Thursday 28 June 2012

the colour yellow

The evening primroses that have seeded themselves from plants I grew from seed picked on Dunwich Beach are opening their cheerful yellow flowers from long buds with a hint of apricot at the base.  Looking round the garden I realise how much yellow there is throughout the year.

There are some customers at the plant centre where I work who tell me with an air of pride, as if I should admire them for their good taste, that they have no yellow in their garden.  No primroses or daffodils?  That's not a particular marker of good taste in most people's books.  At the moment, besides the evening primroses, we have tall pale yellow verbascums with soft grey leaves, much beloved of mullein moth, and a few deep yellow ones from the Cotswolds series.  In the herb bed the flat discs of tiny parley flowers are showing yellow, and in the back garden the soft brownish yellow flowers of the golden oat Stipa gigantea hover over the island bed.  Before the evening primroses we had the starry yellow flower spikes of Asphodeline lutea, which self seeds with great glee in the gravel.

The new foliage of box has a yellowish tinge.  Prostrate junipers, so useful for filling in awkward corners and covering slopes, were chosen partly for their sulphur yellow tones, and the obliging Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' does what it says on the tin.  A Thuja occidentalis 'Rheingold' planted as a corner feature in the island bed about fifteen years ago has finally reached its desired size, so much so that for the first time ever this year I trimmed it lightly.  That is a strong, bronze, old gold sort of yellow.  A prostrate yellow yew does a useful job covering the base of the slope outside the conservatory, taking over where the juniper leaves off, and I enjoy the sight of the dark red flowers of the texensis clematis 'Gravetye Beauty' sprawling over it later in the year.  The small scots pine in the long bed that is a sober shade of grey at the moment will flush a warm soft gold come the cold weather.

The pineapple broom is full out now with its fine, clean yellow flowers that smell of pineapples (what else), and it will be followed by the yellow pea flowers of airy Genista aetnensis.  A yellow flowered Halimium with nice dark green evergreen foliage has made a dense dome in the gravel, surviving the harsh winters without turning a hair and flowering profusely.  The brownish yellow bobbles of Phlomis russeliana and clearer yellow flowers of Phlomis fruticosa are pleasant enough, and the plants will cope with horribly dry conditions.  I don't even mind the little yellow flowers of Santolina, though I grow it for the grey foliage rather than the flowers.

Several of the roses are yellow, mostly David Austin varieties in the old rose style, some with a strong tinge of apricot.  In the rose bank I have the lovely muddled yellow and pink flowers of the rambler 'Phyllis Bide', which unusually for a rambler is a repeat flowerer, plus the stout modern climber 'Leverkusen', said by Peter Beales to be a good doer, and which is doing very well with me.  Up in the meadow a very early flowering species rose with tiny ferny leaves has little yellow flowers like primroses, and I'm trying to get the rugosa hybrid 'Agnes' going, though I think it is too shady where I have put her.

The heads of Euphorbia characias are fading and I must cut them down sometime soon, being careful not to get the sap on my arms.  We are warned nowadays that an ever increasing number of species and varieties could irritate the skin (hyacinth bulbs, the leaves of Aconitum), but the milky sap of euphorbias really does.  They coincided with the tulips, looking very zingy together, and the tulip display was jazzed up by the inclusion of yellow and orange with the red and purple.

The dangling soft yellow flowers of the Corylopsis were extremely tasteful, as were the yellow Hamamelis, and so will be the yellow Banksia rose I'm trying to grow up the hazel tree behind the Hamamelis, if it ever gets going.  I should think the Dicentra scandens counts as tasteful as well: at any rate it is rarified.  The pale yellow scabious flowers of Cephalaria gigantea, carried a good metre above the clump of basal foliage, are pretty refined, as are the dainty yellow trumpets of Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus and the taller H. 'Marion Vaughn'.  My yellow flowered hellebore hybrids would not disgrace the most elegant garden, yellow hellebores scoring far higher in the garden snobbery stakes than the more usual muddy pinks.  The pale yellow perennial foxgloves are rather smart too.

In the long grass coltsfoot is making free.  OK, it is a weed, but it is a graceful weed and good for insects.  Even the oxeye daisies have yellow centres.  I'm planning to extend the range of yellow weeds in the long grass by adding toadflax, come the autumn, and have some nice little plants coming along in the greenhouse.

And yes, there are assorted yellow flowered daisies up in the meadow that flower at various points during the summer, and no, they are not refined plants, and some are a harsh shade of yellow, but they blend cheerfully with the other things up there.  The ochre yellow flowers of a tall yarrow are not the most refined things either, but Achillea taygeta grows in such dry conditions that you forgive it a lot, if you have a dry garden.

I like yellow, and I have lots of it.  In the garden, that is.  Most yellow clothes make me look as though I had jaundice.

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