Category Archives: stumpery

Feeling blue…

flowers, garden, plants, raised bed, stumpery

what a week!  Suffice to say we have had the builders here for a few days and the less said the better!!  Scaffolders grrrrrrrr!!
I don’t have that much in the way of blue in the garden but I may add a few more blues over the next few years.  The brunneras are still going strong, as are the veronicas, but the forget-me-nots are looking a bit straggly so I have been pulling some of them out.  They will have self seeded  and will pop up all over the place next year.  My mecanopsis Willie Duncan and Susan’s Reward are doing fine now.  The slugs really went for them when they were first planted last year (or was that 2 years ago?) but they are now looking good.  I moved the blue iris (Jane Phillips) from the middle bed to a sunnier spot last year, having only had them a year, and although they appear much happier the slugs got them too!  The centauria blue is flowering away but it looks like something has sat in the middle of it, it is just not able to hold it’s own weight. (the white one got eaten by the pigeons!!). The pale blue aquilegia is still flowering away.  My proper blue bells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)  that I have in little pots didn’t flower again this year so that has been 2 years now with no flowers. There are a few blooms on the blue geranium but maybe I should thin it out a little as it is spreading just a bit too much and is coming up through other plants now.  I had to cut back the Jacob’s ladder as it was being used as a slug nursery and was being completely decimated.  That was  right next to the fennel (which was also decimated by slugs) so, now that I have dealt with the slugs they might get a chance to grow. This time last year the fennel was over a meter high!  There has hardly been any rain over the last 6 or 7 weeks and  I have had to keep on top of the watering which takes ages. And the poor pond too needs topping up, and with no rain water about, I have to spray tap water into it.  The tadpoles don’t seam to mind.  Anyway the garden on the whole is looking ok and the wee sparrows and tits have started to fledge so there is a lot of cheerful chirping about.

plants,flowers,
Aquilegia pale blue
plants,flowers
Centauria blue
plants,flowers,
Iris ‘Jane Phillips’
plants,flowers,
Mecanopsis ‘Susan’s Reward’
plants,flowers,
Mecanopsis ‘Willie Duncan’
raised bed,
Raised bed
garden,
garden from patio
stumpery,
stumpery right side
stumpery,
stumpery left side

Warm at last…

plants, pond, stumpery

finally a warm day to loiter in the garden.  Lots of things are coming up now but only in little clumps and they haven’t quite spread out as much as I would have liked, but then I am quite impatient in the garden.  I have a few Fritillaria meleagris (snakes head) in various places but they look a bit sparse so I may have to splash out more money and buy a few more to put on a bit more of a show.  I do have some white ones but they are not quite in full bloom yet.  The Caltha palustris (marsh marigold) is looking nice and bright and it is always the first thing in my pond to flower.   I just love my mossy-grassy logs in the stumpery and I do have a favourite one right now.  It is a shame that it will just rot away so I will just have to take lots of photos of it to stick in my scrapbook.

plants,
Fritillaria meleagris
plants, pond,
Calthea palustris
Mossy-grassy log
plants, stumpery, moss,
Mossy-grassy log
plants, stumpery, moss,
Mossy-grassy log

Rain, rain, rain…

conservatory, flowers, plants, raised bed, stumpery

sleet, and then more rain!  My goodness when will we ever get into spring proper?  I am not venturing out over the grass in the garden as it is like a very soggy sponge at the moment but there is a bit of sunshine and some sturdy plants flowering.  Before the Acer  (palmatum dissectum Garnet) are clothed in leaves, creating dense shade, there are a few Chionodoxia in bloom but they are taking a very long time to naturalize so are looking a bit sparse at the moment.
I moved the Dens-canis (Erythronium) from the raised bed to the stumpery area as the large fern in the raised bed completely smothered them.  They look really pretty in front of the drumstick primula and I hope they will make a nice clump fairly soon.
I am trying to dig out all of the Ornithogalum out of the small bed out the front where my lavender is as the leaves have a similar habit to bluebells , where they fall to the sides and cover up anything under them and, as they go over and turn brown, look very tatty coming through the woody stems of the lavender.  So I potted them up in the conservatory for the time being just to make sure all the little bulbs were indeed Ornithogalum and not mixed together with snowdrops.  They were sold to me as nutans but I think they may actually be umbellatum instead.

flowers, raised bed,plants,
Chionodoxa luciliae
flowers, plants, stumpery,
Dens-canis snowflake and Primula denticulata
plants, flowers, conservatory,
Orinithogalum umbellatum and violas

Happy 2018…

flowers, grass, stumpery

Happy New Year to all who read my little blog.  It has been a strange start to the New Year; I have had the lurgy for weeks now and haven’t been out much at all but today I went out for some fresh air and to see if storm Dylan had caused any damage in the garden.  Lots of fallen twigs but nothing too big thankfully.  I did notice a few flowers about to open like red spidery ones on the witch hazel (Hamamelis inter.Diane), and the creamy-green of the Corsican hellebore (Helleborous argutifolius) but I will wait until they are open to get pictures.  There are tiny catkins forming on the corkscrew hazel (Corylus avellana Contorta) and there are bulbs a plenty poking through the soil.  What was strange though was seeing flowers open on the native primrose (Primula vulgaris).  I thought they just flowered in spring?  Well they are food for the slugs I guess by the look of those nibbles.  I just love the bright stripey colours of the upright Golden Japanese Rush (Acornus Ogon).  Not sure why they call it upright as all of mine tend to lean sideways.  No matter.

stumpery, flowers,
Primula vulgaris in  flower Jan 2018
stumpery, grass,
Acornus Ogon

The stumpery..

stumpery

So… the stumpery!  It only has one stump in it and that is not for lack of trying.  I phoned around loads of places that you would expect to have stumps but alas only one to be found.  I did however manage to get some lovely mossy logs from Gosford (with their kind permission) as the backbones for the new area – which used to have the greenhouse and vegetable patches on it.The basic design was a kind of reverse ‘D’ shape; the path wide enough for my wheelchair to get through once it has plants tumbling over the edges.   The lovely Gardens by Water Gems did the hard landscaping (and the pond but that is another story) and I love how it has turned out and it is great to be able to keep adding new plants to it.  The area is now a jumble of mostly woodland plants and I have to say the birds just love it.  I know the logs will eventually decay but I can always replace them.  I am still making mistakes with my planting though.  What I thought was wild garlic turned out to be few flowered leek and I am still ripping the stuff out.  I wanted some lovely red campion but it grew massive and overcrowded everything else around it.  I would like proper bluebells in there but I am waiting until I get all the the non-native ones out first which may take a while yet.  The Vancouvera hexandra is a bit of a thug now so I need to take more of that out.  Can’t wait till spring as it has loads of spring flowers in it.

stumpery,
stumpery,
stumpery,
stumpery,
stumpery,