Six on Saturday – 17/1/2026

It’s beginning to feel like winter has been going on for a long time and needs to loosen its grip. On the other hand, I don’t want time itself to go any quicker, it’s way too fast as it is. I’ve scraped together another six items, for one of which (number two), the modern world probably expects me to issue a trigger warning for those of a squeamish disposition. I’m sure most sixers are made of sterner stuff. The Six on Saturday brief is to post picture(s) and a few words about six things garden related on a Saturday. Put a comment down below with a link to your post, and Bob’s yer’ uncle. Need to know more? Lookie here.

One.
Unknown Camellia. For several years I have been working as a volunteer on the National Collection of Camellias at Mount Edgcumbe. They have no propagation facility so I have tried to root cuttings of some of the plants in the collection that strike me as at risk of being lost. There is an area of the park known as the Zig-Zags, about a mile along the coast from the main garden, where there are a number of old and mostly unidentified camellias that may date from the mid 1800’s. This is one of them, taken from a younger plant in the same area that may itself be an earlier (1980’s ?) propagation from one of two much older plants of the same variety. It flowers February-March in the park, my rooted cutting is in my glasshouse, so earlier.

Two.
I came downstairs on Wednesday to find an offering from our cats lying on the floor. Nothing new about that, but this wasn’t anything I’d seen before. The size of a shrew but gingery and looking like a tiny mouse. It’s a harvest mouse, Europe’s smallest mammal. In all probability I’ll never see another and the thought that the only time I will ever have seen one is when our cats killed it makes me sad. I put it on my scales and it weighed just under 6 grams.

Three.
It was a typically dull morning on Thursday, heavy overnight rain had given way to drizzle. I climbed onto the bank at the back of the garden and hoisted my camera aloft on a long monopod to get this high view, primarily to highlight how bright Hakonechloa macra and its varieties are in these conditions. Last week’s storm thinned them out but the best one for both resilience and brightness is H. macra ‘Albostriata’. It’s paler and the leaves roll up somewhat if it gets dry, but that doesn’t happen a lot here in mid winter. Most years it gets left until the end of February when I cut it down as the new shoots start to emerge. The tall grass in the foreground is Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’.

Four.
This melee consists of Maurandya barclayana, which is a perennial climber that usually dies in the winter, Fuchsia hatschbatchii, a hardy species Fuchsia that I usually cut to the ground each year only for it to grow back to 6ft or more and Clematis viticella ‘Polish Spirit’, already shooting away and due to be hard pruned in February. Most of the support for all of them has been a big Magnolia ‘Ann’ but I cut it down to around 2ft so it won’t be supporting anything this year, even if it shoots from the bare trunks. A dilemma for which I haven’t yet worked out a solution.

Five.
Yucca gloriosa ‘Variegata’ doesn’t seem to have a very fixed flowering time. This year it got it completely wrong, starting to put up flower spikes deep into autumn. I don’t recall when I first noticed them, but I thought at the time it had left it a bit late. Up they came, only for the buds to get frosted before a single one had opened. I need to cut them off but I’m never quick to tackle the Yucca, it’s a beast. It needs a lot of dead leaves pulling off too.

Six.
Another non flowerer to finish; I’m resisting the temptation to put in another Camellia. My Phyllostachys aureosulcata ‘Spectabilis’ produces a flush of new canes each year and the height they reach depends on how much moisture is around over the three months or so over which they grow from nothing to their full height. I remove old canes after 3-4 seasons so while the plant may have produced equally tall canes in the past, it hasn’t in the last few years. The relatively sparse leaved new shoots are 4-6 feet taller than they’ve been for several years. They’re not easy to measure until they’re cut down, but will be around 16ft.

We’ve had a run of frosty and/or very windy weather so flowers are in short supply at the moment. I’m hoping that by next week there will be a bit more colour around though it could be a brief respite with more cold weather in prospect for the end of the month.