Holidaymakers tend to return from Italy with a bottle of extra virgin olive oil, some red wine and a suntan, if they are lucky. But you might be so inspired by the gardens you see that you want to create a permanent memento.

This is what Grant Williams, 45, and his wife Sandy, 49, have done to the acre of south-facing land that slopes away sharply beneath their white painted Victorian house in the hamlet of Wollaston, close to the busy market town of Shrewsbury.

'We love Italy and have spent a lot of time exploring the country and its gardens over the years,' says Grant, who runs The Darwin Supply Company which designs, manufactures and imports garden pottery for garden centres.

'When we decided to buy this house there was not much debate over the garden - we just had to have an Italian landscape.'

They bought Wollaston Lodge (for sale at £725,000 with Savills, 01952 239500) in 1998 for £177,000. They were living in Central London but wanted a rural location to bring up Hannah and Guy, now 18 and 14.

'We had friends in Shropshire so looked around the area. When we saw the view, we knew we'd found the right place,' says Grant, pointing to a sea of green fields leading to the gentle Shropshire Hills.

Despite its enviable position, the garden was nothing to look at.

From the quiet lane that runs past the property there was a steep driveway which bisected a large lawn and led to the front door of the five-bedroom home, built in 1840 as a hunting lodge.

'It was really unremarkable with no plants apart from a couple of old cedar trees that were most likely planted at the same time as our house was built,' says Grant.

As the site was sloping, he decided to steal ideas seen in Italy and create a garden broken up by terraces. But rather than let the space be seen in one go, he has broadly split it into two by building a high wall that hugs the side of the driveway. From the front door you step on to a small, raised lawn dominated by the venerable cedars of Lebanon (Cedrus libani).

This drops down to a parking space and then a roughly triangular, formal and symmetrical garden divided by three lawned terraces, each separated by a band of scented lavender.

Enclosing this area is a low hedge of Ceanothus repens punctuated by ten evenly spaced evergreen oak (Quercus ilex) lollipops.

Back towards the house a tasteful wooden conservatory juts out on to a raised patio. A large dining table sits in the centre, but what really grabs your attention are the 75 blue glazed containers around the outside, with plants including Japanese maples, tulips, pines, box, aquilegias and agapanthus.

'It's one of the perks of importing pots,' says Grant, who guesses there must be 'hundreds' of containers in the garden.

A short walk leads to a doorway in the side of the dividing wall and the first of four terraces. A raised pool surrounded by neatly clipped box hedging sits at its heart, while nearby the bust of a Roman emperor can be glimpsed among the foliage of a bed heavily planted with roses, bamboo, rhus, ferns and emerging perennials.

Steps lead down to a grass terrace broken up by huge clumps of phormium and big terracotta pots planted with rosemary, lavender, pittosporum and a twisted willow (Salix babylonica var. pekinensis 'Tortuosa').

Past another grass terrace you land on a terrace at the very bottom covered by a pergola supporting climbing roses and honeysuckle.

Although gardeners cut the lawns and hedges, Grant claims the garden is fairly easy to look after.

'All the beds are covered in landscape material to prevent weeds and every plant, whether in a bed or pot, is kept damp with an automatic irrigation system attached to a computer,' he says, showing me a 20,000-litre underground storage tank that collects water from the roof, baths and showers for reusing outdoors.

Grant and Sandy have decided to downsize as Hannah starts university this year and the house will be too big for three. They are looking for a large apartment in Shrewsbury and will probably spend more time abroad, especially in their beloved Italy.

'It's been lovely here, but we feel it is time to move on. I've really enjoyed the garden, but most of all I'll miss the view,' says Grant. 'When you look across the valley you could almost be in Tuscany.'

Source: Daily Mail

Once upon a time, a gardener had to be a defence line – armed and ready with a battery of pesticides in a never-ending war against slugs, bugs and disease. But not any more.

Thanks to advances in breeding, plants these days should pretty much defend themselves.

