November in London

It’s garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day again; middle of November and five ½ weeks to Christmas – distinctively chilly with cool days and a lot of rain, but it’s also only 2 weeks since we had day temperature of 24 degrees C. Yes, London can be very mixed in the autumn, but I doubt we will have another day of above 20 degrees C until late spring next year. But even though the weather stays in the low teens now, my garden keeps going and noting really stops, it just changes to a slightly slower gear for a few months. There has been reports of ‘season confused’ plants around the country, I have some too, I guess the nice summer, cool August and then warm September and October made some plants slightly out of balance. However, as I am writing this, the weather is very much like it usually is in November, the rain is hammering down and it is very windy with top temp of only 12-13 degrees. So what could possibly be flowering right now then? Quite a lot actually! As usual I have been having difficulties choosing what to show you, I can’t really show every single plant in flower, you would be sitting here until tomorrow reading – I will spare you that, but I have made a careful selection of the best bits – lots of photos even so.

But let us start in my front garden this time, where I made a snap decision 10 days ago and chucked out my summer bedding and ordered winter bedding plants a whole month earlier than I did last year. The plants I had here were all still in flower but I was afraid most things were going to be sold out just like last year so I dug up all the dahlias that were in the window boxes and re-potted them. Time will tell if they will survive and come again next year.

The winter bedding is a mix of Bellis, Pansies and these very pretty Primrose Rosebud, one already in flower.

The large fuchsia on the window sill is still in flower, the leaves are not looking their best though. I have quite a few of these trailing large fuchsias and they are just growing too big for any normal sized pots or trays. I think this one will have to grow in a container next year.

Moving to the back garden, there are a few changes since last month. All the sunflowers have gone, so have the dahlias. They were still flowering, but not looking good anymore. The leaves on my arch are starting to fall off and are rather sad and limp looking, they will turn yellow and drop the next few weeks.

Here are the pots of geraniums I rescued from last year’s summer bedding from the front garden, they survived the winter outside and have been flowering on and off all summer. I gave them a trim a few weeks ago and now they are flowering again – must be the 6th time or so, I have lost count!

There is fresh foliage and new buds everywhere, these 7 plants think it’s June, not November :-)

On this shelf I also have a newcomer to the garden, Alstromeria ‘Dandy Candy’ – beautiful colour, next spring I will have to find a place in the garden for it.

The bed next to the patio has been emptied for plants in the ground, and some of the fuchsias have been allowed to move up from the shadier bottom of the garden where they have been all summer. Now that the weather is cooler they can stay here in the sunny bed but eventually all the pots have to get out of this bed so the spring bulbs can emerge without getting disturbed. I am just not sure where to put all the pots! Right in the centre of this bed I have planted the rose I got for my birthday, ‘Ingrid Bergman’, you can’t see it that well in this photo but it is the red dot in the middle.

Ah, that’s better! Isn’t it a beautiful rose? It has already produced 3 flowers so far, and there are more buds to come. Give it a couple of years and this will be a lovely rose for this bed.

And if you think I am fretting a bit about getting the pots out of the beds in preparation for the spring bulbs, after all we haven’t started winter yet – have a look at the Iris reticularis, they are already on their way up.

And so are the crocuses. These are in pots on the sunny side, so slightly earlier than the shady side of my garden, but the rest is also on their way up, under the thick layer of bark mulch I have everywhere. Oh, yes, spring is not that far away in my garden :-)

The chrysanthemums are almost finished flowering, they have been in flower for 3 weeks.

On the opposite side the fuchsias ‘Annabelle’ are still producing flowers, for the 17th month in a row!! They have lost a lot of leaves, no wonder, after such a long flowering time, but amazingly – keep on flowering.

The flowers are just exquisite though, it’s hard to have a favourite fuchsia, they are all so pretty - but this one is very high on my favourite list :-)

Just behind the fuchsias is one of the four hydrangeas I have. This is just a bog-standard pink mop head which due to the soil produces quite dark pink flowers. When the flowers go off they turn into these porcelain looking flowers with bronze-beige petals mixed with pink. Some of the flowers look quite like dried flowers whilst other look still alive.

At the bottom of my garden is a similar hydrangea, to the far right corner in this photo. This one produces much pale pinker flowers due to being so close to the concrete wall. But the big difference is how the flowers look after they have gone off.

These don’t look dead or dried at all, they just lose the pale pink and go creamy white-green instead – with the odd very dark pink petal here and there. It’s strange how different they are in the winter, being effectively same type of plant.

Did you see what was missing on the overview photo of the bottom of my garden? The tall ‘passionflower tree’ has gone! I have loved the experiment, but that’s what it was, an experiment. I can now safely say I will never grow a passionflower in the ground anymore. Ever. In 3 years it grew from a 1m sucker to this monster. I tried to prune it this spring, and I thought I cut off a lot even though it was difficult to reach, but it was now twice as big as last year and being evergreen it grows all winter too.

The worst bit is that it throws up suckers everywhere down here at the bottom of my garden, like here in the middle of the rhododendron. Each sucker has the potential to become just as big as the mother plant in just a couple of years so if I left them to it, the whole thing could become a complete passionflower jungle in no time. So I decided that it had to go. Question was HOW?? Last week-end I started snipping off branches, pulling at it and using my loppers to cut into the branches. The problem is that the passionflower has been growing up a dead tree stump that made the whole thing about 4m tall. I am no good with ladders anymore so pruning has to be done standing or sitting under it – and that just became impossible.

