SUN AT DAWN AND STORKS AT DUSK

I shan’t apologise for photographing the same subject yet again. I spent years doing just that at the cottage, and now it is this view that defines my mornings. Photos are taken from the windows, in passing. There is no time for more than that most mornings. This is the view from the living room, looking across seeding zinnias and blue Browallia (read more about them here) into the Ellensgate Garden with the wisteria arbour of the Anniversary Garden beyond. Beyond that again, the Pride of Indias at The Garden Celebrating an Imperfect Universe, and the arboretum. A misty haze drifts off Freddy’s Dam, rising slowly, and often forms  a horizontal element in the composition. By the moment, sunlight drops into the valley…

What I really want to share with you though, is a dusk experience. The Woolly-Necked Storks are back often enough now that I can call them our resident storks. Most nights between sunset and darkness, five of them drop out of the sky, then circle gracefully, confirming their perch for the night in the tall gum tree before settling down. I’ve yet to see them leave, but many a morning as I arrive at school, about two km away as the stork flies, I see them pacing the dewy playing fields and taking the morning sun. I get great pleasure at the end of the day watching their arrival and knowing they too find this tree, pictured below, rather special.

 

WEEKLY PIC: APRIL2011 WEEK 2

The overwhelming impression at the moment is of autumn, warming up like an old Alfa, before roaring off impressively. (OK, if you don’t get that image, it’s rather boyish for a gardening blog…) This is the view from the living room window. In the foreground the Ellensgate Garden is aligned perfectly with the living room; beyond that the wisteria-covered pergola in the Anniversary Garden, to the left the junipers that flank the axis from the front door. The blue flowers that featured two weeks ago are in the foreground, and the orange crocosmia in the Ellensgate Garden immediately behind them. But to show you those two colours will mean blowing every other colour out of the water. Perhaps try enlarging the photo…

 

WEEKLY PIC: MARCH10 – WEEK4

Time to take a look again at the Anniversary Garden – laid out to celebrate my parents’ golden anniversary, it is a yellow-gold garden with blue-mauve-purple accents. The central path is flanked by a rosemary hedge and wisterias grow into the pergola.

Today we had our first ever visitors to the open garden: a local family who visit often; a family from Johannesburg who were the ‘official first ever visitors’ and were wonderfully enthusiastic; and a couple from Botswana. It is a long weekend in South Africa. Yesterday the Ebenezer Mile Swim took place, organised by our Rotary Club, and the village is abuzz with visitors. An article in our local quarterly newsletter, which appeared on Wednesday, alerted readers to the fact that Sequoia Gardens is open. Such is the wonder of modern communications that you can read the newsletter anywhere in the world should you so wish, because it forms part of our eponymous website www.mountain-getaways.co.za – you will find me on page 6.

Now I need to spend the rest of the day getting the marketing side of my blog updated. You’ll see changes in the header line below the masthead. Any comments on how I’ve gone about it – or should have! – will be gratefully studied.

 

RATHER RANDOM ROSE CLOSE-UPS

For weeks I’ve been gathering material for this post, but the more I got, the more random the theme became; it has not been a good year for rose photographs, and there is not really the time to delve through my archives, so this is it – a selection of the season’s better pics…

‘Buff Beauty’ is one of the most charming of all roses, and one of my favourites.  Her colour can vary from a dull straw to apricot, depending on the light and the temperature. She is a graceful climber and sweetly scented.

Here she grows with ‘Veilchenblau’ on the Wisteria Arbour in the Anniversary Garden. As they get bigger it becomes less of a contortion to get them both into the same shot. I must remember that come the pruning season!

I am certain that ‘Veilchenblau’ is an ancestor of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, one of the most talked about of recent introductions. The way they have a red rather than a grey undertone, their velvety purple aging and their lime green foliage differentiate them from most other “blue” roses.

I’ve spoken before of Rosa chinensis ‘Mutabilis’ and here the various colours, from bud to dark maturity and faded old age can be seen. A glorious rose; and of course, a species rose not a hybrid… amazing, isn’t it!

Rosa rugosa is another unmistakable species rose, repeat-flowering all season, with heavily corrugated leaves and a suckering habit. It has single  magenta flowers, which are not to everyone’s taste, especially when seen with the huge orange heps – a startling combination!

Usually R. rugosa comes true from seed, but this is a hybrid! However it won’t make my fortune as it is a little shy to flower and the blooms don’t last very long or produce any heps. A curiosity for my garden only!

