Six on Saturday 6/5/2017

“The Propagator” has just launched a new meme which struck a chord with me, so this is by way of climbing on board. Six things going on in the garden.
1) This is Camellia ‘Nightrider’, very dark, very late flowering and with new leaves a similar colour to the flowers but shiny. It’s a very classy plant IMHO.

2) Maianthemum racemosum is for me a bombproof plant given a bit of shade and some moisture. It’s about the only woodlander I grow that is not mauled by slugs. This form is ‘Emily Moody’, which doesn’t look very different from the species but has a formidably sweet and strong lily of the valley perfume.

3) The host of this meme being a propagator, I give you ‘Plympton Pippin’, a fine old Devonshire apple, grafted in February onto my pretty useless ‘Elstar’ and already flowering. I may remove any fruit that sets but I’m leaving the flowers as an aid to pollinating the other 5 varieties grafted onto the same tree.

4) I scrounged some seed of a good Schefflera taiwaniana form some years back and this baby is now 6 feet plus. I love these emerging shoots, like the hands of synchronised swimmers, that slowly enlarge and open out into elegant umbrellas.

5) There’s no need to propagate Libertia, they need no help from me. I grow chilensis and ixioides, which occasionally hybridise to produce this thing. I actually weed out most of the seedlings, which usually look like chilensis, but this one got left. Someone did a review of the genus recently and proposed the name x butleri for the hybrid. It’s got several seedlings around it, which I don’t have room for but I want to see what they do. A familiar dilemma for gardeners.

6) And for number six, another Camellia. I just pruned four foot off the top. It was just getting too big and flowering too high up, such that the flowers were hidden behind the conifer that is just out of the picture. It’ll be a couple of years before it flowers well again and I will try to keep it compact in the meantime by removing any long extension growths in winter. It’s called ‘Annette Carol’ and is one of my favourites, so it was a reluctant decision taken after a couple of years putting it off.

So I wish The Propagator well with his new meme. His post is at https://thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/06/six-on-saturday/ where hopefully a few more links will soon appear.