Finally I decided to cut the whole thing down instead. Now, I have never felled a tree before in my life but I have seen how they do it on TV. I also, wrongly assumed that the dead tree was going to be fairly easy to saw into, but boy that was hard – me sitting on my gardening stool in the flower bed trying to saw that tree was a bigger job than I thought! So two-third in I just broke off the rest, not the prettiest lumber job in the world, but the tree came down - no mice nor men hurt and no damage to property. Job done! I dug up some cyclamens from the left side of the garden and placed around the stump and it doesn’t look too bad. Every time I look at this tree stump I feel a bit of pride. I felled a tree on my own, even if it was a small, dead one :-)
Oh, and as for the suckers all over my garden....I have already bought a bottle of Roundup gel, time will tell if it works as well as the adverts says!

While we are here at the bottom of the garden, let’s look at a few things to come. The Sarcococca confuse has fat buds and will probably flower for Christmas this year.

Sarcococca hookeriana var. digyna has very different leaves but just as wonderful scent, I can’t wait for them both to flower.

And the rhododendron I showed you on the photo with the passionflower sucker has fat buds. It is called 'Christmas Cheer', a bit of a misnomer as it normally flowers in February, but I think it will flower earlier than that this time.

And here is one of my slightly confused plants, my Grand old Lady of the garden, the huge camellia has got ONE flower about to open. This camellia usually flowers in March so this is very early, but the rest of the flowers seem to be well behind this one.

But this camellia is a much earlier one, Camellia japonica 'Takanini' usually flowers from December and onwards so this one seems right on track.

But let’s get back to this year’s flowers, there are still lots to see. Here are the very last daylilies! This is an un-named variety I got in one of my plant swaps from Angie earlier this year. I am not sure what it is and neither was she, but it could possibly be 'Stella de Oro' or ‘Happy Returns’. I wrote earlier this year that I would make a post about all my daylilies once they all had finished flowering – I have been waiting for them all to finish and never thought the post about them would have to wait until November!

I cut down this Clematis 'Ville de Lyon' to the ground in August as it had a lot of mildew and didn’t look very nice, look at all the flowers it has now – and lots more buds to come.

I really love this clematis, although it is not in the right place in my garden, it should be moved to the opposite side so I can enjoy the flowers more. At its current position, my next door neighbour gets to see the flowers more than me as it flowers most on the south side. Perhaps this plant will take a walk-about next early spring, it has only been in its current position for 3 years so I hope it won’t be too big job to move. Famous last words…

Here is another plant that really should have a different address in my garden, this is Hydrangea paniculata 'Pinky Winky' and it produced only 3, rather odd looking flowers this year. I think the deep shade possibly could be the reason, it’s just that the sunny side is rather overcrowded already with plants. Perhaps it will be happier in a large container up on the patio.

The autumn colours of the leaves are rather spectacular though, well worth waiting for.

I have several Skimmia japonica 'Rubella' in my garden, and they don’t mind growing in complete shade. I love how these plants start producing flower buds in September even though they don’t open the flowers until April.

These flower buds stay on the plant all through autumn and winter, so effectively it is in bud for at least 6 months of the year, and the colour is so pretty in the winter garden.

All my roses flower very sparingly from now on and until they are cut down first week of February, usually just a few flowers on each plant. This is ‘Freedom’

And this is 'Mildred Scheel'.

The most typical autumn flower in the garden is the cyclamens, they are in all different shades, and here is just one example.

But most prominent is still the fuchsias. This is 'Perpetual Falls', a hardy trailing fuchsia.

And this is Fuchsia bacillaris 'Cottinghamii', a miniature fuchsia that has done very well in my garden, still with lots of flowers.

And it has produced lots of berries too, I keep eating them every time I see any. They taste sweet with a hint of pepper. All flowers and fruit of fuchsias are edible, if you haven’t tasted any you have been missing out. I have so many fuchsias that I have been able to let some of them fruit and still have lots of flowers – a nice treat to find berries when I go around deadheading. Every fuchsia tastes slightly different, some have black berries some have red, but all are perfectly edible and the flowers look spectacular in salads.

This is Fuchsia 'Marcus Graham', one of last year’s cuttings.

And this is Fuchsia 'Bella Rosella', this plant is 10 years old and have lived all its life in a container.

It’s not just me that loves fuchsias, of all the plants in my garden, the fuchsias are the best attraction for bees. Especially the bumblebees seem to favour fuchsias and this bee was flying around me for ages when I was taking photos today. I don’t think this little fellow was ready for bedding down for the winter just yet.

And finally, let me show you my kitchen window sill, where my one year old Christmas cactus (Schlumbergera) has been growing since I bought it as a tiny plant in December last year. I have never had a Christmas cactus before, so this summer I went online to find out how to get it to flower for Christmas. I was astonished to read all the faffing about with lowering temperature, dark room at night, no watering for a while, then remember to water, but not too much water – it all sounded very complicated, and where would I find a place inside my house with 10-12 degrees C for the Christmas cactus? My fridge is too cold, and all the rooms too hot.

Fortunately, the cactus managed to do what it’s supposed to all by itself here on the window sill, without me interfering, without ANY of the advice I read about online, and every end-piece has got a flower bud, some of them almost ready to flower. Sometimes it’s better to just leave the plants to do their own business I guess. I now hope the Dendrobium nobilis I also have on this window sill has taken notice, it has also apparently got some specific requirements in terms of much colder nights than days in order to flower in early spring. I hope it will just get on with it too!

That was the end of my GBBD for November, I hope you enjoyed the tour, please visit our host Carol at May Dreams Garden for many more November gardens around the world. Until next time, take care.