Weather warning!
Choisya Aztec Pearl
Weather warning! Thunderstorms, with large hail and very heavy rain coming. Possibly. The local council has sent me a warning e-mail. No mention about gardening, though every other activity seems to be off-limits.
Monday 18th November
So I will stay inside and do some web gardening. Catch up on the relationship of my real garden with its virtual presence on the web. I try to be as accurate and up-to-date as possible. This seems to matter to me. And it's really difficult. What do I do with older, gushing pages detailing garden make-overs which hardly lasted a year? Write something like 'Update 2019 : This idea was silly. Didn't work.'? Hmm...
Not that there's anything wrong with trying things and being optimistic. Often it's my difficult garden areas that see the most changes - I plant unsuitable things, then they get shifted. Like roses in the Hen-House Gardens, which are shaded all summer. Oops. But sometimes things are simply slow to grow - like the shrub in this photograph, a Choisya variety with different shaped leaves.
I also have some detective work to do - the identification of my older David Austin roses. I do this every year. When New Zealand rose nurseries started stocking English roses I bought as many as possible, though the selection was limited. Naturally I took off their labels - my garden was to be as natural as possible!
Possibly Perdita Rose?
One such, a pale apricot, suffered for years planted by the side of the house. Whipped into the Hump's new rose garden, it is flourishing, and this year is flowering. I reckon it's Perdita, which was issued (not quite the word) in 1983 and whose shrub is one metre high.
White Iris
Later...
Weather update. Just five minutes of heavy rain. No hail, no thunder, no problem, but no gardening, either. My fingers are having the day off (after some heavy-duty weekend weeding).
The dogs and I have been out walking, and I've seen the garden area I'll be working in tomorrow - the part of the Hump Garden where my dahlias are planted. There's Cleavers, isolated patches of Lamium, and enormous spreads of Alkanet to deal to. The roses in here need sunlight and space.
Shakespeare or Prospero?
I've spied (flowering) a Golden Celebration, a pink Grootendoorst, and a William Shakespeare (or possibly Prospero. I record buying a Prospero in 2006, but not what consequently happened to it. And I remember shifting a WIlliam Shakespeare which a friend bought for me.
Then there are other roses nearby whose identities I can only guess at. Oops. And some I will never know, because I dug them out of other people's gardens and re-homed them here. Hmm...
It's also time to pull out the Honesty (love it) and scatter the seeds around. I then need to clear the path and to welcome two new climbing roses to the archway. Aha! I've wisely left their labels on! They might enjoy being tied in, just a thought.
Done and dusted...
There! Tomorrow is done and dusted, and I haven't even lifted a (slightly achy) finger!
Weather up-date : we missed the weather, and none of the irises flopped over. But other gardeners closer to town weren't so lucky. Daughter's lettuces got completely shredded. I pointed out that one tears and shreds lettuce for a salad anyway. And at least she doesn't grow hostas. She had hailstones the size of large marbles - not golf balls, but no doubt someone will have had those. And luckily her glasshouse roof wasn't broken.