Six on Saturday 22-06-2019

Yesterday was the summer solstice (already!), so that’s it now, the nights are drawing in. To use the vernacular, winter is coming. How depressing! I’m going to try to forget that and focus on the next few months of decent light and warm weather. I note that next week the weather is going a bit bonkers hot. That should give everything in the garden a good boost, coming on top of the all the rain we’ve had recently. In the meantime, it’s Six on Saturday. Six things, in the garden, on a Saturday. Could be anything – a flower, a bud, interesting foliage, a weed, a pest, a failure, a border, anything at all. Join in!

Here are my Six, with a theme of profusion, both current and future.

1 – Eryngium planum. Native to these shores, this is the mother plant from which I spawned several baby eryngiums. I’m amazed at how many flower heads there are. It will soon turn a vivid blue.

2 – Rose ‘ali baba’. This year I have been using a foliar feed on all my roses. ‘Uncle Tom’s Rose Tonic’ is applied once a fortnight, sprayed on. I must say all of my roses are doing very well. To quote Elvis Costello, I think it is anyway a good year for the roses, so it’s difficult to tell whether it helps, but I’m certainly planning to use it again next year. Regardless of why, this particular rose has an extraordinary number of buds on just this one stem. Ali has conveniently produced a fresh flower so you can see imagine what 20-odd of them will be like. There is a light fragrance for which precariously balanced leaning is required to fully appreciate.

3 – Clematis ‘Mme Julia Correvon’. Planted a couple of years ago, this was the best of the new ones last year, and even better this year. I think it gets a little more water here than the others do and responds accordingly. Anyway, there are a lot of flowers out, and lots more to come. Julia is doing a pretty good job of entirely covering a fence panel. Nice work Julia, high five!

4 – Papaver ‘Lauren’s Grape’. I grew these from seed last year, the plants were a bit spindly and flowered at about 45cm, considerably shorter than advertised. Still, pretty enough, and I scattered just one seed head across the wisteria border. They began to make their presence felt in early spring – hundreds of them. I weeded some out, moved some, gave some away, I still have loads. The flowers aren’t out yet, but they soon will be, and at their regulation height of 1m to boot.

5 – Geranium ‘orion’. One of several divisions from a couple of plants I bought cheap in the end of season sale at my local Wyvale. It is rather sparse in the foliage department but is flowering well. I saw great swathes of this plant at Wisley a few weeks back, giant plants in comparison. I can’t decided if I want them to grow that big out of some misplaced sense of competition, or if I’d rather they were more modest in size. What will be will be, I guess.

6 – Nemophila menzesii ‘penny black’. I was given these as a gift at Christmas ( I refuse to use the linguistic abomination that is “gifted”), one of a few packets of seeds. I think this is the first time anyone has bought me seeds for a present, strangely, and very welcome they are too. I might not have chosen them but it’s always fun to grow plants from seed. Being monochrome, they are not very bright but they do repay a closer inspection. they are in fact very dark purple rather than black. A low grower, these are sat in the front row of the patio border. They seed about a bit too, I gather.

Those are my Six, what are yours? If you’d like to join in, just publish your post and pop a link to it in the comments below. If you also mention/link to my blog in yours, that would be fab. For more details and for other ways to participate, you can read the brief guide here.

I hope you have a productive gardening weekend, I certainly have a long list to get done. Don’t forget to check back later on as more links get added during the day.

I’ll be back next weekend for another #SixOnSaturday.