Gardening

Six on Saturday 7th January 2023

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Well this is novel! I haven’t posted anything on my blog since the end of August! I’d forgotten how to compress my photos and how to connect my keyboard to my iPad. I kind of fell out of love with blogging and that combined with much less time due to general life duties and the end of summer and, hence, lack of prettiness in the garden meant I just haven’t posted for ages. I’m not sure if I’m, in the words of Take That, back for good, but I’m here for now, and we’ll see if I rediscover my blogging enthusiasm.

I think what has drawn me to write, is that I saw from the kitchen window that my newest hellebore has flowers and it prompted me to venture into the garden to check the damage done by the recent cold snap (not as extensive as I’d feared) and I was inspired by the signs of life, and, dare I say it, spring coming!

Hellebores will be my first point.

I should know what variety these are, but alas, I don’t! I think the white one is Christmas but the other two, nope, no idea! The pinky-white one is the newest and it’s the first time I’ve seen it flower – isn’t it pretty? The middle one hasn’t opened it’s pretty flowers yet, but once it does, it flowers for ages, well into summer.

Next up are these erysimum in a pot.

I got these in the sale at some point last summer. There were only five in the carton instead of six, hence the sale price, but the five that were left were perfectly fine so I snapped them up. They look quite happy in this pot. I’m looking forward to seeing what colour flowers they produce.

I couldn’t resist including a photo of my unidentified success. Those who’ve followed me for a while (if you’re still there after such an extended absence!) will know that this cost me pennies a couple of years ago and it had no label, and that it’s gone from strength to strength. I’d have been really upset if the cold had killed it, but it (unlike its owner) is obviously quite happy with arctic conditions. As it’s unidentified, maybe I should give it a name – Elsa seems apt (Frozen, anyone?)

My final three points are full of hope and new beginnings. First up my pink damask is pushing through new shoots. Before I know it, she’ll be a couple of feet tall and threatening to burst forth with her dusky blooms.

In front of Ms. Damask under the watchful eye of Monsieur Red Breast are, joy of joys, the beginnings of daffs! Daffs mean spring, and spring means warmth, light and holidays are just around the corner – what’s not to love?

Finally, lots of miniature sedum cabbages! Aren’t they cute?

I’m so glad nature’s done its thing completely unaided by yours truly. It’s just been too cold to go out there for so long, and now it’s too wet to do anything! There’s a mouldy pepper plant in the green house, a collapsed honeysuckle trellis, a couple of coprosmas that may or may not be dead (I hope not, but it doesn’t look hopeful) and the weeds and sopping wet debris are everywhere, but after pottering around out there today, I’m confident that if the rain ever stops, I’ll be able to get things back in order.

That’s all for now – enjoy the rest of the weekend folks!

Several on Sunday

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I was going to do a Six on Saturday yesterday as I haven’t posted in a while, but then I realised I had more than six points to make so I’m doing several on Sunday instead!

I took the day off work on Friday to make a lovely long bank holiday weekend. it feels like ages since I had longer than a weekend off. I guess it was the jubilee weekend which wasn’t actually that long ago but I was ready for a break.

Hubby doesn’t work on Fridays so we had the day together, but we hadn’t made any plans in advance not knowing what the weather would be doing. It was gloriously sunny so we decided last minute to go to Twycross Zoo. Last time we went was just as lockdown restrictions were being eased and they were only allowed something like 30% capacity so there were no queues and we were free to spend as much time looking at the animals as we liked. Not this time though. It was absolutely heaving full of kids but I guess that’s what you get for going to a zoo in school holidays. I did get to test out the camera on my new phone though and got a few really good snaps.

As ever, I found myself in a quandary between being fascinated by the animals, and wishing they weren’t in captivity. I console myself with the knowledge of the conservation work that zoos are able to do because of the entry fees but really I know that if I wasn’t for mankind much of conservation wouldn’t even be necessary. However, we are where we are and that’s a whole other discussion.

Yesterday morning I went for a walk in Kingsbury Water Park with my sister-in-law and I’m really pleased with this photo of a duck. Hubby says the photos with this new camera are better than actually looking at the subject in real life!

On we go to some floral delights, and this time I’ve decided to show some zoomed in contrasts, largely due to the fact that the new camera is sooo good at close up shots.

First is my nigrescens in the hanging basket. I think I shared the flowers that it had for the first time a few weeks ago, and speculated that maybe that meant I’d get berries this year. As you can see, I have! Very exciting.

