End of Month View - September 2015

There seems to be a terrific amount of flower still around the garden, albeit looking a little tatty in many cases. The later in the year it gets, the less that seems to matter.

Hakonechloas 'Stripe it Rich' and 'Mediovariegata' flanking an Aster we were given years ago, name unknown. The Hosta is
called 'Chinese Sunrise' and I bought it for its elegant narrow leaves. The flowers are pretty good too it turns out.

Bulbine frutescens, Nerine and Fuchsia splendens, which struggles through the winters and starts flowering in late September. The Nerines are an unknown variety given me by my sister who lives in the north of Scotland.

The starring roles are taken by Fuchsias, Salvias, especially ‘Amistad’, Dahlias, Asters, Japanese anemones and Hesperantha. I’ve planted two new anemones recently, ‘Bressingham Glow’ and ‘Lorelei’; both seem excellent so far. The grasses are probably at their best around now too, Hakonechloa, Miscanthus and Chionochloa standing out.

Nerines are just beginning to flower and while one clump of Amaryllis has finished, two others are pushing up buds.

I’m grateful for the few remaining blooms on my Heleniums, but I also want them to finish so that I can lift them and move them around a bit, adding in two new varieties there too.

Salvia 'Amistad' and Hesperantha.

Our tomatoes are also at the stage where I want to clear them and start moving some of many potted things under cover before the wet of autumn really sets in. I’m well ahead of myself on the veg front, next years seeds are not just ordered, they’ve arrived. I clearly don’t have enough to do.

I’ve also gone and ordered about 20 new dahlia varieties for next year. The National Collection display field down at Penzance is a sight to behold and to coin a phrase, resistance is futile. (I’m going to grow them on my allotment, I’m truly turning into my granddad.) Then there are 2 more apple trees on order too. Well, I have a tree of ‘Suntan’, which is growing and flowering well, but flowers too late to get well pollinated. It’s also a triploid, so it won’t reciprocate on pollination, hence the need for two pollinators. I’ve gone for maidens on M9, I still think spindle trees should be ideal in my restricted space. (See my earlier post about fruit)

Dahlias 'Fille du Diable', 'Danum Torch', 'Weston Spanish Dancer', 'Chimborazo' and 'Akita'.

Bulbine frutescens is a succulent we’ve grown, in pots, for perhaps 15 years. We have a yellow and an orange form. This year, for the first time, I noticed it has a sweet and quite strong perfume. I think maybe the orange is the stronger scent.

It is very apparent when you take photos on clear autumn days that there is a massive difference in light levels between light and shade. With no clouds and little haze, there can be very little diffused light. The shadows of buildings and big plants are also getting much longer now, even in the middle of the day. On the other hand, as the sun gets lower, it sometimes gets in under the canopy to places it can’t reach at other times of year. Never two days the same, all part of the pleasure.

The house casts a lengthening shadow at this time of year.

This blog is my contribution to Helen Johnstone's end of month meme.

Fancy a Fuchsia?

I am in the habit of writing about my garden as if I was the only person with a stake in it. I want to say a bit about fuchsias and I simply cannot talk about my fuchsias in my garden, they are Sue’s fuchsias in our garden.

Fuchsias really come into their own in late summer and autumn. Even though most of our hardy varieties come through the winter with their top growth fairly unscathed, they all get chopped down to an inch or so in late winter. Up they come again, bushier than ever, to start flowering in midsummer and continue until frosted.

Fuchsia microphylla, one of the encliandra types with tiny vivid pink flowers, is outstanding every year. It is the hardiest we grow and more years than not, comes through the winter without dropping a leaf or stopping flowering. ‘Cornish Pixie’ is a variety of it that only gets a foot or so tall.

Fuchsia microphylla

‘Delta’s Sarah’ is a tall growing variety with white sepals and petals at first lilac blue, turning to pink. ‘Ian Storey’ is very upright and has flowers with red sepals and petals at first almost black, lightening to deep purple.

Fuchsia 'Delta's Sarah'

We have three varieties with bright gold foliage; ‘Genii’ is good but magellanica ‘Aurea’ is better, making a mound of gold against which the red stems and flowers are well set off. ‘Olga Storey’ is even showier, with larger flowers of red and purple. The leaves are bright yellow with a red midrib and petiole, seemingly immune to fuchsia rust.

Fuchsias magellanica 'Aurea' and 'Olga Storey'

We have one very good plant which was a volunteer seedling. While probably not distinctive enough to name, it is very free flowering and very healthy, the flowers a very bright red with lighter red petals.

