Cathy

I feel sorry for gardeners who have no incentive to spend time in their gardens in January, especially on the more clement days like those we have had this week – with colder days due soon, however, it might be a matter of looking for tasks that can be carried out inside for a while! Now that the working greenhouse is up and running again (albeit currently sharing the space with the remnants of reconstruction and unpacked bags and crates) I can at least begin sowing seeds, starting them inside the house before moving them into the greenhouse upon germination.

Last week, Anna of Green Tapestry apologised for ‘cheating’ when she shared her amaryllis/hippeastrum In a Vase on Monday. Happily, our rules for this meme are fairly fluid and contributors share vases very much in the spirit of it, and it was by no means cheating – and I am not just saying that because I doing something very similar this week! In fact, I am very grateful to Anna for messaging me back in November to let me know that ‘a certain German supermarket’ had these bulbs in stock, allowing me to hotfoot it down to our local store ASAP.

I have no idea what has caused this ‘flame’ in the garden, but perhaps it really does symbolise the heart of it. I was not aware of the flame while I was working in the garden today, removing and cleaning the bricks from the low retaining wall at the back of one of the bold borders, and it only became evident when I looked at the photos later. Looking at the wider picture, when there was about a third of the wall left to remove and clean, you can see that there is a glass sculpture in the border but, at the time the picture was taken, the sun (and it was a sunny day) was behind me and to my right, so it wasn’t shining through the glass. Curiously, as I perched on my makeshift stool, chipping away at the bricks with my lump hammer and chisel, I found myself thinking of earlier civilisations, chipping away with bones and stones to make their artefacts – so could I perhaps have been joined by ghosts from the distant past, huddled round their fire for warmth…?

eye of potato, monkey’s tail….

In terms of a review of the year as a whole, there is not a lot to say, with it being more a case of consolidation than of change, building on subtle changes made the year before, like moving snowdrops to the woodland, thinning the apple trees to introduce more light to the woodland edge border below, and extending the blue & white borders. Even the current project, despite the organised mayhem it has generated, will only bring about a subtle change to the garden. Within the garden as a whole, mixed weather patterns created uncertainty in flowering times but there were negligible losses from the previous cold winter and no problems with waterlogging during the last few rainy and unsettled months.

I wasn’t expecting a lot from today’s count, but mild temperature in the week leading up to Christmas Day must have given things an unseasonal boost and I have had some surprises in the last few days. Having noted it was still only in bud, I wasn’t going to include sarcococca in the total until I came out of the back door again a little later and was instantly hit with an almost overwhelming fragrance: tucked under foliage and sprawling ivy was a clutch of fully open blooms, doing what they do best and perfuming the garden from several metres away.

With very best wishes and thanks to all my blogging friends for your continued friendship, wishing you health, happiness, joy and good gardening in 2024.

The gentlemen may well be resting and making merry but, never one to sit and twiddle my thumbs, I have suddenly found myself in the middle of another project. With only eight weeks until we open the garden again, it is not necessarily a sensible thing to be doing, but with a settled period of weather in the offing it was hard to resist, especially as the Golfer was very much up for the challenge. In fact, unusually, the project developed from an idea of his, a practical revision of the status quo, and began with stealing one of the cutting beds (above) and temporarily bagging it up (below):

When I set off into the garden yesterday to pick materials for today’s vase, I fully expected to come back with a little posy and certainly not a bunch, Winter not being quite as generous in her offerings as other seasons of the year are.

Working through winter tasks in the garden when time and weather align favourably, there are plenty of opportunities to look forward and back, usually simultaneously, such as with crab apple Malus ‘Evereste’. This sad, mushy state was pretty normal for M ‘Golden Hornet’, but the blackbirds have usually taken all the peachy crabs from ‘Evereste’ well before now, leaving me looking forward to the pretty spring blossom or at least to when I am able to remove the offending fruit. Even the red Christmas lights do little to enhance their ugliness.

