SUMMER BRIGHTS FOR SNOWED IN FRIENDS

In my previous post I promised some more summery pics to show that autumn was not all… Now as I read about England caught in yet more snow, I think it is time for a colour injection. These photos were taken on last weekend’s walk, and summer heat is still with us although some early mornings have called for a sleeve.

These cannas grow below the old barn – the red is a species (or near species I grew from seed collected some 25 years ago and the yellow is a later acquisition. The spotted canna was only planted this summer, given to me by my father from a single plant he planted a few years back in Johannesburg, and which was recently divided and moved.

The above photo from 5 years back when my lovely Border Collie was still with us shows this area as a whole – and here you will find a post from 3 years back on a canna garden I wish to revisit!

This Red Hot Poker grew wild on the farm and we moved into the Cottage Garden some years ago. Its season is short but dramatic.

One last pic for now (most other flowers are white and can wait); this is a dark cosmos, blown over and seen against the weathered brick of the wall below it  – rather a nice way of seeing these dramatically simple daisies I think!

 

ABANDON CONTROL NEGLECT

I was planning a post on our wild flowers to slot in with the celebration of Wildflower Wednesday and have been saving suitable pics for days – it being high summer and wild flowers plentiful. But my own recent writing has prompted thought on the subject (see my nature/nurture pic on my previous post) and as a direct result of that  post I discovered http://thinkinGardens.co.uk This is a fascinating forum for serious talk about gardening and why we do it; about gardening as art, or at least as highly conscious construction.

This morning when I stuck my head across the gate of the Ellensgate Garden it struck me, not for the first time but more forcibly than before, that this most considered and contrived of my gardens had shown me a toffee and done its own thing – rather spectacularly well. What is more, self-sown wildings like the ferns, the mass of Gladiolus dalenii and the yellow arum, Zantedeschia albomaculata contribute substantially to this mutiny. As do the mosses and lichen on the very expensive sandstone trimmings from 800km away I commissioned – even if they now might just as well be cast concrete…

The Ellensgate Garden  was the first development along the new axis from the front door. I started on it in 1996. It came to be because my father acquired the gate made by his father for their family home back in the 30s – read more about it here and follow the link given for full explanations of the material used etc. That original description, first used on a gardening forum nearly 10 years ago, makes for amusing reading against the backdrop of my present plight – is this carefully designed and built garden all about control? Is it the living abandon within the framework of control that makes it a success or a failure? Is what we are witnessing now simply the result of neglect? And then we can ramble on to the ethical/aesthetic debate around “can a garden which is the result of neglect even be considered to be a ‘good’ garden?” And as every gardener knows, that question leads on to all sorts of issues like the passing of time and the need for maintenance, which are like frame and wall to a painting…

You see, the above is to my mind one of the most successful parts of my garden. Snag is that the only human intervention here has been the removal of some dead branches every few years. The trees were planted by nature. So were the grasses and the creeper. All natural, indigenous, endemic, native. Does that mean that it is not a garden? Or that I am such a poor gardener that I can’t compete with something so totally random?

What if I told you that the deepest joy of my gardening is these random incidents? The moments where Nature says – so it seems to me – ‘well done, Jack, and as a reward I will give you this as well!’ Witness these wild daisies in the arboretum growing, you guessed it, amongst wild grasses and other wild plants but against a backdrop of highly exotic camellias.

Here it is in close-up: Berkeya setifera, called Buffalo Tongue because of its large rough leaves…

Of course it is easy for me in our mountain’s kind climate with its varied flora to call on nature to contribute… The garden lobelia in the pot and the agapanthus beyond are close relatives of our wildings.

This is Lobelia erinus, the species of the garden hybrid, photographed growing wild on the farm; individually possibly more beautiful, but not as floriferous as the garden hybrids.

And here, planted in the narrow bed up against Alfred’s Arches and raised from seed from a wilding on the farm, is Agapanthus inapertus, a different species from those most garden Agapanthus hybrids originate from.

Above, the same two flower heads, photographed a few days earlier from the opposite side, together with possibly our most spectacular wilding, Crinum macowanii, seen in more detail below.

