Six on Saturday – 30/6/2026

Enough already. I get fed up with overly hot weather just as quickly as wet. Take your eye off something for a moment and its scorched or shrivelled. And everything is over so quickly when it’s hot; last week I was waiting for a peony to open, a week on and both that flower and the one that followed it are just a pile of petals on the ground. Somewhat reluctantly I’ve been planting the likes of Salvias in the garden, beans and tomatoes on my allotment. They’ve needed checking twice a day to make sure they don’t dry out. Next week it’s back to a more mixed bag of weather, it’d be nice if it topped up my water tanks.

Right, enough whingeing, time to pull together another six on saturday, where gardeners far and wide tell us about half a dozen things happening in their gardens this week. Tiz simple enough, post your post and then, because I happen to be the host, put a link to your post in my comments below so we can all find it. Need to know more, check out the participants guide. Onwards and upwards.

One.
I said I would put my second inter-sectional peony in this week so I will, even though it is actually all over already. It’s a variety called ‘Cora Louise’ and it’s very nice but doesn’t last long. I’m generally reluctant to give advice, to anyone about anything, but if pressed on the subject of keeping a garden flowery I suggest a focus on things that flower for more than two days. I’ve been known to ignore my own advice.

Two.
I’m going to repeat something I put in last week, namely Leptospermum ‘Karo Spectrobay’. I bought it in 2020 and put it in a six back then. It’s a New Zealand raised hybrid of two Australian Leptospermum species. I don’t know if that tells you anything useful about its hardiness but it has grown outside here since 2020 without problems. I don’t know if manuka honey is made from Leptospermum in Australia but the bees are loving this plant so it seems to produce a good nectar flow.

Three.
I managed to grow a cell tray of Orlaya from seed I’d saved, sown in August 2025. I planted a group at both ends of one bed in the garden, very similar conditions, and this group have done very well and are looking good with Allium cristophii. The other group vanished under a molluscular onslaught never to be seen again.

Four.
Clematis don’t in the main do very well in this garden. The exceptions tend to be the montanas, which do too well. I think of myself as a happy medium sort of guy, so Clematis and I have an uneasy relationship. This one is putting on quite a good show, which I don’t recall it doing before, in fact I’m not sure I recall planting it there at all. I seem to have had Clematis ‘Ernest Markham’ elsewhere in the garden and I have a hunch that’s what this is, but I don’t recall moving it and the label at its base said ‘Sunny Sky’, which it surely isn’t. And what happened to that, did I move that elsewhere?

Five.
The action now moves to Sue’s glasshouse, which I have been in and out of a lot today. From yards away outside I spotted what looked like a leaf dangling from a cobweb inside the glasshouse but when I checked it out it turned out to be a Poplar hawk moth. It must have only just emerged from its cocoon since it was very dark and still expanding and getting paler. There are poplars a short distance away, populated by the local Jackdaw tribe; likely not a good place for a moth to hang about. I measured its width at 57mm, so quite a big beast. Just hope it doesn’t get caught in one of the many spider’s webs in there.

Six.
The reason I was in and out of the glasshouse so much was that it’s in the middle of a mass flowering. Starting mid evening thursday 44 of the big trumpet Echinopsis hybrid flowers opened up by the morning. Another 33 are starting to open now, on Friday evening. I was hoping for a cooler day so that the earlier lot would still be in good shape for the second batch but I don’t think there’ll be much left of the Thursday evening openers by Saturday morning. These pictures are from 8.45 and 21.25 on Friday.

I may get up early enough to get another picture done before this blog goes live at 7. Who knows.

This was 6.42 this morning. Tricky light.