After all the lack of genealogy… a bit of breeding. This is a Hybrid Tea known as ‘Garden Queen’ or (in the USA) as ‘Buxom Beauty’. She still stands in her unglamourous bag near the front door. I  thought she might be the answer to my prayers, but her shrill pink colour and flaunting shape don’t appeal to me as they ought. I’ve come to appreciate subtler beauties. I guess she’ll find a spot in the Beech Borders. Yes, I did say bEEch. She was intended for the Ellensgate Garden, but I think something less of a trophy will work better in that comfortable and intimate space…

‘The Squire’ on the other hand has no pretensions to grandeur. He knows he represents the Best of British and happily stood around in Trudie’s Garden for a year before I gave him a more permanent home there. Now, of course, in a quiet way, he lords it over the other roses. He is, after all, one of David Austin’s English Roses…

R. roxburgii plena  is a strange Chinese fellow and was originally thought to be a species, until the single form was introduced and he had a plena added to his name. In fact he is so strange that there are those who question whether he should be called a Rose at all… His buds are covered in spikes, giving him the names Burr Rose and Chestnut Rose  ( you can see one top right) and his silvery bark tends to peel in a most unroselike manner. He has 12 tiny leaflets to a leaf, although that is not nearly as unusual as one might think amongst the species roses.

My ‘New Dawn’ roses are all grown from cuttings. They strike more easily than any other rose I know. The one below the waterlily pond has had literally hundreds of blooms over the last two months – of the softest pink. It is about as typical a rose as one can get, and possibly one of the easiest flowering plants to grow, relative to its contribution in the garden. You do realise that I rank this rose rather highly, don’t you?

‘Tausendshon’ – thousand times beautiful – is an aptly named rose. Almost thornless, it flowers continuously with flushes of apple-blossom pink blooms. Another easy rose from cuttings, although a little prone to mildew with me. But I have yet to spray it; it pulls through of its own accord.

This is not, I guess, a close-up. At least not of the roses, not even quite of the foxglove.  But I’ve been wanting to show you the Anniversary Garden, where mauves and yellows combine. Most of the roses in this shot are ‘South Africa’, a very disease resistant and robust soft orange rose which I can’t praise highly enough, bred by Kordes of Germany.

Here it is in close-up. Worthy of oohing and ahing over…

I’m certain David Austin waited a long time before he dared name a rose after Graham Stuart Thomas, the doyen of old-rose specialists.  He made a good choice.  I believe this has become the most popular yellow rose in the UK.  In South Africa it is best grown as a climber.  After trying to contain my two bushes for three years, they are now blissfully happy on  reed structures, each about two meters high and three meters long.

I said the theme was yellow and mauve, didn’t I? I’d actually misplaced this shot of ‘Veilchenblau’, (taken last year and sought out for this post), but I’m pleased it happened that way. I think it rounds of this little show quite nicely!

 

A LONG WALK TO LOOK AT BLOWSY ROSES

I’ve been asked about my red foliage and my roses, so I’ll identify my roses in this post and tell you a little more about other plants. And I’ll take you to a number of other spots around the garden, but let’s start again in the Beech Borders.

All the roses you see here I grew from cuttings from stock first planted in the Rondel Garden in 1996. From left to right they are: the bright pink of the Damask rose Ispahan (early 1800s) which featured often in the previous post. A few blooms of the  Bourbon rose Mme Ernst Calvat (1888) peek out from behind it and look rather similar. The pale pink is New Dawn, one of the best climbers of all time. In 1930 it sported as a repeat-flowering version of a 1910 introduction – one of the most fascinating rose sports of all time, as for the rest they are identical. To its right the rich pink of the Gallica Belle de Crecy(+-1850s) All these roses are wonderfully scented. Towards the back, more Ispahan. The red shrub is Berberis thunbergii atropurpurea and the pink flowered shrub which I love to mix with roses is Spirea x bumalda ‘Anthony Waterer’. They too are grown from cuttings; when you garden on this scale doing your own propagation is necessary ! The background is a row of seven now mature Acer palmatum (Japanese maples – a glorious sight in autumn) and to the right is Acer davidii, one of the snake-bark maples.

