Six on Saturday – 24/2/2024

Categories six on saturday43 Comments on Six on Saturday – 24/2/2024

The thing about doing an absolutely regular snapshot of a garden is that it makes you very aware of the speed of change. By June things are moving so fast that everything changes from one weekend to the next and you’ve even missed the odd thing that happened in between. Then you get a week like this one, where absolutely nothing has changed. I could have put the camera on a tripod last weekend and taken a picture, then taken another today and you couldn’t even tell which was taken first.

This will give you the true measure of this week: the highlight was getting a couple of quotes for replacement double glazing. Sum total of horticultural achievement was dead heading one hydrangea before being driven in by the next hail shower.

Having said all of which, I do have flowers, mostly Camellias, and they are further on than they were last week. The only question is whether to put in six Camellias or whether to try and mix it up a bit.

One.
Camellia ‘Francie L.’ This would be thought of by many as a ‘retic’, meaning a variety of the species C. reticulata. In this case it is quite a bit more complicated than that but I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that it has the biggest blooms of any of my camellias, at 13-14cm across.

Two.
Camellia ‘Quintessence’. At the other extreme is this variety, which would likely be described as a lutchuensis hybrid. It could as accurately be described as a japonica hybrid, in that it is a hybrid between those two species but 90% of all camellia cultivars are japonica varieties or hybrids so no-one is interested in that side of its parentage. It is very low growing, very slow, with lots of pink blushed, white flowers that have quite a strong perfume. They’re single, and small at about 4-5cm across. I’m hoping it will hang down over the wall, not stick out like a shelf.

Three.
Somewhere between the two is Camellia ‘Adorable’, which gets described as a pitardii hybrid, being a seedling of that species the pollen parent of which is unknown. It has vivid pink flowers that are 7-8cm across. It’s a relatively compact plant but is still around 2m tall and will have to pruned to keep it around the size it is now.

Four.
Camellia ‘Sweet Jane’ gets the tag transnokoensis hybrid, being a cross between that species and C. japonica. The japonica involved was ‘Edith Linton’, a big, strong growing cultivar with large pink flowers. C. transnokoensis is a small leaved, upright twiggy bush with tiny flowers. There’s something of the Rottweiler crossed with a Chihuahua about it but it turned out good looking and well proportioned. It’s upright but slow growing and has flowers 5cm across, white with a pink blush on the outer petals.

Five.
OK, let’s go elsewhere for the final two. Hakonechloa gets cut down at the end of February at the latest, then takes four to six weeks to be back up again. If it gets cut down a month earlier, it’s done its thing of being strawy through two thirds of the winter and is down when crocuses are up. Crocuses can be grown in grass, so what happens if I plant crocus into the clump of Hakonechloa. Will they cope, push through the tough mat of grass. Yes, is the answer. It can work. Which means there are probably other similar combinations that would work just as well. Are you already doing something similar? What combinations have you found to work well. Double or treble occupancy of the same piece of ground is a great way to grow even more plants.

Six.
I was going to have a hedgehog for number six but I must have looked at the pictures from my trail camera without downloading them to the computer and I’m not going out for the memory card in the dark now. You’ll just have to have another Camellia. This is one you won’t have seen anywhere. It isn’t registered, which I thought it had been, but it was named for Pat Short, past president of the International Camellia Society, who sent me cuttings of it some years ago hoping I could root them and put a plant in the National Collection. I have one plant, growing slowly in a pot and still way too small to plant out in as testing environment as the collection.

That turned out better than I’d feared it might. Six things from your garden on a Saturday is what the sixonsaturday meme calls for. Pictures posted in a blog or Insta or whatever, some indication in my comments below (because I’m the designated host) so that the rest of the world can find them. If you want more info, the participant’s guide is here.

