breakfast flowers

This morning's tiny posy for the breakfast table carried a little foretaste of autumn, with sedum and a sprig of the first asters.  The sedum is still in bud, but they have a bobbly, ornamental quality that looks well enough in a vase.  We tend to overlook the appeal of buds, but after all there are some shrubs like Skimmia japonica 'Rubella' where the flowers stay in tight but colourful bud for weeks, and it's a big part of their appeal.  The aster has blue flowers with yellow centres, not quite an inch across, and is about the earliest to open in the garden.  Unfortunately I need to do some detective work with my spreadsheet of things planted to work out which one it is (a depressing document, after twenty years so many of them are dead).

I used to be very assiduous about marking plants with aluminium stick-in labels when I started, but it turned out not to be a durable solution to keeping track of what things were.  The labels got trodden on and broken, or scratched up by birds (or cats), or scuffed to the point of illegibility, or buried.  I like to grow things in complex intermingling drifts, so it was not always obvious which label went with what.  And I let my plants seed around so some never had labels to start with.  And buying that many labels was very expensive, and gave the borders the air of a gigantic hamsters' graveyard.  So instead I keep a list of what I've planted in which bed, and in theory should be able to match the plants in the garden to the list, especially since with the resources of the internet there are always a huge number of pictures and descriptions available.

In theory.  Sometimes I move plants that aren't doing so well from one part of the garden to another, and unless I bother to work out what they are at the time, the data on location can become redundant.  And the self seeded ones could be hybrids anyway and not deserve their parents' name. And matching plants to descriptions isn't always so easy, especially if you garden in atypical conditions and your plants don't match the average.  It is so dry here that many things don't get as tall as the books say they will, on the other hand, I can get away with much less staking than gardeners on less arid soil.

Anyway, I think my breakfast aster is a cordifolius hybrid, and am pretty sure the variety is 'Little Carlow'.  Now I've puzzled over it I shall pay special attention to the asters if I should visit the Beth Chatto nursery, and see what properly labelled Aster cordifolius 'Little Carlow' and Aster c. elegans look like in the flesh, if they have any.

I am fairly sure the Sedum is the variety 'Strawberries and Cream', though it has only made half the height the Beth Chatto website suggests that it should.  It is in one of the worst strips of soil in the whole of the long bed, and has barely been watered.  I gave that area a good soaking after (possibly optimistically) planting out some Erysimum cuttings into the gap created by removing a chunk of Artemisia which had run to take up too much space, and have been watering the sedums in the past couple of weeks when I do the wallflowers.  They are still small, but look happier, while some barely visible, minute Perovskia have suddenly doubled in size.

I find Russian sage tricky.  You will see it recommended in books on dry gardening.  One of the first links I came to just now when Googling it was a Telegraph article from 2003 by Helen Yemm, saying that 'perovskias actually seem to thrive on starvation rations and in parched places', grow well in 'hot and sunny conditions in the garden' and grow 'particularly well in gravel'.  All I can tell you is that growing them on almost pure sand and with an average 21 inches of annual rainfall, they are desperately slow to get going.  I think Hank Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf are nearer the mark when they comment in Dream Plants for the Natural Garden that Perovskia is at its best in dry, well-drained and fertile soil and 'gets into a very sorry state in poor, sandy soil'.  I had better keep feeding mine mushroom compost.

One Perovskia leaf and a slip of Teucrium fruticans foliage completed the breakfast posy.  It is a very small jug.