Life must be filled up

Past ten o’clock and the frost is still thick. Luckily, I spent some time yesterday moving pots into the greenhouse and fleecing up. Yet look at this plant. It’s a pelargonium, ‘Concolor Lace’ and in theory tender. I had so many cuttings of it this year that I tried bedding some out and it worked brilliantly. Here it is still looking fresh, if icy, after a few degrees of frost. The Cerinthes are also still green and even flowering. Marvels of nature, eh?

Answer: a lot better than it did, thanks to non-stop rain yesterday. Unfortunately it was also cold and very windy so plants got bashed up rather. Today is quite different, rather humid. A month ago I posted about the plants waiting to go out. Since then, growth has been amazing. Half-hardy and tender plants certainly know how to make the best of their short season. First comes the gothic basket, overflowing already: look, no joins!


( more )

Not my garden but at the garden centre. First the bad news.
Drought. We’ve had hardly a drop of rain for weeks and weeks.
Deer. They’ve eaten all my phlox and sedums. Now I know why there weren’t any in the garden when I moved in.
Crocosmias. Crocosmias! I’ve already paid a man to spend most of a morning digging out the ginormous clump of ginormous crocosmias I hated so much. The damn things are like dragon’s teeth, though: they keep coming up again. Some of the corms are the size of a large baking potato. Grr.
Age. I was out in the garden at 8.15 this morning and when I came back indoors I felt twenty years older.
( better news, picture heavy )

The grass is cut, shrubs and perennials are bursting into flower but it's much too windy to take photographs of them. So windy, in fact, that some plants blew off their shelf in the greenhouse. So I shut the door and snapped this, which is in there hardening off.



I love pelargoniums.