Painting your garden with annuals

Ah growing annuals I hear you think suspiciously. But they don’t come back.

Well no, but as I say to folks many times each year, They give you colour as no other plants will give you colour, and they last for months…usually to the first hard frosts or Christmas…and they are (relatively) cheap.

Well that’s my opinion, and I prove it by growing an annual border every year.

I love it, it is the place where you can plant and create fast growing colour, and try something different each year.

Each year I include some common ingredients, but always try to incorporate something new. I am always on the look out for new ideas and often peering into other peoples gardens as I walk around Inverness.

COSMOS
A great annual, beautiful feathery foliage and large weather proof cup shaped heads of pink, white, red and purple.
I grow it because it is fast and forms a mass of weed proof foliage in 4 weeks.  Pest proof and a great backdrop and filler. Cosmos Sensation is the best seed strain.

NICOTIANA (Tobacco plants)
I usually grow majestic Nicotiana affinis, a tall clean white with strong foliage. What more can you ask! yet it gives even more, and an evening stroll will show how much moths are attracted to it.  I vividly remember one warm late summer evening; I saw elephant hawk moths hovering at the flowers like huge humming birds – just wonderful.
I sometimes grow Nicotiana sylvestris or Nicotiana langsdorffii, which have elegant whorls of white flowers and are even taller.  Occasionally I try the green flowered strain, but it is never completely satisfactory.
Never grow the dwarf bedding Nicotiana - they just do not cut the mustard.

RUDBECKIA Favourite yellow daisies that take the colour display on to November. I like the black eyed ones and the green eyes variety Irish Eyes.

CALENDULA (Pot Marigold)
Always good and in a wet year they retain their colour and vigour like no other . I like the big fat orange flowers.

POPPIES…..Lots of poppies.
ESCHOLTZIA (The Californian Poppies)
Such elegant funnel shaped flowers. When I am trying to paint a border with colour and imagining Monet in my mind’s eye, I love to use the single colours, however they can be hard to get.
The original orange Californian poppy and the white are lovely, and very impressive as a colour block.

Opium Poppies
You cannot help loving these big blousy poppies. Doubles are the most telling and I have had huge reds and pinks and this year black and white, all wonderful. They are short lived of course and will break you heart when you find them all lying down after wind and rain. But beauty is fleeting and always worth any effort.

MATTHIOLA (Night Scented Stock)
Thin straggling plants with lots of single pink and puce purple flowers, so why grow it? - for the most delicious scent in your garden. The scent begins to rise in the early evening and is like old fashioned scented sweeties, once smelt always desired.

GRASSES
Yes annual grasses are lovely, and wonderful with poppies growing through them.  I love barley grass Hordeum jubatum, so elegant and you have the love the quivering heads of quaking grass, Briza maxima.

THISTLES 
I have written about the magnificent Onopordum, the Scot’s Thistle, but I like growing others such as Milk Thistle, with its white splashed leaves and the lovely little Galactites. Lots to experiment with.

DAHLIAS
Dahlias were out of fashion for years and then Christopher Lloyd showed us all what a mound of dark foliage and bright flower can do.
Favourites for me are Arabian Night, tall and red flowered and it actually came through the winter for us for about 8 years before real winter returned.
Bishop of Llandaff is now everywhere, but this year I found his colleagues, Bishop of  Canterbury, Bishop of Leeds and Bishop of Durham, great fun and all good.

This year my new (old plants) are annual Scabious, Larkspur (but the mice have eaten almost every one) and Double Stocks. It’s nice to rediscover old friends.

I learnt to love annuals when we lived in the Falkland Islands. There the gardens were a blaze of summer colour -  Livingstone Daisies, Godetia and Nemesia. I have been trying to recreate that picture in my minds eye ever since.  

An Imposing Imposter - Onopordum (The Scots' Thistle)

Each year we see the magnificent stems of Onopordum Acanthium rise from the silver over-wintering rosette.
We carefully position the young plants each year so that they are near to the driveway where people walk up to the nursery. Many photographs have been taken of visitors standing beside a 2 metre high "Scots' Thistle".

But is it an impostor? If so, it is a very handsome one.

The silver cottony leaves are fiercely toothed and grow quickly into flat silver rosette in the first summer. It stays that way over the winter and in spring it begins to build.  In June the silver stem rises, the mace like buds opening to a glorious purple thistle head.

It is also called Cotton Thistle and comes from Southern Europe & Asia, but believe me it looks magnificent growing in Scotland, and has long been naturalised and taken on the local accent.

Choose a sunny well drained spot and plant any time from April to August.

One for adventurous gardeners yes, but for beginners too, easy and satisfying.

It is our August 'Plant of the Month' at the nursery and available through our online catalogue.

Primula Propagation and Summer Snow

Where have I been? Well here, but doing what?
Well it happens every July. I really look forward to the end of committee meetings and more time at home and in the garden, and what happens?

