Six on Saturday - 14 November 2026

 At this time of the year, I feel impatient for the spring or at least for the next season's plants and flowers which will most probably start with the snowdrops.  En masse the garden is looking pretty good thanks to the Chrysanthemums that continue to give colour, it is the leaves that take me out to the garden. We had our first frost during Thursday night and another one again last night. This time it is a hard one with the water frozen solid in the bird bath and heaving up.

For more about this weekly get together of gardening and plant fans, and for lots of topics on gardens visit Jim over his 'Garden Ruminations'.

1. Growing in the gravel garden is this attractive leaved Cyclamen Graecum.  This one was the lesser of the two growing not far from each other.  Since the really pretty one succumbed to something and I found it just a mushy mess, the one that remained becomes the one to focus on.

 

Cyclamen Graecum

2. Unnamed but lovely leaved Gingko turning butter yellow soon,  to be scattering its leaves over the Conservatory border where the Cyclamen coum are already coming up, but not yet flowering.

3. Of the few chrysanthemums in the garden Chrysanthemum Hillside Apricot is the latest flowering this year.  It is to these that the butterflies have been coming even this week.

4. I used to grow a few vegetables, and still grow a few herbs.  When I visited my friend Alison a few weeks ago, she was potting up some tiny seedlings and they were a form of greens a hybrid I believe of mustard and kale.  I had a few bare patches, I have yet to try it, but is has done fairly well.

5. Each year I wonder what is stopping me from getting rid of the Mahonia Soft Caress. It is still here and come the winter it is a fairly OK green mound.

It does hide my little heap right in the corner of the garden behind the Acer.  Poor Acer it is in a dire state, with its finer branches and twigs chewed whatever the month by the squirrels.  However in the corner, formed purely as a refuge for the bugs, lady birds and slow worms, are some dried cuttings from around the garden: not so much a bug hotel but a bug 'camping au sauvage'.

6. When we are missing rain drops, or even dew for weeks, some of the damp stuff can be so refreshing to plants and to the eye. No doubt there will be frost this morning, but having just got lovely and warm from my Strong Woman for Life Exercises, I simply await my Saturday breakfast, made as always by my lovely husband.

Pseudodictamnus acetabulosus with heavy dew

To be honest I am suffering from a sort of writer's block, a gardening sharing sort of block or whatever block it could be called.  I haven't even read my club book for next week's meeting, and I haven't written up about our Northern Ireland holiday.   It is not that I don't like going out into the garden and pottering around, its not that I don't notice a plant or the butterflies that have been flittering around the garden right up to yesterday visiting the remaining flowers. It is just that I may take an occasional rest from SOS posting. I may write up about the odd plant(s) on a post. I may even write up about six and join you all occasionally. I will most definitely be visiting from time to time to enjoy what you have to say about your plants and gardens. There is nothing wrong with me, so don't worry my friends.

As compensation here are a few pictures from the Hauser and Worth gardens, which we visited yesterday for our date day.

Seeds floating away from an Anemone
probably A. hupehensis 'Pamina'

Seeds of Asclepias incarnata

View of one of the courtyards