Cathy

It has been busy in the garden recently, although perhaps it always is, juggling the less exciting seasonal maintenance with more gratifying tweaks and improvements. A number of new plants have been ordered, although where possible I have moved plants from elsewhere or used leftovers from those grown for sale. Meanwhile, the garden ticks over by itself, albeit slowing down but bringing joy with every new bloom, like a fresh flush of roses on ‘Strawberry Hill’ (above), currently awaiting a new structure to support its abundance of blooms during the season, now likely to be a winter project.

The garden is definitely on the turn, but there are still treasures to be found. Helichrysum ‘Bright Rose’, for example, has flowered prolifically this year but, with all the other material, I had not cut it very often and the plants were covered in blooms that were not quite buds but didn’t look like spent flowers**. With little rain in August, it wasn’t as if they had ‘balled’ either but, whatever their status, I took advantage of their numbers and used them as a starting point for today’s Vase on Monday.

I clocked up 46 hours in the garden in August this year, up from 34 the year before, so I have clearly been busy one way or another. I don’t include things like preserve making in this total, but nevertheless found time this week to make my first batch of tomato chutney (recipe here). This time last year I had already made 3 batches and had enough tomatoes to make a fourth batch, which is perhaps as well as I may not have enough ripened tomatoes to make the minimum of three batches I need to keep me going till the next tomato season. Not only have they been very much later to establish and ripen than most years, but the beefsteak tomato ‘Burlesque’, that I grow to make things easier for the chutney-making process, is less than half its usual size, either not maturing as normal, or not the correct variety in the first place.

Last Sunday we treated ourselves to a visit to David Austin Roses, the ‘royal’ We that is, as the Golfer was happy enough to tag along wherever I planned to go. Although only about 35 miles away, I prefer to be as economical as possible with such trips and combine them with something else,  or include them en route to a more distant location, which is what we did, staying one night on the Staffordshire/Shropshire border and visiting other places too. The gardens are attached to the nursery and are open all year round at no cost, with over 700 different roses planted within the two acre rose garden, divided into smaller themed areas divided by neat hedges. The roses are complemented by a range of perennials, with sculptures by the late Pat Austin dotted throughout the gardens.

I have unashamedly but apologetically ‘borrowed’ the idea for today’s vase from last week’s contribution by Jenny of Zone Three Garden (sorry Jenny, and thanks!), in which she placed several stems of rudbeckia in a clear glass vase, held in place by aquarium pebbles. It made such a striking arrangement, the bare stems serving to emphasise its elegance.

Other than a gradual reduction in blooms and the appearance of seasonal orb spiders and Cyclamen hederifolium I hadn’t really noticed how close autumn is until Pauline of Lead Up the Garden Path talked last week about signs of autumn in her garden. I duly looked UP here, instead of down or straight ahead and, my goodness, the leaves are indeed beginning to turn! Overnight temperatures are now cooler too, down to 7°C in recent days, with a monthly maximum of 29°C. It has been a fairly dry month (and the driest of the year), with around 29mm of rain which has been typical of August here of late. Although the garden would certainly welcome some rainfall, the main thing I noticed when I took this month’s photographs is the amount of foliage, the result of lush growth earlier in the year when rainfall was plentiful.

My original thoughts for a post title ( ‘As Easy As…’) were thwarted when I realised the blue and white alphabet mug I planned to use as a vase was too small; several other similarly coloured vases were rejected for various reasons before I settled on this clear glass jar with its integral ‘cage’. A miniature bird cage, no doubt intended for a doll’s house, now serves as a satisfactory prop – someone must have left the cage open though, as the bird has flown…

For the first time in many weeks, or so it seems, rain stopped me from getting out in the garden – no, that’s not true, it deterred me for a while but it wasn’t raining heavily so I girded my loins and went for a belated first-thing-in-the-morning ramble, ducking under drooping climbers and lifting my skirts (decorously!) as I passed overhanging borders. Taking my secateurs, I accomplished some deadheading whilst rambling, picked some tomatoes in the greenhouse, planted out some seed-sown Lychnis coronaria on the terraced beds in the rose garden and pondered what I might include in today’s Six on Saturday, the meme hosted by Jim of Garden Ruminations.

