The Lily Season

It's the lily season all right - both hemerocallis and lilium. This picture shows a combination - a lovely big pink one, planted last year, along with my ubiquitous flesh-coloured daylily which has been spread all over the place.
So, time for a progress report. This summer was great for growing peas, but we didn't actually *eat* many of them, so I am thinking that, as far as peas go, their room is more useful than their presence. In fact I've hauled them all out, and plan to fertilize their spot for garlic later in the fall. Carrots have struggled - they needed to be planted and re-planted several times, and they are still not much of a size. The last ones I planted were the tiny round ones, so I hope they make some size at least. I have gathered all of my plastic tubing from making hoop skirts, and plan to use them to make row covers for the more tender plants. To heck! with running out and covering the tomatoes with sheets every night. I'll just cover with fleece and leave them up. Just have to find the fleece, or equivalent, here.

Still haven't put the ends in the greenhouse - it will have to happen fairly soon, but not just yet, as I think I still need the ventilation. It was quite hot in there yesterday, and I didn't get out there until the evening when I found a couple of plants - a strawberry and a tomato - quite wilted. Hope they are looking better this morning.
Things are a bit disorganized in there at the moment, but once I get the strawberry bed dug and them in the ground and out of their pots, I'll be able to organize for winter. The brown leaves in the lower left of the picture were willow branches, which I left in a trug until they sprouted roots - they are now all either potted up or in a bed in the garden. Roll on willow weaving, etc. next year. Hope this will be a good kind of willow to work with - it certainly was easy to root. 

 The ground cherries are doing quite well, large plants and plenty of little "lanterns" on the branches. They are all still quite green, I don't know if they change colour or not, to indicate that they are ripe. I have actually picked some rhubarb from my one tiny bunch - enough for a rhubarb cake. Apparently you are supposed to leave it alone, that first year. The plant seems fine still, though losing some of the lower leaves. No sign of a seed-head yet. I suppose I should leave that alone, should one develop.

Apparently I have been killing hydrangea slips to no good purpose. I haven't gotten even one of them to root.  I am not going to give up, but I think I should adhere to the rules a little more rigidly - use an inert medium, and do it indoors, covered, with bottom heat. We'll see if that helps. If successful, I may try rooting rose cuttings again! But it is heartbreaking to think of the potential, alas, now lost! I still think I stand a better chance of rooting and growing something that's already shown its survival instincts in this climate - than buying something grown elsewhere.

The gladioli Helen gave me are all blooming like good ones! The first to bloom were a deep pink with white, but it looks like some of the other ones - not yet in bloom - will be other colours, including white. Interestingly, I have learned that it's probably not the best thing to plant gladioli at the north end of a flower bed, as they seem to want to face the sun - and therefore have their backs to you as you stand on the lawn looking at them. Next year, I'll find a spot down on the south corner of the bed and they will face the public!! I actually think they will be perfect there, as there's quite a black spot there at the moment, after all the feverfew and geraniums got chopped down. Back to the vegetable plot for a bit, the asparagus are doing really well. They keep growing new shoots, and some are almost of harvest-able size. Of course I know not to, but I am looking forward to a spear or two next year. After I hauled out the peas, I staked up the asparagus, as the fronds had been knocked over by the wind a bit. We are eating green beans, and I have even found a few yellow ones. And I've put up a bag of greens for the freezer. Raspberries were quite a disappointment, very few berries at all, so they are going to get some fertilizer, soon, and I will get busy and cut down the old canes as well. There might be a cup or so left, and I did get 2 batches of jam made...not so prolific as last year at all. They seemed to dry out quite badly despite the almost constant rain. Maybe they need a soaker hose invested in them.

Further Rain

I've been making progress on trying to bring my garden up slightly closer to the "Aiken Standard".

Last week I dropped in to Habitat for Humanity, and they were putting out a little garden wicker set - loveseat, chair and table. They'd been painted, (and two different colours, worse luck) but for $45 they were fine. I'd been prepared to pay more for a grotty modern "bistro" set for the deck and these are so much better! They had no cushions, of course, but I can make cushions! (and in fact I have.) They make a great spot to set out my pelargoniums and also my tiny blooming calla lily. And for sitting out and inhaling the honeysuckle fragrance in the evenings too.

