ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
Now that we are done with opening the garden for this year, it can slide into autumnal disarray without us feeling the need to put up much resistance. Growth this year has been particularly lush so the disarray had come early and hard. Now it doesn't matter, since we are the only ones to see…
Our last open day is today, which is just as well since most of the paths around the garden are getting hard to negotiate for all the vegetation hanging over them. Roll on 2025. I did a quick whizz round on Friday morning grabbing a few pictures, then set about some last minute tidying and…
I was trying to cobble together a really short video of our garden to put on Facebook to publicise our last openings for 2024. I filmed lots of clips then tried to squeeze them into two minutes. Didn't work, the first attempt was three and a half. Then I had another go, which went a…
I've spent a lot more time on my allotment this week than in the garden. It actually got pretty warm for a few days mid week which has brought out lots of flowers. Friday was cooler again though with rain expected overnight into Saturday. We have a garden club group coming round on Monday, rain…
From time to time we have grown the odd lily, with mixed results but at the lower end of the achievement spectrum. Mostly they have gone in pots, the only ones in the ground were martagon types and they haven't done especially well. Slugs have been a big problem but I also think our soil…
It's all just ticking over in the garden now. Nothing more will be planted until autumn; it's just weeding and dead heading and if it stops raining, watering; a bit of tying in and up. Our thoughts are tentatively turning to next year, what do we want more of, what has been a failure that…
The American Begonia Society maintains a list of unidentified species of Begonias in cultivation, allocating each a number consisting of the letter U followed by three digits. The whole number should be italicized, turning Begonia U614 into Begonia U614. U614 was originally introduced to cultivation by the late Michael Wickenden, then proprietor of Cally Gardens…
We have just had a lovely sunny day with the garden open and it has now clouded over, is drizzling and the forecast for tomorrow, when we are also open, is for rain all day.On a much more positive note, at the beginning of the week we were getting very worried about opening because the…
Mid July and still the weather persists with being cool and wet. Looking at pictures from the same time last year I see there is a lot less in flower, in particular Cosmos and Cleome, which are way behind where they were then. We also lost several plants over the winter, like Salvia nemorosa and…
I'm getting a bit ahead of myself in that I'm writing this on Thursday, mainly because we have visitors coming tomorrow for the weekend. Barring disasters, what is happening on Thursday should still be happening two days later.It's high summer, though it scarcely seems like it, but the flowers know and the build-up continues. Here's…
garden ruminations 