ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
Fuchsias are a terrific group of plants for providing colour in the late summer /autumn period, especially in gardens that are a bit on the shady side. In this garden they have the further great merit of not being touched by slugs. Just need to sort out the capsids. We have a good number, both…
Ignore the few pink blooms at the top left of this picture and what you are looking at is two rows of Dahlias raised from seed collected from the variety 'Orange Cushion'. The left hand row are from a 2016 sowing, the others from a sowing in March this year. Almost all of them are…
In the last few days I’ve found time to take in a bit of the natural world. On Saturday I walked up Brown Willy, the highest point in Cornwall, coming in from a lane that runs north from Jamaica Inn in the middle of Bodmin Moor. Yesterday I went along the A38 to visit a…
My last week’s Six on Saturday included Melittis melissophyllum ‘Royal Velvet Distinction’. This is a cultivated form of a native wild flower, which if not exactly rare, is limited in its distribution. As it happens I know of a colony growing in a lane about a mile away and since its inclusion on the blog…
At this time of year I'm putting a lot of plants into pots. This will include sowing seeds, pricking off seedlings, potting up young plants from the propagator, potting on plants into bigger pots and potting up plants that have been dug from the ground. As an ex nurseryman, I know that professional growers do…
Fight your way into my garden shed, or my allotment shed and you will find a set of tools common to most other similar sheds. I have a couple of spades and forks, three different rakes, edging shears and hedge cutting shears, a strimmer and a pressure washer and a shredder. What I also have,…
I suppose in this day and age I should be doing a You Tube video, but I’m too old for that. Many of us want a reasonably accurate map of our gardens and end up with something that falls short. Here is a fairly simple method which will produce quite an accurate map. You will…
We're running at around 32°C by day and 20°C by night. Can't believe we've been here a week. Our host's garden is a modest affair, as are most gardens in the very many new housing developments hereabouts. All the houses are single storey, so have a big footprint, not leaving a lot of room for…
I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm having to pretend it's winter down here in rainy Cornwall, but while there has been frost on the car a couple of times, we've had nothing to do any damage. There are odds and ends of flowers everywhere, but mostly bedraggled and looking sorry for themselves. So…
I came across a picture of the garden from June 2005 and, struck by the number of plants that we no longer have, tried to take exactly the same picture as it looks now. I worry sometimes that the garden has become too static, that I am too slow to make alterations. Not so,…
garden ruminations 