Next some violas that I planted ages ago. They were in flower when I planted them, then they were just a mass of leaves, and now they’re flowering again. Double whammy! Also, they’ve seeded in the gravel around them. I guess that makes it a triple whammy! I’ve never had that happen with bedding plants before.

My wheelbarrow has really done itself proud. I bemoaned the fact that my apricot mix pack of begonias was actually just red earlier in the year. The red was (and is) beautiful, but I’m really happy that I’ve now got some of the apricot tones that I wanted too.

My poor cordyline that got flattened by the snow at the beginning of the year is starting to recover. Hopefully by the end of the summer, the bent offerings at the bottom will have died off to be replaced by more upstanding fronds at the top.

I have a mix of feelings when the sedums start to turn pink. On the one hand, the pink is prettier than the green that they’ve sported all through the summer, but the pink tinge heralds the end of the lazy, hazy days of summer and the slow descent towards the cold and dark. Still, we’re not there yet so I’ll just try to enjoy what’s left of summer and the late summer blooms.

Here you can spy a closely shorn hubby hard at work being photobombed by the thing whose name I can never remember! Just googled – leycesteria formosa. I can’t remember if I planted this or if it just turned up, but it’s gone crazy!

Finally we have a pond! In typical quirky style, it has a heron and, perhaps even more bizarrely, a wildly out of scale triceratops! It’s not finished, there will be more plants added around it and, I’m sure, more random animals but for now it has a coprosma and I couldn’t resist showing you a close up of its beautiful leaves.

I think that’s all for now. We’re off to a garden centre once our Tesco delivery has arrived. No doubt we’ll come back with more garden paraphernalia that I’ll be able to share at a later date. Enjoy the rest of the bank holiday weekend for UK folks, and the regular weekend for everyone else.

Six on Saturday 16th July

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Has anyone seen Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? It starts in the summer holidays with Harry sat on a swing in suburban Little Whinging, Surrey with normal summer activities going on around him in the park, and a radio somewhere is discussing it being the hottest day of the year. Well it feels like that today! I’m sat on my egg chair in the garden and I can hear normal family life going on in one neighbour’s garden – the kids on the trampoline, the dog wanting to jump over and kill me and the parents discussing what to have for dinner. On the other side our solitary neighbour is whistling to the birds, and someone somewhere is playing summer tunes. Back to Little Whinging, and soon Harry’s cousin Dudley turns up and starts taunting him, but then the sky turns black and the calm is shattered as the pair are forced to run for their lives when the dementors of Azkaban swoop in. It seems to me that the forecasted heatwave for the next three days is the real life version of the dementors waiting to swoop in and end the current summer happiness on my street!

Anyway, at least it’s only three days till normal British summertime is resumed, and in the meantime, here’s some pictures of pretty garden regalia to occupy our time until the heatwave sucks all the joy out of us.

First up, here’s one of the few inhabitants of the garden that might actually thrive in the heat, my olive tree. It’s covered in flowers, but I’m not holding my breath because although it’s had flowers before, it’s never produced any fruit.

My hebe Purple Pixie is flowering nicely. It looks bluey-purple in the photo but is a deeper purple in reality. This was my first ever hebe which I rescued from the sale table at Notcutts several years ago. It’s doing well even though I’ve moved it a couple of times and it’s in complete shade.

I’m glad I nipped out on my lunch break earlier in the week and took photos of my pink damask flowers which emerged all of a sudden, because, as I’ve lamented before, they’re beautiful but barely last more than a couple of days. They’ve pretty much done their thing already for this year. The remaining ones are certainly not going to survive 40° on Monday.

I found half a packet of nigella seeds in the greenhouse earlier in the year and decided to sow them without really expecting much success, but now I have a pot of them! This was the first one that opened. I really love their layered petals and the delicate blue hue.

This gerbera has unexpectedly survived two winters. I didn’t even notice a bud this year but one day this week I went outside and found this flower. Lovely surprise!

Finally another discovery this week. I pulled out some dreaded herb Robert that had managed to find its way into my hanging basket that houses my nigrescens and found that said nigrescens is flowering. This is the first time it’s done that, so now I have high hopes that I may get some berries on it in the autumn. How exciting!

So there we are for another week. I’m off to think happy thoughts to summon my patronus (which, by the way, I’m pretty sure would be a cat, but I can’t be sure because I didn’t get my Hogwarts letter) to banish the heatwave and save my pots from death by dementor’s kiss! For anyone who doesn’t obsess about Harry Potter like me, apologies because that will make zero sense to you, but hopefully you’ll have enjoyed the flowers. Why not pop over to the Propagator to check out some more?