SoS 12/12/20
It’s been an horrendous couple of weeks with the seasonal equinoxial gales. We live at 42 degrees south latitude, commonly known as the Roaring Forties, so gardening has been something we’ve done only if we really really have to. Best to stay indoors or find a stretch of the coast under the shelter of cliff.
Our house painter says the winds make him melancholy, the teachers all say the pupils develop a kind of madness; our Jack Russell certainly does. I have a balance issue and so the sound-buffeting and the visual disturbance of trees waving and gyrating can bring on an attack of vertigo. But the gales are abating now and I’m in clean-up mode. Masses of whippy branches from the two willows, cossetting the gardens with as much water as possible and starting to shovel mulch all around after much water, so that summer doesn’t dry everything out.
Here’s my lot for this week:
The berry house is busting out. In a short 20 minutes, I picked over 1 kg of loganberries (my 2.5 year old grandson calls them ‘lodabeddies’ and LOVES eating them) Many more to come, along with many other berries, so it’s good that husband is a great jam maker. The strawberries are struggling though. Not sure why – good soil, plenty of spring rains before the winds, but barely a blossom. I may pull them in autumn and begin again.
The area next to the fern garden was bare of anything until I began a remodel. I pulled up the token frog pond (it might only have encouraged blue tongue lizards or even snakes) and made a pseudo-cairn with the rocks that I’ve realised leans awfully. I’ve planted snow in summer and a white campanula to creep down to the drainage ditch, along with a few annuals – lobelia and impatiens, all white of course. (People ask why I choose white in the garden – it’s because it gleams at dusk and in the moonlight and is such a cool colour in the heat of summer. In winter, I can pretend it’s the snow we will never have.
And more by accident than design at the edge of the fern garden, white pulmonaria has appeared around the auriculas that spend summer in the lacy shade of the tree-ferns. The fern garden’s actually showing it might have potential. Time will tell.
The pachystigia insignis has thrown out 3 flowers but the wind has left them bedraggled and less than beautiful. I love this robust plant, not for its flowers but for it’s amazing leaves and flower buds.
The white penstemon is looking lovely in our small perennial bed. It’s backed by a white achillea, some euphorbias, spreads of stachys, and a few annuals like white cosmos, petunia and lobelia. This garden is gradually coming into its own but I often pull things and replace them with others. I haven’t found what’s perfect yet. But then that’s gardening, isn’t it?
Take care everyone. For what it’s worth, we’ve just had 100+ days with no Covid and then bingo, the minute the repatriation flights from overseas begin, we have 3 cases in the quarantine hotels! Ah well…
The start of the week was nothing but wind and rain…but now sunshine!
Been relentless here – no rain, juts drying winds.
Very pretty photos! I would love to have a fern tree as developed as yours. Mine is still very young…I will have to wait 12 years to get a reasonable size.
Thanks Fred. We are fortunate to have a forestry department that provides them to the nursery trade from our state forests. We can get them any size but they have to carry a government certificate as they’re protected. In the beds we have planted them, digging a hole big enough was a challenge as the roots of the liquid amber and acers are thick through the soil.
I’m with your grandson I could eat all those lodaberries too!
He didn’t even get hives from the acid overload!
Yes, I agree with you regarding white in the garden….lovely at dusk. When I saw your stone obelisk, I thought you might be practising for the Stone Tower Building competition, although I think that takes place with pebbles on the south coast of Britain. Nice, bright Six-on-Saturday.
Somehow I think I would make a very ordinary Iron Age cairn builder, Granny. But it’ll do in that corner. Hopefully the plants will eventually grow around in quite thickly. My husband says it leans to port, rather like I do on a bad balance day! 😉
The wind sounds very challenging, but you have managed to take some lovely photos nonetheless! Love the pachystegia, such a great plant, one I would like for my own garden. And can you beat that perfect white penstemon? It would be very difficult!
Gill, it’s ghastly. All my spring blooms just frizzle in horror. I do to. But it’s done and dusted and now we just have the weekly storng ocean breezes on the really hot day like today. 31 degrees. No gardening. Just inside or swimming on the beach.
That pachystegia has so much to offer. So glad I planted it on the patio. Do get one.
Lovely crop of loganberries Prue. I’ve just planted two canes and can hopefully look forward to a crop like yours in a year or two.
Katharine, hello. There’s only two canes here too and they’re 20 years old from my Mum’s canes. They’ve had terrible years in drought but this is one of those one in five we get between El Nino and La Nina. This is a La Nina weather year.
Oh, the thought of fresh summer fruit! How delicious! We love making loganberry ice-cream, one of our favourites. It is a very good way of using the summer surplus which has been frozen. What we can’t consume between the two of us in summer is frozen and later used for jams, jellies or ice-cream – the latter leads to indulgent gluttony, ooooh, so enjoyable!
Oooh Paddy. Never thought of loganberry icecream. It’s one of my commercial favourites but why not make my own?
Husband’s making jam as we speak.
We’ve so many other varieties of berries yet to ripen. It’s a bumper year.
A lovely summery six to remind us of what is to come next year.