Of course not all the wildings are spectacular. The two flowers below are each no bigger than a finger nail, the yellow Hypoxis hiding in rough lawn and the blue Wahlenbergia floating inches above it on thin stems.

Some are little more than weeds. Weeds? Ah, there too is a whole argument. Rephrase: some are so fleeting in flower and willing in seed that they have no garden value, tend to spread, and have value only as sudden little incidents in the wilder parts of the garden. Ergo, the kind of flowers I love. The flowers of Vernonia, below, are a case in point, especially in a strongly coloured example such as this one, seen against a little fern. Ferns too are worth an investigation on their own…

I have told the story before of how, on a tour to Sissinghurst, I was first attracted to Phygelius. ‘Don’t you know it?’ asked a lady on the tour, ‘It is from South Africa!’ I didn’t explain that just because one came from Washington DC it meant one knew the president. But I remembered the flower.

To my absolute surprise I discovered huge sheets of it just below Freddie’s Dam’s wall on my return to South Africa. But one needs to wade through the marches to get to see it in close-up. Which is well worth doing.

It took me another 15 years to strike a cutting, and that has been languishing for over a year on my kitchen window sill. That is the kind of sharing of one’s inadequacies which leads to angst – or perhaps stills it. (Never mind; I’m not nearly as angst-ridden as you might suspect. ) However it does reopen the debate about neglect and good gardening… Change the subject.

We move further and further away from Wildflower Wednesday, and I have been away overnight to my cousins on Samaria near Mapungubwe – see this post which tells more about Samaria and links in to many of my other current thoughts. It was hot – night-time minimums equalling day-time maximums in less extreme parts of the country during last week’s heat-wave. And I want to share just one plant from this visit: an indigenous plant but considered a pest by many farmers; its English name, Devil’s Thorn, gives just one reason. The seed has vicious prickles. I have more than once had it go right through the sole of a shoe into my foot!

My sister tells of arriving in the arid city of Windhoek as a young woman. Dotted around her sandy ‘garden’ were the prettiest yellow flowers. So she dug them up and planted them on either side of her concrete entrance path. She wondered why the neighbour looked at her strangely. Until the seeds developed and she understood…

Sticking to the joys of wildings, I am pleased to report the survival of an attack by baboons (which you can read about here) of the Eulophia orchid. Here is its first flower of the season, on the only stalk. Not as robust as before, but alive!

I end this post, written over several days, with a reference to one of our quieter but more pervasive wildings, a flower that grows on you with close scrutiny – Thunbergia natalensis: a perfect example of the charms of a wilding as expressed by gardeners around the world on Wildflower Wednesday, a monthly post initiated by Gail of ‘Clay and Limestone’.

 

RANDOM ROSES

‘Tis the season of the rose… Many of mine are once flowering old-fashioned types, others are so tatty by the end of summer that they hardly have a leaf left. Mine is not the perfect climate for roses, and my adapt or die attitude does not make it easy for them. But after months in which I doubted the sanity of growing roses by the hundred, propagating them from seed and cuttings, owning shelves of books on them and generally being more than a little obsessive about them, I am once again overwhelmed…

Intoxicated by their scent, I am pleased I planted a dozen cutting grown Jacques Cartiers outside The Plett – a typically high-shouldered Portland which does brilliantly with me.

Despite having lost well over half the roses planted in the Anniversary Garden, it is still possible to take an impressive picture there – the deep gold is ‘South Africa’ (KORberbeni, marketed in other countries as ‘Golden Beauty’) The pale one is the David Austin rose ‘Molineaux’.

Then there are the two nameless roses I received from two favourite aunts who live 1400km apart. They are very similar, but definitely different. Both are heavily perfumed, tend to suckering and long whippy growth and are once-flowering. I would describe them as Centifolias of obvious Gallica parentage, but can do no better. Aunty Corrie, pictured above and below, is a rich fuchsia pink with a silvery sheen to the reverse of the petals, and it darkens to a lovely rich pink. In fact, the colour ‘old rose’ seems to have been invented for this rose.

