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…
I don't have lawn in my garden, so in theory I don't have the regular chore of mowing. However, since nothing's ever that simple, I do mow next door's, except he's now gone into a home and his mower has been given away so I had to do it with my strimmer. Then I went…
Oh it's definitely changed now. Needless to say we get fed up with rain far quicker than sun but it's good to have the pressure of endless watering and badly stressed plants lifted somewhat. Autumn seems to have arrived while summer still has a few weeks to run so with two seasons overlapping I had…
The sight of a bud emerging on Amaryllis belladonna two days ago was a bit of a shock, it's hard to see it as other than an early sign of autumn. Much of the summer flower palette has been battered by the heat and blown through too quickly. The flowers on my Heleniums are half the…
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…
We have finally had a decent drop of rain, accompanied by quite strong winds. I don't know what I will find when I next go up to my plot, likely a mix of reinvigorated growth and devastation. Once past midsummer a sense of running downhill slowly settles in, with more crops being removed than sown…
Earlier in the week I blogged about the many and various plants that I grow in pots. I thought I'd zoom in on half a dozen for this week's six. We had a little rain overnight but it's sunny again now; much of what is in the ground looks jaded. One. Impatiens auricoma x bicaudata.…
Back in my nursery days one question more than most made me pause to collect my thoughts before answering. What can I grow in a pot? They were surrounded by about 100,000 plants in perhaps 3500 varieties, all in pots. What I have come to realise is that for at least some of those people…
I spent many years working on a retail nursery where plants exchanging hands for money was pretty much what life was all about. Times have changed and this week was a classic example of a rather different way of doing things. On Wednesday I was at Trewithen Garden for an away day organised by the…
Growing your own food is very satisfying, eating it even more so. When you can pile a plate with salad, accompanied by a baked spud, nine different crops in total and all harvested that day from your own garden or allotment, then follow it with blueberries and raspberries, well that is hard to beat. This is…
garden ruminations 