The Gardener Magazine

The Gardener is a monthly, national magazine dedicated to inspiring gardeners, providing practical advice and showing step-by-step garden projects. Our monthly features include garden design, in-depth plant features, growing vegetables and herbs, water gardening, garden wildlife and pets, specialist plant articles and much more. We have an extensive database on our website that is growing daily.

WELCOME

Play plants for topiarists • The art of topiary, which is the clipping of the leaves and stems of an evergreen plant into a clearly defined shape, dates back at least 2 000 years. Topiaries can be either fantastical shapes like animals or other objects, or geometrical forms like squares, pyramids and spheres, all forming living sculptures in the garden or in pots. The simplest form a topiary can take is a formal hedge.

Garden GALLERIA

Get more from metal • Plastic may be incredibly versatile and useful in the garden, but sometimes you want something with more aesthetic appeal in the garden or on the patio. Knowing exactly this, First Dutch Brands has introduced a range of galvanised metal products that look good, are functional, and will last for years even in the harsh environment of the garden.

Game, Set and MATCH • Back in the day, when gardens were large and leisure time was aplenty, many homeowners installed tennis courts. Fast forward to modern times and many of these white elephants lie cracked and forgotten. A perfect case in point lies in a leafy suburb east of Johannesburg.

A reason to wax lyrical! • These are tough shrubs that will produce billowing clouds of flowers from late winter to spring with such abundance that you can pick them by the bucket full. Go all out for Geraldton wax!

Regally yours! • All pelargoniums are fabulous garden and container pals, but the grandest and most regal of them all must be the grandiflorums…

3 flower bombs

CONTAINER GARDENING 101: Choosing the right container

Aquascaping 101 • Taking care of your tank

Growing veggies in tune with your physical limits

Healthy herb greens for spring

Forest lily

Make THE CUT • Pruning: the when, what and how.

How

Pruning roses • Rose fundi Ludwig Taschner has many years’ experience with growing roses, so we know that when it comes to pruning time, his method is going to work. Here are his steps:

Echeveria agavoides

Petunias for every season

HOW TO PLANT POTATOES

Chervil

Alan Tew • ‘Alan Tew’ has a warm combination of soft-gold, almost butterycoloured blooms on a base of salmon. The blooms themselves are large and lightly fragrant, a gorgeous garden and picking hybrid-tea rose. The bush grows to shoulder height, producing an abundance of blooms, and the deep green leaves are glossy and healthy.

ROOT-OVER-ROCK BONSAI STYLE

Big-hearted fern

Checklist

Easy but classy • We made two simple but cool wooden pot plant holders of different height and sealed them with Woodoc Water-Borne MARINE and a Clifton Grey tint.

LUNAR Gardening Giude

The Gardener Magazine

A chainsaw massacre • Anything with a blade, from a pair of scissors to a chainsaw, means disaster in the hands of a novice!