 In other news, I put out a freebie request on Kijiji for used carpet for weed suppression - and got a response! So on Friday we borrowed the truck, and after work Fred and I went and picked it up - it was a wonderfully grotty one, in two pieces, one huge and the other smaller. On Saturday I put the smaller one on top of the former beds at the north end of the vegetable plot. I plan to espalier some fruit trees there - cherries, plums and apples, I think. Then I cut strips of the big one and put them in between the raised beds in the vegetable garden. The left-over pieces I put along the south side of the greenhouse. It's the whole length of the greenhouse (15 feet) plus the space between the greenhouse and the garden, and a bit less wide, maybe 10-11 feet.  I'm thinking fruit there, too, but smaller ones:  cranberries and strawberries. Maybe blueberries too!
The strips between the beds are likely to remain there - even after I get the bed sides put up - but once the fruit beds are planted I'll be able to use those bits of carpet elsewhere. I can't wait for the roadside waste collection in October - I'm scouting for more carpet!! This weed suppression method is GREAT.
In my travels I have been keeping an eye open for hydrangeas and taking sneaky slips when I do. I have three in the greenhouse, and am trying to root them. Fingers crossed. I went to Cool Breeze nursery on Friday, they had plenty of hydrangeas but I didn't sneak any slips of theirs. Didn't buy any either - $40 each! Perhaps there will be an end-of-season sale. I did get a buddleja, with three or four flowering buds on it. Anne says they're a weed in Vancouver, but I'm afraid that here in Zone 5b they'll need winter cover to survive. I always thought that they were shrubs, but Cool Breeze was selling them as perennials - and the cheapest ones, at that.

Hydrangea Paniculata Grandiflora

I saw some bright-ish red hydrangeas in a greenhouse in Winsloe, but the shop wasn't open so I don't know if I could afford one or not. Yet.
I DO have two hydrangeas of my own, an Annabelle from Mum's garden, which is struggling to survive, having moved itself UNDER a fir tree in the west of the house, and a Pee Gee which went in a couple of years ago and is doing quite well, just to the west of the spruce hedge, behind the Ring-around-the-rosey bed. It's putting on blossom like a good 'un. I'll try propagating from them in the spring. I'm prepared to baby along the current slips in the house over the winter, if I'm lucky enough to root them. After all, some people's garden hydrangeas started off as house plants! (I will keep an eye out at Easter-time for house plants too, though I suppose they aren't hardy here.) I scratched away some soil under the fir tree and put in some fertilizer - in FRONT of the Annabelle hydrangea. Maybe she'll pull herself out of there, and into the better soil. And I've limbed up the tree to give her some head-room. Come on, Annabelle.

The Summer of Rain...

Yes, no chance that the garden will dry out while this summer continues. OTOH it's been great for knitting and Brit-TV watching.

Went to visit a fabulous garden on Sunday - open for charity. I have admired this one from afar for quite a while, as it is opposite the place where we used to go to get our lawnmower serviced (the old gas mower. Dave doesn't do electric). On the outside there is a lovely Japanese-inspired fence with a lovely, wide, herbaceous border. It includes a pergola and a door as well.

Inside, it's amazing! There are two sun-houses, a cottage done up like a guest bedroom, several more bits of the nice fencing, a long fenced-in walk, many pergolas and other structures, and innumerable sets of tables and chairs with tea sets and decorative birdhouses, dotted around everywhere.
The theme is "VICTORIAN", and yes, I do mean the all-caps. Much too twee for my taste, all of that, but the plants were amazing. There were lots of beds with roses integrated into the planting - this must be my aim this fall, I'm already making spots where they could go. I mean to take out the less-hardy ones I've had in the front of the rose mound and just let the rugosa-types take it over, and place the others here and there in the beds.

(I have been having propagation fun in the greenhouse. When I cut back my big pink Geranium Macrorrhizum I had several bits with roots on them, from underneath the plant, so I potted them up and now I have about a dozen, growing away in pots. Too bad I like them so little - they make a great leafy plant but not much bloom. The Geranium Sanguineum have been setting seeds, so I potted up some of those yesterday, as well as potting up some cuttings. I think the rainy summer has been good for rooting cuttings. No chance of any of them drying out.)

Anyway, back to the Aiken garden. There were many, many spectacular clematis everywhere, sometimes climbing a post in the middle of a big bed, other times on the structures, either fences or pergolas, etc. I really liked this dark pink one.  A few had finished flowering, but most were full out and gorgeous. If I knew more about clematis I would maybe know what kinds they were.