My nephews aged 16 and 14 were here from Namibia last week. They crept down to The Embarkment to get to the water with good grace. They knew that cutting the plants that had fallen across the path was out of the question –  an Abelia x grandiflora and two roses: the common moss rose Rosa centifolia muscosa (before 1700) and the Four Seasons White Moss Quatre saisons blanc mousseux (1835)

Another of these impressively named roses holds its own across the water after (I must admit) being dumped there some years ago when the area was much more open in the hope it would survive. To its left Acer palmatum atropurpureum with Rhododendron luteum  and Exochorda x macrantha below and Salix babylonica ‘Crispa’, the lovely Ram’s Horn Willow to its right.

Here is a view of my house through the Four Seasons Whie Moss, the camera held above my head. If nothing else this photo proves that it was not pruned last year, but survives quite happily nonetheless! ‘Four Seasons’ is a bit of an exaggeration – it repeat flowers slightly in autumn. Which was, of course, very unusual when it was first introduced…

Whilst on the far side of the dam, a view of my house and yes, my vehicle: a Malaysian designed Toyota Condor 4×4 diesel: it works like a slave, can carry 7 passengers or a load of plants or cement or even take a full-sized mattress when I go camping. Irreplaceable, it has been superseded by vehicles that are hopelessly too sophisticated and expensive to play such a multi-purpose role! (Anyone from Toyota reading this??) White climbing Iceberg roses (1968 – had to add a date for this modern classic!) grow left and right onto my house, with a Clematis montana adding to the show on the right. Overhanging the dam at the entertainment area are two Félicité et Perpétue roses, a lovely old climber from 1827. Penelope, a Hybrid Musk from 1924, graces the Cottage Garden below the Condor.

Here is another view across the Cottage Garden to where we have just been; the green  rod in the right quarter has me baffled. I suspect it is a rather potent Watsonia – but it will come as a wonderful surprise when it flowers. (No, I’m NOT going to identify the trees to the right of the willow right now!)

Near the garage the Wichuraiana rambler Excelsa scrambles up into a pine; wonderful if the mildew doesn’t do too much harm to it!

As  I’ve said before, the Rondel Garden, home to my original old-fashioned roses, commemorating Sissinghurst in its name and Francois in its existence, is in need of serious replanning… This is Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’. I’ve never seen a single one of the famed flagon-shaped hips on it. Climate? Or just my bad luck to have an infertile strain? Iceberg on the house.

Still in the Rondel, Pink Grootendorst (A Dutch surname meaning ‘big thirst’ – there are three members in the rugosa family!) has flowers frilled like a carnation and dates from 1923. To its left in the rugosa bed is Frau Dagmar Hastrup from 1914. Prunus cerasifera in one of its many forms provides a plummy background.

We now move to the end of the wisteria arbour in the Anniversary Garden where the Polyantha climber Veilchenblau (1909) lives up to its name which means ‘Blue veil’. Below it the wonderfully subtle strawwy yellows of Buff Beauty (a shrubby climber from 1939) can be seen. Veilchenblau is beginning to climb up into the Japanese maple. I can’t wait to see the effect five years from now!

I planted New Dawn in the Upper Rosemary Border by mistake, thinking it something else. It has scrambled about, reaching for the sun through the thick planting of smallish shrubs, and set off especially well against Abelia x grandiflora. The species Rosa rugosa has been a mixed blessing next to it, suckering whenever the roots are damaged during cultivation. However the flowers are a perfect colour match with Spirea x bumalda ‘Anthony Waterer’ and the rose flowers continuously, later producing startling orange hips at the same time as its magenta flowers. I enjoy the unsubtle colour mix and the birds enjoy the food. Win-win, I’d say.

Here is another view, taken from the Rosemary Terrace; I’ve written enough and you’ve read enough. No more details on the planting.

This is the first year I’ve even noticed the Tausendschön (Thousand beauties, 1906, a Polyantha climber) in the purple crab-apple. It must be five or more years since I planted it there. It repeat flowers in a good spot. This can’t be one. But it will grow through the tree and in years to come give greater joy.

Gosh, this walk is exhausting me! We are now up in the arboretum where I planted a number of tough roses some six or more years ago. The rather garish pink was incorrectly marked ‘Compassion’ but has proved itself to be tough alright. Behind it is South Africa. I will sing its praises (the best rose since Iceberg???) in a future post. A single flower is all that can be seen of Rosa chinensis mutabilis about which I will tell you more when I post close-ups soon.