Any help in identifying them will be hugely appreciated! Aunty May is a slightly smaller rose,  a little paler, with narrower petals and  less robust in growth, but she also darkens with age. Here she is below.

The next rose I can identify with certainty. She is Mme Ernest Carvat and was introduced to the world by the widow Schwartz in 1888 after sporting from Mme Isaac Pereire. Bourbon climbers, they are two of the most beautifully scented roses in the world. I have several of the darker pink Mme Isaac Pereires, having grown them from cuttings, but I lost my two original plants.

The next two I truly believe I grew from seed. The first I named ‘Mothertjie’, my pet name for my mom, adding the Afrikaans diminutive. It is a slightly remontant rambler and I grow it through a tree at the water lily pond. It featured in a recent post – here the photo is again.

And here the close-up – a pretty rose with textured pink on white colour and a creamy-yellow towards the centre.

The other seed raised rose intrigues me no end – especially as I can only assume it was seed-raised. It looks as though it will be a tall many stemmed shrub, although it might prefer to be a climber; it has reddish pink flowers and the new growth is beautifully dark. I will be watching it carefully for it might be a winner.

‘Penelope’ possibly the best of the Pemberton Musk roses, is another I have raised successfully from cuttings. Then I decided some years ago to plant The Mothers’ Garden with only ‘Penelope’ – and over two years struck not one cutting successfully! So now we have other plans there.

Growing away lustily in the New Old Rose Garden (read more here if you want to know how we came to move the roses) is Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’ – in fact I wish a few more of these roses would grow as well… this is their first full summer in their new site and we lost several more roses over winter, as well as seen several to be slow to get going after the winter.

Lastly we have one of the great curiosities of the rose world: Rosa moschata, the Musk Rose or Common Moss Rose, growing alongside Freddie’s Dam. Those are not thorns on the bud, but glands which when stroked release a musk-like fragrance. The flowers are beautifully and typically scented though.

Whilst in Johannesburg we spent many happy hours in my cousin’s garden where there are more beautiful and interesting roses than I’ve seen anywhere in South Africa. When we left she gave us 6 roses waiting to be planted. And when Louis refused to let me buy petrol I bought him 3 more at Ludwig’s. A double bargain for me, I’d say! Here they await planting, which happened today.

Oh – and I bought Rosa rubrifolia (syn R. glauca) for myself, having managed to get one I raised from imported seed to not die over 15 years… and I bought my cousin one too, as well as a Cardinal Hume which I consider to be one of the loveliest of roses. Rosa rubrifolia is my all-time favourite foliage plant – it stands in the foreground with its steel-blue leaves and wine-red stems and young growth.

This photo of the Ellensgate Garden with the mauve-pink rambler on the opposite side – another of my mystery plants – somehow didn’t make it into the story. And lastly, my little storm story. I add it in sympathy for the millions who suffered under Sandy, not just at the time, but who face the heart-  and back-breaking task of clearing up… we lost just two major branches off one of our oldest trees in a storm earlier this week and it was a mission to clear. How much worse is the process for all these people!

 

 

FIT FOR A BRIDE!

A week has passed since I walked down to The House that Jack Built to make certain that all was ready for the arrival of the bride and her groom, my cousin’s son, the next day. What I saw took even my breath away, despite 11 years of calling this spot ‘home’. It has never been more beautiful.

Even before he proposed he asked me what the most beautiful time was on the mountain in spring. I said mid-October. When he proposed he had his plans laid out, the venue booked…

This is where they came after the wedding and reception at the neighbouring Cheerio Gardens to spend their wedding night. As a little boy he had seen me build this house, and this was where he wished to bring his bride…

I took these photos either the day before or the day after the wedding. I remember the earnest little boy, fishing rod in hand, talking to me as I worked on the space where the curved wooden window now stands. With him then was his best friend, the photographer at the wedding, who took a set of photographs here more unique, from what I’ve heard, than you will ever find. I hope to share a few in due course…

Across the dam the yellow azaleas under the purple  Japanese maple were more splendid than ever.

So I wondered in to photograph them, and got caught up in the beauty of the Japanese maples as well.

