OF BUTTERFLIES,BRIGHTNESS AND A ROSE

Mid-summer is when the butterfly migration takes place. I posted on it some years back over here. When I went looking for my Monty dog one recent evening, I photographed them all asleep in the grasses, where they looked like flowers. (Monty not only visits anyone who is a guest in the valley, especially if there are children present – he also all but disappears for days at a time when the neighbours’ cross-German Shepherds are on heat… as they were again of late.)

The snapshot taken with my phone which I showed in the previous post really got me obsessed about the view back across the garden, with its layers of stacked planting, and I took several more photos with my DSLR. That in turn has got me thinking about upgrading my blog theme to show bigger photographs. But as my current theme is discontinued, I dare not do anything in haste, as I won’t be able to return to the current format. So watch this space… perhaps come Feb there will be a change…

Here meanwhile are a few details. Clicking on the pics of course shows them full size, or you could increase your screen view to around 125% so that the blog fills the full screen width.

Lastly I want to share a home-grown rose which has featured before, and impressed me. Now it has wowed me. A fresh shoot, grown since it was planted out last summer, has flowered, and the way in which the flowers on it are carried is most unusual. I  might just have a second worthwhile rose of my own breeding here! (‘Cascade’ being the first; you can read more about it in these posts.)

The flowers are quite large, semi-double, frilly, lightly scented, and of a very pleasing pink with a touch of salmon, and lighter towards the centre.

The last shot shows them with the Watsonias in the adjacent bed beneath the guest room window; I have always thought of them as being salmon-coloured, rather than pink…

 

 

HOME

By the time I publish this I will have been home a week – but there hasn’t been much time for my blog, or even for photography. So this will be a rather random photo-essay, impressions after two weeks away. The continuation of my story about my dad and Sequoia will have to wait. It needs time to prepare. But since we ended with the arrival of The Plett, let us start off there today.

There was a rather similar angle of The Plett as it arrived. Last year I added the 2nd roof and pergola and expanded on the gardening around The Plett. It is looking lovely, as the following photos (almost) show.

Creepers are making their way up the pillars and the paved area is surrounded by lush shrubs and perennials.

Privacy between The Plett and the big house improves every week and this garden area is fast becoming THE place to explore. This path is a reminder of the route The Plett followed to get here.

In addition there is plenty of scope for cuttings of new perennials from here… I wander down to inspect other parts of the garden. The big lawn is looking neat and finished, although not one plant from the past-their-sell-by-date seed packs we planted in the straightened lower edge of the top bed germinated. Good. Room for perennials then!

The pale orange dahlias that were planted too late last summer have recovered fully and make a strong statement. My plan is to document and collect from the vast variety of old dahlias around the village and neighbouring gardens that have survived since the heyday of the dahlia half a century ago…

This one (bought new though) will start the collection. One thing I did learn – not that one doesn’t know this of dahlias: beware which colours you plant where!

The magenta-purple dahlia on the right is all wrong! Luckily it is also of very short stature; it will be moved. This soft orange is ideal. We have pure yellow pompoms (although there is already rather too much pure yellow around) and clear reds of an orange rather than purple shade will work here; also the many russets growing around my cousin’s staff house, survivors from the terraced gardens next door… One thing I learnt late last summer: dahlias can be moved when not quite dormant and still survive, and that is what I plan to do later in the summer!

Before moving on I admire my favourite plant combination in the whole garden, seen in the background of the last dahlia pic. It gives me pleasure for at least ten months of the year! Then I turn to the Upper Rosemary Border.

It is looking lush and richly textured. Not for the first time my mind wonders to the impossibility of achieving such richness in time for the Spring Festival when much in my garden has yet to awake…

This is Mozart, a Hybrid Musk rose much like Ballerina (and my own Cascade Rose)  but larger and more inclined to sprawl. Each year it has looked better, spilling over other plants in this border.

And here, finally, is a good shot of the cardinal red of Cardinal Hume which grows close by in this border. Below – a more general shot again of the varied plants in the Upper Rosemary Border.

