Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature

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Frost gives me good opportunities for garden photography in winter, but it’s generally not good news for the flowers in my pictures. The rose photographed last week was robust enough to survive, although it may not open any more fully. Most frozen blooms, however, are left with wilted and sagging petals when they thaw.

That’s not a worry, since the frost will usually just have finished off the last of the flowers from autumn. The plants will flower again next year – if they’re hardy. But there are some that are only borderline hardy and will only survive if the winter doesn’t get too cold for them.

The salvia above (Salvia involucrata ‘Bethellii’) may withstand temperatures down to about -5℃ and this plant managed to come through several winters. A far colder spell than we’ve had for a long time was too much for it, though, and it didn’t reappear the following spring. Some cuttings from the plant did survive that unusually cold period. They are in a huge pot that’s part of a collection of containers that my husband has planted up to go in front of the house. There it’s sheltered by the house wall. It benefits from a sunny, south-facing position and the warmth that radiates from both the wall and the paved driveway below it. This just shows how microclimates can vary within a garden!

The little daisy below was, I think, Rhodanthemum ‘Moondance’. (The leaves belong to the plant behind it.) It should have coped with winter. In this case it was probably the heavy winter rain that killed it rather than the cold. It’s a Mediterranean plant that likes good drainage. Here our summers are normally very dry, but, awkwardly, our winters can be rainy and wet. That means that I do sometimes lose plants if I haven’t given them good enough drainage. I think I’m lucky that so much does survive! 🌿

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By November there are few flowers left in the garden. The asters have almost all gone over now and many plants are beginning to die down for winter. Even so, there is a little colour left here and there. There are still the white ‘butterflies’ of the gaura flowers, which will continue to look good until a frost gets them. Also hanging on are some fuchsias, a couple of penstemons and the tiny daisies of Erigeron karvinskianus (Mexican fleabane).

Late October and November is the time when Hesperantha flowers here. The white one in these photographs is Hesperantha coccinea f. alba. It brings a beautiful freshness to the garden at a time when so much looks tired, and most foliage is turning yellow. (I have a red-flowered plant too, seen in this post.)

It brings great pleasure to see newly-opened flowers at this late stage of the year. Sometimes, however, there is disappointment if they don’t manage to flower before a frost arrives. Why the Hesperantha plants in my garden flower so late is a mystery to me. They’re said to flower from late summer, but it’s always well into autumn before we see any flowers here. Maybe the plants will flower earlier as they mature, or do they just prefer to flower in the cooler weather later on? In any case, I do love to have some flowers still around in November.

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My recent posts for this month and September have almost all featured blue or lavender-blue flowers. (No surprise there, since they are amongst my favourite colours.) So for this week, I thought I should try to find something different. That’s not so easy now. I have a little bit of pink and red around, and a some white, but there’s not a lot left in flower here at this stage of autumn.

This Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’ is just coming to the end of its flowers after providing a bright gleam of yellow for the last few weeks. I’m waiting for it to die down a little more to allow me to move it to an area where it will have a bit more moisture. It’s a plant that isn’t really happy in the dry conditions here, and can struggle when there’s little rain. If I don’t remember to water it in the summer, it can very quickly begin to look sorry for itself.

It will be moved to an area beside the little bog-garden, where it will be easy to remember to water it. (The bog-garden itself needs regular watering, otherwise it can dry out surprisingly quickly. Probably that’s because it is small and is now well-filled with Siberian irises, astilbes and ragged robin. It could do with being bigger, but we don’t have the space.)

I hope that the new position will allow the rudbeckia to bulk up and flower more prolifically. Nearby there is a vibrant purple aster and another, much shorter, rudbeckia. With a bit of luck, there should, in future, be a bigger patch of yellow flowers to bring some extra ‘sunshine’ to our autumn days.

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After last week’s post, where I showed you the large-flowered aster I’d like to buy, I decided to show a couple of the asters already in my garden. To be honest, there’s not much other than asters (Michaelmas daisies) left in flower in the garden now. I have several and they’re all providing an uplifting display of colour that helps to combat the sometimes grey days of autumn.

These are two short-growing cultivars. The pink one at the top is ‘Alpha Light Pink’, but the identity of the blue one below is a mystery to me now. (I try to write down the names of the plants I buy, but don’t always remember.) We have a similar plant elsewhere, named ‘Audrey’, but I expect it to be a bit taller than this one. (This one is only about 30cm, Audrey can grow to 50cm.)

Trying to keep track of plant names isn’t easy, but is impossible when friends give you the generous gift of a name-unknown plant from their garden. There must be much-loved plants in gardens everywhere that have been passed around but their cultivar names either forgotten or mistaken for something else. (I have a couple of very pretty taller asters, both given to me by friends, but no idea of their names.)

However, it gets even more difficult when the powers that be decide to change a well-know name for something difficult to say, and usually all but impossible to spell. In this case, many Aster cultivars have become Symphyotrichum – yes, I had to look that one up for the spelling! But it’s more complicated than that. Checking on the RHS site, I read that the Aster genus is now divided into several: Aster, Callistephus, Eurybia, Kalimeris, and Symphyotrichum. Thankfully, they use the common name aster for all!

Does it really matter if the name of a plant is hard to pronounce, is overly complicated, or gets forgotten? Perhaps not so much in the garden, if it’s happy with where it’s growing and it looks good. It does matter when you want to enable someone else to buy the same plant, or to be able to check important details like the size of the plant or its preferred growing conditions. In future I’ll try to keep a better record of plant names, even if it’s just for labelling my photographs and writing this blog!

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Autumn is a great time of year for daisies of all kinds, with rudbekias, echinaceas and asters bringing a vivid splash of colour to our gardens. The asters are looking especially impressive now, with a long-lasting display of blue/mauves, purples, pinks and the occasional white. My favourite is the flower photographed here, Aster x frikartii Mönch (Michaelmas Daisy).

The reason I like this aster so much is because the flowers are bigger than most. They’re larger than the other asters that I’ve seen, and than those already growing in my garden. (You won’t be at all surprised that I love the colour too, given how often I write about blue and purple flowers!) This aster has a long flowering-time and is popular with bees, so it really should be in my garden!

I don’t know why I haven’t grown this aster yet – probably just because I haven’t come across one for sale when I’ve been in the mood for buying plants. I did go out to try to find one in some of our local nurseries recently, but saw only other smaller-flowered cultivars. However, we are soon going to have a visitor to stay and he enjoys visiting garden centres, so I’ll have a good excuse to do a bit more searching…😄