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.