My bargain £1 lily is the star of the show
A small garden in Merseyside packed with a variety of different features.
St Swithin’s Day (my wife’s birthday) certainly kept the old saying alive! Since then the westerly flow of weather has alternated between rain and sun, with the odd spectacular thunderstorm thrown in! This, however, has not deterred the begonia ‘Destiny’ bedding plants going from strength to strength with very large flowers – one regret is that I didn’t pot a few up individually.
On the edible side, the garlic is harvested and dried. Our one pot of gooseberries (now eaten in crumbles) produced a good crop and the pot-grown potatoes faired quite well. A windowbox of strawberries, ‘Mara des Bois’, is now back in the greenhouse to protect its next crop and the little hedge of alpine strawberries are raided when I go to the garage! Greenhouse crops are looking good, with more than enough mini cucumbers for our needs and the late-sown tomatoes, despite a little tomato moth, are showing promise.
In the garden, the overwintered Nicotiana sylvestris and seed-grown castor oil plants are adding height to the cottage garden border, but the star of the show is a lily I bought for £1 (from a shop where everything is £1!). But not everything needs to be a riot of flamboyant colour to add impact in a garden and the Itea virginica, planted next to the bamboo, demonstrates this perfectly, and is alive with the buzz of bees.
It’s now very difficult to catch a glimpse of the water in the pond as the water lilies have run riot! Excellent flowering, but the abundance of leaf growth means I’ll get a little wet when the time comes to divide them. One plant combination that caught my eye is the Houttuynia cordata ‘ Chameleon’ near the pond climbing into a fuchsia, If I’d planned it, it probably wouldn’t work!
My wife came across a very curious caterpillar on the laburnum. This alienlooking specimen turned out to be the caterpillar of a vapourer moth. It’s great to see the diversity of wildlife that shares the garden with us.