And so down we go and across the Makou Dam to the old stone barn. Tausendschön,  the mother plant of many on the mountain, absolutely loves this sunny spot where I planted it nearly 20 years ago. Beyond it another repeat-flowering pink rambler-like climber grows on the fence of the vegetable garden. I’ve known this rose all my life here on the farm and in neighbouring gardens. Unlike most climbers – and definitely most ramblers – it has an incredibly long season, being one of the first in bloom and carrying on right into winter. It is very happy here where it steals the sun from the veggies, happier than its mother plant, and being a sucker for charm and beauty I allow it to keep pride of place.

We end our walk (pant, pant) at Trudie’s Garden outside the big house, where I reiterate what I said at the beginning of the previous post: I like roses where they can grow as huge as they like and flop over complimentary shrubs and be voluptuous and abandoned. This might be a rather more elegant lady, a prim and sophisticated hybrid tea called Germiston Gold, but she too benefits from the arm of a dapper shrub to show off her assets…

 

Wisterias at Sequoia Gardens

Someone asked for more pics of wisterias… and I have long wanted to consolidate my wisteria photos into a story – so here goes! Most of our wisterias we grew from seed, taken from a plant which was the off-spring (clonal, I think) of one at the family farm which was originally planted in the early 1900s. We grew them because we – my dad and I – had just discovered the joy of germination on the farm and well: because they were there! Wisterias carry long velvety seedpods with big seeds that call out “good with beginners”!

These first two photos are in fact the last I took. This particular plant, incredibly robust, covers a camphor tree and the adjacent pin oak, which is just visible beyond the camellia on the right. It has completely swamped the small pergola built for it between the two trees and has set off through the adjacent shrubbery, where last year we realised that it was leaning too heavily on a flowering dogwood and twenty assorted shrubs. I was looking at it yesterday and thinking that it needed further curtailing. The blue spikes below it are Scilla natalensis, a bulb which grows wild on Sequoia. The netting is to protect it and the young roses from the deer (more correctly buck – duiker and bush buck). Early in the season when food is scarce they love to nibble on fresh rose foliage and the blue  firework flower stalks.

Here it is in close-up. Definitely; this year we will search for rooted cuttings amongst its meanderings. It is floriferous, with good colour and long racemes, and the fact that it is two weeks later than most can only be an advantage. I will plant it in the huge old mother-pine where its sister’s dumpy flowers are over before the yellow banksia rose gets under way.

Every year I have to act the contortionist just to get the yellow and mauve into the same frame. The banksia was planted by a friend’s mother as a young woman. When their yard was subdivided, he offered me the huge old root ball. Within three years it proved a good investment, worth transporting 350km (over 200 miles) to its new home!

Today I went and took this photo specially. The banksia flowers 10 meters up into the tree. The wisteria reaches twice as high and will eventually climb to the top of the tree – but no longer has a single flower.  Now imagine the banksia combined with the day before yesterday’s sprawling giant…

The next example I think is a brother; a sprawling good-for-nothing brat, a disgrace to the family name; why he has not been disinherited I do not know! He grew right here from a root in what used to be the nursery holding area. As a result he was a bit neglected as a child. Surrounded by trees (some of which have subsequently been removed), he didn’t have one of his own to look up to – and so he was left to his own devices and became a scruffy introvert. The brown behind him is an unsuccessful rescue job (just as well, considering where it was planted), a conifer from a terracotta pot that I valued more than its occupant. Beyond, an assortment of conifers including a gawky ginkgo not yet in leaf. The area to the right is the future Sage’s Walk, a path through a  collection of salvias (in sun) and plectranthus (in shade) culminating in the azalea crescent in the distance. It is also the area where most of my collection of seed-grown pink deciduous azaleas are concentrated. Their twiggy outlines add to the general scruffiness, but by this morning they too were coming into flower!

We now move to an area up on the boundary below the neighbour’s gum plantation across from my house,  where many of the seedlings were planted just to get rid of them. Bear in mind that it takes up to ten years for a seed-grown wisteria to flower. That is according to several sources I’ve just consulted. The figure I remember is seven, and my first ones flowered at five years if I remember correctly. It was a convenient spot to dump them while we waited. Out of sight proved to be out of mind, and not one of them was ever moved. They are a motley collection, mostly disappointing and can easily be grubbed out if something better comes along. However one of them, visible in the centre, will still make me my fortune (he said wishfully.)

