EARLY OCTOBER - SIX ON SATURDAY
I think I will have to reluctantly accept that Autumn may have arrived. Another week of rainy weather has left the garden looking rather mellow. Leaves are yellowing and the grass has a light scattering of birch leaves.
1. In the Rose Garden the colours are softer. The plants billow and loll, and the Sedums hang their heavy rain laden heads.
2. The roses with thin delicate petals are spoilt by the rain. Compassion is one of the few to not be affected.
3. Snowberry, looks fresh and dainty its berries gleaming white in the shady shrubbery. In 'The Education of a Gardener' Russel Page writes about the approach he takes to altering an existing garden. 'My first action is to remove all the obvious rubbish, misshapen spindly trees and bushes that have lost in the struggle for light and air and food as well as such plants as elder, snowberry or indeed any other unattractive subject...'. So that's a no from him then.
4. Another sign of Autumn is the ripe berries on this Holly.
5. We had a Leylandii cut down two or three years ago. These miniature fungi are growing on the tree stump and in small ribbons across the grass following the path of the shallow roots.
That's all from our garden this week, but to see what's happening in other gardens from around the world visit The Propagator who kindly hosts Six on Saturday.
When I started in the nursery trade about 35 years ago Snowberry was quite popular and we offered a number of varieties. It fell out of favour rather quickly, we found ourselves growing far more than we could sell and we ended up dropping all of them from the catalogue. It's nice to see a picture of one, I've not seen a growing plant of it for years.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting Jim. I think that the shrubbery here was planted in the 70s or 80s and it hasn't been updated since then.
ReplyDeleteYour snowberry picture is a beautiful composition. They look like strings of pearls.
ReplyDeleteThanks Katharine. It brightens up a gloomy corner, although the berries do turn unpleasantly brown later.
DeleteI'm jealous of your rose. I had one of those but it failed to thrive, not sure why, it is now long gone.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you had a poor specimen. Mine seem quite robust and they throw up lots of new growth from the base.
DeleteThe first garden we had w/snowberry in it, my neighbour met my pleased reaction w/'Wait until it drops its berries.' They self seed like crazy, but not as bad as elder, in my experience. We have 2 currently that look as if they were donated by the snowberry bush next door which has been left to grow taller'ns the fence. It's a nice bit of white at this time of year. Really like your rose arch.
ReplyDeleteThankfully the variety we have don't self seed much, and are only about 3ft high, but despite being spindly plants they are surprisingly difficult to dig out. The elders though - they self seed everywhere but at least they have the advantage of being easy to remove!
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