HEADING FOR AUGUST!

How exciting; do you remember I said the Ginger lilies were starting to bud....well look at one of them now...........and in a bit closer........isn't it lovely! The sun has also brought out the Agapanthus....this is a dwarf variety...much more suited to a small garden.....we don't get many flowers on them (I have a blue one as well that's still in bud) as really they prefer a south facing garden...but considering how poor the weather has been lately I'm pleased to see any flowers at all!

Over the weekend I'd noticed that the Rubekias were also starting to bloom................last year I had a few fasciated flowers ....I wonder if I'll get any this year??When I posted a photo of our first hibiscus bloom the other day I had an email asking which one it is.....In case anyone else would like to know it's Hibiscus syriacus "Red Heart"I'm sure I've done a couple of posts now with no beastie photos in them....... that's mainly because I haven't found any new ones in our garden lately.......HOWEVER....the other day in Manda's garden I found these...................
I haven't a clue what they are but haven't spotted them in our garden yet. Manda's garden is much "wilder" than ours and it could be that these beasties prefer that sort of habitat....
Wednesday is the 1st of August....this "summer" is flying past so quickly....on the 23rd August it will be this blogs 1st birthday....I can't believe I've been blogging for almost a year........ The worrying thing is it means that I will have blogged a whole gardening year....what on earth am I going to write about now....I guess I'll start doing what the TV does....endless repeats...LOL The funny thing is when I first started blogging I intended to do posts covering A to Z of our garden...I was convinced I'd find nothing much to blog about and thought at least A to Z will fill 26 posts.......now it's almost a year later and I've still not got further than "F is for..." and that post was way back in January.

F IS FOR ........................

I don't have a photo yet of our largest Fern (Dryopteris filix-mas) but these are; unknown, Ursula's Red






Lady in Red and Hart's tongue (our only evergreen fern)






We are lucky to finally get a Foxtail Lily to thrive in our shady garden it doesn't get much of a "baking" in summer










We always have loads of Fuchsias in our garden; this is just a sample of a few different forms. All bar the hardy ones are overwintered in the shed; any cuttings we take in Spring.



Lady Boothby (climbing) .........Mini Rose (upward facing flowers)













Trailing........................................Alison Patricia (upward facing flowers)













Bush Type......................................Tom West and Sharpitor (hardy)




I love the mottled throats in the Foxgloves they are very prolific self seeders; I am always digging up small plants and moving them; they are quite happy in the shade which is a bonus.







Feverfew; we have no lawn and so this is our "daisy"; another good self seeder; lovely lime green foliage; if they start looking bedraggled I just chop them back.








Our Fatsia started off as a house plant and had terrible red spider mite. Mick said throw it away but I popped it in the garden and it has thrived ever since.

E IS FOR...................

It's strange but although E is one of the most used letters in the English alphabet we only have 3 plants beginning with E in our garden. I could cheat and put the Dog's tooth violets in under their Latin name of Erythronium but that wouldn't really be fair.
We don't really have a sunny enough aspect for our Echinea but it seems to be thriving.
I love the seeds of our Eunonymus. We grow it against the fence and I prune it hard each year to keep in trained as a fence covering plant.

Our Eucomis our Pineapple plant is a source of fun. People often think we are growing pineapples! I must say the particular variety we have smells rather putrid if you stick your nose in to sniff the flowers; probably why flies are always hanging around it; still it keeps the flies away from us!

D IS FOR................................

At the moment we only have a white DICENTRA; we moved our pink one and it wasn't very happy about it and we lost it. We will definitely get another though; they are a superb plant. We call them Bleeding hearts but they are known by many different names like Dutchman's breeches and Lady in the bath. The grandchildren like picking one of the flowers, turning it upside down and gently pulling the petals apart and lo and behold the lady in the bath appears.

Believe it or not these are our DWARF DELPHINIUMS.....I think the good weather this year made them put on a growth spurt! Once they've flowered I cut them to the ground and we always get a second flush later in the year.

One of my favourites; the DOGS TOOTH VIOLETS; I have them in pots and they are exquisite. These too get a potash feed once they've finished flowering. The leaves have a slight purple marbelling on them. They are quite expensive to buy but I picked my bulbs up in a little nursery tucked away in the back of beyond. They were 2 for £1. What a bargain.

Spring just wouldn't be spring without the DAFFODILS. We only grow the dwarf varieties; this spring being pre camera days I've only this one photo. We do have other varieties.....more pics next year! I try very hard to leave them to die down naturally so that all the energy goes back into the bulb for the next year. As they start to die down I always give them a good potash feed.



Mick loves the DAHLIAS. His special favourites are the bottom two; Fascination (bought when we went to Salcombe in Devon) and Bishop of Llandaff. We really like the bronze foliage. The upper two are just dwarf varieties we grew from seed one year. We keep them in pots and once the first frosts have blackened the foliage we dry them off and pack into sawdust for the winter.

