The garden still has a few seasonal tricks up its sleeve, even in the second half of October. I don't count the two Iris unguicularis flowers that have just opened. I don't want to see them now, ungrateful though that sounds, and wish the winter iris would save their efforts at least until the leaves have fallen from the trees, and it looked like winter. No, I am thinking of the chrysanthemums.
I like chrysanthemums, despite their garage forecourt overtones and funereal associations. We studied 'The Odour of Chrysanthemums' at school, and I've read accounts in recent years of British women who have committed social faux pas by taking bunches as hostess presents on the continent, not realising that in parts of Europe they are still considered funeral flowers. Never mind, I find the strong, distinctive smell, not just of the flowers but of the whole plant, quite pleasant, and I like their bright neatness, as well as the fact that they come so usefully late in the year. They last for a long time in vases, presumably why they became such stalwarts of the petrol station emergency flowers trade, and I don't even grudge taking the time to strip the leaves off.
I once read a useful article about their wild origins and the species that have gone into making up the modern garden varieties, and wish I had paid more attention, because I have had very mixed success with them. The durable and undoubted stars are those with relatively compact growth, producing numerous tightly packed stems and nice little densely double button flowers about an inch across. This morning I picked a small posy of 'Bronze Elegance', which makes sturdy plants no more than a couple of feet tall, indeed less in our soil, with tawny brown flowers opening from dark buds. Why the Gardeners' World website classifies it as a tender perennial I have no idea, since my plants have been in the ground for over a decade. Part of it once sported purple, but it wasn't a particularly nice colour break, and that section of the plant seems to have died out, which is fine.
I bought 'Dr Tom Parr' on impulse from Langthorns near Stansted five years ago, when I called in on my way back from a woodland talk,wanting to get maximum value from the drive if I were going to trek to the other side of the county. It is another dense double, with flowers in an agreeable shade of mauve. According to their website it can grow a metre tall, but here it's no more than half that, and I don't have to stake it. Although shorter than it could be given more luxurious conditions it spreads steadily, making an ever wider mat, and last year I nibbled off some little rooted pieces from the very front of the bed and potted them up. All settled happily in their pots, and I have several plants sitting by the greenhouse to squeeze into any vacant spaces, or give to friends. Given the root aphid problems this year I'd probably keep my plant ailments on site, and use them myself.
'Julia' was another impulse purchase, got from the plant centre a couple of years ago. She too has smallish double flowers, this time in a nice pale pink, and is starting to spread, so there might be enough of her to nip off a couple of rooted shoots come next spring. My final double has no name, being salvaged from a tray of bedding chrysanthemums at the plant centre several years ago. A customer accidentally broke a piece off one, and knowing how easily small fragments are to pot up, the manager suggested I rescue it. It is a good, very dark red, and again I must make some more plants next year, so that I can extend the patch.
These four have all been very, very easy going. I chop the old stems down at some stage over the winter, feed and mulch them when I'm feeding the bed, and that's it. They don't seem to require regular splitting, or die out in the centre of the plant. I like them so much, I feel slightly sorry that they are dotted around among the remains of the asters and other flowers that have already gone over. If I were rich and had unlimited space, I should like to make a bed specifically for flowers that produce their main display this late, so that I could enjoy them in their freshness, instead of as islands of bloom in a New Perennials sea of dead heads.
The other sort of chrysanthemums are taller, leggier and have more open flowers, and I've had little success with them. The plant spreadsheet records that I've had two goes at establishing the fine, dark red 'Duchess of Edinburgh', but there's never a flower to be seen this year, and three attempts at the apricot 'Mary Stoker', which is putting up a miserable display in the ground, though I do have some plants in pots grown on from rooted shoots. I'd better consider what to do with them, since experience to date strongly suggests that if I plant them out into the bed they will just slowly die. The pale pink, quill petalled 'Emperor of China' isn't putting in an appearance either, and I've tried that twice, though it is a really late flowering variety so maybe it is still to come somewhere among the aster stalks.
One of these days I will settle down with a pile of reference books and the resources of the web, and try to get to grip with chrysanthemums, and why it is that some are so easy and others so impossible. In the meantime, I'd say buy any you like the look of, but don't bother paying for more than one, since if it likes your garden it will be easy to propagate, and if it doesn't it will disappear so you might as well not waste your money.
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