Was there once a time I didn’t spend hours every day watering? Seems like something I’ve always done. I’ve focussed on watering pots, with all but a few recently planted items in the ground having to fend for themselves. Even among the pots I’ve been getting increasingly ruthless about getting rid of hangers on that just don’t justify having water wasted on them.
Inevitably some things, quite a lot of things, are beginning to look stressed. Me, for one. Moaning about it won’t help and there’s plenty happening to pull together a six, it being Saturday an’ all.
Six on Saturday is what you’re now reading and if that is news to you then you should perhaps have a gander at the participants guide and consider becoming a participant. Those of us in the know move straight to the next square, which is
One.
Eucryphia milliganii hasn’t featured much in sixes considering how long it’s been here. It started in shade but I moved it into full sun and it is flowering very well this year. Compared to the likes of Eucryphia ‘Nymansay’ the flowers are very small, only around 2cm across, but there are plenty of them and the bush, it is hardly a tree, is a sensible size for a small garden. It’s going back a bit but I grew this from a cutting, which is quite pleasing. It’s now 9 feet tall.
Two.
Crocosmia ‘Paul’s Best Yellow’ is a particularly good form with flowers that seem to me to an even richer golden yellow than usual, almost to the point of looking somewhat orange by comparison to some other yellows, like Lilium leichtlinii. Somewhere buried in the middle of it is an orchid, which it overan and which I must try to rescue at an appropriate season.
Three.
If memory serves, this was the hydrangea I sidestepped a week ago in favour of Veronica spicata. It’s a modern Japanese bred variety with double flowers. This is the most intense blue it’s ever flowered but it’s teetering on the brink of shrivelling in the heat. Hydrangea macrophylla ‘You and Me Together’ is its thoroughly modern and borderline offensive name.
Four.
Let’s stick with hydrangea and feature my home made quarter standard Hydrangea paniculata, cultivar unknown. It gets early morning and late afternoon/evening sun and looks great backlit by either. Sue had taken a few cuttings of it, one of which I have selected to grow into another quarter standard. Not that I need or even particularly want another but I just can’t help myself.
Five.
I’ve been pussyfooting around cutting down the Cistus ‘Sunset’ that is in your face as you walk out the back door. I regarded it as one of Sue’s, so there was baggage attached. It hasn’t had more than half a dozen flowers on it all season and today my patience ran out. There’s a bit still left, a shoot growing at the base, and I’ve a couple of young plants I might put in alongside it to make it more substantial.
Six.
Right outside the front window downstairs is a 35L pot with 5 bulbs of Lilium ‘Robina’ flowering around 2m tall. The smell seems to find its way into the house even with all the windows closed. I feel slightly guilty for not emasculating them but the flowers are fairly well out of harms way and I just don’t seem to have time for dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s this year.
I was going to put in a pot full of Coleus that I’d used as a bedding container rather successfully this year and then there were the leaf cutter bees taking their pieces of leaf down into one of the cactus pots in the greenhouse but which I failed to get a picture of. A bunch of other things too and it’s no good saying I’ll use them next week, that’s how it is this time of year. Six on Saturday and an occasional surplus on Sunday would fit the bill. The header can be hellfire with spider, that should get your attention.
garden ruminations 
Hello Everyone! Gosh, it’s been a super busy weekend setting up my new planters and trellises. The humidity, heat and fatigue got to me. So I posted my update super late. Only getting to the party now.
Love the hydrangeas, crocosmia and lilies, Jim. So beautiful!
I find it really difficult to stick to just 6 pictures and no words. So I’m going with the format of 6 topics to update on. This way my SoS posts double as my digital gardening records for future reference. I hope that’s okay. I totally understand if you’d rather not read all the ramblings and prefer to just scroll through the photos.
