Six on Saturday: Summer Suns are Glowing

I look forward to the above view in late summer, when the peachy rose ‘Lady Emma Hamilton’ has its second flush and the peachy crab apples of Malus ‘Evereste’ are beginning to ripen, a match serendipitously made in heaven as it didn’t cross my mind when I chose the roses two years ago. Last year, however, the crab apple was mistreated by the Beast From the East and cropping was poor, and there was no such spectacle.

Deadheading down by the cutting beds this week, a seedhead of Calendula ‘Orange Prince’ crumbled in my hand, transformed into viable seed, prompting me to take action and start putting little ‘hats’ on seedheads of plants I feel it is worth collecting seed from. The ‘hat’ is a little gauze drawstring bag, bought on eBay and sold to hold jewellery or party favours, and on the photo below contains seedheads from two-tone Lychnis coronaria ‘Occulata’:

The white and pink varieties seed around quite generously, but I don’t know if this variety does. I shall not, however, be collecting seedpods from this wayward nasturtium which not only clambers through the bed and onto the path but also up the trellis and into the climbing rose, extending possibly as much as 12 feet or nearly 4 metres. I quite like its exuberance and it certainly adds brightness to this bold border, but it was meant to be RED (Crimson Emperor)!

Also clambering exuberantly is this clematis, C viticella ‘Walenberg’; nothing unusual in that, you might think, but all this growth has been in the last couple of weeks! I suspect molluscs hiding in the leafy growth around the base destroyed the first new shoots, but I was confident that the plant was still alive and would grow as normal next year (subject to mollusc vigilance) – so the almost overnight emergence and growth of what you see below took me by surprise, even more so when I found there were also flower buds, as shown on the second and rather out of focus shot. The plant clearly wants to make up for lost time!

There seems to be a lot of active plants in this post as this week I have removed the ‘overactive’ Persicaria ‘Firetail that I referred to in my EOMV. This plant originated in the woodland edge border from where an offshoot was taken and planted in one of the main borders, where it didn’t do much, before a border overhaul saw it taken out and replanted in the bed next to the streamside grass. This was a little over a year ago and from a very small root this is what it has grown into now:

Fairly humungous, wouldn’t you say?! It’s strange, but all the persicaria in the bottom part of the garden seem to show a bit of restraint, but here the opposite is true, and although I talk of  ‘the streamside’ it is an artificial stream contained within a butyl liner, so the ground should be no moister than the rest of the garden. It may get more sun, I suppose, but whatever the reason P ‘Blackfield’ and P ‘Inverleith’ both need a bit of attention in the coming months, as does the whole of the main streamside border where couch grass is proving difficult to keep on top of. In the meantime, most of the big chunk of ‘Firetail’ was replanted back into the woodland edge border, co-ordinating nicely with P ‘Red Dragon’ in front of it:

Jon the Propagator kindly hosts this Six on Saturday meme, where gardeners are asked to feature any six things from their gardens, giving rise to an intriguing and varied range of subjects, so do consider visiting his blog to check them out. My sixth today is one of our regular visitors, one of the welcome ones, which I am thrilled to say we see or hear most days, although with an active family or families around it is not always possible to tell them apart and yesterday, when this photo was taken, I also saw his/her sibling/parent/offspring/friend scurrying away in the opposite direction:

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