AGM and Social Evening

Please join us for our Annual General Meeting, on Tuesday 30th November in Hale Village Hall, starting at 7.30 pm. The meeting will consist of the following: Reports on our reduced 2021 programme including financial accounts Election of your new Committee American Buffet: please bring a plate of food if you can We will provide the free drinks Raffle Fun gardening quiz Find out about our 2022 programme,  including some great talks and hopefully a return of the Annual Show. If ...

Furzey Gardens visit, 13th September 2021

Furzey Garden is an informal woodland garden located near Minstead in The New Forest.  It has an excellent cafe and shop and exists to raise funds to support those with learning difficulties providing horticultural training and employment. Your Society has given financial support on several occasions in recent years and we thought it about time we paid them another visit. With all the COVID restrictions in 2020, and further uncertainty about what would be possible this year, Furzey was ...

2021 Programme?

In these trying circumstances we hope you will be pleased to hear that your Committee has been exploring what might be possible to include in our 2021 Programme of Events. Indoor meetings would appear to be inadvisable for the foreseeable future, except perhaps much later in the year. Instead it might be possible to enjoy a number of our traditional events if we concentrate on outdoors and perhaps scale these back a little to allow appropriate social distancing so that we ...

A Walk on the Wildside?

Hale gardeners show the way 10 lovely but very varied gardens were opened to the public in support of this year’s chosen local charities. If there was a theme it was that our gardeners are heeding the concerns about our environment and the decreasing diversity of plants and wildlife… as climate change and other factors take hold and harm the world in which we live. Working with nature to create naturalistic gardens in tune with their location, with mature trees, ...

Outing to The Savill Garden

We were blessed by just about perfect weather for our trip to The Savill Garden and Windsor Great Park: like a summer’s day, but not too hot. The garden looked at its very best and we were shown around by John Anderson for the first hour or so to get our bearings. The food in the Restaurant was very tasty and everything was fairly priced… plants, food, gifts etc. The staff were really friendly and helpful. We even got home ...

Rosy Hardy: Spring Flowering Perennials, 19th March 2019

On her visit Rosy gave lots of great tips and tricks for growing successful Spring Flowers. Here are some of them: Hellebores…Woodland setting, all soil types, except heavy clay. Flower well into April, cut out flower stem when finished. Next years growth and buds will already be showing. Best in semi shade. Look for seedlings to bring on, but have to leave flower shoot to seed first. Hellebore “Walburton Rosemary” a niger/hybrida cross which has a very long flowering ...

Gardeners’ Question Time, 19th Feb 2019

A very enjoyable evening with our 3 very knowledgeable experts yielded lots of good advice in answer to members’ questions: Growing and showing shallots: plant in small pots and keep in a cold greenhouse. feed with onion fertiliser. Transplant in Spring, but don’t bury them. Sit them just on the surface. Thin to 3 or 4. If showing dry them off 7/10 days before the show. Remove loose skins and tie/whip the tops with raffia. Stand in a saucer of ...

“Propagating Flowers for Summer”, by Marina Christopher

This talk very nearly didn’t take place due to the unusually heavy snowfall just before. Not least, because Marina lives and propagates at altitude in northern Hampshire, at the end of a long narrow lane, never visited by the gritters. Thankfully the snow melted just in time and Marina was able to visit to explain her very own way of propagating plants, hands-on with live material rather than pretty pictures. She grows them by the thousands, often very unusual or ...

GQT

In spite of the poor weather, and very little to get us into our gardens just yet,  there was a very good turnout to our first event of 2018, no doubt encouraged more than a little by the prospect of an enjoyable social get-together to set the evening off with a swing. The questions, as ever, came thick and fast, and our very knowledgeable and experienced panel gave much excellent advice. Just some of which follows… Woodash ( potash) is ...

Open Gardens…blooming marvellous yet again

That hardy biennial in the local gardening calendar, our 'open gardens' event, has once more succeeded in attracting a large and appreciative attendance and raised a considerable sum for our chosen charities. Twenty-nine gardens across Hale and Woodgreen were dug, planted, carefully tended, cajolled, watered and mowed, before the crowds arrived on our chosen dates in May and June. Hale first, with its acid soils and early flowering shrubs, followed by Woodgreen 4 weeks later with its later flowering treasures. ...