I may well have created a vase on Monday with the title ‘Candy Girl’ before, but with Dahlia ‘Eye Candy’ as the main focal point that is what popped into my head, alongside lyrics of the Archies’ late 1960s song ‘Sugar Sugar’.

Well, I did it: after a few light showers, I took the plunge and moved the roses as planned, breaking all recognised rules about moving and replanting. The existing roses in the rose garden are now planted closely together in groups of 3 of the same variety, to give the impression of larger bushes, together with the new additions making a total of eight varieties in the enlarged bed, leaving the terraced beds either side of the bus shelter empty for some hardy perennials.

Well, I did it, got out our stepladder and climbed up to cut some of the mammoth sunflowers for today’s vase! Joining them are several stems of Rudbeckia ‘Cappucino’ which work brilliantly with the sunflowers as they are all on the same colour palette. The sunflowers, ‘Velvet Queen’ and ‘Earthwalker’, are both shades of copper, and the rudbeckia range from pure to two-tone copper in various coppery degrees.

What has this rambler been brandishing her secateurs over this week, I wonder? Not these sunflowers, certainly, as they are probably over 3 metres or 10ft tall, and I would need a ladder to cut any blooms. I usually grow coppery-coloured ‘Velvet Queen’, but this year have also sown ‘Earth Walker’, another dark variety, neither of which would be expected to grow above a more manageable 2m or so, and I don’t know where the yellow blooms have come from. Perhaps I could manage to reach some blooms for a Monday vase…?

There is so much material to choose from in the garden and there have been more than a few warming Monday vases of late, but I particularly wanted to include a couple of seed successes whilst the opportunity was still there. I have grown gomphrena from seed before, but with minimal success, so this year’s three plants (right) were par for the course, each bearing a single bloom. Although supposedly mixed colours, the only variety I could find at the time, all three are this fiery orangey-red. Emilia javanica ‘Irish Poet’ (left) is new to me and has been very much an eyecatcher since early June, with its tiny fluffy orange blooms. I shall certainly grow it again.

Having ‘forgotten’ that it was the end of the month a few days ago, I am playing catch up with recording the transition from July to August; to save time, instead of a series of photographs I am posting a video.

Saturday has come around again ridiculously quickly, meaning it is time for another contribution to Jim’s weekly meme at Garden Ruminations; also coming round quickly is a new month, with an end-of-month post noticeably lacking…hey ho!

Three weeks ago I posted an ‘Armful For Julie’ on IAVOM, blooms scheduled for my retiring Pilates teacher but, thwarted by her illness, not given. After battling a nasty bout of Covid, her third and worst, she will be calling into our class tomorrow to say a belated goodbye to those who have known her a long time, so I am trying again and have created a slightly smaller armful of blooms to go with the vase that is wrapped and ready for her.

Welcome to another Six on Saturday, the meme kindly hosted by Jim at Garden Ruminations.

Not having used fiery colours for a few weeks, that is what I had in mind for today’s IAVOM contribution but, having picked a stem of Alstroemeria ‘Indian Summer’ as my starting point, I found there were no suitable blooms on Dahlias ‘David Howard’ or ‘Totally Tangerine’ to continue my planned theme. However, there was a single bloom on new Dahlia ‘Blyton Softer Gleam’, albeit looking slightly more yellow than the colour that attracted me in the catalogue, so this was snipped and the search continued.

