Six on Saturday – 16/8/2025

Categories six on saturday31 Comments on Six on Saturday – 16/8/2025

There’s no escaping the fact that midsummer is well behind us and the days are getting shorter. Our garden openings are behind us, or so we thought before we were asked if we would have a small group, just four, round on Monday. The forecast for the weekend is warm, sunny and windy, not the preparation weather you want when the garden is already parched.

Friday evening has arrived again, as it does every week, so it’s time to sort out six delectable treats to be served up with Saturday breakfast. The first should be my trusty Hawes watering can but it isn’t. Maybe next time. Do join in, any six items from your garden, or a garden, on a Saturday, posted to a blog or some such, with a link in my comments below. Easy peasy, so you won’t need the participants guide.

One.
Now that the purple maple that was beneath it has gone, our Ligustrum lucidum ‘Excelsum Superbum’ is standing alone. Time was it was part of a group of three, with Magnolia ‘Heaven Scent’ the third item. The maple is shooting, so may yet rise again. It is currently smothered with tiny white flowers that are covering everything below as they fall. It’s essentially just a big variegated privet and there are parts of the world where it might be invasive, but not here. As far as I know it never even sets fruits.

Two.
Eucomis ‘Pink Gin’ came out on top in a RHS trial some years ago and has done well for me, growing and slowly increasing in the ground, which few of the Eucomis I grow have done. Having had success with leaf cuttings of ‘Sparkling Burgundy’ I should try the same with this one. It must have been about this time of year I did them. The white flowered one on the right is E. pole-evansii.

Three.
The nurseryman from whom I purchased the Eucomis pole-evansii, Mark Wash, of Trecanna Nursery, was one of our garden visitors last weekend. One of the things he asked was where the scruffy bit was, where we dumped the rubbish, had the compost heap and so on. He must have missed the area just behind Sue’s cactus and succulents greenhouse which I am working to clear of algae covered terracotta pots. At the bottom of the pile I turned up this one, perhaps an old seed tray?

I can give you a bit of history on this item. In the mid 1970’s I had a couple of spells working for one of the west London borough councils, based in a large park not far from Kew Gardens. The first stint was as a middle year student on a three year sandwich course in amenity horticulture. In the park was a large range of very old and very decrepit glasshouses and next to the glasshouses an open fronted shed which contained hundreds of these terracotta pans, disused for many years, many of them crumbling from frost damage. My recollection is that the glasshouses were little used but they couldn’t afford to replace them. I acquired a couple of the terracotta pans but I think I now only have this one.
I went back to work at the park for 18 months after completing my college course and my memory is fuzzy on the detail but at some point there was a mishap, a middle of the night explosion, which took out every single pane of glass in the entire old glasshouse range. The silver lining seems to have been that they were able to get some insurance money and replace the old glasshouses with new ones.
I recall asking the park chargehand if he knew what had happened and he said he had heard it suggested that someone may have stood a gas bottle on its own ring, then lit the ring and retired to a safe distance. I may not have said it out loud but what I thought was good for you mate!
The terracotta pan will go into the glasshouse and stay dry with all the other mainly modern pots that I have cleaned up.

Four.
Rhodochiton atrosanguineus is a perennial climber, usually grown as an annual. I have found it works well to grow it as a biennial, collecting the first seeds set each summer and sowing them immediately, to be overwintered in small pots and planted out after the risk of frost in spring. Except that they get tangled with each other and everything else they touch, it does get them off to a flyer as they are by then 2-3 feet tall. I harvested the first three seed pods today, they’re drying off and I will sow them this weekend. The flowers are long tubular and almost black, the calyx is maroon and very long persistent. When the calyxes start to shrivel, the seed pod within is likely to be ripe.

Five.
Fuchsia corymbiflora has been flowering away for ages in our conservatory, drawing a fair number of oohs and aahs from visitors not familiar with the outer reaches of genus Fuchsia.

