• 4 months ago
An amateur gardener who has become a local legend in Bristol for his multi-coloured garden has says this years garden is "better than ever".

Shaun Schroeder, 61, spends up to three hours each evening tending his 200 hanging baskets.

And he appears to have surpassed himself this year after a teenager asked to have her pre-prom photos in his garden.

The grandad-of-two got into gardening during lockdown and found himself hooked.

He now re-designs his garden each year, with a totally different look every time.

Category

😹
Fun
Transcript
00:00Hi everybody, my name is Sean Schroeder, I live in Whitchurch in Bristol.
00:12Starts in February, in the house, where I start from seed, a lot of the bedding is done
00:19from seed, and then later on in April when the plants start coming out into the garden
00:24centres, I usually go every Sunday to a few garden centres, I'll buy a plant and then
00:30come back and then I'll take cuttings from it and start to grow them on, only in the
00:35house until end of March, because I haven't got a heated greenhouse.
00:40Takes about two and a half weeks to three weeks to plant everything up, with the back
00:45garden and the front garden, and I also do the community garden, that is usually with
00:50plants that I've got left over, I'll plant up the garden for the community.
00:55Well there's lots of different types of petunias, there's something like 200 varieties, so I
01:01do about 2000 plants, over 200 pots and containers, I do 500 to 600 cuttings and bring them on,
01:10so all together I would say there is just hundreds of varieties, too many to count.
01:17It's been bad this year, because we had a lot of rain, so that brought the garden back
01:21a couple of weeks, and now it's boiling hot sunshine, which they don't like, so the watering,
01:28you've got to keep up with the watering when it's like this, at least once, maybe twice
01:31a day, and bugs, the bugs this year, the whitefly are attacking all the plants, so you've got
01:38to try and keep on top of that, it's never easy being a British gardener.
01:42I've adopted it from Bristol City Council, they don't complain, nobody's ever stopped
01:46me from doing it, and the locals that walk down through the park just comment on it and
01:52say it's lovely, so I'll keep doing it.
01:55It brings a smile to their face, and there's nothing like a compliment, you know, and they
02:00say look, your garden's lovely, I show hundreds of people around the garden, because most
02:05people just see the front garden and the park garden, so if they're having a good look,
02:10I'll bring them round and I'll show them the back, and they're always impressed.

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