Fuchsias 'Ian Storey' and an unnamed seedling

We have a lot of varieties in pots which I have been trying to propagate this year in order to get young vigorous plants going to replace the old, somewhat tired ones. Some are truly outstanding and it is difficult to pick favourites. ‘Jadi Messingtetra’ is one of the showiest, its sepals arching like pink birds wings below which is a hula skirt of blue, turning mauve.

Fuchsia 'Jadi Messingtetra'

‘Walz Blaukous’ has similar colouring but semi-double flowers. ‘Dying Embers’ has red suffused leaves, dark red sepals and almost black petals. Compact and free flowering, it is in the garden and will be left out to see if it survives the winter. Cuttings have been taken.

Fuchsias 'Walz Blaukous' and 'Dying Embers'

If your view of fuchsias is based on the basket and bedding varieties that abound in garden centres I would urge you to look again, you’re missing some very lovely and very beautiful plants.

Fruit trees, I'm learning.

A couple of years ago I took on an allotment, which meant that I no longer needed to give over space in the garden for fruit and veg. Unfortunately, I am not permitted to grow fruit trees on the plot other than in pots. So, crammed into my overfull garden are five trees, a plum and four apples.

The plum is Victoria, a half standard on St Julian A stock. It is tucked against the northern boundary so I can let it grow without creating any more shade, but I don’t want it to get very big because it becomes difficult to pick and I have no need of massive numbers of plums. For the last two years I have cut it back hard in April, shortening all new growths to an inch or so and thinning out the centre of the tree. This year I had a massive crop which I should have thinned but didn’t. So I had quantity but not quality; good for jam and stewing, not so good for eating whole. Hopefully next year I will get it right.

Too many plums.

The apple trees are a mixed bunch. The best of them is Suntan, a bush tree on MM106. It’s a great variety in that it is very healthy and produces good dessert apples that keep well. I have spur pruned it, cutting all the new growths back to one leaf above the basal cluster in the third week of August. This means that I can keep it at roughly the same size indefinitely without losing my crop. This spring it was a beautiful sight, producing a flower display to compare with any ornamental variety. But then came disappointment, a very mediocre crop of apples. As the season progressed, many of the fruits that had set dropped. I put this down to it flowering late, after my other apples have finished, so not getting pollinated. I need to plant another late flowering variety and have in mind ‘Lane’s Prince Albert’ or ‘Newton Wonder’.



   

Suntan with a rather poor crop of apples and showing pruning.

Almost all commercial orchards are grown using M9 as a rootstock. It gets into cropping very quickly and produces fruits of good size. They are generally grown as spindle trees, supported on wires and planted about a meter apart in the row. I can see no reason why they wouldn’t suit most home gardeners to a tee. Small trees utilising upright space, so several varieties can be grown in a small area, giving good pollination and no glut of any one variety. The pruning is different, but not difficult and, this being the 21st century, is well explained in film clips on You Tube.

Convinced I needed to give it a whirl, I planted Red Windsor as a knip tree on M9. That is to say, a well feathered maiden tree. I tied down the laterals to just below horizontal and left the leader as it was. It has cropped well, but like so many varieties described as having good disease resistance, has not proved to be a match for the Cornish climate. Scab has spoiled the fruits and severely impacted the vigour of the tree. I should also have shortened the leader as my second tier of laterals is separated from the first by a long length of bare stem.

At the same time as I planted Suntan, I also planted Elstar. I now see that orangepippin.com are describing its disease resistance as poor. In Cornwall it is hopeless. After its first awful season I thought I would try grafting other varieties onto it. Holstein Cox is a variety that an ex work colleague was growing on her allotment very successfully and she furnished me with some scions. I also grafted Red Windsor and Meridian at the same time. This was done with whip grafts in January. I can claim no vast amount of experience of doing this but all of them took, which means it can’t be very difficult! The key is a nice clean cut; a sharp knife and a bit of practice on unwanted twigs first, the cut must be made in one go.

Whip graft tied with rubber strip and covered with Buddy tape.

Graft after tie removed, already flowering.

Three years on, the graft union is hard to see.

The Holstein had a couple of fruits in the first year, the scions having produced flowers only two or three months after grafting. It has grown strongly but is very weeping, perhaps due to the weight of fruit.

Grafted March 2012, the branch is now heavy with fruit.

Red Windsor has fared no better than the M9 tree, being too prone to scab to really succeed. Meridian has grown strongly upright and appears fairly healthy but has not fruited. A lot of the tree is still Elstar so I may try and get hold of some more varieties this winter and replace the original all together.

The last of my trees is Holstein again, a maiden tree on MM106 that I chip budded. It’s still very small. My intention is to treat it like Suntan. It'll probably have other ideas.

