Six on Saturday - 21 May 2022

 It has certainly rained this week.  I am sure we shall have weather reports as well as six things in the garden on The Propagator's weekly 'American Supper' of a gardening get together.  With all the rain forecast, I decided to move the succulents onto the shelf inside the shed from the shelf outside!  With no watering required one would think a little more time for the garden.  There was not much gardening in this garden, but I have enjoyed just looking at mine, and visiting other gardens this week: Bristol University Botanic Gardens with Mr S, and East Lambrook Manor and Avon Bulbs with the Somerset branch of the Alpine Garden Society.  

Here the plants in the garden has moved on visibly after the rain: 

1. Baptisia australis Exaltata is very slowly increasing; from two spikes, I have  six this year, though I did see ever such a big clump in the botanic gardens.  However there is no point comparing my new tiny garden to the likes of anything larger. It is still at the bud stage, but I just love that soft green and the promise of a blue pop of colour.

2.  Blue and gold: here a campanula is legging up the golden Lonicera nitida 'Baggensen's Gold.  

3.  What a disappointment: the ant sowed seedling of Linaria at the edge of the gravel turns out to a hybrid.  The bees on the Linaria 'Canon Went' last year must have been to other gardens, a sort of American Supper.  Maybe this is the wrong term but the sort of supper where you go from house to house for a course, enjoyed by many during the early seventies, sometimes driving some distance from house to house. These types of suppers with friends may well come back now that the tenner isn't what is used to be and restaurant prices rising, but maybe everyone will bring a dish to one house to share, cos the fuel is too expensive!  This blue Linaria may well be 'edited' this week, in the meantime I value it for the 'architectural' element'! 'Designer Speak!

4.  It was on the naughty step  having not flowered since its first season in 2018, the Iris sibirica 'Silver Edge has earnt a reprieve. Another week or so it would have been added to the 'To Be Edited' list.

5. Certainly on the to be edited list is the  Allium nectaroscordum Siculum.  This year instead of growing straight they are snaking their heads up from a recumbent position, with the leaves all long and chocking off some of my Origanum collections. For now I shall cut off all the leaves, and the leave the flowers if they don't look so weird.. Maybe it is a question of right plant for the garden, wrong place and it would be better suited to a position in the Mediterranean style front garden. Though with the origanums and bulbs I had tried to make a small Mediterranean bank along the gravel path.

6. Some seed can be viable for a long time, as I discovered with the rocket seed my son gave me a few years ago. Someone who I shall not name, told a group of us at a talk that one should keep seed in the fridge and throw it out after one year, and buy new.   I've never followed that: our fridge is too small, and I am always game to try old seed, and love going through my seed collection if only to dream about what I could grow.  The reality is that the garden wouldn't be large enough to accommodate all the plants. Thinking that germination would be low, you can see that it certainly wasn't and I sowed a little too thickly close to the peas.  

Even with a tiny garden it is possible to go out and pick some leaves minutes before lunch.

Ingredients: rocket,  tops of mangetout pea which I accidentally broke whilst tying up with string(Monty Don laughs out loud), thyme flowers, nasturtium leaves, chives, parsley and flowers from Tropaeolum tricolor.