This wisteria’s flowers are of good but not spectacular colour, but their length and grace is exceptional. What really makes this plant unusual though is that it chose to be a tree rather than a climber. From a young age it had a sturdy, self-supporting stem. As time passed it became clear why: the space between nodes is compressed. This has a further advantage: the magnificent trusses are carried close together, so that the flowers literally hang like a beaded curtain…

Here you can see my wisteria tree, al the way from its stem to its spectacular flowers. On the left an altogether less impressive sibling grovels before my Joseph’s Coat (hmmm: Wisteria ‘Joseph’s Coat’  - it has a ring to it!) In addition to its typically short flowering season , it is most beautifully hung with silver-brown velvet pods for many months of the year, some of which can still be seen in this photo!

If the tree wisteria is my most important specimen, this one is my most successful. It grows over the pump-house (I have to stoop slightly to fit under that green cross-beam) and the surrounding trees. To the left foreground lies my water-lily pond. I have a dream of building a deck and a pergola over the edge of the water to support the wisteria and its reflection… but that will relate to developing Sequoia Gardens as a tourist destination in years to come!

To give you an idea of the setting, here is a picture taken this morning; the wisteria is spent, but the first water-lilies are in bloom! To the left an indigenous tree fern is stretching out its 2 meter fronds, at this stage still rolled and golden. And as I tend to interrupt myself when speaking, why not do so here? So here’s a bonus pic :

As the pump-house wisteria is all round my best example, and the flowers hang conveniently low, here are a few close-ups and flower studies.

Each pea-flower is perfection in itself.

And then a bee arrived to complete the photo-shoot!

Just about the only wisterias not propagated on Sequoia are the matching clones planted in the Anniversary Garden. Their tresses are disappointingly short, but born profusely and richly coloured. If it was not a five year project – at least – I would replace them though with cuttings from the pump-house. This photo you have seen in a previous post.

To end off – a romantic shot of  a carpet of wisteria flowers and a yellow iris; one of those shots that make me feel I have achieved my objective in the Anniversary Garden!

 

Weekly pic: September week 4

I know I know I know my last two posts were also about the Wisteria Arbour, but of all the myriad flowers in my garden at the moment – blossoms, azaleas, rhododendrons and even the first roses, it is the wisterias that give me the most pleasure!

I peered through Alfred’s Arches to get this view, photostitched from two vertical shots. It helps give some idea of the unusual shape of the arbour. Talking of arbour – I’d been wondering what the difference is between an arbour and a pergola. Then the October issue of  Fine Gardening arrived all the way from America. (www.finegardening.com) There Brady Halverson explains that an arbour is like a doorway, a pergola is like a ceiling and a trellis is like a wall. How simple! That definitely makes this an arbour, even once the wisterias have grown to cover the structure more fully for, as he explains, “An arbour with a deep passageway adds to the sense of arrival that comes with passing through it, comparable to arriving in a home through a foyer rather than simply entering a door.” That helps me to understand why I enjoy this design so much!

 

Wisteria in the Anniversary Garden

I laid out the Anniversary Garden for my parents to commemorate their 50th wedding anniversary – it  lies below a tall wisteria arbour (the building of which was more difficult than my house!) and contains gold and mauve roses. Here is a photo taken in the last rays of the sun in November 2007 to show the mix of yellow and gold roses.

Truth be told, many of the roses have been unsuccessful and the garden is due for a major rethink, with the range of plants in the two outer beds being considerably extended, but continueing the mauve and yellow theme using shrubs and perennials and self-sowing annuals. The two central beds, flanking the rosemary-lined path, need a bit of tweaking only. Most successful have been the David Austin roses Molineux and Graham Stuart Thomas, Amber Queen and a marvellous new rose marketed as “South Africa”  here ( KORberbeni) – one of the most trouble free roses ever.

But at this season, with the roses still pushing their new shoots,  it is the wisteria that dominates, and it is these photo, taken today, that I really want to share with you. The first gives an overview of the garden. The arbour is long and narrow with a rounded edge on the garden side making the centre substantially narrower than the edges. There is a central path lined with rosemary and from the edges of the arbour paths lead down to the focal point at the end of the central path, thus dividing the garden into 4 triangular beds. It is a successful design and a potentially successful garden, but there is a vast amount of tweaking and improvement of maintenance needed before it will come into its own…

Just for the hell of it, here are a few more archive photos of the Anniversary Garden, starting with Buff Beauty grown against the reed fence under the arbour, seen through Veichenblau, the subject of the next photo. This old rambler is remarkably close in colouring to Rhapsody in Blue which is planted in the two central beds. This marvellous new rose has unfortunately not proved vigourous in my wet climate and sandy soil. To end with – the robust rose  we call South Africa.

