Tag: photography

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My title isn’t entirely true! Annuals, like the cosmos in this post, can flower for months. But here I’m thinking of the difference between annuals and perennials.

Most of my garden is made up of perennials because I rely on them coming back year after year and gradually spreading. I wouldn’t have time to grow much from seed every year, so I need plants that are long-lived and can pretty much do their own thing once they are planted.

That makes lots of sense for building up the planting of the garden. But annuals have the advantage of providing me with something new to photograph. These – such as the zinnias, cosmos and nigella I’ve grown in past years – add some variety to the images I can create. This year I’ve missed having that variety because I didn’t grow any annuals at all.

There are sometimes a few annuals and biennials that reappear from self-sown seed. The love-in-a-mist (nigella) manages to spread itself around, as do evening primroses, wild carrot (daucus) and borage (which gets everywhere if it gets a chance). This year I’ve noticed that there is a small self-sown cosmos in a border. I’ve never had them do this before, so it’s an unexpected surprise and I’ll have to wait to see what the flower will be. (Probably a pink and white ‘Candy Stripe’, since they were the most recent. You can see them here.)

Waiting for that little cosmos bud to open is making me feel that I must make time to sow some annuals next year. I’ve missed the added interest and excitement that growing something new and unfamiliar from seed brings. Hmm, now I need to look at some seed catalogues… 🙂

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Tall, climbing clematis are amongst my favourite plants. I love the different flower forms, as well as their wonderfully rich colours and the velvety look of their petals. But I can struggle to keep them going here, in the dry and baking soil of my East-Anglian garden.

The short-growing herbaceous varieties of clematis may be a dependable alternative here. I have two at the moment: ‘Sapphire Indigo’ ( just opening in the top photograph) and the popular ‘Arabella’ below. They have been in the garden for a number of years and have managed to come through the drought and unusually high temperatures of this summer without any extra watering. Both are still in flower now, at the beginning of October and have been in flower on and off from June. (They would probably be more constantly in flower if they had more moisture.)

Reading up on these clematis tells me that they don’t suffer from clematis wilt and that they are long-lived. They have no tendrils to help them climb and are only 30 to 60 cm tall, so are good where they can grow through another plant for some support. I have ‘Arabella’ growing through a shrubby sage that gets to over 60 cm and provides a useful home where the clematis can lean against its twiggy framework.

The only problem that I’ve found so far is that slugs and snails like snacking on the flowers. So I’ll need to find something gritty or prickly (we have a holly and mahonia bushes, so perhaps some of their leaves) to sprinkle around the stems in the hope of keeping these marauders away.

The flowers on these two plants start off with a lot of purple in their colour when they first open and then gradually become more blue as they age. (You can see the newly-opened flowers of ‘Arabella’ here.) My last photograph is another purply-blue short-growing clematis, probably a clematis integrifolia. This one was photographed on a visit to Fullers Mill Garden and is one that I would like to try here. These lovely purple-blues are my favourites, but I’m sure I’ll be tempted by pink and white varieties too. For now though, I’m going back outside with my camera to take some more pictures of ‘Sapphire Indigo’…

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Here we’ve gone from unusually high temperatures to autumnal chills in a very short time. I’m still wondering how the summer disappeared so quickly. (And hoping for some more gentle sunshine that we can enjoy rather than be baked by.)

Late summer flowers have become a memory too. These heleniums (aka sneezeweed) are in colours that remind me of that summer heat. They are fiery and glowing and demanded to be gazed at and photographed.

The heleniums in the top image were in a garden I visited. I wouldn’t plant this particular helenium in my own garden because I’m not keen on its combination of colours. However, the flowers made a good picture anyway, so I was pleased to be able to photograph them.

The flowers in the bottom photograph were in my own garden. (Unfortunately the plant didn’t come back this spring – but I think it would have struggled to survive this dry summer, even if it had.) The colour here is much redder than the other plant and makes me think of the hot embers of a fire. Maybe I’ll try to grow it again in the future.

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I’d like to thank Tanja Britton for the idea for this post…we felt that some of my frosty photographs may bring a suggestion of coolness to these over-hot summer days. (The temperatures are still higher than normal in the UK and, I believe, in many areas elsewhere.)

Snow is infrequent in our winter in Suffolk now, so the Japanese anemone seedhead, with its tiny cap of snow, (top photo) is a rare image for me. Frost is much more usual in our winters, so I leave seedheads to see if they will become interesting subjects to photograph. The frost can make something magical out of the most ordinary plant remains, as you can see from the photo below. The honesty seedheads were long past their best and getting very scruffy, but with a bit of frost and some sunshine, they’re suddenly delicate and attractive.

Bronze fennel tries to take over my garden by spreading its seedlings everywhere but I resist the temptation to clear away the seedheads and I leave it intact for the frost. This plant never disappoints me when it’s frosted, and it can become most decorative, especially when the sun adds some sparkle.

If the frost is early, it can catch plants that are still in flower. The echinacea below was a new plant and had come into flower much later than normal. It was an unexpected sight one morning, to see it completely frozen through by the first frost. (It hasn’t happened to any of the echinacea flowers since.)

