Six on Saturday: Striking

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…?

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!

Garden mirrors offer a simple way to create interest and light in the garden. They can create the illusion of more space and add focal points that lead you through the garden. And, with so many types of garden mirror to choose from, you can match the design to your hard landscaping and planting to enhance your garden style.

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

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…

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.