July 2011 in the Northern Hemisphere

[pehe]

Wild flower with another kind of 'flower'.

Poul

[PaulM]

Here are some new plants which have flowered for the first time for me:

Dianthus libanotis is a very branched, approximately 60cm tall plant in which the leaves and especially the calyces are quite pointy and hard:

Masses of flowers are produced, most being pink spotted and some with brownish markings , but all with frilly edges. Very nice indeed. It's blooming so heavily in its second year that I anticipate that it will only be biennial, but it should set seed.

Two other plants from the same region are Delphinium staphisagria which is a quick growing annual, if you can just get it to germinate. I have seeds from 2004 and 2002, which still germinate after one to several soakings in GA-3 solution.

                and      Paeonia mascula from Turkey comes up in April here, and then flowers about 1 month later, just for a day. The seed pods are splitting open now revealing the pink unripe seeds ( I wonder if they will mature to black good seeds, or if they will just shrivel up and fall off. It makes you think of....hmm, some fruit like a cocoa pod almost.



                       

[PaulM]

  Hypericum bellum from Yunnan was started from seed in 2009, and it formed a woody bush about 1 m tall in the summer of 2009. In 2010 it grew on producing more branches, but never flowered. The last winter was hard on it, and all but one woody shoot died, but it still produced more shoots after being cut back, and so far I have had four flowers on it, and thay are large
( 4cm ), and have lots of stamens. I hope it will eventually produce lots of flowers.

Another plant collected by the Czech is Adenophora capillaris:
                                                                                            which has nice pendant bells, but the color is a bit bleak:

A not so bleak flower is Impatiens namchabarwensis , which I had one plant of last year. I collected lots of seeds from this and stored them outdoors in a plastic bag with peat moss, just barely moistened. I sowed two pots of these seeds in November, leaving them out, and taking them indoors in April. Not a single seed germinated. The seeds that were left in the plastic bag were consequently sowed in a tray of soil outdoors, and left there, and these seeds germinated nearly 100%, so I had plenty of seedlings to plant out, and also to give away to some of my colleagues.

In a clay pot I have some small plants ( raised this year ) of Astragalus coccineus which I will do my utmost to overwinter. I saw it growing in a trough at a lady's garden in Calgary once, so it should be able to cope with the winter temperatures here as well, but it needs to be very dry. I will probably wrap the whole pot in some foam carpet, and leave a small hole at the top.

That's all for now. Thank you very much for all the comments to my previous post.

[fleurbleue]

Nice plants as ever Paul 

[PaulM]

Thank you Nicole !

[Maggi Young]

I do like the delicate form of the Adenophora capillaris

 Remember, Readers, that a mouse-click on the small photos will enlarge them

[fleurbleue]

Yes Maggi, this Adenophora is very amazing 

[Lesley Cox]

Well done Paul, with the Astragalus seedlings. VERY well done!!! I have seen a larger plant here at my favourite nursery but I don't recall seeing it last time I was there so maybe it is no more. I do hope yours go on, from strength to strength to flowering. Congratulations.

[Great Moravian]

Josef - the bed has not used sharp sand or builder's ballast as is usually recommended. We had a large supply of fine potting grit left over from the nursery. This is actually a heat shattered flint and the smaller material left over from what is used for rendering house walls makes a good potting grit, very sharp and with a little larger particle sizes than sharp sand. However, it is not very attractive as a surface(!) so I have topdressed the bed with 6mm chippings, and generally redo this every year. The plants do take a while to get established and might well do better in sharp sand which is likely to hold more moisture. But on the whole they have prospered quite well.

The bed was made simply by removing about 30cm of soil and filling in with the fine grit - no membrane was put in to separate the soil from the bed and so worms (and ants!) will have gradually begun to mix in the soil and I am sure quite a few plants will have put roots down to the soil below.

I would like to make a bed with sharp sand or ballast to see how it compares, and also a crevice bed which seems especially good at growing choice plants, but we don't have access to suitable local stone so easily in Kent.

Thanks.

[Giles]

Some garden pinks.

[Maggi Young]

Hey, Giles, you don't fool me... I can tell that these are just plain pinks that got in the way while you were wielding a six inch brush to do a bit of decorating and splattered them with  red paint.

[Lesley Cox]

Ireally like those stripey forms. I wish they were still being grown in NZ. I haven't seen them for many years.

[Tim Ingram]

A few sun-lovers from Kent! These are not in my garden (I wish they were) but in the garden belonging to the late Rosemary Powis, who had a fine and artistic eye for plants and planting.

[meanie]

First up is my Eucomis comosa.
The second is not strictly in bloom, but it will be and I'm excited about it! Tacca chantrieri.

[Maggi Young]

A certain bulb seller of my aquaintance, who stocks the bat, tells me I ought to grow it, since it was surely named for me..... 

Is it tricky, meanie? Does it take a lot of cossetting to get to flower?