Japanese Acers don't like full sun or exposure to drying winds. That's what they always tell you. What I tell you is question everything you are told, especially in these times of fake news. This one of a pair of Acers in full exposure on our hot, dry, windy south-facing terrace. It's not doing badly really -
Also facing south, we had raised beds which started off as one thing, and ended up as another. The proliferation of Alliums had mixed success, as these tended to rot off in the wet winter soil. Here I have a picture of Allium cernuum, with its pendulous flower heads -
One that didn't perform well, usually surviving one season only was the spectacular starburst Allium schubertii -
Also in this border was a bulb formerly classified as an Allium but now Nectaroscordum siculum ssp. bulgaricum, seen here planted against cardoons -
I'm not saying all these were my favourite plants. It's more a matter of what I photographed, which was whatever was in flower when I took the camera to work, and whatever other people sent to me that had captured their imagination. However, one of my favourites was a rare horse-chestnut which grew in one of our less formal beds near the village church. this was Aesculus x mutabilis 'Induta' which was an absolute beauty with its two-toned flowers in yellow and apricot -
Close up the flowers looked like this -
Who wouldn't want one of those? We had a number of different horse chestnuts around the garden, including the sprawly, suckering shrub, Aesculus parviflora, which had been used to fill quite large holes -
The one final horse chestnut I want to mention was one which was unique to us. A chance seedling from the common plant, it had a striking variegation, and at some point we had decided that we should grow it on, see how it performed and if possible propagate from it for sale. In so doing we would find a place in garden history. We planted it out in a certain amount of shade in the chalk pit and left it to show what it could do. The splashes of pure white would make a fascinating fully-grown tree, we were sure. In the event, the white areas were so devoid of any pigmentation that they scorched something terrible in the slightest ray of sun and shrivelled up to look like they had been masticated by an enormous herbivore, so we gave up on it. I don't know if it is still there or not. I'd be interested to find out. On a good day it looked like this -
One plant I like is the choice Paeonia mlokosewitschii, commonly known as 'Molly the Witch'. It has lovely pale yellow flowers followed by seed pods which look spectacular when they open. It takes three to five years to get a plant to flowering size from seed. They used to sell well from our barrow at the kiosk in the small numbers we could produce, but that was subject to outside interference from kleptomaniacs with membership cards. As soon as the pods opened they would be mesmerised by the colour and would fill their pockets with the goodies, depriving us of the necessary propagating material. Well, I found a way to stuff most of them, because it is a fact that most of the thieves weren't experts, but opportunists, seduced by the brilliant display of metallic blue nestling within a surround of shocking pink, and they just lifted the whole thing without knowing fully what they had. The fact is, the seed itself was the hard round metallic blue material, and the shocking pink bits were protective padding, a bit like polystyrene chips. What I used to do, was carefully remove the blue seeds in the morning before we opened, leaving all the packing behind with its colourful attractions, and people would go home with the pods filled with the useless rubbish, albeit attractively colourful, leaving me with the important part, and them wondering why nothing came up in their trays. No pictures of the pods, sadly, but a couple of the plants in flower. Nice subdued foliage, with pinkish veining too for your money -
And -
While we're on the subject of Paeonies, I should mention that some people get quite excited about the precise identification of plants. For the plantsman, it has to be absolutely spot on, and nothing else will do. We had the tree paeony that went by the various names of P. rockii, P. 'Joseph Rock' or P. 'Rock's Form'. No matter that nobody could settle on a single name for it, some of my colleagues got a bit pedantic on me for even calling it any of those names. Apparently ours didn't have quite the right size of flower, or the purple blotches at the base of the petals weren't dark enough, or were too dark, or something. Really? Well, do you know, I don't care. The differences were negligible for garden use. It was still a not too commonly seen choice plant, with sparse flowers, which needed to be enjoyed from close up to be properly appreciated. It wasn't a high impact plant under any of its names, but it did have huge papery white, purple-blotched, dinner-plate sized flowers. Wasn't that enough?
To augment our stocks I bought one in, from Liam McKenzie of Madrona Nursery. They were notoriously difficult to propagate, and he told me that his method, which was very slow, was to bury the stock-plant very deeply, and wait for new shoots to appear from the ground, which he would then remove carefully with roots attached, essentially propagating a woody subject by division. The lengthy process meant that the price was high, and the best part of twenty years ago, I paid £45 for a single stick less than a foot high, and wasn't around long enough to witness it flower, to see if it differed from the old specimens in the garden. I was never able to prove anything to my or any other pedant's satisfaction. And it still doesn't matter. Not to me.
It's really just a question of whether you like it, in a garden sense, isn't it? Different, I suppose, if we were aiming to conserve a near-extinct naturally-occurring species. Then we'd want to get it right. But as for how it looks in your garden, there's no point at all in being snobby about it. It's a good-looking thing, full stop.
More tomorrow.
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