Our May talk is Awareness of Bees and will be given by Alison Wakeman at the Christ Church Centre in Stone at 7.30pm on Thursday May 9th. Having been a beekeeper for a couple of years, Alison realised there was a lack of education in primary schools why bees are so important. So she created Alison’s Bee Class in 2014. She will discuss our awareness of bees and their importance in the environment.

On Sunday May 12th you can join the annual Bluebell Walk at Sandon Church – there is a fee to help with church funds and full details on booking a place and joining in are on their website. The church itself is open on Tuesday mornings if you would like to explore – again details are on the website.

Bank Holiday weekend Sunday-Monday 5-6 May 2024 is the date for the next Plant Hunters Fair at Weston Park, Weston-Under-Lizard, TF11 8LE  Times: 10am – 4pm. Admission: Special early bird advance-purchase ticket £4.00 (plus 20p booking fee) per person. Admission on this day includes access to the entire estate including the Park, Temple Wood, Formal Gardens and the Woodland Adventure Playground plus our wonderful plant fair. Tickets are on sale online until 9am on the day of the event. (Full venue entry price of £8.00 applies if you arrive without having purchased a ticket).

A Flower Power plant fair is being held on the late May Bank Holiday Monday 27 May at Rode Hall, Scholar Green, ST7 3QP.  11am-4pm with home made refreshments served in the old coach house. Pre-Book Tickets online via Rode Hall website where you will also find details of their Bluebell Walks. Before then don’t forget their fair on Sunday April 28th at Sandon Hall Sandon, Stafford ST18 0BZ  open at 11am.  Last entry to the fair will be 3.30pm. Admission £4.00 (card preferred, but cash welcome). You can also buy advance tickets online via Sandon Hall’s website.  Don’t forget to take cash for the plant stands.

There are several Staffordshire gardens open under the NGS scheme this month – see your yellow book for details. Use the website, or app, to find gardens open in our nearby counties of Shropshire, Cheshire and Derbyshire as well as further afield.

Also open this month (and the next few months) are several Shropshire gardens for the Shropshire Historic Churches Trust – costs are between £5 and £6 for each garden to help preserve and maintain Shropshire’s historic churches. Full details are on their website.

Our next meeting at the Christ Church Centre is on Thursday 11th April at 7.30pm. Our speaker will be Duncan Coombs who will give a talk on Ponds, Marginals and Bog Gardens.

There are still a couple of plant fairs in March including two this weekend –

Saturday March 23^rd Plant Hunters Fair at Sugnall Walled Garden  10 – 4   £1 free parking

Sunday 24 March 2024 Plant Hunter’s fair at Arley Hall Northwich, Cheshire CW9 6NA   Times: 10am – 4pm Admission: NEW FOR 2024: Entry includes full access to the gardens and the plant fair for the special offer reduced price of just £5.00 (Normally £12.00). Children under 16 free.

Good Friday 29 March 2024 Plant Hunter’s fair at Whittington Castle Near Oswestry SY11 4DF  Times: 10am – 4pm Admission: Plant Fair and Castle: Free Entry.

NGS Gardens are now opening for visits – see the Yellow Book or the website for details, or download the app to your phone. 23 St John’s Road in Stafford is open tomorrow (Thursday March 21st) and also Thursday April 18th. If you haven’t yet been to John’s Garden at Ashwood Nurseries it is open on Sunday March 31st. If you can’t get there (or to any gardens) you can take virtual tours of many NGS gardens and while away several wet afternoons.

On Sunday April 28th there is a Flower Power Plant Fair at Sandon Hall Sandon, Stafford ST18 0BZ  open at 11am.  Last entry to the fair will be 3.30pm. Admission £4.00 (card preferred, but cash welcome). You can also buy advance tickets online via Sandon Hall’s website.  Don’t forget to take cash for the plant stands.  

Finally – those pesky slugs and snails have been enjoying the wet weather but is it time to learn to live with them? Have a look at the Wild About Gardens website and read what they have to say – some slugs can actually be good for our gardens, but which ones?

Our next meeting is on Thursday March 14th at the Christ Church Centre in Stone when Philip Aubrey will give a talk called Keep Them in Shape – pruning tips and demonstration. Meetings start at 7.30 prompt and admission is £2 including refreshments. Visitors are always welcome!

Having failed to find a photo of anything that had been properly and sensibly pruned a hunt through the books on the shelf produced this. Its from a little book with a long title – The Cottager’s Kitchen, Fruit and Flower Gardens: containing Directions for the Management of each Department. Its by J.H. Clark, no date but the cover looks to be about 1880-1890.

