Six on Saturday – 4/10/2025

Categories six on saturday, , 33 Comments on Six on Saturday – 4/10/2025

It’s Friday and I’m not going out to take any more pictures today. Hopefully I have enough in the can to put together a Saturday Six without an excess of repetition or deviation. There may be a bit of hesitation though.

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, Six on Saturday is a garden oriented meme where people post a picture or two about six things happening in their garden each week. Couldn’t be simpler. I’m not even sure why there’s a participants guide, but there is.

October, in the season of autumn, when fruit gets picked and produce put away to get us through the winter. Just as well Morrisons is still down on the edge of town or we’d starve by Christmas. Talking of shopping, I just placed a small bulb order, I am repeatedly flirting with placing a seed order for veg and…..

One.
I think the technical expression is Woo! Woo! Pan Global Plants are the richer but I don’t feel poorer. They’re not all for me, I added a few items for another gardener. To my garden inventory get added Isodon longitubus ‘Kutani’, Coniogramma intermedia ‘Yoroi Musha’, Hedychium coccineum ‘Hungphung Stripe’ and Curculigo crassifolia NJM 10.123. It don’t take much to make me happy.

Two.
In the looking good but now what do I do with it category is this thing, given me by another gardener who is sadly no longer with us, meaning I really don’t want to lose it. I don’t know that its any great rarity, probably Oxalis vulcanica ‘Molten Lava’. It’s easy from cuttings but I’ve left it quite late. I may lift the two plants I have and keep them in a glasshouse, probably try some cuttings as well. I planted out two plants in the ground in a somewhat shady spot and they’ve done really well.

Three.
I bought three bulbs of Scilla autumnalis from Avon Bulbs in 2022 and put them in pots, not being very confident I could give them suitable conditions in the garden. One is flowering, one has a flower coming and the other is nowhere to be found. It is supposedly naturalised around the coast of Cornwall so should be easy, but I have reservations about whether what I have is really S. autumnalis, it doesn’t seem a good match with the pictures I’ve seen of that species.

Four.
I bought Polypodium cambricum ‘Richard Kayse’ once before but it was infected with some malaise, perhaps eelworm, and it faded away. This replacement specimen was planted out in the spring when it looked pretty ragged and it only got worse. It turns out that all is well and it was doing what it is supposed to do, which is to be summer dormant then leaf out to provide lush green ferniness through the winter months. A little housekeeping around it wouldn’t go amiss.

Five.
Begonia ‘Garden Angel Blush’ came through last winter in the ground, protected by a few inches of dry leaves. I don’t think it’s truly hardy, but in Cornwall, with a little protection and with the evergreen foliage of a bamboo overhead, I don’t think it will have been down to freezing. There are two downsides (at least) to leaving it in situ; one is that it takes forever to get going again in spring and the other is that the bamboo roots will have grown back into the area I cleared when I planted the begonia. In a tussle between a 5m bamboo and an emergent begonia there is only going to be one winner. Even so, it will probably carry on into November and may even put on a spurt now that there’s water enough for all.

Six.
There’s an air of deja-vu about the idea that our salvias have left it very late to reach their peak. I may have said much the same in previous autumnal sixes. This one is ‘Indigo Spires’, tall and unruly but the best of the lot in our garden right now. That could change with storm ‘Amy’.

Made it! I could do next week’s six on the various new things I’ve purchased in the last week. Except new plants often don’t look much and you wonder at first whether you’ve done the right thing in buying them. Most of them turn out well. Hope all the Brits reading survive Amy in one piece. See you next week.

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Published by Jim Stephens

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

33 thoughts on “Six on Saturday – 4/10/2025”

  3. I looked one of the plants you bought and smiled at “this hardy evergreen Japanese fern is lusted after by those that have seen it here”. I see you could not resist buying it. The Garden Begonia is a beauty and I think you are right about who would win that spot.