Growing in the shade below the wall of the Carpetgarden, almost completely hidden these days by the purple maple and a dogwood, are two dissected Japanese maples, one green, one purple – or wine red, which better describes their leaves.

Here you can see what the leaves look like on this exquisite low-growing tree, and below the soft mound it forms. Beyond is the purple form.

The yellow azaleas also demanded more attention.

But these yellows, as you could see in my previous posts, do not alone represent the deciduous azaleas – here are a few more photographed in recent days.

This last one is growing right outside the glass doors outside the living room of the big house. Here it is again:

There are more, and when I return from Johannesburg where I am spending time with my father, I will hopefully get to photograph them too…

It is also the season of the Japanese flowering cherries, and I have not photographed them sufficiently.

There is more, azaleas and other Japanese maples, not to mention the first irises and roses… They will have to wait for a further post. My time is limited, and it is time now for bed…

 

PROGRESS TO REPORT–AND THEN SPRING PICS

The hedges are planted! After more than a year in which the rectangle of barren earth needed constant explanation, the Mothers’ Garden is laid out, the hedges planted and the central yew trimmed dramatically in preparation for training as a pyramid. I hummed and hahed before realising the obvious… The pillars of the lower steps must be visible and the yew must not obscure the dam. But it is surprising how long it took me to realise that a pyramid would be the ideal shape. Since the newly laid grass path has a topdressing of compost similar to the beds, it rather disappears at the moment. And in the harsh light the irrigation pipes are the dominant line. But I promise you: when you sit on the bench looking across this view, with the curves of the New Old Rose Garden to your left, the big lawn and the blobby rhythm of the Upper Rosemary Border to your right, and an assortment of trees framing the view and protecting your back… it is, I believe, potentially the most beautiful spot in the garden. You can read about the planning of the garden here. We have revisited the choice of roses and made some changes. Hopefully when we go to Johannesburg at the end of the month we will collect the 26 roses due to go in here. Although quite frankly at this stage I’d be happy for the hedges to settle down first.

Here is the view from across the big lawn. To the left you can see where we dug up the grass for the paths and are still digging for other lawn work. In the process the upper border is being squared off and enlarged. This will give a new area for annuals and other flowers. I want to start collecting dahlias, as there are a great many old varieties around Haenertsburg. There is a whole new development waiting here! In the process the lawn is now finally surrounded by straight lines – the wavy top border, its shape never really planned, was more and more of an anomaly.

When I turned my head from taking the last picture, this is what I saw. With a bit of imagination you can see the water-spout beyond Alfred’s Arches. Last year I decided the Arches, of pussy-willow, had to be cut down and grow out again; then I relented, but in the winter decided that the Arches really were looking tatty. Now I look at them as they start to fill out with young green, and I find the rustic rhythm totally enchanting. What to do? I guess there is so much else that needs doing that this is far from a priority!

The dogs and I make our way down the Arches, past the Garden Celebrating an Imperfect Universe (much more of a priority!) and down to the Makou Dam. Where we stop to enjoy the reflections and the thousands of backlit plants in the arboretum.

Along the edge there is a self-sown clump of the beautiful local lily, Scilla natelensis. Usually they choose stony well-drained slopes, but these, perched on the edge 30cm above the water, are blissfully happy. Which makes me so too.

Around the corner on the dam wall grow the clump of Siberian irises we first planted there 20 odd years ago, and which we thought had disappeared. As you can see – they are back in force! Then we stop to collect stones for a rosemary bonsai I am preparing as a birthday present for Felicity, my dad’s care-giver and my adopted sister.

Here it is, settling in in the greenhouse. I know nothing about bonsai and have never attempted it before. I’m sure my rocks overhanging the container break every rule, but I’m quite pleased with the way I managed to arrange the gnarled plant as though it had grown out from amongst the stones, just like the ones I found growing in the garrigue when I was in the south of France… But onward and upward (to quote my blogging friend Frances…)

I stopped to photograph the pink flowering cherry, but it was the view of the garden that intrigued me. Look how neat the hedges are on the left, and how good the Upper Rosemary Border is looking with its regular shrubby rhythm. To the right of the red azaleas (which are looking great against the long blue line of the rosemary hedge) there is over 100m2 of recently planted scatterpack. It is germinating nicely and a green haze lies across the ground there. I’m hoping for a fortissimo display by December. And in the bed below that the cannas are beginning to make an impression.

