SPRING COLOURS 3–LAST WEEKEND CONCLUDED

I am in Johannesburg, busy with a marketing expo for Warriors, but I hear the garden is again wet and cold. An ideal build-up to the spring fair, especially as we planted up pots and annuals during the week, and sowed over 150m2 (150 sq. yards) of scatterpack – the annual meadow mix flowers which were spectacularly successful several years ago, but which I’ve not repeated since.

After all the close-ups over the last two posts, lets take a look at the bigger picture. The arboretum is often now a closed view down a path, suddenly opening up to bigger views and even distant views, and from some spots a panorama down onto the main formal gardens in front of the big house. The thousands of azaleas planted here are starting to flower…

Along the top edge of the arboretum there is an avenue of crab-apples, looking magnificent en masse.

And even more magnificent in detail…

This is Malus floribunda – and abundantly it flowers! Malus purpurea might not be purple, but as is so often the case with plants, ‘purpurea’ indicates a darkness of leaf and flower. I love these dusky shades!

Near the top end of Freddie’s Dam there is a viburnum which has a short magnificent flowering season when its scent spreads far and wide. I’m certain I know what it is called, but I don’t have my resources with me to check… beyond it against the water is the purple new-leaved maple I referred to in my previous post.

Here is a close-up of the flowers – both beautiful and scented. For the rest of the year it is, like so many viburnums, a very non-descript shrub.

And here it is again because – well, why not?

Nearby are some dogwood trees – Cornus florida. Their ‘flowers’ are in fact bracts which start expanding in August and last through to October –much longer than the fragile blossoms!

In the close-up you can see the tiny flowers which are surrounded by the bracts.

I also have a red version of which I am extraordinarily proud.

Another shrub or small tree which does well with  us, and of which I am proud, is Magnolia, considered to be one of the most primitive flowering plants.  This one is M. x soulangiana. It has a fist-sized fleshy flower, heavily scented of… soap. That is merely because I got to know the scented soap before the flower. It only slightly dulls my pleasure in it!

So where does that leave us? With more blossoms to explore, in particular the various pyrus (pears) and prunus (cherries, almonds etc.); here is a taste. I’ll need to get home and get my camera out for more.

One last indulgence. Wisteria. In particular the wisteria and japonica together in the Anniversary Garden.

 

One last one… in the bed up against the house the first diaramas shoot from nothingness to ther mauve flowers in only a week or two. They combine rather dramatically with the last of the orange aloes…

 

SPRING FESTIVAL BUILD-UP

On Monday we collect the next edition of MountainGetaways from the printers, in good time for the Spring Festival. Louis designed the front page with the spring theme taking up the whole of the upper half of the cover, instead of just the masthead. As I sit here in short sleeves, spring is suddenly alarmingly close, even though everything is still quite grey’nbeige and I thought it time to wet your appetite – and that of the growing number of potential visitors to Sequoia Gardens who visit my blog – with a few spring pictures from the past. All of them were taken at Sequoia Gardens…

Here my father poses proudly in the arboretum (‘collection of trees’) which was his great project through the 90s and which is now looking very impressive.

Marching up between two rows of widely spaced Tulip Trees is an avenue of azaleas. Later in the year the dense canopy of large leaves shield blue and white hydrangeas; still later the autumn leaves are a bright and cheerful yellow.

Another part of the arboretum; evergreens and deciduous trees of all kinds abound.

The deciduous azaleas, usually in shades of yellow and flame, are often beautifully scented as well.

Blossoms, azaleas, and the freshness of the first greens – these are what spring is about on the mountain.

However Sequoia Gardens offers much else besides… here we have Wisteria and Bearded Iris…

…and Wisteria and Japonica.

In fact Wisteria features all over Sequoia Gardens, sometimes in formal settings, sometimes scrambling through trees, or even self-supported.

Here are a few more photos, taken during late September and early October at Sequoia Gardens.

The delicacy of the early leaves of some Japanese maples have to be seen to be believed!

To begin with there is very little green, but gradually the leaves on the trees change the whole density of the views, and in a gentle year the soft greens of the young growth are one of the overriding impressions of spring.

I do think I prefer the delicate signs of spring to the in-your-face brightness of massed azaleas…

…but that doesn’t stop me from getting as carried away as everyone else when I have a camera in hand!

Why don’t you pay us a visit and come see for yourself?!

 

FOR THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGING…

This is the longest I have ever gone without posting. And the most my life has ever changed in two weeks…

Sure – spring has kicked in during this time. Possibly more successfully than at any time since I saw spring from here in 2009 when I was nursing my mother.

Late cold held things back, and winter rain sped things on, with the result that spring is not as bitty or as schizophrenic as it can be at times… But with the Spring Fair only a week away, I wish, as usual, that it all happened a week later: yesterday’s pic shows how early in spring it still is on Sequoia, which is several degrees colder than Cheerio, a few hundred meters higher up the valley…

What makes the wish more urgent, however, is that this is the first year that Sequoia Gardens is listed alongside Cheerio Gardens (where the fair originated back in the seventies) as an open garden. So let me tease you too with some of the more springy shots I took yesterday …

The old spring war horses: azaleas …

…and  blossoms – pear against crabapple…

Luckily there are a few alternatives, unique to Sequoia Gardens, that I hope people will enjoy as much: this combination of a bright red azalea with rosemary is different from the usual soft pastels  of spring.