And yes – if the plant dead centre looks suspiciously like a weed – it is! One of my favourite weeds. With great anticipation I turn to investigate the Lower Rosemary Border where the scatterpacks of annual seeds were just beginning to flower when last I was here…

Mmm… at first glance, disappointment. A little selene which we already have, dominates, followed by gypsophila and a few yellow daisies. But there are signs of more to come, although I don’t think we can expect the exuberance of the last sowing, some 5 years ago. This morning I returned with my camera for a few close-ups…

Here are the selenes. Like so many flowers, there is just too much of magenta and too little of pink about them. Below are a pair of blue flowers.

On the left a blue daisy which could be one of any number of ‘blue daisies’; on the right something I know as a weed of sandy riverbeds, but a flower I’ve always admired. Rather like a morning glory in appearance, it is carried on a fleshy shrub-like plant with spiky leaves, and if I’m not mistaken forms a large spiky seed capsule. I shall have to identify it and check how weedy it will be in our climate; in fact I wonder how a lone plant ended up in my seed mix… 

A wine-red cosmos hints at the rich colours to come, and a variety of nemesias and gypsophila show that all is not magenta…

In fact, it is worth seeking out the nemesias and coming in close to see their delicious colours.

Searching through the bed I start to find the startling clashes and serendipitous blends that so enchanted me during the last incarnation of this garden. I believe it will be a success after all…

Satiated, I turn to the next bed down – the groupings of cannas. And am enchanted by the sinuous lines that characterise this part of the garden.

On I go, crossing the wall of the Makou Dam.

Stopping to look back across the garden I think – I know not for the last time – ‘How I would love Dad to be standing beside me looking back at what we have achieved!’

And on, up into the arboretum.

The Mothers’ Garden still awaits its roses, but over the next days I will clip its hedges. I took the big Toyota Condor seen in front of the garages – a 4×4 based on a Malaysian commercial vehicle, simple, cavernous and ideal for transporting both goods and people, and even for sleeping in when camping (and of course now off the market, leaving a gaping void waiting to be filled) – to Johannesburg in late November, intending to buy the roses. But life took over…

In the arboretum I find the double  Rugosa flowering. I must propagate this intriguing rose. Grown from species seed, like all my Rosa rugosas, this one is double instead of single. Whether it is a mutation or in fact a cross I suppose I will never know. But I suspect it to be a mutation as the colour, growth and leaf is stock-standard.

Onwards I go, enjoying being on the farm again with my dogs, finding the new sights of the season, and listening to the rush of summer waters…

 

THIS WEEK IN MY GARDEN: FEB 2011 WEEK 1

The 3rd evening of the month already, and still no post. But then, as I thought wryly last night as I arrived home after a 13 hour day away from home, I’ve not had too much time to think gardening of late, let alone do it… The afternoon of the 1st of Feb however provided a wonderful opportunity for a walk, the third sunny day in a row. I took many photos, but one grouping stood out as the unique event to record. Last year I moved my dramatically stripy cannas into the Lower Rosemary Border, and spread them wide so that they could multiply freely. I am treating it like a propagating bed. This summer an essentially weedy plant decided to move in with the cannas. It is of the lamiaceae or mint family, for sure, but which one none of my books could tell me. Perhaps it is exotic, a weed indeed, but I doubt it. Its flowers are a mere 6 or 8 mm across their widest parts, but delicately marked. It has filled the space between the cannas, and its airiness makes for an unusual contrast with the solidity of the cannas. They are backed by the rosemary hedge and the wall beyond the lawn supporting the Upper Rosemary Terrace, and joined by a few welcome rudbeckias. A charming and unplanned association.

 

WORKING ON THE NEW VISITORS’ ENTRANCE

At its best the Italian pot which marked the end of the vista down the Rosemary Terrace looked like this. Yet even then the conifer seemed windblown and the Abelia ‘Francis Mason’ cubes were out of scale and straining at the lead. But the perceptive might have noticed the past tense in the above. Because things are changing.