 

This is the area I particularly came to see:  the mollis azaleas in shades of yellow and orange near the darkest of our three copper beeches. Let’s take a closer look.

Difficult to capture the luminous darkness of the beech without the orange of the azalea looking washed out by the strong sunlight.

So we need to take a look at the azalea on its own – and even then the light is far from ideal…

The yellow one, in the shade, is easier to capture. But what I can’t share is the heavenly scent of these azaleas.

For richness of colour, delicacy and perfume these azaleas are a match for the best roses can offer – what a pity that they flower for only a week or two!

I spend some time here, treasuring the moment, enjoying the scented shade.

Taubie agrees and joins me; Mateczka and Abigail snuffle around happily, chase down paths, then come back to check all is OK with us. Monty is away patrolling his territory, probably entertaining visitors at the Cheerio tea-garden, relishing his role as the alpha male (human and otherwise) of the valley…

All in all it is a good place to be… especially at this time of year.

 

EASY ECOSYSTEMS

I could start this post in many ways – but there is nothing like the wow-factor to get you reading… So let me introduce you to this beauty: it is Gladiolus densiflorus.

It is one of many plants I wish to touch on in this post, my contribution to Wildflower Wednesday, a monthly look by garden bloggers around the world at those plants which are native to their immediate area, started by Gail of Clay and Limestone several years ago.

I suddenly became aware again a few days back of a truth I’d come to take for granted: I grew to love gardening on this farm because everything grows so harmoniously here. Many years ago I walked through the young ‘garden’ with a friend, very much a city boy, who could not believe the scale and assumed every bit was considered and conceived, planned and planted. “Surely THIS you planted!” he would exclaim, pointing at three species with minute flowers and a small-leaved groundcover growing on a path which curved amongst grasses and ferns. “No,” I’d say, “we only mowed a path through the existing growth, which caused other plants to dominate in the more open habitat.” My mother once described it as a scarless world, and that sums up the way in which it was possible to gently expand the human presence without pushing nature aside.

Even the big lawn consists of grasses – and other greens! – that grow wild here, although other areas are kikuyu – a thuggish (exotic) grass which is by far the most popular lawn grass in most of South Africa. It was originally planted here back in the 40s and 50s as pasture for the mules used in the early days of timber-farming, and keeping it from spreading insidiously has been one of the on-going tasks in the garden. The picture above regular readers will recognise: the stand of Ouhout (literally ‘old wood’) trees – Leucosidea sericea – with a wild evergreen grass and other plants beneath it: all entirely the work of nature, with no more than the  judicious removal of dead wood every few years by us. And one of the most beautiful spots in the whole garden… for 12 months of the year! In the photo above that you can see the mixed growth along a low cutting that first gave me the theme for this post: self-sown tree-ferns are becoming fine specimens, and an assortment of wild flowers, grasses, ferns and shrubs partial to conditions here have made this their happy home – all with minimal interference by us.

In many areas velvety mosses have covered bare earth – either because nothing much grows there, or because we have consciously kept the ground clear to encourage them, such as in the Japanese Walk where seven years on there is now sufficiently shade on the ground for my vision to start becoming a reality…

But this is all about wildFLOWER Wednesday, so let’s see what is blooming…

The rustic fence at the main entrance from the dirt road frames a lovely composition in blue and yellow – the blues appearing paler on film than in reality. The blue featured recently in a post: it is Wahlenbergia undulata, known locally as a ‘Bluebell’ ; the yellow is Hawkweed (Taraxacum officinale, and officially an exotic weed, but I claim it as one of our loveliest wild flowers…) and another smaller yellow daisy – one of the ubiquitous yellow daisies that we so easily just dismiss as weeds – possibly one of the many Senecio species.

Small flowers abound, and many I have had great trouble trying to identify. The next two might or might not be species of Selago or Tetraselago; I tend to think not. It is frustrating, but does not detract from the subtle beauty of these late-summer bloomers with their heads of minute flowers, each only about 3mm across.

