the autumn tidy up continues

I gave up waiting for frost to blacken the leaves of the dahlias, and started cutting them down.  After last night's rain, the ones in pots are as wet as they need to be before going into winter storage under the greenhouse staging, and it feels like time to put them away for this year.  Cutting the string off the supporting stakes, chopping down the dahlia stems and weeding the tops of the pots and the dahlia bed by the greenhouse, is another step towards winter.  Though it still doesn't feel like winter.  I'm trotting around the house with my bare feet shoved into a pair of clogs, and wandering outside to put the recycling out in a T shirt.

The Iris unguicularis are starting to put on a good show, not just the odd bloom but approaching a full display, so they are working by the calendar and not the thermometer.  Down by the septic tank, the ivy shaped leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium have expanded to almost cover the ground, another winter plant on the move.  The flowers have been and gone by now, but the leaves are a good feature in their own right.  I've bought a few more plants each year for over a decade to build up my stocks, always choosing ones with good leaf markings as well as selecting for flower colour, and they are starting to seed themselves around, so that while not there yet I'm getting closer to the sheet of cyclamen effect I've admired in various gardens open to the public.

We had 12mm rain last night, enough to soften the ground surface, though it has not penetrated very deep.  I've begun cutting the lawn edges around the paving slab path that leads across the back garden.  Over the course of the summer the grass has crept across the surface of the slabs, so that by now some of them are barely visible, just smudges of Marshalls Heritage in line across the turf.  Paving slabs dropped into lawns are somewhat retro, but a very practical way of getting hard access to the bottom of the back garden.  On frosty mornings I want to be able to go out there and look at the winter flowers without leaving footprints across the grass, to reproach me for my carelessness for weeks afterwards by going brown where my weight has damaged the frozen grass blades.  It's impossible to see where the edge of each slab is, so I make a rough guess, probing with the lawn edger, and shifting a centimetre further out if I touch concrete until the point where the blade slides down into the earth.  It looks smarter at the time not to cut too far away from the slab, though the lawn advances back quickly enough.

I've been coaxing fallen leaves off the gravel too, a fingertip job to avoid picking up stones as well as leaves.  I've collected red leaves from the Japanese maples, yellow leaves from the field maples and hazels, and big brown leaves from the Malus tschonoskii.  This is a useful tree, with a vase shaped habit and an ability to tolerate vile soils and transplanting at a large size that make it ideal for public landscape schemes.  I bought it for its excellent autumn colour and because I needed a relatively narrow tree in that spot.  I've never met any gardener or tree enthusiast who raved about Malus tschoniskii.  It does a job, but doesn't seem to inspire love.  Poor tree.

The Systems Adminsistrator collected chestnut leaves using the leaf vac, and has promised to go after the leaves from the 'Tai Haku' over the weekend, when more have fallen off.  It's tricky knowing when to start with leaf collection.  Too early and you end up raking over every bit several times, but too late and they have blown away into inaccessible places.  If you just wanted them off the lawn that might be fine, but I want the leaf mould.

This will be a working weekend for me, so no more gardening until Tuesday.  We need more rain, but please let it rain in the night.  I lost half this morning to some heavy showers.  Tidying dahlias and leaves is all very well, but I need to get out the heavy equipment, and make a start on the hebes that need to come out, to be replaced by box, and the big bed along the boundary.

some March flowers

I've just taken a stroll round the garden to see what's blooming.  It's drizzling and 4.0 degrees C outside, and most of them look as if they wish they hadn't bothered.

The display of Hamamelis x intermedia is coming to an end.  The red ones are lasting later than the orange and yellow, having opened after them, with the variety 'Rubin' the last.  The hazels are showing what genetic variation there is in the wild population, as some still have bright yellow catkins while others are going brown and shrivelled.  Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill' still has plenty of buds, and the white form hasn't really got going at all yet.  The Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' has flowers open, but the overall effect is a bit pink and brown.  The Ribes laurifolium is still blooming, but I think that whatever animal is terrorising the back garden has had a chew at it.  Mahonia japonica is flowering quietly in its corner.  It got rather overshadowed last year by a rambling rose that is supposed to be growing up a tree, but instead flopped around and over the mahonia.  I have a feeling I shall be returning to the question of training roses up trees.

Shrubs that are new blog entries for March include Corylopsis sinensis var. sinensis, whose yellow flowers are just opening.  This suffered dieback last winter, but seems untouched so far this one, despite it being colder.  Maybe the fact that the deepest frosts came before Christmas this winter helped, if it is less vulnerable to cold damage when still tightly in bud than when the sap is rising.  I think it is going to be far too large for the space where I have put it, and I wonder if I can trim the tips back after flowering.  I don't think the books recommend this treatment, but Chris Lane says it works for witch hazels, which are not supposed to like being pruned.  We visited Cornwall a few years ago, and I noticed how many of the gardens had terribly tall specimens of  Corylopsis, with bare trunks at eye level and the flowers carried way above our heads, so some pruning to keep new growth coming low down might be a good idea.

There are a few flowers on the winter flowering cherry, but I'm sure that when it comes into leaf there will be a mass of dieback.  The water table has risen under it and it's sitting far too wet.  I've been eyeing up possible spaces for a replacement in the front garden.  Pieris 'Katsura' is opening its dusky pink buds like giant heather bells as if nothing had happened, which is surprising and delightful after the winter weather.  I've a feeling the frost danger for pieris is to the emerging leaves more than the flowers, and the flowers were still in very tight bud when the worst of the weather came.  No flowers on the Edgeworthia, though.

