Six on Saturday 03/12/22

Winter certainly arrived this week with daytime temperatures only reaching around 5C and then falling down to near zero for several nights. At least it’s been dry with very little breeze. The big news from me this week is that I have finished planting all of the Tulips (plus a few other things as well). Between the weather and work it has taken a lot longer this year but, finally, all of the half hardy things are tucked up in the glasshouse and a lot of the Begonia and Eucomis corms are dried off and ready to go in the loft for the winter. This weeks main garden focus is to dig the Dahlia tubers up and get them dried off and packed away in the loft as well. In the meantime here are six things that caught my eye as I worked in the garden this week.

• Impatiens auricoma x bicaudata has been flowering in the glasshouse since June. It suffered in the exceptional summer heat and lost a lot of its leaves but it still kept flowering. With more plants moving into the glasshouse I’ve run out of room for the large Impatiens and so I’ve cut it back to about 8″ high. I’m not sure if it will survive the winter (there are cuttings on a bedroom window cill) but it has two choices.

• Next to the glasshouse is an arch with a Honeysuckle and Clematis ‘Margot Koster’ climbing up it. Margot is having a final flurry of flowers and the tiny snails are having a feast.

• The other end of the arch has a piece of trellis attached to it and I grow Persicaria ‘Red Dragon’ through it. It reaches over six feet tall and has been flowering for weeks and weeks.

I hadn’t noticed that the winter flowering Honeysuckle had started to flower until I took this photograph.

• The weeks of rain destroyed the flowerheads on most of the Hydrangeas but H. macrophylla ‘Dancing Snow’ is still looking good. The flowers were white when they opened and then slowly turned lime-green. They are now this lovely soft pink.

The fern in front of it is Dryopteris sieboldii.

• Mahonia aquifolium ‘Pamina’ was given to me as a small plant many years ago. It’s not the showiest of Mahonias and reaches for the sky regularly. I started cutting it back a few years ago in the hope that it would bush up. It grows back quite quickly but has no intention of thickening up. The berries from the spring flowers show how it got its common name of Oregon Grape.

• Fatsia japonica is that lovely mix of an exotic looking yet really hardy plant. The bees have been enjoying the flowers for a couple of weeks. They’ve passed their peak (the flowers, not the bees) but stand out well against the glossy green leaves.

I think it’s going to start being more of a challenge to find candidates for SonS now that the weather has taken a turn for the worse but I shall keep trying.

Thanks to Jim at https://gardenruminations.co.uk/ for hosting Six on Saturday. Head over there to see what the other Sixers have found to show us this week.