A few flowers, such as the yellow winter jasmine, the pink-flowered shrub Viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn’ and this winter-flowering iris (below) have flowers through much of the winter. They look especially appealing with a touch of frost (although that shortens the life of the individual flowers).

I’m glad that the roses in my garden right now haven’t got any frost on them though! Zepherine Drouhin sometimes has a few flowers left just as the frosts are starting, so I always look to see if they’re in good enough condition for a photograph. Of course, when the frost melts, the flowers are left looking wilted and they won’t survive the damage the frost has done to the petals. But a photograph preserves the memory of them.

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To me, white flowers with green foliage have a lovely fresh and cool look…something that would be welcome in all the recent hot weather. (Fortunately the temperatures have dropped a bit, but it’s still hotter than normal.)

The climbing Hydrangea petiolaris in the top picture has recently finished flowering. During June and early July its airy white flowers looked graceful alongside our shady seating area. It’s going to get too big for its space, so I ought to prune it back now the flowers are over. However, I like to leave some of the flowers to dry out so that I can photograph them in the frost. It’s hard to imagine frost right now, but it does look deliciously cool, as you can see below.

We have just a few white flowers in our garden. It’s still a little early for the white Japanese anemones. These struggle a bit in the heat and do need watering to keep them going, so I’m not expecting great results from them this year. And I haven’t grown any of the white cosmos this year, so I’m rather missing it.

The white geranium below was originally planted years ago but has now managed to spread itself around the garden by self-seeding. It’s very welcome, so I hope it will continue it’s journey around the garden. Most of my geraniums form spreading clumps but this one seems so far to be much more compact. That’s great, because it means that it doesn’t cause much disruption to other plants and can fit itself into gaps quite easily.

A plant that I’ve only started to notice recently is Gillenia trifoliata. The plant below was growing at Fullers Mill Garden, and being able to see it close up – rather than in a photo or on TV – made me realise how pretty and delicate the effect of the tiny white flowers is. If I can find space I’d like to grow it, but there’s already a list of plants I’d like to find room for…

The Gillenia makes me think of the flowers of Gaura lindheimeri, which are just starting to come out in my garden and will last into the late autumn. Gaura is great here because it doesn’t take up a lot of room and the flowers weave themselves through and around the other plants. I’m looking forward to seeing their flowers dancing in the borders like little white butterflies very soon.

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A couple of weeks ago, the garden seemed to be full of blue and purple-blue flowers. Now it’s the turn of pink to come to the fore. The pink flowers growing here range from the softest and palest of shades (like last week’s water lily) to the most vivid of fuchsia-pinks. The shades here are somewhere in the middle.

Clematis ‘Hagley Hybrid’ (above) is one of the softer pinks, especially on a day when the sunlight is not very strong. (I’ve seen it look much brighter than this on a day with very bright sunlight. The age of the flower will make a difference too. The newly-opened flowers are a little brighter.)

Another soft pink is the little prairie mallow above. It is Sidalcea ‘Party Girl’. The flowers are small and delicate – each one measures just 5cm across. They’re like miniature hollyhocks, which makes me wonder what it would be like to have normal large hollyhocks nearby. The difference in scale could be a bit mind-boggling!

The pink of the deutzia below is a deeper and brighter shade than the others. I haven’t yet planted this shrub out, but had been wandering around the garden with it, looking to find it a home. (Like many gardeners, I too often buy a plant and then have to work out where I have room for it!)

Wherever I eventually manage to plant the deutzia, I think it would look good with this pink salvia. (It’s ‘Rose Queen’.) The low evening sunlight shining through the pink flowers makes them glow with a rich pink which is very similar to the deutzia.

This low slanting light, whether it’s evening or early morning has a wonderful effect on the colours of plants. I’d love to be able to plant a border just so that it would catch the light at both the start and the end of the day. That’s giving me ideas about where I might plant the deutzia…

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Some flowers have a very velvety look to their petals. The two plants in this post (rose ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and clematis ‘Dark Eyes’) have especially dark and velvety flowers. But, having investigated, I can tell you that the flowers look a lot more like velvet than they actually feel. (They are, though, very soft to the touch.)

There was actually a study into the reasons for the velvety appearance of some petals. As I understand it, it’s all down to the dark colour of the flower, the shape of the cells within the petal and a low angle of light. (If you want to read all about it, you can find the report here.)

The feel of a petal or leaf is something that I tend not to think about very much when I’m planning what to plant. But there’s no doubt that textures add a stimulating element to a garden. The soft hairs on the flowers and leaves of pulsatilla (which you can see in an earlier blog post) are a great example of texture adding interest. While some plants are hairy, other plants are smooth – like the star-shaped flowers of Allium christophii, which have an almost metallic-looking sheen.

There’s lots of choice amongst the flowers that have a velvety lustre to their petals. The most obvious may be the classic red rose. Then, for instance, there are deep blue delphiniums, dark-flowered pelargoniums and purple, crimson or almost black petunias. Or, in mid and late summer, there are the rich, dark purples and reds of dahlias and the bright orange of tithonia (Mexican sunflower), which you can see here. All of them contribute something extra to the garden. They give that feeling of luxury, a suggestion of the opulence of rich fabrics, and the engagement of the sometimes-neglected sense of touch.