The map – click on it to enlarge – shows the new visitors’ entrance I am working on. The red loop show the anti-clockwise movement of vehicles through the new parking area. And the new entrance will be along the axis of the Rosemary Terrace, past the pot whose sole purpose was to close the vista down the long, narrow terrace in the past. A beginning and an end are not the same I have realised. (Besides – the pot composition was seriously in need of attention, the abelias out of hand and the conifer departed.) Not seen in the photo below, lost in the cube of abelia at the end of the lawn, is the pot…

Now the Italian pot will be one of the first things one sees on entering the garden, and beyond it the terrace flanked by the Rosemary Borders.

How to treat it? For long I considered four clumps of zebra grass to replace the Abelia, then realised they were (a) too seasonal and (b) even more out of scale. Then on impulse I spent too much money on too many plants to give a complex mix of yellow and coloured foliage and orange flowers. And half of them quite tender to boot. Mistaaake… They stand forlorn, waiting for me to figure their future. Meanwhile I found some lovely young box plants in my own nursery. They can form, four to a hole, much smaller, neater cubes around the pot.

But what IN the pot? No longer only an exclamation mark at the end of a vista, it needs to be a welcoming first focal point too. And it is at an awkward height, the lip too close to eye level. Does one put in simple low bedding? Or a trailing foliage plant? What will be multi-seasonal? Low maintenance?

This photo shows how the abelia hedge behind the pot has been removed for the width of the terrace, and gives an idea of the arch that will be cut through the dense maples to frame this view from the entrance. The old concept of yellow foliage against green no longer is valid. The pot is beautiful as it is. Does it stand empty? And suddenly a vision from a friend’s garden comes to me: a large Chinese jar filled with water, and a pump set to boil just below the surface right in the middle, thus creating little concentric waves which gently move in and out. Eureka! And I need to get electricity to the new entrance anyway!

Back to the past. Here the late lamented Doubly looks down the Rosemary Terrace from the pots which mark its entrance from the path on the axis from the front door. The Upper Rosemary Terrace is newly planted.

 And here he is again, some time later. The borders are looking good, the edges appalling, and the Rosemary hedge, planted as cuttings, reads only in the imagination. The viburnum hedge at the end of the terrace has never had a perfectly horizontal top. That soon must change. These borders – more particularly the Upper Border – are the closest to conventional borders I have. Maintenance and design (or visa versa?) on them need to be upped substantially. For South Africans don’t come to look at formal gardens; not on our mountain anyway. People need to be wowed before being led out around the dams and up into the arboretum…

This rather randomly chosen picture shows that the border is worthy of close inspection. But its real strength is when seen at sundowner time from the stoep (veranda) of the Big House, backlit by the late sun, the dam a black shadow beyond it.

 I love this shot. It has an old-fashioned artificial quality, like an enhanced Edwardian postcard. The cosmos, the Golden Rain Tree and the  Pride of Indias are in bloom, the light golden, and all is well with the world. There will, by the way, be a single jet of water rising through a bed of river stones just to the left of the hedge. It will be visible from the front door down that axis. Semi-completed several years ago, it awaits the installation of electricity for the pump.

There is much work to be done. But it has started. Beneath the roses visible in the wide shot of the Italian pot as it looks at the moment, there stands a yellow bucket. I had just used it whilst planting five different coloured Phygelius in shades exactly matching Rosa mutabilis. At the moment it is ‘Cornelia’, rather pinker, that dominates the composition. But I have no doubt that in years to come there will be a real show-stopper to greet visitors as they enter the garden!