I failed to say that the reconfigured rose garden featured yesterday is far from a ‘fait accompli’, and won’t be completed till much later this year or probably into the next. Firstly, I need to do something with the six slabs removed from the central area, the largest of which are 30″ x 18″ and all of them far heavier than they were when the last rose garden layout was established back in 2012. Although they are concrete, they are cast from moulds of real flag stones and there is a pleasing variation between them. We used these extensively when we laid the paved area and many of the paths and, although they were fairly reasonably priced when we first bought them, prices have escalated as we found when planning another project more recently – and hard to source, especially singly. At the moment, I cannot see where we might use them, but I am reluctant to get rid of them and they will need to be stored – which involves moving them… Then there are those nine bags of rubble (already moved down to the front of the house)…fortunately a local friend is happy to take rubble to fill in a boggy area where she stables horses…

Although June’s abundance of bloom and colour has moved on, July has brought its own striking sights throughout the garden – plants blooming for the first time, growing much taller than usual or otherwise making an impact in a way they never had before. I have already shown Clematis ‘Prince George’ a number of times this year, but it is now flowering literally from bottom to top and I can’t resist sharing it again (below). The individual blooms are delightful too, intriguingly crinkly (above).

Today’s boozy vase shares some elements with last week’s although lacks its fullness, containing less than an armful but more than a small posy, although with more time at my disposal it could have become more fulsome than it is. Having achieved my personal challenge of creating a vase with such a large number of blooms, I feel more confident of repeating the exercise and the garden is certainly proving the material to do so.

Not new to the garden, that is, but new this year, like ‘carpet rose’ ‘Magic Carpet’ above, which has come into flower just in the last week or so at the end of the shrub border. On this raised bank, it is perhaps the ideal type of rose to loll about here, but it does seem to start flowering several weeks later than all the other roses and probably even later this year. Campanula ‘Loddon Anna’, shown below with white Sweet William and a pink flowered Stachys officianalis, possibly ‘Cotton Candy’, is certainly later as she is normally in bloom along with alliums in May/June.

The garden as a whole has looked pretty hot in recent weeks, with June’s abundance filling it with glorious colour and lush foliage; the gardener, however, sees it very differently, and will quickly provide a list of its defects, things which a casual visitor might overlook. As simple as the overblown geranium above (probably G ‘Ann Folkard’), perhaps, draping itself over several smaller choice plants in front of it, or a more complex problem like the lack of support given to Rosa ‘Strawberry Hill’ (gearing up for a repeat flush) by its current support, below. Certainly, as I see it, everything is NOT coming up roses, or maybe it is but just not in the right place.

I was planning on taking the contents of whatever vase I created to Julie, whose Pilates class I have been attending for 12 years but who is stepping down as of today; however, she is poorly and unable to take the class so I will arrange to see her with a fresh bunch when she is well enough to mix with people again. I shall miss her weekly classes, but have always enjoyed those taken by her replacement, who has covered for illness and holidays and teaches a slightly different style, so all is not lost.

I have mentioned the performance of my clematis this year several times, and thought I would do a quick reccy of them today to substantiate my feeling that it is a poor year for them here. Not including those that didn’t perform at all last year (mostly herbaceous clematis in the middle of borders, which have unaccountably been reluctant to establish), there are 15 in flower, 17 not yet flowering (many a long way off doing so) and 5 no-shows. All those not yet flowering would usually have been blooming since mid-June or so, other than ‘Duchess of Albany’ and ‘Gravetye Beauty’, who don’t start till later (strange then that ‘Princess Diana’, also a C texensis, is one of the first Group 3 clematis to flower).

I have been watching and admiring the white antirrhinum, A ‘Liberty Classic White’, in the cutting beds for a few weeks, not wanting to cut any stems until all our garden visitors had departed. Now that they have indeed all gone, I was at liberty to use the stems in today’s vase, where they form the mainstay of an all-white arrangement.