There is a white flower too, almost certainly the same species.

We have our own indigenous knotweed, or Persicaria, P. attenuata I think it is; it might not be as attractive as some of the species I have seen in English gardens, but it does have the added value of being used to treat venereal diseases… Doctrine of Signatures, perhaps??

Something much more dramatic. In the fading light (and shot by flash) I come upon Crocosmia aurea just breaking bud. I have never noticed it like this before.

Immediately I think of the stock description of our other native, Crocosmia paniculata:  “inflorescence zigzagging, each zigzag ending in a flower.” Can I still find paniculata in flower to show this, although one can also see it from the swelling seeds on the stalk? They flower a little earlier. Ah yes. Here it is.

On a walk I get to my hedgerow – a mixed planting, dense, forming a rough hedge, in honour of England, in memory of a specific walk in Gloucestershire some seven years ago… There is nothing remotely indigenous in this view…

Standen Walk (besides the inherent paradox in the words) I named after Philip Webb’s Arts & Crafts home in West Sussex, where I saw one of the most magnificent garden features of my entire 1995 pilgrimage: a long narrow walk with a shrub border on one side and on the other, beyond a low parapet wall, a long view over  a meadow and across a valley. You can see it on one of those 360 degree thingies over here. In miniature I have something similar in Standen Walk. And the plants all come from Europe, and North America, and the East… Yet I heard, coming from an equally exotic conifer, the screechy hiss of one of South Africa’s most iconic birds. I’d heard it there the previous day too. What was this lover of afromontane forest doing in an exotic conifer?

The Knysna Loerie – or Turaco as we are now encouraged  forced to call it – is an elegantly shaped and marked green bird, with bright red on its wings, pictured here in what is simply known as ‘Roberts’ – the bible of Southern African bird books. Like so many beautiful birds, its assorted calls are harsh, ugly. For years I hardly ever saw or even heard it in our gardens. Now, due to the many exotics here, it is resident. May I include it amongst the wild beauties in this post?

Was it after the heps of this rose in the hedgerow? Was it after the pyracantha berries below? Who knows. It was there, and it had not been there. I believe in the value of judicious planting of exotics. I rest my case.

I circle and flush the bird and  manage a shot. It is blurred, without detail, but the shape is unmistakeable…

And so, in the glow of a summer evening, we make our way home.

But wait. I have not yet showed you all my shots of Gladiolus densiflorus. It is after all my subject for Wildflower Wednesday. My first memory of it is of a tighly packed double row of almost grey flowers. It was in neatness that its beauty lay. Densiflorus is an apt name, and nowhere clearer than in the elegant spike of developing flowers.

I have never deliberately grown these in the garden, although I am planning to harvest seed this year. Like so many of the wildings, the flower is small (each about the size of a thumbnail), but more importantly: their season is fleeting and their charm increases tenfold when come across unexpectedly in their season. And so, as I often do throughout the year, on a walk I will ask myself: ‘I wonder if xyz is flowering yet?’ And watching out for it adds immeasurably to the pleasure of a walk… As does finding it.

OK. We were returning home in the glow of a summer evening, tra-la…

It is a good time to sit on the stoep – veranda – with a drink and watch the colour drain from the world, and then slowly from the sky. Besides which: on two occasions this week five very indigenous Woolly-necked Storks (I posted about them here) soared in in the gloaming and settled with utmost grace in our very exotic big bluegum tree…

 

EARLY MORNING EVENING PRIMROSES

My marking is done. I have a few more hours of school work left. (Actually I’m posting this now  – as an ex-teacher.) The magazine was due to go to the printers yesterday. We are a week behind schedule – but that is about what we were expecting. Two fulltime jobs, both on deadline, is (are?)exhausting – but remarkably exhilarating. Soon I will be able to think again of other things. Meanwhile: here is an early morning shot of a particularly pleasing sight, taken after three hours of work earlier in the week…

 

OCTOBER FEST

A whirlwind dance, snapping away on Monday as the sun dropped low; an awareness all week that the true beauty of spring was now upon us; a longing to share the spirit of my garden in this mid-October week…

Fifty five processed pics there are from that one walk. Some editing is called for… Let’s start with the expected: azaleas (other than the deciduous kinds) and cherries – the flowers which form the heart of the Magoebaskloof Spring Festival !