Intelligent design?

Like most gardeners, I love to visit plant fairs, nurseries, garden openings and all the other places where plants are available to buy. And like most gardeners, I succumb to the lures of those plants without regard to whether I have room for them and sometimes without regard to whether I can provide them with the conditions they need. Sometimes, at the time of purchase the required conditions may not be known. Sellers are apt to go all vague when asked, for fear of losing a sale.

It is normal for me to have a small collection of plants kicking about waiting to be planted. The decision as to where to put something can be deferred indefinitely, in favour of keeping it in a pot. That is rarely a good decision as very few plants are easy to keep growing well for more than a season or two in a pot and also because almost all pot grown plants need to be overwintered under cover, provision of which is very limited.



Helenium 'Monique', still awaiting planting.

I should think that most of the additions to my garden are impulse buys of this sort, with planned purchases and gifts making up the rest. I began to wonder whether my purchasing could be made more sensible if I gave some thought to what I wanted to get out of the garden in the first place.

I quickly realised that there are many things  that I want from it, some of them quite contradictory. I want it to be uplifting and I want it to be calming. I want it to be interesting and I want it to be impactful. I want variety and detail but I want it to work well as a whole. I want there to be things that need doing but I don’t want it to be a burden. Each requirement begs a basketful of ‘so how do I achieve that’ questions.

Trying to do too much leads to confusion, but I'm not too bothered.

Having been in the same place for over a quarter of a century helps because to a considerable extent the garden has haphazardly and arbitrarily been steered in the right general direction. The weak and feeble non-performers have gone. The out and out thugs have gone. The performers have been propagated and given more space. More of the same or similar have been acquired. The overall effect is less important to me than the detail; I accept that and if others don’t like it, tough!

Over time, gaps, all year round or seasonal, have been plugged with appropriate additions. Things have been moved to better locations for a plethora of reasons. Occasionally quite big chunks have been cleared and replanted. The inevitable cycle of plants getting bigger and bigger, or dying from old age or disease has been dealt with. Very few deaths are mourned for long and almost always something different goes in the space created.

Astelia chathamica, a plant I wouldn't be without.

If someone decided they liked all or part of it so much they wanted to recreate it elsewhere, it would be impossible to do. Some plants are decades old, some a few weeks. The exact soil and light conditions could not be replicated and the weather enjoyed over the time my plants have been growing will not be repeated for the growth of the new version. I cannot see how you could design your way to where my garden is now. In reality a garden design, like a genome, is more recipe than template. The uncertainty of the finished result can be reduced by restricting the plant choice to highly reliable and predictable subjects.

I’ve convinced myself that my approach to plant buying is something I can live with. In fact, I think it’s the best approach for my established garden. There is always a space somewhere that needs filling, or something that needs replacing. Each plant is purchased because I think it will contribute something that I want. Planted sensibly there’s a good chance that it will. That’s why next weekend’s plant fair is marked on the calendar and unless something unexpected crops up, I shall be there.

Azalea seedling; not good enough, its replacement is ready to go in.

Perhaps what I like most of all is to be able to stroll round the garden and find something new happening; something flowering for the first time, shoots emerging after a drab winter, a flower proving popular with bees.  To have had exactly the same plants in the garden for the last 25 years is too ghastly to contemplate. As much as I love it when the older residents perform each year, there’s something special about a new arrival.

Time, a garden's fourth dimension.

I dug out some old photos of the garden and was minded to try and take new pictures from the same spot.
The first picture was taken in winter soon after I moved in, around 28 years ago. The house was then about 10 years old and had had two owners. One of them had landscaped the garden with a round lawn, 2 each of 4 varieties of tree and the then ubiquitous leylandii hedge.

It took a year or two, but in the next picture the last of the lawn is being dug up and some pretty extensive planting has been going on. There's a pond and a polytunnel. Much of the paving has gone, what is left has been upgraded. Except for the hedge and maybe one shrub, nothing remains of the earlier planting.

Now lets roll forward almost quarter of a century. I can see only two of the earlier plants still remaining, the bamboo in bottom left and the Carex beside it. The wall is still there but hidden and the circle shape is still present in the recently laid paving. I still have my fork, though it has been re-shafted. The hedge is a distant memory. Trees have grown large and gone.

Did I plan for it to look like this now? Of course not. To look more than a year or two ahead is to look into complete uncertainty. What will do well, how fast things will grow, what will die or be removed; these are unknowns, and gardening is much the more interesting for it.

Next picture I take I'm going to stand there again and strike that same pose. See if I haven't changed a whole lot less than the garden.