C IS ALSO FOR .................................

This solitary little flower may not seem much to get excited about but it is the first flower on a clematis I grew from seed. The parent plant was Daniel Doronda so I call this one Son of Doronda.







This is clematis texensis. It's a fairly new one to us and I'd forgotten to take photos of it when it was in full flower but hopefully these few flowers will show you how lovely it is.

There is a close up photo in my Flower Album in the side bar under Clematis Tex.

Our clematis montana clothes the sorbus in the spring and no matter how much I hack it back puts on a good show every year. The scent is beautiful and if I'm in the garden on a fine spring day I will often hear people walking down the alley commenting on it.







Our Polish Spirit is another good "doer". It flowers for such a long time; at the time of writing this it still has a couple of flowers on it.

I apologise for this photo being so blurred. Clematis Rubramarginata is a small flowered clematis and I was trying to get a close up. I'm still a novice photographer as you can see. What this clematis lacks in flower size it makes up for in the abundance of flowers. This too has the most beautiful scent. I would say it smells of vanilla. Mick and I love it so much that we bought another one for the other side of the garden.
This is Hagley Hybrid; for us it flowers in late spring and doesn't have much of a second flush. We have planted it to weave in with a climbing fuchsia and that way we get a good continuum of flower. When the clematis stops flowering the fuchsia starts.

Clematis atropurpurea is cut back almost to the ground each winter yet it manages to put on all this growth and flower profusely by the summer. Make sure you click on this photo so you can have a closer look at the flowers.

This our clematis Bill Mckenzie; this too is cut back to the ground and come the spring romps away and never wants to stop flowering!

I love the nodding bells and the seed capsules have a beauty of their own.

This is Dr Ruppel, very similar to a Nelly Moser in colouring but we find it keeps its colour better in full sun than a Nelly.

I really love Clematis seiboldi, the flowers are reminiscent of a passion flower. Intertwined with this one is the alba variety which is plain white but I don't think any were in flower at the time I took this photo.

This is Clematis nameless; so called because it was an unlabelled 25p bargain at a local garden centre. It was a little 3" high dead looking stick when we "took the chance" on it. I repotted into fresh compost and grew it on in the pot for the first year. In its second year we planted it in the ground and had a couple of flowers before it fell sick to clematis wilt. I cut it right back and put a bottomless plastic flower pot around it so that I could build up the soil depth around the stem. This seems to have worked because this year we had three or four good flushes from it.

Now that's all the clematis we have at the moment. By this time next year it wouldn't surprise me if a couple more have jumped into the shopping bag. Some gardeners find clematis a little daunting; all the groups and different pruning techniques and times. My rule of thumb is;

• if it flowers in the spring it has flowered on last years growth so prune it straight after flowering
• if it flowers in the early summer onwards it is probably flowering on this years growth so prune it hard back in February or March (though I find I get away with a pretty hard prune in the winter; just to make the garden look tidier)
• remember you don't HAVE TO PRUNE AT ALL. It's just that if you don't you may need a step ladder to see the flowers and they may smother everything around them

ALSO

• plant them deep; deeper than they were in the pot you bought them in (a good anti clematis wilt tip!)
• keep roots shaded; head in the sun

It works for us!!!!!!!!!!!!!

C IS ALSO FOR .................................

We only have the dwarfer Chrysanthemums due to lack of space. They start to flower towards the autumn and the flowers don't even seem to suffer after a few frosts. One lesson we have learnt is not to plant chrysanths in a position where they have artificial light i.e. street lights shining on them. This is because their flowering is triggered by the day light hours getting shorter. Hence if they have light shining on them all day and all night the flowers won't want to come.

Our cyclamen are the autumn flowering ones. We have tried to grow them directly from corms but had no success. We find they are better planted when they are in leaf. They seed themselves around beautifully. It is quite incredible the way the stem coils up as the seed pod forms; then when the time is right the coil springs open and disperses the seed. There is a story that in the past the tubers were baked and made into little flat cakes that were considered a love potion, which caused the person eating them to fall violently in love. Thankfully I've never tried it. I have a feeling it could result in stomach ache.

Although we often grow annual cornflowers; no photos - pre digital camera days again. This photo is of our perennial cornflower. Another of Micks acquisitions when he was at work (he does ask for seeds, cuttings or plant portions; gardeners are nice sharing people and no one ever said NO). This is another plant that seeds about well in our garden - a bit too well! I have to make sure I remove most of the seedlings or our garden would be overrun.

These are the annual cosmos we grow. They range in colour from white to dark pink. Although they are not hardy they do seem to last right up to the first frosts as long as I deadhead them regularly. They make a good cut flower too. We used to have a perennial chocolate cosmos but after a bad winter we lost it sadly. The smell of the flowers really was like chocolate.


I have in a previous post spoken about coleus. Easy to grow, easy to propagate from cuttings.