Six on Saturday, 05/09/2020

It was not an especially good week for gardening. I seem to have been occupied with other things, some garden-related but I feel I have done little hands-on gardening this week. Nonetheless, the grass was cut and edged and I made good inroads into tidying up the vegetable patch in preparation for winter. The damsons which grow on the boundary ditch were gathered and made into jam and Damson gin and the playhouse (that, the youngest, child is now approaching his 28th birthday!) was painted BLACK!!! It must be kept in good condition for the grandchildren who like to play there when visiting and worth the bother for the gems, the precious moments, that arise there – my grandson telling me to sit down to watch television with him – that’s us looking at the two windows – and he telling me that it was great that we had two televisions sets as we could look at two different programmes! I was looking at the trees and he was looking at the sky. Such simple fun!

The highlight of the week was away from home, a short trip to Inistioge in Co. Kilkenny, to visit a riverside meadow where the Meadow Saffron, Colchicum autumnale, were in full flower. It is really marvellous to visit a site such as this and see a plant growing in huge numbers, in its natural environment, just perfect simple beauty. This has been an especially good year for the colchicums and I have never seen them in such great numbers. Individually, they are very beautiful flowers – we grow some in the garden – but there is no doubt but that large drifts do make a fabulous impact.

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Some views around the bridge and river in Inistioge, the meadow and groups of the Meadow Saffron.

The colchicum season is also getting under way in the garden and the first of the Colchicum autumnale – the same plant as is growing in the wild in the photographs above – is just beginning to come into flower at the moment. C. ‘Benton End’ and ‘Nancy Lindsay’ continue to carry the show until joined by others as the season progresses. These have become favourites of mine in the last few years. We have grown some for years but added a good number of different cultivars in recent years and they add both variety and a longer season so we enjoy them all the more.

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On the home front, it is the display from the cyclamen which is the highlight at the moment. These are Cyclamen hederifolium which have built up in numbers over the years through self-seeding. The final photograph is of Cyclamen purpurascens and, though it is still only a small clump, it is treasured. The original corm was given to me by a gardener at Villa Balbianello on Lake, on Lake Como, when we were visiting. Of course, I later realised that they were probably regarded as weeds in the garden as we saw afterwards that they were growing everywhere in the woodland around the villa garden. Nonetheless, they have a good background story, a good souvenir of our holidays and they are proving to be an excellent garden plant.

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Sedums are also looking great at the moment and they are a wonderful plant for a huge range of pollinators such that one will rarely look at a flower without seeing a bee, butterfly of some other insect enjoying the fare on offer. Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ is an old and reliable cultivar; ‘Matrona’ is similarly a very good garden plant with the addition of darker foliage and while the foliage of the variegated forms is attractive we have always found them weaker growers. ‘Red Cauli’ has been the garden wonder here over the last number of years after being given a small plant by a friend, Mary has propagated it continuously and has now built up quite an amount of it. Although cuttings can be taken at any time during the growing season, it is Mary’s practice to give all sedums the “Chelsea Chop” – a cut back in mid May – and she used the pieces cut off as cuttings which she simply pushed into the soil where they root without fail.

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Not all looks well in the garden and the vegetable garden has become a raggedy patch of late. I thought that somehow the runner beans and French beans had survived the recent storms but as the days pass it became obvious that the foliage had been shredded in the winds as it soon turned brown and dropped off. The runner bean plants had broken about a metre above ground level and there was no hope of them producing further so I put them on the compost heap during the week. The french bean plants are still producing, remarkably so, given their condition and I will continue to pick and enjoy them for another while at least. Lettuce plants simply rotted from the amount of rain while purple sprouting broccoli had bolted so left them for the enjoyment of the Common White butterflies who laid their eggs on them and whose caterpillars devoured the foliage when they emerged.

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Finally, the chestnuts have begun falling from the old chestnut tree in “The Lane” and the make a pretty picture and bring back childhood days of collecting and hardening – baking in the oven! – and games of conkers, sore fingers and lots of fun and laughter.

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To read more Six on Saturday blogs go to The Propagator’s entry for today: https://thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com/2020/09/05/six-on-saturday-05-09-2020/  ,scroll down to the comments and you will find other bloggers have posted links to their Saturday entry there. Lots to read!