 Late this afternoon I went for a walk in the garden. It was a glorious day after two sharp showers during the night. Roses and many other plants scented the air. I spent time photographing the Rosemary Terrace and Borders. Only when I started photographing the roses – about which a post will follow! – did I realise the camera was somehow set on black and white. So here is yet another very old-fashioned photo, taken from the path and looking back across the whole of the Rosemary Terrace area. Ubiquitous ox-eye daisies and an indigenous diarama (angels’ rod) in the foreground. I think I shall be spending more time with black and white…

 

WEEKLY PIC: MARCH10 – WEEK1

Late summer brings fewer flowers and greater subtlety. In the Upper Rosemary Border penstemon, coreopsis, rudbeckia hirta, rock roses and various abelias are still in flower, but much is over. In the background two very different and very lovely trees that share a common name  – ‘Pride of India’ – are coming to the end of their contribution as well. In the centre the dusky pink flowers of Lagerstroemia indica (crype myrtle) and on the right the yellowish spikes of  Koelreuteria paniculata (Golden-rain-tree) support the pinks and yellows in the border below.

 

HOORAH FOR HYDRANGEAS part 1

I promised a walk around my hydrangeas, so let’s set off… Under the oaks on Oak Avenue, near my stone cottage, there are many mopheads in shades of blue.

Because of my acid soil, blues are particularly good and I have shades from pale through powder to rich dark blue. A particular favourite is almost turquoise, an amazing colour in a plant. Those with a mauvish tinge would be pinker, even pure pink in alkaline soil.

 

After last week’s sunny hydrangeas, let me stress that these are planted under a dense but high canopy of pin oaks and gnarled Ouhout  trees, with little direct sun ever reaching them except in the early morning. 

There are several areas in the garden where hydrangeas play an important role, and we will stop to look at a few of them. The white hydrangeas across Freddy’s Dam were picked to show right until the last light and to reflect in the water. It is time I clear a little under the flowering cherries and lift the canopy, for the depth of white in under the trees is all but lost. On the other hand I love the denseness when you cross the bridge and climb up the sheltered path where foliage meets overhead…

Here they are again, seen from the bridge today, the ripples caused by Taubie dog taking a swim in the heat. In the foreground are several shades of Schizostylis coccinea, which is usually scarlet as the name implies. The scarlet species form grows wild on the farm, but these were planted.

The white can be absolutely pure, but it is never so for long. The immature blooms are greenish, as they mature they often get a blue cast, and as they are splattered with rain and start to age, first pink and then wonderfully rich wine-red and blue metallic colourations (that’s the only word for them!) appear. The pinking has started on some of the older and more exposed blooms in the previous photograph, and the masthead shows you what they look like by late April, 3 months hence.

One of the most satisfying gardening afternoons I’ve ever had was after a particularly frustrating day at school. I went home and instead of marking, threw two massive axes out into the garden. I had thought about it for long, but the sheer scale of the planning was exhilarating. The first follows the contour from below the Rosemary Borders and in the opposite direction towards the beech above the Beech Borders. The second runs perpendicular to it from the beech across the contour, through the Beech Borders, across the lily pond and then cuts through a stand of young poplars on the opposite slope, across a sweep of blue hydrangeas and onto an Acer saccharinum and beyond across the arboritum to the conifer planted by my mother at the official planting of the arboritum on my birthday in 1988. So many serendipitous placings came together on that day, some of which I had planned over years, others which were pure chance.

It took several years after old Frans planted the hydrangeas for them to make a show, and there was plenty of weeding to be done in the early days, but he kept at it, and for the past two years these hydrangeas have been of my favourite incidents in the garden.

Here they are again, this time from the other side, where one comes upon them suddenly in their gap among the poplars…

 

Here they are again, for I couldn’t resist including this photograph, taken this afternoon. And now, although we are not yet halfway through the walk, I think it is time to take a rest, and to continue our explorations later…

PS: This is my first post written using Windows Live Writer – thanks to our great guru and friend from Blotanical,  Jean from Jean’s Garden. The only problem was loading what was a rather large file through my iffy internet, more than made up for by the slickness of composing without the irritation of uploading. And I love being able to chose my font, the borders and the watermark. Now it is only the narrowness of the blog which irritates me – but try looking at it at 125% magnification!