Blooms are almost non-existent in the garden at the moment after several days of frost, but I had two options: another pelargonium from the Coop, or stems of the overwintering Salvia ‘Phyllis Fancy’ in the working greenhouse. The latter, which never made it back into a border last year after its previous overwintering, remaining in its pot in disgrace, won the toss. After continued underperformance, I have been on the point of banishing it altogether, but now plan to give it a reprieve, albeit keeping it in a pot rather than giving it border space. However, I am not holding my breath…

Joining with Cathy at Words and Herbs and her seasonal meme and looking back to the end of August, and Clematis ‘Gravetye Beauty’

Joining in with Cathy’s Week of Flowers meme, with a vase from April

Revisiting May for Cathy’s Week of Flowers at her Words and Herbs blog

Although bubblewrapping the Coop in the middle of last week was abandoned after less than an hour, due to numb fingers, there was enough time to notice that two of my 2022 purchases of dwarf pelargoniums were in full bloom and looking surprisingly pretty, considering the time of year. This knowledge was stored in my head and formed the basis of today’s vase, with a single white bloom of P ‘David John’ forming the focal point. He was joined by three stems of Argyranthemum ‘Grandaisy Pink’ (now in the Coop too) and a clutch of foliage from Pittosporum ‘Tom Thumb’. The latter is in dire need of pruning, but for the time being I shall just remain selective about where I snip any foliage from!

Joining Cathy of Words and Herbs for the third day day oh her Week of Flowers meme

Linking to Cathy of Words and Herbs, who hosts this seasonal Week of Flowers

Linking with Cathy of Words and Herbs, for her annual Week of Flowers meme, brightening up the first week in December

Consecutive days of frost have certainly put paid to most herbaceous plants in the garden, and with time and less chilly weather I could now begin cutting back some of the top growth and improving the general scruffiness of some of the borders. Meanwhile, I have  finally been giving some thought to  a certain event that seems to have taken many people by surprise this year, and have at least ordered some seeds from Chiltern Seeds and bedding plants from Brookside Nursery Nursery so have achieved something garden-related in the last week. I still have a ramble at least once a day, albeit more of a sprint than a ramble – if you need to take it at a more leisurely place, then please do.

Caught out yet again by the sudden descent towards darkness, I had to quickly pluck a few things from the garden to make a posy for my lift-giver to choir early last week. Having been working in the greenhouse, I snipped a few blooms from the overwintering Salvia ‘Mystic Spires’ and plucked greenery from some ivy on the way back to the house. Back inside with my cup of ta and cake, I found my friend had messaged me to say she was unwell and not going after all, so the posy was no longer required. Rather than keep it in its interim jam jar, I sought a vase with a degree of sultriness to match the dark moodiness of the salvia blooms and deep green of the ivy and its curious flowers, coming up trumps with a blue hyacinth vase.

After a few days of clear sunny days and blue skies, even with a hint of warmth in the sun on Thursday, it was almost inevitable that we would soon be seeing our first frost of the season – and so it was, arriving like a thief in the night. Temperatures dipped to -2°C in the early hours, and haven’t risen above 5°C for the rest of the day, finally putting paid to autumn for this year.

Dusk caught me unawares yesterday afternoon – with sunset officially occuring at about 4.00, I shouldn’t have been surprised, although it still seemed light as I finished cutting up the prunings from R Cécile Brunner (with only the teeniest bit of shed roof clambering required…) and headed inside for a cup of tea and piece of cake… to remember I hadn’t prepared for IAVOM!

When it is full of newly-planted bulbs, of course!

Welcome to the 10th anniversary of IAVOM, a meme which commenced on an inauspicious November Monday, with the sole purpose of encouraging me to pick flowers or other material from the garden on a regular basis. It must have worked because, ten years and 520 vases later, it is still going. My favourite vase from each of the last 12 months is shown in the collage below – July presented the hardest choice!

Both day and nighttime temperatures are dropping here, although nights have only been down to about 3°C so far. I note from my garden diary that I bubblewrapped the greenhouse this week last year, and the Coop soon afterwards; that certainly won’t be happening this year, but I am keeping an eye on the weather forecast for the next fortnight and if need be I will abandon other jobs on my job list and bubblewrap instead. The lower temperatures have certainly made an impact on leaf fall, as leaves are beginning to accumulate around the garden, and the witch hazels by the streamside (above) have become all but bare in recent days, although that is not the case with all of them.

No prizes for guessing what some of the contents of today’s vase will be – blooms from my gifted rescue plant, Salvia ‘Mystic Spires’! With so many blooms and autumn closing in around the garden, it is not surprising I chose to grab them while I could. Having already taken some with me to the voluntary work I do, I added them to the remains of the previous posy I had taken there, stems of Chrysanthemum ‘Emperor of China’. They made a surprisingly pleasing combination, so I decided to replicate this at home, adding foliage of Persicaria ‘Red Dragon’ and stems of Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’. My cornus, unlike those of Cathy at Words and Herbs in Bavaria, still retain their foliage, so I snipped all the leaves from the stems apart from the topmost pair.

