Six on Saturday – 31/10/2026

Last weekend fairly thoroughly trashed everything in the garden that was still looking half decent, so this weeks six on saturday might be a bit of a struggle compared to recent weeks. That said, today was a lovely day and I managed to drag myself up to my allotment and do a bit of weeding, something I’ve been putting off for a good while.

The big blow last weekend didn’t do much damage, the most serious casualty was Camellia grijsii, half of which split off at the base. I’m inclined to dig it out and replace it with one of several other camellias I need to find a home for. The wind was accompanied by nearly 100mm of rain over three days so the ground is now sufficiently moistened to get on with planting stuff. It would be good to get as much as possible of digging out and planting done this side of Christmas, give new plants a chance to get their roots down a bit before next summer.

It’s a new Camellia season, I’ve been back up to Mt Edgcumbe in my role as volunteer on their Camellia National collection, having effectively taken a year out. It’s taking a little time to get back into the swing of things but I’m getting there.

Right, on with the show. Six items from the garden, looking interesting this Saturday. Join in, it may not be the easiest time of year to start but perhaps you like a challenge. Post six things to a blog and put a link in my comments below, that’s the short version of the instructions, the full version is in the participants guide.

One.
Hosta ‘Devon Green’ went from green to rich autumn yellow to dead in well under a week. When I say dead I mean the leaves are dead; I’m confident the plant will come up again in the spring, it’s very much at the robust end of the Hosta spectrum. I’ve another plant, also in a pot and less than 10 feet away which is still green. It’s the one in the header photo.

Two.
Polypodium cantabricum ‘Richard Kayse’ is a feathery leaved selection of the least common of the three British Polypodium species. It is more or less summer dormant, this year definitely more. Come autumn rains and it wakes up with a vigorous flush of fresh green leaves that it carries through until spring. It’s at the back of a border so summer things in front hide it when its not even there to be hid. Gill featured a variety of the same species in her six last week which may or may not have been the same variety, there are several.

Three.
Two for the price of one. My idiosyncratic fruit growing gives me just two apples hanging onto my family tree, the variety ‘Tregonna King’, and on the other tree, I have taken the ties off the four chip buds I did a month ago, of ‘Ashmead’s Kernel’ and ‘Orleans Reinette’. I just checked and it was two and a half months ago in mid August. All four buds seem firmly attached though there is no new growth so it’s hard to tell if they’ve taken. The bud in the picture looks good in the middle, which is the bit the counts, if dead above and below. They are both late varieties which should flower the same time as the parent tree and pollinate it rather better than is happening now. I don’t know what the parent tree is, it was grown from budwood of a good but unknown tree. The fruit it did have this year was excellent.

Four.
Clematis cirrhosa ‘Wisley Cream’ is flowering very well if ineffectually. White flowers against the sky are a bit of a waste of space. Add in the fact they are fairly inconspicuous and usually produced in the depths of winter and you do have to wonder why you bother. I visited another gardener today and was able to point out lots of buds and a couple of open flowers on what I took to be the straight species Clematis cirrhosa, in that the flowers were white with a little purple speckling. She has literally been growing it for decades and this is the first time it’s ever flowered, or at least been seen to flower.

Five.
I’m going up to my allotment for this one, which is a tea plant. I bought two tea plants from James Treseder a few years ago and planted them on my allotment. They’ve done quite well and next year I intend to try to make myself a brew from them. They have flowered and fruited too and I have a pot full of seedlings in desperate need of being potted on. I think I bought them as Camellia sinensis var assamica, a variant of Camellia sinensis that may be native to Assam, Myanmar and other places outside of China or may have been introduced there by man in ancient times.

Six.
My sixth is from further afield still. I went up to Mount Edgcumbe and its Camellia collection twice this week, firstly to show someone around the autumn flowering Camellias in the collection, then a volunteer working day which I spent taking video and clearing a big fallen branch from the camellias it had dropped on. I was especially pleased with how well a plant of Camellia sasanqua ‘Paradise Venessa’ I had planted in 2020 was doing. There was already a plant of this variety there, but growing in considerable shade it didn’t flower very freely. I put another plant out in the open and it has really underlined how much better many, perhaps most of the sasanquas do with at least a few hours of sunshine each day. In hotter climates than ours it may not play out this way but it certainly seems to hold true in Cornwall. This is an Australian raised variety with 10cm flowers freely borne. Every flower seems to have a wasp or three on it but I’ve not been stung yet.

That’s yer lot. See you next week.