Planting some camellias will make a difference to your winter garden. These wonderful shrubs are evergreen so you have leaves all year and in the cooler season, they produce wonderful bright flowers, some scented that you can cut and bring inside.
Your garden centre should have them in flower at the moment, so pop in and you can see what they will look like next winter.
Most will grow to between two and three metres, and will be quite bushy so they will need a bit of room, but they are also great planted together to form a privacy barrier or windbreak.
Camelias, like rhododendrons and azaleas, love acidic soil, so do pick up a bag of fertiliser for them when you’re buying and don’t, whatever you do, add lime!
Hit the spot:
You can get rid of black spot fungus on rose bush leaves with onion skins. An old-fashioned remedy is to save your brown onion skins, then place them around the base of the bushes with a little compost on top. Within a month, the black spots will have disappeared.
Take a look at how to set up a worm farm here.
