e-mail Jane Owen with your gardening questions: jane.owen1@timesonline.co.uk

My potatoes have started to curl up their leaves. They also seem to be going yellow but I have kept them well watered and folowed all the normal cultivation rules. It definitely isn’t blight. Brenda Daley, Guildford

This is leaf curl virus and there isn’t much you can do about it apart from preventing its spread. Dig out and destroy the plants and clean your tools and hands thoroughly afterwards. Next year be sure to buy virus-free potatoes and try to keep them aphid free (they can spread virus)

The sheep in our orchard do not seem to eat anything except grass so the nettles, brambles and thistles there have gone crazy. We imported the sheep to cut maintenance on the orchard – any suggestions? Pet Baines, Ledbury

My short and disasterous period as a shepherdess has put me off sheep for life. Unless they are well roasted. These creatures will never eat unwanted plants, in my experience, added to which they get ghastly health problems and they have a collective death wish. One of mine climbed a tree. It survived but I nearly didn’t after wrestling the animal from the branches of a chestnut tree. Get rid of a the sheep and hire a gardener if you haven’t the time to deal with the brambles etc yourself.

Our new pool needs water lilies and we have spent some time looking through gardening books about them. It is still difficult to imagine how they will look in real life and also whether or not they will be suitable for our pool which is only 15 cm deep although it is very wide. Where can we go to see them where they wil be properly labelled? Jessie Mann, London

There are specialist nurseries and national plant collection holders which you will be able to locate through the following site http://www.nccpg.com. These organisations are especially well qualified to help you find the right plant for what is a slightly tricky position - although there are an increasing number of water lilies suitable for containers as small as water butts. None are near London, and although there are several aquatic nurseries around J 25 of the M25, I happen to think it will be worth your while travelling to one of the specialists.

We recently moved to a garden where there is a lot of lavender. It is now in flower and smells lovely. I have seen lavender preserved in some way – is this something that can be done at home? Timothy Marsdon address not given

It’s easy – you cut the stalks just before the flowers open fully, tie them into smnall bundles and hang them somewwhere dry and warm, like an airing cupboard, to dry out. I tie them with ribbon so the bunches make presents.

The glasshouse is infested with whitefly. It’s really bad because it happened while we were away for three weeks. We have a whole wall of geraniums, plumbago, jasmine and other stuff. Will we have to get rid of it? We’ve tried spraying but nothing seems to happen. Kiley Wills, Arundel

It’s a shame you’ve already sprayed because, depending on what you’ve used, you may not be able to use the predator wasp, encarsia, which is highly effective. Hang as many sticky yellow cards as you can – these will attract and kill insects good and bad. Keep your plants well fed and watered and spend as much time as you can washing the leaves with diluted washing up liquid. You will win eventually but it will take time. Now you’ve started spraying you may as well go on until you’ve got over the worst of the infection and then maybe you could try easing off the chemicals so that the glasshouse can balance its ecosystem.

I want to make a jungle style garden with lots of leaf. I’m not interested in flowers. My garden is sheltered and measures 60 ft by 40 ft. Charles Sington, London

Difficult to do without flowers altogether but you could focus on plants with exceptional foliage like: bananas, melianthus, gunnera (it does better is damp or boggy soil), giant thistle, bamboo (just remember to contain the roots or most will take over) artichoke and evergreen climbers like Trachelospermum and Clematis armandii. Once you’ve established a main planting you could experiment with increasingly tender leafy plants. Go to Kew and see which plants in the Palm House you most admire – and then see if you can grow them.

I have been having a heated discussion with my partner over the colour of our garden. It is not large and at the moment it is a chaotic mixture of colours. I want pink as the theme – I would settle for another colour apart from orange – to give the garden unity and make it feel more relaxing. Name and address withheld

One person’s idea of relaxation can sometimes be another’s idea of hell. Colour themes can be great but they can be monotonous and, even if you end up with a monochrome garden, you should think about putting some spots of contrasting colour in to enhance the main colour. Gertrude Jekyll used spots of white to bring her borders alive (she worked in spectrums and monochromes). When using pink I like to add a few spots of blue which seems to enhance the pink. The most important thing is to find a mid way that you both enjoy and find relaxing. Could you make the garden into two areas? This may sound extreme but a lot of (very loving) couples do it successfully including my parents!

e-mail Jane Owen with your gardening questions: jane.owen1@timesonline.co.uk

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