Planting a flowering japanese quince

Hello and welcome back to my blog. I took some time out from blogging recently due to my work commitments, but I managed to do some light gardening over the last weekend that I wanted to share with you all.

The end of the tomato season

Despite sowing and planting out my cherry tomatoes rather late this year, I had a great harvest, but all good things must come to an end eventually. The recent drop in temperature finally hit the remaining tomatoes that were left outside, so the Mr and I cleared up the area this weekend:

I will recycle the old compost either on the compost heap or around the garden.

Planting a fruiting japanese quince

As the title of this post suggests, the main highlight over the last weekend was planting out a japanese quince that I received a number of weeks ago.

This is a variety known as ‘Pink Lady’, which is a deciduous shrub that grows to around 1.5 metres tall and blooms with deep pink blooms in very early Spring when the rest of the stems are bare.

This plant has received the RHS award of garden merit and is good for pollinators. It also produces fruit than can be made into quince jelly, though the seeds must be removed as they are toxic.

My vision for this area was inspired by a garden I saw at Chelsea Flower Show this year, which I plan to post about soon. In that garden, small trees/shrubs were trained against a sunny wall and I loved how it looked.

I also similarly posted earlier this year about my trip to Kew Gardens (post here), where in The Queen’s Garden, they utilised vertical training on the courtyard garden to great effect:

In short, I love the impact that plants trained as espaliers and fans provide to the garden.

Obviously, the plant I have received is much smaller than the above and its size will be much more petite than the above inspiration, but I think it will provide a pretty focal feature on our staircase wall in The Suntrap:

I will be training the japanese quince either as a fan or an espalier over the wall.

The actual staircase rails will eventually have the evergreen clematis that I recently planted (post here) growing over them. The Mr and I will replace the staircase raillings in time

Training more honeysuckle

Other small jobs I have been doing have included training the honeysuckle to cover the sides of the pergola in The Honeysuckle Nook. I have used simple twine to create a soft support structure that the honeysuckle and rambling rose will grow over in time to fully enclose the seating area. Eventually, the twine will decompose and the honeysuckle and rose will support themselves as they mature: