IS THAT AUTUMN ON THE AIR?

It was only on Sunday afternoon that I got to taking the dogs on a long exploratory walk. The mission: to determine what advances autumn had made during the month I was away. Already, on waking on Friday morning, I was surprised at how cool it was; especially after braving 36 degrees of heat in Cape Town only days before.

I maintain that the first subtle signs of changes in leaf colour happen by mid Feb, by mid March autumn gets going and mid April to mid May it is at its peak. So I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that the above sights greeted me on 17 March: a birch in full autumn glory!

It was not the only example of Look at Me Now! Here a dogwood struts its stuff as only a dogwood can. I think it is Cornus sanguinea, but I’ve always had my doubts about these small shrubby trees which I grew from seed I imported nearly 20 years ago. As it has never flowered for me, identification is difficult.

The beautiful little pagoda-like buds identify Cornus florida, as do the bright colour of early leaves against the still fresh green of others.

Quieter, but lovely, are two trees we bought together as Acer rubra; I have no reason to doubt this, except that they lack the autumn drama and staying power they are known for in other parts of the world. In addition the one tends to yellow rather than red autumn colour. They are planted meters apart.

Oh (and I won’t say this too often) – one can see we’ve had a harsh summer with several hail storms and plenty of wind. Or is it just that the battered leaves are the first to give up on life?

I’m darned if I know what these lovely leaves belong to – a viburnum? It is one of a mix of seed-raised plants in what I call my hedgerow. Bit of thinking and research needed here…

We are back a little beyond where the very first photo was taken. One of my most interesting trees grows here, and soon I will again try cuttings for my friend Jo… It is a plane tree, but instead of turning yellow its leaves turn red. I found it amongst hundreds of other quite normal planes at a wholesale nursery at about this time of year. Last summer it took a bit of a knock when a huge old pine fell and caught some of its branches, but it has thrived this past summer…

It is one of the first trees to show definite colour change in mid Feb; here it is in mid March and it has staying power till mid May – longer than any other tree!

There are other pics from this walk, and subsequent ones. More summery, less autumnal. But this pic from the end of the walk, warm light reflected after sunset from a bank of clouds to the south-east, is a good place to end off for now.

50 photos; and here endeth May

I use the Biblical language with care – the beauty of May has been an almost religious experience. And on one walk during these last days I took 177 photos, which I whittled down to 50 to choose from for the next two posts. And of them I guess 40 will make it onto the blog. Comments will be brief, or I will never get done…

I will start with a selection in which the gables of the big house are noticeable – note that here you can see both in the reflection, but only one through the foliage.

Here is a similar angle but from up in the arboretum. Look at the mauve azaleas with profuse autumn flowers that are a wonderful addition  to the autumn reds and yellows.

More autumn detail, more mauve – and if you look on the very edge in the middle of the right-hand side of the frame you can just see the left side of a gable through the foliage!

Another panorama, with a young beech in the centre – beeches are highly treasured rarities in South Africa, and I’ll never forget an Austrian friend describing the germinating beeches being like fleas on a dog’s back as the snows melted!

Save the best for last – this photo gives a pretty clear indication of the state of things; despite there being flowers out, and plenty of autumn colour around still, the frosts have knocked the cannas and the lawns. The Upper Rosemary Border always looks good at this time, as autumn highlights the various shrubs growing there. More of that anon.

The mauve azaleas – lightly scented and almost completely deciduous – are worthy of a close-up… and then some!

‘Evergreen’ azaleas aren’t usually noted for their autumn colour, but many loose some leaves or have leaves which take on rich tones in the cold. They add immeasurably to the beauty of late autumn.

The paler the flower, the yellower the leaf; the darker, the redder…

Many trees and shrubs have lost most leaves, but those that cling on often turn richer shades than earlier stars, which faded before the cold became more intense.

There is more sunlight reaching the remaining leaves too – here the five-fingered Liquidambar styraciflua.  And since counting fingers has become a bit of a pre-occupation, below is Croft Cottage against the three-fingered Liquidambar formosana, a late bloomer that with luck will glow into July, and a detail of the tree below that.

Well OK, not really a detail, but hopefully you can see the three-fingered leaves. And the fact that these trees along Park Lane, the motor road up the arboretum, are only just turning. And Mateczka who, having covered kilometres dashing away on the walk, is now parked off in the sun waiting for me to get a move-on!

Continuing the fingered theme, the Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) has seven – sometimes five – fingers; here is the tree on the edge of the lawn, which has an unusually uniform rich red colour.

Our three-fingered maple, by choice and sheer force of s/weedlings, is the Chinese maple or Acer buergeranum. Dare I say that its autumn colour can be even more impressive than the Japanese maple’s, although it never achieves the same grace of form. Below an avenue of Chinese maples cross the official entrance into the garden where Flora’s Path passes  by the end of the Rosemary Terrace.

Rose heps – and the final roses – also add autumn colour to this last bit of the Upper Rosemary Border which forms part of the New Old Rose Garden. Below, hiding behind the greenery in the shade of the Chinese maples is a Japanese Maple of great beauty, tucked into much too small a space…

In fact, I think it is worthy of a close-up:

Let us step back now for a change of theme, to the furthest end of the Rosemary Terrace. No photo I’ve ever taken makes its name so abundantly clear as this one.

Have I mentioned? Mateczka does dash-dash-roll and Taubie, the old girl with the gammy leg, does plod? But loves the walk even more than do the other dogs!  What appears to be solid rosemary on the left is in fact interspersed with a  wide variety of shrubs, annuals and herbaceous perennials. (Go back to the photo of the house from the arboretum.)

Here, seen across some rosemary, is flax, oak-leaved hydrangea, berberis and abelia, with the Chinese maples in the background. Below is the marigold which featured in my previous post – now thoroughly snuffed, but still architectural.

And to end Part 1, a photo from the beginning of the walk – the upper side of the Upper Rosemary Border near the steps.

WEEKLY PIC: MAY10 WEEK4

No cheating this week, please take note! I knew the aloes would feature. In fact I’m preparing a whole post on them. But I wanted the right shot for today, which I found when looking up from where I was kneeling, dealing with the complications that go with four dogs gently but insistently wanting affection at the same time. So out came the camera. And it is surprising how much is in this shot.

The aloe is Aloe arborescens, one of the smallest of the ‘tree’ or multi-stemmed aloes. Some years ago there was so much damage from the cold that we cut back the rosettes and the result is a very dense version – so dense that flowering is not as plentiful as it could be. In a good year each rosette or branch will produce at least one flower spike. It seems as if I need to put on my thickest and longest gloves and prune out some rosettes at the end of winter. They grow on very quickly into new plants when stuck into a sandy mix after being allowed to dry for a few days and form a callus. All the same, the spiky medusa heads are green all your and contrast beautifully with the soft mounds of Rose Geranium that grown next to them.

Immediately behind the aloe is the gaunt shape of a bottlebrush, Callistemon citrinus, whose hard textures are so typically Australian, although the warty seed pods start life as fluffy red flowers which give the shrub its common name. The sunbirds  -our version of hummingbirds – love them and in summer one can watch them come and go for hours. In winter they turn to the aloes, one of the  reasons for growing them so close to the house. The elaborate bird bath – about which I blow hot and cold – was recently moved here, and the birds love its new position. A fruit feeder also hangs in the bottlebrush.

Further down a Japanese Maple is in full autumn splendour. We are having a strange autumn, with many trees being quite late to turn. Although we have missed out on the intensity of a ‘normal’ autumn, we are in for a long one it seems! It was the combination of hot colours that drew my attention to this composition.

Below that  and behind the birdbath is my yew (Taxus baccata). It took years to decide to stay with us, produced several hundred cuttings a few years back which I gleefully planted as hedges – and lost. It seems yew hedges are not to grace Sequoia Gardens after all… This yew will form the centrepiece of the Mothers’ Garden which I’m planning to edge the Big Lawn and which will commemorate my and my partner’s late mothers. Sometime.

And then right down on the Makou Dam’s wall the fan shape of one of the 40-odd young tree ferns that have germinated for us of their own accord  over the past 20 years can be made out.

WEEKLY PIC: APRIL10 WEEK1

One hundred frames exactly from this afternoons walk. None wonderful and the subject I set out to photograph  for this first week in April rather lacking in context… so the question was (which is what it should be every week anyway)… : which pic best shows what is happening currently in the garden? This one. Undoubtedly. It is the first maple to colour purposefully across the dam from The House that Jack Built. I bought it (as well as another to the right of the pin oak) as Acer pseudoplatanus. Which both ain’t. But they aint the same either – I think. Their autumn timing and colour differ too much, yet they come from the same source. My guess is A. cappadocicum, but guess is the operative word. No-one seems to know much about acers in Africa… Anyway – the strong reds combined with rich greens marks the start of autumn proper in my book. Till now it has been voice exercises and warm-ups. This is a melody!