Does your garden need a festive spruce-up?

This is your go-to gardening guide to getting the yard up to scratch before relatives arrive. Minimum effort. Maximum reward.

Petunia flowers in hanging pots.

With Christmas around the corner, here are some quick “fixes” to get your garden looking good before visitors arrive – we’re talking maximum impact for minimum effort. Hose-on liquid lawn fertilisers take minutes to apply and will green up the lawn within days. Try biologically activated Sudden Impact For Lawns + POPUL8 or Seasol Lawn Fertiliser Hose-On. To instantly make garden beds look better, apply some mulch; soft mulches such as sugar cane and lucerne are sold in easy-to-handle bales and will also feed and nurture the soil. To add bursts of colour, buy small pots of annuals or perennials already in flower; they can cost as little as a dollar or two each. Choices include petunias, impatiens, bedding begonias, marigolds, blue lobelia and red salvias. For larger pots try mandevillas with masses of large trumpet flowers; in warm regions they’ll last for many years. Adelaide has a wonderful tradition of tying giant red bows around street trees. It’s a simple alternative to lights and very effective when the whole street gets involved. Why don’t we all adopt this happy idea?

They’ll keep giving

Pots of hydrangeas in full bloom make wonderful gifts. They’ll stay in their pots quite happily for months if watered daily.

Strawberries and Cream.

Obsidian ‘Black Lace’.

Look for new varieties that repeat flower, offer new colour combinations or feature black stems or foliage.

Magical Revolution.

Tuxedo - either Red, Pink, Purple or Black Tie - with black foliage.

Q&A

Our high hedge of lillypillies is infested with white wax scale again. I sprayed malathion and white oil in May and August but the scale are still there. Do they fall off?

Damian Pitt, Newcastle

This is a common and serious pest of many lillypillies, plus pittosporums and gardenias. The sap-sucking pests favour the shady, protected interiors of plants, particularly stressed plants. Females are protected by large blobs of white wax, so they’re hard to treat, and each can lay 1000 eggs at a time. Remove small infestations with a gloved hand or toothbrush. Fortnightly oil sprays smother young-stage pests most prevalent in spring and summer but won’t penetrate the wax. Open up the hedge interior to light and natural predators by pruning the whole top off. Control ants and keep water, fertiliser and mulch up to the plants. Malathion, although still available, is a toxic organophosphate. Wax blobs persist on branches; check underneath – live scales are reddish and gooey.

Why has my 10-year-old caper plant in a pot never flowered? It gets reasonable sun and water.

Janet Scott, Adelaide Hills

Capers love it very hot and very dry in all-day sun; in Italy they grow in stone wall crevices. It’s a bit cool where you are. Try it in the hottest spot you have and withhold water. They prefer room for roots to spread so perhaps pot it up. The flowers are beautiful – capers are the unopened buds and caperberries the fruits.

My herbs and fuchsias are covered in little white flies. What’s a natural remedy?

Denise Hunter, Sydney

Whiteflies fly up in a cloud when disturbed. Spray with organic Eco-neem or make sticky yellow traps by smearing Vaseline on yellow plastic or cards.

Send your questions to [e-mail]. The best question for December/January wins Paul Bangay’s latest book, A Life in Garden Design (Thames and Hudson) worth $80.

Paul Bangay ‘A Life in Garden Design’.