 There were many hydrangeas as well, most of them the white ones - Annabelle, I think. They had a couple of the big-leafed ones, with the gigantic blue and pink flowers. They were just planted, I think...quite small. Anyway, they obviously make lovely cut flower arrangements as well.

 There seems to be a mainly pink-and-white colour scheme in large areas of the garden, which I liked a lot, as that's what I think goes best around our place here. So, lots of suggestions about what could be used here. There were plenty of yellows and oranges, but in other locations, separate from the pinks and whites. Specifically, there is a series of terraced beds leading down to the brook from the screened porch. There were plenty of daylilies there, as well as hostas and astilbes.




There were a lot of hostas everywhere, of course, as they do a great job of filling in the fronts of borders and so on. (I am still convinced that gardens can be made without them.)

All in all, an amazing garden, full of great plants looking absolutely wonderful, and not so terribly far out of my reach - in a more modified way.
I think I want my structures to be more organic (willow, rough cedar) and my seating to be more in keeping with the arts and crafts esthetic than the Victorian. But I'd take the plants! They must have the greenest of thumbs. The garden was started 20 years ago, and Mrs Aiken says they haven't done much that's new for the last five years, but there is a new DU pond next door that will take some decorating - she says rhododendrons. Spring interest!

Ring-around-the-rosey a Success!

A while ago, I went on at length about my plan to disguise the ugly stump of a Theves poplar in my lawn by ringing it with roses. Exactly two years ago I cleaned up the firespot (we'd tried to burn it out) and planted white and pink shrub roses between the roots, and a rose I've been calling "wild" in the middle, just against the stump. They did well last year, though there wasn't a lot of bloom.

Well, this is it, two years on. The shrub roses aren't getting big very fast (though to be fair, they started out as tiny little offshoots). However, the wild one is loving the position and the encouragement. It's not actually wild. I have been seeing it everywhere in municipal and private plantings, so it must be available commercially. I don't yet know its name, but I am scouring the rose books, looking for it. Up close, the individual flowers are single, with a heart-shaped petal, and they are pink in the bud, with a bit of a pink tinge even when open.  I think it might be "Pleine de Grace" The pink rose underneath is Pink Grootendorst, given to me by my friend Henry last year. It bloomed last year, and it's blooming again. Lovely.

I was in Summerside yesterday, and they have a lot of shrub roses in their municipal plantings, particularly along the seaside boardwalks. They seem to prune them quite successfully to keep them in shape (though their wild ones like mine are showing new growth above the pruning line, like mine above). I'm not sure whether it will bloom again on the old growth, so I am leaving it alone for this year. If it turns out NOT to bloom on old growth then I'll be able to keep it in line by pruning.

The bed beside the Ring-around-the-rosey is looking well at the moment. I put a sucker of the rosa Gallica Tuscan Superb in the middle last year, and this year it's shyly blooming. The liatris is looking likely to bloom soon, and the pink astilbe is blooming away quite happily. The ubiquitous feverfew is all over the place, of course. I thought for a while that I had three kinds, but now I think the daisy-like ones have centres which keep coming out so they get fluffy in the middle. There's a taller astilbe in the next part of the bed, not blooming yet because it's in shade, like the pink one should be!!

The red climbing rose Henry Kelsey on the Celtic trellis is doing quite well, although the Dublin Bay has yet to bloom this year (you can just see a tiny sprig in the bottom of the photo). The foliage is there but no blooms so far. In other rose news Celestial is out, although it has been damaged by bugs and weather, so no blooms which would look good in a photograph so far. The Royal Bonica has two huge buds, so I'm hoping that today's wind and/or tomorrow's rain don't damage them too much. I think I've decided that the mystery rose in the bed along the south is de Montarville. I saw a photo which looked a lot like it, and the name sounds familiar. It is just coming in to bloom now, as it had a bit of a breakage problem after the winter. It seems to cope with being broken down (or gnawed by mice!) so perhaps that's what I should plan to do to it, if ever it isn't devastated some spring.

Summertime tasks abound

persicaria affinis

Much progress has been made since last I wrote. The best thing has been the discovery of The Flower Patch - we've been back for more plants, including some yellow iris for Karen (she babysat the cats while we were in Halifax) and the rest were groundcovers - persicaria affinis "Superba",  saxifraga x arendsii "Purple Robe", a campanula "White Clips"and a couple more. They are in the bed around the south lawn for now - I'm developing the lasagne beds on the west side and they - or their progeny - will go in there later.

