a lovely day

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.

some drought tolerant summer flowers

I am still bashing along weeding the gravel.  I keep thinking that one more day's work will finish it.  Maybe tomorrow really will be the day.  This will be a swift blog entry (and therefore potentially riddled with typos and examples of lexical facilitation, although since Con Coughlin used the phrase 'pet projects' three times in as many paragraphs in the Telegraph I should say anything goes nowadays)  as I have been nominated as officer in charge of supper, on the grounds that it is chicken pie from the remains of the weekend's roast and I know how to make pastry.

There is quite a bit going on florally in the long bed.  The perennial wallflower 'Bowles Mauve', of which I have written before, is still blooming away.  The bed is not very rigorously colour-themed, but the far north end mostly contains pale blue, pink, white and yellow flowers.  Trotting out there just now to collect some flowers I came back with a handful, and could have picked more if the chicken pie hadn't beckoned.  Verbascum nigrum does well in the light soil.  This is longer lived than some of the hybrids like the Cotswolds series, let alone 'Helen Johnson', and gradually bulks up to make a many-stemmed plant.  The caterpillars of the mullein moth attack it occassionally, but not too often.  The flowers, held in tall typical verbascum spikes, are individually small, and a rich shade of yellow.  I know that some people consider it a mark of good taste not to have yellow flowers in their gardens, but I like them myself.

The shrubby Potentilla fruticosa are flowering.  Again, some people despise them because of their associations with municipal planting, but they are good tough plants with a long flowering season.  I mostly stick to the whites and yellows.  The single flower I have brought in with me is a beautiful thing, looked at objectively and forgetting it is a potentilla.  Five rounded soft yellow petals surround a boss of dusky yellow stamens.  In winter when they are out of leaf they do look astonishingly dead, but they will actually take very low temperatures, and I have read that they are popular in the scandinavian countries.  They can be clipped to form low hedges, though you rarely see them used in that way.

Gaura lindheimeri is trendy at the moment.  This is a skinny plant, that produces tall spikes of white flowers that open from the bottom of the spike upwards.  The unopened buds are pale pink, which gives an overall effect of soft pink rather than stark white.  The petals are slender and held upwards, while a bunch of white stamens protrudes, and the effect is often compared to butterflies.  There is a cultivar called 'Whirling Butterflies', but mine are the straight species, raised from seed.  Gaura has a reputation for being short-lived, though the pink cultivars are said to be worse than the white.  However, in my experience G. lindheimeri is pretty long lasting given very free draining soil.  The leaves can be oddly spotted, a feature commented on (somewhere) by Christopher Lloyd, but mine are looking very green and healthy this year (so far).  It will seed itself modestly if happy.

There is a useful Campanula, which I think is C. alliarifolia (I'll look it up later when I have time, and confess tomorrow if I have got this wrong).  It has wrinkled, roughly heart-shaped leaves, white bell-shaped flowers, and seeds itself usefully around shrubs and at the base of hedges, where it tolerates drought, root competition, semi-shade, and looks exactly right for a country garden.

The Catananche are great.  They form rosettes of narrow, grey-green leaves, from which cornflower shaped flowers rise on wiry stems.  The base of each flower is a cup of overlapping papery scales, each with a dark rib up the centre, which is as pretty as an everlasting flower.  I have the blue form, and some white ones, which don't spread as readily as the blue.  The season lasts a long time, following which the dried flower heads are quite architectural.  It seeds itself generously, but I am grateful for things that do so well on such light and starving soil, and just pull out the seedlings I don't want.

The news is that we let the black cat out for a couple of hours.  He has been looking increasingly energetic, and bored in the house.  He sunbathed in the long bed, then lay under the hedge, then went back inside and we shut him in so that he wouldn't wander off.  We wouldn't want him overdoing things, and he can spend another night or two safely locked in the study with his dose of anti-inflammatories and his special luxury food.  It will be an immense relief when he is judged fit to go out as he pleases, and we can leave the inner hall door open again.