Today was a beautiful early autumn day, or maybe late summer, like you hope it's going to be at this time of the year. I snipped dead heads off the dahlias, and thought how many buds there now were, and how I must be more generous with the tomato food next year.
Some weeks ago I did something I had told myself I musn't do (and don't so much, nowadays), and bought a plant I didn't have a clear place in mind for. It was a small but vigorous-looking specimen of Clematis 'Bill Mackenzie', a tangutica form with delicate yellow flowers in late summer followed by seed heads like puffs of silk. I justified the purchase by telling myself that I had a large garden, and there must be a shrub somewhere for it to ramble over. No suitable host immediately presented itself, given that I was limited to the less sandy parts of the garden, but my previous plant in a similar vein (the cultivar 'Helios') had failed to thrive in the heavy clay of the far rose bed (failed to thrive is a euphemism for died after a couple of seasons). The yellow flowers were also an issue. I love yellow and orange flowers, and am always gently amused by the customers we get at work who obviously believe that to declare a hatred of yellow flowers is a mark of genteel good taste. However, yellow flowers scrambling over, say, the pinkish white rose 'Sally Holmes' and pink hydrangeas was not going to work. Just before the weekend I suddenly saw the spot, a clipped, bird-sown dome of holly with two young Callicarpa bodinieri 'Profusion' in front. Delicate yellow flowers draped over the dark green holly leaves would look just right, and if the flowering overlapped with the ripening of either the purple Callicarpa berries or the yellow-berried Cotoneaster salicifolia 'Rothschildianus' behind then so much the better. I am never very good at remembering or predicting flowering times, and anyway they vary so much according to weather.
I also succumbed on Monday and bought a plant of the shrubby potentilla 'Daydawn'. It has nice, apricot-tangerine coloured flowers, and this afternoon it went into the long bed in the front garden. I had thought it might fit in between a new pittosporum and the Colutea x media 'Copper Beauty', but when I looked at the spacing there wasn't really room for a third shrub. Instead I removed a Hibiscus that had made only tiny amounts of growth in a decade, and this year developed mottled leaves that didn't respond to feeding, making me suspect a virus was at play, and not just drought and starvation. One of my resolutions for improving the garden is to remove various plants that are not thriving, and have not picked up despite improved cultivation. In the long bed a Choisya 'Aztec Pearl' and a Lonicera nitida 'Baggesen's Gold' are for eviction, as soon as I'm feeling energetic about wielding the pickaxe, as it has turned out to be too dry for them. The Choisya is always stunted and the 'Baggesen's Gold' full of dead twigs, and no amount of mushroom compost or blood fish and bone has made any difference. I don't mind watering recent plantings, until they are properly established, but mature shrubs have to be able to look after themselves.
I was chatting to a customer at the weekend and they had experienced dieback in a mature Cotinus after a dry spell, and it responded well to having the dead bits pruned out, followed by feeding and watering. I think I will try and revive the purple leaved Cotinus in the long bed before giving up on it, because it did do OK for years and had at least made decent growth before its recent setback, whereas the Choisya never thrived from the start. I had got as far as setting up the hose to run on the Cotinus, when it was annexed by the Systems Administrator, who took advantage of the light wind blowing away from the lettuce field to start burning the great pile of stuff up by the compost bins. and wanted the hose on hand in case of accidents. Some of yesterday's grass went, but I think we need more dry prunings to help things along. The grass made a lot of smoke. I like the smell of bonfire smoke, and find it very evocative of autumn, though I believe it is dreadfully bad for one.
Addendum The news of over £1billion losses run up by a rogue trader at UBS seems to support the idea that splitting out the trading elements of banks from the bits with your and my savings in them would be a very good thing. Granted, the bank in this case is not British, but why exactly should the taxpayer be standing as guarantor for trading activities intended to make profits for the bank? I asked the Systems Administrator whether the problem with risk control in banks nowadays was that derivative products were so complicated that it was impossible to understand what risks were being taken, but the S.A. said that actually the products were not that complicated. The problem was that many front office staff were quite fantastically aggressive and unpleasant, and the management were unable or unwilling to control them. In his last City job, a clerk who queried the activities of one of the fund managers was told that 'you're in the back office so you can f**k off'. The head of the back office played the tapes to the fund manager's boss and requested that he be sacked, but it didn't happen. Or at least, not then.
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