The Summer of 2013

It was a good summer to be out in the garden in 2013, and if you visited a garden centre or nursery and saw the range of plants on offer (and the amount of people shopping) then you won’t be surprised to learn that the sales of plants increased markedly, this of course was probably due to the warm and sunny weather but also down to the simple fact that people do like to garden and in doing so invest both time and money in plants and garden equipment. As we can all guess the weather always play a vital role in how people enjoy their gardens, and there’s no denying that we do like to be outside in good weather. Even more impressive is that the market for outdoor garden furniture was also very good indeed with the market worth over £900 million in 2013. Now that’s a lot of furniture and equally a lot of people getting out and enjoying just being in their gardens, and there’s an undeniable pleasure about sitting in the sun watching the grass grow. Gardening always follows trends of one sort or another and plants are no exception. I have recently had a look around plant growers and suppliers for 2014 and it would seem that best sellers for annual summer flowers for hanging baskets and the like are most popular in the red, pink, blue and purple colour ranges, those are the colours that mostly lean towards being in the ‘luxury’ colour range. Yellows, oranges and white are not as popular but that’s fashion. Over the last couple of years popular perennials have also been towards the purple and red range too and I don’t think this will change for a while yet. Some plants never go out of fashion but conversely aren’t seen as trend setters or madly popular either. I’m referring to the humble rose, a plant which never did any wrong but even so managed to cultivate an image of difficulty with regard to correct pruning, disease control etc, none of which really matters and should never put anyone off buying a rose. If a rose can survive for years in the wild and flower beautifully through neglect then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t grow happily in a garden. There are some brilliant new roses available for 2014 such as ‘Thomas a Becket’ which has an old rose scent, and a healthy rambler called ‘The Albright Rambler’ which can be left to roam free in a larger plot. There are some very tempting new plant introductions this year, see your nearest garden centre this spring! Though whatever you wish to plant in your own garden then I’m a great advocate that if you see a plant that you like, regardless of the colour, fashionable or not, easy or hard, then you should buy it. There’s an immense amount of satisfaction in buying and indeed just growing plants for the pleasure of it.