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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: viburnum

November blooms

15 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

blackcurrant sage, calendula, marigolds, Mexican sage, nerine, November flowers, pinks, tagetes, tangerine sage, viburnum, winter flowers

Flowers are getting a little thin on the ground lately.

Not that there’s no colour around: quite the opposite. My lovely ginkgo tree has lit up the garden like a butter-yellow lantern; the oaks and hazels have turned coppery brown and there are white pearls (Symphoricarpos) and red rubies (holly, viburnum and hawthorn) gleaming in all the hedgerows.

It’s a bit of an in-between month: the last of the summer’s flowers lingering ragged as 5am party girls and the winter’s blooms only just beginning to peep.
gbbd1

This is about the only flower from my Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ intact at the moment: the rest are having an off day, rather unappetisingly draped around with half-dead leaves. I’m hoping they’ll fall soon to leave the flowers unblemished again: it blooms constantly all winter long, releasing a gentle perfume you just catch on the air from time to time.
gbbd2

But I prefer to wait till later, when it’s properly cold, for my winter flowers. Right now it’s the hangovers from summer which I’m enjoying the most: those flowers so resolute, so stalwart, so undaunted by piffling things like weather that they just keep coming for as long as they can.

gbbd3

The marigolds – both Calendula and French marigolds (Tagetes – above) have been indefatigable this year. I’ve had calendula running right through my veg garden like a cheery wave: any empty patch I had going spare, any edge unadorned turned a summer yellow and orange. And they’re still going strong now. I have left the ones in the veg garden to set seed in the hope that they’ll come back next year.

The French marigolds too, sown in a propagator in February, have been better than in many a year: these are in the greenhouse, under the tomatoes. I couldn’t bear to pull them out as they were looking so pretty – so they’ll just have to prettify the winter salads I’m about to plant in here instead, until the first frosts arrive at least.
gbbd3a

The sages have been huge and prolifically flowery this year too. This one is tangerine sage, a more scarlet shade than my other big Mexican sage, blackcurrant sage – more of a magenta pink. Both are like neon lights at this time of year: I adore them and keep meaning to take cuttings but always get distracted at the proper time. One day I’ll manage it. In the meantime I’ll have to lift this and the other sage to bring in under cover for a frost-free winter: when I’ve got the cuttings going, though, I shall risk both outside. With borderline hardy plants like Mexican sages I find the more mature you can get them, the more likely they are to survive a winter outdoors: though you’ve still got to keep your fingers crossed for a kind season.
gbbd4

Must plant these out: my little violas, some for a client, some for my pots which line the steps down from the front gate.
gbbd5

And this little pink is another summer hangover: you can’t keep a good pink down, and this one is particularly sweet and dainty. They’re tougher than they look though: there are buds a-plenty still here and they’ll keep flowering till the frost gets them.
gbbd6

The undoubted star of the show however, the one which makes me smile every time I walk past, is my increasingly glorious Nerine sarniensis. I have clearly found it the conditions it likes: a winter in a frost-free greenhouse, then summer outdoors half-forgotten at the bottom of a cold frame. Do not pot on, do not feed; do not, in fact give it any care at all. In return for your neglect, it bursts into enthusiastic flower at the beginning of November and looks utterly breathtaking for weeks. Sometimes plants can be downright contrary. But when they look this lovely, you forgive them anything.

New year – new blog

01 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

cyclamen, January, January flowers, mahonia, nerine, New Year, viburnum

Sunrise on a new year

Sunrise on a new year

Hello again, and a very happy 2013 to all.

I do hope this year will be a bit of an improvement on last year’s – with eyepopping statistics just about to be announced, no doubt informing us – as if we needed the rubber stamp – that 2012 was indeed the wettest since records began. The evidence here is all around: the Levels are under water, and driving over the Salisbury Plains to my Mum’s house after Christmas was like driving through Waterworld.

Still, in the spirit of New things, I’ve got a shiny new blog to unveil today: I’ve been tinkering around a bit as I’d got a little jaded with Blogger, and a bit annoyed by the fact that my URL didn’t fit my blog’s title. It still doesn’t match but at least it’s now relevant and doesn’t secretly annoy the wonderful and admirable Wellywoman. So I made the well-worn trek across to WordPress and here I am.

(please don’t look at the rest of the website just yet: I am a baby where website building is concerned and Do Not Know What I Am Doing so it’s rather rubbish while I’m fiddling about figuring out the answers to various niggly little difficulties).

Anyway, to celebrate January 1st I thought I’d start a little annual challenge, based on a competition I used to enter (and come last in, every year) with the Surrey branch of Plant Heritage – an organisation worth undergoing ritual humiliation for every January if it raises a few pennies to save some long-lost garden cultivar from oblivion.

We had a little form to fill in, on which you listed every plant in flower on January 1st. Mine was a very, very short list: in fact I claimed the prize for the shortest list pretty much every year I was there. The best I heard about was a stoic 28: I can only sit back and admire in wonder at such wintery prowess.

So here’s your challenge. Since it’s now dark outside I won’t stick to Jan 1st, but during this week pop out and count how many flowers are out in your garden, and let us know about them. There is a virtual bunch of (winter and highly scented) flowers for the winner, plus a major allocation of smug points.

Here’s my list: just four, though beauties all. General verdict: could do better, I think. If I’m still here I’ll repeat the exercise this time next year (giving us all time to plant a few more January gems in the meantime).