Here’s my link, just in case anybody returns here later this week: https://chronicallyhopeful.com/this-week-in-the-garden-six-on-saturday-11-july-2026/
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Jim, I really love #4 Hydrangea, the flower looks like the elongated form of an Oakleaf Hydrangea. I used to have one, but it died in the ‘Great Drought’ inflicted on our back yard a few years back! I can’t wait for Spring to arrive here in Tasmania, so I can resume my gardening schedule and blog about it.
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Hello! Very pleased to see this thing is still a thing! After a lengthy period of very low interest in the garden, this year I am spending a little more time trying to regain control, one border at a time. Even bought some plants! Hope you’re well. Jon
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This thing is still a thing! You picked a hell of a time to come back to gardening, this weather is brutal, but I guess even more brutal for running long distances. Good to know you’re still hanging out in the blogosphere, might we get a post at some point?
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Hello Jon, yes SOS is still here, and we think of you each week. Control! No such thing in gardening…so many variables and at the moment the weather is the biggest challenge.
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I must be the only one old enough to remember the pop song that gave the hydrangea its name. The blue is stunning. So is the brilliant color on the crocosmia. Thank you for hosting! Here’s my contribution this week: https://stoneyknob.wordpress.com/2026/07/11/summer-rain-2/
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Oh you are unkind, showing that huge bed of yellow crocosmia (as you will see if you read my post)!! It looks lovely, though, I must admit 😀 Your Robina is more striking than mine too, and surprisingly, I have realised since I took my photographs, I wasn’t aware of the fragrance of it or the one I featured. Thanks for hosting https://ramblinginthegarden.wordpress.com/2026/07/11/six-on-saturday-feeding-pruning-and-stringing-amongst-other-things/
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I’m also sick of water even though I haven’t had to do it for that long and it certainly doesn’t take hours in my small garden. We got some rain yesterday though which was needed and bonus, meant I got the night off.
Your hydrangeas are lovely. I would like to plant more, but am afraid they’d just become rather expensive deer food.
Here is my six for this week: https://minhus.blogspot.com/2026/07/six-on-saturday-july-11.html
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I love hydrangeas and for some reason STILL do not have a paniculata. I have felt much sympathy for the heat over there that I am reading about. On Facebook, the fellow who does Very British Problems put up an amusing video about his right to moan about it. I spent a LOT of time watering pots. I tend to favour tall plants which gives me little space for short plants so even short perennials often go in pots. And in the woods delicate special plants must go in posits because they would be swamped with maianthemum which is a running pushy native plant here. Also I like to propagate and have a table of plant sale plants that must look good till my next open garden at end of July! My six: https://tanglycottage.wordpress.com/2026/07/11/six-on-saturday-11-july-26-in-the-garden/
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The blue hydrangea is a beauty, but the name is most definitely ‘borderline offensive’. Who dreams up these things! I seem to have yellow crocosmia, but have lost the information as to what it is. I also have the red Lucifer, although one clump has loads of BIG leaves but no flowers. Yet. It’s been rather too hot for me this week, but fortunately I had helpers.
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I seem to have got into the habit of forgetting to post on here on a Saturday morning. Beautiful hydrangea. I think I like the paniculata best.
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That glorious blue hydrangea summons up longing for a Greek sea immersion experience. And the Crocosmia – a floral conflagration.
https://tishfarrell.com/2026/07/11/six-on-saturday-hot/
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I love the bright yellow Crocosmia and the blue if the hydrangea. I agree, terrible name. That name doesn’t even make sense. I envision some marketing guy in a cramped office just using the first thing that pops into their mind as a name. doesn’t need to make sense. The lilies remind me of a story an artist friend of mine told me. She bought a bouquet of lilies, and the florist dutifully cut off the stamens, rendering them useless for her, as she planned to paint a still life and wanted the flowers intact.
Here are my six: https://wisconsingarden.wordpress.com/2026/07/11/july-112026-six-on-saturday/
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Just a short post from me today. Beautiful hydrangeas especially the blue H. macrophylla.