Well I spend more time in the garden, but not as we know it. 

July is propagation month, first the Auricula and then the old fashioned primroses.
Almost two weeks are taken up with the task. It is rather satisfying, the rows of young plants grow, you get to meet some old plant friends and you listen to a lot of radio. All good fun.

The other thing that happens in July is that it rains. This year it has excelled itself and we have had torrential downpours and it is a surreal experience sitting in a poly tunnel propagating and seeing the sheets of rain cascading down the outside. When I looked out across the hill, the woodland was steaming and for a second I was on the wet west coast of New Zealand…except I was wearing a fleece in mid summer.

This week has been much dryer and I have been back in the garden real.

After several wet weeks absence, it is very scary to see weed growth and my first task is to tackle the ones that are about to seed….lesser willow herb and bittercress. That’s quite good fun as they come out readily, the only down side is the midges, who are now here in force.

And I have made a point of lifting my eyes from the soil. Many plants have grown rapidly this past month and often surprise you.
I love the corner where many Primula florindae have flourished and are now in full flower. Fragrant and very hardy, they have all come through the past two winters, they are excellent garden plants.
They are normally a rich yellow, and there is also a lovely rich dusky orange, and a rare and lovely red.

I also revisited some of the mid summer shrubs. Flowering shrubs are not so plentiful in summer after the riotous flush of rhododendrons and azaleas, but those we have are all the more appreciated for that.

I love the white flowering ones. Just now we have Deutzia glabra  and several Hoheria . Both are lovely and stand out well against the lush dark green foliage of summer.

And then look down. Below the Deutzia the ground is covered as with a snow shower. And further along the path, Hoheria lyalli blossoms are scattered as confetti at a garden wedding. Just lovely.

Romping away after the rain

It is grey and overcast today, but perhaps we are through the gales and lashing rain of the past two days.
It was very cool first thing and I left the house with five layers, It is now after 9am, and I am down to four.

There was fresh feel to the air, but none of the wonderful after rain smells that you get on a warm day. Is anything nicer than the peppery smell of your birch leaves, a pulse of wild garlic from the stream or the lovely sharp apple scent of Rosa eglanteria. I will wait for them to return with the warnth we are all missing.

'This is the time of year when you loose control'. I heard a character on the Archers say that, when I had it on in the car yesterday evening. He said that things race away from you, and they do. It is not so much the ever present weeds; though of course they are accelerating; it is the lush growth.  Warmed in April and watered in May, many plants are romping away.

So I walk along a path, peering eagle eyed for weeds; wheeking out the seeding bittercress (I try not to hold botanical grudges, but bittercress comes near!) and than I stop think, "Were there primroses in this bed? well yes, when you look below the Geranium Jolly Bee and the Ferns, there are some yellowing primrose leaves.

Early in spring everything has its place and there is none of this exhuberant growth, but you have to adnmire it.
This is the time of year when you loose the heart to cut down and banish the Campanula lactiflora seedings and the just flowering Jacob's Ladder.

NO No No this is definately a case of less is more, the garden will be the better for less Campanula...but I'll just let it flower.

Some days I think if we went away for a year and returned we would find the garden populated by Campanula , Hardy Geraniums and Bittercress of course!

The Burning Bush - Combustible Weeding

I have spoken of the tedium, nay obsession of searching out ground elder and racing to get to bittercress and dandelions before they seed, and I have confessed my loathing of bracken. Well now we are beyond the point of no return. Suddenly there are weeds running away everywhere…well not everywhere but with 4 acres of garden they can regularly surprise you.
Well we have one answer, a flamethrower. We have had this “flame gun” for some years now. I must admit to being enthusiastic about its non chemical based powers of weed destruction, ( I choose to ignore the LPG gas) years…but I do admit to being rather nervous of it.

My husband Donald is made of sterner stuff; after all he is the real gardener around here. He can be seen regularly lugging the gun and its accompanying LPG gas cylinder around the garden blasting away at offending noxious weeds.

I recently drew his attention to a footpath where Alchemilla mollis had seeded and there were thousands of seedlings. He suggested this was a job for the flame gun.

One bright afternoon he approached the path. Now April was a very dry month. What happened next is unsure. He was flaming the path next to a squat golden Cupressus and Wooosh!

Now Donald is a Queen’s scout, but he admits to a frisson of fear. The thing roared and burst and fire ran through the shrub like lightening. It was over almost as fast as it began and mercifully after consuming the Cupressus the fire put itself out.

We can only think that the heat and sunshine had encouraged volatile oils to rise and they just needed a flame to go off. Still, a useful lesson; if a lesson it is; about dry and flamible aromatic shrubs in dry, dry weather, we have learnt it.

All a bit scary. I know gorse can be like that but maybe there are more shrubs and trees that can become a potential torch.

Ah well here comes the rain this week and a whole new germination of weeds
That is unnecessarily cynical…the garden needs it and will benefit greatly.
Where is my brown jumper.