 

 

THE ROSEMARY BORDERS PART 3: THE LOWER BORDER IN JAN 2007

The Rosemary Borders in colourful splendour in January 2007

By early 2007 the Rosemary Borders were looking the best they ever did. I have told of how they were planned and developed here and here. Pictures of the Upper Rosemary Border have featured over the months, but I will post  on it in detail in future. Today I wish to show you, in celebration of the coming of a new decade and in the high hopes that in 2010 I will again attempt such delicious excess, the profusion of flowers from scatterpacks in the summer of 2006-7. Most of the Lower Rosemary Border that year  was prepared and sowed to mixed summer annuals, known in South Africa as “scatterpacks”.

The Lower Rosemary Border starting to show colour. The cannas are in the bed just above the road and visible in the distance shots from my previous post on the Rosemary Borders

 I over-catered and sowed slightly more densely than recommended – plus we were exceptionally lucky with our weather and germination was wonderfully successful. I have seen scatterpacks literally scattered amongst shrubs and the individual plants and their flowers then showed up beautifully. But THIS border I pictured as excess – and boy-o-boy did I achieve it!

Evening light through the cosmos

If disasters such as shrivelling heat at the seedling stage or too much rain can be avoided, it is not difficult to succeed as long as one doesn’t start off with a residue of weed seed in the soil. Weeding is difficult and time-consuming and in fact impossible until you can see which are weeds and which desirables!

I sowed shorter seed on the edges, but will mix them in drifts in future. The young Rosemary hedge, growing from cuttings, barely survived the attack!

Here is an extract from my Moosey diary of 15 January 2007: the scatterpacks (also known as Meadowmix in SA due to the original trade name, and it seems called simply ‘wild flowers’ in NZ if I have understood correctly) which I planted in the Lower Rosemary Border were just coming into their own when I left in December. Now they are lovely! Mainly cosmos at this stage, it is infinitely better than the ‘species’ we harvested by the roadside. Flowers are larger, and there is more variety. There are lovely plants of the amaranthus family which I guess are celosias, gorgeous zinnias and many more; sunflowers, marigolds, daisies, dianthus – my experience is that different species will come to the fore as summer progresses.

What has constantly struck me in these borders where I have used a greater variety of plants and colours than ever before, is how often one achieves marvellous combinations by accident, and how seldom combinations actually jar and create problems.

Jewel colours against the water

For Moosey’s I assembled a range of collages to share my joy in the excess. Here they are: a firework display to herald the new decade!

And last but not least: one that was too good to reduce!

You want an encore?

 

THE ROSEMARY BORDERS 2: A FORMAL VISTA

This post follows on a post from the earliest days of my blog in late August, which you will find here.   It tells how I first planned the borders and how I feel about the results three years on. Let’s take a closer look at the thinking behind the design now. Three distance shots from the arboretum over more than 16 years give ‘the lay of the land’.

Six months after the house was completed, this shot from spring 1990 shows how Phineas, the foreman and a keen gardener, dealt with the vague terraces from the days when this was a potato land by turning the steep slopes between terraces into beds. In the foreground the young azaleas work hard at making a show. Across the dam the young Pin Oaks can be seen against a berm of browning pine branches, packed there after the trimming of the trees in the background. All of them have since gone. Those on the right mark the present Anniversary Garden.

February 2005 and the Anniversary Garden is taking shape, Alfred’s Arches have become a feature and what is to become the Rosemary Terrace, levelled when we had to have a bulldozer on sight some two years earlier, already has a markedly different feel to the lawns above and below it. The entrance to the Rosemary Terrace from the path was built and the large Italian jar on the opposite end was in place, out of frame to the right.

January 2007 and the Upper Rosemary Terrace is filling out, whilst the Lower Rosemary Terrace is solid with scatterpack annuals. The staircase is visible hard against the right-hand gum tree. Between the trees the bed of coloured-leaved cannas looks as good as it has ever done.

In the early days of planning the gardens along the axis from the front door I was concerned with how the lawned gardens on one’s left as you came down would differ from one another. With some imagination it was possible to see that the second lawn, being somewhat longer and considerably narrower, could be turned into a long vista towards a focal point. My dad bought into the idea and after I installed the Italian pot at the end of the vista, he decided a wall needed to be built, echoing the one below the house. I protested, rather half-heartedly, that the money could be spent more effectively elsewhere in the garden. He won the day, and I am eternally grateful, for this rather non-descript transitional area has become the most effective part of the entire garden, and gives us the most joy from the house.

