Barring unforseen events and emergencies I have a whole week to spend in the garden. Between now and Sunday lunchtime I'm not committed to going anywhere or doing anything (apart from making a pudding for the lunch). I was looking forward to it all over the weekend, and scanning the weather forecast, torn between the need for rain and my acute desire that it should not rain during the daytime (which is ridiculous, since it will rain when it rains, irrespective of whether or when I would like it to).
I worked in the back garden today, so admired the 'Taihaku' at intervals. There are some buds still to open, but already petals are falling on the lawn. I was weeding around the shrub roses, a fiddly task since by now I have to manouvre around tufts of hyacinth and colchicum foliage, plus self-sown seedlings of Orlaya grandiflora. This is a delightful umbellifer, with white flowers like lacecap hydrangeas, a flat central cluster of tiny flowers surrounded by larger petals around the outside of the cluster. I first saw it on a Chelsea show garden designed by Tom Stuart-Smith a few years ago, and was enchanted, so asked one of the girls on the stand what it was called. She replied that it was a wild flower and Tom said it didn't really have a name. I said that even weeds had names, and managed to discover what it was. Since then it has become rather trendy, and one of the glossy magazines gave away packets of seed. Received wisdom is that it transplants badly and is best sown in-situ from fresh seed, and certainly I haven't found packeted seed gave me many plants. My self-seeding colony hangs on at one end of the rose bed, but sadly the Orlaya isn't as generous with its progeny as the wild umbellifers that try to move into the garden. I think cow parsley is a beautiful plant, but it has territorial ambitions all over my cyclamen. There is also some sort of hogweed, with ribbed stems and more solid flowers than cow parsley,whose name I haven't yet discovered yet. It is handsome, but too inclined to spread itself about, so I'm now rooting seedlings out when I find them. I do have a plan to establish self-seeding parsnips in this bed, because their yellow flowers would look so good with the purple roses, and it would be a horticultural joke to see how many people recognised them out of context for a vegetable gone to seed, but I haven't got round to that yet. There is some angelica which shows signs of setting up a colony in front of 'William Lobb'.
There are also quite a few seedlings of a dark leaved form of Geranium maculatum. Due to poor record keeping (no excuse for that) I'm not sure whether the original parent plants are the form 'Elizabeth Ann' or 'Espresso'. There are so many named forms of geranium, and some of them look so similar my mind begins to glaze over. G. maculatum is one of the geranium species that will bear a bit of shade, hence I'm experimenting with it as ground cover around shrubs. The initial results, including the controlled amount of self-seeding, are encouraging, so today I added three plants of G. maculatum 'Chatto'. This is already in bloom, one of the earliest flowering geraniums, and has mid-green leaves and flowers in a dreamy shade of pale blue.
Three white flowered plants of Vinca minor that I planted last autumn are spreading, and showing signs of starting to do their intended task, which is to stabilise the soil at the end of the bed where it slopes down quite steeply towards the deck. Buoyed by that preliminary success I'm planting a blue form as well, 'La Grave', which used to be called 'Bowles Variety'. I don't know why poor old E A Bowles has lost his periwinkle.
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