Cheerful, hey!

And having started with the brightest – here’s ‘ Kanzan’, brightest of the cherries…

Again.

‘Ukon’ – single, white shaded green and palest pink, is the subtlest and (sometimes) my favourite…

But this one, shot at very high ISO in poor light, whose name escapes me now, so I will call it the fluffy cherry, is really the prettiest – so here below it is again …

Everywhere there are azaleas…

Here they shine through a pin oak going into leaf, with a Clematis montana growing through it.

In several photos I needed to adjust the brightness and light balance – but I made a point nowhere to bump up the saturation levels – what you see is what you get! (This time meant entirely positively, unlike last week )

But let us leave colour right out of it for a moment. Look at the subtle variations between the various white azaleas…

      This last one is just beginning to show signs of doubling up –         a good flower to carry into a junior botany class to explain how this happens…

Whilst we are talking white – here is the white garden as seen from the side this week.

And here it is again, not looking very white (work is needed) when seen through the Ellensgate Garden where – at last – the fountain has been refurbished! And below you see the fountain again, on the opposite axis, as seen from outside the living-room window. A trio of water-features now bubble and gurgle and splash. Eureka!

In what would have been part two of my October Fest post  – but since nothing is yet published a week on, we will combine the parts – I want to share with you my deciduous azaleas.

This picture best illustrates how the deciduous azaleas differ from the evergreen varieties. In spring the upright tips erupt into either a rosette of leaves or a claw-like cluster of flower buds, almost always substantially darker in bud than in flower.

These rich subtleties in shade and the markings on the individual flower, make them of the most fascinating flowers I know.

Add to that the brevity of their season, and you have something truly precious!‘

All most all of these deciduous azaleas are from a seed-tray containing literally hundreds of seedlings I received as a gift from my friends Erie and Laurie, owners of the nearby Sandford Heights Nursery at the top of Magoebaskloof.

Unfortunately these azaleas are much more specific in their climatic requirements, and very difficult to grow in the Gauteng climate.

Enough? One more?

My patient companions on the walk also deserve mention – especially as for once all four featured in a reasonable shot.

And the clematis on The House that Jack Built deserves mention too.

 

 

 

WEEKLY PIC: JULY11 WEEK3

There is only one plant that can match the old roses when it comes to voluptuous soft pinks or – even more unusual – rich pinks that age to almost neon shades which become overlaid with a blue-grey bloom: the camellia … which insists on blooming for me in winter.

The problem is that my winter is not suitable for camellias. Two kilometres away and several hundred meters away from the water, I have neighbours who hardly ever have frost, and whose plants face away from the morning sun. Now you should see the sheer excess of THEIR camellias, dozens of cultivars and hundreds of bushes.

Mine face into the morning sun and regularly show frost damage. However when we have a few warmer nights in a row, such as this last week, and now that the bushes are larger and dense enough to have shady sides, one can find  a few near perfect blooms. But even on bitterly cold mornings, the pink camellias call one across the valley from behind the gum trees – and you tend to go, even when you know that from close by you will be disappointed.

PS: I can’t get away from the latest garden developments: next to the big lawn in the far right of the photo above, taken from the arboretum, you can see the ground work that has been done on the Mothers’ Garden. And we’ve started digging the holes for the roses that are being transplanted into the new Old Rose Garden…

 

WEEKLY PIC: JULY11 WEEK 1

Do periwinkles wink at you in winter too? I always forget to check: I’m certain they DO flower most of the year, but their bitty display and inherent bashfulness make one look right across them. And then suddenly, when all else is drab, they greet one shyly.

Not for nought is one of the intensifiers for blue periwinkle blue! Somehow it is more a flower of spring than of any other season; and yet… that perfect pentagon in the centre speaks of hidden strengths. This is Vinca major; Vinca minor is just the same but smaller, and often an inkier blue. And this is Monty, posing among the periwinkles.