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That blue hydrangea is stunning, but what an awful name! My six this week is here: https://mysanctuarygarden.wordpress.com/2026/07/11/six-on-saturday-11-07-2026/
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Your hydrangeas are looking so much better than mine, also my Crocosmia Pauls Best Yellow is pathetic compared to yours, I think you must be so much better at watering than I am!
My six are here…………https://www.leadupthegardenpath.com/
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Quite happy to read you neglected to emasculate the lilies this year; let the poor dears have their fun, I say!
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I don’t mind them having their fun, but lily pollen is reputedly very toxic to cats so I’m always alert to the risk of my two getting it on their fur.
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Ah yes…cats…most of my indoor plants had to be banished when the cats arrived…
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My favorite this week: “Not that I need or even particularly want another but I just can’t help myself.”
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So nice to see those huge hydrangeas, I love the big blue blooms. I think everything’s wilting this week. Here’s my selection: https://doingtheplan.com/2026/07/11/roses-marigold-obedient-plant-garden-cinema-whirling-butterflies-hoe-and-pub/
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I do like that crocosmia. Is it a spreader or content to remain where it was put?
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The clump is a lot bigger than when it was planted but it has perhaps averaged 4-6 inches spread each year, in all directions. It doesn’t seed, or hasn’t so far.
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Maybe one for a pot then in my small garden. I will add it to my wish list 😀
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How wonderful to grow something from a cutting and then have it get 9 feet tall! I also really like the look of your lilies! Very bright and cheerful.
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I was just looking up Eucryphia milliganii in Trees and Shrubs online and it can get 10m or so, which would be rather splendid. I’ve another Eucryphia, a variegated one, that hasn’t flowered in so long I never think to check it any more. Perhaps I’ll go and look now.
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Hello Jim
Very enjoyable read as usual. We have a hydrangea paniculata called Silver Dollar, which looks very much the same as your plant.
Jane
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There were a whole rash of H. paniculata varieties bred and released in the 80’s and 90’s and I think mine could be an earlier one still, perhaps ‘Grandiflora’, superseded by numerous bigger flowered forms, inevitably.
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Your garden is looking splendid, and what a fantastic clump of Crocosmia ‘Paul’s Best Yellow’ which looks just perfect this week. I find Cistus tend to flower better in their earlier years, so I think you made the right decision to cut it back.
https://noellemace.blogspot.com/2026/07/six-on-saturday-11-july-2026.html
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I didn’t think there was a good shoot to cut the Cistus back to and was surprised to find one.
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Eucryphia milliganii is an interesting one because I am unfamiliar with it. Cistus I am too familiar with. We grow quite a few because they like the warm and dry summers here. However, they live for only a few years before deteriorating and dying. Do you give the Hydrangea macrophylla with the borderline offensive name anything to enhance its blue color, or is that all natural?
Here are my six.
https://tonytomeo.com/2026/07/11/six-on-saturday-mixed-bag-2/
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The Hydrangea is always blue without help but not usually so intense. Most flower blue for me but I have one that is always deep pink. Eucryphia milliganii is regarded as a stunted version of E. lucida by some but as a distinct but closely related species by most. They hybridise readily, even in the wild.
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Well, I am also unfamiliar with Eucryphia lucida. I do not get out much.
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I also chucked out some small pots of plants this week, it is just too hard to keep everything hydrated. They might as well feed the compost heap. Love your hydrangea, what a fabulous colour. I am a softie for a eucryphia, the flowers might be smaller but than Nymansay but there are an awful lot of them! Here are my six https://offtheedgegardening.com/2026/07/10/six-on-saturday-here-we-go-again/
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A lovely choice—I also have a Hydrangea paniculata this week, and I find the blue hydrangea amazing ! Thanks for sharing this. https://fredgardenerblog2.wordpress.com/2026/07/11/six-on-saturday-11-07-26/
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A great selection. I love the blue Hydrangea with the ‘borderline offensive’ name. I find roses are often the worst offenders for schmaltzy names https://onemanandhisgardentrowel.wordpress.com/2026/07/11/six-on-saturday-11-july-2026/
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