This suits the low-maintenance gardener, who doesn’t have the time for attacking aphids and the like, as well as the organically minded. To cater for both, plant breeders have been focusing on creating pest- and disease-resistant versions of popular plants.

Roses: these plants were once thought of as high-maintenance, but most of the varieties introduced in the past 10 years are less trouble. “In the early 1990s, we realised there wouldn’t be a future for the rose unless it could resist disease,” says Gareth Fryer of Fryer’s rose nursery in Cheshire. “People were so sick of black spot, they weren’t buying roses, so all the breeders had to make health their priority.”

The hard work has paid off. There is now a large selection of disease-resistant varieties on the market. Fryer’s itself is the creator of ‘Lucky’. Rose of the Year 2009 and the result of 15 years’ work, it is a floribunda with pink petals in a traditional shape and has exceptional disease resistance.

Other new varieties include ‘Sweet Haze’, a tiny pink shrub rose; ‘Lancashire’, a scarlet ground-cover rose; ‘Gardeners’ Glory’, a golden climber; and ‘Strawberry Hill’, a romantic variety that smells deliciously of myrrh. All are winners of the new Gold Standard, an accolade awarded by breeders for good plant health, as well as flower power and scent.

Old roses that have stood the test of time are another option. Albas and gallicas are rarely ill, but they won’t repeat flower as modern roses do. The best is ‘Félicité Parmentier’ (1836), a gorgeous alba that flowers for six weeks.

Fruit trees: the other main area of horticulture that has been transformed by disease-resistance breeding is fruit – especially apple trees, which are often attacked by scab, a fungus that leaves scars and cracks on the fruit.

“Eighty per cent of UK apple-tree spraying is for the prevention of scab,” says Hamid Habibi of Keepers, a fruit-tree nursery in Kent. “So, apple growing has been transformed by the introduction of scab-resistant trees.” New varieties include ‘Rajka’, red apples with a faintly strawberry flavour; ‘Scrumptious’, which produces honey-sweet apples; and ‘Herefordshire Russet’, the fruit of which tastes as good as a ‘Cox’.

“People plant a ‘Cox’ or a ‘Gala’ without realising how much spraying is done to grow supermarket versions,” says Habibi. “The equivalent grown at home is always poor. With one of the new varieties, you won’t have to spray and you’ll enjoy their apples.”

The same applies to many other fruit favourites, such as the ‘Victoria’ plum, which is susceptible to disease, especially silver leaf. Habibi recommends growing ‘Opal’, a smaller plum that tastes and looks similar.

Hostas: hosta leaves are caviar to slugs. However, the slimy pests are less partial to those with a thick leaf. Leathery varieties such as the ghostly, blue-tinged ‘Halcyon’, and ‘Sum and Substance’, which has huge gold-green leaves, are largely unaffected once established (though the young leaves can be eaten). The same is true of upright hostas, such as ‘Krossa Regal’, the leaves of which don’t touch the ground and so thwart slugs. Richard Ford, of Park Green Nurseries in Suffolk, suggests growing hostas in the open. “People plant them in damp, dark places, which is where slugs congregate; try planting in semi-shade instead.” Slug-proof alternatives for the shady corner include lady’s mantle, ferns, solomon’s seal and foxgloves.

Trees and hedging: since it was discovered in the UK 15 years ago, the fungal disease box blight has grown to become one of the main problems reported to the Royal Horticultural Society. Beatrice Henricot, principal plant pathologist at RHS Garden Wisley, Surrey, suggests the following alternatives for evergreen hedge planting and trimming: Ilex crenata (box-leaved holly);Berberis buxifolia(a dwarf berberis with box-like leaves and yellow flowers in summer); and Teucrium xlucidrys (hedge germander), which has a great aroma.

The latest disease creating havoc in British gardens, according to Henricot, is a fungus called Pseudocercospora cladosporioides, which affects olives. The leaves develop spots, then yellow and eventually fall off. Opt for the silvery-leaved ornamental pear ‘Pendula’ instead of an olive.

