Last SoS of 2019

Six on Saturday is a weekly diary hosted by The Propagator & contributed to by gardeners from all over the world. To see more SoS links, check out Mr P's comment section & the Twitter hashtag, #SixOnSaturday. 

We're at the end of another year, the end of another decade, yet in the garden, change is so gradual & so constant, it never seems the end of anything.

Let's see what's happening in the garden this week, shall we?









1.  Shed blooms.

This is the first year the potting shed's been used to overwinter live plants, & they couldn't be happier there.

The strawberry & salvia are two of the shed plants in bloom.


2.  Outside buds #1.

I didn't expect the witch hazel to start so soon.

Nevertheless, here they are, like small wounds on a seemingly dead branch.


3.  Outside buds #2.

On the other hand, I'd hoped the sarcococca would be wafting sweetly by the front door for Christmas.  Not to be.

This is one of the smaller type sarcocca (my foot below for scale).

I've seen mass plantings of the larger sarcs, & they're impressive.  I prefer the little guys, for some reason.


4.  Flower boxes.

A previous tenant put Japanese anemones in front of several stretches of garden wall, their flower stalks nearly as tall as the wall itself.  One section of border'd been planted with golden rod, though, which at their tallest, reach about half as high.  I've decided to hang flower boxes above them, hoping for a bit of fetching variety, rather than a trio of boxes oddly out of place.

The boxes've been planted but not hung, because once up, they'd be too tall for my short self to spy on.  There'd been nothing to see other'n a few weeds until this week when . . .

. . . the first daff showed up.  The boxes'll most likely get hung sometime in January.


5.  Moving day for Phyllis Bide.

The main garden project this week involved a change of plan.  The original idea was for this Phyllis Bide rambling rose to brighten up the wall behind the hot bin.  Phyllis knocked her socks off, but still has a long way to go before she conquers the wall.  Which isn't why I changed the plan.

The problem with Phyllis is, she's at the end of a narrow path that runs between a border & the bin.  That makes her hard to access, especially in summer.  For a rapid grower & prodigious bloomer, not ideal.  Also, there'll eventually be a fair bit of her hidden behind the bin, which, beyond the inconvenience, wastes a good rambler.

I gave her a prune, then moved her to an anemone wall where I've started a winter clematis.  Most likely there'll be anemone wars in Phyllis' future, but once they reach the negotiation stage, I think the combined effect will look nice.

As to the wall behind the hot bin, it'll get some fast growing annual climbers in 2020.

6.  Books.

My dodgy health has put reading in the category of things that exhaust me.  When a fellow SoSer suggested Gertrude Jekyll's Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden,  I wished I could, but suspected I couldn't.  

I found a used copy for £5.50, & the price decided it.  Jekyll's language is a century old & we don't particularly share the same gardening ethos, but, as a non-visual gardener myself (yes, we exist), her colour expertise is what I'm after.  Two pages at a time interrupted by frequent online image searches, & I'm working through it.

Coincidentally, my son got me Scent Magic by Isabel Bannerman for Christmas, saying he couldn't resist because it combined 2 of my favourite things - smell & gardening.  He thought that since it's divided into many small sections, I might be able to read it, albeit slowly.  He was right.

Like Jekyll, it's a challenging read for a sluggish brain, but definitely not because of dated prose.  Bannerman tosses Latin names through the sometimes historical, sometimes biomedical, often botanical & even gossip-ical.  It's become my favourite gift this year.

For all you visual gardeners, the photography in this book'll take your breath away.

That's my week reduced to Six.

Now time to scour the Special Plants catalogue.

Thanks so much for stopping by.  See you next time.