 

Mauves and orange and late winter warmth…

A beautiful Sunday on the veranda at my parents’ house; a glorious roast leg of lamb for lunch, and afterwards my mother’s first ever perambulation around the garden in a wheelchair; she is 80, has been diabetic for 45 years and of late has become frail. ‘Broos’ we say in Afrikaans, which also translates as fragile and vulnerable. After fighting against the idea of a wheelchair for ages, she quite looked forward to the ride, and was amused by the word perambulation. (Did you know that pram, as in a baby’s pushcart, is a contraction of this word?) Out on the veranda she could admire the combination up against the house of the earliest of the diaramas, D. gracile, with its silvery-white bracts and soft mauve flowers against the orange Aloe saponaria which has been flowering since autumn.

Diarama  (hairbells, fairybells, wandflowers or most poetically: fairies’ fishing rods) is one of the most beautiful of our indigenous flowers, and D. gracile is endemic to our area. It is a shorter and more solid plant than most, carrying its flowers on shorter and more upright wands and it is the first to flower. The bracts appear silvery in the sunlight and combine exquisitely with the soft mauve flowers. But the zing comes from the contrasting Aloe saponaria flowers! They are one of the few aloes that can survive our bitter winter nights unscathed. They multiply gleefully from the root and flower cheerfully for months on end.

So out we went, round the back of the house where the steps are shallow, and for the first time this visit she saw the primulas growing where they will – seeding in cracks one doesn’t even realise exist. She looked and looked as I practiced small manoeuvres with the wheelchair and the dogs looked on in exasperation at this new, slow form of going for a walk.  

It always amazes me that we battle so to grow most primulas in South Africa – in fact many are quite impossible, disliking our harsh springs, but in late winter P. malacoides puts on a brilliant show, spreading as it wishes. Once you’ve planted it, it is there for ever. I remember one plant that somehow found its way to the steps to my classroom. Four years later there were so many that I allowed the girls to pick them on their way into class!

Out onto the drive we went, and past the first azalaes. Confidently my mother declared the white ones her favourite these days, musing on the days when the pinks, or mauves, or reds took her fancy first…

Down we went past the flowering quinces (japonica, or Chaenomeles speciosa). They were of the first shrubs we planted when we started gardening here in the early 80s;  a red, a white and a spectacular small crimson one (perhaps ‘Atrococcinea’). To our delight the mix produced an offspring across the road, to where  one of the beautiful but bitter yellow fruit must have rolled. It is apple-blossom pink. We stopped to admire it and to reminisce about the first time we noticed its blossoms. Subsequently one year I grew a large number of seedlings from here and planted two hedges on either side of the Anniversary Garden from them. Some are rampant, some beautiful, some non-descript. Turning seedlings into hedges is not a good idea at the best of times, but I love the haphazardness of it all.

On we went… stopped to pick a sprig of witchhazel, to discuss the nemesias which deserve a post of their own, the new growth on the roses and aphids and their absense (thankfully!) We looked at the changes I made during the winter to the Big Lawn, simplifying the upper edge and removing three of the five circular beds cut into it by our late great gardener, Phineas Magoale, who did so much to establish the garden. We looked at the young sweetpeas, planted where he had always done, and remembered how proud he used to be of them. Then we turned  back and up the avenue between the Sequoia trees past more azaleas and two beautiful camellias, stopping and studying plants that have become friends in the years since they were planted: the Scilla natalensis, wild off the farm, beginning to shoot; the rose-scented pelargonium, always the worse for frost at this time of year; also from wild stock on the farm the Aristea galpinii,  with the promise of their glorious blue stars only just beginning to show through the leaves although last week in Tzaneen’s sub-tropical climate I saw them in full bloom… then back around the house and another threshold crossed as she sank into her familiar, comfortable chair near the fire.

 

Weekly pic: August week 1

Late winter is rose pruning time. With over 300 roses, and a climate too damp to really be rose country, it is quite a job, and one that this year I am trying to do myself as much as possible. There are many roses being given a year of TLC - and if they don't perform, they get dumped. Ruthless efficiency is my motto for the coming gardening year; we'll see if it goes the way of all new year's resolutions... This photo was taken in the Anniversary Garden: golden roses and mauve wisteria set the scene. It was my gift to my parents for their Golden Wedding Anniversary.