Published by Jim Stephens

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

43 thoughts on “Six on Saturday – 24/2/2024”

  2. Ooh love this Camellia fest! đŸŒ¸ My favourites are Adorable and Pat Short which reminds me of a vintage Camellia that used to grow in my mum’s Adelaide Hills garden. đŸŒ¸ This grew to rather large proportions in giant tins buried in the soil, to keep the soil around them acidic. The person must have been desperate to grow the Camellias!

    My Six Are Here –

    Six on Saturday – Musical Hoses 24đŸŒ¸2đŸŒ¸24

    Six on Saturday – Musical Hoses 24đŸŒ¸2đŸŒ¸24

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  5. Camellia ‘Quintessence’ is the winner for me. I hadn’t realised Camellias came in a prostrate form.
    I’ve grown Snowdrops in/under Hac Mac for many years and it’s worked really well but I have to say that in the last couple of years they have definitely diminished. The grass is restrained by a sleeper so it’s made a dense, rather than spreading, clump which leaves less room for the Snowdrops to grow up through. That’s my theory anywayđŸ˜‚

    A Soggy Six on Saturday 24/02/2024

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  8. You have some delightful camellias Jim. The low growing one is interesting. We had that hail here too yesterday and it was very windy! I was despairing about getting out into the garden, but fortunately this afternoon has been dry and not windy so I have managed to do a bit more cutting down of things that have outlived their usefulness. Really I could do with starting from fresh!

    https://cornwallincolours.blog/2024/02/24/six-on-saturday-february-gold/

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  14. Jim, your five Camellias are simply delicious. I’ve never met a Camellia that wasn’t, and the variety of size, color, form, and habit are always interesting. I love how translucent the outer petals of ‘Pat Short’ appear in your photo. But ‘Sweet Jane’ is my favorite this week both for its ethereal coloration and its perfect form. And again I learn from you- I had no idea that such a high percentage of Camellias had C. japonica as a parent. 

    Interplanting Crocus with your ornamental grasses certainly make the garden more interesting while the grasses are resting. Yes, I love mixing geophytes with other perennials to keep something going in a space year round. I use lots of spring flowering bulbs and of course Italian Arum interplanted with deciduous ferns. It lets us enjoy more species, and gives us a reason to go outside in the rain, hail, and cold this time of year to see what there is to see. 

    Our garden also seems to be largely on ‘hold’ with little change from last week. But, I have new Camellias to brag about! Here are my six for the week: https://woodlandgnome.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/six-on-saturday-tea/

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  19. I am so tempted by that low growing camellia, not something one sees in the garden centres. And the beautiful pink and white of ‘Sweet Jane’ is wonderful. I try to make the garden work by layering in bulbs, erythroniums and anemones but I don’t think I could trust myself not to cut off the crocuses if I planted in amongst the hak mac. I’m trying underplanted the euphorbia wulfenii with muscari, its surprising how many muscari bulbs are needed!

    Here’s my post for the week https://wordpress.com/post/n20gardener.com/5526

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  27. A wonderful selection of Camellias. The description of ‘Sweet Jane’ made me chuckle – ‘something of the Rottweiler crossed with a Chihuahua about it.’ Interesting to hear you have a hedgehog up and about. I’ll have to keep an eye out to see if our neighbourhood hedgehog has woken up and is visiting again https://onemanandhisgardentrowel.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/six-on-saturday-24-february-2024/

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  30. Francie L. is the only of your Six that I recognize, and just barely. I know that we grew it, but I do not remember it looking quite like this. I would have guessed that it is a darker red.

    Combinations of bloom are not so easy to work with beyond home gardens. I could not expect maintenance gardeners for whom I have worked in the past to actually follow through with it. Here, we plugged a bunch of African daisy in an area that will be overwhelmed with some sort of bramble rose later (It is supposedly a carpet rose, but I doubt that it is.). I do not care what happens to it during the year, but it would be nice to see it when the roses get cut back next winter. Of course, it could become a sloppy mess before that happens. Regardless, I still trust my efforts more than I would trust those of a so-called ‘gardener’.

    Here are my Six:

    https://tonytomeo.com/2024/02/24/six-on-saturday-strange-times/

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