This is my first attempt at a Six on Saturday (also first attempt at a blog!). It’s all plants this week
My first plant is Schizostylis coccinea ‘Ice Maiden’ (I think we’re supposed to call it Hesperantha coccinea now). I have a three varieties of Schizostylis in my garden, all in various shades of pink. I found this one at a local garden centre a couple of weeks ago and have eagerly awaited the first flowers. It’s very nearly white! Just a touch of pink.
Number two is Begonia sutherlandii. I bought some as small plugs back in April and they have flowered non-stop ever since.
My third choice is Salvia patens. I haven’t grown this for many years and had forgotten what a beautiful colour it is. It’s taken a while to start flowering but is well worth the wait. 
Number four is another blue flower – Ipomoea tricolour ‘Heavenly Blue’. I sowed the seeds quite late as the plants don’t like the cold and have planted them to grow through many of my climbers. It’s a shame the leaves don’t last. The photo doesn’t do justice to the colour!
A couple of weeks ago I went to Picton Garden and nursery where they hold the National Collection of Michaelmas Daisies. It’s a beautiful garden and, needless to say, I came away with a couple (maybe slightly more) of plants. This is a photo of an unnamed variety of Michaelmas Daisy that I have had for a few years it doesn’t seem to succumb to the slugs either
Plant six has to be Cyclamen hederifolium. It’s taken me years to get a decent show of these and now the seedlings are popping up all over the place. This particular one is a seedling from a large corm I bought in Amsterdam several years ago
That’s my six for this week. Happy gardening.
2. Staying with the yellow flower theme is Kniphofia ‘Percy’s Pride’, a lovely understated variety of Red-Hot poker. I just wish the flowers would die a little more tidily.
5. A strong pink in the garden now is Anemone japonica ‘Hadspen’s Abundance’. It’s got a much simpler flower than ‘Bressingham Glow’ (SoS 25/8/18) but stays as a good clump rather than running.
6. And finally, I couldn’t resist this beautiful Geranium a few weeks ago. It’s called ‘Bloom Time’.
The sun’s still shining so I’m off outside. There’s foxglove seedlings to move and loads of other ‘jobs’ to do. Thanks for reading this far. Enjoy your garden this weekend and don’t forget to get your fix at our host’s site 
4. In late spring I sowed seed of Ipomoea ‘Heavenly Blue’ and I. ‘Crimson Rambler’. Crimson Rambler started flowering in July and has continued to do so, on and off, but I haven’t seen sight of a flower on the much more desirable Heavenly Blue. There’s plenty of leaves!
5. The berries on the Amelanchier have long been eaten by the blackbirds, ably assisted by pigeons but other berries are beginning to colour up including a later flowering honeysuckle
Solanum jasminoides ‘Glasnevin’ (it was windy when I was trying to take these pictures!)
Pyracantha ‘Orange Glow’
and Sorbus aucuparia ‘Autumn Spire’. I only planted this tree a couple of years ago and it’s suffered badly this summer with the leaves looking like this for a couple of months.
6. The Michaelmas Daisies are starting to show their colours. ‘Monch’ has been flowering for weeks already and now Aster amellus ‘King George’ is looking great. It was a new plant from Picton Nurseries last autumn. ( I don’t think this one has changed it’s name to Symphyotrichum.)
I’m hoping for a day in the garden on Sunday and hope you all have time to get out into your gardens as well this weekend.
2. Last week I mentioned the problem that I’ve had with Salvias, Fuchsias and other plants. Several Sixers confirmed that the damage is indeed Capsid Bug. However, a few of the plants are making a valiant effort to finally flower after months of nothing. This is F. ‘Gartenmeister Bonstedt’. It normally flowers non-stop from June until the frost but the second photo shows the damage a lot of the shoots have suffered from.