Monty and Taubie playing on the Rosemary Terrace in March 2007, with the Italian pot which forms the focal point in the background. The Rosemary hedge is growing nicely.

The Italian pot never looked better than it did in February 2007. Note how the dark background necessitates lime green planting.

The garden got its name quite early on in my planning: I intended to mask the slopes above and below the terrace with two Rosemary hedges. The lower hedge has happened, successfully grown from cuttings planted in situ and thinned out later. The upper hedge, once the wall was built, became a rhythmic punctuation with clipped balls of Rosemary. Humph. They were planted, but never clipped. On my endless TTD list, “clip rosemary balls” hardly ever features. I would  like clipped balls along the way… but I don’t think Rosemary lends itself to such close clipping, and so this becomes one of the refinements I dream of… oneday, when the garden is a tourist attraction… oneday, when I am rich… oneday when I start looking for things to keep me busy…

The Abelia ‘Francis Mason’ squares around the pot have grown too tall and leggy since this shot was taken. There is too much shade for them to grow vigorously and fill out after clipping. The conifer has died of neglect – regular watering of pots is a habit I only succeeded in teaching my gardener who works in this area BECAUSE it had died. I am thinking of the next step, and seriously considering zebra grass, both in the pot and to replace the abelia. Any comments or ideas?

Looking in the opposite direction, with the bottom of the stairs on the right.

If one looks in the opposite direction, one sees the pots that flank the entrance to the Rosemary Terrace from the path on the axis from the front door. They were my 50^th birthday present from my parents, and I treasure them! Getting the hedges level instead of following the contour is one of the challenges of 2009 we never got around to facing. To the left of the hedge Pride of India is in full flower. (Crepe Myrtle, Lagerstroemia indica, and actually from China!) It combines spectacularly with the mass of cosmos in the Lower Rosemary Border, an effect I can easily repeat and really ought to!  Above the hedge there is another tree in flower which is also sometimes known as Pride of India. It is Koelreuteria paniculata or the Golden-rain-tree, also from China.  The hedge we grew from cuttings of an evergreen viburnum bought years ago, I suspect Viburnum tinus; it makes an excellent hedge in my climate, dense, clothed to the ground and not needing too much cutting.

The pots at the entrance are also planted with Rosemary.

In Part 3 I will look at the planting in these two gardens. Prepare for a colour assault for Christmas, as I post collages of annuals from the Lower Rosemary Border!

 

WEEKLY PIC: DECEMBER WEEK 1

Serious cheating – this is more of a photo essay.

I picked Frances of Fairegarden’s brain about her wonderful pics and found out that her camera is not too fancy: the same as mine but 4 generations more advanced. The quality of her pics has more to do with getting the light and everything else right than with technical know-how or equipment. So I could and should  go out and do better than I’ve been doing!

At the end of a cloudy day I took my camera and tripod to the Rosemary Borders.  As the sun sinks low in the west on such a day, it might break through the clouds which often don’t extend across the much drier plains to the west of us.  The light can be spectacular; today was merely adequate. And so to the subject of this week’s pictures…

So this week’s pic – or perhaps it should be pick! – is of the penstemons in the Upper Rosemary Border. I love them with the species rugosa rose and ‘Antony Waterer’ spiraea; the colours are identical but the plants so different. I love them against the hummocky shapes that dominate this bed, and I love the mauve and pink varieties together.

We move down to the Lower Rosemary Border for this shot. This bed was originally planted with scatterpacks, and I want to get back there, but it is currently more of a grow-on bed for Canna Durban (Tropicanna) and my indigenous orange poppy which featured a few weeks back in the weekly pic. Here Durban grows with the California poppy.

We move lower yet to the Makou Dam. I love this year’s ferns and last year’s oak leaves against the water.

Finally – the sun breaks through beneath the clouds as it sets.