It was a beautiful, sunny day, and after charging around looking at other people's gardens it was nice to have some time in my own. I need to get the pots of pelargoniums and other tender things into the greenhouse pretty soon, before a frost catches me out, which is tricky as the greenhouse already seems rather full. The answer to this is to plant out some of the trays of home grown plants, and accumulated purchases, that are currently in the greenhouse, which in turn means finding spaces for them in the borders.
The variegated Luma apiculata was no problem. I've known for ages where that was going to go, and there's been a place ready for it since the gigantic self-sown biennial Silybum marianum that was there flowered and died. This is an ornamental thistle whose leaves are splashed with white, and purple flowers. Legend has it that the white markings are down to the Virgin Mary accidentally splashing the plant with her milk, a story reflected in some of its common names, like blessed milk thistle, as well as the specific epithet of marianum. It was traditionally used in herbal medicine to treat liver disease, and the scientific jury is still out about quite how clinically effective its active ingredients might be, though they are used to treat acute poisoning due to eating death cap toadstools. The plants can stay as little runty specimens or grow well over a metre high, depending on soil conditions, and this one had become truly enormous. It is a spiny beast, and the brown remnants were quite uncomfortable to cart off to the bonfire (Christopher Lloyd refused to grow the Scotch thistle Onopordum for that same reason).
The Luma is a slightly tender shrub, and it may be unwise to plant it out in late September, but I thought I could put a pot over it if a very cold snap were forecast. At least the ground is warm so it should start rooting into the surrounding soil, and it will have more reliable drainage in the gravel than sitting in its black plastic pot all winter in the greenhouse. In milder parts of the country I have seen the plain green Luma form small trees, with lovely cinnamon brown bark, but in north Essex I'll be quite happy with my variegated Glanleam Gold if it manages to make a nice medium sized dome. I have got it near to the olive tree in the Italian garden, where it is supposed to contribute to the Mediterranean ambience.
A likely looking gap near the front of the sloping bed in the back garden, where I was hoping to drop in three Penstemon grandiflorus, proved to be rather full of roots. That is the trouble with trying to fill spaces in mature borders. Even when there is a gap visible to the eye above ground, below ground things tend to be pretty crowded already. I hacked out planting holes, digging up a few Muscari bulbs in the process. Penstemon grandiflorus hails originally from the prairies of central North America, so it may cope with root competition from shrubs or it may not. We'll see. It has tubular flowers in a subtle shade of lavender blue, and looks wilder and more natural than the hybrid penstemons you usually see in garden centres, as indeed it is. I thought it was delightful. I have just seen that Chiltern Seeds offer it, so if my plants survive, flower and set seed, and if I remember to save some, I should be able to get some more plants. Looking at the way the bought plants were clumping up in their pots, I thought it might be possible to split a mature specimen, something you can't normally do with penstemons, but this species seems less woody than most of the hybrids. It may be correspondingly less easy to take cuttings.
One piece of planting from a previous year is starting to pay off. I sent a Vitis coignetiae to climb up a native birch that had seeded itself into the pile of soil created when the conservatory foundations were dug. It is very nasty soil, which has seen off several of the plants I've tried in it, and the vine took its time to get going, but on the basis that grape vines are very deep rooting, I hoped that this one would manage to get its roots down or out to some decent soil. Vitis coignetiae is not a grape vine, so it may be that it isn't deep rooting at all. However, it has survived on the spoil heap and has just about got to the top of the birch, and this year is colouring up as it is supposed to. It has the largest leaves of any vine, which are meant to go a vivid red in the autumn, hence its common name of crimson glory vine. Finally this year it is starting to look both crimson and glorious, standing out against the birch when seen from the far side of the garden. Some concentration so as not to cut through the base of the stem when clearing brambles and weeds has been required over the years to get to this point.
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