With garden openings over for 2024, my ramblings around the garden involve a combination of “this is gorgeous!”, “aren’t we fortunate?”, “thank goodness that’s over” and “how can I improve this?”. Already thoughts have turned to potential ‘tweaks’, nothing major, and ways to improve things I don’t feel have really worked – perhaps I will write a post on them in due course…

The garden is full of seasonal stars at the moment, so picking out just six was not easy – but let’s start with the most asked about plant on our garden open days, Clematis texensis ‘Princess Diana’ (above). Almost every plant in the garden is labelled, something I like to see when I visit a garden myself, but very few visitors seemed to take the trouble to look, preferring to ask the gardener or the dogsbody: fortunately, Princess Diana is one variety that the dogsbody/Golfer knows! Smothered in blooms, it deserved all the attention it got, and is possibly flowering better than ever before, despite the issues with several of my other clematis. This variety was the first clematis I actually sought out after seeing it performing so spectacularly in a garden more than 20 years ago; up till then, I had only bought whatever clematis were available at my local garden centre. The current plant, however, is a replacement for the original, which suffered when moved to the clematis colonnade.

Monday vases following any Sunday garden opening usually take advantage of flowers used for table decoration, which in June inevitably means sweet peas. However, being even more prepared this year due to an early group visit, I had time to think ahead and made my vase on Saturday.

After a day of tweaking we are all but ready for tomorrow’s garden opening (although there are always things that can only be done on the day), and I am enjoying sitting down while I write this post. Things are generally in order and the garden is poised and waiting, so a chilled evening is more than justified.

I have chosen roses to go in my Monday vase this week because they are the most floriferous blooms in the garden at this point in mid-June. There are two varieties, growing together in the gallery border, and both seem to have done better this year than before – behind the gallery fence is the woodland which blocks sun from the south, so the roses only get the morning and late afternoon sun. However, our neighbours cut some of the lower branches from their huge mature beech over the winter and perhaps this allows more light to filter through.

Although our first proper opening of the garden is not till a week tomorrow, we had a group visit on Thursday, a mixed blessing, as it meant the garden had to be more or less ‘ready’ over a week sooner than it might otherwise have had to be. We didn’t have any group visits last year, the first year that we hadn’t, and this was the first time we had a visit before the main openings as I had previously avoided this – June is probably the most floriferous month, and sometimes we could be in limbo for two or three weeks after the main openings until all group visits were over, before we could loosen the reins a little. Interestingly, this gardening group, from one of the local villages, had previously visited us the first year we opened, although all but a handful of them were new members so the garden was new to them.

My early sweet peas, grown in the greenhouse, are now flowering prolifically and I have to work hard at picking them regularly – but will have to work even harder soon as there are now buds on my outdoor varieties. The indoor ones have been bred specially to flower at lower light levels and in the UK have to be grown in a greenhouse. For some reason the lavender blooms are more dominant this year, although I sowed the same number of seeds of each colourway.

Oriental poppies in any shade may look dramatic when in bloom, but don’t flower for long, flop unattractively and certainly don’t die back well. Somehow they still merit space in a border, but if they start thinking they can take over the world then they are OUT, although removing them is never as easy as one would like it to be. I have a basic fiery scarlet one, pale coral pink Papaver ‘Princess Victoria Louise’ and the more recent acquisition above, ‘Royal Wedding’. The blooms on this one seem particularly large, especially when the petals are splayed out like a frilly tutu – no doubt they will be gone by tomorrow!

Bloom of the moment here is undoubtedly the delphinium, displaying its stunning deep blue spires in the blue & white border. I have had this plant many years and although it lost its label it may be ‘King Arthur’; it was moved from its original position about 3 or 4 years ago and has done even better since – so much so that it was split and part of it moved to one of the bold borders where sadly it declined to return after its second season. Although it does have side shoots, it never really reflowers to the same extent later in the season as perceived wisdom suggests it might.

It wasn’t actually a lie, but I was misleading myself as well as anyone who reads my blog, when I talked yesterday about how behind the clematis were. In reality, it seems to be mostly the C viticella and C integrifolia that are either slow or not showing at all, whereas  C texensis like ‘Princess Diana’ and ‘Duchess of Albany’ are as floriferous as usual although not yet in bud, and the few Group 2 clematis are growing and flowering (or about to) as usual, like the striking Clematis ‘Kingfisher’ above.