Spring is on its way and so are the plant fairs: –

Saturday March 23^rd Plant Hunters Fair at Sugnall Walled Garden  10 – 4   £1 free parking

Sunday 24 March 2024 Plant Hunter’s fair at Arley Hall Northwich, Cheshire CW9 6NA   Times: 10am – 4pm Admission: NEW FOR 2024: Entry includes full access to the gardens and the plant fair for the special offer reduced price of just £5.00 (Normally £12.00). Children under 16 free.

Good Friday 29 March 2024 Plant Hunter’s fair at Whittington Castle Near Oswestry SY11 4DF  Times: 10am – 4pm Admission: Plant Fair and Castle: Free Entry.

The 2023 International Garden Photographer of the Year (IGPOTY) competition winners in all the categories are now online. There are some stunning photos – it is well worth a browse, just remember to allow yourself a lot of time. If you are going to be in London in the next few weeks you can see the IGPOTY 17 Launch Exhibition at Kew. February 3 to March 10, 2024 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

But before all this there is one last February Zoom talk from Tender Shoots Garden Club Network (TSGCN) –

Tuesday February 27th at 7.30pm – Francesca Page-Smith will talk about Snowdrops. Full details on the TSGCN website.

Our next meeting on Thursday February 8th will be our AGM starting at 7.00pm. This will be followed at 7.45 by a talk from Jeff Bates on the Royal Gardens at Windsor.

February is snowdrop month and many places will have a ‘snowdrop walk’ between now and March. The National Trust Gardens often have these as do many of our local gardens – this photo was taken in Trentham Gardens back in December but there will be plenty more out by now.

On Sunday Feb 18th between 2 and 4pm you can visit the grounds of Eccleshall Castle to enjoy the snowdrops (by kind permission of the Carter-Motley family). Buy your ticket on Feb 3rd from Eccleshall Library – £2 available from 10am – 12noon. Unsold tickets will be available at the gate on the day. Refreshments available and proceeds to local charities.

Don’t forget that the Tender Shoots Garden Club Network (TSGCN) has a variety of talks via Zoom organised by other garden clubs which you can join in with. Sign up on their website to be notified of these and the log-in details. Coming up this month are three talks, although the date of one has yet to be confirmed –

Feb 2nd Fri – Alec White – Primrose Hall Peonies (8pm start time)
Feb 14th Wed – Dr Ian Bedford – Companion Planting for a Balanced Garden
Feb TBC – Francesca Page-Smith – Snowdrops

Next month, at our meeting on March 14th, Philip Aubrey will be giving us some pruning tips with practical demonstrations.

Happy New Year! Our new 2024 programme of talks and trips is slowly appearing on the website pages so do go and look to see what we have in store for you in the coming twelve months. You will be receiving your membership renewal forms soon as well and we look forward to seeing you all throughout 2024.

Our January meeting is on Thursday January 11th and will be held via Zoom with TSGCN – see their website for log-in details. The speaker is Sally Gregson from Somerset who will be talking about Hydrangeas. Sally Gregson ran Mill Cottage Plants nursery for over thirty years, having trained professionally at Hadlow College, Kent, and exhibited at the major flower shows, including Hampton Court Palace. Mill Cottage Plants specialised in Hydrangea and sold the more unusual, and more interesting, species and cultivars of hydrangea and their shade-loving companions. With her husband, Peter, she opens the garden by appointment under the NGS Yellow Book scheme. She has written several gardening books and continues to lecture throughout the UK and abroad, as well as writing for national gardening magazines.

We will be holding our AGM on February 8th at the Christ Church Centre as usual. The AGM starts at 7.00pm and will be followed at 7.30 by a talk from Jeff Bates on The Royal Windsor Gardens.

Quick edit – the weather was against us, the sun didn’t stay long and the rain soon reappeared so we are extending the challenge for the rest of December. Venture out in between the showers/downpours and snap a photo or two for our photo gallery. You can see some are there already.

The sun has appeared and it isn’t raining (briefly?) so grab your phone/camera and venture outside to take part in the photo challenge – a photo taken today (December 28th) of something in flower. it doesn’t have to be in your garden, or indeed a garden flower. Send them to us (email address in the sidebar) and we will add them to our photo gallery.

Here’s a couple taken earlier from the dry – leaning out of the patio door and using the zoom feature on the phone

You too could stay dry and snap a quick shot of your violas or primulas in patio or balcony pots. We’re not looking for fabulous photos (though that would be nice) – quick snapshots like these are fine! There are more starting to appear on the Photo Gallery page.

A quick reminder that the January meeting is via Zoom on Thursday Jan 11th at 7.15 for a 7.30 start when Sally Gregson will talk about Hydrangeas.

Our December meeting is in the afternoon (don’t forget!) at 2pm on Thursday 14th – tea/coffee and mince pies with entertainment provided by a choir from Oulton Primary School. You will need a ticket for this (free) event so Helen knows how many mince pies to order. If you didn’t collect a ticket at the November meeting then give Dawn a ring to order one – her number is on the front of your membership card/programme. NB – while our meeting is free don’t forget you will need to pay for parking at the daytime rate.

