November is Gardenalia month! This meeting on Thursday November 14th is the chance to clear out your shed of surplus equipment or bag a bargain. This ever-popular sale will continue after our talk from David Emley who came in January to talk about Staffordshire wildlife. This month he will present a talk on butterflies of Staffordshire. We are very grateful to David for stepping in at short notice.

Meetings start at 7.45 at the Christ Church Centre in Stone; visitors are welcome and admission is £1.50.

Next month’s meeting starts at 2.30pm with an afternoon tea for which you will need a ticket. Tickets should be bought at this November meeting if at all possible.

Our October meeting is on Thursday October 10th when Don Whitton will talk about Euphorbias. He is a National Collection Holder for this genus and has a keen interest in all perennials. The meeting, held at the Christ Church Centre in Stone, starts at 7.45pm – visitors are welcome and admission is £1.50.

The photo is of Euphorbia mellifera and was taken at Cambridge Botanic Gardens in April.

The 33rd Stone Chrysanthemum and Dahlia Society Annual Show takes place on Saturday September 14th at Walton Community Centre, Whitemill Lane, Stone.

The Show open to the public at 2pm and admission is free.

There is ample free parking.

The flowers will be for sale and available for collection at 4pm.

Full details are on our Events page.

Our September meeting is one week early – Thursday 5th September – when Alun and Jill Whitehead will give a talk on the Wild Gardens of Shropshire. They hold a National Collection of Iris and their garden participates in the Open Gardens NGS scheme. The meeting starts at 7.45 at the Christ Church Centre on Christ Church Way in Stone. Admission is £1.50 and visitors are welcome.

Saturday September 14th is the day of our 33rd Annual Open Show. Full details, entry forms and Schedule are available to download on our Events page or you can contact our Chairman Helen Harrison. The Show opens to the public at 2pm and admission is FREE!

We have no meeting in August. Our next meeting is September 5th when Alun and Jill Whitehead from Aulden Farm Nursery will talk about Wild Shropshire Gardens. Note that this is one week early as our 33rd Annual Open Show is being held on Saturday September 14th at Walton Community Centre. Further details are on our Events page where you can also download the entry forms and Schedule.

In the meantime we hope the weather stays fine, enjoy your gardens and visiting the Plant Fairs and gardens locally and further afield – lots of links to places to visit on our Links page. See you in September!

Neil Timm from the Fern Nursery in Binbrook, Lincs will be talking about The World of Ferns at our next monthly meeting on July 11th, 7.45pm at Christ Church Centre in Stone. Neil works as a landscape gardener and the nursery is family-owned, growing nearly all of its own plants some of which he will bring with him for sale on the evening.

Our July bus trip is on July 5th and is heading to Nottinghamshire stopping for coffee at the Japanese Garden of the Pure Land Meditation Centre before heading to Reg Taylor’s Nursery and Swan Sanctuary. Further details on the Events page.

Also happening locally this month  is Barlaston Open Gardens weekend on 13 – 14th July. You can find out more on their Facebook page. In addition Aston by Stone and Colwich & Haywoods have their Open Gardens on July 7th. You can find more Open Gardens throughout the county and country on the Open Gardens website. There are a lot of NGS gardens to visit locally this month as well – find them here and if you have a smart phone or tablet you can download their app.

Euphorbia mellifera

June sees us travelling to Madeira and the Azores as Razvan Chisu talks to us about plant hunting in this region. Born in Transylvania Razvan grew up in a Botanical Garden there and now lives in the UK. Several of our garden plants originated  in the Madeira/Azores region thanks to plant hunters who have collected seed or cuttings and propagated from those.

Razvan’s talk starts at 7.45pm on Thursday 13th June at the Christchurch Centre, cost is £1.50 payable at the door with tea/coffee afterwards.

Before that however, on June 5th, we have the first of our Bus Trips. Nowhere near as exotic as Madeira but promising to be a fascinating day out nonetheless, we will be going to the British Ironwork Centre and Sculpture Park in the morning and Wollerton Old Hall Gardens in the afternoon. See our Events page for further details.

June is also the month for Eccleshall Open Gardens. This year it is being held on the weekend June 15-16th. Buy your programme outside Eccleshall Library on the day and spend the weekend wandering around Eccleshall and many of its gardens – and eating homemade cakes.

If you enjoy growing herbs (and eating cake!) then Hooksgreen Herbs have a Nursery Open Days on June 22nd and 23rd. You can find them at Hooksgreen Farm, Old Road, Oulton Heath.

Our Annual Plant Sale takes place on Saturday May 4th and is held at St Michael’s Hall in Lichfield St. ST15 8BB. The sale starts at 9am and will close at 1pm – admission is FREE. A wide range of plants will be on sale from vegetables, bedding plants, basket and border annuals, hardy perennials; sweet peas to garden peas, begonias to beans, coreopsis to cabbage (well, you get the idea by now). Our members will be donating their surplus cuttings and young plants so the actual mix will depend very much on what has done well over the last few months.  Further details are on our Events page.

The following Thursday – May 9th – is our normal evening meeting at Christ Church Centre in Stone at 7.45pm. Our speaker tonight is Dr Keith I Ferguson who will be talking about the North American plants growing in British gardens. Dr Ferguson worked in the USA for a number of years before moving to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew where he worked for 29 years. It promises to be an interesting and possibly surprising evening.

Byron Machin, a geography teacher from the Staffordshire Moorlands, has a passion for all aspects of landscape history. He has been researching our native British orchids, particularly those of the Peak District for a number of years and on Thursday April 11th, will be sharing that research with us.

Our Plant Sale is next month – May 4th. If you are likely to have any surplus plants you can donate please let Helen know.

Richard and Jill Rawlings, owners of Mynd Hardy Plants, will be talking about the History of Walled Gardens at our March meeting on Thursday 14th.

Mynd Hardy Plants is a plant nursery within the Victorian walled garden of Delbury Hall at Diddlebury, Shropshire. Well worth a visit, they also open for the NGS (as shown above), and featured on BBC Gardeners’ World in April 2015.