late flowers

As if to reproach me for gadding off looking at other people's gardens, my own is producing a late flourish.  In the island bed at the back the main display of asters has just opened.  There is lots of 'Harrington's Pink', which produces soft pink flowers, and 'Andenken an Alma Potschke', with brighter pink flowers.  In fact, there are more than two shades of pink, which leaves me wondering whether they have been seeding themselves.  I often leave the seed heads standing though the winter, in an attempt to get that New Perennial sculpted look, to feed the birds, or because I simply don't have time to cut everything down in the autumn.  I've raised asters for the meadow from bought seed, and subsequently noticed tall plants in a fairly dull shade of purple blooming where I never put them, so I know they will self sow.

There is a tall fancy purple flowered one in the back garden which I'm pretty sure is a trophy from a visit to The Old Court Nurseries, national collection holders of autumn flowering asters based over in Worcestershire.  A smart deep blue one is definitely one of their's, but the dumpier purple could be from the Chatto Gardens.  I need to do some detective work with my list of all the asters ever planted in that bed, and try and put some names to faces while they're in flower, and when I can see their relative heights.  I haven't helped myself by possibly allowing them to seed, and by dividing a lot of them late one September when I was renovating the bed.  September is not the recommended month for messing around with asters, instead you are supposed to do it in the spring when they are starting back into active growth, but I thought that I would get away with it on our light soil and wanted to finish work on that area.  They all came up the next year as if autumn division was the most natural thing in the world.

Kniphofia caulescens is on the verge of opening its orange and yellow flowers in the same bed. It hails from marshes on high altitude slopes in South Africa, according to Kew's website, so it's slightly surprising that it has willingly made a large clump in my dry and low altitude sandy garden in north Essex.  However, it has survived since March 2002, expanding into a multi-stemmed clump of evergreen, slightly drooping, slightly fleshy rosettes of greyish leaves, woody at the base.  You might think that orange and yellow were not the best thing to pair with a great deal of pink, but the orange is a fairly soft shade, described by the RHS as coral red, and there is a lot of yellow in the garden by now anyway with all the dying foliage.  Anyway, I like the kniphofia, and the asters, and by the twentieth of September you can't afford to be too precious about your colour schemes. The poker has a fairly open habit, and last spring I squeezed in some plants of the low growing Allium karataviense between its rosettes, so we'll see if those appear again next year.

The Cotoneaster salicifolius 'Rothschildianus' at the back of the sloping border is carrying a splendid crop of yellow berries.  The birds will eat them in due course, which is fair enough and counts as wildlife gardening, but the display until they do get round to stripping the bush is a good one.  However, I'm disappointed that the Clematis orientalis which was supposed to be draping its coordinating yellow flowers all over a nearby holly bush, and which I admired draping itself madly over walls and shrubs in most of the gardens we visited last week, is still refusing to flower.  It has managed a bit of draping this year, but that's all.  I will have to give it more mushroom compost and fish, blood and bone, and see if I can find it in my heart to water it occasionally next season.