back in the garden

Today was the first time I've done any work in the garden for nine days, apart from watering the pots.  I kicked off by deadheading the dahlias.  The ones in containers are not blooming so well as they should be, and the leaves look rather pallid, so I had better dose them more regularly with tomato food.  Then I did a run to the dump, and weeded around the compost bins.  Never let it be said that I don't know how to enjoy my days off.

The weeds have grown prodigously in the last week, shooting up like, well, like weeds, really.  Some have managed to set seed, which shouldn't have been allowed to happen, but there you go.  The rambling rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' has made a tremendous flush of late summer growth, and has once again managed to block the steps down to the bottom of the garden, as I discovered on Sunday when we took our friends to see the holey stone, and had to go the other way round the block.  Fortunately the wind was in the right direction recently for the Systems Administrator to have a bonfire, blowing the smoke back into our wood rather than on to our neighbour's lettuces, so there is space for me to dump a new pile of prunings.  The S.A. has embarked on cutting the eleagnus hedge, which has shot out over the drive again, to the point where it would be a squeeze for a transit van to make it to the front door, let alone an oil tanker or any other delivery involving a lorry.

The stooled Paulownia tomentosa have responded to the damper weather by throwing up stout shoots fully 3-4m high, with truly enormous leaves.  I raised the plants from seed, which I recall was fairly easy, and they also spread by suckers.  The stems are hollow, and the books tell you to cut the trunks down in the spring, if you are going to coppice them.  These ended up being cut down in the autumn, because I'd not got round to stooling them the previous spring, and they had got far too big for their position so close to the house.  They survived the experience, despite the severity of last winter.  Christopher Lloyd warns that repeated stooling can weaken them to the point of death, but these are still very much alive (so far).

Taking our visitors to see the garden statuary (at their request.  I never inflict a garden tour on people unless they ask) I discovered that since I last made it down to the lowest part, the Dicentra scandens had scrambled over the Magnolia stellata so enthusiastically that the latter was practically invisible.  The little yellow bleeding heart flowers of the Dicentra are quite sweet, and the leaves look so delicate that you could scarcely believe it would hurt anything, but I must keep an eye on the magnolia and check that it doesn't seem to mind being engulfed in late summer.  There is a wild bryony in there as well, and that is going to have to go, as its large, vaguely vine shaped leaves are too smothering.  It seeds like crazy, so there are plenty of others around the place.

The Kirengeshoma palmata was just opening its yellow bells too.  This is a tall, handsome woodlander which rather unusually flowers at this time of the year rather than spring.  I have tried and utterly failed to germinate it from seed, but the plant I bought and planted in a fairly leafy, shady, sheltered spot has grown happily with little further attention.  Grown in black plastic 2 litre pots and exposed to sunshine as when for sale in the plant centre, it is one of the most wretched, scorched, miserable looking plants you have ever seen, and sells correspondingly badly (thus compounding the problem) whereas in the garden it is a fine-looking plant.

star magnolias

The Magnolia stellata down by the ditch has come out in the past few days.  It is the variety 'Waterlily', which has numerous white petals that give quite a full, starry effect.  The soil down there is silty, and the bed is partially shaded by the willow trees that grow on the far side of the ditch.  Indeed, at times it has probably been too shady.  Some of the shrubs along the border were leaning forwards towards the light, and this winter we took a lot of low branches off the willows.  The magnolia was planted in February 2004, and is still only about 1.2m across and tall.  It might have grown taller given more light, though the stellata forms are reckoned to be slow growers.

One reason it is not larger is that two or three years ago, after it had flowered normally, it failed to come into leaf, and I discovered that a large part of the top growth had died, for no reason I could discern.  I have heard of other cases of magnolias doing this, mentioned in booklets picked up at open gardens I've visited, and it's something my boss has talked about.  I had a young M. lilliflora 'Nigra' do the same thing, though I presumed that was because I was asking it to grow in thoroughly unpleasant clay soil.  The M. stellata 'Waterlily' began to produce new growth from low down, so I cut out the dead wood and waited to see what happened next.  It regrew to make a well shaped bush that flowers perfectly normally, and the 'Nigra' is also recovering, though slowly, having not found the past two winters to its liking.  I think the moral is, if you have a magnolia which suddenly decides to abandon all its top-growth, it could be worth giving it some time to see if it is really dead, or if it proposes to start again from the base.

I like the Magnolia stellata forms, and if I had more space I should grow more of them.  'Jane Platt' is a pleasant shade of pink with slim petals, and 'Chrysanthemiflora' as its name suggests is enormously full, and pink.  I have a soft spot for 'Norman Gould', which is more vigorous and grows larger than the others, with only 6-9 broad fleshy petals.  Its extra vigour derives from the plant breeders' dark arts, it being a colchinine-induced polyploidal form (meaning its cells were chemically induced in a laboratory to divide with more than the normal quantity of chromosomes).  The extra sets of chromosomes somehow confer extra strength.  Magnolia stellata 'Royal Star' fooled me at work yesterday, by producing distinctly pink buds and newly opened pink flowers when the label and coloured tag showed it should be white.  It turns out that this fades to white as the flowers age.  I'm glad I learnt that, before being confronted by some irate customer convinced we have sold them the wrong plant.

The 'Waterlily' is not honestly very interesting in the summer after flowering.  For the past couple of seasons I've grown the climbing yellow flowered Dicentra scandens, up it.  This has typical dicentra flowers in a good deep shade of yellow, and deeply cut leaves in a fresh shade of green, and is not too large so does not overwhelm the magnolia.  I raised it from seed.  I don't recall that I achieved a very good germination rate, but one plant was sufficient.