At ground level the hellebores are looking good, the Lady series and their offspring in the front garden and assorted hybridus forms and their seedlings in the back.  A yellow form that has not been so vigorous is doing quite well this year, with several nice solid butter-yellow flowers.  H. x ericsmithii is flowering profusely, with petals of yellowish cream with pale plum backs.  'Pirouette' was a new purchase last year, and has made a chunky plant so perhaps it is a good doer.  It is a pinky plum with a formal double centre, and I planted it partly for its own sake, because it is very pretty, and in the hopes of some exotic babies in that part of the garden.  It got rather shaded last summer as a shrub rose leant all over it, but seems none the worse for the experience.  New hellebore varieties are so tempting, but not cheap, so I tend to try just one the first year and see whether they seem to have a robust constitution in a garden setting.

The primroses and polyanthus are starting to get going.  I love the wild yellow primroses, but like the pink ones too, and the more highly bred polyanthus, which I have in soft and strong yellow, and all shades of pink from pale and grubby to magenta and purple.  Some were from an alleged woodland walk seed mix, which came less true to description than any other seed I've grown, and some particularly vigorous yellow ones in a good clean shade of dark lemon were half price at B&Q.  The violets are starting bloom under the roses, my ambition being to cover the ground entirely with them and other ground cover so that there's no room for weed seedlings at all.  The white bergenia has two flowers on it, and not as many leaves as it should have, so something is eating it.  Driving back from Colchester today we passed a mass of a pink flowered variety, which reminded me how full and lush bergenia should be looking at this time of the year, if it is happy.  There are a few pulmonaria flowers out, in mid blue, bricky red, and a good red-blue with bright violet and purple overtones.  The pulmonarias started out as named varieties, but over the years self-seeding and the destructive effects of birds and animals on stick-in labels means that I don't know what most of them are.

The snowdrops still look good from a distance, but close up you see that they are starting to go over.  There are some flowers of Cyclamen coum, but not great sheets as I would like.  I plant a few more each year and they gradually spread and bulk up.  Something has dug up the majority of the crocus bulbs from the borders, though not so far from the grass.  I need to go over the borders and smooth down every last hole and scuffled area, then inspect them daily for fresh signs of digging to work out how often whatever it is comes.  We tried the trail camera on one badly affected bit of border one night, but didn't photograph anything.  It has been set up on that area again for tonight, and we'll see what we get.

The dwarf iris have just gone over, but Iris unguicularis is still sending up new flowers.

Iris unguicularis

The Iris unguicularis are out.  They grow in a row along the bottom of a south facing house wall, in very light soil, which ought to suit them fine, and normally does, but this isn't a vintage year for them.  The plants themselves still look dishevelled, and while there are dense clusters of bloom at some points along the row, there are also stretches that are devoid of flowers.

The flowers are larger than on the dwarf irises I wrote about on 5 February.  They are the same shade of mauve that you get in crocuses, with a lustrous sheen.  There are three standard petals, shaped like elongated spoons, that stand upwards, and three falls that curve and hang gracefully downwards.  The overall shape is like the classic fleur de lis, though I believe that was based on Iris florentina, the source of orris root, not I. unguicularis.  The falls are marked with a creamy blotch at the base, striped yellow up its centre and flecked with purple.  Named varieties are available, though I don't have any of them.  You can find details of them on the excellent Avon Bulbs website.

It was a struggle when I first planted them years ago to get them to establish, and I had to replace more than one of the original plants before getting an entire row.  Even now there is one missing at the end, though I don't mind that now the space has been used for a shrub needing wall protection.  Some gardening writers do comment that they can be hard to get going in the garden, so it may not just have been me.

I wonder if their indifferent flowering performance this season is down to the weather.  They come originally from north Africa and Greece, so the snow, cold and persistent damp may not have suited them.  I know I'm not the only local gardener to be having a bad year with them, as the great and knowledgable gardener of the solitary 'Katherine Hodgkin' (see 5th February) lamented that hers weren't up to much this year.  She blamed it on the fact that the girl who helps in her garden had given them a very thorough tidying last year, which she thought they must have resented.  What to do about the old and tatty leaves is an issue that divides gardeners.  Lots of people say to cut the leaves down by half after flowering, to let the sun ripen the base of the plant as well as to make them look less disreputable.  I tried that one year, and got a pretty poor crop of flowers the next year so went back to my previous method, which is to go through them at some point in the summer pulling out brown leaves in their entirety, and trimming off any dead ends.  I'm pretty sure I never got round to it last year, though, what with all the extra work caused by the previous winter's damage.

They used to be called Iris stylosa, worth knowing if you happen to be reading about iris in any old gardening books.

new year flowers

I had planned to make my inaugural New Year's Day post an account of the flowers out in the garden on 1st January.  There is normally a scattering of winter stalwarts and a few summer stragglers.  This year, practically nothing.  Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' had made a valiant effort, but the open petals were browned by cold.  At least there'll be some more along later.  Viburnum tinus opposite the dustbins managed a scattering.  It is never very floriferous.  Maybe it resents the mundane aspect.  Elsewhere a blank apart from one rather weedy Helleborus foetidus sporting a small tuft of green flowers on top of its single stem.  Among the leaves of Iris unguicularis I counted three tight buds, one nibbled by snails and one collapsed at the neck due to the weather. I haven't seen any flowers yet on the winter flowering cherry since winter began.  Some shrubs were 'showing colour', as plant nurseries' availibility lists would put it, but don't count for the purposes of today's survey.  Happy New Year.