3. The grasses are really starting to come into their own now. This is Chasmanthium latifolium. It’s a plant that quietly sits there minding it’s own business and just getting on with it, slowly spreading, not self seeding and not being cropped by the local cats! The Viburnum behind it lost all of it’s developing flowerheads to the Beast From the East and has been eaten and looked absolutely awful all season.
I don’t know if it was me or the plant that was shaking when I took the above photo.
5. My climbing roses had a great start and then suffered very badly in the drought. I can’t get enough water to them (hosepipe extension?) so they’ve had to cope on their own. However, the rain that we have recently had has given them a new lease of life. This is R. ‘Graham Thomas’
6. Although not a climbing plant I wind Persicaria microcephala ‘Red Dragon’ up through a six foot trellis. It’s coped with the conditions well although I think the leaves are a little smaller this year. I’ve tried to make this bed have a tropical feel with tall Salvias (Capsid Bugs found them), a banana, Ricinus, Cannas, Zinnias and Heleniums. There’s also a Lobelia tupa that is thinking of flowering so will, hopefully, feature in a couple of weeks.
Yes, there’s some Beech hedging in there as well. I kept some spare plants in case there were any gaps in the hedge I planted a couple of years ago. There aren’t but I couldn’t bear to throw the spare ones away so planted them here. Seemed a good idea at the time! I keep telling the Non Gardener that I need a bigger garden. Apparently, I don’t – I just need to grow and buy less plants.
2. Another sorry tale. I’ve tried to grow Berberis thunbergii ‘Atropurpurea’ for four years now. Year 1 was great. Year 2 started great but the plant seemed to defoliate almost overnight. Year 3 also started great but the same thing happened again. Research suggested that Berberis sawfly is the culprit. The plant is towards the back of the border, the idea being that it would grow up above the plants in front of it. This also means that it gets obscured and so I haven’t noticed any caterpillars. This year, despite my best intentions it’s happened again so today I made the decision to dig it out and I’ll replace it with something else in the autumn. This is the advice given on the RHS website. The sorry specimen is below, post removal.
3. On to cheerier things in the garden. The dry conditions meant that Athyrium nipponicum var. pictum, which was so beautiful earlier in the year, collapsed and most of the fronds died. The recent rainfall has revitalised it and also Geranium ‘Rozanne’ behind it.
4. The dry conditions have made me rethink some areas of the garden. For the last few years I have planted out several half hardy Fuchsias in the bed around my small Birch tree. They’ve done well there in the past but this year have really struggled despite copious watering. I’ve decided that in the autumn I’ll remove them to the glasshouse as usual then plant the bed up with plants that will, hopefully, need little attention. It’s a small bed, fairly shady but the outer part gets some sun. I ordered a collection of ferns for dry shade from Shady Plants which arrived last week. They were beautifully packed and very healthy.
5. I grew Ricinus communis from seed in the spring and they’re all about three foot high and single stemmed but one has really gone for it and is approaching six foot.
6. The Japanese anemones are looking glorious at the moment, they don’t seem to have minded the lack of rain. This one is ‘Bressingham Glow”. If it has a fault it’s that it wanders rather than staying in a clump.
In the second photo the plant behind is one of several Cosmos that I have that have made exceptional leaf growth but no flowers. There was a question about this on GWQT but I didn’t feel that the answers they gave applied. I wonder if they’ll flower before the frost gets them?
I hadn’t noticed the bindweed coming up in the corner until I wrote this! My neighbour cultivates it along with brambles (sorry, blackberries).
There was indeed a slug in there but then I found these monsters
Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillars. I’ve never noticed them in the garden before and have never seen the moth. They’ve been re-homed in another part of the garden.
4. The hanging baskets (all two of them) have survived the heat due, I think, to the automatic drip watering system. They’ve had the occasional top-up water when I’ve fed them but, overall, they’ve had far less water than I’d normally give them, half of which usually runs out of the bottom of the basket.