Cyclamen coum

Cyclamen coum

janflowers_nerine

Nerine sarniensis ‘Blanchefleur’

janflowers_mahonia

Mahonia japonica

janflowers_viburnum

Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’

March flowers

15 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by sallynex in Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Anemone blanda, celandines, Chionodoxa luciliae, daffodils, Leucojum, mahonia, primula, scilla, spring bulbs, spring-flowering shrubs, viburnum

Spring has sprung: and all over the garden flowers are spangling lawns and peeking from borders. I’m not sure why spring flowers are almost all tiny: perhaps it’s to do with the energy involved in getting to flowering stage before most plants are even waking up. But they’re all the more exquisite for their diminutive size.

I can’t take credit for the flowers in these pictures, or indeed for most of the flowers in my garden over the next few months: I’m taking the softly, softly approach this year as I really have no idea what I’ve got just yet, having only had the acquaintance of my garden since last September. And big fat buds are emerging from the ground in the most unexpected places so I suspect there will be more than a few surprises. So far, it’s all looking very promising. Very promising indeed.

Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’: still going strong, but now joined by sumptuously pleated leaves in a brooding shade of slatey-green just breaking their buds

Primula vulgaris – or a selection thereof: these have rather deep yellow centres to be a wilding (though there are plenty of those in the banks hereabouts) but they are close enough not to offend

Scilla sibirica: this is one of mine, one of a few big wide pots I planted up with bulbs the autumn before last, and still going strong. The blue of the scillas backlit with sunlight is enough to stop me in my tracks every time I walk past. They play havoc with the school run.

The early bumblebees are enjoying the last of the Mahonia japonica flowers

and the slugs have been munching my Anemone blanda – though there are plenty more buds coming through

Chionodoxa luciliae: another star of the big sunny pots of bulbs that lift my heart

One of my favourite daffodils: Narcissus ‘February Gold’, small, early to flower and with a deep tangerine corona which glows in low spring sunshine

Leucojum vernum: I was wondering what the big clump of healthy, strappy leaves just outside my back door were: then they started producing lovely clear white flowerbuds about a week ago. Never been able to grow them before (they like wetter soil): I’m chuffed to bits.

Yes, I know. It’s a weed. But you can almost forgive lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria) its rampantly invasive nature and infuriating ability to thumb its nose at your efforts to weed it out when it sprinkles the lawn (and the borders, and the hedgerows) with its lovely droplets of pure sunshine.
Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day is hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens – thanks Carol!

The Grand Tour #2: The Sunny Bit

02 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by sallynex in herbs, pond

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

banks, new gardens, summer bedding, sunflowers, tropical, viburnum

Now for the one bit of my garden that is undeniably Very Sunny Indeed. It is on the south-facing side, there are, for once, no trees shading it, no house in the way, no high banks blocking out the sun. It isn’t even concreted over. For this reason it is, the garden plan in my head dictates:

The Tropical Garden

(you are allowed to laugh)
Turn your back to the house, look a little over to your right, and you will see to one side of the path (the sunny side, natch) a flat bit. This is remarkable in itself as it is the only flat bit in the whole garden (apart from a concreted-over bit behind it, just visible to the left of the picture, which is where my garden office is going to go so that I can look out over this bit of the garden whenever I tire of my computer screen, which will be often).

It measures around 25ft x 40ft: not enormous, but quite big enough to house a selection of exotic and exotic-looking plants. I have for a long time nursed a secret hankering for a tropical edibles garden and this is going to be it.

At the moment my tropical edibles collection includes a big (and splitting) pot of yacon and a fig tree. Not very impressive, really. I hope to add ginger (Zingiber, proper ginger, not Hedychium – although I have two of those too which will no doubt go in there somewhere), some taro roots (Colocasia esculenta to you botanical types), edible passion fruits, kiwi vines, some acocha and a few bananas just for fun. The idea is that it will eventually be the kind of jungly mass of shoots, leaves and, no doubt, eats to pluck romantically from the vine as you waft through its sunshiny shade.

But all that is in the future: here, unfortunately, is it in its current unadorned state.

There is – of course! this is my garden! – a bank. A particularly steep, in fact nearly vertical bank at that. However: ever one to pluck opportunity from the teeth of a bloody ridiculous situation, I am getting quietly quite excited about this particular bank. I see vertical planting a go-go: beans tumbling down from soil pockets near the top, dangling their purple pods among clambering vines of kiwi, passion fruit and acocha…. now all I have to figure out is how to a) support the ones I’m not actually going to plant into the bank, and b) get the bank’s current occupants – mainly stinging nettles and harts-tongue ferns – under control.

The emergency pond lives here, right at the front bit where it curves round to the house. I call it the emergency pond as Mango, who you can just about see under those iris leaves, only just survived the house move: poor old Peanut floated to the top of the rather inadequate fishtank they were living in while we got around to digging holes for ponds (not, admittedly, top of our to-do list on the day after the removal men left). After that and with the anguished wailing of small children echoing in our ears, the fishpond was in within two hours. And very nice it looks: I’m hoping the taro will drape rather elegantly over the edge of it in times to come.

There is a nod at planting: a slightly dislocated herb garden of mint, lavender, rosemary and sage all looking very healthy, if a little without context.

And a splash of colour from bedding. Flowering! In November!

The real splash of colour at the moment, though, is from this viburnum: I’m thinking x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ as it has the most incredible burnished bronze-purple autumn foliage.

And last but not least: some absolutely giant sunflowers. They must be (and I am not boasting here as I had nothing to do with growing them) 12ft tall. It bodes well for the fertility of the soil that they can pull this off in supposedly thin chalk: in fact I think sunflowers, being edible in both seed and seedling stages, definitely qualify for the tropical look.

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