the winter? Contact us and let us restore it with a deodorising jet spray.

The Hampstead Gardner: Early Spring Rose Care

Because the weather has been so mild this year, at The Hampstead Gardner we delayed pruning established rose beds in the autumn as we waited for hard frost and winter to set in.  As spring starts to dawn, we're now ramping up our rose pruning more. In gardens subject to late, hard frosts, we would normally delay pruning until the end of March, but we don't think our London gardens are under much threat of that this year.

If roses are not pruned every year they can become full of dead and diseased wood, tangled in an unshapely mess. Without pruning, blooms become progressively smaller and because they are grown on weak shoots, their bloom time can be much shorter as well. Pruning every year not only gets rid of dead damaged wood, but as encourages healthy shapely growth.

Using sharp secateurs, we're now shortening long growths on bush roses to between 2-3 ft high to prevent wind damage, pruning newly planted and established standards, hybrid tea and floribunda bushes, miniature roses, established repeat-flowering shrub roses and repeat flowering climbers. (Climbers and weeping standards which only bloom once a year should not be pruned now.)

Where roses have black spot, we collect the leaves and burn them. Removal of leaf litter and diseased canes back to healthy wood is vital for reducing the spread of the disease in the year to come. Keeping rose bushes pruned well and deadheaded will help the airflow through the bush also helping prevent black spot and other fungal diseases.

Have some questions about rose care or need some help pruning your roses? Contact us today!

Photo: Shutterstock