Six on Saturday – 4/8/2018

The sight of a bud emerging on Amaryllis belladonna two days ago was a bit of a shock, it’s hard to see it as other than an early sign of autumn. Much of the summer flower palette has been battered by the heat and blown through too quickly. The flowers on my Heleniums are half the size they should be.

My Dahlias however, are loving it. Good thing something is.

One.
Habranthus brachyandrus. They call it rain lily, but they call several other things rain lilies too. This is a lovely bulbous plant which I have in a pot. The trouble with it is that the flowers only last a couple of days and that has not included a Saturday until now. So the first picture is from Thursday, the other from this morning. It looks like the earlier flowers are going to set seed, so that’s another thing I won’t be able to resist growing and which will likely take years to get to flowering size. Looking it up online has left me dubious about the accuracy of the name.

Two.
Yucca gloriosa ‘Variegata’. These flower spikes were just showing last Saturday but are now shooting up by a couple of inches a day. They’ll be reappearing in a couple of weeks when fully out. Biggest problem is I can go round all 360° and not get a decent background, all houses and cars. I could Photoshop a desert scene behind it. Or a dessert scene might be easier.

Three.
Hedychium cv. I bought this under the name ‘Filligree‘, which is nonsense. It looks to me like H. densiflorum ‘Stephen’, though it may very well be a seedling rather than the true clone. It’s growing around the base of my plum tree, probably to the detriment of both plants, but I don’t really have anywhere else for it to go. It’s about three feet tall, would probably be more if it had more moisture. Smells gorgeous.

Four.
Roscoea x beesiana ‘Monique’. Like Hedychium, a hardy member of the ginger tribe. It’s a lot less tolerant of dry conditions than Hedychium and really isn’t enjoying being in the root zone of my big Irish Yew. I water it daily and the yew says thanks a lot while the Roscoea wilts. The reddish flower is a different variety.

Five.
Pelargonium ionidiflorum. Celery scented pelargonium. We have a few oddities amongst our Pelargoniums, this being a species with tiny pink flowers, small leaves and a sprawling habit which means we have it in a hanging pot. Sue noticed it had some seeds on it and they looked interesting enough to turn my macro lens onto them. The spiralling of the tail attached to the seed gets the bristles all pointing outward radially, which would aid wind dispersal. I’m unconvinced by the line that it enables the seed to drill into the ground, which would require twisting by some third party, but one website says so and soon they all do.
You want to know if smells of celery don’t you. Not to my nose it doesn’t. I will be sowing the seeds next spring.

Six.
Dahlia ‘Cheyenne’. Getting the colour right in Dahlia photos is notoriously difficult and I’m still experimenting with the myriad settings in camera and on the computer. I’m happy enough with this one but even so it’s way short of the real thing.

So that’s some of what’s happening in this corner of Cornwall. And I just started a sentence with so and another with and. Aagh!. You have to be of a certain age to see it like that and being of that age means that to be able to peer into lots of other peoples gardens, from all around the world, still seems slightly miraculous and slightly voyeuristic. The keyhole for this behaviour is of course The Propagator’s SoS post, which this week is six of his holiday snaps because this is the modern world and it’s what people do on their holidays. I think I need a nice cup of tea.