Monty’s Hoops

A while ago, Monty Don did a feature on Gardeners' World on how to make your own plant supports from lengths of steel rod. It’s a very simple method to make incredibly effective and inexpensive supports for your plants.



You can view the clip from the programme on the BBC Gardeners' World website, but basically, you take a length of steel rod, bend it into a hairpin shape around a tree, and then bend the tails up at at right angle to the hoop.

   

Monty suggests starting with 2.5m lengths of 6mm steel rod, but I could only (easily / cheaply) find 3m or 6m lengths from companies providing steel rods to the building industry, so decided to go for the 6m lengths as it provided more option on final cut lenghts.

The rods are cut to desired length with an angle grinder and I tried a few different lengths and have bent these around different trees to get different hoop sizes. My favourites styles are the ‘Walnut’ and the ‘Sycamore’, from a 2m rod.



Here’s an example with Mexican Feather Grass (Nassella or Stipa tenuissima). These are lovely grasses for adding movement, but they do get big and the grass starts to flop and can smother neighbouring plants. The photo above shows the front view with a ‘Walnut’ hoop behind.

From the back, the hoop just holds the grass up and allows some much needed light on the plants behind that have been held back by the ‘big hair’ overshadowing them.

And another example holding up some Penstemon ‘Firebird’.

These hoops are not fancy. They are not powder coated or painted black, or green, or sky-blue pink. However, bare steel with a bit of rust becomes invisible in a border and 6mm rods will be more robust than anything you can buy commercially, and much, much better value.

If there is interest from Club members for these hoops, we can look to provide them - probably at about £3 a hoop. Let us know in the comments below, or via email or the Feedback page of the Worplesdon Garden Club website.