Six.
I put in a picture of our front garden last week and a conversation with one of our visitors, who asked about a non flowering Echium pininiana in the back garden, prompts me to put it in as an item in its own right this week. I said to her “Oh, you’ll have seen the flowering plant in the front garden on your way in”. She hadn’t noticed it. Here it is, all eleven feet of it. Amazingly, it still has a flower open on each raceme (is that what they are?) off the main stem and the whole thing is still constantly buzzing with bees. I put it in a six three months ago and it was pretty much in full flower then.

That’s it for another week. At least the wind tomorrow is an easterly, a direction from which we have some shelter. Still not looking forward to it.

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Published by Jim Stephens

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

31 thoughts on “Six on Saturday – 16/8/2025”

  1. Pingback: Garden Diary – I’m Too Hot and so are the Plants! – Piglet in Portugal - Recipes Marketplace
  2. Pingback: 6 on Saturday: Garden Flowers & Plants – Fake Flamenco
  3. Pingback: Six on Saturday | A Dull Week – Cornwall in Colours

  4. I thought I had clicked on the wrong post when I saw ‘Six on Saturday – 16/8/2015’, so unless I am ten years too late then you have presumably had one of those proverbial senior moments, or were otherwise distracted by thoughts of your Monday visitors just when you were loosening your stays a bit… 😉 I am astonished at how clean your pots are, as mine rarely ever look pristinne again despite always being cleaned after use, and I enjoyed your greenhouse tale. Your fuchsia is glorious, and that echium is amazing! https://ramblinginthegarden.wordpress.com/2025/08/16/six-stalwarts-on-saturday/

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    1. One of those increasingly frequent senior moments. I also spent a good while trying to work out why that Fuchsia hadn’t featured in a six before, then remembered it was only given to us last year. A worsening memory is a pain but I know that beating myself up about it isn’t going to help.

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      1. They were just saying on the Today programme on Friday that you can reduce your perceived age by not blaming senior moments for forgetfulness – well, that’s a very brief summary, but essentially the message was it has been shown that you can think yourself younger than your biological age. Which I am sure many of here do! 👍

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  5. Pingback: Six Stalwarts on Saturday | Rambling in the Garden
  10. Pingback: Garden Diary – I’m Too Hot and so are the Plants! – Piglet in Portugal

  11. I see we have gone back in time, which explains why my pingback hasn’t worked! Love clean terracotta pots, hate cleaning them. Do you use anything in particular or just water and a stiff brush? The terracotta pan is fabulous as is the glasshouse tale!

    Six on Saturday | A Dull Week

    Just wondering whether you have had any rain in your area? My garden is as dry as a bone.

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    1. I just twigged to the back in time reference, took me all day. Duly amended. I’ve soaked the pots for 24 hours then used a stiff brush to clean them, occasionally supplemented with a wire brush for the really stubborn bits. No rain here for weeks, quite a few things are looking sorry for themselves. Amazingly I’m still using stored water, not been forced onto the mains yet.

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    1. I didn’t label my Eucomis leaf cuttings so have no record of when I took them. I think it would have been around now. Next time I do some I’ll put them in a Saturday six. There must be info online somewhere, nothing in my propagation book.

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  22. Echiums are an odd group. Not so long ago, I was aware of only two species, fastuosum and wildpretii. I can not count all the other species that I have read about in the past few years. Some are available here now. Some perform well in coastal climates that are not so hospitable to many other options. That terracotta pan is cool because of its history.

    Here are my six:

    https://tonytomeo.com/2025/08/16/six-on-saturday-construction-site/

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    1. I can get away with Echium pininiana just about, in the right conditions of full sun and excellent drainage and no serious frost in its first winter. I think it’s the hardiest species so none of the others are likely to survive, more’s the pity.

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  23. Pingback: Six on Saturday. Frilly Knickers and Friends. | The Blooming Garden

  25. I’m a fan of the rhodochiton too, a lovely plant. I’m also a big fan of terracotta, old and new, in fact I have a similar square seed pan. On one occasion that the thieving doodahs visited Cliffe they emptied the plants out of their gorgeous old pots in the greenhouse and frames and ran for the hills. I am always suspicious when I see them for sale now. Bad people. Anyway, let us return to good people and plants. The fuchsia is amazing, I am going to give it my own little oooh! Here are mine https://offtheedgegardening.com/2025/08/16/six-on-saturday-little-and-large/

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