In fact, I rather like that shot, which looks back to where visitors will be entering Sequoia’s gardens. The following combination is also rather lovely, but needs to be repeated elsewhere for next spring. I’m none too keen on people peering at these flowers inches from where I rest my weary feet on the wall of my veranda!

The combination I am most excited about relates to the feature which at this time of year is already  my best draw card : wisterias, especially the first to flower, those in the Anniversary Garden.

For two years I have been watching one powerful shoot from a japonica (Japanese Quince or Chaenomeles) which decided to grow creeper-like into the pillar of the pergola. This year there is the most beautiful combination of rich red and deep violet against the pillar. A triumph of nature over nurture indeed!

Right at the beginning I mentioned change. Big change. I won’t be returning to teaching next year. Instead I have bought the marketing trio of our local webpage, map  and quarterly tourist magazine/pamphlet/newspaper, which I have been promoting at the top of my right column since I started the blog. In addition I have updated my information pages and posted a host of pics in the photo gallery which you can reach from the green buttons above my header pic. The rest of the weekend will include writing the information sheets which visitors to the garden will collect on entry, and generally getting ready for the arrival of tourists  which gets under way next Friday…

 

SOON THE SOLSTICE MOON

Soon the solstice moon will be full. I shall be in Johannesburg, not here to see it. More’s the pity. Somehow the solstice and equinox full moons have always meant more to me than the events themselves… perhaps literally it is the turning of the tides, even though I sit at 1400m (4500ft) and 300km from the closest sea, and over 1000 miles away from the sea I know and love…

In the above photo, taken from the arboretum at 5.30 this afternoon in the growing dusk, you can see the Big House and to its left Trailertrash Cottage.

 I love winter. (Mostly. Last night it depressed me.) I particularly love this view in winter, the view from The House that Jack Built’s big window. (More or less – this was taken from the terrace under the Water Oak.) The traceries of trees are reflected in the water, some late colour coming from a swamp cypress, and for the rest the palette is reduced to dark greens and neutrals. The angles of the earth, overlaid all summer, support the vertical trunks of trees. Light and frost will now play on these surfaces, and I will only tire of them at the end of August, when all starts to change anyway.

This afternoon the dogs and I went on a walk, our first real walk in 12 days. We took along my new camera to test especially its low light potential. We were not disappointed. Whilst on Samaria one of the plates connecting the batteries on the old camera was irretrievably lost in the dust. It will take weeks in Johannesburg to repair. I thought a cheap and compact  point-and-shoot was the solution – one which could take low-light snapshots in a way my bulky 12x zoom (and rather ancient) Canon S2 can not. I bought the entry level Canon A490 and took it on its first real outing…

This photo, taken in the gloom of the steps up from the bridge – always a difficult place to get enough light – proves that it was a worthwhile choice. Besides having a much shorter lens which lets through more light, the camera  can go up to ISO 1600, 4x as much as the old S2. This I think was taken on ISO 800, but strangely it is not indicated in the properties of the photo.

 Here is The House that Jack Built in its meadow, and beyond Freddie’s Dam with the bridge visible over the left side of the cottage… a stone cottage in a meadow on a dam in a valley on a mountain…

 

This photo of Mateczka – now seven months old and a lovely animal – is clearly shot at high ISOs, and there is no detail to her fur. But it is the kind of snapshot I would never have got in the poor light with the S2, and a rather lovely snapshot it makes. I look forward to less self-conscious photography with the new camera!

 

 

 Here is The House that Jack Built as seen from the bridge. With a little imagination you can see the moon reflected in the right hand gap between the trees. I could see it clearly, but you will have to accept my word on that one!

Silver-grey fur can be both a memory of glories past and a promise of beauty to come… wisteria seedpods and magnolia buds.

 And purple-grey is a highly fashionable colour, although my mother lovingly and simply referred to these flowers as ‘Old-fashioneds’ – aged Salvia leucantha finds a new subtlety after the frost…

 We spend a happy hour or more in the garden; Mateczka dashing through fallen leaves with all the joyful indulgence of the young when making a noise, Taubie and Stompie – our two old ladies – plodding along contentedly, and Monty (who believes himself the alpha-male of the valley despite his six-inch legs) dashing off to investigate before running back and jumping up against me adoringly. 

And thus, as the chill becomes more and more noticeable,  we reach home and heat…

 

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.

 

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.

 

The main house from the arboritum

An overview of the more formal parts of the garden, below my parents' house. Alfred's Arches lead down from the front door axis with the gate that gives the Ellensgate Garden its name visible. Below that the wisteria pergola in the Anniversary Garden stands out. The long sweep to the right in the middle of the photo is the Rosemary Borders which flank the Rosemary Terrace. Beyond the next lawn is the canna bed, very frosted when this photo was taken in early July 2009 as the winter clean-up was starting. The Makou Dam that the house looks out on is visible at the bottom of the photo.