Our nearby town always puts a lot of effort into its floral displays, on approaches into the town and in the main park at the foot of the castle, and is regularly the winner in its regional category of Britain in Bloom. Most of the plants used are annuals, but they do use some perennials of which I have been known to take the odd cutting or two. One year I decided to regularise this and emailed the local council to ask what they did with their plants at the end of the season, and if I could take the occasional cutting. It transpired that there is no longer such a thing as a ‘parks department’ and no facility for growing on or protecting plants; young plants are bought in, planted straight out and composted at the end of the season.

I had hoped to add a video to this end-of-month report on the garden, but sadly it is not going to happen because Time, as always, is ‘of the essence’. Hey ho…let’s just get on with it then, because time, as you know….

Today’s vase is a simple trio: single stems of Rhododendron ‘Cheers’, an unlabelled sedum (hylotelephium) and slightly bedraggled Miscanthus ‘Red Chief’. The rhododendron grows on the fringe of the woodland, in my direct line of sight on rambles around the garden, so I could hardly fail to notice when the first blooms appeared; now, more and more buds are opening and they are such pretty blooms that I thought I would try them out in a vase. The sedum (which probably does have a label tucked at its base somewhere), is planted in a border nearby and has relatively dark blooms that seem to pick out the centres of the rhododendron, as does the miscanthus, the latter proving immensely useful in late-season vases.

I seem to have been a little lax in the garden of late, the result of weather or other commitments rather than general sloth, but seem to have made up for it this week by ticking off many and varied jobs on my mental ‘to do’ list. Ridding the garden of excess ivy is not one of those and is unlikely ever to be so, but I was pleased to remove this admittedly very attractive arrangement of ivy from the wall near the bottom of the garden. It began as a single stem snaking its way vertically upwards before branching out over the years into this neat fan shape – a very satisfactory result if this was a fruit tree or other decorative shrub. Sadly, it isn’t, but I was pleasantly surprised that with a chisel and wooden mallet it came off the wall quite quickly in large pieces of matted root; even digging the main root out of the cutting bed wasn’t as onerous as it might have been, although there may still be small sections of root making their way across the bed out of sight.

A busy weekend meant today’s vase had to be prepared and a post written even further in advance than usual, and it will be brief.

The garden may be in the thrall of autumn, but there is still a fair bit of colour around in patches, with the promise of more to come. Colour is concentrated most in the dahlia beds, where the blooms show little sign of stopping – we, and Jack Frost, know better! There are still roses in bloom, with ‘Strawberry Hill’ the main contender, continuing to delight:

I have no doubt mentioned a number of times that I have been very lax in supporting my dahlias this year, inevitably resulting in a number of casualties. By way of excuse, I have been awaiting a supply of stakes from a friend whose husband coppices for a local farmer, stakes cut a number of months ago apparently, waiting in their garage and on the point of being dropped off here any time now – or at least that was my friend’s intention! At least if I receive them soon they will be ready for next year and I can have them in place when the tubers are first planted out again, as is probably recommended by professional growers!

Busy Lizzies continue to amaze me every year with their flower power – those above have been flowering since the beginning of June and show no sign of stopping, despite a large degree of neglect by the gardener; however, a dose of frost would quickly send them packing.

Succumbing to the urge to move unusually lanky aster Symphyotrichum‘Little Carlow’ today instead of waiting till it was dormant, I also moved the sanguisorba I featured in a vase a few weeks ago, and again today, a little nearer the fence. Whilst doing so, I realised the label read Sanguisorba dodecandra and not S canadensis as I had thought. Googling doesn’t tell me a lot about the former, and illustrations suggest it looks more like the latter, so it remains a bit of a puzzle. The aster looks all the better with something behind it and, having dug it out with a large rootball, doesn’t look any the worse for its experience; the sanguisorba, however, is now glowering at me and I cut a few flowering stems for today’s vase rather than leave them to a potentially slow demise on the plant.

A couple of those commenting on this blog recently have expressed surprise at how ‘tidy’ the greenhouse was, so this post is designed to shatter that misguided illusion. Firstly, I want to make it clear that what is shown above is not ‘the greenhouse’, but the Coop. Attached to the house, but only accessible from outside, it is more of a conservatory than a greenhouse  and hosts a range of tender plants and bulbs, all in terracotta pots. No potting up, planting or propagation takes place here, so there is little excuse for untidiness although the wind blows leaves in, spiders weave their webs there and I splash water and grit around. The working greenhouse at the bottom of the garden, however, is exactly that, a working greenhouse: