Six on Saturday – 4/3/2023

Categories six on saturday, , 58 Comments on Six on Saturday – 4/3/2023

Looks like it’s going cold from the diagonally opposite corner of the country, moving this way but maybe not quite making it. Things are well enough under way to be worried about new growth getting clobbered, a routine, happens every year kind of worry. Six things in the garden on a Saturday, posted for the world to see; that is your mission, should you choose to take it. Of course you will, as will I.

One.
I didn’t have this to worry about this time last year, it was still in a pot and could be taken under cover when frost threatened. Lifting it in the autumn didn’t happen because by then it was three feet across, so I packed dry leaves around and over it when the first frost was forecast, then left it to take its chances. Yesterday when I was looking for SoS contenders I noticed that something was happening, cleared away the leaves, was pretty astonished at what I found and how well a pile of leaves had protected it, let it breath for a few hours then put the leaves back with an upturned pot to hold them in place as frost is again forecast for tonight. Begonia pedatifida ‘Apalala’, which I mentioned in this six from December last year.

Two.
Penstemons are shooting at the bottom and need cutting down, most have survived. Salvias and Dahlias come later and there may be losses. Definitely dead are both Correas, ‘Marian’s Marvel’ and ‘Federation Bell’; also a couple of Prostantheras. Worst loss is Camellia ‘Ariel’s Song’, which may have succumbed to cold, root damage in wind or honey fungus. Six feet tall, covered in buds, dead. I’ve lost a Schefflera and a big Fuchsia to honey fungus just a few feet away, which gives me big worries for anything I replace it with.

Three.
By way of killing two birds with one stone, Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ has evaded inclusion in a six for five years and was sporting a comparatively rare, in Cornwall, dusting of the frosty stuff this morning. Now’s it’s chance to shine.

Four.
Camellia x williamsii ‘Debbie’. A lot of my time over the last couple of months has been spent taking photos of Camellias to put in the records of the National Collection held at Mount Edgcumbe. This one is in the garden, which gives me more options in terms of taking pictures at different times, in sun or shade. I can then upload them to the computer and see if I need to take the shot again. ‘Debbie’, and a few others of similar colour, never seem to look the same in a photograph as they do in life. No amount of tweaking the colour ever seems to work; I’ve come to the conclusion that my brain interprets the colour differently when its on the bush compared to when it’s in a picture. Much of how a colour appears is down to what’s around it, but it just seems to apply more forcibly with this shade of pink with it’s blue undertones.

Five.
Back in the mid nineteenth century, nurserymen and others had to make their camellia illustrations by hand. There are several books available from the period and the pictures are often very skilfully executed and beautiful. Whether they are an adequate basis on which to base an identification has to be highly questionable. They can help narrow the field but without corroborating evidence are of limited value. I was experimenting with trying to create a modern photographic equivalent, using Camellia ‘Annette Carol’. I don’t think I’m quite ready to go to print. The other picture is from the 1843 Iconographie du Genre Camellia by M. L’Abbé Berlèse and is the variety C. japonica ‘Maculata Superba’, a plant of which is at Mt Edgcumbe.

Six.
Euphorbia characias ‘Silver Swan’ is almost flowering. I’m not sure why but I have a nagging feeling that this looks like one of those plants that starts to go over and head downhill quite a long way before it reaches what what should be its best. I will be only too happy to be proved wrong.


Early March and I’m wanting it to rain. Be careful what you wish for whispers the demon on my other shoulder. Early Camellia competition at RHS Rosemoor next weekend, being spared frost is all we ask. Have a good week.

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Published by Jim Stephens

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

58 thoughts on “Six on Saturday – 4/3/2023”

  1. Pingback: Six on Saturday | Spring Forward – Cornwall in Colours
  2. Pingback: Six on Saturday: Preference and Prejudice – Our Forest Garden

  3. I love the vintage rose books from the same period ❤ I think that has also left some doubt however as to accuracy of some of the botanical paintings, as there is some argument in the rose world over plant identification.

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    1. I imagine the same problems exist in any plant group where varieties survive for centuries. Many of the old camellia pictures are from nursery catalogues, their purpose to sell the plants not accurately record them for future generations.

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  4. Pingback: Six-on-Saturday: March Week 2 – The Three Hairs

  5. Ouch, those losses must be painful, Jim 🙄 Not sure yet if there will be any here, although I did notice a completely bare penstemon today, so that might be a goner. Ophiopogon always looks fetching with a dusting of frost – not that you would know much about that!! After just 3mm of rain in February we could certainly do with some here too but it’s not looking promising yet. I have had the chance to be quite busy in the garden this week as you will see at https://ramblinginthegarden.wordpress.com/2023/03/04/six-on-saturday-down-to-the-nitty-gritty/
    Thanks for hosting

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  6. Pingback: Six on Saturday: Down to the Nitty Gritty | Rambling in the Garden

  8. I LOVE those camellia Jim….and your comments about the colours. You are right. I’m a vision scientist as well as a gardener, the phenomenon is called ‘colour constancy’ — how our brains discount the effects of the light falling on objects, so we see them as the same, whatever the lighting. It doesn’t always work, especially when viewing photos, and there are individual differences between people….hence some of the comments here today.

    here’s my little contribution:
    http://www.balmerino.net/geekygarden

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    2. Good to know I wasn’t just making it up to excuse the shortcomings of my photographic technique. “Colour constancy” gives me a phrase to look up more about it, thanks. Close-ups of flowers removes the context I suppose. I took pictures of the same Camellia varieties a few days back both on the sunny side and the shade side of the bush. In isolation both are acceptable but put the pictures together and both look horribly wrong.

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    1. I’ve been surprised at just how effective the leaves have been at protecting the plants without seemingly causing rotting, or etiolation, or slug explosions. It has me wondering what else would be in better shape now if it had been treated similarly, penstemons particularly.

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  10. Pingback: Beauty in the Garden (the show) begins! | Mom in the Garden

  11. It’s so sad to see losses in the garden, I too have sad news to report on my first week back among the fold. Your camellias make up for it though, AC is very pretty. This is the time of year I love driving around Cornwall as there are blossoming camellias and magnolias everywhere. Time for a visit to Lanhydrock.

    Six on Saturday | Springing Back

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    1. I’d been thinking of popping over to Lanhydrock, I don’t know whether the Magnolias will have escaped the frosts or not. I also wanted to look at a camellia, just one, ‘Valtevareda’. It’s complicated.

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  12. It is truly amazing what a pile of leaves can do for winter protection. I used to buy spinach from a guy in Minnesota. He always had spinach in early April and said that he planted in fall, then mulched heavily. The roots survive and the spinach is forthcoming. I have not yet tried that in my garden. Bets wishes for a frost free week. We are in a “warm” period, but frost is likely through April. I only plant the toughest things early. Some things need wait until May, unless you have determination to coddle them through early spring.

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    3. I left some of my borderline Begonias in the ground, lifted others and put them in a frost free greenhouse. The ones in the ground, under a pile of leaves, have made quite a bit of new growth, starting in early January. The plants of the same varieties in the greenhouse have made none, or only just started. Plants die off in winter, their dead stems trap leaves around the crown. We come along, clear away the leaves, cut down the stems. If we leave things standing it’s for the aesthetic effect of frosty stems and flower heads, not for the benefit of the plants. I might have expected shoots under a leaf pile to go mouldy but it’s perhaps too cold for that. Why are we always so surprised when the way nature does it turns out to be the best way.

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      1. So true! I always remind myself that seeds want to grow, plants want to push forth and begin again. My little patch of emerald green moss is a reminder that soon all will be green again, I actually do nothing to my garden in Autumn, save remove the bean structure and any plant cages I used. Maybe cop any squash vines to the ground and chop that up in place. Around here it is recommended to not chop things down or do much digging until temps are in the 50s F for a week straight. It is meant to help the pollinators. I have a buckwheat stalk that I had my eye on. I had cut the top off or aesthetic reasons and it appears that something laid eggs in the hollow stalk, It is still there, so as temps increase, I will see if I can learn what hatched out. My garden held snow better than the lawn, which would insulate the garden soil from extreme cold. I watch for sprouting reseeds to decide when to plant my seeds – works pretty well.

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      2. I took a picture of a small moss covered rock and nearly put it in a six a week or two back. It was so bright (still is) in the gloomy light. Flowers have such a grip on our psyche, they know exactly how to draw attention to themselves and away from everything else.

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  13. I’m sorry for your losses, but that lovely pink camellia is some recompense. I have moved my writing (including garden writing) onto Substack and so my Saturday offering is here https://junegirvin.substack.com/p/early-colours?sd=pf
    If you want to subscribe there (free) I’d be very happy, although it does include different things – midweek I post about nursing (47 years of it) and at the weekend it might be the garden, or books, or anything. Otherwise, when it’s just gardening, I’ll post it here.

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  14. The camellias are so beautiful. Mine were all burned by the early winter flash freeze. I will take the illustrations. Thank you for posting them.
    Our March has begun blustery but warm although we are expecting two nights near freezing next weekend.
    I must control the urge to put out more plants which are now safe in the cold frame.
    Here are this weeks efforts.

    https://mensgardenvestavia.wordpress.com/2023/03/03/late-winter-3-march-2023/

    Happy gardening y’all from here in the American South where the spring so seems so close to busting out.

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  16. Pingback: Six on Saturday: 4 March 2023 – My Tiny Welsh Garden
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  19. I agree that botanical art is beautiful! One of my students gave a presentation on the fine line between floral paintings and botanical art (she curates 17th and 18th art collections at the museum of fine arts in Belgium), Flemish painters saw it as their mission to get as close as possible to reflecting divine creation, and so tried to be as accurate as possible. Your camellia against the black background looks pretty divine!

    Old friends in the garden (6 on Saturday)

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    1. 😊
      It makes me wonder what the Flemish painters would have made of cameras. Reflecting divine creation made easy. Divinity is not my thing but I am no less in awe of creation for all that, and trying to reflect it as accurately as possible is no less important as a goal.

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  21. Pingback: Six on Saturday | Springing Back – Cornwall in Colours
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  24. I was given a similar euphorbia to yours and as a disclaimer I will say that it was very pot bound. It did die on me fairly quickly, so I think your instincts are probably right.

    Your photos of the camellia’s are stunning, but even with my ‘good’ camera capturing true colours is very difficult (when photographing art work), so I don’t think it is your eyes necessarily.
    I’m still trying not to count the losses here and I don’t think there is anything too precious that has gone, but I am kicking myself that last year I only took cuttings of one penstemon.

    Here’s my link for this week
    https://www.hortusbaileyana.co.uk/2023/03/mulch-and-more.html

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    1. The apparent colour of flowers, or anything else, depends on the colour of the light falling on them. With Camellias, I’m very often taking pictures in shade and in the dull overcast conditions of late winter, so the flowers look too blue. It’s easy to correct with software and I can even set a custom white balance to get it more accurate but the “corrected” colour is not what I actually saw; what I saw was what the camera saw, corrected by my brain by comparing it with peripheral stuff like grass and sky. The correction made by the camera and the correction made by your brain don’t quite match up somehow, it seems to me. The camera presumably shifts the whole spectrum over by a set amount, red shift or blue shift, in astronomical terms. Your brain knows, and is able, to correct only the bits it needs to? What do I know? It nearly always leaves me dissatisfied when I have to correct light temperatures. The fact that my software allows me to make adjustments over a wide range of specific colours is presumably recognition of a need to tweak parts of the spectrum more than others. There are probably reams written about it on websites that I’ve never found or found time to read.

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    1. We’re lucky to have the oak tree, not that many, if any, of our neighbours would agree. It could have been a sycamore, or pinus radiata, any number of nightmare alternatives.

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  27. The Camellias are still rad. ‘Debbie’ certainly is prolific. We need to cut some of ours back this year, but I hate to do it. They are in public landscapes, so I can not get away with as much with them as I could in my own garden. For example, they can not hang over pavement, since their flowers are so slippery if stepped on. I have not seen them in quite a while, but I sort of suspect that some are still blooming. Of course, everything seems to be late this year. I only got three flowers in my Six this week, and one is merely a hazelnut bloom. Another is summer snowflake, which blooms whenever it wants to. The third is forsythia, which should have finished quite a while ago. I can not complain, since it looks great.
    https://tonytomeo.com/2023/03/04/six-on-saturday-aspen/

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    1. The guys up the park are planning to cut back a bunch of their camellias on tuesday, and mostly they’ve only just started to bloom. They have a bunch of volunteers coming in and are so short staffed they have to grab any opportunity that comes along. It’ll be butchery, hat-rack pruning. Heart breaking but with 1700 overgrown camellias in the park there just isn’t time to do a more careful job on more than a few of them.

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      1. Dang! That is discouraging. I do not mind doing it on the farm, where there is no one to see the bloom anyway, but not in a landscape, where they are there to bloom. (One of my chores during winter was breaking off all the bloom from the Daphne stock plants to promote more vegetative growth. It made sense, but still seemed wrong.)

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    1. Should I tell you or should I keep schtum. Picture my photographic studio if you will. It doubles as a lean-to greenhouse that we grandly call the conservatory. A foot tall square glass vase has a shoot from a camellia bush attached to the rim with a bulldog clip. It stands on the floor among the fallen leaves of the Fuchsia that’s been pushed aside to make a tiny open space. A camera on a tripod is three feet away, trailing a cable that goes out the door, up and through the bathroom window upstairs, along the hallway to the computer. Behind the floral subject is a contraption consisting of a cotton sheet, once black, now dark grey, stretched over a frame of wooden laths, a little under 3 feet square. It leans against a bench with plants on it. We gardeners are an inventive lot, or we inventive sorts often find an outlet in gardening. It’s what you do with what you’ve got that matters.

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    1. Re camellia book see my reply to Rosie Amber. It was interesting just doing the shot of ‘Annette Carol’. With a painting you can move the leaves around and edit out the blemishes as you go along. In theory you could do the same with photo editing software but it takes a lot of time and rarely looks quite right. I’m very fed up about Ariel’s song; I don’t think it’s available to buy anywhere. I have a small, scruffy plant of it on my allotment which has been catapulted into a new level of significance.

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  32. Mission accepted and completed – I hope we don’t self destruct in 5 seconds.

    I love your plan to create a Camellia book, if all your photos are like these then it will be wonderful.

    Next week’s weather forecasts do seem to be all over the place – we’ll get what we get and move forward with it.

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    1. Now I need to read what I wrote again to see if I really said I’d like to write a Camellia book. If I did it wasn’t quite what I meant. The internet, with its connectivity and universal accessibility, combined with being able to lavishly illustrate every aspect of a plant at minimal cost, puts it light years ahead of anything you can do in a book, at least from the point of view of helping to identify varieties. With Camellias you’re talking about so many varieties, 26,092 accepted names in the ICS register currently, with such minute differences between many of them.

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