Six on Saturday – 3/9/2022

Categories six on saturday51 Comments on Six on Saturday – 3/9/2022

The switch from summer to autumn happened rather abruptly but since summer ended in blazing heat and parched soil, there is a sense in which autumn represents an upturn in the garden’s fortunes rather than the beginning of a steady decline. A lot of things have perked up greatly and late flowerers like Fuchsias and Dahlias are beginning to produce a decent flower display. I’ve been watering because the ground has still been very dry, targeting those plants which have the potential to keep the colour coming. After tomorrow I should be able to stop watering outside for this year.

One.
Begonia ‘Garden Angel Blush’. I put this in a six on 11th June, remarking that it looked set to be a garden highlight of 2022. It has done exceptionally well, the one big and two small plants I put out having merged into a clump about three feet wide. It has a few flowers and they’re pretty enough but it is primarily a foliage plant and as such it is so striking as to look slightly out of place in a predominantly green and informal setting. Planted as it is among the roots of my bamboo, watering has been essential. This is no wild collected species but a hybrid raised by Terra Nova Nurseries, who have plenty of information on it and its sister varieties.

Two.
Colocasia gaoligongensis is supposedly the hardiest Taro, a claim I haven’t put to the test yet, my plant being in the ground for the first time this year. It has done well provided I’ve watered it adequately and a week or so back had a flower on it which I meant to photograph but didn’t. Pale yellow, beneath the foliage, you haven’t missed much. If it continues to thrive I will explore the business of whether as a species its roots are edible. Sounds like it would be terrifically good for my bowels, if it didn’t kill me.

Three.
Indigofera pendula. Another plant making a return appearance after an outing in my July 16th six. In the heat it continued to produce flower racemes but they were all but bare of flowers; it is now performing normally again. I cut it back last winter and it has made between 1.1 and 1.4m shoots, with flower racemes along the length of them. The best of the display was on the 30cm or so of last years growth that I’d left, so I will do the same this year, cut back substantially but leave a length of this season’s growth. There was a deluge going on in the background when I took the picture but it missed us completely.

Four.
Eucomis ‘Pink Gin’. Last year I planted one of these and it did sufficiently well to persuade me to fork out for a couple more. I lifted the bulb last year and kept it dry and frost free for the winter, I’ll do the same this year. For all the backdrop of leafiness there is not much in front and it is in sun most of the day.

Five.
Fuchsia magellanica var. gracilis ‘Variegata’. I blogged earlier in the week about the numerous problems Fuchsias seem to be suffering from and many of ours have performed very badly this year. Some, including this one, are doing what we have long relied on them to do, producing a strong splash of red in late summer. This variety combines the slender and graceful flowers of F. var. gracilis with a neat, white margined leaf that makes it well worth having even without flowers. We find it tricky to propagate, pretty much the sole exception amongst all the varieties we have.

Six.
The trellis I put up to screen off the neighbour we call ‘the fishwife’, had three contenders for inclusion flowering this week. Two have been featured before so it’s the turn of the third, Clematis serratifolia ”Golden Harvest’. Looking it up in ‘Clematis on the web’, it seems it may be a hybrid with C. tangutica. It’s growing through Fuchsia ‘Lady in Black’ and as far as I can recall hasn’t flowered before this year. Truth is it may have passed unnoticed, as it did this year for quite some time.

Our host, The Propagator, is pounding the paths of Anglesey today but his comments section is still the place to go for all the links. That is surely not going to be a lot of fun in the rain, but hey, I’m happy to be a wimp.

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Published by Jim Stephens

Gardener, no-dig allotmenteer, camellia enthusiast. I love colour, it cheers me up. Retired nurseryman.

51 thoughts on “Six on Saturday – 3/9/2022”

  2. Good to hear that you have had decent rain. We have had some here but the ground is still so dry. The begonia seems to be the star of the show but ‘Pink Gin’ is a close runner up. Great variety as usual!

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    1. We visited a garden centre on the way back from todays Plant Fair and found both the other members of the Garden Angels set. I bought one of them, the other was in terrible shape. There are three plants of the begonia in the garden, one big, two small. I will probably lift the smaller two and leave the other in. It has come through a winter outside before now but didn’t enjoy it much and came into growth very late. I think I have a better understanding now of what it will tolerate, so I will provide extra protection if the weather goes very cold.

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  4. I added ‘Pink Gin’ to my Eucomis this year and they have made very large plants but there’s no sign of a flower (or three). ‘Oakhurst’ is the same although that has flowered for the past three years.

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    1. That’s odd; two of my Pink Gins were planted this year and are flowering, the third was planted last year and flowered then and again this year. The new ones came much later than the older plant.

