ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
It's absolutely sluicing it down just now, as it has been for several hours. The wind has dropped a bit though. Good thing I did my pictures yesterday when it was only drizzling. One. Camellia yunnanensis. I went down to Trelissick on Thursday to a meeting about a study day on Camellias that I'm going…
It's not great for taking pictures in the garden so I brought a few things in and tried to get good pictures of them. Took a couple in the rain too. One. I'll start and finish outdoors, pretty much the order the pictures were taken. This is Camellia sasanqua 'Navajo', which just about had its…
As the seasonal sine wave heads downwards I find myself taking pleasure out of ever smaller things in the garden. It doesn't seem forced, just natural. A smattering of flowers on the Daphne, a few late patches of blue from the Corydalis, the first bud opening on a camellia. The few things that are still…
Here's a fine thing, six on Saturday and I had done nothing until this morning. Being in the luxurious state that is retirement, I usually have it all lined up by Friday night at the latest. It was inevitable then that the weather would conspire to frustrate me, not that it's raining or snowing, just…
One. So much in flower, picking six becomes difficult. OK, a bit of lumping together: Dahlias, I grow a few, but then again... Such flamboyance, such joie de vivre. Dahlias, especially en masse, have an unrivalled capacity for putting smiles on peoples faces, even mine. Some I leave in, some I lift, then put back…
We drove up to Marwood Hill Garden in North Devon today, then on to RHS Rosemoor. So many plants, so little space! Marwood have a National Collection of Astilbes and there are pots of most of them in their plant centre. To come away empty handed would be plain rude. One. Is the box of…
One) I know it's only an optical illusion, but plants are set off better by moist dark soil than pale dry stuff. After last night's deluge, which combined the most sustained lightning I have seen in my life with rain akin to the tropical downpours I've seen in Australia, moist and dark wasn't a problem.…
Back in November I noticed fruits on Fuchsia glazioviana growing in the garden. This is a quite small grower with often good leaf colour so well worth growing. I wondered if it had picked up pollen from something interesting, so I picked a few fruits, extracted the seeds and sowed them. They germinated very quickly…
Years ago, there was an Astelia at RHS Rosemoor called 'Alpine Ruby'. It was very nice, I wanted one. At the time I worked on a nursery and looking for sources of supply, there was one, in Northern Ireland. There still is. Around the same time a new variety called 'Red Devil' was launched and…
garden ruminations 