5. Behind this sleeper is a tiny border with a rather large Viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn’ on my boundary with next door and a Lamprocapnos (Dicentra) spectabile. The front of the bed has snowdrops in the spring and then this Hakonechloa macra ‘Variegata’ grows through as the snowdrops die back. There’s a bit more not in the picture and it’s taken a few years of dividing and replanting of the original plant.
6. Is it me or are the Cyclamen through earlier this year? It’s taken years of lifting and moving seedlings around but I have them in several areas of the garden now. They seed easily in my gravel paths. I love seeing them emerge from a patch of seemingly bare earth but they also, sadly, mark the end of summer to me.
Talk of the end of summer is a bit of a sad note to end on, sorry, so cheer yourself up by visiting other Sixers gardens courtesy of our host at
2. The Allium ‘Christophii’ seedheads last well into the winter but they tend to fall over at this time of year as they dry and detach from the bulbs . I take some indoors but they are so structural it’s good to have them in the border as well. It’s taken me a while to come up with a solution – push half the length of a 12” thin green cane into the ground by the bulb then feed the rest of the cane up the hollow stem of the Allium (I cut the bottom couple of inches off of the stem first). Others have probably been doing this for years but I can be a bit slow……
After –
3. More by luck than planning this Lobelia x speciosa ‘Hadspen Purple’ (a new variety to my garden) looks glorious with Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora ‘Emily McKenzie’ (what a mouthful).
4. Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’ was hit badly by the SnS earlier in the season but the clump has come back really well considering. I’m hoping to divide it in the autumn. The flowers are an insect magnet. More ‘Emily McKenzie’ in this part of the border.
6. The first flower of sunflower ‘Wahoo’ featured a few weeks ago. It’s getting into its stride now. There are more buds forming further down the plant. The bees love it and spend ages on the flowers and get covered in pollen.
So that’s another week and another Six. It’s quiet work-wise so I’m hoping for lots more time in the garden next week. It may be a small garden but I’ve managed to make it lovely and labour intensive! I hope you get to spend some time in yours as well. Don’t forget to keep checking back to our host’s site to see the other Sixes and add more plants to the must try list.
2. I grew Eucomis bicolor from seed several years ago. I grew some in pots for a couple of years as I wasn’t sure how hardy they would be. The answer was very hardy and so I planted a group in a border. However, the slugs and snails love the new growth, the leaves that survived the munching grew so large that they covered their neighbours and the flower stems had to be staked. This situation carried on for a few years and then last autumn I dug the bulbs up and planted the largest ones in a couple of pots. The flowers have a slightly “off” smell and seem to attract flies rather than bees but the flower structure more than makes up for that. You can see how they get their common name of Pineapple Lily.
3. Geranium ‘Rosanne’ has been very slow to flower this year. It’s growing in a dry, shady spot and usually gives a long, good display. I’m assuming that it isn’t enjoying the exceptionally dry weather and the few flowers that have finally arrived are about half the usual size.
4. There are signs throughout the garden that the summer is starting to transition towards autumn. The first Anemone japonica flowers have opened, stronger colours are appearing and the Crocosmias are in full flower. This one is ‘Emily McKenzie’, I love the markings on the flower centres. Some Crocosmias can be a bit thuggish but I find Emily M to be well behaved. (Sorry, the first picture isn’t a great photo)
5. The first Michaelmas Daisy is in full swing – Aster frikartii ‘Monch’.
6. Some years I can grow Rudbeckias from seed and some I can’t. This year I could! These are R. hirta ‘Rustic Dwarf’ and they seem to have thrived in the heat. It’s a shame that they’re just annuals as the yellow/mahogany colour combination is wonderful.
Having spent a lot of July not in the garden due to holiday, working away and visiting family I have severe withdrawal symptoms. I’m really looking forward now to a few quiet weeks where the garden can take priority. I’ll also have more time to read all of the Sixes! I hope you can find time to enjoy time in your garden this week as well.