We try to have a little bit of a photo competition at this time of year – just for fun, no prizes – and this year we are asking that you take a photo of something flowering on December 28th. It needn’t be in your garden; it could be a garden you are visiting or a neighbour’s garden, or wherever you happen to be, it might even be a ‘weed’ at the motorway service station on the way somewhere! Send your photos to Chris at our email address with perhaps a brief note of what and where and we will have a montage of a photos here on January 1st.

We’re hoping we see these

and not this!

Our January meeting will be via Zoom so we don’t have to be out and about on a chilly January evening, you can sit in warmth and comfort to listen to Sally Gregson talking about Hydrangeas. This will be held in conjunction with TSGCN. There is no Christmas quiz this year but if you missed George Hargreaves talk on UK Botanic Gardens you can find a link to it on the private members page on the TSGCN website.

In the meantime the Committee would like to send you all our very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year. We hope you will continue to support us and look forward to meeting up again in person from February onwards.

Our next meeting will be held on Thursday November 9th when Sue Clarke will talk about Hardy Geraniums -The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Sue is a well-known expert on everything to do with growing hardy geraniums. She has been growing them for 25 years and has a Plant Heritage National Collection of Geranium sylvaticum & renardii. Geraniums can be beautiful but some can also be thugs. Sue will talk about the vast range of geraniums that are available and which are best for different environments.

Please note – our December meeting, on Thursday December 14th at 2pm, is a ticket only event (so we know how many mince pies are needed). Please collect your ticket at the November meeting.

Before that however we have two Zoom talks from TSGCN – on Thursday October 26th Timothy Walker (formerly of Oxford Botanic Gardens) will give a talk titled Bordering on Insanity (creating an all-year-round border) and on Wednesday November 9th Andrew Mikolayski will ask Do Your Roots need Doing? Good root growth is essential for healthy and productive plants. How can you be sure your plants are performing well under ground when you can’t even see them? Full details of these talks and how to join them are on the Tender Shoots Garden Club Network website.

If you need to make plans for the New Year our January meeting on the 11th is via Zoom and TSGCN when Sally Gregson from Mill Cottage in Somerset will tell us about Hydrangeas.

February is our AGM at 7pm followed by a talk at 7.30 from Jeff Bates about the Royal Gardens, Windsor. Details of all our meetings are on the Programme page.

Remember to keep an eye on your emails (and check the spam folder) especially through the winter months for changes to venue and programme in case the weather causes disruption to our plans.

Our next meeting is on Thursday October 14th at the Christ Church Centre in Stone when Ken Black will give a talk: Clematis – For All Year Round Colour. Our meeting starts at 7.30 with coffee/tea available beforehand. All are welcome, just £1.50 payable at the door.

Ken Black has been growing clematis for more than 30 years. He says he tries to make the whole evening as interactive and enjoyable as possible with a talk about the different varieties of clematis followed by practical demonstrations. He grows many clematis from seeds and cuttings and, if there are spare plants, there will be some for sale.

Before then however there is our bus trip to RHS Bridgewater on September 28th – if you have a place booked you should have an email about it before then, if Helen can get her computer to cooperate! Otherwise its 9.30 from the carpark at the Stone House Hotel.

And even before that, on Monday September 25th is a TSGCN talk via Zoom on Climate Change and its Effect on our Gardens by Lucy Hartley. Full details are on the Tender Shoots website.

Back to Clematis – they are such versatile plants that we can all find space for at least one – whether its a C. montana taking over a holly tree (intentional, or otherwise), or more showy ones scrambling through the border (possibly not intentional either) or brightening up a fence.

I’m sure that following Ken’s talk we will all be scrambling to acquire another clematis or two.

Our first meeting after the summer break is on Thursday 14th September when Alun and Jill Whitehead of Aulden Farm near Leominster will tell us about their favourite Cornish Gardens in a talk entitled Pasties and Tin Mines. Full details are on our Programme Page.

Our trip to RHS Bridgewater on September 28th is fully booked, you could ask to go on the waiting list in case of any last-minute cancellations. Those already booked should be getting details soon.

We have had an email about the Eccleshall Show to be held on September 2nd at Sugnall. The Horticultural and Craft Section have an award that was presented by the Stone Chrysanthemum and Dahlia Society a number of years ago – for the best exhibit of chrysanthemums or dahlias. So they thought they would contact us to see if any members would be interested in entering any of the open flower (or other) classes at the Show this year. The schedules and entry forms can be found on the Show website.

There are still a few Plant Hunters Fairs being held (more or less) locally before our next meeting – Bodenham Arboretum on Sept 2nd, Ness Botanic Gardens on the 3rd and at Weston Park on the 10th. Full details on their website.