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  12. I am waiting for a delivery too, and have had a couple of plant packages from eBay too – it seems ages since I bought amy plants and I think I was getting withdrawal symptoms!! Frustrating when you can’t track down what you would like to buy, though… Your oxalis is very similar to the one I have in the Coop, although on checking I see it is Oxalis spiralis ‘Sunset Velvet’, whereas yours is O vulcanica. What a great clump of salvia that is – as you say, it’s a bit late in the day to be at its best!! My busy Six are here: https://ramblinginthegarden.wordpress.com/2025/10/04/six-on-saturday-less-of-a-lazybones/

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    1. Now I want to know what it is you can’t track down. My Oxalis could be the same as yours; mine didn’t come with a name so I was just trying to find its likeness on the internet. I’ll look up ‘Sunset Velvet’, it seems vulcanicola is at best no more than a subspecies of spiralis.

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      1. My oxalis was recommended by Bob Brown as something for winter colour in a greenhouse, so I don’t know how it would fare outside. I was looking for small shrubs for my fairly shady and dryish entrance border and an article recommended Berberis stenophylla ‘Coralina Compacta’ and Fatshera ‘Annemieki’ amongst other things. When nurseries say out ofstock youcan never be sue whether it’s a temporary situation or not – but I could ring them up I suppose. I already have a very healthy sarcococca there, so any recommendations for small shrubs that might also do well would be most welcome Jim

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      2. I don’t have very many small shrubs growing in my shady areas, the nature of most shrubs is that no matter how slowly they grow, they do get inexorably bigger, as opposed to perennials that die down each year and come back to the same height each year. Hydrangea serrata ‘Fuji-no-taki’ and Skimmia japonica ‘Bowles Dwarf Female’ are the only two I have, perhaps also Pittosporum ‘Nutty’s Leprachaun’. Some Fuchsias would qualify but all of ours get cut hard back every year in a vain attempt to keep gall mite under control. A lot of ferns are more or less evergreen so are present all year, even if not shrubby/woody.

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      3. Thanks Jim, I did try moving some ferns, as they clearly do well in the shadier parts here too, but they have been slow to re-establish. I have noted your thoughts (Nutty’s Leprachaun sells itself with that name!) and will keep looking and see how I get on in the meantime.

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  15. Seeing your box reminds me that I should be receiving some dormant bare root Anemone patens, a spring ephemeral that I really like. I keep wondering if it will grow for me and finally decided I should just get a few and see what happens. They may come this weekend. Excitement plus! The Salvia is looking nice – you should see the planting by our Capitol. They change the beds depending on the season, but in one planter dedicated to fallen soldiers, there is a planting of very blue salvia in the shape of a star that fills the circular planter. I have terrible spacial awareness, so I can’t tell you how big the planter is. maybe 5 meter diameter? It is striking. Winter ferns must be nice. My Matteuccia struthiopteris is about shed of its leaves, with only the dark fertile fronds left. For me, it is all about asters and butterflies this week.

    October 4, 2025 Six on Saturday

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  19. Another lovely six this week! I especially like that Scilla autumnalis.

    And I like a bit of repetition and deviation. In just a minute you’ll find my blog veers from notes on how easily sedum propagates to musing on how the dahlias are as smashing as the genial host of a light entertainment darts show, and why the chlorophyll fades to reveal the carotenoid when the leaves go orange…

    https://doingtheplan.com/2025/10/04/smashing-machine-dahlia-sedum-aster-clematis-sumac-hotlips-and-bullseye-six-on-sat-2-oct

    And I like a bit of repetition and deviation. 😉

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  21. More exciting new plants with challenging names. 😁 Enjoy them – I’ll have to google them later! The Oxalis is beautiful with its autumnal colours starting to show, and no matter whether the Scilla really is S. autumnalis – it’s gorgeous.
    No post from me today – we’ve had a very wet & windy week with the latest storm hitting us yesterday. It’s calm but wet right now, though winds will be picking up again within the hour. Not a day for the garden. Again…

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