East-west bed, on the edge of the south lawn

In Halifax I bought a mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia "Heart of Fire") and a couple of perennials - groundcover again, a variegated bugleweed and another campanula, blue this time, I think. We bought them at the Lakeland Plant World in Dartmouth.What a place. Any plant you could want is there, I think.
Anne and I (mostly Anne) tidied up the beds around the south lawn and planted a lot of the groundcovers in there, after edging the beds and doing some mulching. Looks good. The snowballs and spirea have mostly gone over by now, but they were spectacular while they were on.
Roses are coming along, now that we have been having some sun on a regular basis. The 'wild' rose is starting, with one of the Pink Grootendorst underneath, and Samuel Holland is peeping out. The rugosas on the mound are doing well - Blanc de Coubert, Snow Pavement, Alba, Hansa, and Marie Bugnet. Celestial is looking healthier now - should be a good bloom season.

Too busy to post...

 The greenhouse, tidied up. Needs a few more shelves, and doors at both ends, I think, to get the breeze through. So, currently, the things in there are enjoying shelter but not exactly warm greenhouse conditions.
I have planted all the tomatoes out in the garden (except the 6 I plan to keep indoors, 2 Sweet Million, and 4 Early Girl). I need a couple of tomato cages and they will all be ready for the growing season. I also put in the ground cherries and the rhubarb in the lasagne bed yesterday, and planted carrots, more lettuce and spinach, and a short row of beets. I'm really getting into this succession planting lark.
I managed to get most of the plants from Veseys $2 sale, which had been soaking overnight, potted up, Now to wait until they are a bit bigger before putting them out in the garden beds.  Some of them looked quite healthy - and others are definite long shots.
We dug a trench in the western garden and put in the willow twigs - we have been keeping them in water, and the ones with their heads covered have done best. However, they apparently root readily anywhere so we are hopeful.

Must go arrange dinner, as we are at Small Halls tonight! Cynthia MacLeod, Tony McManus, and Nuala Kennedy.

Visits to Plants

Anne and I set out yesterday to visit greenhouses and plant sources in the East, mainly on the lookout for groundcover plants, and willows.
Started at Jewells, where there were lots of big begonias and pelargoniums but nothing much that was unique at all. I did get a pot rhubarb, Anne found a yellow-flowered groundcover, and I got some liquid tomato food, of which I have heard such good reports. Then we went to Veseys. They were having a sale on all of their remaining roots and bulbs, all at $2 a bag. Most were quite dried up, but we got 8 different things - three geraniums, a couple of calla lilies, some white liatris, oxalis, and firecracker plants, whatever they are. We soaked them overnight, and will pot them up and monitor their progress before putting them out to fend for themselves in the garden. Also got two more packets of bean seeds, as the ones I planted have not shown - I think the seed was bad. I also picked up carrot seeds because I suddenly remembered that I hadn't bought any. Have to put those in today. We dropped in to the York Greenhouses but again didn't see much.
Then we went to Covehead and had fish lunch on the wharf (I had a lobster roll - delicious!) while looking at the following view:
 

Then we drove cross-country and ended up in Orwell, headed to Wood Islands first, to the Island Pride Nursery, where Anne found a gorgeous climbing hydrangea ($29.99) and I got a couple of groundcovers, a moss phlox in white and another thing with pink flowers. Can't remember the name right now, but it feels like that plastic "parsley" they used to put between meat trays at the butchers. Then, on the way back, we followed a sign to The Flower Patch on the Glasvin Road in Pinette, and WHAT a Place!

We didn't know how much the plants were going to cost, so just bought three things, a little cushion dianthus (SWEET) a big bunch of Iris Siberica in White Swirl, and a gorgeous Japanese Iris in Wine:

ISN'T it LOVELY??


I have planted it in the middle of the N-S bed - there were two big blooming ones in the clump. Total cost? $12. That's $4 each, folks. Race down there and buy this lady's plants. They are field-grown, weed-free, healthy, and there are shrubs too.



On the way back we drove down to Orwell Cove, just to admire the view, and found this gorgeous rugosa rose growing wild on the side of the road - it's single like mine but a deep, deep pink. There were cinnamon roses too.
Here they are:

And then we found a clump of WILLOW!! so we picked a few samples. We are on the hunt of willow that we can propagate and make into willow things - furniture, living fences, that sort of thing. Can't find any trees for sale (except pussy willow and weeping willow) but whatever kind this was it was hardy, had long branches, and its feet were in the water.