The winter pansies in the two flowerbeds have more or less run their course and are soon to be removed and replaced by summer plants, but instead of more seasonal bedding plants, I’ve been to “Goulds“, my local garden centre and picked out a few evergreen Alpine plants.
The daffodils behaved beautifully, growing tall and strong, battling the winds with great success as we caught the tail end of the few storms which made it to our island.
The purple pom-poms did extremely well too, they held their pretty round heads high on solid, stick-like stems.
Unfortunately the honey lillies didn’t fair too well, whether from battling against the winds of from not being assertive enough against the daffodil and pom-pom leaves as they grew I’m not sure, the stems seemed strong enough, but they wound their way upwards and needed a lot of help to find a skyward direction and to support their pretty flowered heads. I’ll make sure they get a little earlier help next year.
Sparaxis, these are new to me, they’ve brought many smiles this year, lots of different colours at just the right time and height for me to enjoy them. The number of bulbs has at least doubled for next year and I’m already looking forward to them.
The little bulbs at the front of the bed’s, the snowdrops and crocuses didn’t fare do well, they came up and went pretty much un-noticed which was a shame, the weather beat us back indoors instead of inviting us out into the garden and the little bulbs were too small to see from the kitchen window so as I poked around in the soil, removing the odd old pansy and planting the new alpines, I gathered a few handfuls of the little bulbs and Mum-in-law is taking them home for a patch in her garden where they will get the appreciation they deserve.
The four clumbing roses have grown far more than I expected them to. Mum-in-law has shown me how to not just grow long stems up over the arches with next year’s roses all flowering at the top, but to keep cutting a few shorter stems too, meaning I will have a nice spread of roses over the whole arch next year.
As the bulbs have finished flowering and the leaves have died back to provide next year’s plant food, I’ve had a running battle with one or two of the local cats over who’s flowerbeds they really are. Now that the back of the bed’s underneath the arches are a little bare, I’m expecting another cat attack so I’ve headed them off by placing pretty shells over the ground to keep it safe for next year’s bulbs to come through.
I only had enough shells for the one flowerbed, and that was including all of the broken pieces as well as some tiny ones, so I spread them out prettily under the arch and around the new plants where the cat made its last attack… Success… Sort of… The cat didn’t like the shells… But it moved to the other flowerbed.
I called in reinforcements, and borrowed some gravel from the front garden. I moved the whole, larger shells to the front of each bed, carefully placing them around the new alpines and in the gaps left by the retiring pansies, then spread a very thin layer of gravel “Underneath the Arches“, to hopefully be replaced by next spring as the storms bring me more shells on the high tides through the winter.
The broken bits of shells? Well, they’ve gone to join the gravel on the front garden to add interest to my repayment when the borrowed gravel is returned.
More from before : going’s on in my “Garden“.
