late flowers

It was such a grey day, it was difficult to get motivated to do anything.  It wasn't cold.  The air was maybe a trifle too humid for perfect comfort, but not desperately so.  It didn't rain, or even spit and threaten showers. There was just something about the total lack of sunshine, and monochrome grey sky, that was discouraging.

I gardened anyway, albeit at a sluggard's pace, and went and bought another ten bags of mushroom compost which had to go in my clean car.  It is not that clean, unfortunately.  Now it has dried I can see a few muddy triangles on the paintwork where I missed patches with the sponge, and I need to have another go at de-smearing the inside of the windscreen.  Still, there were no disasters with the compost.

In the garden, there are some flowers still coming out.  Rudbeckia subtomentosa 'Henry Eilers' is just opening, having grown to about 1.5 metres tall, the best it has ever done with me.  The wet summer must have been to its liking.  This is a lovely thing in the daisy family, with petals of a soft, rich yellow surrounding a dark, fairly small, slightly raised central boss.  The petals are quilled, rolled into a cylinder along most of their length, before opening out into a spoon shaped tip, which gives them a substantial, three dimensional effect that contrasts with the overall daintiness of the plant.  The central boss is laid out in two opposite Fibonacci spirals, like the centre of a sunflower.  My plants are starting to spread and join to form a proper clump, which is a relief since the emerging shoots got rather trampled on in the spring when I was weeding.  It has been utterly trouble free with me, but it is a tricky beast to keep alive for any length of time in a pot, so isn't offered for sale all that widely.  Plus perhaps not everybody likes the sound of quilled soft yellow petals.

An area of planting in the front garden has come off.  Next to an existing purple leaved Cotinus I planted a purple leaved form of Berberis thunbergii, and a Colutea x media 'Copper Beauty'.  The Colutea is a shrub with greenish-grey leaves, and burnt orange flowers in late summer that are followed by long-lasting, inflated pinky-orange seed pods.  The mixture of purple, grey and orange is as good as I hoped it would be, and was forming a fine backdrop for the sulphur yellow flower heads of some purple fennel, though those are fading now.  I've seen it used to great effect in a Piet Oudolf designed garden in North Yorkshire, but it isn't all that commonly grown, or widely available.  We have plants intermittently at the plant centre, and I bought one of the last batch, which was large and rather expensive, wishing I'd picked up a small one at Scampston when I saw them.  Still, mine has established well and is growing happily in full sun on light soil.

In the back garden a hardy hibiscus named 'Blue Chiffon' is opening its double flowers, in a rich shade of mid blue.  It hasn't grown much since I planted it, and really at this stage I'd swap the flowers for some extension growth.  The rather glamorous, barely hardy salvia S. guaranitica 'Black and Blue' has made a good bushy plant, and is busily producing a succession of flower spikes, each deep blue flower sitting in a black calyx, very exotic.  The foliage on mine is looking better than the boss's one at work, which has been disastrously attacked by something and is horribly distorted.  So many of the leaves in the garden this year are chewed to shreds or destroyed by fungal attack, it's gratifying to find something that's doing comparatively well.

Wandering around for a look-see before coming inside to post today's blog entry and tackle the beekeeper's accounts before tomorrow's committee meeting, I discovered that the autumn flowering cyclamen are already opening, and that a fresh crop of Herb Robert has germinated in their bed.  That will all have to come out next week.  It's a funny time of year, the cusp between summer and autumn.  I like the late flowers, as do numerous bumble and solitary bees which were busily foraging on many of them, and part of me wants to make the most of the last of the vaguely warm days.  Winter will be long enough, after all, when it comes.  The other part of me looks at the yellowing foliage and half gone-over nature of many of the plants that are still flowering, like the everlasting peas, and the purple lobelia in the bog bed, and just wants to have done with it, cut them to the ground, and restore the garden to a minimalist state of pared-down tidiness.