Take care when deciding on hedging, as yew, viburnum and privet can be plagued by the UK’s most common disease, honey fungus.Safer evergreen bets are pyracantha and cotoneaster. If you want to be a little more daring and don’t mind a deciduous hedge, try Amelanchier lamarckii, which has bronze leaves and white flowers in spring.

Source: The Times

A vegetable garden need not be an eyesore. It can be an oasis of beauty, pleasing your eyes as much as your palate.

Just visit or find a picture of Villandry, the famous French potager (“kitchen garden”) near Tours, France, with its patterns of geometric beds filled with growing vegetables. Some beds are bordered with low boxwood hedges — 19 miles of them — and the whole garden is interlaced with white, gravel paths.

In fact, call your vegetable plot a “potager” and right away you might find it more charming.

When locating your potager, keep it close to your house, and consider that it needs at least six hours of full sunlight each day.

As the old saw goes, “Put your vegetable garden no further from your back door than you could throw the kitchen sink.” Or maybe even from your front door. (And that old saw dates back to when kitchen sinks were made of cast iron!)

Whether it is near or against your house, establish connections — visually and physically — between it, the house and the rest of the landscape. For instance, mimic in or around your potager some design element from your house or yard: a decorative fence, a row of clipped hedges, a piece of statuary.

Paths create visual and functional connections. Choose paving for paths that matches that of a nearby patio or echoes the pattern on a floor in a room looking out at the garden.

Straight paths have a formal air, if that’s the tone of your yard, while curving ones lend themselves more to informal settings. To further tie everything together, run paths from your house right up to and into the vegetable garden itself.

Paths, paving, fences, hedges, statuary and other “tie-ins” help overcome a common limitation of vegetable gardens: their often dreary appearance in winter, when, too often, they are just dirt.

These tie-ins can help carry the overall design of the garden through the winter. Create beds in your potager, perhaps geometric in shape, perhaps flowing; in either case, beds whose shapes create year-round patterns of beauty. Define your garden with hedging, arbors, fencing and paving.

Finally, remember, a potager isn’t only for vegetables. No rule says you can’t plant some ornamentals to help keep up appearances through winter. The shapes and lines created by small, densely twigged plants, such as potentilla, shrubby dogwoods and cotoneaster, as well as boxwood, heather and other small evergreens, make their statements year-round.

Come spring and summer, add vegetables themselves to your designer’s palette: frilly red or green lettuces in all shapes, blue-green leaves of kale, a backdrop of feathery asparagus leaves. And some flowers — for distraction from those temporary bare spots where you’ve picked delicious vegetables for eating.

Source: thestate.com

A topiary tribute to The King has appeared on The Dolphin pub in Dominion Road, Worthing.

The 8ft leafy lookalike was designed by the pub's landlord and Elvis fan, David Stocken, in a cheeky bid to thwart council planners.

The watering hole regularly hosts two impersonators but Worthing Borough Council has said that 13 signs and placards advertising the event “damaged the character and appearance of the building” and must be removed.

In reply David, 43, and wife Mo, put the giant performing Elvis, made from a new kind of fake topiary, up over night.

He said: “It just appeared yesterday and we have had lots of interest from customers about it, they love it.

“We have monthly Elvis nights here and they are always popular.

“We thought it would be a good way to advertise them, seeing Elvis performing on top of the pub.

“It is so frustrating that the council has asked us to remove the signs.

“We are just trying to advertise our business but they are so dictatorial.”

The council's report said that if a planning application had been made for the signs, it would have been refused and ordered their removal by the end of the month.

Mo, said the plastic Elvis is eco-friendly because it doesn’t need watering. She added: “We wanted to do something fun for our customers.

“Lots of them don't have much money at the moment and the recession is causing depression so we wanted to do something to cheer them up.”

The next Elvis night at The Dolphin is on Sunday.(April19) A spokesman from Worthing Borough Council said the 13 signs must be gone by the end of April and said the new Elvis hedge has not yet been discussed by its planners.

Source: theargus.co.uk