gravel gardening

I have been weeding the gravel in the middle of the drive so that I can plant out my seed raised Limonium caspium and Dianthus cruentus.  It is rather like a re-run of cutting the hedge, as I seem to be perpetually one day's work away from finishing the half of it nearest the entrance.  Scooping up fallen Eleagnus leaves, dibbling out the creeping stems of the wretched purple leaved oxalis, pulling out the old stalks of Nigella damascena whose dry seed pods could be architectural but are in truth tatty, and hoicking up tufts and as much as possible of the running roots of the sheep sorrel which, in sandy soil, ye have always with ye, bucket after bucket of rather gritty debris has gone into my nice new garden waste bin, but there is always a bit more left to do.

It pays to know your weeds.  The rosettes of next year's yellow evening primrose are fairly unmistakable.  The foliage is mid green with a hint of yellow, very slightly bullate (meaning the surface of the leaf bulges upwards between the veins), and while the ends of the leaves are pointed they are still fat towards the tips.  The apricot flowered Oenothera has narrower and more pointed leaves that are equally easy to spot.  They have seeded themselves generously, and quite a lot of seedlings found their way into the bin.

I want to keep next year's teasels.  They are biennials, flowering in their second year and then dying, and at this stage next year's flowers are no more than rosettes.  Darker green and bristlier looking than the evening primroses, they are not so easy to tell apart from some other things I'd rather not have.  There is a yellow flowered member of the daisy family, whose common name I don't know, but that suddenly sends up tall flowering stems from dark green rosettes.  As the basal foliage expands it develops strange lumps on the surface of the leaves and looks less and less like a teasel, but young plants are not easy to tell apart.

I couldn't place another rosette former, and pulled a couple of plants out on the basis that they must be the annoying yellow daisies, while not feeling entirely happy about it.  Then the penny dropped that they were actually viper's bugloss, Echium vulgare.  This is yet another biennial, a native with spikes of intensely blue flowers that are highly attractive to bees.  I planted some out of pots into the gravel in June of last year, which flowered later that summer, and was disappointed not to find any seedlings, given the original plants came (at the second attempt) from a packet of bought seed.  Now it seems that they have seeded after all, and it's a pity I pulled some of them up, but on closer inspection there are quite a lot left.  I had completely forgotten I'd tried viper's bugloss in that area, but the location of the mystery rosettes is such a good match to where I remember planting the bugloss that I'm sure that's what they are.  The plants have wide ranging, fleshy white roots and did not especially like being raised in pots, but with any luck will now keep themselves going like the evening primroses do.