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  5. That fuchsia is stunning, I do like the variegated leaves. I hope you and I get the rain we need. It is promised most days this week so fingers crossed. (By the way, it was 3 years ago we visited you, not 4 as I think I said). Time flies anyway!

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      2. It’s been sluicing it down for hours here, heaviest rain we’ve had in many months. Devon looks to have had even more. Hope there’s a bit left when it reaches you. It’d be lovely to see you again, do get in touch.

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  6. Gee, now that the weather is getting a bit cooler elsewhere, it is finally getting warm here. A major difference though is that such warmth is not unusual. It might get warmer than 100 degrees in town this week, which is about 38 degrees by your standard.

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      3. Record temperatures? Although it has been unpleasantly warm, I was not aware that it was too unusually warm, at least locally. Regardless of how warm the weather gets here, it is trivial compared to what is happening there!

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      5. What the heck?! I saw some similar information about this so-called ‘extreme’ heat, but these are hardly record breaking temperatures. First of all, as you mentioned, California is a big place, with MANY towns that were not here even during relatively recent history. I mean, San Jose is less than two and a half centuries old, and it is one of the older towns here. Many of the towns that are now significant were such small towns as late as the 1970s that no one bothered to monitor the weather there. It is easy to break records within the context of less than half a century of records. Secondly, I can remember warmer weather in some of these places, particularly in San Jose, where it gets warmer than 110 degrees every few years, and sometimes a few times within the same year. Fortunately, the weather here is remarkably mild, and when it does get warm, the warmth does not last long. It generally cools somewhat at night, and warm weather tends to draw a breeze by late afternoon. Aridity makes the warmth more tolerable. The weather is quite pleasant now.

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      6. It may be that our generally cool and wet climate doesn’t prepare things for even moderate extremes, neither the natives that have evolved here nor aliens growing in gardens. They get a nasty shock when it gets hot and dry.

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      8. The same paper was backtracking today somewhat, admitting that the conditions weren’t exceptional but that it was unusual to have everything at once, heat, drought, storm and so on. Absolutely back to normal here after our four day heatwave.

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      9. Drought is another . . . overrated weather pattern here. This is a chaparral climate, portions of Southern California have desert climates. It is perfectly normal. My former neighborhood has always gotten about a foot of rain annually, and almost exclusively between late autumn and early spring. Trona gets about four inches of rain annually. There is nothing unusual about that. However, some believe that such weather is classified as drought, or that ‘every year is a drought year’ here. A ‘drought’ is a sustained and unusually dry weather pattern. That means that it is ‘unusual’. There is nothing unusual about the climates here.

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      10. I assume that The Guardian newspaper, online version, is targeted at a worldwide audience these days, so there is quite a bit of coverage of Australia and America as well as the UK. Being a left leaning title their readership is probably not in Texas, but Californian weather is quite generously covered. It’s weird this business of the world seeming smaller but you’re always looking through a keyhole at a tiny piece of it.

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      13. Female Royal? Is that like a queen or something? I can not understand the reverence for the Royalty there. There is nothing like it in America. Queen Elizabeth II was so very likeable though. She seemed to be so elegant and so pretty, and so very refined, but still did automotive work during World War II. Again, there is nothing like that in America.

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      14. The other female royal at the centre of national weirdness was only a princess. I’m not sure the reverence for royalty can survive the succession, it depends on the incumbent having something of an aura about them, which Elizabeth II had but Charles III probably doesn’t. I don’t see it as a quality of the royals so much as a facet of the deference they’re accorded; the less you know about the actual person the better. Charles is too well known and is essentially a very ordinary person.

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      15. Prince Charles III, who I suppose must be King Charles III by now, does not seem to be overly popular. I do not know who he is, but he certainly looks important. However, Queen Elizabeth II is a hard act to follow.

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      19. I find it to be tiresome. It has gotten so crazy that the previously simple definitions of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are . . . very confusing. I mean, I do not know what they mean anymore. Each side does exactly what it accuses the other side of. . . . Anyway, like you say, horticulture is more comfortable.

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  7. I have three good plants of the calocasia and planted one out in the garden to see how it gets on over this coming winter. It has done well with only an occasional watering this year. It probably wouldn’t survive a hard frost/freeze but I’ll give it a try anyway. It bulks up very quickly at any rate.

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  8. That is a striking begonia and given my liking of gin (though not necessarily pink) I really ought to try Eucomis ‘Pink Gin’. I keep seeing Eucomis among the sixers and I am quite tempted.

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  11. What is the best propagation technique for this begonia? Bulbils? or leaf cuttings?
    It will be very interesting to know how the colocasia will resist the next winter… Are you going to cut the leaves and mulch it or lift and pot it?

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